WHAT AMERICA WANTED

The America we baby boomers were born into was a very different place from the America we know today.  I mean, think about it, in the days right after World War II --

• 33% of the homes still didn’t have running water.
• 40% didn’t have a flush toilet.
• 60% didn’t have central heat.
• Less than 50% had a phone.
• Only a third of the people lived in a town with 50,000 or more people.  If you lived on a farm – and 17 percent of the people still did – the odds were better than even you didn’t have electricity.

Running water, electricity, flush toilets -- these were simple things.  Things everybody wanted.

Then there was the car.  When I was born, there were 26 million cars registered in the entire country.  And as we know, everybody wanted a car.

And the television. Believe it or not, there were a total of 17,000 T.V. sets in America in those days – hulking cathode ray machines with unsteady black and white images and tiny 10 inch screens. The picture quality was so bad that every TV came equipped with “hold controls” you needed to keep the picture from rolling one way or the other for no apparent reason. And remotes?  Forget about it.  The Zenith Space Command didn't come on the scene till a decade later. When I was born, if you wanted to change the channel, you got out of your chair.  Not that it did much good. TVs had twelve channels in those days – but only three that worked – ABC, NBC and CBS. That was it. And they weren’t on 24-7, either. Around 1:00 a.m. each night, a waving American flag came on and they played the Star Spangled Banner.  Well, that had to change!

In those days, a lot of the things we now take for granted either hadn’t been invented or hadn't come into  common use. A few of them:

• Air conditioning - except in a few public buildings (imagine the Sunbelt without it!)
• Microwave ovens
• Anything digital (computers, cameras, watches, CDs, MP3s)
• The Internet

• The cell phone
• Credit cards, debit cards, ATMs
• Anything battery operated
• Almost anything imported

We needed those things, right?

I guess so.  I mean, there are more cars in America today than there are people registered to drive them.  

Today the average American household has 2.86 television sets, and there are more telephones in the country than there are people.

Yeah, we've come a long way ....  By other measures, too.

At the end of World War II, America produced —

• 57% of the world’s steel
• 62% of the world’s oil, and
• 80% of the world’s cars

Per capita, Americans earned roughly twice as much as the British, the Canadians, the Swedes or the Swiss (the group of nations that came in second). 

• America had 7% of the world’s population, but produced 42% of its income.
• America was the world’s premier creditor nation
• America had three-quarters of the world’s gold.

Obviously, things had to change. I mean, when I was born, the second World War had just ended and the United States, was the only major country that hadn’t been either bombed, invaded, or both. So Americans were much better off than most, and the world economy had to rebalance .....

Still, it’s interesting to see just how much things have rebalanced.

 Today America produces –

• 7% of the world’s steel
• 10% of the world’s oil, and
• 12% of the world’s cars

We Americans still have the fifth highest GDP per capita.  But unfortunately --

We also have the world's highest debt.  In fact, we are the biggest debtor nation in the history of the world.


And when they write the history of the Baby Boom generation, I'm afraid that's what they'll remember. I guess the ttruth of the matter is, we got what we wanted.

And we wanted it all.