Sublime

the claims about the putative relationship between growth and human progress are just an alibi. Of course, they hope that growth will end up improving the incomes of the poor, and in so doing pacify social conflict. After all, elite accumulation is more politically palatable if the incomes of the poor are rising too. But this strategy cannot be sus

At the same time, the experiment of having government keep its hands off the economy altogether in an industrial society, along the lines proposed by a great many free market proponents these days, received an equally thorough test, and failed just as dismally. In America that test ran from the end of the Civil War into the first decade of the twen

Most of the admired and undoubtedly remarkable technical advances that have transformed industries, transportation, communication, and everyday living would have been impossible if more than 80 percent of all people had to remain in the countryside in order to produce their daily bread (the share of the US population who were farmers in 1800 was 83

The agency whose budget was once second only to the Department of Defense, the agency that had replaced slums with (once) safe and dependable housing, soon couldn’t pay for its buildings’ trash collection or elevator repair.[11]

Once in office, and freed from Southern obstructionism after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and his Republican majority unleashed a blitz of prodevelopment legislation almost without parallel in American history—a “second American Revolution,” in the words of historians Charles and Mary Beard. The Republican achievement has been obscured by the

“cult of inevitable progress,”

But our economic progress has profoundly altered the position of the individual acting alone. We can no longer take care of our own needs. We have all become dependent on many others