History of Consumption and Waste, U.S., 1950–Present

Affluent Society

Never in the history of humankind had so many people in any nation enjoyed so much prosperity, even though the impoverished continued to number in the millions. According to William Leuchtenburg, the United States had only 6 percent of the planet's people at mid-century, yet it was producing and consuming over 30 percent of the world's good and services. The phenomenal domestic production growth that occurred after the war depended on international political and economic networks of which it formed a constituent part, but it also depended on a series of domestic compromises and repositionings on the part of the major actors. A complex of dynamic industries arose, including automotive, steel, petrochemical, and construction. Some of the propulsive engines of growth, based on technologies that had matured in the interwar years, had been prompted after the war by both new extremes of rationalization and links to academic research and development.

From 1946 to 1958, writes Leuchtenburg, corporations put an average of $10 billion a year into new plants and machinery. Consequently, large corporate power was further deployed to assure steady growth of managerial expertise in both production and marketing and the mobilization of economies of scale through product standardization. The state, for its part, assumed varying social and political obligations. Given that mass production required heavy investment in fixed capital, it also required relatively stable demand conditions to be profitable. The state strove to curb domestic business cycles through a mix of fiscal and monetary policies directed toward public investment in transportation, suburbanization, and public utilities; in the establishment of social wage agreements, social security benefits, and federal guarantees of mortgages earmarked for a mass of ex-GIs—all pursuits that were vital to the perpetuation of the flows of mass production and mass consumption. In the meantime, the civilian labor force expanded, as Leuchtenburg put it, from “54 million in 1945 to 78 million in 1970.”

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