Prosperity

"This book does have the disgrace of being called Prosperity on the eve of the bursting of the tech bubble. That’s the aspect of the book that isn’t so great. The aspect of the book that is great is the really detailed fine-grained reporting that Bob Davis and David Wessel do into the question of how living standards in the late 1990s compare to living standards a generation earlier. They compare two families – one that entered the workforce in the 1970s and one that entered the workforce in the 1990s. The stories of these families give you a good feel for how life changed during that period. In some ways it got easier but in many ways it got harder. It got harder to purchase a house, it got harder to purchase an education and there was less economic security overall. I followed through on their reporting by checking in with the Blentlinger family, who had been interviewed for Prosperity , to see how they were doing now. Davis and Wessel chose the Blentlinger family because they were right at the median in terms of income. I was pleased to discover that the Blentlingers were doing better than the median today – they’ve managed to move up and that’s the good news. The bad news was that the way the Blentlingers were able to achieve this advancement was by absenting themselves completely from the private sector economy. Jim Blentlinger’s wife was a schoolteacher and he went to work for the Tennessee Valley Authority. So today they rely on government jobs to provide the kind of security that you could get from private sector jobs in the 1970s, including a labour union, which is almost impossible to get in the private sector these days. In large part, because of those two features, the Blentlingers are now much better off. I think these stories give you a more vivid sense of many of the historic trends that I’m describing in my book. There are two kinds of personal stories in the book. One, stories about real people like the Blentlingers and a bank teller during a period when the advent of ATMs was making that job somewhat obsolete. I also tell the life story of Yves-Andre Istel, who had worked on Wall Street since the 1950s. In the book he describes the ways that the culture changed there. The other type of story I tell in the book are stories about figures who were shaping history like Horatio Alger and Walter Reuther. Alger spread ideas about upward mobility and Reuther took the labour movement about as far as it was ever going to go in the United States in a spirit of cooperation with management. Again, I think these stories give you a concrete sense of underlying trends."