The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture

In The Age of Abundance, Brink Lindsey offers a bold reinterpretation of the latter half of the twentieth century. Following the rapid expansion of postwar America's economy, widespread affluence triggered tumultuous cultural changes that resulted in the contemporary ideologies of left and right. By shifting people's needs from tangible, day-to-day requirements like food, clothes, and employment to more intangible, value-based ones-a search for meaning, equality, and self-expression on the left and a subsequent quest for stability and a return to traditional values on the right-mass prosperity has shaped today's polarized, "red vs. blue" political atmosphere. So how do we move past the stalemate and toward useful political discourse? Lindsey persuasively argues that an emerging consensus that mixes the social freedom of the left with the economic freedom of the right is trying to do just that-and it might be our best hope. A breathtaking re-evaluation of our recent past, The Age of Abundance will change the way we think about the future.

About the Author:
Brink Lindsey is vice president for research at the Cato Institute. He is the author of Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism