Content area
Full text
Buy Now Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s. By Martha L. Olney--Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. viii + 424 pp. Tables, graphs, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. ISBN 0-8078-1958-1.
Reviewed by Sue M. Bowden
In the twentieth century Americans have demonstrated a growing and, to some observers, alarming taste for immediate private consumption. The satisfaction of these desires, in the form of mass ownership of consumer durables, is seen both as a measure of the prosperity of the country and as a harbinger of doom to those concerned about falling trends in the personal savings ratio. Exactly how, when, and why the American love affair with consumer durables began is the subject of Martha Olney's fascinating book.
Buy Now Pay Later poses and succeeds in answering the question of whether there was a consumer revolution in the 1920s. To address this question, Olney first derived annual estimates of real expenditure by commodity group, which extend the published Department of Commerce estimates back to 1869. The resulting revised series is, in itself, a major contribution to economic history. A stock adjustment model was then used to explore the determinants of demand and to test for demand shifts. The intellectual rigor of Olney's analyses is particularly impressive. This is cliometrics of the highest order presented in a fashion that non-cliometricians will be able to understand. Olney's findings--that there was a shift to major durable goods (mainly, though not exclusively, to automobiles) in...