Les Trente Glorieuses

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Frommer's Paris 2013 by Kate van Der Boogert

Airbnb, airport security, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, eurozone crisis, gentrification, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, Les Trente Glorieuses, music of the spheres, place-making, retail therapy, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal

Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel Sarah’s Key, which was released as a film starring Kristin Scott-Thomas in 2010, tells the story of a young girl’s experiences during these events, describes France under Occupation, and highlights the degree to which the French were complicit in, and even enthusiastic about, the Vel’ d’Hiv round-up. Les Trentes Glorieuses (1945–75) After the end of WWII, France embarked on a period of ambitious industrial modernization. The postwar economic boom that followed came to be known as les trentes glorieuses (the 30 glorious years). Wages were higher and increased spending on consumer goods radically changed the culture of everyday life, with more and more French households being equipped with television sets, washing machines, and cars. Women became more independent, and younger people gained more freedom. Many of the lifestyle changes brought about by les trentes glorieuses were explored in the films of the French New Wave, known as la nouvelle vague, which were a celebration of youth, Paris, and above all, cinema.

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Under the orders of Maurice Papon, the police opened fire on the crowds and savagely assaulted protesters. Over 11,000 Algerian men were arrested and the bodies of a number of Algerians were thrown into the Seine. It is thought that around 200 people died in the massacre, which is commemorated on a plaque on the Pont St-Michel. Many immigrants who came to Paris during les trentes glorieuses found themselves living in bidonvilles (shantytowns) on the peripheries of the city. Slowly, those living in the bidonvilles were relocated to huge housing estates, known as grandes ensembles, in the banlieues. However, these poorly built housing estates soon became sites of spatial isolation and economic exclusion, and many people believe that the current problems in the banlieues date from this period.

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

That a country that failed to pay attention to the needs of its youth was morally bankrupt. That it was time for young people to take matters into their own hands and hit the road. We argued that if French youth took this idea on and acted on it, the ruling class would have to pay heed. Since the end of the three decades of sustained growth the French call Les Trente Glorieuses, which came to a close in 1975, France had been barely plodding along economically. If the young, the lifeblood of the nation, took off, their whole future at the top of the pyramid was in question. The column created a stir and upset a lot of people, to my utter delight. By noon on the day it ran, I was busy doing the rounds on the daily talk shows.

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movement 123–7, 130, 146–7 education system/Grandes Écoles 48–9, 54, 118, 126 emigration of young people from 48–54, 55, 69, 116–20, 123–7, 130, 145–7 FM childhood in 37–42, 43 FM family first move to 37–8 gerontocratic tradition in 50, 123, 128 Gilets Jaunes movement 48–9 hip-hop in 28, 45–6, 50, 55, 113, 124, 139, 162, 233 Islamist terror attacks in 23–6 Les Trente Glorieuses (three decades of sustained growth) 124–5 London, emigration to from 54–5, 59 racism and 52 ‘republican equality of chances’ (les valeurs de la République) 20, 211 Syrian refugees in 169–75 youth unemployment/lack of opportunity within 48–54, 55, 69, 116–20, 123–7, 130, 145–7 see also individual place name French Islamic Foundation 24 Friedman, Sam 211 Fuerteventura 149 Fulbright scholarship 34–5, 136 Gates, Bill 28 Générations 88.2 (French independent radio station) 48–54 Georgia (nation) 73, 175–8 Georgia (state), US 82–3 Germany 1, 2, 17, 32–4, 37, 38, 42, 43, 47, 72, 73, 79, 100, 101, 126, 132, 138 gerontocracy (government by entitled elders) 50, 124, 127 Ghana 96, 134–5 Gilets Jaunes 48–9 globalisation 11, 51–2, 90 globalism 30, 54 Goodhart, David 40–1 Grand Tour 57, 59 Grandes Écoles 48–9, 54, 118, 126 Great March for Climate Action 218–19 Greece 18, 35, 36, 37, 43, 45, 47, 55, 57, 78, 135 Group, the (religious cult) 64 Hedges, Chris 32 Heimat (mix of home, culture, vernacular, community) 17 Hibbard, Cooper 1–2, 4, 238 Hindriks, Karoli 191 Hine, Dougald 20 hip-hop 28, 45–6, 50, 55, 113, 124, 139, 162, 233 Holiday Swap app 195 Hollande, François 126 Homo erectus 9 homosexuality 102–7 Hughes, Solomon 114–15 Hult 137 hunter-gatherers 9–10, 18, 187 Huntington, Samuel P. 195–6 Hutchinson, Robert 84–5 iEconcalc 78 Ikola, Rabbi 220 Illich, Ivan 232 immigration economic 122–47 see also economic migration education and 48–69 see also education, immigration and emigration 93–121 see also emigration entrepreneurs and 70–92 see also entrepreneurs, migration and Felix Marquardt, transformative power in life of 23–47 see also Marquardt, Felix labelling of 169–200 see also labelling, migration and nomadism and see nomadism ‘out of Africa’ migration of early humans 9, 18, 69 pushback against 201–23 see also liberals refugees and 148–68 see also refugees World Economic Forum, Davos and see World Economic Forum, Davos India 14–15, 76, 80, 83, 111, 118, 130, 155, 156 Citizenship Bill (2016) 140 entrepreneurs returning to 139–45 Youthonomics Global Index (YGI) and 139–40, 145 inequality 16, 20, 31, 49, 209, 210–11, 216, 228, 241 Ingvarsdóttir, Sigurlína 239 initiatory journey 57 ‘internal’ migrations from village to city ix, 10 International Council on Clean Transportation 217 International Herald Tribune 28, 188 international schools 41 ‘inverted totalitarianism’ 32 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 215 Iraq 10, 123, 179–80 ISIS 23, 25 Islam 4, 8, 15, 23–5, 160, 175 Israel 157–8 Italy 36, 126 Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) 53, 98, 152, 155 Jackson, Wes 227 Japan 77, 93–9, 128, 135, 136, 156 Jews 2, 15, 27, 31, 70, 79, 100, 157–8 Jobbatical 191–2 Johnson, Boris 100, 146 Jung, Carl 212 Jungle, Calais 9 Kaba, Mbake 153–4 Kansas Wesleyan University 206 Kati, Mali 2, 5, 6 Kawaakibi1 Foundation 24–6 Kazakh government 177 Kierkegaard, Søren 212 King, Steve 199 Kobalia, Anastasia 177–8 Kobalia, Vera 175–9, 182 Koum, Jan 71 Kundera, Milan 45 Kurzweil, Ray 181 labelling, migration and 168, 169–82 Amr Maskoun/labelling of refugees 169–73 immigration and emigration, distinction between 174–5 ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’, conflation of terms 174–5 Mustafa Al Sarajj/labelling of refugees 179–82 refugee, usefulness of term 174 Vera Kobalia/labelling of refugees 175–9 La Croix-Valmer, France 42 Larsson, Sven 179, 180, 181 Latour, Bruno: Où atterrir?

