American Economy 1950s
The American economy in the 1950s experienced a period of significant growth and prosperity, characterized by a booming manufacturing sector, increased consumer spending, and the rise of suburban living. This era saw the expansion of the middle class, the development of new technologies, and the emergence of consumer culture, all contributing to a period of economic expansion and stability.
7 Key excerpts on "American Economy 1950s"
eBook - ePubBad Old Days
The Myth of the 1950s
- Alan J. Levine(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 13 The Economy and Industry in the Postwar Era The era of the late 1940s and 1950s saw an amazingly successful American economy, which arguably reached the peak of its performance in that period. Although conventional wisdom holds that the 1960s saw, if anything, even greater success than the fifteen postwar years, it seems that it was actually in that decade that the economy began to go seriously awry in many respects. To a remarkable extent, the performance of American industry as a whole paralleled the feats, faults, and problems of the car industry described earlier, stumbling, in the 1960s, onto a mistaken path, and perhaps running up against the limits of existing modes of organization and doing things. That occurred even as the blundering policies of the Johnson administration turned a more or less stable economic advance into just an inflationary boom—which, thanks to the widespread misplaced faith in Keynesian economics, many mistook for the attainment of a permanent plateau of prosperity. Origins of Postwar Prosperity The length and extent of post-World War II prosperity had not generally been foreseen during the war, yet some of its roots lay in wartime, or even earlier. The war forced a huge amount of investment, and growth in productivity, further extended by a postwar tax cut. Reconversion to civilian production had begun even during the war itself, while soon after the war, 250 government-built factories and a mass of surplus materials were sold into the private economy. Just how much war-built plant could actually be converted to peacetime use is unclear, estimates ranging from a low of 15 percent to one-third. After the Depression and war, there was an enormous pent-up consumer demand, along with high savings from years of full employment at high wages, while goods, and especially housing, were scarce...
eBook - ePubThe Climax of Capitalism
The U.S. Economy in the Twentieth Century
- Tom Kemp(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 5 The post-war economy: the 1950s boom The Second World War opened a new phase in the history of American capitalism, launching it on a long-term expansion which encountered no major setback until the late 1960s. The factors which now propelled it were different from those responsible for the 1920s boom and it did not end in a crash or a slump of the 1930s type. History did not simply repeat itself, as many people at the time expected. There was no post-war slump and the feared return of the depression did not happen. On the contrary, as early as the mid-1950s, and certainly during the early 1960s, there was a confident feeling that the expansionist trend would continue indefinitely with only the mild and short-lived recessions experienced up to that time since 1945. The business cycle seemed to have been brought under control and the stagnationist hypothesis demolished. But these views were premature. American capitalism had by no means overcome its problems; but they were the problems of a new age and a different world from that of the 1920s. To understand why there was no return to depression or stagnation it is necessary to look at the changes wrought by the war, both in the domestic situation and in the relationship between the American economy and the world market. Corporate business had waxed fat on war conditions; it had built up capacity while making high profits. It was able greatly to reduce its debt burden; it was now more liquid and vastly more self-confident than it had been in the 1930s. It had the means and the technology to turn out goods on an immense scale for the civilian market as it had been doing for the war machine. Favouring the investment of liquid funds in new plant and machinery was the fact that civilian investment had been curbed by the war, following on years of low, or negative, investment during the Depression...
eBook - ePubRethinking Macroeconomics
A History of Economic Thought Perspective
- John F. McDonald(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 10 The 1950s and 1960s A time of economic growth Introduction This chapter is a detailed examination of the macro economy of the United States and the United Kingdom during a period of economic growth that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. The real GDP of the United States grew at an average annual rate of 3.53 percent from 1950 to 1970, and the United Kingdom almost matched that annual rate of growth with 3.18 percent over the same 20 years. As usual, we will examine the data and compose a narrative for each nation, consider the role of macroeconomic policies, and then make a judgment about the relevance of the different macroeconomic theories. The economy of the United States from 1950 to 1970 In 1950, the U.S. economy stood unchallenged in the world and had already entered the postwar boom period. Postwar prosperity was fueled by productivity growth. Median family income in real terms doubled between 1949 and 1969 (up 99.4 percent). As noted previously, real GNP increased by 3.59 percent per year over these 20 years. The population of the nation increased by 34.4 percent; these were the years of the Baby Boom (1947 to 1964). Non-agricultural employment increased from 45.2 million in 1950 to 70.9 million in 1970 (up 56.8 percent) as more women entered the workforce, agricultural employment declined, and the first group of Baby Boomers grew up and took jobs. As the economy grew, its composition was changing away from the production of goods to the production of services. The percentage of employment in the goods-producing sectors (manufacturing, construction, and mining) fell from 40.9 percent in 1950 to 36.1 percent in 1970 – and would decline at an even faster rate in the subsequent decades. The share of employment in manufacturing fell from 33.7 percent in 1950 to 27.3 percent in 1970...
