The Great Boom 1950-2000: How a Generation of Americans Created the World's Most Prosperous Society - Softcover

Sobel, Robert

3.83

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780312288990: The Great Boom 1950-2000: How a Generation of Americans Created the World's Most Prosperous Society

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312288999 ISBN 13: 9780312288990

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002

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In The Great Boom, historian Robert Sobel tells the fascinating story of the last 50 years when American entrepreneurs, visionaries, and ordinary citizens transformed our depression and war-exhausted society into today's economic powerhouse.

As America's G.I.s returned home from World War II, many of the nation's best minds predicted a new depression—yet exactly the opposite occurred. Jobs were plentiful in retooled factories swamped with orders from pent-up demand. Tens of thousands of families moved out of cities into affordable suburban homes built by William Levitt and his imitators. They bought cars, televisions, and air conditioners by the millions. And they took to the nation's roads and new interstate highways—the largest public works project in world history—where Kemmons Wilson of Holiday Inns, Ray Kroc of McDonalds, and other start-up entrepreneurs soon catered to a mobile populace with food and lodgings for leisure time vacationers.

Americans and their families began to channel savings into new opportunities. Credit cards democratized purchasing power, while early mutual funds found growing numbers of investors to fuel the first postwar bull market in the go-go '60s. At the same time the continuing boom enriched the fabric of social and cultural life. A college education became a must on the highway to upward mobility; high-tech industries arose with astonishing new ways of conducting business electronically; and an unprecedented 49 million families had become investors when the 1981-2000 stock market boom reached 10,000 on the Dow.

The Great Boom is the first major book to portray the great wave of homegrown entrepreneurs as post-war heroes in the complete remaking and revitalizing of America. All that, plus the creation of unprecedented wealth—or themselves, for the nation, for tens of millions of citizens—all in five short drama-filled decades.

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About the Author:

Robert Sobel was a financial historian and Lawrence Stressin Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Business History at Hofstra University and the author of numerous books on finance, including IBM: Colossus in Transition and The Pursuit of Wealth. He died in June 1999.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A rigorous, engaging assessment of the impressive post-WWII economic growth in the US by the late business historian Sobel (Coolidge, 1998, etc.). Like the teacher he was for more than 40 years, Sobel begins with a question: How did Americans who in 1945 imagined their futures might not be particularly bright come to accomplish so much during the ensuing fifty-plus years? Throughout the remainder of this comprehensive work he provides a variety of answers, most of which flatter--deservedly so--his coevals, Tom Brokaw's greatest generation (Sobel alludes to Brokaw's book more than once). Sobel establishes that the GI's returning from WWII felt a generalized lack of confidence--after all, they had lived through both the Great Depression and a devastating war. But they possessed, he writes, the values of hard work and dedication and the determination to improve not only their own lives but the lives of their descendants. Sobel argues that the most important factors fueling the unprecedented accumulation of wealth were home ownership (he has an enlightening account of the development of Levittown and the ensuing suburbia), education (he credits the GI Bill), and entrepreneurship (he discusses many ventures (from McDonald's to Yahoo!). President Reagan emerges as a sort of cultural hero in this account: Sobel assails critics of Reagan's economic policies (stockholders profited during the corporate-raiding 1980s, he observes) and identifies as Reagan's defining moment the breaking of the PATCO strike. Sobel also leans right in his social criticism, sniping at 1960s campus radicals and at universities' declining academic standards. His reply to the question of why so many people remain in poverty is the cold comment that there will always be some who cannot handle capitalism and freedom. The book ends with a sanguine view of a future with boundless possibilities. Conservative in bent, expansive in scope, sedulous in scholarship, often wise and wonderful. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright � 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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