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

The experience of Depression and war influenced the intellectual environment created by Keynes among many others, which then shaped the post-war mixed economies of the west. This was the first post-war political economy cycle. The subsequent few decades brought strong economic growth, thanks in part to reconstruction after the conflict, but also to the active Keynesian macroeconomic policies, and the growth of trade. These were les trentes glorieuses, the thirty glorious years in Fourastié’s famous term (Fourastié 1979). Electricity in homes and factories became universal, access to cars spread with towns and cities built or rebuilt to accommodate them, while radio and cinema had their heyday. Electricity and the internal combustion engine are examples of general purpose technologies, technologies which can be used for a range of purposes and spread widely through the economy, with substantial economic and social effects.

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Hogan, 1998, ‘The Dublin Taxi Market: Re-regulate or Stay Queuing?’, Studies in Public Policy, 3, 1–72. Fitoussi, Jean-Paul, Amartya Sen, and Joseph Stiglitz, 2009, Commission on the Measurement of Economic and Social Progress, 2009, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/118025/118123/Fitoussi+Commission+report. Fourastié, J., 1979, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975, Paris: Fayard. Fourcade, Marion, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan, 2015, ‘The Superiority of Economists’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29 (1), 89–114. Frank, Robert H., Thomas Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan, 1993, ‘Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?’

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

In essence, communism only survived by becoming more like capitalism while capitalism survived only by become more like communism. The various resolutions of the backlash in the 1920s and 1930s set the modern world on a steady course for decades. The fruits of social calm, booming innovation, and advancing globalization yielded what the French call les trente glorieuses. Thirty Glorious Years Once Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms made the whole socio-economic system politically sustainable in the United States, and similar reforms did the same in other industrial nations, economic growth boomed in the West (as the capitalist world came to be called despite including Japan, Australia, and New Zealand).

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SOURCE: Author’s elaboration of data published in Berthold Herrendorf, Richard Rogerson, and Ákos valentinyi, Handbook of Economic Growth, vol. 2B, ch. 6, “Growth and Structural Transformation,” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-53540-5.00006-9. As both sets of charts illustrate, something historic changed at the end of les trente glorieuses. The steady shift in the share of workers in industry turned on its head. THE SERVICES TRANSFORMATION Catherine Spence’s demise in the London Docklands started our account of the Great Transformation. The demise of the Docklands itself ends it. For centuries, the Docklands rolled their way through booms, busts, and bombings—becoming the Royal Docks in the process.

Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn by Nick Kostov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, bitcoin, business logic, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, Masayoshi Son, offshore financial centre, rolodex, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, the payments system

She had told him that her family was middle class, but when Ghosn turned up at her place it was a huge villa with four cars in the garage, including a Porsche and a Mercedes. This is how the American middle class lives? Ghosn thought. He hadn’t seen anything like it in Brazil, Lebanon, or France. When he returned to Paris from the land of opportunity, the country had just emerged from what would be known as Les Trente Glorieuses—the three decades of growth and technological progress following World War II. Graduates of École Polytechnique could envision their future prospects with confidence. Back home in Beirut, however, things were deteriorating. The carefree Lebanon in which Ghosn had grown up, the cosmopolitan playground of jet-setters, was being dragged into the conflicts that surrounded it.

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See also Suhail Bahwan Automobiles (SBA) Kume, Hiroshi, 59–61 Lagarde, Christine, 107 Latham & Watkins, 140, 172, 174 Lawrence Academy, 230–31 Le Borgne, Jean-Yves, 266 Le Grèves, Frédérique, 143, 153 Le Maire, Bruno, 201, 207 Le Puy-en-Velay, France, 34 Lebanese Press Syndicate, 256 Lebanon civil war in, 29 Ghosn’s privileged life in, 15 judicial officials, 267 Ministry of Justice, 257 tax havens and, 125–26 Lehman Brothers, 88 Les Trente Glorieuses, 29 Lesort, Fabien, 186, 189 Lewis, C. S., 164–65 Lonsdale, Joe, 130 Lott, Trent, 120 Lutz, Bob, 43, 56, 66 Ma Cocotte restaurant, 161 Maaraoui, Alain, 129, 149 Macron, Emmanuel, 137, 139, 140–41, 199 Manaus, Brazil, 8 Mandarin Oriental hotel, 89–90 Maronite Christians, 9 Marshall, Jim, 75 Masaas, Boulos, 16 Matsui, Tomoyuki, 239, 244–45, 247 Mazda, 50 the McKinsey way, 34–35 Michelin Brazilian market, 36–37 Chahid-Nouraï coaches Ghosn, 34–35 as family-run company, 33–34 Ghosn as head of heavy-duty tires research and development, 35 Ghosn as youngest plant manager for, 34 Ghosn in Brazil, 37–38 Ghosn mentoring Édouard, 44–45 Ghosn resigns from, 45–46 headquarters for, 33 Kléber-Colombes and, 35 reaching out to Ghosn, 31 Uniroyal Goodrich merger with.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

THE ALARM CLOCK The secret of the West’s success over the past four hundred years is its appetite for creative destruction: just when everything looks hopeless, it succeeds in regenerating itself. Look at the changes wrought by the Roosevelts in the Gilded Age and the Great Depression. Having almost destroyed itself during the Second World War, Europe became the continent of les trentes glorieuses and wirtschaftswunder. Now the West has to recover from Covid, at a time when America’s power is waning and China is strengthening. The question is whether the West can rise to the challenge as it has so many times before and rethink the theory and practice of government—or whether it will fumble about, letting liberty slip away and leaving China to reclaim the global leadership it had when that frightened old tutor sat down to write Leviathan.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

Although there were some obvious problems—be it a shortage of housing in the United Kingdom, or the need for rationing of food to continue for years after the end of the war—the foundations of prosperous modern consumer societies were being laid. The period is sometimes known in the English-speaking economics world as the postwar Golden Age. To the French, it is les Trentes Glorieuses. As with any golden age, some people look back on it with fond nostalgia and wonder why we can’t return to that period when GDP seemed to do the bidding of government economic policymakers. THE POSTWAR REBOUND It is one of the distasteful aspects of a disaster that the immediate consequence is a boom in GDP growth.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

Western Europe benefited from what economist Brad DeLong called a “virtuous circle”: Trade expansion drove growth, growth drove expanded social insurance programs and real wage levels; expanded social insurance states and real wage levels social peace, social peace allowed inflation to stay low even as output expanded rapidly, rapidly expanding output led to high investment, which further increased growth and created the preconditions for further expansions of international trade. During this period, unemployment rates were impossibly low. The rate was 0.6 percent in West Germany in 1970, 2.2 percent in the UK, and 2.5 percent in France. In France, this era was called les trente glorieuses, or 30 glorious years. But Europe began to suffer a downturn in the early ’70s. The principal cause, as in the United States, was a combination of a profit squeeze from a militant labor movement and the development of global overcapacity in key postwar industries like textiles and steel. But in Western Europe, the slowdown was aggravated by the abandonment of capital controls and America’s abandonment of a fixed and overvalued currency that had given Europeans a price advantage.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

In one Western country after another, the need to mobilize conscripts and workers for war and the fear of a return to Depression-spawned radicalism had compelled the managerial overclass reluctantly to cut “new deals” with national working classes. The results were unprecedented levels of working-class prosperity and economic growth during what in France was called les Trente Glorieuses, the “thirty glorious years” that followed 1945. But the war-inspired class peace treaties within Western democracies would not last. For many members of the managerial overclass, the need to share power, wealth, and cultural authority with petty tribunes of the working class like trade union officials and small-town politicians and religious leaders was an indignity to be endured only under duress, until they could liberate themselves from constraint.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

As I say, if you want an economic chart that stops you from sleeping you should start with the elephant. Now, recall what came before the elephant. That was what we now refer to as the Golden Age of Western middle-class growth between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, or what the French call les Trente Glorieuses of rising incomes for the bulk of society. The annual gains were almost metronomic. Then something went wrong. It can be corrected, we tell ourselves. The West somehow managed to step off the natural escalator that assured annual income growth of 2 to 3 per cent, which roughly doubled our standard of living every generation or faster.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

The ‘winds of change’ that Harold Macmillan had caught blowing through Africa would herald the final days of empire. The Suez crisis, and the brutal demonstration of Britain's financial and military subservience to the USA which it supplied, began to bring home to Britain's political elite the economic and political costs of imperial overstretch. And the unfolding economic miracle of Les Trente Glorieuses in Western Europe, which had gathered pace in the 1950s, exposed the relative decline of the British economy and the penalties – in manufacturing competitiveness, export market access and political influence – of staying outside the EEC after the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957. Between 1950 and 1960, GDP grew at an annual average of 2.7 per cent in the UK, compared with 7.75 per cent in West Germany, 5.85 per cent in Italy and 4.6 per cent in France.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Instead, Western societies settled into peacetime with what used to be called a ‘mixed economy’, one that was neither capitalist nor socialist. Nor was the post-war experience of financial repression an unmitigated economic disaster. In fact, after 1945 France experienced a prolonged period of strong economic growth, known as Les Trente Glorieuses. Germany enjoyed its Wirtschaftswunder. America’s economy returned to its pre-Depression growth trend. Britain limped along as the ‘sick man of Europe’, but its economy performed better than in recent years. The Bretton Woods period (1945–71) was largely free from speculative bubbles and financial crises.

