American Economy 1950s

7 Key excerpts on "American Economy 1950s"

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  The Climax of Capitalism

  The U.S. Economy in the Twentieth Century

  • Tom Kemp(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The post-war economy: the 1950s boom

  The Second World War opened a new phase in the history of American capitalism, launching it on a long-term expansion which encountered no major setback until the late 1960s. The factors which now propelled it were different from those responsible for the 1920s boom and it did not end in a crash or a slump of the 1930s type. History did not simply repeat itself, as many people at the time expected. There was no post-war slump and the feared return of the depression did not happen. On the contrary, as early as the mid-1950s, and certainly during the early 1960s, there was a confident feeling that the expansionist trend would continue indefinitely with only the mild and short-lived recessions experienced up to that time since 1945. The business cycle seemed to have been brought under control and the stagnationist hypothesis demolished. But these views were premature. American capitalism had by no means overcome its problems; but they were the problems of a new age and a different world from that of the 1920s.

  To understand why there was no return to depression or stagnation it is necessary to look at the changes wrought by the war, both in the domestic situation and in the relationship between the American economy and the world market. Corporate business had waxed fat on war conditions; it had built up capacity while making high profits. It was able greatly to reduce its debt burden; it was now more liquid and vastly more self-confident than it had been in the 1930s. It had the means and the technology to turn out goods on an immense scale for the civilian market as it had been doing for the war machine. Favouring the investment of liquid funds in new plant and machinery was the fact that civilian investment had been curbed by the war, following on years of low, or negative, investment during the Depression. Although clearly these factors do not account for the long-term expansion of the 1950s and 1960s they certainly inaugurated the post-war boom.

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  Daily Life in the United States, 1940-1959

  Shifting Worlds

  • Eugenia Kaledin(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Cities like Boston even created arts festivals where both professionals and amateurs could display their creations and poets could offer read- ings to a new listening public. As people settled down to domesticity to compensate for the uprootedness of the war years and the fear of Economics and the Cold War, it became a paradox that materialism Employment provided comfort. Americans saw themselves in close- knit nuclear families rather than as a lonely crowd. What is called "the culture of the Cold War" not only had an impact on the growing birth- rate-in 1955 as great as India's-but also influenced the increased pro- duction of material goods. By the mid-1950s, with only 6% of the world's population, the United States was producing and consuming over one- third of all the world's goods and services. The gross national product, considered by many the most important index of economic success, leaped from $206 billion in 1940 to over $500 billion in 1960. In place for defense reasons at the end of the Korean War, the military budget continued to provide economic stimulus for research and devel- opment in fields like electronics and aviation.2° Easily available credit for installment buying encouraged Americans to purchase "consumer dur- ables" on budget terms, while the booming public relations industry took note that people spent 35% more using plastic credit cards than they would using money. In 1950 "plastic" entered the vocabulary of the American financial world with the creation of the Diners' Club card. American Express and credit cards from oil and phone companies and car rental services fol- lowed by the mid-'50s. Such installment purchases caused consumer in- debtedness to soar during the decade, from $73 billion to $196 billion! Madison Avenue writers preached immediate personal gratification as a way of life, and manufacturers complied by building "planned ob- 128 Daily Life in the United States solescence" into many new products.

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  American Business Cycles 1945-50

  • Conrad Blyth(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER I The American Business Cycle, 1945 to 1967 Since 1945 the United States economy has continued to experience alternating recessions and expansions in business activity. Leaving aside the fall in output following the end of the Second World War, there have been serious recessions in 1948–49, 1953–54, 1957–58 and 1960–61 when industrial production and employment fell sharply and for several months. Each was followed by an equally rapid, though short-lived (except in 1950), rise in output. In 1950 the expansion was prolonged by the Korean War rearmament. As well as these major fluctuations in activity there were marked pauses in expansions—substantial declines in the rate of growth—in 1951–52, 1962–63 and 1967. The fluctuations in the rate of growth of U.S. industrial output are shown in Fig. 1.1 which also indicates the conventional periods of business cycle expansion (from trough to peak in business activity) and contraction or recession (from peak to trough) determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research. These postwar fluctuations differ from those of the interwar period in several ways. As Table 1.1 shows, leaving aside the wartime expansion of 1938–45, postwar expansions have typically lasted longer than those in the interwar period, while postwar contractions have typically been of shorter duration than those earlier. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the extent of contractions, measured by the declines in industrial production, has been much less severe since 1945 than before. After the economy made its rapid conversion from war to peace in 1945, in not one of the four succeeding recessions did industrial production fall more than 15 per cent. In 1920–21, 1923–24 and 1937–38 the falls were much greater, while that of 1929–33 was disastrous. Only the 1926–27 fall was lighter than those after 1945

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  Guide to U.S. Economic Policy

  • Robert E. Wright, Thomas W. Zeiler, Robert E. Wright, Thomas W. Zeiler(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  As the United States rose in economic and political power, its leaders often found opportunities to involve themselves in foreign economic affairs in order to pursue perceived American interests. In a globalizing world economy, Americans increasingly recognized that their economic policies would affect the world, and vice versa. Americans were divided, however, over the best policies to pursue. Americans vacillated between protectionism and freer trade. Americans likewise debated the level of international commitments and use of military force that the United States should undertake to secure economic goals. Today, Americans continue to face a globalizing world and rapid economic and technological changes that powerfully impact their lives, and they continue to debate the ideal role of government policy in an industrial and highly interconnected economy.

