washing machines reduced drudgery

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pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

People loved the shiny stuff—especially large appliances: washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators. Everyone wanted the biggest and the best, and in hot new colors like avocado green. The media had cast these mechanical marvels as freedom machines, transformers of the dreary into the fabulous. Washing machines banished the drudgery of “washing day”; freezers made the dream of TV dinners come true. To cite but one remarkable example, General Electric ran an advertisement entitled “Things My Bill Has a Right to After It’s Over,” referring to the postwar world as seen through the eyes of the wife of a young soldier.


pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Brother, can you spare a dime?’ The song tells of one of the sources of America’s wealth: the thousands of miles of railways that moved goods and people between ports, factories and cities. At the end of the 1920s food was plentiful, many people owned their own homes, and products such as washing machines that did away with domestic drudgery were within reach of ordinary Americans. But as the song said, only a few years later many workers who’d helped build the wealth were reduced to begging. By 1933, 13 million Americans were unemployed, a quarter of all the workers. In some cities half were out of work. The railways carried a new cargo: millions of people stowed away in the freight cars, criss-crossing the country looking for work.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

The early data for washing machines in the 1940s and 1950s need qualification, for some of the machines in question were equipped with hand wringers to squeeze the water out of the clothes, requiring human effort no longer required by fully automatic washing machines with their mechanical spinning wash tubs. Whereas washing machines eliminated the previous drudgery of the washboard described in chapter 8, the arrival of the clothes dryer eliminated the tedious task of hanging clothes on outside clothes lines, where the drying process could be interrupted by rain or where, in industrial cities, the clean clothes could be coated with soot and pollution.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The fridge and the washing machine were increasingly commonplace in middle-class households but within two decades, as their price dropped, became accessible also to working-class families. By the early 1970s most households had a fridge, and could for the first time buy food in bulk for storage and later use. Two-thirds of families by then had a washing machine, freeing women for the most part from a significant element in household drudgery. A big status symbol in the 1950s was ownership of a television. Britain began in the lead, but when television had launched there in 1946 there had been only 1,760 subscribers. By the mid-1960s there were 13 million television sets in Britain, nearly 10 million in West Germany, 5 million in France and Italy, about 2 million in Holland and Sweden.


pages: 240 words: 60,660

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Cepheid variable, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency risk, diversified portfolio, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, law of one price, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Myron Scholes, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, riskless arbitrage, savings glut, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, stochastic volatility, the scientific method, washing machines reduced drudgery, yield curve

Once you understand that a model isn’t the thing but rather an exaggeration of one aspect of the thing, you will be less surprised at its limitations. Let Someone Else’s Fingers Do the Walking Thinking for yourself is hard work, and models save mental labor. Like the vacuum cleaner and washing machine that promised to liberate suburban housewives of the 1950s from drudgery, models provide easy and automated ways of letting other people do the thinking for you. When I worked on my PhD thesis to test the Weinberg-Salam Model in the early 1970s, I carried out each calculation using Feynman diagrams, the cartoonlike representations invented by Richard Feynman in the late 1940s to systematize and enumerate the ways particles interact during collisions.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Before the advent of washing machines, cleaning clothes was a time-consuming process of soaking, soaping, rinsing, and drying each garment. The washing machine is nothing more than an automated system that relieves the need for human labor. And to the great benefit of humanity! Washing machines not only liberated humans from the boring, labor-intensive task of doing laundry but, given the traditional division of labor in households around the world, freed women in particular from drudgery. Does anyone lament the diminished place of human labor in the task of doing laundry? We doubt it. Washing machines are not especially intelligent, but they are more effective and much more efficient than humans.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

In 1920 came latex condoms; in 1960 the oral contraceptive; and in rich countries the birth rate dropped below the replacement level of two per couple. As healthier children and the pill released women from lifetimes of breeding, cheap electrical heating coils for irons and toasters and little motors for washing machines and vacuum cleaners released them from household drudgery too. Pressing a button took care of tasks that previously called for hours of tedious labor. A woman’s work was still never done, but by 1960 she could jump in the car (almost every American family had one), drive to the supermarket (where two-thirds of the country’s food was sold), store her purchases in the refrigerator (98 percent of houses had them), and put the laundry on before the two or three kids got back from school and settled in front of the TV.