…

Scott, 203 Florence, 21–3 ‘Fordism’, 89 Fordyce, Alexander, 63 foreign exchanges, xxv; currencies pegged to the dollar, 251, 252, 253; dollar as global reserve currency, xxiii, 118, 239, 251–2, 253, 261, 262–3, 267; French currency during Mississippi bubble, 56–7; growth of reserves, 252, 253, 254–5, 256; international bills of exchange, 24; Louvre Accord (1987), 105–6; printing of money to acquire reserves, 137, 252; Shanghai Accord (2016), 241, 241*; undervalued Chinese yuan, 267–8, 270, 271 Forest Service, US, 154–5 France: 1848 Revolution, xix; allocation of capital in Bretton Woods era, 291; French Louisiana, 50, 52; Law and depreciated government debt, 48, 50, 51–2, 59, 65, 69; Law and paper money, xxii, 47, 52, 55–8; Law as Finance Minister, 46, 57; Law establishes General Bank (1716), 49–50; Law’s Mississippi Company, 46, 50–61, 65, 68, 172–3, 178, 202–3, 273, 286, 298, 308; Les Trente Glorieuses, 302; and long-term bonds, 225; Palais Mazarin, Paris, 54, 54*; rentier term, 7; Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars, 41–2, 69–70; Royal Bank, 50, 52, 53, 57, 58; war with England (1690s), 38 Francis, Pope, 201, 213 Franklin, Benjamin, Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748), xviii, 22, 28, 190 fraud, 64, 80, 149 free market economics, 95–6, 295–6 Freud, Lucien, 208 Frick, Henry, 157–8 Fridson, Martin, 146 Friedman, Milton, 98, 99, 101, 131 Fugger, Jakob, 202 Fullarton, John, 67–8, 71, 75 Gage, Lyman, 83, 311 Galai, Dan, 228–9 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 287 Galiani, Ferdinando, 218–19, 220, 221, 222, 233 GameStop (retailer), 307 Garber, Peter, 60 Gehringer, Agnieszka, 134–5 Geithner, Tim, 76 General Electric, 156, 157, 159, 170–71 General Motors, 90, 166–7 General Strike (UK, 1926), 86 Genoa, 22, 23, 35, 47–8, 49 George, Henry, 243, 246, 260* Gergy, Jacques Vincent, Count of, 60 Germany, 7, 159, 225, 291, 299; economy in 1920s, 82, 91, 92, 93; and Eurozone crisis, 144–5; negative interest rates in, 192–3, 245; Wirtschaftswunder, 302 Gesell, Silvio, 242–3, 246, 294 ‘gig economy’, 149 Gladstone, William, 40, 72, 76* Glahn, Richard von, 265* Glass–Steagall Act, 232 Global Asset Management, 228, 228* globalization: feedback loop with interest rates, 260–61, 311; first wave of (from 1860s), 260, 311; global aspect of inflation, 122; and great bubbles of history, 263; political backlash against in West, 261; recent phase (from 1980), 260–61, 311 Goetzmann, William, 8†, 14, 60, 247 Gold Exchange Standard, 11, 85, 85*, 86, 87, 90*, 261 Gold Standard, 43, 82, 84–5, 85*, 86, 98, 99, 133, 251 Goldman Sachs, 175, 255, 258 Goodhart, Charles, 105, 121, 127, 246 Gopinath, Gita, 144 Gordon, Robert, 128 Goschen, George, 77, 78–9 Goschen conversion (1888), 65*, 79 Graham, Benjamin, 90–91 Grant, Albert, 73 Grant, James, 82, 118, 141, 148, 191, 194, 230–31, 297; on Fed’s dual mandate, 155; on negative-yielding bonds, 226; on radical monetary gimmicks, 242; on regulation, 232; The Forgotten Depression, 100 Grantham, Jeremy, 183 Great Depression, 98–101, 98*, 105, 108, 125–6, 129, 142–3, 299 see also Wall Street Crash (October 1929) Great Fire of London (1666), 33 the ‘Great Moderation’, 112 Great Recession, 146, 152–3, 181–2, 206–17, 221–4; and secular stagnation argument, 124–5, 126–8, 131; slow recovery in developed world, 124–5, 126–9, 131–2, 150–53, 298–9, 304; and support for democracy, 299 see also financial crisis (2008) Greece, 144–5, 147, 148*, 253, 262, 293; ancient/classical, 6, 9, 10–11, 11*, 13, 13, 17–18, 18†, 20, 200, 200*, 219 Green, Sir Philip, 197 Greensill, Lex, 228* Greenspan, Alan, 110, 132, 226; Fed’s focus on near-term inflation, 110–14; interest rates under, 110–15, 117, 134–5, 134*, 162, 186, 190–91, 204, 226–7, 238, 252–3, 267 Gresham’s Law, 145–6, 224 Griffin, Ken, 209 Gross, Bill, 217, 221, 235, 236, 246 Grotius, Hugo, 40 Guinness (Irish brewer), 79 Gundlach, Jeffrey, 246 Gupta, Sanjeev, 228* H2O (investment company), 228 Hadley, Arthur, 140, 157 Haldane, Andrew, 168, 232, 233, 311 Hamilton, Earl J., 48, 58, 58* Hammurabi’s Code, 9 Hanauer, Nick, 217 Hankey, Thomson, Principles of Banking, 75–6 Hansen, Alvin, 124–5, 126, 127, 128, 129 Harding, William, 84 Harman, Jeremiah, 66 Harriman, Edward H., 157, 158 Hartnett, Michael, 200 Hawtrey, Ralph, 87 Hayek, Friedrich: and concept of time, 32, 95; critique of monetary policy in 1920s, 92, 96, 96*, 101, 105, 108, 114, 133; and deflation/inflation, 100, 101, 105, 113, 133–4, 302; and inequality, 296, 299; interpretation of 1929 Crash, 101, 105; on money, 294, 295, 297*, 312; and ‘natural rate’ of interest, 32, 96, 96*, 133, 269; rejects price stabilization policy, 92, 96, 96*, 108, 133; view of intellectuals, 297, 302–3; view of interest, 297–8, 301; The Denationalisation of Money (1990), 297*; Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1929), 96; ‘The Pretence of Knowledge’ (Nobel prize lecture), 302–3; The Road to Serfdom (1944), 295–6, 298, 302 Haywood, Tim, 228* Hazlitt, Henry, Economics in One Lesson (1946), xx hedge funds, 166, 169–70, 183, 207, 209, 229, 304 Heinz, H.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Over the postwar decades, the emphasis would shift from industrial and social to economic and financial agendas, creating a succession of boom-ier booms and bigger busts, culminating in the GFC. The initial phase of postwar expansion—known variously as the Long Boom, the Golden Age of Capitalism, or the New Gilded Age—spanned a period from around 1950 to the early 1970s. In France the thirty years of economic expansion from 1945–75 is known as Les Trente Glorieuses (the Glorious Thirty), rivaling La Belle Époque (the Beautiful Era, which covered the period from 1871 to the beginning of World War I). Its hallmarks were economic prosperity, low unemployment, rising incomes, growing wealth, increased availability of social services, and greater affordability of household items, leisure activities, and holidays.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

