Review worth reading

Review of 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) in http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/not-so-fast-economic-growth-robert-gordon captured how American growth fell.

I wish to present two paragraphs from the review by Lawrence Summers which is to be read, for its ability to convey the change that has undergone:

 

"The strongest part of Gordon’s book is his evocation of the remarkable 50-year period between 1920 and 1970. My grandmother was born around the turn of the century and died in the mid-1970s. Reading Gordon’s chapters, I was reminded that over her adult lifetime she saw the flush toilet, electricity for lighting and central heating go from being luxuries enjoyed by a quarter or less of the population to becoming universal. She saw radio come into being and then be supplanted by black-and-white and ultimately color television. She saw air-conditioning; washing machines, dryers and refrigerators go from non-existent to universal. Over her lifetime, transportation went from meaning walking, riding a horse or taking some kind of train to being primarily based on cars and aero planes. When she had my mother in 1922, infant mortality was 75 per 1000 and large families could expect to suffer an infant or childhood death. When her youngest grandchild was born in the 1960s, infant mortality was below 20 per 1000 and life expectancy had risen by more than a decade."

 

“But whereas my grandmother would have been at sea if returned to her girlhood home, I would miss relatively little if suddenly placed in the home I grew up in."

 

The review is very well written and worth reading (link is provided above).