How This All Happened

Paul Graham wrote in 2016 about what something as simple as there only being three TV stations did to equalize culture:

If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. If you learned that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945, you’d be shocked. If you saw the level of wealth in New York and San Francisco, you’d be shocked. If you c... See more

1. August, 1945. World War II ends.

4. Gains are shared more equally than ever before. The defining characteristic of economics in the 1950s is that the country got rich by making the poor less poor.

2. So we did something about it: Low interest rates and the intentional birth of the American consumer.

This was important. People measure their well being against their peers. And for most of the 1945-1980 period, people had a lot of what looked like peers to compare themselves to. Many people – most people – lived lives that were either equal or at least fathomable to those around them.

It’s difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync.

3. Pent-up demand for stuff fed by a credit boom and a hidden 1930s productivity boom led to an economic boom.