Suburban growth made many middle-class Americans doubt the value of economic progress itself

Evidence

Well before 1970, therefore, the destruction of open space had led many middle-class Americans to reassess the costs and benefits of economic growth. The millions of new homes in the suburbs were signs of progress, the most striking evidence of the blessings brought by the postwar boom, and yet, as William Whyte warned in 1957, “much more of this kind of progress and we shall have the paradox of prosperity lowering our real standard of living.” By the early 1960s, advocates of open-space preservation often set the word “progress” in quotation marks to express their intensifying doubts. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 564

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘prosperity lowering standard of living’ paradox connects to Eco-Justice themes on growth-versus-environment tradeoffs in the polyad.