And social democratic governments continued to sanction sterilization for “hygienic purposes” into the age of ABBA: Between 1934 and 1976 some six thousand Danes, forty thousand Norwegians, and sixty thousand Swedes, 90 percent of them women, were subjected to compulsory sterilization.12 But for the time being the big state seemed to work—and rapid economic growth more than made up for a bit of bossy social engineering. For America the postwar era was one of unrivaled ­supremacy—of new freeways and schools, the GI Bill, and expanding opportunities. For the British it was an era when the ordinary people had never had it so good. The French had les trente glorieuses. The Germans basked in the Wirtschaftswunder. The state showed that it could be enlightened: In France and Germany many of the brightest minds went into government. It also showed that it could be flexible. In the 1960s, even as they hung on to the commanding heights of the economy and took away half of many people’s income in taxes, politicians loosened their grip on people’s private morals: Divorce, abortion, and homosexuality all became legal.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

This book follows this momentum and assesses its consequences for social life and politics. To do so, it presents an alternative account to that of the ‘affluent society’, which has continued to inform the popular imagination and treats consumption as a phenomenon – or disease – of the decades following the Second World War: the era of the boom, the Wirtschaftswunder or les trente glorieuses. This is the period commonly associated with the rise of hedonism, the power of marketing and advertising men, the coming of the credit card, self-service supermarkets and, above all, the American way of life. It is to these years that commentators trace the root cause of today’s fixation with consuming more and more.

…

The neo-liberal 1990s told a similar story, but celebrated the triumph of choice and markets. The end of our own era of affluence in 2009 and the decline of America are an opportune moment to take a broader view. The golden years from the 1950s to the early 1970s – das Wirtschaftswunder, il miracolo, les trente glorieuses – brought annual growth rates of 5 per cent to Western Europe, unprecedented in history. Affluence, however, came in the wake of an equally extraordinary series of transformations that compressed into a single generation total war (1914–18), a world depression (1929–31), the rise of totalitarian regimes and another even more brutal world war (1939–45).

…

Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle-class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), 43–8. For film and fashionability, see Juliane Fürst, ‘The Importance of Being Stylish’, in: Juliane Fürst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006), 209–30. 90. Jean Fourastie, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la revolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris, 1979), 17: in 1975 there were 212 homes, of which 210 had a fridge; 197 gas or electric cooking; 100 central heating. They owned 280 cars; 250 radios; 200 TVs; 180 washing machines; 150 interior WCs. 91. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 199f., and 128–9, 203 and 218 for the above.

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

This had happened on the back of strong economic growth, with the West German economy expanding 5.5 percent per year on average in the 1960s, the French 7 percent, and the Italian an astonishing 8 percent. For many countries the 1960s was the most intense growth period of all, part of what in France was called Les Trente Glorieuses, the glorious thirty postwar years of economic boom. In the core countries of the western European economy, economic growth led to full employment and better conditions for workers, at least in terms of buying power. The regions at the periphery also benefitted, but on different terms: their benefit was as much in the export of labor as in local industrialization.

