In the past ten years, we lost hope in American politics, realized we were being watched on the internet, and finally broke the gender binary (kind of). So many of the beliefs we held to be true at the beginning of the decade have since been proven false—or at least, much more complicated than they once seemed. The Decade of Disillusion is a series that tracks how the hell we got here.If you squint hard enough, you could theoretically be optimistic about capitalism in America right now. Technically speaking, the U.S. economy is currently in the midst of the longest expansion in its history—a record that started when the country dragged itself out of the Great Recession and back into something resembling growth in 2009. Middle-class incomes have shown (at least fleeting) signs of life after decades of stagnation, too.
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But if the first decade of the 21st century was defined by the rise and fall of what George W. Bush described as the American "ownership society,” the second saw that myth permanently disintegrate, replaced by the realities of economic precariousness. Even as stock markets started booming again, politics shifted leftward and socialists gained clout—and hackneyed terms like "late capitalism" gained followings.Along the way, the very idea of what counts as money—what wealth looks like and how it's represented, what people aspire to earn and how popular figures flaunt it—shifted radically. This is the era of memes about the horrors of student loan debt and temp gig labor, about young people subsisting on GoFundMe campaigns and Seamless coupons, about plowing all your savings into brand-new digital currencies.If the economy's capacity to atomize workers and conjure up wealth were part of the story of our unraveling confidence in capitalism, this decade also saw a surge in awareness of pay disparities, discrimination, and scams. The Women's National Soccer Team. Theranos. Fyre Festival. This was the time when the spectacular display of wealth reached its zenith, and also when society started to turn up its collective nose at the ugly truth.
End of 2011: U.S. Student Debt Tops $1 Trillion
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July 2012: Uber Launches UberX, Mainstreaming the Gig Economy
June 3, 2014: Seattle Is the First City to Pass a $15 Minimum Wage
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September 17, 2015: Martin Shkreli Reminds America How Fun It Is to Hate Arrogant Rich People
October 16, 2015: The Wall Street Journal Publishes the Exposé That Would Take Down Elizabeth Holmes, the Biggest Grifter of the Decade
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March 30, 2016: U.S. Women’s Soccer Players Allege Wage Discrimination
April 23, 2016: The Panama Papers Drop, and the Rich Get Nervous
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December, 17, 2017: The Bitcoin Bubble Hits $19,783
May 15, 2017: Avocado Toast Defines a Generation and Sparks a Million Arguments
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