MICHAEL BARONE ON TSOS
In a column for the U.S. News website, style aficionado Michael Barone discusses The Substance of Style and, among other points, explains its connection to The Future and Its Enemies and, hence, to "creativity, enterprise, and progress." The conclusion:
In mid-20th-century culturally uniform America, advocates of different styles struggled for the pre-eminence of their favorites. In early-21st-century culturally diverse America, all kinds of different people can have the styles they want.
The Substance of Style is a celebration of some of the wonders of our country in our time. Postrel points out that demands for aesthetically pleasing goods and services have created jobs by the many thousands for designers, craftsmen, nail salon workers--jobs that probably give their holders greater satisfaction than the grim clerical jobs in giant corporations that mid-20th-century theorists thought we would all be consigned to today. And she also points out that the profusion of aesthetic products has made them cheaper: Women today accumulate much larger wardrobes out of much smaller percentages of their earnings than they did in the conformist 1950s. Here we rub up against one of the limitations of economics: It is hard to estimate, and easy to underestimate, how much better off we are than previous generations. Product improvement and enhancement of aesthetics are not fully measured by our statistical indexes. Just as we get much more computing power for the dollar when we buy a computer than we did in the late 1970s, so also can we get (if we want it) a much more attractive computer than the utilitarian boxes of a quarter century ago. And for some of us, it's worth it. You get choice. This is a book about style--and about substance.