Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast, this is your host Anastasia Yuglova for Monday, May 21st.

Cato's Vice President for Research Brinklinzy is author of a new book from Harper Collins titled

The Age of Abundance How Prosperity transformed America's politics and culture.

Brink was on John Stewart's The Daily Show last Thursday to discuss his book and he's a

podcast guest for today.

Your research for the book has led you to identify the 1950s as the critical juncture

at which America's wants and needs began to trace a more libertarian direction, but how did

you come to that conclusion?

Why the 1950s?

Well, anytime you're drawing historical lines, there's a certain arbitrariness to it.

You can move it back a year or 10 years or so forth. But I think that there is a clear

distinction between America after World War II and any other society at any

point in history. In earlier eras including the United States in the 1920s, you'll see outbreaks of prosperity

and you'll see cultural consequences of that prosperity, but generally they're restricted.

It's relatively small numbers of people in the society that were

affected and so the vast majority of people in the gilded age boom of the late

19th century in America the vast majority of people are still farmers and factory hands and they are not

participating in this. What was different about the 1950s is that this

prosperity had become the rule rather than the exception and so the vast

majority of people were neither poor nor directly exposed to the forces of nature and dependent upon nature to supply their needs.

As recently as the

1920s which was a time of consumerism and some decadence with flappers and all of that.

...