Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

That's the title of a book [from Bill Bryson] that I just closed. It's about life and times in America in the years of transformation - 1950's and 60's, and actually one of those light harmless reads, but one of the lines was particularly poignant.

"By closing years of 1950s most people had pretty much everything they had dreamed of...

... Soon millions of people were caught in a spiral in which they worked harder and harder to buy labor-saving devices that they wouldn't have needed if they hadn't been working so hard in the first place".

How disturbingly true. I guess that explains development, as we know it, in a single sentence.