A correspondent writes:
Posted by DeLong at June 7, 2004 07:53 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postFor those upset by our hedonistic existence and all the spending it takes to maintain it, I recommend reading a great bit of economic history, "The Pursuit of Happiness," by Stanley Lebergott, once a professor of mine at Wesleyan. Stan traces the history of consumer spending decade by decade through most of the 20th Century. His account is replete with telling statistics, such as how many tons of coal a typical housewife carried into the house from the coal shed in the backyard each year at the beginning of the century.... [In] Johnson City, TN... in 1950... half the homes in the county of 50,000 still used outhouses, though the proportion in the town was much smaller. We've come a long way, baby--thank goodness.
Stan Lebergott is one of the great economic historians of the War generation, and a great humane man. I'm glad he's getting a little plug here (though he doesn't really need it). He did English before he did economics -- in many ways a better preparation for understanding how things economic work than math. Hat's off.
Posted by: Knut Wicksell on June 7, 2004 08:12 PMSave the sybaritic solipsisms and ad hominems.
There are still plenty of one-lane rural roads and outhouses in America, and still hundreds of thousands if not millions of people living in chicken shacks and travel trailers, in cardboard boxes or abandoned warehouses, eating weeds and surplus food. The difference is, back in the 20th, there was a hand out, not a police roust.
Our American War on Poverty has become just that.
A permanent apartheid, an ever-expanding gulag.
"There will always be a place in America for chauffeurs and maids." Sr VP for AT&T
To which we can add, budding teenage porn stars.
12.1 million HOUSEHOLDs is America were exposed to food insecurity in 2002, 3.8 million of them to the extent of being qualified as "hungry" -- and that was official:
http://www.frac.org/html/hunger_in_the_us/hunger_index.html
US is second only to Russia, and closely following, in number of prisoners per 1,000 population - US: 6.19; Russia: 6.39
And that makes how many million prisoners in US?
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/cri_pri_cap
I mean it is a bit strange to find these poverty figures in a country where productivity is so high and natural resources are so abundant -- and democracy and is valued.
Posted by: Bulent Sayin on June 8, 2004 12:30 AMIn America, we have maintained a deep appreciation of that most cherished of basic human freedoms- the freedom to be born to the wrong parents.
Posted by: non economist on June 8, 2004 01:15 AMOne more bone of (critical) contention regarding this "entry":
Is it just a sign of sloppy thinking? Or are economists actually *trained* not to distinguish between the notions of "economic development" and "economic growth"?
I mean, it's one thing to celebrate the "news" that someplace an acorn has developed into a fine, sturdy oak. An altogether different response is in order, it seems to me, when one learns that a "mole" has grown up to be a melanoma...
Posted by: Mike on June 8, 2004 02:55 AMThe book is called "Pursuing Happiness."
JBdL, if possible maybe you could edit the original post so people can actually find the book if they choose to?
Posted by: globecanvas on June 8, 2004 05:29 AMI don't get it, Brad. What's wrong with all of the commentators here [except me, given that I'm a shining paragon of sanity and level-headedness]? Did you have secret text in which you said that the U.S. was a land without poverty or inequality?
Posted by: Julian Elson on June 8, 2004 07:27 AMGrew up in that -- had an outhouse as late as the 5th grade.
The hardest thing I try to do is explain to my kids that have only lived in surburbam Boston
what it was like in the rural south 50 years ago. Although it is still bad, it is nothing like it use to be.
http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/06/the_republican_.html
Posted by: Adrian Spidle on June 8, 2004 10:43 AM"Did you have secret text in which you said that the U.S. was a land without poverty or inequality?"
If anything the subtext of this post is the second chapter of his textbook, http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/Slouch_wealth2.html, which is all about the improved conditions the rising tide of growth has brought us (the next chapter is about why we aren't satisfied yet).
Posted by: Noumenon on June 9, 2004 12:16 AMBizarre: the conflation of economic growth with technological progress...no one would say that they are one and the same thing, nor are they necessarily dependent on each other.
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