OUTLINE OF THE U.S.

ECONOMY
2012 EDITION
 CONTENTS
Cover
CHAPTER 1: The Challenges of this Century
The world’s largest and most diverse economy currently faces the most severe
economic challenges in a generation.
CHAPTER 2: The Evolution of the U.S. Economy
The economy has expanded and changed, guided by some unchanging principles.
CHAPTER 3: What the U.S. Economy Produces
Large U.S. multinational firms have altered their production strategies and their roles
in response to globalization as they adapt to increasing competition.
CHAPTER 4: Competition and the American Culture
Competition has remained a defining characteristic of the U.S. Economy grounded in
the American Dream of owning a small business.
CHAPTER 5: Geography and Infrastructure
Education and transportation help hold together widely separated and distinct regions.
CHAPTER 6: Government and the Economy
Much of America’s history has focused on the debate over the government’s role in the
economy.
CHAPTER 7: A U.S. Economy Linked to the World
Despite political divisions, the United States shows no sign of retreat from global
engagement in trade and investment.
CHAPTER 8: A New Chapter in America’s Economic Story
The United States, in its democratic way, faces up to immense economic challenges.
 PREFACE
“The panic itself was felt in every part of the globe,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “It was as if
a volcano had burst forth in New York, causing a tidal wave that swept with disastrous power over
every nation on the globe.” One of the after-effects: “an accumulation of idle money in the banking
centres.” The date of this item? January 17, 1908.
Given the sobering news that of late has arrived with distressing frequency, preparing this edition
of Outline of the U.S. Economy has been a real challenge. We have tried to approach the task with a
sense of historical consciousness. In addition to the 1908 events depicted above, the United States has
endured a Great Depression (began 1929), a Long Depression (began 1873), a Panic of 1837—“an
American financial crisis, built on a speculative real estate market,” says Wikipedia—and assorted
other recessions, panics, bubbles, and contractions, and emerged from each with its economic vigor
restored and its republican institutions vibrant.
We hope that our readers will find this new entry in our Outline series frank, informative, and
above all useful. We offer it in the spirit of optimism embedded deeply in American life.
—The Editors
 CHAPTER 1
The Challenges of this Century
The world’s largest and most diverse economy currently faces the most severe economic challenges
in a generation.

From left, Vice President-elect Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, stop in
January 2009 on their way to inauguration and big challenges.
© AP Images

“We are still the nation that has overcome great fears and improbable odds.”
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
United States of America
2010

The economy of the United States, which generates nearly $15 trillion a year in goods and services, is
the largest in the world and, by most measures, the most innovative and productive. American
households and employers make millions of daily decisions about what to spend, invest and save.
Many layers of laws, policies, regulations and court decisions both constrain and stimulate these
decisions. The resulting economy reflects market and individual choices but is also structured and
shaped by politics, policies and laws.
This edition of Outline of the U.S. Economy, updated in 2012, offers historical context for
understanding the interplay of individual economic decisions and the legal and political framework
that surrounds them. It is a primer on how the U.S. economic system emerged, how it works and how
it is shaped by American social values and political institutions.
The United States’ entrepreneurial and opportunistic culture supports competition and risk taking in
the economy, but many Americans also rely on government social “safety nets” to help them through
unemployment and retirement. These conflicting currents shape the U.S. economy. The most
fundamental questions about how the U.S. economy works and which policies best serve the nation
have been debated since the nation’s founding. Today’s economists and political leaders continue the
debate.
For more than two centuries the U.S. economy has responded to new opportunities and rewarded
long-term investment—but it has also proved vulnerable to booms and crashes. The cycle of highs
and lows swung violently in the first decade of the 21st century, culminating in the global financial
panic of 2008 and the “great recession” that followed.

AN ECONOMY DRIVEN BY COMPETITION

Many economists agree that an understanding of the American economy begins with Adam Smith’s
concept of the “invisible hand.” Smith, considered the father of economics, wrote in The Wealth of
Nations (1776) that an economy performs best when buyers and sellers seek the best outcome for
themselves, as if guided by an unseen hand. The sum of their many independent transactions is the
most efficient use of a nation’s resources, he reasoned. In freely operating markets, prices are
determined by the interactions of buyers and sellers. Competition results in better products and wider
prosperity than a government-run economy could deliver—as the failure of communism in Russia so
clearly attests, market economists say.
Leading economic thinkers also understand the limits of a pure free-market model. “For various
reasons, the invisible hand sometimes does not work,” said economist N. Gregory Mankiw, a former
member of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. A manufacturer won’t pay the
environmental and health costs of the pollution emitting from its smokestacks unless government
requires that it do so. A monopolist or group of dominant companies can charge higher prices than a
competitive market would allow. Another former White House adviser, Nobel Prize winner Joseph E.
Stiglitz, says, “The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.”
Most Americans subscribe to the idea of a dynamic economy that embraces competition, fosters
striving and invention, heaps rewards on winners and gives second chances to those who fail. The
United States has achieved a highly flexible economic system that arguably offers more choices and
opportunities than any other, and one that has displayed repeatedly its capacity to repair mistakes and
adapt to recessions, wars and financial panics.

THE U.S. ECONOMY TODAY

The U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) stood at $15 trillion in 2011. Measured by purchasing power
parity exchange rates (equalizing what people can buy with different currencies), that came to about
1.3 times the size of the second largest economy, that of China (whose population is more than four
times that of the United States) and more than three times the GDP of third-ranked Japan. With just 4.5
percent of the world’s population, the United States was responsible for 19 percent of total economic
output.
In 2011, U.S. GDP per person was $48,100, compared with a worldwide average of $11,800. The
economy generated more than $40 billion a day in goods and services, drawing its fuel from the labor
of the 153 million Americans who make up the workforce. Providing more fuel were the billions of
dollars that Americans invested daily in their businesses and homes, exclusive of government
spending, and the nation’s resources of minerals, energy, water, forests and farmland.
The productivity of American working men and women remains a standard for the world. In 2011,
the average American worker produced more than $62 of goods and services per hour; the average
worker in the European Union produced only 71 percent as much; and the average Chinese worker
produced less than 20 percent as much, according to the U.S. Conference Board business
organization.
A long trend of strong productivity growth has helped the United States maintain relatively low
unemployment and inflation during most of the period since World War II.
U.S. labor productivity growth fell to 0.8 percent in 2008 but rebounded to 1.6 percent in 2009 and
2.7 percent in 2010.
The World Economic Forum, whose annual conferences bring together top international
government and corporate leaders, has regularly ranked the United States as the world’s most
competitive economy. Major U.S. companies have remained competitive in international markets
through a determined focus on innovation, cost reduction and the return of profits to shareholders. Of
the 2011 Fortune magazine list of the 500 largest corporations worldwide, the United States was first
with headquarters of 133, Japan was second with 68 and China third with 61.
American technology leadership continues to expand from its current strengths in computers,
software, multimedia, advanced materials, health science and biotechnology into the frontiers of
nanotechnology and genetics. The American dollar remains the centerpiece of international commerce
but competes with the euro, Japanese yen and, just starting now, Chinese yuan.
When Barack Obama took office as president in January 2009, the immediate economic crisis—
and its implications for future U.S. economic growth and prosperity—dominated his agenda.
Speaking just before his inauguration, Obama acknowledged the severity of the challenges facing
the United States. But he also reminded the nation of its heritage and of its inherent strengths. “We
should never forget that our workers are still more productive than any on Earth. Our universities are
still the envy of the world. We are still home to the most brilliant minds, the most creative
entrepreneurs, and the most advanced technology and innovation that history has ever known. And we
are still the nation that has overcome great fears and improbable odds.”
 CHAPTER 2
The Evolution of the U.S. Economy
The economy has expanded and changed, guided by some unchanging principles.

Harper’s Weekly published scenes of U.S. farm life in the 1860s, years when America was poised to become a world
manufacturing power.
Courtesy of Library of Congress

“Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people.”
THOMAS JEFFERSON
1787

By the time that General George Washington took office as the first U.S. president in 1789, the young
nation’s economy was already a composite of many diverse occupations and defined regional
differences.
Agriculture was dominant. Nine of 10 Americans worked on farms, most of them growing the food
their families relied on. Only one person in 20 lived in an “urban” location, which then meant merely
2,500 inhabitants or more. The country’s largest city, New York, had a population of just 22,000
people, while London’s population exceeded one million. But the handful of larger cities had a
merchant class of tradesmen, shopkeepers, importers, shippers, manufacturers, and bankers whose
interests could conflict with those of the farmers.
Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia planter and principal author of America’s Declaration of
Independence, spoke for an influential group of the country’s Founding Fathers, including many from
the South. They believed the country should be primarily an agrarian society, with farming at its core
and with government playing a minimal role. Jefferson mistrusted urban classes, seeing the great
cities of Europe as breeders of political corruption. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen
people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson once declared.
Opposing Jefferson and other supporters of a farm-based republic was a second powerful political
movement, the Federalists, often favored by northern commercial interests. Among its leaders was
Alexander Hamilton, one of Washington’s principal military aides in the American Revolutionary War
(1775-1783), in which the American colonies had won recognition of their sovereignty from Britain.
Hamilton, a New Yorker who was the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury, believed that the young,
vulnerable American republic required strong central leadership and federal policies that would
support the spread of manufacturing.
In 1801, Jefferson became the third U.S. president and headed the Democratic-Republican political
party, later to be called the Democratic Party. In 1828, war hero Andrew Jackson from Tennessee
won election as the candidate of Jefferson’s wing, becoming the first U.S. president from a frontier
region. His combative advocacy for “ordinary” Americans became a main theme of the Democrats.
He declared in 1832 that when Congress acts to “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful,
the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers” who lack wealth and
influence—have the right to protest such treatment.
Hamilton argued that America’s unbounded economic opportunities could not be achieved without
a system that created capital and rewarded investment. Hamilton’s Federalists evolved into the Whig
Party and then the Republican Party. This major branch of American politics generally favored
policies to spur the growth of U.S. industry: internal infrastructure improvements, protective tariffs on
the import of goods, centralized banking, and a strong currency.

A BALANCING OF INTERESTS
The U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1788, sought to ground the new nation’s experiment in democracy in
hard-won compromises of conflicting economic and regional interests.
“The framers of the Constitution wanted a republican government that would represent the people,
but represent them in a way that protected against mob rule and maximized opportunities for careful
deliberation in the best interests of the country as a whole,” says professor Anne-Marie Slaughter of
Princeton University. “They insisted on a pluralist party system, a bill of rights limiting the power of
the government, guarantees for free speech and a free press, checks and balances to promote
transparent and accountable government, and a strong rule of law enforced by an independent
judiciary.”
The lawmaking power was divided between two legislative houses. The Senate, whose
membership was fixed at two senators from each state (and until 1914, who were chosen by the state
legislatures rather than by direct election), was assumed to reflect business and landholder interests.
The Founders created the House of Representatives, with membership apportioned among the states
by population and elected directly by the people, to adhere more closely to the views of the broader
public.
Another essential constitutional feature was the separation of powers into three governmental
branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. James Madison, a primary author of the Constitution
and, beginning in 1809, the nation’s fourth president, said that “the spirit of liberty…demands checks”
on government’s power. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote, in
defense of the separation principle. But Madison also believed that the separations could not be
absolute and that each branch ought properly to possess some influence over the others.
The president thus appoints senior government leaders, chief federal prosecutors, and the top
generals and admirals who direct the armed forces. But the Senate may accept or reject these
candidates. Congress may pass bills, but a president’s veto can prevent their becoming law unless
two-thirds of each congressional house votes to override the veto. The Supreme Court successfully
claimed the right to strike down a law as unconstitutional, but the president retains the ability to
nominate new Supreme Court justices. The Senate possesses an effective veto over those choices, and
the Constitution assigns to Congress the power to fix the size of the Supreme Court and to restrict the
court’s appellate jurisdiction.
The Constitution outlined the government’s role in the new republic’s economy. At Hamilton’s
insistence, the federal government was granted the sole power to issue money; states could not do so.
Hamilton saw this as the key to creating and maintaining a strong national currency and a creditworthy
nation that could borrow to expand and grow.
 There would be no internal taxes on goods moving between the states. The federal government
could regulate interstate commerce and would have sole power to impose import taxes on foreign
goods entering the country. The federal government was also empowered to grant patents and
copyrights to protect the work of inventors and writers.
The initial U.S. protective tariff was enacted by the first Congress in 1789 to raise money for the
federal government and to provide protection for U.S. manufacturers of glass, pottery, and other
products by effectively raising the price of competing goods from overseas. Tariffs immediately
became one of the young nation’s most divisive regional issues.
Hamilton championed the tariff as a necessary defensive barrier against stronger European
manufacturers. Hamilton also promoted a decisive federal hand in the nation’s finances, successfully
advocating the controversial federal assumption and full payment of the states’ Revolutionary War
debts, much of which had been acquired at low prices by speculators during the war. These measures
were popular among American manufacturers and financiers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia,
whose bonds paid for the country’s industrial expansion.
But the protective tariff infuriated the predominantly agricultural South. It raised the price of
manufactured goods that southerners purchased from Europe, and it encouraged European nations to
retaliate by reducing purchases of the South’s agricultural exports. As historian Roger L. Ransom
observes, western states came down in the middle, objecting to high tariffs that raised the prices of
manufactured goods but enjoying the federal tariff revenues that funded the new roads, railroads,
canals, and other public works projects that their communities needed. The high 1828 barriers,
dubbed the “Tariff of Abominations” by southern opponents, escalated regional anger and contributed
to sectional tensions that would culminate in the U.S. Civil War decades later.
By 1800, the huge tracts of land granted by British kings to colonial governors had been dispersed.
While many large landholdings remained, particularly the plantations of the South, by 1796 the
federal government had begun direct land sales to settlers at $2 per acre ($5 per hectare),
commencing a policy that would be critical to America’s westward expansion throughout the 19th
century. The rising tide of settlers pushed the continent’s depleted Native American inhabitants
steadily westward as well. President Jackson made the displacement of Indian tribes government
policy with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the forced relocation of the Choctaw tribe to the future
state of Oklahoma over what came to be called “the trail of tears.”
The first regional demarcations followed roughly the settlement patterns of various ethnic
immigrant groups. Settlers from England followed the path of the first Puritans to occupy New
England in the northeastern part of the country. Pennsylvania and other Middle Colonies attracted
Dutch, German, and Scotch-Irish immigrants. There were French farmers in some of the South’s
tidewater settlements while Spain provided settlers for California and the Southwest. But the sharpest
line was drawn by the importation of African slaves, which began in America in 1619.
In the South, slave labor underpinned a class of wealthy planters whose crops—first tobacco, then
cotton, sugar, wool, and hemp—were the nation’s principal exports. Small farm holders were the
backbone of many new settlements and towns and were elevated by Jefferson and many others as
symbols of an “American character” embodying independence, hard work, and frugality.
Some of the Founding Fathers feared the direction in which the unschooled majority of Americans,
a “rabble in arms” in one author’s famous description, might take their new country. But the image
that prevailed was that of the farmer-patriot, once captured by the 19th-century philosopher Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s depiction of the “embattled farmers” who had defied British soldiers, fired “the
shot heard round the world,” and sparked the American Revolution.
President Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana territory in 1803 from France doubled the nation’s
size and opened a vast new frontier that called out to settlers and adventurers.

THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY

The South’s economy relied on the labor of slaves, a fundamental contradiction of the principle of
equality on which America was founded. Congress outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808 but not
slavery itself, and the domestic slave population kept expanding. American politics in the half-century
preceding the Civil War (1861-1865) were increasingly dominated by the South’s tenacious defense
of its “peculiar institution” and growing northern demands for slavery’s abolition. In 1860, in the 11
southern states that would secede from the Union, create their own Confederacy, and launch the Civil
War, four out of 10 people were slaves, and they provided more than half of all agricultural labor.
One crop stood out above all others in the region. “Cotton is king,” declared James Henry
Hammond, a South Carolina senator and defender of slavery, in 1858. Cotton was the nation’s most
important export, vital to the economies of North and South. The low cost of slave-produced cotton
benefited U.S. and British textile manufacturers and provided cheaper clothing for the urban centers.
Southerners bought the output of northern manufacturers and western farmers.
The Civil War’s devastating economic impact widened the disparities between the victorious
North and a defeated South. An earlier generation of historians argued that the war stimulated the
great manufacturing and commercial expansion of the decades that followed. More recent research
asserts that the U.S. economy would have expanded greatly with or without the war. The victorious
North, in any case, moved to new heights, stumbled during a series of financial panics, but recovered
and continued to advance.
The South mostly adopted a system of tenant farming that effectively broke up the plantation system
on which the region’s economy had previously depended. While the Reconstruction years
immediately following the Civil War saw real efforts to improve the lot of former slaves, the political
will to see through these reforms ebbed, especially after 1877. The promised political and economic
freedoms thus were not delivered. Instead the repressive system of “Jim Crow” segregation took hold
throughout the South. By the end of the 19th century, poverty was widespread among blacks, as it was
among many rural whites.
The Civil War marked the greatest threat to the Union’s survival, but it was also an opportunity for
the war-time Congress—in the absence of representatives from the rebellious southern states—to
expand the power of the national government. The first system of national taxation was passed; a
national paper currency was issued; public land-grant universities were funded; and construction of
the first transcontinental railroad was begun.

