Word: nonfarmer
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Even if the Democratic coalition can be tugged back together, many of the party's basic elements are dwindling in numbers and clout. Union membership is declining, down from about a third of all nonfarm workers in the mid-'50s to less than a fourth today. Blue-collar workers are a shrinking minority of the work force (33%); white-collar workers have become an outright majority (51%). Fourteen of the 20 biggest U.S. cities, traditional Democratic strongholds, lost population during the 1970s, some drastically, as residents moved to the largely Republican suburbs. The cities that did gain in population tended...
Despite the drop, the U.S. remains first in the international productivity league, but its lead is narrowing. Over the past ten years, nonfarm private productivity increased only 27%-the same as in Britain, but less than half as much as in France, West Germany and Italy and less than a quarter as much as in Japan. In 1950 it took seven Japanese or three German workers to match the industrial output of one American; today two Japanese and about 1.3 Germans do as well. Says Economist Arthur Laffer: "The U.S. is the fastest 'undeveloping' country in the world...
...A.A.M. wants crop prices raised to 90% of "parity," an antiquated concept founded on the argument that farm prices should have been rising as fast as nonfarm prices since World War I. Agriculture Department economists scoff at this demand; they say that 90% parity would drive retail food prices -the biggest single factor in the U.S.'s inflation problem -up by 16% this year, on top of the 10% increase...
...devote increasing attention to complying with health and safety rules, rather than buying productive machinery and figuring out more efficient operating methods. Though lives undoubtedly have been saved and the air and water cleansed, the price has been high. The CEA estimates that regulation may be cutting annual nonfarm productivity growth by four-tenths of a percentage point...
...Atlanta, however, housing is an exception. Overbuilding in recent years has held prices down. A three-bedroom house at $54,000 is still far beyond the reach of someone earning even twice as much as $6,191 a year, which is the federally set "poverty level" for a nonfarm family of four. But the average price of a house in Atlanta seems like a fire-sale bargain compared with the six-figure tags on similar homes in many parts of the North and West...