In the introduction to "Inferno," a magisterial new history of World War II, the eminent British historian Max Hastings writes, "One of the most important truths about the war, as indeed about all human affairs, is that people can interpret what happens to them only in the context of their own circumstances."

This is a useful truth at all times but particularly in the annual exercise of summing up the year just passed and anticipating the one ahead. Many people no doubt had a wonderful 2011 — a wedding, a birth, a new home, a promotion. Others may have lost someone close to them, been evicted or foreclosed upon or lost a job. They will not remember 2011 fondly.

In the long view of history, years don't matter much. Entire decades and even centuries get a paragraph or two. We found this about the decade 100 years ago: "America came of age. The Titanic was sunk and Americans marched off to war in Europe."

Hardly seems fair to Theodore Roosevelt or Henry Ford or the 146 women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Assuming 2011 gets a sentence of its own a hundred years from now, what will it say? Perhaps something like, "America began to realize the seriousness of its debt problem but failed to address it because Americans were not yet fully aware of the problems their economy faced."

Hardly seems fair to Gabrielle Giffords or Steve Jobs or the Joplin, Mo., tornado victims.

The year ahead may be slightly more significant to history, if only because it is a presidential election year. The temptation here is to suggest that it will be a critical election in that it will demonstrate how fully Americans have absorbed what is happening to them. History will be the judge.

We are at the end of a three-decade-long process that has profoundly altered the post-World War II social contract. The war ended the Depression, which itself had wiped out the last remnants of the Gilded Age. The New Deal had assured Americans that they wouldn't die in penury. The post-war contract, forged out of the all-for-one cause of saving Western civilization, created broad and unmatched prosperity.

To be sure, Americans of color and those living in the hollows of rural poverty were not included, but the GIs who returned from the war were all but guaranteed a college education or a good-paying job in a booming industrial economy.

The contract said work hard and play fair and you will have a place at the table in a nice home with a car in the driveway — sometimes two cars and a boat. Your kids will go to good schools and will be more successful than you. Love your country, and your country will have your back, giving you a hand up when you need it. We'll even take care of your medical needs when you grow old.

Then the world started to change. And we didn't realize it. Some of us still haven't realized it.

By 1980, globalization and automation/technology began to seriously erode the industrial base. American companies found that machines were cheaper than human beings, particularly human beings in trade unions. Then they discovered cheap labor overseas.

Profits went up. Executives stacked their compensation committees with cronies who rewarded them for "cutting costs" — that is, eliminating jobs. In a perversion of the language, today these people are numbered among the "job creators."

Why, the stock market was such a great deal that employees surely would like to put their retirement money there instead of boring old pensions, wouldn't they?

A huge part of the economy made nothing but money; by 2006, the financial sector accounted for a third of all profits in America. Had all of this money been invested in new businesses, the economy would be thriving. But increasingly, bank profits grew out of trading, not investing, making a relatively few people (1 percent, perhaps?) unimaginably wealthy. But as Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, has noted, as much as half of all banking is 'socially useless activity."

At the other end of the scale, unskilled and low-skilled workers discovered that the social contract had been abrogated. There was nothing for them anymore. Many companies kept the profits created by technological revolutions and off-shoring jobs. Many didn't invest in anything new to replace what was lost at home.

The trickle-down economy applied to jobs, not profits. A guy who'd been making $25 an hour in a factory trickled down to $10 an hour in a warehouse. And the warehouse worker trickled down into long-term unemployment.

The middle class began to disappear. Health care costs skyrocketed. Income inequality reached unheard-of levels — as much as 90 percent of the wealth is controlled by 20 percent of the people. This is at a time when Michael Hirsch of The National Journal reports that the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee estimates that a family of four today needs $68,000 a year just to cover basic costs.

In 2011, thanks in part to the Occupy Wall Street movement, Americans began to figure this out. This year will tell if they're able to start doing something about it.

The need for a social safety net — part of that social contract — never has been greater. And yet the nation is at least $4 trillion short of stabilizing its budget over the next 10 years. The safety net is on the table — Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps. Tax increases for the wealthy may not be.

There are five unemployed Americans for every open job, and many of them don't have necessary skills and have exhausted their unemployment benefits. With the deficit as job one, there seems to be little chance that Congress will enact the kind of job training and industrial policy that could help the long-term unemployed find a place in the new economy.

The year ahead will be a battle between the haves and the have-nots, funded by have-lots. As many as two in three Americans tell pollsters that they think the economic table is tilted too far toward the wealthy. Whether they will vote that way after being bombarded by campaign commercials paid for by wealthy interests is a different question.

In 2011, many Americans realized that this is not their father's America any more. Common cause has dissipated. Others, in different circumstances, had no problem with that. The new year will either see the start of something different or the continuation of an era that history will judge harshly.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH