Avner Offer, now a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, spent eight years working as a soldier, farmer, and conservation worker in Israel. This experience may have influenced the questions he places at the center of this economic history of recent years in Great Britain and the United States. Certainly the assumptions that lift his conclusions from the bleak to the almost optimistic show traces of a social contract more encompassing and vital than exists currently in the North Atlantic nations he studies. The core of his argument is that “affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being” (p. 1), the wash of novelty under affluence eroding commitments and burnishing uncertainties.

Ceding precedence to the economist side of his economic historian's practice, he frames a test: “in the presence of affluence, does postwar consumer behaviour in the US and the UK converge, following a path from common purposes to private benefits?” The answer to the test question (which seems to be “yes”) is less interesting than Offer's rumination along the way, a bravura performance, which models better practice than contemporary quantitative research often delivers. The test requires comparable “measurables,” a precondition that leads Offer beyond formulaic data-cleaning, to a careful interrogation of the behavioral soundness of the assumptions silenced in the quest to deliver these ranked deliverables. His concern is less with the worthy if hoary “quality/price” incommensurable, than with the reciprocities of status, these being emotional relations, diminished by categorization and not readily ranked. His wide review of contextualized instances from social science literature suggests that the circuitry of status, as it underpins well-being, is decidedly low-watt, a local rather than a global experience (p. 237).

The analysis has a sensitivity to gender as well as scale. Consumption is a deeply gendered activity in the times and places he studies. He pays assiduous attention to the gendered identities of designers, makers, purveyors, purchasers, and users in the research findings he reviews. His critique of the gendered construction of social economic indicators is cogent. By using female pronouns for the actors in many of the exchange relationships, he draws the reader's conscious attention to a difference often coded by not conceptualized in analyses based on large data sets. This part of the book is exceptionally comprehensive and intriguingly intricate.

The two chapters on boys' toys, a.k.a. automobiles, parse these consumables, variously, as sources of sensual pleasure and status in ways that arouse the historian's discomfort with the economic modeler's choice for clarity over nuance. He is right to conclude that the passing of the giant chassis and extraneous fins suggests a maturing in consumer culture to embrace more sophisticated forms of distinction and self-expression. But the “Volvo” guy and his “I drive a hybrid” successor are savoring their own internal satisfactions while also courting the approving gaze of their neighbors. In these chapters Offer has some fun. His entirely satisfactory prose grows playful with descriptions of the car's face, the headlight eyes, and the silver grimace of the grille, and of Harley Earl's protean achievement: “as distinctively American as jazz. . . a post-modernist before his time, reaching promiscuously for inspirations, an artist whose sculptural steel creations poured in their tens of millions onto streets and highways” (p. 200).

He concludes that there was convergence between the United States and the United Kingdom in the Thatcher years, a move toward self-regarding individualism and a shift from New Deal to New Right, bringing with market liberalism a dazzle of opportunities and rewards, which unsettles psyches. What moderates this dark view is the uninterrogated assumption, that through their “human nature” the bond-trader and the street person share a “hard-wired” desire for regard (p. 367), accumulated as positive reciprocity and “enforced by the cold glare of exclusion and punishment.” What powers the communications system of affluence is a companion assertion that humans are wired for trust, an emotional capacity that gives commercial speech credibility (p. 125).

This is a wide, wise, and careful book. I only wish it offered more comfort to those of us on the deteriorating infrastructure of the modern highway, driving elderly sensible cars amongst the road-raging Beemers and SUVs.