He was right that Americans were especially well off compared with others: they were three inches taller in 1950 than they had been at the turn of the century and spent twice as much on medicine as funerals – the reverse of the ratio in 1900. Roughly eight out of ten American households had running water, central heating, electric light, washing machines and refrigerators by 1955. Almost none had these luxuries in 1900. In his 1890 classic How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis encountered a family of nine in New York living in a ten-foot-square room plus a tiny kitchen, and women earning 60
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