More is More

[Becky Lindroos]

Or try “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War” by Robert J. Gordon  (Princeton Uni Press - 2016).   I’m reading it now - it’s very interesting,  well organized,  nicely written.  Yes,  I did read "Capital in the 21st Century”  by Thomas Pikkety and it’s kind of like that in terms of readable history/economics books.  

Gordon’s book focuses on the period between 1870 to 1920 and from 1920 to 1970.  Then he compares that whole century of unprecedented growth to what has happened since.  It’s only about the US which was pretty much driving the world in terms of various growth rates and innovation at the time,  but not any more.   He calls that era the  “special century” and discusses quantitative output (GDP) as well as Total Factor Productivity (TFP).   These are the drivers of consumerism.  

And there is the qualitative factor as well -  does this growth improve the quality of our lives and how so?  How big an effect does a specific point or item have?   Compare the light bulb which was a huge life changing improvement,  to the button holer,  a minuscule improvement.  There were lots of biggies between 1870 and 1970 and they worked off each other. 

But all that’s over now.  

"Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government, and that we must find new solutions. A critical voice in the most pressing debates of our time,”

This book might take all summer.  lol 

Bekah/Becky 
https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com

> On May 24, 2017, at 7:04 AM, jody boy <jodys.gone2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Deborah Cohen on Frank Trentmann's" :
> 
> "Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the
> Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First:"
> 
> In the NY Review:
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/05/25/consumer-society-more-is-more/
> 
> 
> "Just where and when the impetus toward material acquisition
> originated, though, has been a matter of debate...
> 
> What, then, about the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth-century
> Golden Age, when even the maid had paintings in her room? Although
> Trentmann criticizes the energy that’s been devoted to proving the
> origin of consumerism, he nonetheless agrees with those scholars who
> have pinpointed a qualitative and quantitative change in consumption
> in northwestern Europe, particularly the Netherlands and England, in
> the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries..."
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l