Yale political science professor Douglas W. Rae traces how mass affluence and consumer culture emerged in the industrializing West, part of his course Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform. He covers the rise of the joint stock corporation and the growth of advertising in America, then turns to competing explanations for the Industrial Revolution. Gregory Clark's theory gets extended treatment: England's medieval and early modern upper classes outbred the supply of high status jobs, pushing their children into lower economic strata and, on this account, spreading upper class work habits and even genetic traits downward through society. Rae weighs this against exogenous and endogenous growth theories, institutional explanations, and Schumpeter's creative destruction. The lecture moves from abstract growth theory to the concrete mechanics of corporate wealth creation and the culture of consumption it produced.