by Darren Beattie at Revolver.news
On those bleak corners of the Internet that fret about economic growth, social cohesion, and other boring stuff, there’s a common question: What the heck happened in 1971?
On one chart after another for the United States, there is a pattern of steady growth and improvement in life that suddenly goes haywire right around 1971. Wage growth stagnated for all but the richest Americans. Inequality explodes. Housing prices began a long upward march that has yet to level out. Fertility rates crashed while illegitimacy surged. And so on, and so on.
Many other nations have data that tells a similar story, around a similar time. But one nation has a very different year that marks a shift in fortunes. In South Africa, the question could well be, “What the heck happened in 1994?”
In that country, life expectancies grew until the early 1990s, when they suddenly went into reverse, driven heavily by an explosion of AIDS.
Primary school enrollment in the country peaked in the early 1990s but then started to go down, reaching only the low 80s by the mid-2010s…
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