“A male-dominated economy gave way to a more gender-blind one.
The proportion of men aged sixteen to sixty-four engaged in the workforce declined from 91 percent in 1950 to 84 percent in 2000, while the proportion of women rose from 37 percent to 71 percent.
The era saw what Daniel Bell dubbed the “post-industrial society” emerge from the womb of industrial America.
The focus of economic life shifted from making things to irrigating ideas—from factories to office parks and from steel mills to universities.
Specialists in IT and finance were in particularly heavy demand.
The share of U.S. gross domestic product accruing as income to finance and insurance rose fairly steadily from 2.4 percent in 1947 to 7.6 percent in 2006.
The finance industry also attracted people with ever more rarefied skills, such as PhDs in mathematics and physics.
In 2007, a quarter of all graduates of California Institute of Technology went into finance.
One way to show the profound change in the economy, as brain took over from brawn, is to look at the overall weight of the economy.
In the classic industrial age, America had measured its might in terms of the size of things—giant factories covering acres of land and huge mines scarring the surface of the earth.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the American economy did its best to fulfill Karl Marx’s prophecy “all that is solid melts into air.”
The discovery of the electrical properties of silicon and advances in material science meant everyday objects could be made smaller and lighter.
Radios no longer needed to be put in hulking cabinets to house the vacuum tubes.
Metal cans could be rolled thinner.
Lightweight fiber optics could replace copper.
Architects could provide accommodation with less concrete or steel.
At the same time, the service sector expanded.
More and more workers toiled in office parks rather than in factories or, even if they did work in factories, in the business of coordinating production flows rather than actually making things.
This broke the long-established link between economic growth and more physical inputs and outputs.
America’s real GDP doubled between 1980 and 2000, but the raw tonnage of nonfuel raw materials consumed by the U.S. economy remained more or less fixed over these decades.
This means the only explanation of the increase in the size of GDP must lie in the world of ideas.”
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