A SPIRIT OF INVENTION
Across the country, a flow of inventions sparked dramatic increases in farm output. Jefferson himself
had experimented with new designs for plow blades that would cut the earth more efficiently, and the
drive to improve farming equipment never slackened. In Jefferson’s time, it took a farmer walking
behind his plow and wielding his sickle as many as 300 hours to produce 100 bushels of wheat. By
the eve of the Civil War, well-off farmers could purchase John Deere’s steel plows and Cyrus
McCormick’s reapers, which cut, separated, and collected farmers’ grain mechanically. Advanced
windmills were available, improving irrigation.
In the next 40 years, steam tractors, gang plows, hybrid corn, refrigerated freight cars, and barbed
wire fencing to enclose rangelands all appeared. In 1890, the time required to produce 100 bushels of
wheat had dropped to just 50 hours. In 1930, a farmer with a tractor-pulled plow, combine, and truck
could do the job in 20 hours. The figure dropped to three hours in the 1980s.
Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, introduced in 1793, revolutionized cotton production by mechanizing the
separation of cotton fibers from sticky short-grain seeds. Cotton demand soared, but the cotton gin
also multiplied the demand for slave labor. Whitney, a Massachusetts craftsman and entrepreneur,
fought a long, frustrating battle to secure patent rights and revenue from southern planters who had
copied his invention, one of the earliest legal struggles over the protection of inventors’ discoveries.
Whitney did succeed on another front, demonstrating how manufacturing could be dramatically
accelerated through the use of interchangeable parts. Seeking a federal contract to manufacture
muskets, Whitney, as the story was told, amazed Washington officials in 1801 by pulling parts at
random from a box to assemble the weapon. He illustrated that the work of highly trained craftsmen,
turning out an entire product one at a time, could be replaced with standardized processes involving
simple steps and precision-made parts—tasks that journeymen could handle. His insights were the
foundation for the emergence of a machine tool industry and mass production processes that made
U.S. manufacturing flourish, eventually producing “a sewing machine and a pocket watch in every
home, a harvester on every farm, a typewriter in every office,” journalist Harold Evans notes.
The 19th century delivered other startling inventions and advances in manufacturing and
technology, including Samuel Morse’s telegraph, which linked all parts of the United States and then
crossed the Atlantic, and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which put people in direct contact
across great distances. In 1882, Thomas A. Edison and his eclectic team of inventors introduced the
first standard for generating and distributing electric energy to homes and businesses, lighting offices
along New York’s Wall Street financial district and inaugurating the electric age.
And a transportation revolution was launched with the completion of the first transcontinental
railroad, when converging rail lines from the East and the West met in Utah in 1869.
“The American economy after the Civil War was driven by the expansion of the railroads,” writes
historian Louis Menand. During the war, Congress made 158 million acres (63 million hectares)
available to companies building railroads. Railroad construction fed the growth of iron and steel
production. Following the first connection, other lines linked the country’s Atlantic and Pacific
coasts, creating a national economy able to trade with Europe and Asia and greatly expanding U.S.
economic and international political horizons.
 The Richest Man in the World

Andrew Carnegie, ca. 1886

© Getty Images

In the post-civil war gilded age, a generation of immensely wealthy industrialists rose to
prominence. Hailed as “captains of industry” by admirers and as “robber barons” by critics, these
titans dominated entire sectors of the American economy. By the end of the 19th century, oil had its
John D. Rockefeller, finance its J. Pierpont Morgan and Jay Gould, and tobacco its James B. Duke
and R. J. Reynolds. Alongside them were many others, some born into wealthy families, and some
who personified the self-made man.
None climbed further than Andrew Carnegie. He was the son of a jobless Scottish textile worker
who brought his family to the to the United States in the mid-1800s in hopes of better opportunities.
From this start, Carnegie became “the richest man in the world,” in the words of Morgan, who along
with his partners would in 1901 purchase what became U.S. Steel. Carnegie’s personal share of the
proceeds was an astonishing $226 million, the equivalent of $6 billion today, adjusted for inflation,
but worth much more than that as a percentage of the entire U.S. economy then.
Carnegie’s life exemplifies how an industrializing America created opportunities for those smart
and fortunate enough to seize them. As a teenager in Pennsylvania, Carnegie taught himself the
Morse code and became a skilled telegraph operator. That led to a job as assistant to Thomas A.
Scott, a rising executive in the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the nation’s most important lines. As
Scott advanced, becoming one of the most powerful railroad leaders in the country, his valued
protégé Carnegie advanced too, sharing lucrative financial investments with Scott before going into
business himself to build iron bridges for the railroad. By the age of 30, Andrew Carnegie was a
wealthy man.
After quitting the railroad, Carnegie also prospered in oil development, formed an iron and steel
company, and shrewdly concentrated on steel rails and steel construction beams as railroad, office,
and factory construction soared. His manufacturing operations set standards for quality, research,
innovation, and efficiency. Carnegie also availed himself of secret alliances and advance knowledge
of business decisions, practices forbidden by today’s securities laws as “insider” transactions but
legal in Carnegie’s era.
Andrew Carnegie was a study in contrasts. He fought unionization of his factories. As other
industry leaders did, Carnegie imposed hard, dangerous conditions on his workers. Yet his concern
for the less fortunate was real, and he invested his immense wealth for society’s benefit. He financed
 nearly 1,700 public libraries, purchased church organs for thousands of congregations, endowed
research institutions, and supported efforts to promote international peace. When his fortune proved
too great to be dispensed in his lifetime, Carnegie left the task to the foundations he had created,
helping to establish an American tradition of philanthropy that continues today.

CONVULSIVE CHANGES
Convulsive changes caused by industrialization and urbanization shook the United States at the end of
the 19th century. Labor movements began and vied for power, with immigrants helping to adapt
European protest ideologies into American forms.
By the 1880s, manufacturing and commerce surpassed farm output in value. New industries and
railroad lines proliferated with vital backing from European financiers. Major U.S. cities shot up in
size, attracting immigrant families and migration from the farms. A devastating depression shook the
country in the first half of the 1890s, forcing some 16,000 businesses to fail in 1893 alone. The
following year, as many as 750,000 workers were on strike, and the unemployment rate reached 20
percent.
Farmers from the South and West, battered by tight credit and falling commodity prices, formed a
third national political organization, the Populist Party, whose anger focused on the nation’s bankers,
financiers, and railroad magnates. The Populist platform demanded easier credit and currency
policies to help farmers. In the 1894 congressional elections, Populists took 11 percent of all votes
cast.
But American politics historically has coalesced around two large parties—the Republican and
Democratic parties have filled this role since the mid-1800s. Smaller groupings served mostly to
inject their issues into either or both of the main contenders. This would be the fate of the 1890s
Populists. By 1896, the new party had fused with the Democrats. But significant parts of the Populist
agenda subsequently found their way into law by way of the trans-party Progressive movement of the
20th century’s first two decades. Among the innovations were direct popular election of senators and
a progressive national income tax.
American Progressivism reflected a growing sense among many Americans that, in the words of
historian Carl Degler, “the community and its inhabitants no longer controlled their own fate.”
Progressives relied on trained experts in the social sciences and other fields to devise policies and
regulations to reign in perceived excesses of powerful trusts and other business interests. Writing in
1909, Herbert Croly, author of the hugely influential The Promise of American Life and first editor of
the New Republic magazine, expressed the Progressive’s credo in this way: “The national government
must step in and discriminate, not on behalf of liberty and the special individual, but on behalf of
equality and the average man.”
The influence of Progressive thought grew rapidly after the assassination of President William
McKinley in 1901 thrust Vice President Theodore Roosevelt into the White House. Adventurer,
naturalist, and scion of wealth, “Teddy” Roosevelt believed the most powerful corporate titans were
strangling competition. Businesses’ worst excesses must be restrained lest the public turn against the
American capitalist system, Roosevelt and his allies argued.
The New York World newspaper, owned by the influential publisher Joseph Pulitzer, editorialized
that “the United States was probably never nearer to a social revolution than when Theodore
Roosevelt became president.” Roosevelt responded with regulations and federal antitrust lawsuits to
break up the greatest concentrations of industrial power. His administration’s antitrust suit against the
nation’s largest railroad monopoly, Northern Securities Company, was a direct attack on the nation’s
foremost financier, J.P. Morgan. “If we have done anything wrong,” Morgan told Roosevelt, “send
your man to my man and they can fix it up.” Roosevelt responded, “That can’t be done.” The Supreme
Court’s ultimate decision against Northern Securities was a beachhead in the government’s campaign
to restrict the largest businesses’ power over the economy.

