Books June 2016
Growing pains
A 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) by Robert J. Gordon.
Endless economic growth, culminating in the world’s highest living standards, is part of the way that America—meaning “the United States of America”—sees itself. The phrase “the American dream” is hackneyed, but even the one word “America” can become a metaphor of desirability and longing. In Jacques Brel’s 1962 song, Madeleine was the alluring but difficult to attain girlfriend who was “mon Amérique à moi.” The first generation of Europeans after the Second World War yearned for...
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