  See also Chapter 1 : Early U.S. Economic Policy: Jefferson versus Hamilton (1790s–1816); Chapter 2 : The Unrestrained Business Cycle: Boom and Bust (1815–1900); Chapter 4 : The Great Depression and Its Aftermath (1929–1950s); Chapter 5 : The U.S. Economy since World War II: Unprecedented Growth, Inflation, and Stagflation (1945–2007).

  FURTHER READING

  Keller, Morton. Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

  McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920. New York: Free Press, 2003.

  Palmer, Niall. The Twenties in America: Politics and History. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

  Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

  Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

  Passage contains an image chapter 4 The Great Depression and Its Aftermath (1929–1950s)

  Jason E. Taylor

  T HE GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930S GAVE birth to modern economic policy; more specifically, it solidified the widely held notion that the federal government should attempt to steer the economy through the rough waters of the unfettered market. John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,

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  A People and a Nation

  A History of the United States

  • Jane Kamensky, Carol Sheriff, David W. Blight, Howard Chudacoff(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Nonetheless, Cold War fears and policies shaped American life during the postwar era in ways both blatant and subtle, even as many people worked hard Experience an interactive version of this story in MindTap ® . CHAPTER 25 America at Midcentury | 1945–1960 726 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 25-1 Shaping Postwar America 727 to leave the difficult years of depression and war behind and create good lives for themselves and their families. Of all the major nations in the world, only the United States had emerged from World War II stronger and more prosperous. While Europe and Asia had been devastated, America’s farms and cities and factories were intact. U.S. pro- duction capacity had increased during the war, and despite social tensions and inequalities, the fight against fascism gave Americans a unity of purpose. Victory seemed to con- firm their struggles. But sixteen years of depression and war shadowed the U.S. victory, and memories of these experiences would continue to shape the choices Americans made in their private lives, their domestic policies, and their relations with the world. In the postwar era, the actions of the federal government and the choices made by individual Americans reconfigured American society.

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  A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900 - 1950

  • John T. Matthews(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  1 An Economic History of the United States 1900–1950 Eric Rauchway

  In 1900 Americans still counted as a country people, and for most of them the rhythms of rural life shaped their ideas about past, present, and future. They shared memories of cultivation and scheduled their work in anticipation of the seasons and obedience to the weather. But before the twentieth century had half passed, the American city grew to overshadow the farm. Business cycles displaced seasons at the center of Americans’ forecasts, and while weather still played its capricious part in determining how fully an investment might come to fruition, a host of other factors, epiphenomena of the industrial world, joined storm, drought, and flood as the unpredictable masters of fate. Americans who lived through this shift from rural to urban life often complained that the regimentation and complexity of the industrial world robbed them of their independence. At the same time, the shift to modern modes of production turned the United States into the most nearly independent national actor on the world’s stage, at the center of an international economy Americans had little experience managing or even imagining. Only through the wrenching of war and depression did they come even to a tentative reckoning with the way the world worked now, and their place in it.

  The Move to the Cities, 1900–1920

  The shift from farm to city occupies a central place in the developmental theories of economists and the developmental histories of those nations fortunate enough to make it. By shifting resources out of agriculture and into industry, a people make possible greater specialization in production and begin to learn how to manufacture goods for which they can earn higher profit margins than they can for agricultural commodities. The shift to cities requires more elaborate networks of connections extending not only from farm to mill to market, but from steel town to rubber town to manufacturing center.

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  Imperialism and Resistance

  • John Rees(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 US economic power in the age of globalisation

  The world economy is made up of the totality of economic activity by competing states and corporations. This totality of economic activity has its own patterns of development that are characterised by certain general trends. The period from the Second World War to the 1970s was, for example, a period of high growth and limited recessions. The period since the 1970s has seen growth rates halve and the return of the boom–bust cycle. Again, the middle decades of the 20th century were dominated by certain state-led forms of development not just in the Eastern bloc but also in the welfare-state/ nationalisation economies of the West and in the developmental models of the Third World. In the period since the 1970s, the neoliberal era, the role of the state has not been reduced but it has been altered so that it is now much more the facilitator of global corporations. These kind of general characteristics of the world economy as a whole will be examined in chapter four .

  This chapter is concerned with the relationships between the competing parts of the economy, predominantly with the economic strengths and weaknesses of the different states that compose the system. This competition is the origin of the general patterns in the world economy, patterns produced by blind interaction rather than conscious intention. But the weight and position of the competing states within this wider pattern is often the element that drives the system beyond economic competition towards military conflict.

  The scene at the end of the Second World War

  When the victors of the Second World War–Britain, Russia and America–met at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945 they set about constructing a new world order. Churchill had set the tone on an earlier visit to Moscow. He wrote down how he saw the post-war world on a sheet of paper. Russia would have 90 percent of the say in Romania, Britain 90 percent of the say in Greece and they would share Hungary and Yugoslavia. Churchill records, ‘I pushed this across to Stalin. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.’

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