A MODERN ECONOMY EMERGES

Electric power surged throughout the U.S. economy in the first decades of the 20th century, steadily
replacing steam and water power in industrial plants. It lit offices and households, illuminated
department stores and movie theaters. It reshaped cities, lifting elevators in new skyscrapers and
powering street cars and subways that enabled people to work farther from home. By 1939,
electricity provided 85 percent of the primary power for U.S. manufacturing. The ability to transfer
power easily over thin electric wires spurred totally new manufacturing processes favoring
automation, the use of specialized parts, and the rise of skilled labor.
But the Great Depression of the 1930s brought economic expansion to a devastating halt. Its causes
were complex. After a decade of increasingly reckless stock speculation, the stock market crash of
1929 wiped out millions of investors and crippled confidence among business executives and
consumers.
The United States and other economic powers waged a destructive battle over trade, raising tariff
barriers against each other’s imports and pushing their currency values down in an unsuccessful effort
to make their exports more competitive. Prices collapsed, impoverishing businesses and families.
Drought and poor planting practices led to dust storms in the U.S. farming heartland and drove
thousands of farmers from their homes. The nation’s worst banking crisis shut down 40 percent of the
banks doing business at the Depression’s beginning. The national unemployment rate exceeded 20
percent.
Some desperate and disillusioned Americans looked to communism and socialism as better
alternatives, others eyed the fascist alternative pioneered in Italy by Benito Mussolini, and many
feared the United States was approaching a breaking point politically.

THE NEW DEAL

The inability of President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) to meet demands for economic relief set the
stage for the 1932 election of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt as president and the enactment the
following year of the first of his “New Deal” economic programs. The president, known by his
initials, FDR, was a wealthy patrician from New York State with a gift for communicating his
message to Americans in those hard times. He used the new medium of radio to do so directly. In his
inaugural speech upon assuming the presidency, Roosevelt assured the country, “The only thing we
have to fear is fear itself.”
Roosevelt then launched a tide of new laws and programs to halt the paralyzing banking crisis and
create jobs. New agencies such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress
Administration, and the Public Works Administration put millions of unemployed Americans to work
on government projects. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration worked to support farm prices
by reducing output, fining farmers in some cases for excess production. Overall, the programs marked
“the return of hope,” said long-time Democratic congressman Emanuel Celler of New York.
 FDR was far more an improviser than an ideologue, historians agree. His budget policies were
inconsistent: Spending cuts in the middle of his presidency probably extended the Depression. Some
New Deal measures proved contradictory or hugely controversial. The National Recovery
Administration negotiated a series of industry-wide codes establishing minimum prices, wages, and
other particulars. Many small businesses complained that the codes favored larger competitors.
Others saw in the close NRA-engendered ties between government and big business a “corporatist”
outlook fundamentally at odds with America’s traditionally looser, more free-wheeling economic
arrangements. The Supreme Court agreed, declaring the law establishing the NRA unconstitutional, an
exercise of Congress delegating power to the president beyond that granted by the Constitution’s
commerce clause.
But other New Deal measures proved long lasting. The federal government tightened regulation of
banking and securities, and it provided unemployment insurance and retirement, disability, and death
benefits for American workers under a social security program funded by payroll taxes on employees
and employers. The New Deal established a federal social safety net that has helped Americans
through hardships, but whose costs today pose huge future financial challenges for the government.
Before Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, the federal government had taken a predominantly
hands-off attitude toward business, except for its regulation of banking and the railroads, and the
campaigns against the monopolistic trusts. FDR took the country far in the other direction, injecting
the federal government into economic activities previously deemed the domain of the private sector.
One notable example was his creation in 1933 of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally
chartered corporation formed to control flooding and generate electric power in an impoverished
region of the South.
Roosevelt and his supporters saw the government-run TVA as a way to set a benchmark for fair
pricing of electricity that would show whether customers were being overcharged by electric power
companies. The TVA stood for the New Deal’s confidence in government’s ability to define and solve
society’s problems. David Lilienthal, whom Roosevelt appointed as a TVA director and later its
chairman, once said, “There is almost nothing, however fantastic, that a team of engineers, scientists,
and administrators cannot do.”
To its opponents, the TVA was socialism, violating the basic principles of free enterprise.
Roosevelt’s Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had opposed earlier proposals for government
power projects and economic development programs in the Tennessee Valley, saying it would “break
down the initiative and enterprise of the American people.… It is the negation of the ideals upon
which our civilization has been based.”
Americans differed as well over more practical questions: How could any private power company
compete with the virtually unlimited resources of the federal government? And once a federal agency
determined to act, what would be the check on its authority? The same hand of government that built
dams to produce power and limit floods also uprooted thousands of people from their farms.
Although the TVA complex of dams was built and the TVA remains the largest U.S. public power
producer, Roosevelt’s efforts to adopt the TVA model in other parts of the country were shelved by
growing political opposition and by World War II.
American industry and offices mobilized to fight Germany, Japan, and the other World War II Axis
powers. The last U.S.-made automobile of the war years left its factory in February 1942. In its place,
industry produced 30,000 tanks in 1943 alone, nearly three per hour around the clock, more than
Germany could build in the entire war. A piano manufacturer produced compasses, a tableware
company turned out automatic rifles, and a typewriter company delivered machine guns, author Rick
Atkinson notes. The weight of U.S. industrial might was irresistible. American factories supplied
armed forces in both the European and Pacific theaters, with more to spare for the British, the
Soviets, and other Allied armies.
At the war’s end, much of Europe and Asia were in ruins, and America stood alone as the world’s
economic superpower.

ORGANIZED LABOR: PROSPERITY AND CONFLICT

The end of wartime economic controls unlocked pent-up demands by American workers for better
wages, leading to a series of major labor strikes that polarized American attitudes toward unions, as
in the 1890s. In 1935, the Democratic-controlled Congress had enacted the National Labor Relations
Act of 1935 establishing the right of most private-sector workers to form unions, to bargain with
management over wages and working conditions, and to strike to obtain their demands.
After World War II, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which
reduced union power in organizing disputes, strengthened the rights of employees who didn’t want to
join a union, and allowed the president to order striking workers back on the job for an 80-day
“cooling-off” period if he determined a strike could endanger national health or safety. United Mine
Workers president John L. Lewis called it a “slave labor” law. President Harry S. Truman vetoed it,
but was overridden by the required two-thirds congressional majorities.
Together, the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Taft-Hartley Act established the broad legal
parameters within which organized labor contended with business leadership and union opponents for
economic and political influence. In 1950, when American automobile companies enjoyed substantial
global market share, General Motors Corporation and the United Auto Workers union negotiated a
contract affording workers extensive health care and retirement benefits. From the employer’s
perspective, generous pay and benefits ensured freedom from strikes and motivated the employees.
The costs of these benefits, the companies reasoned, could be passed on to consumers. With the rise
of competition from Japanese, European, and other foreign automakers, American industry became
less willing or able to pass through such labor costs.
These issues played out in the political realm as well. As a generalization, labor unions mostly
supported Democratic candidates with money and manpower, while businesses backed Republicans.
Each side hoped that electoral victories would secure more favorable treatment. But global economic
developments intervened. With the recovery of industry in other nations, U.S. industrial unions
generally declined in membership. At the end of World War II, one-third of the workforce belonged to
unions. In 1983, it was 20 percent. By 2007, the figure had dropped to 12 percent, with union
membership totaling 15.7 million.
Union growth today is mostly in arenas less susceptible to foreign competition: the services sector,
particularly among public services employees such as teachers, police officers, and firefighters. In
2007, just over one-third of public-services workers belonged to unions, only 7.5 percent of private-
sector workers were in unions, and union membership among workers under 24 years of age was less
than 5 percent.
One symbol of organized labor’s relative decline came in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan
fired striking air traffic controllers. Public employees such as the controllers typically enjoyed great
job security but, in turn, were prohibited from striking “against the public.” This is not to say that
public employees never struck: Sometimes they did, and usually the illegality of the strike was
forgiven as part of the settlement. Not this time. Reagan ordered the controllers back to work, citing
the federal law against government employee strikes. He then fired more than 11,000 controllers who
refused to return, replaced them with new workers, and broke the union.
Even as unions gained, then lost, influence, other major currents helped shape the postwar
American workforce. The civil rights movement began in the mid-1950s with demands to end state
and local laws in the South that segregated schools, public facilities, and public transportation,
separating blacks and whites, as well as restrictions on African-Americans’ voting rights. After a
strife-filled decade, the non-violent campaign for racial justice led by the late Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. led to passage of federal laws to combat racial discrimination and poverty. A wide-ranging series
of laws that Democratic President Lyndon Johnson called his Great Society program followed.
Education and employment opportunities for minorities expanded. While Americans have debated the
fairness of “affirmative action” preferences for minorities in hiring and college admissions, the
1960s’ laws opened increasing workplace opportunities for minorities.
The 1960s civil rights movement also led to laws forbidding discrimination in employment against
women, emerging from a far-reaching movement by women to gain equal status with men in the
economy and society. Only one-third of adult women had jobs in 1950, but by the end of the century
three of every five women were in the workforce. Female chief executive officers have led such
major corporations as technology giant Hewlett-Packard and the Ogilvy & Mather advertising firm.
Other women have built careers in virtually every arena, from academia, politics, and medicine to
manufacturing, the construction trades, and the military. A wage gap between men and women is
shrinking, but still remains. In 2000 women working full time earned 77 cents for every dollar paid to
men throughout the workforce, while 20 years earlier women earned just two-thirds of what men
received.
Another major impact was the arrival of the “baby-boom” generation in the workforce. Between
the end of World War II and 1964, 76 million Americans were born, an unprecedented surge that may
have reflected the nation’s postwar optimism. This population bulge, in the midst of a long upward
economic trend, triggered a sustained boom in housing construction and the expansion of a consumer-
focused economy.

