Arthur Laffer turned five in the summer of 1945, as World War II ended and the great postwar prosperity was about to unfold. Philip Roth expressed the material wonder of this period in his celebrated 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, as cited on page 1 of The Emergence of Arthur Laffer:
Laffer’s childhood memories coincided precisely with the first years of the great postwar prosperity. The profundity of this experience must have shaped his decision to become and economist and his priorities as a supply-sider over a long career. From page 3:
