US lawyers per capita stagnated for seventy years then suddenly doubled

Evidence

Astonishingly, America had fewer lawyers per capita in 1970 than in 1900. … Two world wars; the extraordinary booms of the 1920s and the 1950s; one Great Depression; one New Deal; our metamorphosis from a rustic nation (with 60 percent of its inhabitants living in hamlets of fewer than 2,500 souls) to a metropolitan nation (with nearly half its population in cities an order of magnitude larger); the transformation of our economy from gaslights, horse drawn buggies, and the general store to GE, GM, and Kmart—none of these economic, social, and cultural revolutions raised the lawyering ratio in the American economy by a single iota. After 1970, however, the ratio of lawyers to the rest of us suddenly exploded, more than doubling in the next quarter century and bloating this entry in our national “transaction cost” accounts. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 476

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the Milgrom and ‘Opting Out of the Legal System’ material: the shift from informal/low-cost trust to formal ‘artificial trust’ as social capital declines. — connects to: American lawyer density doubled in fifty years and far exceeds Britain’s and Germany’s. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1003; Law-firm employment concentration grew enormously between 1968 and 2011 — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1043; Legal profession growth substantially reflects opening to formerly excluded groups — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1195 (+3 more)
• CANDY: ‘Fewer lawyers per capita in 1970 than in 1900, then a post-1970 doubling’ is a startling single stat for conversation.