America of the 1920s had the same real per-capita GDP as Turkmenistan does today.

No, no, no,” replied Brynjolfsson. “From about the 1930s through about the 1960s, the [top] tax rate averaged about seventy percent. At times it was up at ninety-five percent. And those were actually pretty good years for growth.” Indeed they were. Between 1948 and 1973, real GDP grew 170 percent in the United States and per capita income nearly doubled. During that same period, the revenue collected through that progressive tax code made it possible to build an interstate highway system and fund the space program, while dramatically expanding the social safety net, with new programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and food stamps. Even with historically high tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, the period of economic expansion came to be viewed as a golden age of capitalism. And with government largely delivering for people in a way they had not seen before, these years were also not coincidentally an age that saw Americans two to three times more likely to express trust in their government than they have in more recent years.

Of course none compare to the exponential growth unleashed by late-20th Century America’s synergy of government, enterprise and unleashed individual competitiveness. One result was the first society transforming itself from the feudal pyramid of privilege to a diamond shape[227] whose vast and healthy and well-educated middle class proved to be the generator of nearly all our great accomplishments.

But in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the United States was an emerging nation, prices held steady, even though the banks had begun printing money like crazy.

There are two ways to tell the story of the twentieth century. You can describe a series of wars, revolutions, crises, epidemics, financial calamities. Or you can point to the gentle but inexorable rise in the quality of life of almost everybody on the planet: the swelling of income, the conquest of disease, the disappearance of parasites, the retreat of want, the increasing persistence of peace, the lengthening of life, the advances in technology.

Corporate profits are up fifty-five-fold since World War II, and the stock market is up sixtyfold. Four wars, nine recessions, eight presidents, and one impeachment didn’t change that.

In 1950 the global world product was roughly four trillion dollars,” he says. “In 2008, fifty-eight years later, it was sixty-one trillion dollars. Where did this fifteenfold increase come from? It came from increased productivity in our factories equipped with automation.

The elephant in this big room, obviously, is context. In America, the twenty-first century began with the contested election of 2000, followed shortly thereafter by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. From there came the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial collapse of 2008, the lightning-rod election of the first black president, the rise of antidemocratic authoritarianism at the hands of his successor, and finally a second contested election and a worldwide pandemic that saw the death of one million Americans. All of which is to say: None of the art made in this period happened under “normal” conditions.

if consumption by the one billion people in the developed countries declined, it is certainly nowhere close to doing so where the other six billion of us are concerned. If the rest of the world bought cars and trucks at the same per capita rate as in the United States, the world’s population of cars and trucks would be 5.5 billion. The production of global warming pollution and the consumption of oil would increase dramatically over and above today’s unsustainable levels. With the increasing population and rising living standards in developing countries, the pressure on resource constraints will continue, even as robosourcing and outsourcing reduce macroeconomic demand in developed countries. Around the same time that The Limits to Growth was published, peak oil production was passed in the United States. Years earlier, a respected geologist named M. King Hubbert collected voluminous data on oil production in the United States and calculated that an immutable peak would be reached shortly after 1970. Although his predictions were widely dismissed, peak production did occur exactly when he predicted it would. Exploration, drilling, and recovery technologies have since advanced significantly and U.S. oil production may soon edge back slightly above the 1970 peak, but the new supplies are far more expensive. The balance of geopolitical power shifted slightly after the 1970 milestone. Less than a year after peak oil production in the U.S., the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to flex its muscles, and two years later, in the fall of 1973, the Arab members of OPEC implemented the first oil embargo. Since those tumultuous years when peak oil was reached in the United States, energy consumption worldwide has doubled, and the growth rates in China and other emerging markets portend further significant increases. Although the use of coal is declining in the U.S., and coal-fired generating plants are being phased out in many other developed countries

The decades between the Civil War and World War I were also an epoch of rapid population growth and urbanization. Between 1870 and 1900 national population nearly doubled from 40 million to 76 million, while the population of cities tripled from 10 million to 30 million.

…

Year after year an endless stream of hopeful emigrants from American farms and European villages poured into the anonymous teeming cities of tenements and skyscrapers. These migrants were living now not merely in a new community, but in a setting so unfamiliar and disjointed that many doubted it deserved the term community at all.

Most of the new urban dwellers were also living in a new country. In the thirty years between 1870 and 1900, nearly 12 million persons immigrated to the United States, more than had come to our shores in the previous two and a half centuries. In the following fourteen years nearly another 13 million would arrive. In 1870 one-third of all industrial workers in America were foreign born. By 1900 more than half were. In 1890, immigrant adults actually outnumbered native adults in eighteen of the twenty cities with a population over 100,000.

…

To those who lived through this epoch, what was most striking was simply the overwhelmingly accelerated pace of change itself. We often speak easily about the rapid pace of change in our own time. However, nothing in the experience of the average American at the end of the twentieth century matches the wrenching transformation experienced at the beginning of the century by an immigrant raised as a peasant in a Polish village little changed from the sixteenth century who within a few years was helping to construct the avant-garde skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan in the city of ‘big shoulders’ besides Lake Michigan. Even for native-born Americans, the pace of change in the last decades of the nineteenth century was extraordinary. A Bostonian Henry Adams later wrote of his own boyhood, ‘The American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 t

If the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were, in many countries of the West, times of accelerating social power, and a corollary increase in freedom, peace, and material welfare, the twentieth century has been primarily an age in which State power has been catching up — with a consequent reversion to slavery, war, and destruction.43 In

1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization.

As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups – adults who had never, since they left school, had anything productive to do; adults in the embittered by years of suffering and hardship. The President's Advisory Commission on Education was to warn of a whole lost generation of young people.

We had just finished the world’s greatest depression and there were many bankrupt companies. But a war causes a demand for almost every product, so during a war almost every company will prosper again.