…

Asia and, 157–158, 230–231 Congo crisis, 282 covert actions in Iran and Guatemala, 287 Cuba and, 297–301 election (1952), 224 Guatemala and, 345–346 India and, 151–153 Indonesia and, 327–328 Iran coup and, 269 Japanese exports and, 400 Korean War, 181–182, 224 Middle East and, 456 militarization of Cold War, 287–288 New Look policy, 225 nuclear deterrence, 224–225 Pakistan and, 427 Paris summit (1959), 229–230 relations with Soviet Union, 228–230 Suez crisis, 272–274 Vietnam and, 150, 315 in World War I, 26 El Salvador, 499, 532, 570 ELAS (Greek People’s Liberation Army), 75–76 elites post-WWII violence against, 74–75 power transfer to after World War II, 129, 132 Engels, Friedrich, 11 Enlightenment values, 8 environmental problems, 522, 544, 596 Eshkol, Levi, 337 Estonia, 123, 582, 600–601, 609 Ethiopia, 487–489, 566 Eurafrique, 275–276 Eurocommunism, 373, 503 Europe empires built by Europeans, 8–9 epoch of predominance, 9 globalization of, 15 integration, 383–384, 516–519, 592–593, 623 Korean War concerns in, 176–177 Marshall Plan, 94–95, 102, 110–113, 115, 210–212, 214–215, 217, 219 post-Cold War, 624 post-WWII, 71–98 postwar devastation, 71–73 regional identities, 518 Stuttgart Declaration (1983), 517–518 US influences after WWI, 29–30 European Coal and Steel Community, 215–217 European Community, 516–518, 593 European Economic Community (EEC), 216–217, 382, 384, 393 European Free Trade Association, 384 European Nuclear Disarmament, 521–522 European Parliament, 516, 519 European Union, 17, 593 exchange rates, floating, 396–397 factory councils, 189 Falkland Islands, 519, 571 Fanon, Franz, 270 farming, collective, 186–187, 207–208 Farouk (King), 452 Fascism, 27, 30, 36–38, 73 Fatah, 459–460, 462 Fatherland Front, 63, 80 Federal Republic of Germany, 217–218, 386, 516, 606 Federation of Socialist Workers, 11 financial revolution, global of 1980s, 525–526 Finland, 44, 74 Firmenich, Mario, 354, 361–362 Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, 432 Food and Agriculture Organization, 100 Ford, Gerald, 366, 420, 466–468, 477–479, 483–484 Ford, Henry, 30 Ford foundation, 221 Forest Brothers, 123 Fortuny, José Manuel, 347 Fourteen Points, 28 Fourth Republic, 115 Frahm, Herbert (Willy Brandt), 37 France Algerian conflict, 276–278 anti-Americanism, 115 Communists in, 74–75, 98, 113–116, 177, 219, 275–276, 372–373, 379 Czechoslovakia and, 96 declaration of war on Germany (1939), 40 decolonization, 264–267, 274–278 economic growth, post-WWII, 218 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 215–217 European integration, 274–275, 519 GDP decline in WWI, 25 German occupation of, 41 Gorbachev and, 547 Les Trente Glorieuses, 371 Marshall Plan funds, 94, 113, 115 in Middle East, 449–450, 452 Mitterand’s Right turn, 520 nuclear weapons, 214, 382, 416, 507 positive image of Soviet Union by people of, 114 reduced global status, 222 Suez crisis, 272–274 trade unions, 114 Vichy government, 149, 212 Vietnam and, 56, 150–151, 313, 315–316 views on Communism post-WWII, 55 welfare in 1930s, 39 youth protests in 1968, 377–379 zone of occupation in Germany, 51, 107 Franco, Francisco, 38, 73 Frei, Eduardo, 355 French Communist Party, 41–42, 98, 115, 219, 275–276 French Revolution, 9, 261 French West Africa, 277 Friedan, Betty, 380 Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), 482 Fuchs, Klaus, 121, 310 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 415 Gandhi, Indira, 425, 434, 438–447, 564 Gandhi, Mohandas, 55–56, 264 Gandhi, Rajiv, 564–565 gas, exports by Soviet Union, 504–505, 528 Gates, Robert, 533 Gaza Strip, 154, 461 Geisel, Ernesto, 359 Geneva Accords, 314–315 Geneva summit (1955), 229 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 606–607 Gerasimov, Gennadi, 545 Gerhardsen, Einar, 96 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 193, 292, 294, 387–388, 515, 546, 590–591 Germany attack on Soviet Union, 43–46 Communists in, 37, 116, 193 currency reform, 110–111 declaration of war on United States, 47 defeat of, 58 division of, 111, 116 GDP decline in WWI, 25 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, 40–42, 44, 48, 543 Marshall Plan, 95, 113 military production in WWII, 50 in NATO, 605 as one-party state, 36 post-WWI conditions in, 107 reunification, 110, 217, 297, 385–386, 546, 590–594, 593, 605–607, 624 submarine warfare against shipping, 21 Weimer Republic, 36 zones of occupation, 95, 107–111 Gerő, Ernő, 201–202 Ghana, 262, 271, 277, 283, 324, 566 glasnost, 541, 543–546, 581, 602 global transformation, late-twentieth-century, 553–578 Glucksmann, André, 417 Golan Heights, 460, 464 Golitsyn, Anatolii, 310 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 83, 125, 201, 206 gongchandang, 558 González, Felipe, 552 good neighbor policy, 344 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeevich, 534–552 Afghanistan and, 539–540 background of, 534–535 Baltic states and, 609 Bush and, 581, 599–600, 610, 615 Castro and, 569, 571 challenges to, 602, 604 China and, 586–587 Cold War end, 579 concern of threat of nuclear war, 537 coup of August 1991, 611–613 democratization and, 579, 582–583, 600–601, 603–604, 611, 614–615 East Germany and, 590–591 eastern Europe and, 545–547, 585–586 economic reform, 582, 611 election as general secretary, 534 end of Cold War, 617 Germany and, 604–605 glasnost, 541, 543–546 international policies, 552, 604 nuclear weapons and, 536–537, 540–541, 548 perestroika, 541, 543, 545–546, 551, 622 Poland and, 589 political reform, 544, 550–551, 579, 582, 601 Rajiv Gandhi, 564–565 Reagan and, 537–538, 540–541, 546, 548–549, 568, 581 referendum of March 1991, 609–610 reforms, 541–547, 550–551, 579–583, 599–603, 611, 621–622 release of political prisoners, 543 resignation, 613–616 resistance to leadership of, 582 rule-of-law state, 551 on Saddam Hussein, 610 Shevardnadze resignation, 608 style, 536 Thatcher and, 547, 581–582 trips abroad, 535 United States relations, 547–550 western Europe and, 537, 546–547 withdrawal from Third World, 568–569 Gorbachev, Raisa, 612–613 Grotewohl, Otto, 193 GosPlan, 542 Gottwald, Klement, 94 Goulart, João, 351–352 grain, imports by Soviet Union, 529 Grand Alliance, 43–44, 58, 68 Great Depression, 35, 39 Great Leap Forward, 242–244, 246–248, 254, 256, 292, 404 Great Patriotic War, 52, 54 Great Powers, 66, 84–85, 222, 605, 618, 627 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The Bretton Woods era is still seen by many people as an extraordinary success. This was undoubtedly true of continental Europe, which recovered remarkably quickly from the worst efforts of Hitler. In Germany, there was the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, in the western part of the country. In France, they talk of les trente glorieuses, or glorious thirty years. In each case, the old laissez-faire model appeared to have been proved wrong. Europeans could use economic management to enjoy a high standard of living, low unemployment and generous social benefits. The picture was slightly different in the English-speaking economies of America and Britain.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Almost everyone in the world was richer in 2000 than their grandparents, or great- or great-great-grandparents, had been when Queen Victoria died and Louis Armstrong was born in 1901, adding to another century of progress before that, from 1800 to 1900. In the rich countries of western Europe and North America, the rate of income growth reached its all-time high in the period known in France as Les trente glorieuses, the thirty years after the Second World War. During those years in the United States, not only was the growth of national income per head faster than ever before, it was also widely shared by rich, poor, and middle class alike. Education is a similar story. In 1900, only a quarter of people graduated from high school; by midcentury more than three-quarters did.