THE POLITICAL PENDULUM SWINGS

The 1960s Great Society legislation, comprising 84 different new laws, was the crest of a wave of
political action begun by Franklin Roosevelt to use government’s power to set economic and social
agendas. Voting rights for minorities, employment opportunity, public education, the safety of
consumers and motorists, environmental protection, and health insurance for the elderly and poor all
were addressed by the new laws.
The adoption of Lyndon Johnson’s agenda was based on his landslide victory in the 1964
presidential election and the decisive majorities his Democratic Party achieved in Congress that year.
But Johnson’s policies energized opposition from conservatives who felt the government had intruded
too far in the lives of private citizens and had put too great a burden on employers, threatening the
vitality of the economy. The civil rights measures Johnson championed embittered many southern
whites, whose allegiance shifted to the Republican Party.
The 1970s was a trying decade for the U.S. economy. In the middle of his first term in office,
President Richard M. Nixon was confronted with rapidly rising prices, triggered in part by the costs
of the Vietnam War waged during his and Johnson’s administrations. Nixon broke with his Republican
Party’s traditional support for balanced budgets to accelerate federal spending to stimulate economic
growth, even though that swelled federal budget deficits.
Nixon similarly embraced wage and price controls in an effort to halt an inflationary cycle in
which rising wages led corporations to increase prices, and higher prices then led to new demands
for higher pay by workers. “Now, I am a Keynesian,” Nixon said in 1971, putting himself in the camp
of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who had advocated deficit spending during times of slow
economic growth.
Nixon’s wage-and-price control program failed. To cite just one example, the price of cotton was
not controlled because of the political influence of cotton farmers. But the price of plain cotton fabric
was regulated, and when fabric manufacturers’ profits were squeezed, they cut back on production,
causing shortages, according to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
The lesson from Nixon’s experiment was a lasting one: The U.S. economy was far too complex,
chaotic, and fast moving to be managed in any detail by government officials. A new consensus
formed that controls could not overcome inflationary forces, but instead stifled innovation, risk
taking, and competition.
Two oil price shocks that followed the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 and the Islamic Revolution in Iran
in 1979 battered U.S. economic performance. Oil prices tripled. Long lines formed at gasoline
stations. At the end of the decade, inflation was higher than at any time since World War I, and
unemployment had jumped to more than 9 percent. The impact hit hardest during the administration of
President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat elected in 1976. The U.S. economy was gripped in a “malaise,”
as Carter’s advisers put it, and nothing government did seemed an answer to high unemployment, high
prices, and stagnant stock markets.
During economic travails, American voters have often punished the party in power, and 1980 was
a case in point. Polls that year showed two-thirds of the public believed the country was faring badly.
Many Americans sought a change in direction, and they found it in the candidacy of California’s
former Republican governor, Ronald Reagan. At the campaign’s only televised presidential debate,
Reagan asked the viewers simply, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Analysts called
it Reagan’s knock-out punch.
Reagan’s election to the presidency marked another directional change in government’s role in the
economy. Reagan declared in his 1981 inaugural address that “in this present crisis, government is not
the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He added, “It is time to check and reverse
the growth of government.”
“Reaganomics” sought to cut U.S. tax rates, even if one result was growing federal budgetary
deficits. Critics protested that this was an indirect way of forcing cuts in domestic social spending
and to programs of which the new administration disapproved.
Reagan and his advisers argued that lower marginal tax rates would revive the economy. It was
better, they believed, to leave more money in the hands of business and consumers, whose savings,
spending, and investment choices collectively would generate more economic growth than would
government spending. This theory, called supply-side economics, held that the resulting economic
growth also would generate more revenue than would be lost through the lower tax rates, and that the
federal budget could be balanced in this manner.
The Reagan tax cuts did help lift the U.S. economy, but contrary to the supply-siders’ predictions,
federal budget deficits persisted and grew. Nevertheless, the “Reagan revolution” was a political
turning point toward smaller government and individualism, and Reagan left office as one of the most
popular U.S. presidents.

DEREGULATING BUSINESS
The 1980s tax cuts were only one part of a broad movement to reduce government’s economic role.
Another was deregulation.
During the 1970s, a number of thinkers attributed some of the nation’s economic sluggishness to the
web of laws and regulations that businesses were obliged to observe. These regulations had been put
in place for sound reasons: to prevent abuse of the free market and, more generally, to achieve greater
social equity and improve the nation’s overall quality of life. But, critics argued, regulation came at a
price, one measured by fewer competitors in a given industry, by higher prices, and by lower
economic growth.
During the economically trying 1970s and early 1980s, many Americans grew less willing to pay
that price. President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican who succeeded Richard M. Nixon in 1974,
believed that deregulating trucking, airlines, and railroads would promote competition and restrain
inflation more effectively than government oversight and regulation. Ford’s Democratic successor,
Jimmy Carter, relied heavily on a key pro-deregulation adviser, Alfred E. Kahn. Between 1978 and
1980, Carter signed into law important legislation achieving substantial deregulation of the
transportation industries. The trend accelerated under President Reagan.
The intellectual and political trends favoring deregulation were not limited to the United States.
Movements to empower private businesses and reduce government’s influence gained momentum in
Great Britain, Eastern Europe, and parts of South America. In the United States, courts and legislators
continued to carve away government regulations in important industries, including
telecommunications and electric power generation.
The most dramatic step was the 1984 breakup of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company,
the nationwide telephone monopoly. Prior to the government’s action, AT&T dominated all phone
service, both local and long-distance, and it argued that admitting new service providers would
threaten network reliability. AT&T obliged Americans to rent their telephones from its Western
Electric subsidiary, a monopoly that stifled the development of innovative types and styles of phones.
A far smaller rival, MCI Communications, contended that technology advances would enable
competition to flourish, benefiting consumers.
The federal government took up MCI’s cause, filing an antitrust suit asking a federal judge to end
AT&T’s monopoly. AT&T capitulated, agreeing to split off its local telephone service into seven new
regional phone companies. This began an era of intense competition and innovation around the
convergence of phones, computers, the Internet, and wireless communications. (AT&T maintained its
long-distance network, but in 2005 the company was purchased by one of its former local phone
subsidiaries.) While many American consumers found the changes in phone service confusing, they
eagerly snapped up a speedy parade of new communications products.
The loosening of regulations on electric power service in the 1990s has been far more
controversial, and its benefits disputed. For a century following Thomas Edison’s time, most
Americans purchased electricity from companies that operated legal monopolies in their regions.
State commissions regulated these utilities’ local rates, while federal regulators oversaw wholesale
sales across state lines. Prices were generally based on the costs of making electricity, plus a
“reasonable” profit for the utility.
 About half of the U.S. states chose to open electric service to competition in the hope that new
products and lower prices would result. But these moves coincided with sharp increases in energy
prices beginning in 2000. A political backlash against electricity deregulation ensued, worsened by a
scandal surrounding the failure of Enron Corporation, a Texas-based energy company that had been a
key promoter of competitive electricity markets.
The deregulation movement stopped in midstream after 2000, leaving an electricity industry
partially regulated and partially deregulated, and divided by divergent regional agendas. Some areas
of the country rely on coal to generate electric power. Elsewhere, natural gas turbines, hydro-dams,
or nuclear plants are important sources of electricity, and in the 2000s, wind-generated power began
to grow. These differing regional interests slowed movement toward a national response to climate
change issues, including such possible measures as the development of renewable electricity
generation and an expanded power transmission grid. Instead, state governments have been the
principal policy innovators.

