Prosperity

But when a totalitarian government gets cozy with large financial and manufacturing concerns, it rings a twentieth-century bell....I’m thinking “Made the trains run on time.” I’m thinking “Greater Asian Coprosperity Sphere.” There is a technical name for this political ideology.  

P.J. O’Rourke, on China in 1997, from “Eat the Rich”

This popped up while heading for the train this morning - the MTA is actually good about keeping them on time. It’s the other one, though, that caught me. It’s far too easy to jump straight to what the name represents than what it means, much less what it says. And it’s “Coprosperity” that really sent me down a path, that I’d never really noticed before, that is perhaps the most important word there.

That would mean “shared prosperity” or at least “united prosperity,” that being a part of it means being a part of a prosperous group. If you offered that to people today, they would take it. People are CONCERNED, now, about economics, or at least about what plans they should make and how much money they might have a year or ten years or forty years from now. Last time around is too easily summarized as “There was a Crash, and then a Depression, and it started to get better and then there was a War.” Instead, it’s starting to sound like “There were a lot of people who thought they were doing well, and then they realized they weren’t doing well, and then some of them figured how they could do better, and it worked for them for a while, and other people realized the implications, and soon it went from casual economic warfare to massive actual warfare.”

And I can’t think of any reason why the same thing couldn’t happen this time around.