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

But not even a promoter with a Texas-size imagination would have bet that by the early 1970s this dusty burg would boast an automobile plant, a vast amusement park, a four-year state university, and a major-league baseball team—much less that pastures and pecan orchards would give way to street upon street of ranch houses with brick facades and two-car garages to accommodate a 2,000 percent increase in population.1 Such transformations were not unusual in the years after the Second World War. The French called this period les trente glorieuses, “the thirty glorious years.” The British preferred “Golden Age”; the Germans, Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle”; the Italians, simply il miracolo, “the miracle.” The Japanese, more modestly, named it “the era of high economic growth.” In any language, economic performance was stellar.

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

By 1973, Western Europeans were 50 percent richer than Argentineans.17 The average rate of unemployment in Europe of the 1960s was 1.5 percent. The number of automobiles in France and Germany increased twentyfold between 1950 and 1966. Income in Western Europe rose from about 40 percent of American levels in 1950 to over 70 percent by 1973.18 The German variation was called the “economic miracle,” the French called it “les trente glorieuses,” and the English, the “golden years.” Italian film epitomized the change. In 1949, Vittorio de Sica’s hero in the Bicycle Thief was a man looking for a job in postwar Italy. In 1960, the hero of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was one who had a very good job and life, but was alienated from both.

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argue, instead, not only that the measured decline in productivity growth in recent years is a product of a failure to measure output correctly, but that an age of accelerating technological progress is ahead of us, as intelligent machines and ‘big data’ transform our economy and our lives.35 At this stage, the only sensible thing to say is that we do not know what promise of a more productive future new technologies hold, though it seems likely that if it is as dynamic as some expect, it will also tend to generate even bigger increases in inequality of earnings and incomes between digital haves and have-nots. If one takes these elements together, the growth rate of the high-income countries may be substantially slower in the future than it was even in the decades leading up to 2007, let alone the magnificently prosperous years from 1945 to 1975 – les trentes glorieuses, as the French call those three decades of economic boom. This will have many difficult consequences: the distributional struggle will be more intense and political stability less assured; the relative power of the high-income countries will shrink; the public finances will be more difficult to manage; and the beneficiaries of public spending – particularly the old – will find the resources at their disposal shrinking.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

