How did a weak collection of former British colonies become an industrial, financial, and military colossus?
From the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the American economy has been transformed by wave after wave of emerging technology: the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, computer technology. Yet technology-driven change leads to growing misalignment between an innovative economy and anachronistic legal and political structures until the gap is closed by the modernization of America's institutions often amid upheavals such as the Civil War and Reconstruction and the Great Depression and World War II.
When the U.S. economy has flourished, government and business, labor and universities, have worked together in a never-ending project of economic nation building. As the United States struggles to emerge from the Great Recession, Michael Lind clearly demonstrates that Americans, since the earliest days of the republic, have reinvented the American economy and have the power to do so again.
The book is rich with details…among the joys of Lind’s book are small, little-known stories like the one about the Wright brothers that have clear relevance today.
-New York Times Book Review
“[An] illuminating new book…”
-David Brooks, New York Times