Only three percent had electricity and one percent had central heating. Only one American family in a hundred owned an automobile. By 1970, the vast majority of those American families who were living in poverty had flush toilets, running water and electricity. More than 40 percent of those in poverty had automobiles, more than half had central heating and virtually all had refrigerators, which not even the affluent had in 1900. By the end of the twentieth century, more Americans were connected to the Internet than were connected to a water pipe or a sewage line at the beginning of the century.
More families have air-conditioning today than had electricity then.
No nation ever protested its way from poverty to prosperity or got there through rhetoric or bureaucracies. It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. In these little cocoons, all that matters is how well you talk the talk.