TECHNOLOGY’S UPHEAVAL
Technology is changing the fundamentals of economic competition, and often faster than government,
political leaders, and the public can keep pace. The computer age grew out of a confluence of
discoveries on many fronts, including the first computer microprocessor, created in 1971. This
breakthrough combined key functions of computer processing that had been separate operations—the
movement of data and instructions in and out, the processing of data, and the electronic storage of
results—onto a single silicon chip no bigger than a thumbnail. It was the product of scientists at Intel
Corporation, a three-year-old start-up technology company that had attracted the support of wealthy
venture capitalists willing to bet large investments on new, unproven entrepreneurs. The raw material
for semiconductors gave the name Silicon Valley to the California region south of San Francisco that
became the center of U.S. computer innovation.
Before the invention of the silicon computer chip, computers were massive devices serving
government agencies and large businesses, and operated by specialists. But in 1976, two secondary
school dropouts, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, developed a small computer complete with
microprocessor, keyboard, and screen. They called it the Apple I, and it began the age of personal
computing and the dispersal of computer power to every sector of the economy.
The personal computer rapidly became an indispensable communications, entertainment, and
knowledge tool for homes and offices. IBM, the computer giant that had dominated mainframe
computers since the 1950s, produced a personal computer in the 1980s that quickly overtook Apple’s
lead. But IBM, in turn, was driven from PC manufacturing by competitors in the United States and
Asia who outsourced component fabrication to lowest-cost manufacturers and minimized production
costs of an increasingly low-margin item.
The biggest winner in this competition was Microsoft, a Redmond, Washington-based start-up
grounded in software, not manufacturing. Its founder, Bill Gates, had seized on the importance of
dominating the internal operating software that made the personal computer work. As rival computer
manufacturers rushed to copy the IBM model, Microsoft’s software became the standard for these
machines, and they steadily and relentlessly gained market share at the expense of other operating
system vendors. Gates’s company wound up collecting half of every dollar of sales by the PC
industry.
Gates moved into a realm of wealth comparable to that of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew
Carnegie, two titans of an earlier age of dynamic economic growth. Like his two predecessors’
companies, Gates’s Microsoft was attacked by competitors and governments for its dominance. And
Gates, like Rockefeller and Carnegie, became one of history’s most generous philanthropists,
committing billions of dollars to long-term campaigns to fight illnesses in Africa, improve education
in America, and support other humanitarian causes.
Rivaling the impact of the personal computer was another epochal breakthrough. The Internet,
including the searchable World Wide Web, accelerated a global sharing of information of every form,
from lifesaving technologies to terrorists’ plots, from dating services to the most advanced financial
transactions.
Like much American innovation, the Internet had roots in U.S. government science policy. The idea
of a self-standing highly redundant network to link computers was conceived as a way to defend
government and research computers against a feared nuclear attack on the United States. But despite
its ties to government, the Internet achieved its global reach thanks to pioneering scientists such as Sir
Tim Berners-Lee and Vinton Cerf, who insisted that it must be an open medium that all could share.
 Unlocking the Internet

This Google logo commemorates the visit by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II to Google’s London office.
© AP Images

In 1998, two graduate students at stanford university in California thought they saw how to unlock
the Internet’s rapidly expanding universe of information. A decade later, Google—as they called
their invention—had become the dominant Internet search engine in most of the world. Its revenue
topped $20 billion in 2008, half from outside the United States, and its employees numbered 20,000.
Its computers could store, index, and search more than one trillion other Web site pages. So
ubiquitous had this search engine grown that its very name had become a verb: When most people
want to find something on the Internet, they “google” it.
Although this astonishing success has rarely been matched, its ingredients are a familiar part of
the U.S. economic story. Google illustrates how ideas, entrepreneurial ambition, university research,
and private capital together can create breakthrough innovations.
Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, started with particular advantages. Brin, born in
Moscow, and Page, a midwesterner, are sons of university professors and computer professionals.
“Both had grown up in families where intellectual combat was part of the daily diet,” says David
Vise, author of The Google Story. They met by chance in 1995 at an orientation for new doctoral
students at Stanford University’s graduate school, and by the next year they were working together at
a new Stanford computer science center built with a $6 million donation from Microsoft founder
Bill Gates.
As with other Internet users, Brin and Page were frustrated by the inability of the existing search
programs to provide a useful sorting of the thousands of sites that were identified by Web queries.
What if the search results could be ranked, they asked themselves, so that pages that seemed
objectively most important were listed first, followed by the next most important, and so forth?
Page’s solution began with the principle that sites on the Web that got the most traffic should stand at
the top in search reports. He also developed ways of assessing which sites were most intrinsically
important.
At this point, Stanford stepped in with critical help. The university encourages its PhD students to
use its resources to develop commercial products. Its Office of Technology Licensing paid for
Google’s patent. The first funds to purchase the computers used for Google’s searches came from a
Stanford digital library project. Their first users were Stanford students and faculty.
 The linkages between university research and successful business innovation have not always
thrived in regions where technology industries are not well rooted. But Stanford, in Palo Alto,
California, stands at the center of Silicon Valley, a matrix of technology companies, investment
funds, and individuals with vast personal fortunes that evolved during the decades of the computer
industry’s evolution.
In 1998, Brin and Page met Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, an
established Silicon Valley leader. Bechtolsheim believed that Brin and Page could succeed. His
$100,000 personal check helped the pair build their computer network and boosted their credibility.
A year later, Google was handling 500,000 queries a day and winning recognition across the Internet
community. Google’s clear advantages over its rivals and the inventors’ commitment attracted $25
million in backing from two of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture funds. And the founders got the
money without having to give up control of the company.
A decade after its founding, Google’s goals have soared astronomically. As author Randall
Stross, author of Planet Google, puts it, the company aims to “organize everything we know.” Its
initiatives include an effort to digitize every published book in the world.
Google has emerged as a metaphor for the openness and creativity of the U.S. economy, but also
for the far-ranging U.S. power that so worries foreign critics. Human rights advocates and
journalists blasted Google’s 2006 agreement to self-censor its search engine in China at the
direction of Beijing’s government. Google answers that these kinds of restrictions will fade with the
spread of democracy and individual freedoms. If that proves true, this example of American
entrepreneurship will have been an agent of that change.

THE NEW ECONOMY

The personal computer and the Internet were building blocks for the new economy that took form in
the 1990s. Technology’s potential to create global markets, to make production and distribution more
efficient, and to expand financial flows attracted hoards of innovators. At first, business’s
introduction of computer technology did not measurably increase American economic productivity, to
the bewilderment of government policymakers. By the end of the 1990s, however, productivity was
increasing, giving hope that a new, sustained period of economic growth was at hand for most
Americans.
The sense of optimism drew substantially on the astonishing gains of technology companies on U.S.
stock markets—particularly start-up companies linked to commerce over the Internet. American and
foreign investors threw money at untested Internet companies at the end of the 1990s in search of what
author Michael Lewis called “the new, new thing.”
Entrepreneurs perceiving a niche for a new software strategy or product might determine to create
a business to meet that need. They might charge initial costs to their personal credit cards. Friends
and families would be asked to help. And with the right connections, such as a degree from a leading
U.S. university, the entrepreneurs might get an audience with some of the small, critically influential
group of financiers called venture capitalists. These investors typically had made great wealth from
earlier successes in technology markets and were on the lookout for new prospects. If they liked an
entrepreneur’s idea, they would invest millions of dollars in advance funding in exchange for part
ownership in the company.
If all continued to go well, the company would be launched. If it enjoyed early success—or even if
it was only well promoted—the entrepreneur and the financial backers might be able to “take the
company public,” selling shares of the company to the public on the stock market through an initial
public offering (IPO).
Low interest rates helped the start-up companies gather headway. The most fabulous of the success
stories—such as the rise of Microsoft, Apple, America Online (AOL), and, later, eBay, Yahoo, and
other “dot-coms” (so named for the “.com” terminology incorporated in commercial Internet
addresses)—created a euphoric mood among investors, who seemed willing to bet on any plausible
“e-commerce” strategy, however chancy.
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan warned of “irrational exuberance,” but that did
not deflate the dot-com stock market bubble. In March 2000, the NASDAQ Composite Index, a
measure of the U.S. stock market specializing in technology stock listings, had soared to over 5,000—
twice its level the year before. Typical of the new breed of companies was one called Pets.com,
which offered cheap prices to customers ordering pet food online in the hope that growing numbers of
consumer visits to its Web site would attract paying advertisers.

