THE GOLDEN YEARS

During the 1950s, many people in the prosperous developed countries realized that the times had improved markedly, but it was not until the boom, during the turbulent 70s, that observers began to realize that the world Developed capitalism had gone through an exceptional, perhaps unique, "golden age" stage. After the war, recovery was the absolute priority of European countries and Japan, which at first measured their success against targets set with the past - not the future - as a benchmark. The material benefits of development took time to make they felt, it was not until the middle of the 50s that they finally became palpable. The advantages of the "opulent society" were not generalized until the 60s. Therefore, it was not until the 1960s that Europe took for granted its prosperity. At first the economic outburst seemed to be nothing more than a gigantic version of what had happened before, a sort of universalization of the US situation before 45, with the adoption of this country as a model. The golden age basically corresponded to the developed capitalist countries, which represented about three-quarters of world production. This limited scope was slow to recognize because economic growth appeared at first to be global in scope, even independent of economic regimes. But in the 1960s it became clear that it was capitalism, rather than socialism, that was making its way.

However, the golden age was a global phenomenon to some extent, although the generalization of opulence was beyond the reach of much of the globe.
The number of countries primarily dependent on agriculture to finance their imports fell sharply. World production of manufactures quadrupled, and world trade in processed products increased tenfold. The ideology of progress still assumed that man's increasing domination of nature was the just measure of humanity's advance. Cities large and small, historic cities, were razed by road builders and real estate developers around the world. Authorities used something similar to industrial production methods to build public housing. Socialist industrialization turned its back on the ecological consequences of a rather archaic industrial system based on iron and coal.

Much of the global expansion was a process of shortening distances with the United States, which was adopted as a model for industrial capitalist society. The era of the automobile arrived in Europe after the war and, later and on a more modest scale, the socialist world and the Latin American middle class. On the other hand, goods and services hitherto restricted to minorities were now thought of as a mass market, as was the case with mass-scale tourism. However, what was most remarkable at the time was to what extent one of the engines of economic expansion was the technological revolution, which not only contributed to the massification and perfection of previous products, but to the production of new and unknown ones. Therefore, more than in any previous epoch, the golden age rested on the most advanced and often abstruse scientific research, which found practical application. Three aspects of this.