Home > Work > The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War QUOTES

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War QUOTES

1 " See the USA in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call, Drive your Chevrolet through the USA, America’s the greatest land of all.

[Quoting The Dinah Shore Chevy Show theme song, c. 1952, in an epigraph to Chapter 11: See the USA in Your Chevrolet or from a Plane Flying High Above.] "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

2 " The combined effects of growing inequality, a faltering education system, demographic headwinds, and the strong likelihood of a fiscal correction imply that the real median disposable income will grow much more slowly in the future than in the past. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

3 " If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside. —Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

4 " Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841 "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

5 " advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down after 1970, "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

6 " Chief among these headwinds is the rise of inequality that since 1970 has steadily directed an ever larger share of the fruits of the American growth machine to the top of the income distribution. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

7 " Hearst was eager to stoke the flames of conflict between Spain and the United States over Cuba and sent Frederick Remington the photographer, who could find no signs of war. In a famous exchange of cables, Hearst responded to Remington, “You provide the pictures; I’ll provide the war.”10 "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

8 " This paradox is resolved when we recognize that advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down after 1970, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

9 " But the cable cars did not last long. They had disappeared from the streets of most cities by 1900 and from Chicago by 1906, and they remain to this day only in the single city of San Francisco, where they are primarily a tourist attraction. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

10 " Morris Kleiner has calculated that the percentage of jobs subject to occupational licensing has expanded from 10 percent in 1970 to 30 percent in 2008. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

11 " The event happened at noon on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. That moment was a pivotal episode in world history as Leland Stanford pounded a golden spike with a silver hammer and in an instant ended the isolation of California and the Great West from the eastern half of the United States. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

12 " For instance, the degree of enjoyment provided by an hour of leisure spent watching a TV set in 1955 is greater than that provided by an hour listening to the radio in the same living room in 1935. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

13 " The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

14 " Our central thesis is that some inventions are more important than others, and that the revolutionary century after the Civil War was made possible by a unique clustering, in the late nineteenth century, of what we will call the “Great Inventions. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

15 " Although advertising began in the late nineteenth century with the development of the first branded products, its true explosion came in the 1920s, when it became increasingly tied to the newly invented radio. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

16 " Less speculative is the productivity-enhancing learning by doing that occurred during the high-pressure economy of World War II. Economists have long studied the steady improvement over time in the speed and efficiency with which Liberty freighter ships were built. The most remarkable aspect of the surge in labor productivity during World War II is that it appears to have been permanent; despite the swift reduction in wartime defense spending during 1945–47, labor productivity did not decline at all during the immediate postwar years. The necessity of war became the mother of invention of improved production techniques, and these innovations, large and small, were not forgotten after the war. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

17 " Throughout American economic life, regulatory barriers to entry and competition limit innovation by providing excessive monopoly privileges through copyright and patent laws, restrict occupational choice by protecting incumbent service providers through occupational licensing restrictions, and create artificial scarcity through land-use regulation. They contribute to increased inequality while reducing productivity growth. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

18 " Progress after 1970 continued but focused more narrowly on entertainment, communication, and information technology, in which areas progress did not arrive with a great and sudden burst as had the by-products of the Great Inventions. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

19 " Compared to Canada, Japan, or any nation in western Europe, the United States combines by far the most expensive system with the shortest life expectancy. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

20 " GDP omits many dimensions of the quality of life that matter to people. "

― , The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War