'By the closing years of the 1950s most people - certainly most middle class people - had pretty much everything they ever dreamed of, so increasingly there was nothing much to do with their wealth but buy more and bigger versions of things they didn't really require: second cars, lawn tractors, double-width fridges, hi-fis with bigger speakers and more knobs to twiddle, extra phones and televisions, room intercoms, gas grills, kitchen gadgets, snowblowers, you name it. Having more things of course meant having more complexity in one's life, more running costs, more things to look after, more thaings to clean, more things to break down. Women increasingly went out to work to help keep the whole enterprise afloat. Soon millions of people were caught in a spiral in which they worked harder and harder to buy labour-saving devices that they wouldn't have needed if they hadn't been working so hard in the first place.
By the 1960s, the average American was producing twice as much as only fifteen years before. In theory at least, people could now afford to work a four-hour days, or a two-and-a-half-day week, or six month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed by people in 1950 when life was already pretty good - and arguably, in terms of stress and distraction and sense of urgency, in many respects much better. Instead, and almost uniquely among developed nations, Americans took none of the productivity gains in additional leisure. We decided to work and buy and have instead.'
Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid, p.330.
