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The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture
by Brink Lindsey
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (2008-08-01)
ISBN: 0060747676
EAN: 9780060747671
Dewey Decimal #: 306
Binding/Media: Paperback - 400 pages
Edition: Reprint
Release Date: 2008-07-22
SKU: 40-1W4Q-FLT1
Condition: New
Comments: Brand new book. Gift quality. Expedited shipping available.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Until the 1950s, the struggle to feed, clothe, and employ the nation drove most of American political life. From slavery to the New Deal, political parties organized around economic interests and engaged in fervent debate over the best allocation of agonizingly scarce resources. But with the explosion of the nation's economy in the years after World War II, a new set of needs began to emerge—a search for meaning and self-expression on one side, and a quest for stability and a return to traditional values on the other. In The Age of Abundance, Brink Lindsey offers a bold reinterpretation of the latter half of the twentieth century. In this sweeping history of postwar America, the tumult of racial and gender politics, the rise of the counterculture, and the conservative revolution of the 1980s and 1990s are portrayed in an entirely new light. Readers will learn how and why the contemporary ideologies of left and right emerged in response to the novel challenges of mass prosperity. The political ideas that created the culture wars, however, have now grown obsolete. As the Washington Post aptly summarized Lindsey's take on the contradictions of American politics, "Republicans want to go home to the United States of the 1950s while Democrats want to work there." Struggling to replace today's stale conflicts is a new consensus that mixes the social freedom of the left with the economic freedom of the right into a potentially powerful ethos of libertarianism. The Age of Abundance reveals the secret formula of this remarkable alchemy. The book is a breathtaking reevaluation of our recent past—and will change the way we think about the future.
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Customer Reviews
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very stimulating, tries not to be shallow but glides over big problems!
Rating  (3)
Date: 2010-08-13
Mr. Lindsey has a nice way with words and as a libertarian isn't angry or divisive. His premise is that after WWII, America entered a new type of society, a society freed for the first time from basic material needs. This was an era of affluence.
A previous reviewer was unfair and mentioned Sahlins' affluent primitive as disproof of the novelty of American's post WWII boom. That's hardly an apt comparison - the fact that foragers 'work' for 20 hrs/week is small potatoes compared to the awesome surge in wealth and comfort that America experienced when the war ended. It was something, to hear my Dad talk about it.
The 50's were an era of bland prosperity, and led to its children rebelling and challenging them in the 60s on every level imaginable (the hippies and counterculture). This in turn led to a counter-counter culture of squares, of the Silent Majority who were in favor of family values and bourgeouis values and religious fundamentalism.
Lindsey has set the stage: affluence has sired two children that will punch and counter-punch for the next several decades, alternately winning and losing and compromising in the hearts and minds of Americans up to the present day.
What has resulted, in true emergent, unintended consequences-fashion in complex adaptive systems, is a synthesis that is relatively resilient of the best of both - the cultural and social tolerance of the left (civil rights and gay rights and feminism) coupled with the economic freedoms of the right (appreciation of the potency of the free market and utter failure of top-down central planning of socialist governments).
This hybrid of social and economic freedom has created the libertarian synthesis that is a neither red nor blue but purplish zone in the middle that most Americans comfortably inhabit, to the frustration of partisans on both sides.
It's a fun, rich book with many stats. He tries not to be a glibertarian, and acknowledges the stagnant incomes for those left out of the shift from manufacturing to information economy, and so forth. Like most libertarians, it doesn't really ring true, but he tries to make it sound like he cares.
The biggest fault I have with this stimulating book is that it's published in 2007 - a year before the crash! He writes about affluence the way Shyamalan wrote about blockbusters - as if the code has been found for all time.
No. America's consumerist ways are debt-financed and now we can see that the media was full of it - the financial press is a joke, cheerleaders-all. No WMD, No critical press on the rush to Iraq, no awareness that the USSR would fall, no sense that the financial system is a joke - over and over we see that our media our completely out of touch and laughably incompetent.
Our 'affluence' is not real, and he seems to glide right over that huge, huge observation. See Andrew Bacevich on Bill Moyers website - the Empire of Consumption - starting in the late 60s we just can't stop consuming.
A deeper analysis of our affluence would be that at first we earned it - but then we grew addicted to it and then were willing to borrow endlessly to pay for it to the point of insanity - no matter what our addiction to foreign oil, trade deficits, interest payments, entitlements, and the inability to provide our own citizens with health care. America is bankrupt, broke, and inept. He glides over this. That's the real problem.