OPPORTUNISM AND CREDULITY

The dot-com boom was a characteristically opportunistic expression of American economic optimism
and credulity. Americans’ fascination with potential stock market windfalls was not a new
phenomenon. America’s Founding Fathers had relied on lotteries to raise money for the Continental
Army, and today Americans wager more than $50 billion annually in state-run lotteries whose
proceeds help fund education and other programs. Investment manias sprouted in every generation,
from colonial-era land speculation, to railroads in the 19th century, to biotech and computers in the
late 20th century.
In March 2000, the dot-com bubble burst. The immediate cause is debated, although rising interest
rates and a downturn in technology investments by major companies hurt the investing climate.
Investor confidence was battered by investigations showing that some prominent Wall Street
securities experts had misled the investing public about the prospects for some of the Internet stocks.
The NASDAQ Index fell close to 1,000 in 2002, wiping out $5 trillion in investors’ “paper” profits.
The value of Pets.com fell from $11 per share in February 2000 to $0.19 the day it closed its doors at
the end of that year.
The fallout claimed two of the highest-flying companies of the time. One was WorldCom, which
had used an aggressive acquisitions strategy funded by stock issues to claim a leading position in
telecommunications, taking over competitors such as MCI. The other was Enron, originally a
provider of natural gas and electricity, but later an online trader of energy services and commodities.
Government investigations led to indictments and convictions of top executives of both companies for
defrauding investors through the release of false financial information.
The dot-com bust was followed by speculative investment in U.S. real estate and the home
mortgage market. The goal of home ownership has been a cornerstone of the American Dream,
supported by the right of homeowners to deduct mortgage interest payments from their federal income
tax obligations. Two-thirds of American families own their homes, which are by far their most
important investment, absorbing one-third of their spending and supplying an average $75,000 in
homeowner equity, a significant retirement cushion. Housing prices rose to unprecedented levels as
home sales increased in the 2000s, fueled by the spread of complex and, many argued, sometimes
deceptive mortgage loan contracts.
 When the housing boom collapsed in 2007, it exposed a fragile layer of high-risk home loans.
Some borrowers had purchased homes trusting that, in a rising housing market, they could always sell
their properties at a profit. As housing prices fell, homeowners who no longer could keep up with
their mortgage payments were unable to pay their debt by selling their homes. This edifice toppled in
2008. Stock markets plunged. Foreclosures grew, and panic followed. Wall Street financial firms fell,
reorganized or were combined with larger competitors. Following the collapse of Wall Street’s
Lehman Brothers firm in September 2008, the normal flows of credit throughout the U.S. economy
came to a standstill, choking business activity. More than a half-million jobs a month were lost at the
end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009—the worst contraction since the end of World War II.
Moreover, the Lehman Brothers collapse revealed how deeply banks in Europe and Asia were
linked. The panic and freefall became global.
The catastrophe revealed weaknesses unheeded during the boom. U.S. consumption had for too
long outpaced savings, and financial regulators’ faith in the efficiency of economic markets had led
them to underestimate the mounting risks.

GOVERNMENT IN ACTION
The emergency responses by U.S. government across a broad front—the White House, Congress and
the Federal Reserve—were among the most dramatic in history, according to economists Alan S.
Blinder and Mark Zandi. The federal government and the Federal Reserve (central bank) seized
control of the two largest U.S. home mortgage firms and bailed out leading banks and a major
insurance company—actions that would have been politically unthinkable before the crisis. An initial
$700 billion bank rescue plan proposed by President George W. Bush won bipartisan support in the
U.S. Congress.
Americans elected new national leadership in the midst of the crisis, choosing Barack Obama as
their new president. President Obama and the 110th Congress adopted a stimulus bill at the beginning
of 2009 that included an estimated $787 billion in tax cuts and targeted government spending on
infrastructure and energy—the largest economic rescue measure ever.
The financial intervention is credited with averting a catastrophe. Blinder and Zandi estimate that,
without the government’s response, 8.5 million more jobs would have been lost in 2010 and the
economy would have suffered a widespread price collapse.
The massive economic stimulus plan passed by the U.S. Congress early in the Obama
administration also sought to fuel expansion of new, technologically advanced energy and
environmental initiatives. These developments, it was hoped, would create new markets at home and
overseas for American companies and millions of jobs for workers across a wide range of skill
levels.
The Obama administration invested an unprecedented $32 billion in stimulus funds, and billions
more in tax credits and loan guarantees, in a wide range of clean-energy research and development
initiatives in 2009 and 2010. The ventures spanned many fronts: advanced nuclear reactors, wind and
solar generation, advanced storage batteries, “smart” electricity meters and electricity grid
monitoring equipment, and biomass and greenhouse gas sequestration from coal plants. Many projects
combined research from U.S. universities and national laboratories with financial backing from
private venture investors, augmented by government grants in a characteristic synergy of U.S.
innovation.
Job growth resumed in 2010. The stock market recovered slowly. Prices of large U.S. company
securities had fallen by more than half between January 2008 and March 2009. By mid-2011, rising
stock prices had erased the losses from 2008.
The dollar maintained its reputation as a safe haven for investors throughout the crisis. But the
government’s actions to stimulate the economy did not trigger the hoped-for strong rebound. Cautious
U.S. corporations were holding cash rather than spending money on expanding production and hiring
workers. Although the recession ended in June 2009, according to the U.S. National Bureau of
Economic Research, the U.S. unemployment rate remained near 10 percent in 2009 and 2010 and
about 9 percent in 2011.
At the end of 2010 both monetary policy and fiscal policy were straining to keep the economy from
faltering. With short-term interest rates already near zero, the Federal Reserve used a controversial
initiative to buy $600 billion worth of bonds in an attempt to drive down long-term interest rates. The
Federal Reserve has signaled that it intends to keep interest rates low into 2013.
In the meantime President Obama negotiated a stimulus package that extended expiring 2001 tax
cuts for two more years through 2012 and extended unemployment insurance payments through 2011.
Passed by a divided Congress, the package was projected to increase the national debt by $900
billion. At the beginning of 2012 a divided Congress was still struggling to agree on tax policy.
Some positive economic developments happened at the end of 2011, notably a drop in the
unemployment rate to 8.5 percent in December, the lowest level since February 2009. The U.S.
economy had added jobs for 15 months in a row.
While the U.S. economy appeared to continue strengthening as 2012 began, many uncertainties
remained, including a possible recession in Europe, a slowdown in China and other emerging
markets, and continued wrangling over U.S. tax policy.
 CHAPTER 3
What the U.S. Economy Produces
Large U.S. multinational firms have altered their production strategies and their roles in response to
globalization as they adapt to increasing competition.

Robotic welders operate an auto van assembly line in Baltimore, Maryland.

