From chapter one: From 1945 to 1970, the United States enjoyed a growing and generally stable economy and also dominance in world affairs. Forty years later, this period seems brief and distant, but at the time it seemed to Americans the natural culmination of national success. It was the start of a new history, justified by victory in war and sustained in resistance to communism. That there was a communist challenge imparted both a certain no-nonsense pragmatism to policy, empowering the Cold War liberals of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the RAND Corporation, while driving the free-market romantics of Chicago (notably Milton Friedman) to the sidelines. Yet few seriously doubted that challenge could or should be met. The United States was the strongest country, the most advanced, the undamaged victor in world war, the leader of world manufacturing, the home of the great industrial corporation, and the linchpin of a new, permanent, stable architecture of international finance. These were facts, not simply talking points, and it took a brave and even self-marginalizing economist, willing to risk professional isolation in the mold of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, to deny them.
Nor were optimism and self-confidence the preserve of elites. Ordinary citizens agreed, and to keep them in fear of communism under the circumstances required major investments in propaganda. Energy was cheap. Food was cheap, with (thanks to price supports) staples such as milk and corn and wheat in great oversupply. Interest rates were low and credit was available to those who qualified, and so housing, though modest by later standards, was cheap enough for whites. Jobs were often unionized, and their wages rose with average productivity gains. Good jobs were not widely open to women, but the men who held them had enough, by the standards of the time, for family life. As wages rose, so did taxes, and the country could and did invest in long-distance roads and suburbs. There were big advances in childhood health, notably against polio but also measles, mumps, rubella, tuberculosis, vitamin deficiencies, bad teeth, and much else besides. In many states, higher education was tuition-free in public universities with good reputations. Though working-class white America was much poorer than today and much more likely to die poor, there had never been a better time to have children. And there never would be again. Over the eighteen years of the baby boom, from 1946 to 1964, the fruits of growth were matched by a rapidly rising population to enjoy them. It was in this spirit that, in the 1950s, economists invented the theory of economic growth. The theory set out to explain why things were good and how the trajectory might be maintained. Few economists in the depression-ridden and desperate 1930s would have considered wasting time on such questions, but now they seemed critical: What did growth depend on? What were the conditions required for growth to be sustained? How much investment could you have without choking off consumption and demand? How much consumption could you have without starving the future? The economists’ answer would be that, in the long run, economic growth depended on three factors: population growth, technological change, and saving. http://www.amazon.com/End-Normal-Crisis-Future-Growth/dp/1451644922/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410903750&sr=1-1&keywords=james+galbraith _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
