The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Despite the promise of limited exploration in space, in the early 1960s the Industrial Revolution was no longer producing anything revolutionary. The theorist of management Peter Drucker noted that the world’s markets were beginning to unify, the world’s technology leader, IBM, was now producing an astonishing thousand computers a month, and plastics appeared to be a new industry of major importance. But otherwise the country remained stuck in the age of Edison, Bell, and Westinghouse. Drucker warned that the economy has been carried largely by industries that were already “big business” before World War I. It has been based on technologies that were firmly established by 1913 to exploit inventions made in the half-century before. Technologically the last fifty years have been the fulfillment of promises bequeathed to us by our Victorian grandparents. . . . Almost all the steel mills built since World War II use processes that date back to the 1860’s and were already considered obsolescent fifty years ago. . . . And there is not one major feature on any car anywhere today that could not have been found on some commercially available make in 1913. . . . Measured by the yardsticks of the economist, the last half-century has been an Age of Continuity—the period of least change in three hundred years or so.