Word: levitts
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...were blessed (and sometimes cursed) with products that were mass-produced based on standardized designs, mass-marketed through new forms of mass media and spewed forth in cookie-cutter form from big factories and studios. This included not only consumer goods like Ford's cars, but everything from William Levitt's suburban homes to David Sarnoff's nationally broadcast shows to Ray Kroc's Big Macs. Mass production made all sorts of stuff, from toothpaste to TVs, more affordable, but it also led to a certain conformity. And because of economies of scale, it had a centralizing effect: power shifted...
Suburbia required cars, highways and government-guaranteed mortgages. It also required William Levitt, who first applied a full panoply of assembly-line techniques to housing construction. That insight enabled him, and the many builders who copied him, to put up houses fast and cheap. Levitt's houses were so cheap (but still reasonably sturdy) that bus drivers, music teachers and boilermakers could afford them. And the first place he offered them was Levittown, N.Y., a town that is as much an achievement of its cultural moment as Venice or Jerusalem...
...those years, the American housing industry was not so much an industry as a loose affiliation of local builders, any one of whom completed an average of four houses a year. What Levitt had in mind was 30 to 40 a day. Before the war, Levitt and his brother Alfred had built a few houses on land their father owned in Manhasset, N.Y. And in 1941 the Levitts won a government contract to provide 2,350 housing units for defense workers in Norfolk, Va. Once the fighting ended, they brought the lessons of that experience to 1,000 acres...
...Would the government have an ever greater incentive to control market fluctuations, if not the market itself? Could the government invest in a tobacco company? What about a company that was a toxic polluter a decade ago?" Levitt asked. "More broadly, assuming the government invests in individual equities as opposed to market indexes, would it be able to vote its shares...
...Levitt made it clear that the SEC is actively pursuing all these questions with an eye towards their commitment to investors...