OPINION: The Rich, Full Life

While many a U.S. citizen worried, when he had the time, about strikes, the cold war, his burden of taxes and his children’s prospects for the future, a noted U.S. economist sat down to consider what the future really seemed to hold in store for the country.

Professor Sumner H. Slichter of Harvard, a man who approaches his subject with scholarly caution, raised his sights from the present, and tried to see what the U.S. would be like 30 years from now. His report was bottomed on sober statistics and hedged by careful qualifications —but it all added up to a bright vision. The good things in store for the U.S. in 1980, Professor Slichter wrote in the November Atlantic Monthly, will make the prosperity of the 1940s seem pale and austere.

Remember 1900. “Suppose,” he said, “someone in the year 1900 had predicted that within 50 years the amount of goods consumed per person in the United States would have risen two and one-half times, that nearly four out of five children of high school age would be in high school, that the number of university students would increase four times as fast as the population, that nearly every family would own an automobile, a telephone, and a wireless receiving set … that this would be accomplished after paying the cost of the nation’s participation in two great world wars and while we were gradually reducing the work week from about 58 hours to 40 … Anyone making such bold predictions would have been regarded as irresponsible.”

Solid Sumner Slichter went into no dreams of his own of an atom-built, atom-powered U.S. wonderland; he assumed only a continuance of the American talent for invention, and the American genius for production. He left the possibility of war out of consideration, as something that could not be charted. Then, projecting forward from known past performance, he predicted:

¶ In 30 years, when the big crop of war babies has grown and proliferated, the U.S. population will have risen to 175 million, expanding the labor force to at least 72,500,000 men & women.

¶ The American worker’s productivity, which has increased about 2% a year for generations, will continue to rise; productivity in 1980 will be more than 88% above last year’s mark.

¶ The work week will be cut to 30 hours.

¶ The output of goods and services—$246.7 billion in 1948—will swell to $416 billion (in today’s purchasing values) and perhaps even to $550 billion.

Two Cars in Every Garage. What would the rich, full life of 1980 be like? “. . . The United States will gradually become a country of two-car families,” Slichter thought. “In another generation 70 million or more cars will be on the roads . . .Air conditioning in restaurants and office buildings will create the demand for much air conditioning in homes. The family-sized swimming pool is likely to become popular and millions of these pools may be installed.

“Medical services of all kinds will be used far more than today. The proportion of people completing high school and spending some time in college will rise … A nation on a 30-hour week will have more opportunity to pursue a multitude of arts . . . The chance is good that the arts will flourish in the United States as never before in the history of the world.”