Kate Brown Ch 9 Q6

The section of this chapter I found to be most interesting was the explanation of why Americans are "five times as rich as he or she would have been in 1940". Wheelan explains that this is because Americans today are more productive. We can do more in the 24 hour day than we were able to do 75 years ago. Wheelan compares how much it would cost a person to buy two different items in two different time periods but rather than measuring the cost in money Wheelan uses time. He uses the example of the stockings to show that Americans can now buy even the most basic items by working less than half the amount they would have had to over a century ago. He uses the example of the cell phone to explain how expensive products that were only considered a luxury of the rich turned into everyday items that needed a fraction of one work day to be able to afford. In the 1980s a cell phone required 456 hours of work in order to buy one. Now that improved version of the same product takes about one work day to earn the cost to buy it.