The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

If you are looking to get a critical, deep and informed view of american economy in last century, you should look for another book. This book is not the type that will leave you with any food for thought. <br/><br/>For instance the book goes literally pages and pages throwing an absurd amount of numbers, dates, percentages,... to just show how AC units become smaller and lighter in a period of two decades. A simple fact like this needs only one sentence or two, and then the reader is ready to get the writers message, if there is any. What happens with this book is that reader (listener) goes on and on trying to focus on long paragraphs of chart description and numbers and dates, waiting for the writer to sum it up and get to a conclusion, a view point or a critical thought on the issue, only to get disappointed.<br/><br/>The only message that the author has (and he iterates it over and over in different chapters) is this: The growth (in other words improvement in people's lives) has been huge in 20th century because the departure point was near zero, so any increase felt huge, but now that we are fairly advanced it is almost impossible to come up with such growth ( such improvement in people's lives) in such a short amount of time. For example, in a matter of 2 decades in early 1900s, flush toilets came to nearly all houses and that dramatically improved life expectancy (say 5 years) by eliminating water borne diseases. But now in 2000s if we want to increase life expectancy by same 5 years (having same "growth") it is not as easy as making a toilet, now we have to do cancer research instead.<br/><br/>I basically doubt if this is an important or valuable point of view anyways, but even if it was, it could be well developed in a 3 page article and did not need a 700+ page book.<br/><br/>This book is only good for you if you love details of how people lived in early 20th century, how daily tasks were done, how people worked, what the wore, what they ate...and so forth. but if you are looking for food for thought, you will be disappointed.

I loved the review of the industrial revolution and learning where various technological changes came from. His suggestions of how to increase American growth seemed pretty standard though. I was disappointed with that. It seemed like he just phoned in that part of the book. We've heard all those recommendations before. The book is worth the time though.

I enjoyed this book, particularly the comparisons of life in the US before and after 1870.There are too many charts and numbers in this book to always allow one to only listen. Book was written to be read "in person" with numbers and charts available for viewing and reviewing. The performance was technically well done, but somehow off-putting and slightly irritating. Still all in all I listened to the entire book and am happy that I bought it.

love economics and hearing about how the world has changed in the past 100 years. this book does rely on lots of charts and graphs so the listener is often lost following along but over all worth a listen.

No way; though I would certainly recommend they *read* this as a print book. Too many charts, graphs, and data sets to be able to coherently follow on audio, especially if you're driving or really doing anything other than visualizing the graphs they're discussing.

Why It's Time to Reset Future Expectations and Reframe Past Understandings

Gives a historical look at how the US got to where it is today and suggest some answers

While the book is full of a lot of statistics and data and covers a great deal of research and is pretty extensive, it is also near impossible to listen to audiobook. Particularly disappointing was the fact that it seemed to be a dump of data from a lot of research with very little to help summarize and interpret that data dump. Unless you're an economist or really want to dive into the details of the subject this book is probably not what you're looking for and if that is the case I recommend getting the physical book because he constantly refers to tables of data and charts. I would really like to see a follow-up book from someone who takes all this information and interprets it and then puts it down into more layman's terms.

Gordon does a masterful job in presenting extreme complexity without simplification. He makes a case for the one time growth window of 1870-1970 and, in almost sheer poetry, cites everything from haircuts to train tickets demonstrating the forces of productivity.

The author had me at indoor toilets. Our standard and quality of life have gotten better since 1870. Any improvement to the quality of today's toilets dwarfs in comparison to the initial move from the privy to today's homes with running water and our other standard utilities. As the author quoted someone saying, "the best thing is to have God in your heart, the next best thing is to have electricity in your home".

I don't think there was one trend or quality of life improvement that the author spoke about for which I didn't already know most of the details. That made for a tedious book in so far as those familiar stories were being retold for me. The telegraph, railroad, child labor, cars replacing horses, computers, telephone, fast food, radio, TV, cable TV and so on are all stories that have already been told. He puts all the stories together and gives graphs and charts in order to give context and support his narrative.

He makes a convincing argument that the rate of the rate of growth (the second derivative) is slowing down. That the statistics that we use to measure growth doesn't always capture our improvements in standard of living correctly. The current growth rate is slower in today's decade than in the recent decades. These are things that I already knew intuitively, but he shows it with numbers and reasonable interpretation of the data.

The author is very good at explaining what it all means and coming up with the right analogies. I appreciated those parts of the book, but unfortunately I had to wade through familiar stories to get to those gems. He makes the point that "progress without innovation is like stacking old wooden plows on top of wooden plows", meaning for standard of living to progress new things must be invented or discovered. The author was more pessimist about future growth then I would be, but that's just a matter of opinion because the future can always surprise.

I think the gems appear in this book when the author went beyond the narrative. He mentioned, for example, as he was talking about changes in our eating habits that manufacturing and the factory haven't disappeared in America, but that the fast food restaurant is what has replaced it. I thought that provided an interesting way of considering the phenomenon.

The author also wrote each chapter such that he would tell you why he's talking about the chapter, go into detail about the innovations, and then at the end of the chapter tell you why it was relevant to the overall book. That's a very good way to write a book.

The narrator did a great job. I recommend listening to this one instead of reading it for those who don't mind visualizing tables and graphs as their being presented because the narrator had an ability to make the dry tables and the narrative seem more interesting than a physical book would have.

This book reveals where the common man (species non-gender specific) developed as a result of the level of the tools invented/discovered to influence both the person and the environment. A real history of mankind as a species mastering it's environment. Statistics can be boring, but the fascinating speed which change has occurred is transcendent.
A true answer to "How we arrived at where we are today." Along with the anticipated soothsaying of the uncomfortable future.