The author found herself inadvertently following the life of a Vietnam veteran whose work history illustrates some very significant truths about American worker lives and the capitalist economy since the early 1970s. It is a tale of alienated work, adapting to technological changes, increasing productivity with only a slight increase in wages, financing of consumption, all leading to the economic collapse of 2008.
In the 1960s, I met a young man about to be discharged from the Army and then, by happenstance, caught up with him again in each of the next two decades. Though he died two months before the Lehman Brothers collapse, those brief encounters taught me how the Long Recession led directly to our Great Recession.