What Did Economic Growth Mean for U.S. Households?

Economic growth is easy to understand: it means that people have access to goods and services of increasing quantity and quality.

What is hard, however, is to measure economic growth. This chart shows two ways of doing this for US growth over the past 160 years.

The purple lines represent a straightforward approach: each line tracks the share of households with access to one specific good or service. Starting from the top, you see the rising provision of basic infrastructure like running water, flush toilets, and electric power. You can also see the increasing availability of communication technology: radios, TVs, the Internet, and mobile phones. And further down, you see the rise of technologies that reduced work at home: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers.

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