That's my editorial, that's a huge problem with his approach to affluence. Affluence is not some wonderful accomplishment (it was - once, for the US0, it is now an addiction and pathological state of denial for us. We're deluded.
But his discussion of how the experience of affluence affected us culturally, is wonderful stuff. We just differ on what is underneath the experience - or, at a certain point, the reality of that affluence changed.
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Decent but flawed libertarian perspective of post WW2 America
Rating (3)
Date: 2010-06-01
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
In some respects I consider myself a libertarian, but the main problem I have with the party and the movement is that it seems like a cult religion in some ways. Once people drink the libertarian 'kool-aid' they say anything to defend their viewpoint, especially manipulating statistics or historical legislation.
Regarding this well-written but flawed book:
Page 47 - "the rise to mass influence was anything but a smooth and pleasant journey" --...That admission is one problem with ultra-conservative monetary and fiscal policy. As John Maynard Keynes famously said '..in the long run, we're all dead' (meaning human lives are put into turmoil during periods of recession, depression, correction, reaching 'equilibrium' etc. while the free market works it all out). A couple recent good books on that topic are The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street and The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. These periods of disequilibrium and recent examples of corporate greed, corruption, exploitation and scandals aren't emphasized enough and show how imperfect the market is and how regulatory oversight is always needed.
The book has way too many boring statistics of post WW2 America, but what makes it worse is that the author doesn't illustrate their relevance to his arguments. Yeah, x% bought houses and washers/dryers, but how did the Holy Grail free market do that? The author doesn't make it clear.
Discussing Reagan (conseratives' messiah) and his economic policies in the first year of office, the author conveniently changes into passive writing, stating "Japan was forced into a 'voluntary restraint agreement' to limit its car exports to the U.S." (which was Reagan really meddling in the free market where he shouldn't be - at least in purist libertarian ideology) and "By 1984, a similar agreement was shielding American steel producers from a host of foreign competitors after import market share exceeded 25%" (meddling again...protectionist tactics to help inefficient American producers compete against cheaper better quality steel from Japan). Of course, politics are what they are, but any libertarian should agree that what these policies do is punish American buyers of cars and steel. There was a reason Japan penetrated the American market so successfully - i.e. buyers wanted their products for whatever reasons and it's not the government's job to get involved.
A good note: the middle portion of the book is quite interesting when the author discusses 60s & 70s counterculture and related topics and people of the time.
But overall it was ok. If you've already drunk the libertarian kool-aid, you'll probably like this book. If you're a socialist, you won't.
***I bought this book at the local 'dollar store' where - ironically - the magic of the free market sent this author's work.
S. RILEY
CHICOPEE, MA
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A truly new idea....
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-01-16
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
For someone who closely follows news and politics, reading this book was a refreshing experience. Its central premise is a truly unique idea, in a field filled with redundant writing.
Lindsey's main insight is that both the evangelical revival and the countercultural left arose in response to America's unprecedented prosperity after World War II. Through his libertarian worldview, Lindsey is able to expose the contradictions within each of these movements. The Christian right defends capitalist principles of hard work, delayed gratifcation, and planning for the future -- but condemns the personal freedoms, choices, and lifestyles that are made possible by the new prosperity. In contrast, the countercultural left embraces a more culturally permissive society that emphasizes self-realization -- but condemns the market institutions that create the prosperity that makes this self-realization possible.
Ultimately, Lindsey argues that we must follow a new course that captures the benefits of both the Christian right and the "Aquarian" left. We should firmly embrace capitalism and market institutions, which have produced astonishing growth and prosperity over the last century. But we should also embrace the fruits of this prosperity -- with more time and money than ever before, Americans should be free to choose the lifestyles, religions, products, and experiences that make them happiest. This book argues that we are moving towards a libertarian consensus in the United States that will capture the best of both worlds. This is a highly cogent and persuasive work of history and political science, and I strongly recommend reading it.
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Yep, we're livin' it up, but is it sustainable?
Rating  (1)
Date: 2007-10-09
10 out of 34 customers found this reveiw helpful
A friend recommended this book to me when he heard some of the other material I was reading, he thought it would be good to see the opposing viewpoint. I agreed and borrowed this from the library. I was skeptical and not expecting much. What I got was even less. All in all this book is a pretentious 400 page op-ed piece whose basic theory is "Americans suffered horribly during the late 19th & early 20th century, now we've outsourced most of our suffering & have convinced ourselves it will only get better, indefinitely. We rule! Perpetual growth forever!". The text is peppered with statistics (mostly on public opinion) but short on substance.
