The Great Boom 1950-2000
How a Generation of Americans Created the World's Most Prosperous Society
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In The Great Boom, historian Robert Sobel tells the fascinating story of the last 50 years when American entrepreneurs, visionaries, and ordinary citizens transformed our depression and war-exhausted society into today's economic powerhouse.
As America's G.I.s returned home from World War II, many of the nation's best minds predicted a new depression—yet exactly the opposite occurred. Jobs were plentiful in retooled factories swamped with orders from pent-up demand. Tens of thousands of families moved out of cities into affordable suburban homes built by William Levitt and his imitators. They bought cars, televisions, and air conditioners by the millions. And they took to the nation's roads and new interstate highways—the largest public works project in world history—where Kemmons Wilson of Holiday Inns, Ray Kroc of McDonalds, and other start-up entrepreneurs soon catered to a mobile populace with food and lodgings for leisure time vacationers.
Americans and their families began to channel savings into new opportunities. Credit cards democratized purchasing power, while early mutual funds found growing numbers of investors to fuel the first postwar bull market in the go-go '60s. At the same time the continuing boom enriched the fabric of social and cultural life. A college education became a must on the highway to upward mobility; high-tech industries arose with astonishing new ways of conducting business electronically; and an unprecedented 49 million families had become investors when the 1981-2000 stock market boom reached 10,000 on the Dow.
The Great Boom is the first major book to portray the great wave of homegrown entrepreneurs as post-war heroes in the complete remaking and revitalizing of America. All that, plus the creation of unprecedented wealth—or themselves, for the nation, for tens of millions of citizens—all in five short drama-filled decades.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this wide-ranging, entertaining socioeconomic survey, the late Sobel (IBM: Colossus in Transition) provides an optimistic perspective on the advances, upheavals and trends of the last 50 years. Starting from the post-World War II period, he analyzes the factors that produced an unprecedented prosperity that surprised everybody with its vigor and consistency. Although fear of imminent economic disaster may have been lurking after the Great Depression, demand for new housing, new automobiles and all the goods and services associated with the baby boom kept entrepreneurs jumping. Economic good times not only did not stop (as they had in 1929) but were fueled by new developments in society. More women entered the workplace, and civil rights legislation, social reform and raised social consciousness extended economic opportunity to previously excluded groups. While factories hummed and an expanding workforce found employment, Americans pursued leisure activities as never before. Sobel draws the conclusion that, whether it was the inflation of the 1970s or the rash of leveraged buyouts of the 1980s, there is an "American proclivity to adjust to changing circumstances and to absorb ideas and people and fit them in with what already existed." In contrasting where we were as a nation in 1950 with where we stand today, he argues persuasively that the United States has evolved into the society that World War II veterans hoped for: "a place where hard work, education, playing by the rules, and sobriety paid off." Photographs not seen by PW.
