94 this was obviously no longer the case. Americans have generally underestimated how unusual our economic advantages once were, and how they have influenced the way we solve our social problems. The economic progresses most Americans have enjoyed since the early 1800s, and which we still take largely for granted, were unprecedented. By the early 1970s, as we have seen, this rapid progress had slowed sharply for the large majority of Americans, and was reversed for many of us. Economic growth had averaged more than 3.5 percent a year since 1820, and fallen to a rate of 2.3 percent a year since 1973. The consequences of the slow economic growth since 1973 have been borne more heavily by some of us than by others, but it has frustrated almost all of us in ways more or less subtle. Wages and salaries have fallen, stagnated, or grown unusually slow for most Americans no matter how well educated they were. In part, it is inevitable that the losses have been especially steep for the young with only a high school education. These young and inexperienced workers are the first to lose their jobs when unemployment rises, as has happened consistently since the 1960s. But the jobs lost in manufacturing and other areas because of greater international competition, fragmenting markets, flexible production, and declining investment have taken a bigger toll on young and less educated workers as we recede from an economy dominated by mass production and distribution. Despite the presumption by some that too many Americans are not working hard enough, Americans in fact responded to their changing economic fortunes by working much harder. The average full-time male employee now works about a week and a half longer a year than in 1973, the first extended increase in hours worked in this century. Seven million workers hold at least two jobs, the highest proportion in fifty years. The number of two-worker families rose by more than 20 percent in ...