It's not a good sign when the first two sentences of a book's introduction already contain a fundamental (and unquestioned) misconception. Sentence two : "In all prior civilizations and social orders, the vast bulk of humanity had been preoccupied with responding to basic material needs". Before Brink dedicated so much time and effort to this theory perhaps he should have looked a little further back into history than the last few hundred years, for example a study (Original Affluent Society; Marshall Sahlins) of hunter-gatherers concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. And the last sentence of back flap of "The Age of Abundance" tells us "[this book] will change the way you think about the future", problem is, Brink doesn't seem to have thought about the future much. He just assumes things will continue on the upward trend indefinitely, in America anyway. That America is the only country that matters is an implication throughout the book, if you were from another planet with no knowledge of world affairs you'd think that child labor and other horrors of the industrial age has disappeared entirely (though you'd wonder how this "abundance" comes about with no more factories). Fact is, more people are hungry and in poverty than ever before in history, but since the author is American & "rational selfishness" is the Randian/Libertarian way, this little detail is irrelevant.
The first couple of chapters focus mainly on how rotten life was during the 19th and early 20th centuries, how huge numbers of Americans lived hand to mouth and suffering was rampant. These chapters along were somewhat interesting and I'd probably rate them as 3-stars alone (they don't contain much smug commentary by Brink which was also a major plus). The rest of the book is pretty much an editorial about the failure of any and all counterculture movements since then and how people have slowly abandoned any and all "romantic" (a favorite word of Brink's, other fun phrases include "lazy pseudo-profundities of unreason") notions in favor of a full embrace of globalization. He doesn't actually analyze the views any of modern society's critics. He prefers simply to mock them, dismissing Limits to Growth as "hysteria" and comparing Al Gore's "hysteria" (yeah, he likes that word too) to the writings of the Unibomber. His flippant dismissal of environmental concerns and complete lack of even any mention of global inequality or our looming energy crisis is enough to dismiss this book as immoral. His narrow focus on America (I don't think China, Southeast Asia, any of the regions from where our physical symbols of prosperity come from are even mentioned in the text) and irrational faith in perpetual growth ('populations & economies have grown exponentially, therefore they will continue to grow exponentially' seems to be his assumption) may not be a product of immorality but genuine ignorance but this doesn't make it excusable. We can appreciate what we've got, all the advances we've made, while still preparing a sustainable future, unfortunately to most politicians discussion of anything other than perpetual exponential growth is taboo. Looks like we're going to have to have some major crises before partisan politicians (and authors) wake up and focus on what's important (solutions) instead of simply finding convenient scapegoats to bash (Russians, "terrorists" and in Brink's case, counterculture hippies). Recommended : The Coming Age of Scarcity: Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the Twenty-First Century & Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (neither are as cheerless as they sound but they're certainly not as "romantic" as Brink).
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A fresh perspective on some familiar history
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-09-29
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Brink Lindsey seems like a really average American guy, which is surprising not because of his unusual name but because he's the Vice President for Research at the libertarian Cato Institute. When so many Libertarians (large L) seem like wackos to most mainstream Americans, Mr. Lindsey does his movement a favor by offering this book. He presents a compelling case that libertarianism (small l) not only makes sense as an ideal for mainstream Americans, but in fact that mainstream America has been moving steadily in that direction since the culture wars of the 60's erupted and left most Americans wondering where all the weirdos -- left and right -- came from. He's much too respectful of both the Aquarians (a useful nomenclature that he seems to have coined) and the Evangelicals to call them "weirdos", but, as is typical of libertarians, he is very comfortable offering criticisms of both movements while at the same time acknowledging the beneficial contributions of both. The book retells the post-WWII history of the United States with some wonderful details added to the stories and personalities most Americans know well. Along the way, he offers his perspective of how mainstream America has adopted most of the libertarian leanings of these two political extremes while rejecting most of the more freedom-reducing elements. It's a refreshing presentation of recent history, and his main argument is compelling and enjoyable to read.
An short adaptation of the book is available online at http://www.reason.com/news/show/120265.html , it offers a decent taste of the book as a whole.
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