EBOOK
The Great Boom 1950-2000
How a Generation of Americans Created the World's Most Prosperous Society
Robert Sobel(0)
About
In The Great Boom, historian Robert Sobel tells the fascinating story of the last 50 years when American entrepreneurs, visionaries, and ordinary citizens transformed our depression and war-exhausted society into today's economic powerhouse.
As America's G.I.s returned home from World War II, many of the nation's best minds predicted a new depression-yet exactly the opposite occurred. Jobs were plentiful in retooled factories swamped with orders from pent-up demand. Tens of thousands of families moved out of cities into affordable suburban homes built by William Levitt and his imitators. They bought cars, televisions, and air conditioners by the millions. And, they took to the nation's roads and new interstate highways-the largest public works project in world history-where Kemmons Wilson of Holiday Inns, Ray Kroc of McDonalds, and other start-up entrepreneurs soon catered to a mobile populace with food and lodgings for leisure time vacationers.
Americans and their families began to channel savings into new opportunities. Credit cards democratized purchasing power, while early mutual funds found growing numbers of investors to fuel the first postwar bull market in the go-go '60s. At the same time, the continuing boom enriched the fabric of social and cultural life. A college education became a must on the highway to upward mobility; high-tech industries arose with astonishing new ways of conducting business electronically; and an unprecedented 49 million families had become investors when the 1981-2000 stock market boom reached 10,000 on the Dow.
The Great Boom is the first major book to portray the great wave of homegrown entrepreneurs as post-war heroes in the complete remaking and revitalizing of America. All that, plus the creation of unprecedented wealth-or themselves, for the nation, for tens of millions of citizens-all in five short drama-filled decades.
As America's G.I.s returned home from World War II, many of the nation's best minds predicted a new depression-yet exactly the opposite occurred. Jobs were plentiful in retooled factories swamped with orders from pent-up demand. Tens of thousands of families moved out of cities into affordable suburban homes built by William Levitt and his imitators. They bought cars, televisions, and air conditioners by the millions. And, they took to the nation's roads and new interstate highways-the largest public works project in world history-where Kemmons Wilson of Holiday Inns, Ray Kroc of McDonalds, and other start-up entrepreneurs soon catered to a mobile populace with food and lodgings for leisure time vacationers.
Americans and their families began to channel savings into new opportunities. Credit cards democratized purchasing power, while early mutual funds found growing numbers of investors to fuel the first postwar bull market in the go-go '60s. At the same time, the continuing boom enriched the fabric of social and cultural life. A college education became a must on the highway to upward mobility; high-tech industries arose with astonishing new ways of conducting business electronically; and an unprecedented 49 million families had become investors when the 1981-2000 stock market boom reached 10,000 on the Dow.
The Great Boom is the first major book to portray the great wave of homegrown entrepreneurs as post-war heroes in the complete remaking and revitalizing of America. All that, plus the creation of unprecedented wealth-or themselves, for the nation, for tens of millions of citizens-all in five short drama-filled decades.
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Reviews
"This last ambitious work by one of America's most noted historians of business and finance engagingly surveys the ways in which World War II veterans and their progeny built the most affluent society in human history. Mr. Sobel's narrative is especially notable for its deft back-and-forth movement between the doings of great entrepreneurs and the experience of ordinary Americans. Few works have s
Alonzo Hamby, author of The Imperial Years: The United States since 1939
"The Great Boom is an engrossing saga of the remaking of America from the end of World War 11 to the year 2000. A fascinating, often surprising book, it explores the many people and discoveries that not only have renewed our country but that have also given us fuller, healthier, more productive lives."
Dominick Dunne, author of The Way We Lived Then
"Bob Sobel was one of our finest financial historians, and this work is his most ambitious. Filled with details of why things happened the way they did over the past fifty years, The Great Boom offers a wonderful perspective on how we got here from where we started after World War II."
Roy C. Smith, author of The Wealth Creators and The Global Bankers