eBook - ePub- John F. Walker, Harold G. Vatter(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER IV The Evolution of the Business Sector 26. The Company in the Postwar World Mansel G. Blackford and K. Austin Kerr Excerpted from Mansel G. Blackford and K. Austin Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History, pp. 345–80. Copyright © 1990 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission. Mansel G. Blackford and K. Austin Kerr are professors of history at Ohio State University. The years following World War II saw tremendous growth in the American business system. With the American government backing free-trade policies, American products invaded the world market, and increasing numbers of American business executives began thinking in global terms. The domestic market also broadened as the consumerism of the 1920s and 1930s continued apace in the postwar years. Just as they had created a new type of business firm—the multidivisional, decentralized company—to take advantage of new business opportunities in the 1920s, so business leaders forged additional types of business structures to take advantage of opportunities in the postwar period. As these new forms of big business developed, the division between center and peripheral firms in America’s business system widened, continuing a trend that had begun with the rise of big business in the nineteenth century. The Postwar Economy Economic Growth “Growth” is the word that best characterizes the economy of the United States for the two decades after World War II. Many Americans feared a recession, or even a depression, after the end of the war, but such worries proved unwarranted. The American economy experienced rapid expansion into the 1970s, its growth interrupted by only a few short and mild recessions. Between 1945 and 1960, America’s real GNP rose by 52 percent, and its per capita GNP increased 19 percent. Over the next decade the nation’s real GNP soared an additional 46 percent, and its per capita GNP rose by 29 percent...
eBook - ePub- D.G. Brian Jones, Mark Tadajewski, D.G. Brian Jones, Mark Tadajewski(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Business, labour and government leaders agreed that future prosperity depended upon unrelenting mass consumption and this consensus firmly established once and for all the great American propensity for buying and having things. In effect, purchasing was transformed into a civic responsibility – good consumers became good citizens (Cohen, 2003). Large numbers of Americans dropped the ethos of Great Depression retrenchment and World War II home front frugality and re-embraced what Cross (2000), Ewen (1976), Twitchell (1999), and many other observers have contended is the deepest and most durable ideology of twentieth-century America: consumerism. The material well-being of American consumers was not something to be taken lightly, as post-war politicians generally recognized. In the 1960s during the Vietnam War, President Johnson did not ask the public to sacrifice financially because he believed the nation could simultaneously afford to fight communism in Southeast Asia and build a ‘Great Society’ at home. After the terrible events of 11 September 2001, the Bush administration actually asked people to continue spending as usual in order to help revive an already sluggish economy. In contrast, President Carter's earnest, cardigan-clad appeals for plain living, energy conservation and lowered expectations did not help him much at the ballot box in 1980. Voters had had enough of oil shortages and stagflation and, instead, opted for Ronald Reagan's politics of early-morning optimism. In the 1980s, and again after 2001, lower taxes, private spending, and record federal budget deficits would fuel economic growth until the bubble burst in 2008 with the onset of the ‘Great Recession’, whose consequences for consumption still remain profound at this writing. Any discussion of relatively recent consumption history risks making premature assessments about the past, but it seems that two trends within American consumer culture during the post-war era are particularly noteworthy...
eBook - ePubRecession Prevention Handbook
Eleven Case Studies 1948-2007
- Norman Frumkin(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Competition in the space race, in which the launching of Sputnik in 1957 showed the United States to be trailing the Soviet Union, was on the surface peaceful, but with military implications. Competition from European companies in the American car market began in the 1950s. This was highlighted by the introduction of imports of small cars, which stimulated U.S. car manufacturers to add small cars to their product lines. Construction of the 41,000-mile interstate highway system, which was a major public works program, began in the 1950s. Only a small part was completed by 1960, and the bulk of the construction was done in the 1960s. 1 Table 5.1 Duration of Expansions Preceding the Onset of Recessions Labor unions increasingly gained cost-of-living allowances and fringe benefit retirement and health care features in their contracts during the 1950s. A steel strike from July 1959 to January 1960 caused production cutbacks and worker layoffs in basic steel, metal fabricating, coal, iron ore, and freight transportation industries. 2 The effect of the strike throughout the economy was ameliorated by a drawdown of steel product inventories and by steel imports from other countries. 3 Economic Indicators in Real Time During 1959–60 The economic data on employment, production, prices, and other economic indicators that were available to policy makers preceding the onset of the 1960–61 recession in April 1960 are referred to as real-time data, as discussed under the analogous section in Chapter 2...
eBook - ePub- Carlos Sabillon(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...After having grown by about 3.8 percent in the 1950s, GDP expanded by about 4.2 percent annually during the 1960s. The empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that there was something intrinsically wrong with the vision of the world of most intellectuals and policy makers of the time. If their premise was right, the economy should have performed poorly and below the rate of the 1950s, and the 1950s and the 1940s should have been characterized by stagnation or worse. Only by conceding that manufacturing is the principal agent that makes growth possible do the events of these decades become rationally explainable. Factory output corresponded very closely as it expanded by about 5.3 percent annually during the 1960s. 12 For such a premise to be logically consistent, the historical evidence would have to demonstrate some form of strong causal linkage between this sector and technology. The empirical data would have to indicate that manufacturing is fundamentally responsible for the creation and diffusion of technology. Since technology is the prime generator of wealth, if such a historical correlation existed it would be understandable why, while large amounts of goods with no private sector demand were being produced, the wealth of the nation was rapidly increasing. The historical evidence reveals such a correlation. The rate by which technology expanded was much faster during the 1960s, 1950s, and 1940s than during the 1930s, when practically no resources were being wasted in weapons or grandiose space projects. Also worth noting is that most of the patents during these decades were directly attached to manufactored goods such as aircraft, missiles, electric instruments, electronic machinery, communication equipment, satellites, tanks, chemicals, motor vehicles, and machine tools. The technology that was created as weapons and space goods were produced soon found a civilian application, which is how society profited considerably from those investments...
