In 1910, there were 2.3 motor vehicle registrations for every 100 households. What really amazed me was not the speed of innovation but the speed of adoption. “In 1910, there were 2.3 cars for every 100 homes. The advent of electricity, cars, indoor plumbing, and telephones meant that people were more connected than ever, dramatically improving quality of life and increasing productivity to previously unseen levels.
You would spend long hours of your short life doing backbreaking labor, owning only two changes of clothes, and eating a whole lot of pork and grain mush.īy 1970, homes-and people-became, to use Gordon’s term, networked. Your world was confined to the distance your horse could travel. To use the bathroom, your choice was an outhouse or a chamber pot. Gordon does a phenomenal job illustrating just how different life was in 1870 than it was in 1970, through both an economic analysis and engaging narrative descriptions.Ĭonsider that in 1870, most homes were lit by candles and whale oil lamps. This was the century that brought us the great inventions that fundamentally changed our standard of living-inventions like the electrical grid, indoor plumbing, automobiles, and antibiotics. Gordon paints a vivid picture of the years between 18, a century of unprecedented growth in the United States. Gordon’s two-part piece in Bloomberg View is a helpful summary for anyone who won’t get through the whole thing.) (And, at 743 pages, the book has a lot of bulk. But I did find his historical analysis, which makes up the bulk of the book, utterly fascinating. I strongly disagree with him on that point, as I discuss below. Most reviews have focused on the “fall” indicated in the title: the last hundred pages or so, in which Gordon predicts that the future won’t live up to the past in terms of economic growth. So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered how much I liked it.
But based on reviews I had seen, I was prepared to be more frustrated than fascinated by Robert Gordon’s new book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. I generally read books that I expect to enjoy.
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