![]() ![]() The net effect of these three decades, according to Johnson, has been salutary. With the 1980s, he says, came ``the Decade of Realism,'' during which Margaret Thatcher's government in Britain and Ronald Reagan's administration in the United States encouraged a return to ``old-fashioned virtues.'' ![]() ``Then in the 1970s came the Decade of Disillusionment,'' he continues, marked by the end of the postwar economic boom, the energy crisis, and the ``particular crisis of government and confidence in the United States'' known as Watergate. The demographic trend, says Johnson, will bring into positions of authority a group of leaders for whom the lessons of the recent past will be no more than ``ancient history.'' These lessons, he explains, arise from a study of the past three decades.įirst came what he calls an earlier ``Decade of Illusions'' in the 1960s, when Western nations imagined that they could ``increase state spending, welfare spending, defense spending, all kinds of investment, and at the same time increase personal spending almost indefinitely - with full employment, too.'' Johnson noted that two trends now in the making will by then have peaked. `IT wouldn't at all surprise me,'' warns author and columnist Paul Johnson, ``if the first decade, or at any rate the second decade, of the 21st century is a decade of illusions - grand expectations, all kinds of rosy dreams.'' The reason? Settling into an easy chair in his third-floor London pied-`a-terre, Mr. ![]()
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