Tim Lee Reviews Brink Lindsey's "The Age of Abundance"
You know, The American Scene is like the love child of National Review and Partisan Review in their heydays--except, that is, for the fact that The American Scene is really good.
Tim Lee:
Two Ages of Abundance | Culture | Politics | The American Scene: I promised that I’d do a post discussing one of the weaknesses of Brink Lindsay’s The Age of Abundance. In particular, it felt like it was really two separate books that were stitched together in one volume. Both halves were good, but they didn’t cohere....
The first half of the book... up to about 1980, is a rich and colorful discussion of Americans social and cultural evolution. The second half of the book, which focuses on the last quarter-century or so, is more a technical economics discussion, focusing on the effects of globalization, changes in consumption and inequality, etc....
I can think of several possible reasons for this. The most obvious is that Lindsey may simply be writing what he knows... a youngish Baby Boomer....
The shift may also be a consequence of one of the trends Lindsey identifies... the astonishing increase in the diversity of American culture. One could make a plausible case that Nirvana is to the early 1990s what the Beatles were to the mid-1960s. But... it’s not clear that it was in the 1990s, or ever will be again, possible to reach that kind of stratospheric social success. The Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show drew an estimated 73 million viewers, about half the country....
[I]t might be impossible to write a cultural history of late-20th-century America as coherent as the one Lindsey writes about the cultural trends of the 50s and 60s.... A final possibility is that it’s not yet possible to write a definitive cultural history of the last couple of decades because we don’t have enough perspective to see which trends proved to be really important. The rise of evangelical Christianity began in the 1940s and 1950s, but a writer in 1970 might not have appreciated its significance... the social movements that will shape popular culture in the next couple of decades are almost certainly in our midst today, but we won’t be able to identify them [for a while yet]....
I found the first half more interesting than the second... [which] draws more on the work of libertarian thinkers whose work I’m already familiar with.... [Also,] the best writing is often about good storytelling, and there are a lot more fun stories in the first half.... The whole thing is excellent, though, and I encourage you to check it out.
