“The parties were bigger. The pace was faster, the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper.”
No-one captures the mood of the ‘Roaring 20s’ better than F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. In the aftermath of the Spanish Flu people were ready to party. The Golden Twenties—as the German’s called them—was also a period of economic prosperity characterized by the mass adoption of cars, phones, radio and appliances.
Are we at the cusp of a similar boom? Medical sociologists widely agree that the appetite for hedonistic pleasures—and the rise in consumption accompanying it—is typical after a pandemic. And similar to the 1920s, technology developed in prior decades might be ripe for mass adoption. In a recent McKinsey survey executives note that their companies are already seven years ahead of where they expected to be in terms of digitalization.