Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream.

• Author: Rauch, Jonathan

Something happened to the American economy around 1973. We don't know exactly what, but we do know the consequences: Productivity growth slowed markedly and has never fully recovered. From 1947 to 1973, hourly work output increased by 3 percent a year; afterwards, by less than 1 percent. Productivity drives living standards. When it slows, so does the growth of wealth. Median family income doubled from 1947 to 1973; since then, it has risen only slightly.

This is the great economic change of our time, and it is where Declining Fortunes begins. Katherine S. Newman, an anthropologist at Columbia University, sets out to explore how economic change translates into generational friction. In a northern New Jersey town near New York City--"Pleasanton," as she calls it (all names are changed to protect privacy)--she conducts more than 150 interviews. And she concludes: "There is virtually no aspect of daily life that has been left unruffled by the shock of declining fortunes ."

Newman is at her best parsing the intricacies of middle-class hopes and discontents. She has an attentive ear and a gift for putting her finger on points of social tension. Subterranean economic change, she demonstrates, leads to eruptions of moral strife. For example, in the age of the working woman, who is a moral mother? The mother who works may be frowned upon as materialistic, but the mother who stays home may be frowned upon as unfulfilled. Or again: Baby boomers, she says, feel economically insecure and so wait longer to have children. "Hypercalculation thus replaces the casual, unplanned style of pregnancy of the postwar parents." This opens another values gap. Postwar parents think their children are being too finicky and waiting too long; the baby boomers think they are being prudent.

All of that is good and useful stuff. Newman's insistence on rooting her analysis in the real lives of real people, supported by her clear and unpretentious prose, makes her book a good example of how the anthropologist's lens can help bring American life into sharper focus. But wait a minute. The book wants to do more than map the changing middle-class mindset. Is it also selling a world view, a new victimology, beginning with its title, "Declining Fortunes"? Something fishy is going on here.

Pleasanton in the fifties--and, by extension, America in the rifties- is bathed in a nostalgic glow. The town was an upwardly mobile melting-pot community where houses were cheap, jobs secure...