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Abundant Social Change

I just started reading Brink Lindsey’s new book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture.  I’m just about 60 pages into it, and so far I’m enjoying it immensely.  I especially like this observation (that appears on page 3):

American capitalism is derided for its superficial banality, yet it has unleashed profound, convulsive social change.  Condemned as mindless materialism, it has burst loose a flood tide of spiritual yearning. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health-care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a "creative class" of "knowledge workers" — all are the progeny of widespread prosperity.

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