The 80s were a bit mixed in America under Reagan. One indicator which is quite telling is that of real wages, which have been largely stagnant since the 1970s.
Homelessness also went up in the Reagan era, another key indicator of economic decline.
But there are other things to look at, such as the nation's quality of education and healthcare. Not sure how it is in Britain, but America's healthcare and education have deteriorated severely as a result of Reagan and his successors (which include Clinton and Obama, whose policies might be considered "Reagan Lite").
We have such a huge national debt, yet nothing to show for it.
The roads are falling apart, the infrastructure is crumbling. So many towns with boarded up storefronts, homeless camps, dilapidated parks and recreation facilities - relics from earlier times when things were better.
All the money we've spent on military has been pretty much wasted. We didn't even use it for conquest or to gain territory or to enrich ourselves with the spoils of war. (Not that I'm saying that we should have done that, but just sayin'.) But considering how much we've spent on just the Middle East alone, Americans should be rewarded with gas prices under $1 a gallon. I'm sure some US corporations and politicians have done quite well, but the majority of the common people get shafted yet again.
The pandemic showed us just how ill-prepared and vulnerable we were by outsourcing and sending all manufacturing overseas. As a result of such myopic, ill-conceived policies, we have shortages and supply chain problems.
The quality of a nation's leadership can be measured in any number of ways, but I think the most salient is to take an overall "bottom line" approach to where the nation actually stands in relation to the rest of the world and whether it has improved or declined on a relative scale.
Relatively speaking, Britain was pretty much on top of the world and at the peak of their power by the end of the 19th century, leading up to WW1. After WW1, the US surpassed Britain in terms of economic power, and the US probably reached its peak around WW2 and in the decades following, up until the early 70s, when we began a slow and steady decline.
I grow somewhat weary of the age-old debate over "socialism vs. capitalism," but I think capitalism has reached a certain plateau. Industrialism and world colonialism built up a huge amount of wealth for the major capitalist countries, which are still wealthy today in relation to most of the rest of the world. A large bulk of that wealth was acquired through methods which we now rightly decry and condemn as unconscionable atrocities and crimes against humanity - slavery, genocide, wars of conquest, expansionism, colonialism, imperialism.
But even if we set that aside, in a larger sense, much of our base wealth was built up at a time when most of the world was still relatively "untapped" and teeming with resources and open lands. Think of the Amazon rainforest in its pristine natural state, or the rainforests of Africa, or the Great Plains of the U.S. still teeming with buffalo - and the deer and the antelope play. So, yes, a lot of wealth was built up as many Europeans went all over the planet to extract those resources to build industries which made them even more wealthy and powerful.
But there have also been long-term human and environmental costs associated with all this exploration, colonization, and industrialization. We've taken both the good and the bad from all of this, and considering that most of us living in modern industrial society have grown dependent upon the structure and system which have been established, we've reached what I've heard called "the technology trap."
In essence, we've reached a dead end in that we've established a system for the acquisition and distribution of wealth on a global level, but the ways and means by which we acquired wealth, resources, and territory in the past are no longer viable or politically expedient in today's world.
There's also a question of just how much there actually is left in the world, in terms of resources. We can ostensibly still produce enough food to feed the world's population, but yet, so many still go hungry. The latest panic these days is over gas and oil - and whether there will be enough for people to heat their homes without going bankrupt. We hear about chip shortages for the long-term, and just two years ago, people were panic-buying toilet paper, because that really is something to worry about.
My main beef with capitalists, as it has been since the Reagan era, is that they seemed unwilling to adjust to what was very obviously a changing world than the one they were born into. They just wanted to maintain the status quo of capitalism and go on business as usual. Their motto and theme song were "don't worry, be happy." It was a drug to give people the illusion of "good times" when in fact, it was just a way of delaying the pain of having to adjust to a new reality.
America has been on some kind of hallucinogenic for quite some time. Of course, we've all heard the old trope of the guy who gets really drunk and wakes up the next morning and finds that he just slept with Donald Trump. He jumps out of bed screaming and wondering what happened.
