Volume 52, Number 4 · March 10, 2005
The Producers
By Jeff Madrick
They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators
by Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer
Little, Brown, 496 pp., $40.00
An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power
by John Steele Gordon
HarperCollins, 460 pp., $26.95
Growing Public, Volume 1: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century
by Peter H. Lindert
Cambridge University Press, 396 pp., $65.00; $24.99 (paper)
For many Americans the long expansion of the economy during the 1990s reinforced the belief that technological advances will naturally lead to prosperity. So strong is this belief that the stock market crash, financial scandals, and a few years of recovery without many new jobs have not undermined it. Supporting this optimistic view of the economic future are gains in productivity, or the output of the economy per hour of work. In the second half of the 1990s, productivity grew rapidly. Not only did stock prices, profits, and the fortunes of the rich rise, but so did the wages and salaries of most of the rest of us, even the working poor.
Review, 4280 words
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