The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 70)

by Robert J. Gordon

Both world wars greatly delayed implementation of the Great Inventions of the late nineteenth century in Europe and Japan, so much so that in 1950 the level of labor productivity in western Europe was only half that in the United States. When Europe caught up in the years the French call “les trentes glorieuses” (1945–75), Europeans were chasing the frontier carved out by the United States decades earlier.