Rule of law is what allows us to grow. Acemoglu won a nobel prize showing that institutions cause growth. Destroy institutions and you'll undershoot potential.
The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades at many American institutions, such as for-profit companies. Openly selling the country short for personal benefit is just one small step after many hundreds of them to get where we are.
I'd say prior to Financialization, i.e. before the "greed is good" zeitgeist of the 1980s. When wages and salaries grew in tandem with increases in productivity.
Bell Labs was cool, but it was more or less just a part of AT&T wasn't it? The company that spent about a century with a near-monopoly on all telecommunications at great expense to basically everyone in America, and even eventually led to them being broken up into a few dozen separate companies.
Pet peeve: there is no Nobel prize of economics, Alfred Nobel didn't include "economy" in his will. Instead there is a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences" whose purpose is to give credibility to the unscientific field of economics. The prize itself is mostly awarded to neoliberalists economists and does not often represent the majority views in the field.
It's commonly called the Nobel prize of economics. That it's not a classic Nobel prize is mostly finance jargon.
> prize itself is mostly awarded to neoliberalists economists
Source? The period in which neoliberal economics won the prize was when neoliberal economics was in vogue (and most successful and producing useful theories).
The price is awarded exclusively to neoclassical economists, because it's effectively a marketing tool for neoclassical economics, which is the economic theory base of neoliberal shareholder capitalism.
