The first revolutionary change that the American people encountered, beginning with 1940,was the transformation of the nation's role in world affairs from isolationism to global interventionism. It was a development initiated by the Second World War. It was carried forward more comprehensively by the Cold War that followed but also by dramatic transportation and communication advances that raised the importance of transnational business activities. The unprecedented ascendancy of the military to substantial influence in American life would follow more or less directly from those changes. Both would have important ramifications for a dramatic restructuring of American business.

Yet, in many respects, the most consequential of changes that Americans experienced after 1940 was the unprecedentedly rapid and broad growth in affluence. Postwar affluence arrived with such suddenness and with such magnitude as to constitute a social revolution in its own right. That development underlay the nation's rise to hegemonic influence in the world and its ability to fund an incomparable military. It also underlay the revolutions in racial and gender relations. It probably contributed significantly to the dramatic changes in sexual behavior as well as, arguably, a growing personal disregard for the value of privacy, even as new technology made it possible for government and private agencies to snoop into people's most private affairs.

By the 1960s, among the remarkable effects of the revolutionary rise to affluence was the country's policy makers' unprecedented concern for America's poor. Widespread abundance was not the sufficient factor for producing measures for reducing poverty and alleviating the hardships of the poor, but it was the necessary factor.