pages: 372 words: 98,659

The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, car-free, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, coronavirus, COVID-19, driverless car, experimental subject, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, Sidewalk Labs, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, twin studies, Wall-E, washing machines reduced drudgery

No one wants a return to mass, repetitive manual labour. And beyond a handful of hair-shirted survivalist types, few would suggest having to carry in piles of wood from a shed every day for heating and cooking. Similarly, domestic appliances like the washing machine and vacuum cleaner have liberated millions of people – almost universally women – from hours of daily drudgery. This is, instead, about finding new ways to put physical effort into modern lives. Nor is this intended as a handbook for better health, or a detailed policy manifesto. There are plenty of those already available. Consider it more a guide through this often unnoticed phenomenon and its many consequences, which are hiding in plain sight in virtually every country across the world.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Revolutionary technologies like automobiles, refrigerators, radios, and telephones—to name just a few—were all unavailable to European monarchs in the Renaissance, but by 1950 they were common features of Western life. In 1900, the average housewife could still only dream of living like the upper classes, who had servants to do the most tedious household tasks for them. In the following decades every home suddenly got equal access to the electric servant. Washing machines, electric irons, and a host of other electric appliances took over hours of drudgery in the home. In short, the capitalist achievement, as the great economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, did not consist of providing “more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.”6 It is easy to oversimplify history.


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pages: 376 words: 101,759

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith. Angwin

airline deregulation, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, green new deal, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jones Act, Just-in-time delivery, load shedding, market clearing, Michael Shellenberger, Negawatt, off-the-grid, performance metric, plutocrats, renewable energy credits, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the map is not the territory, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, zero-sum game

Without electricity, women must pump water, heat water over a fire or on a stove, use the heated the water for washing or cooking, and constantly tend the fire or the stove. Bryce describes Lyndon Johnson campaigning for himself and for electricity in the hill country of Texas in the 1930s. With electricity, Johnson said, women would have water pumps and washing machines instead of washboards. They would have a way to keep cooked food overnight in the refrigerator. A woman’s life would not be a constant round of drudgery. Lyndon Johnson was correct. Today, electrification in India achieves similar gains in release from drudgery.278 I know that some people think we should not have electricity whenever we want to use it. These people usually have a rosy view of a low-electricity-use lifestyle.


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Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Michael Cox, a former chief economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, calculates that the total lifetime hours worked declined by about 25 percent over the twentieth century. Some of the most striking advances were made against domestic toil, thanks to the arrival of “electronic servants” in the form of washing machines, stoves, microwave ovens, and dishwashers. In 1900, marriage for a working-class woman who couldn’t afford servants was tantamount to a life sentence of domestic drudgery. Stanley Lebergott has estimated that the average housewife devoted forty-four hours a week to preparing meals and washing the dishes, seven hours a week to laundry, and seven hours a week to cleaning. That may be a conservative number.


pages: 870 words: 259,362

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

‘Nothing on earth would ever persuade me to have my home anywhere but in England, where my ancestors have lived ever since they sacked and burned the farms of East Anglia fifteen hundred years ago.’19 About the same time, Mass-Observation put the question to the female members of its panel: ‘What are your feelings about housework?’ Predictably, there was no shortage of replies, from housewives of varying ages and varying degrees of contentment: I think housework becomes infinitely easier with the right tools. I consider every housewife should be able to have a washing machine, a proper wringer, a vacuum cleaner and a refrigerator. Without these tools, a lot of the work is a drudgery and the result is either the woman doggedly keeps on at her work becoming a kind of martyred housewife, or she just skips the lot and a fusty dusty house results. (37) I like Monday least as after a slight relaxation of work on Sunday I find it very hard to get going again on Monday.


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