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This chapter examines postwar consumer credit. Many in the postwar United States achieved a material prosperity that, in debt's absence, they could not have attained. Indeed, this postwar prosperity enabled suburbanites with good incomes to live as well as their perhaps wealthier neighborhoods, even if they had little savings. However, this equality of consumption reinforced inequalities of wealth. While the amount loaned grew tremendously in the postwar period, the growth rate for outstanding debt remained relatively flat. Borrowing remained a viable strategy, not only because of rising incomes, but also because all consumer credit remained tax deductible. In such a favorable climate for borrowing, Americans borrowed their way to prosperity.

How successful has Britain been in tackling the giant of Want? Britain experienced greatly increased standards of material prosperity during the second half of the twentieth century, with a fourfold increase in GDP per head, similar to that achieved in other large Western democracies. However, Britain saw an even larger increase in economic inequality than did peer countries such as France and Germany. Increased inequality means that the benefits of rising material prosperity were not shared equally but went disproportionately to the better-off. The modest increase in household income for the poorest families suggests that Want, or poverty, should have declined too. However, poorer households also saw their levels of debt rise sharply after 1999, while the rising use of foodbanks and increasing food insecurity suggests that material progress for the poorest may have stalled in the twenty-first century, or gone into reverse.

This chapter looks at the thoughtful public in America. The term “contemporary American idealist” refers to a man or woman who is consciously and predominantly guided, in the purposes and in the great choices of life, by large ideals, such as admit of no merely material embodiment, and such as contemplate no merely private and personal satisfaction as their goal. Idealism has expressed itself in the rich differentiation of national religious life. Moreover, idealism has founded America's colleges and universities. Indeed, ever since the close of the Civil War, numerous forces have been at work to render America as a nation more thoughtful, more aspiring, and more in love with the immaterial things of the spirit, and that too even at the very moment when Americans' material prosperity has given them much opportunity to be what the mistaken foreign critics often suppose them to be—a people really sunk in practical materialism.

This chapter discusses the Soviet experience. The Russian Revolution and Stalin's death were among the three postcolonial moments recorded during the Soviet period. The living standard improvements over the last fifteen years came from migration in the 1970s instead of any foreign investment or aid program. Moreover, the environmental damage caused by dam building and heavy industry alone is enough to suggest that humanity will need to think of radically different approaches against poverty, inequality, and global warming in the twenty-first century. The Soviet Union found ways to accommodate quite a bit of diversity as it pursued a path to material prosperity and equality.