Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

by Will Storr

call the ‘Great Compression’, a period that lasted roughly between 1945 and 1975. And, sure enough, out of this new kind of economy hatched a new kind of self. It all began with the ‘New Deal’ of the 1930s, which brought tough regulations on banking. Then there was the Social Security Act and the introduction of the minimum wage. Unionization became popular. The tax level for the nation’s highest earners was set as high as 90 per cent. The GI Bill gave millions of working-class war veterans a college education paid for by the state, a big-government act that would do immeasurable good. It was partly due to policies such as these that, between 1929 and 1945, lower incomes would grow faster than higher and, for the next twenty-five years, wages grew at about the same rate for everyone, rich or poor. This Great Compression led to ‘a golden age for millions of high school graduates’, writes the economist Professor Robert