When Esther was born, late in 1972, France had about four times the GDP per capita than when her mother, Violaine, was born in 1942.3 This was typical of the Western European experience. GDP per capita in Europe increased by 3.8 percent every year between 1950 and 1973.4 It’s not for nothing that the French call the thirty years after the war les Trente Glorieuses (“the Glorious Thirty”). Economic growth was driven by a rapid expansion in the productivity of labor, or the output produced per hour worked. In the United States worker productivity grew at 2.82 percent per year, which meant it would double every twenty-five years.5 This rise in labor productivity was large enough to more than offset a decline in hours worked per head that was going on at the same time.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

And a greater emphasis on home working will reduce the need for the daily commute. Our grandchildren may not understand the concept of a “rush hour” at all. — 12 — FROM THE WONDER YEARS TO THE MALAISE: 1945–1979 The three decades after the Second World War were a period of increasing prosperity in the Western world. In France, they were known as Les trentes glorieuses; in West Germany, as the Wirtschaftswunder. Unemployment stayed low and there was barely a recession. The consumer goods that had been invented in the previous 50 years finally came within the reach of most families. All this happened because the developed world avoided many of the mistakes that followed the First World War.

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

Raymond Barre, a European commissioner who then became prime minister from 1976 to 1981, was lauded by the president at the time, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, as “the best economist of France.”46 But “economist” was a dirty word. As the late 1970s were a time of increased inflation and unemployment, the end of the postwar euphoria of les trentes glorieuses, and a period of general disenchantment with the political elites that had until then managed the Third Republic, the concept of economist as ruler looked sinister rather than beneficent. In the 1990s, another economist finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, also attracted more criticism than praise.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In addition, the postwar baby boom added to its population and to overall economic growth, with the French population growing by nearly 30 percent between 1946 and the late 1960s.10 No wonder French writer Jean Forastie, writing in 1979 about the postwar transformation of France, titled his book Les trente glorieuses, ou, La revolution invisible de 1946 a 1975 (The Glorious Thirty: Or, the Invisible Revolution between 1946 and 1975). The Germans were no less ebullient about their Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”). How did Western Europe know what to do to grow? Western Europe was exceptional but not unique.

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

For much of the West, the 1970s marked the end of a long period of extraordinary economic growth. Virtually all the countries of Western Europe as well as the United States experienced an enormous surge in prosperity for the first thirty years after the end of World War II. (The French, indeed, refer to this period as les trente glorieuses, “the glorious three decades.”) Americans, in particular, watched productivity increase steadily from year to year, as did wages and consumption. Everyone benefited: factory workers saw their standard of living rise just as precipitously as that of their bosses. For the first time, even manual laborers could afford washing machines, vacations to faraway places, or college educations for their kids.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

Bretton Woods was an ersatz gold standard: other nations pledged to redeem their currencies for dollars, and the United States promised that it would redeem dollars for gold.5 The system largely succeeded in stabilizing exchange rates for three decades. The world experienced a recrudescence of prosperity the French fondly dubbed Les Trente Glorieuses. But the Bretton Woods system ultimately undermined the economic dominance of the United States. The root of the problem was that the rest of the world needed dollars. In some ways this was a nice kind of problem: it meant the rest of the world was willing to trade goods for dollars, and then to sit on the dollars rather than using the money to buy goods from the United States.* Moreover, the purchasing power of each dollar steadily increased.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

But events, at least in the medium run, proved Zweig right. After World War II, much of the Western world, and some countries in Asia, built new institutions supporting shared prosperity and enjoyed rapid growth that benefited almost all segments of their societies. The decades following 1945 came to be referred in France as the “les trente glorieuses,” the thirty glorious years, and the feeling was widespread throughout the Western world. This growth had two critical building blocks, similar to those that had begun to emerge in the United Kingdom during the second half of the nineteenth century: first, a direction of travel for new technology that generated not just cost savings through automation but also plenty of new tasks, products, and opportunities; and second, an institutional structure that bolstered countervailing powers from workers and government regulation.

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Louis Menand, “How Women Got in on the Civil Rights Act,” New Yorker, July 21, 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/sex-amendment. 24. Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap, 217. 25. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, New York: W. W. Norton, 1963, 474. 14. Thirty Glorious Years of Social Democracy 1. Jean Fourastié, Les Trente Glorieuses: Ou, la Révolution Invisible de 1946 à 1975, Paris: Hachette Littérature, 1997 [1949]. 2. Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971 [1934], 277–320; Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 27–61. 3.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

For West Germans these were the barely believable years of the ‘economic miracle’. But the ‘miracle’ was far from confined to one country. Italians, too, saw their post-war economic recovery as nothing short of miraculous. The French looked back on the era between 1946 and 1975 as the ‘glorious thirty years’ (‘les trentes glorieuses’) – even if, in any other than an economic sense, some of those years were far from glorious. The British, told by their Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, that they had ‘never had it so good’, spoke of ‘the affluent society’, though, for all the improvements, ‘affluence’ scarcely covered the living conditions of much of the British population.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

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Both world wars greatly delayed implementation of the Great Inventions of the late nineteenth century in Europe and Japan, so much so that in 1950 the level of labor productivity in western Europe was only half that in the United States. When Europe caught up in the years the French call “les trentes glorieuses” (1945–75), Europeans were chasing the frontier carved out by the United States decades earlier. In fact, it has been claimed that the percentage of the French population having access to electricity and an automobile in 1948 was roughly equal to that of the United States in 1912. Not only is this book limited to the American experience between 1870 and 2014, but it is also limited to the viewpoint of the household in its twin roles as consumer and worker.