© AP Images

Standing by itself, U.S. manufacturing would be the eighth largest economy in the world.
U.S. MANUFACTURING INSTITUTE
2006

The U.S. economy is in the midst of its second radical conversion. The first represented a shift from
agriculture to manufacturing. The past quarter-century has witnessed a further evolution toward
finance, business services, retailing, specialized manufacturing, technology products, and health care.
The first revolution mated European capital to America’s burgeoning 19th-century expansion, while
the current transition reflects Americans’ response to unprecedented global competition in trade and
finance.
Like other economies, the U.S. economy comprises a circular flow of goods and services between
individuals and businesses. Individuals buy goods and services produced by businesses, which
employ individuals and pay them wages and benefits, providing the income that individuals use to
make new purchases of goods and services and investments, or to save.
The most common measure of the U.S. economy is the federal government’s report on the gross
domestic product (GDP). GDP records the value in dollars of all goods and services purchased in the
United States by individuals and businesses, plus investments, government spending, and exports and
imports from abroad. (It does not include sales by foreign companies located in the United States or
by American companies operating in foreign countries.)
GDP is made up both of goods and services for final sale in the private-sector market and
nonmarket services, such as education and military defense, provided by governments. In principle,
the value of goods and services in the market reflects an exchange between willing buyers and sellers
and is not fixed by government, with some notable exceptions such as government farm and energy
subsidies.
In 2011, the $15.1 trillion U.S. gross domestic product comprised approximately $10.7 trillion in
personal spending by American consumers; $1.9 trillion in private investments for homes, business
equipment, and other purposes; and $3 trillion spent by governments at all levels, minus an
international deficit of $578 billion—the difference between what the United States imported and
exported and its net financial transactions with the rest of the world.
Looking at GDP another way, in 2010 governments collected $2.7 trillion in taxes, roughly 60
percent of that on personal income and the rest on production and business profits. Governments paid
out $3.2 trillion in benefits, primarily to individuals, and $202 billion in interest to holders of
government debt. (The United States places near the middle of major economies in its overall tax
burden, ranking 18th out of 35 nations surveyed in 2009 by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development.)
GDP sources are broken down into major economic sectors such as manufacturing and retail sales.
Comparing the 2010 output of these sectors with 1980 shows the magnitude of the shift from goods to
services over the past 30 years. In 2010, manufacturing provided 12 percent of total U.S. domestic
output of goods and services. In 1980, its share was 20 percent. Finance and real estate services
overtook manufacturing, contributing 21 percent of the U.S. economic output in 2010 versus 16
percent in 1980. Suppliers of professional business services, including lawyers and consultants,
contributed as much value as manufacturing—12 percent of the domestic economy. This figure was
only 7 percent in 1980. Retail and wholesale trade, at 12 percent, was slightly lower than in 1980.
The category of health care and private educational services was 9 percent in 2010, compared to 4
percent in 1980. Government at all levels accounted for 14 percent of the country’s economic output
in 2010, essentially unchanged from 1980. Oil and gas production dropped to just over 1 percent of
the nation’s output in 2010, from 2 percent in 1980.
Excluding government’s share of the economy, goods-producing companies made up 21 percent of
total private-sector output in 2010, down from 34 percent in 1980. The services sector climbed from
67 percent to 79 percent during that period.

MANUFACTURING FACES COMPETITION

Manufacturing’s share of the U.S. economy peaked in the 1950s, when Europe and Asia were still
struggling to recover from the devastation of World War II. By 1980, Japan and Western Europe were
ready to challenge U.S. industrial leadership, and in the new century they have been joined by China,
India, and many other nations around the globe.
American producers have responded to rising competition and higher labor and benefits costs by
moving operations offshore, purchasing foreign parts and components, and concentrating on higher-
value products where innovation offers a competitive advantage. Only 10 percent of the U.S.
workforce holds manufacturing jobs today, down from 20 percent plus in 1980.
Even so, high U.S. worker productivity and technological leadership enabled the United States to
rank as the world’s leading manufacturer in 2006, with $1.5 trillion in products in 2006, or about
one-quarter of total worldwide production. “Standing by itself, U.S. manufacturing would be the
eighth largest economy in the world,” the U.S. Manufacturing Institute has said. U.S. manufacturers
employ more than 14 million workers, and another 6 million work in related industries. According to
the institute’s 2006 report, manufacturing jobs pay about 25 percent more in wages and benefits than
nonmanufacturing jobs in the United States. The country’s manufacturers produced more growth and
more productivity gains between 2001 and 2005 than any other sector of the U.S. economy.
Five manufacturing groups had more than $100 billion each in sales in 2006: fabricated metal
parts, a key product for the construction industry; machinery; computers and electronic equipment;
motor vehicles; and food and beverages. U.S. manufacturing output that year included 4,500 civil
aircraft, 11 million cars and light trucks, 87 million metric tons of raw steel, 27 million computers,
$127 billion worth of pharmaceutical preparations (excluding biological products), and $120.6
billion in semiconductors and electronic components.
Retail businesses contributed about 6 percent to 2006 economic output. Wholesale businesses,
which buy from producers and then supply retailers, added another 5 percent. Together, these sectors
produced about $1.6 trillion for the U.S. economy, and their share of the total in 2006 was slightly
less than in 1980.
The retail sector’s makeup illustrates the great diversity of stores in the American economy. More
than 95 percent of all retailers are single-store businesses, the traditional “mom-and-pop” operations
that populate America’s Main Streets.
But revenues taken in by single-store businesses account for only half of all retail sales. In the
sprawling malls and shopping centers on the outskirts of U.S. cities are the “big-box” retail stores and
“super-center” warehouses that compete for consumers’ dollars through relentless price competition.
The largest of these major retailers, Wal-Mart, seemed to be everywhere, with 4,100 U.S. stores and
3,100 stores abroad.
Amazon.com, which ranked No. 32 in retailing revenues in 2007, had no stores—all of its sales are
made online. The company is by far the most durable survivor of the 1990s dot.com retailing boom.
The shifts in rankings of leading U.S. retailers each year show evidence of the constant struggle
among large stores to win and hold the loyalty of U.S. consumers.
 Retailing’s Competitive Battlefield

A “greeter” awaits customers entering one of the stores of the chain Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the United States.
Courtesy of Wal-Mart

The story of wal-mart’s stunning rise within a single generation from a commonplace, low-price
variety store in Arkansas to the world’s largest and most powerful retailer illustrates many
fundamental shifts taking place in the U.S. economy. Wal-Mart’s fixation on beating competitors’
prices and squeezing its operating costs to the bone year after year has proved to be a potent
strategy. By 2006, The Wal-Mart Effect author Charles Fishman reported, more than half of all
Americans lived within eight kilometers of a Wal-Mart store.
Although Wal-Mart typically sought out U.S. manufacturers to stock its shelves, as the company
grew, Wal-Mart management accelerated their search for lower-cost products and components in
overseas markets. Today, Wal-Mart has become the most important single conduit for foreign retail
goods entering the U.S. economy.
Wal-Mart’s spread across the American landscape has provoked intense opposition from critics,
led by labor organizations fighting what they view as the company’s antiunion policies. Wal-Mart
workers make half the wages of factory workers, or less, and have sometimes had wages capped to
hold down store costs. Personnel turnover is relatively high, but the company reports it routinely
gets 10 applications for every position when a new store opens. The company is using its economic
clout to promote energy-efficient products, solar energy installations at its stores, and fuel
conservation by its truck fleet, and has urged employees to support its “green” strategies. Its “big
box” stores, exceeding 13,000 square meters in size, have been vilified by some for overwhelming
nearby small-town merchants.
However, retailing in the United States has always been intensely competitive, with losing
technologies and strategies falling by the wayside. The spread of electricity in cities and the
invention of the elevator in the 1880s enabled retailing magnate John Wanamaker and imitators to
create the first downtown department stores. Then Sears and other catalog stores opened a new
retailing front—shopping from home. The movement of Americans who followed the Interstate
Highway System to ever more distant suburbs undermined local merchants long before Wal-Mart
reached its leviathan size. And Wal-Mart’s recent U.S. growth has slowed, as it and other big
retailers face competition from Internet shopping and specialty marketers.
The older, simpler U.S. retail model of a century ago, when community-based merchants sold
largely made-in-America products, might have provided a more stable economic base for some
 communities. But this static model often failed to adapt to new conditions generated by the nation’s
dynamic economic, social, and political institutions.

THE RISE OF FINANCE

The first decade of the 21st century marked the “ascendancy of finance,” in the words of Joseph E.
Stiglitz, chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. The finance, insurance,
and real estate industry category of gross domestic product, which includes giant securities funds,
small regional banks, and insurance companies, contributed $3 trillion to the economy in 2010, or 21
percent of the total. Its share in 1980 was 16 percent. Between 1998 and 2006, the revenues of U.S.
finance and insurance companies shot up by 71 percent, capitalizing on the U.S. leadership in rapidly
growing global financial markets.
A category of industry called “business and professional services” added about $1.8 trillion in
output to the economy in 2010, or 12 percent, compared to 7 percent in 1980. This encompasses the
growing economic role played by lawyers and consultants. The American Bar Association reported
that more than 1.1 million lawyers were practicing in the United States in 2008, or one out every 300
Americans, a far higher proportion than in any other country.
Health care came to $1.1 trillion in 2010, or about 7.6 percent of economic output, reflecting the
expansion of high-priced health care technologies and the medical needs of an aging U.S. population.
In 1980, health care accounted for 4 percent of the economy.
Americans today travel more for business and pleasure than a generation ago, and this has fed the
growth of the hotel and restaurant industries, whose output totaled $417 billion in 2010, or 2.9
percent of the gross domestic product. This is slightly higher than in 1980.

WHERE AMERICANS WORK

Details about where Americans work provide another view of the economy. On a typical workday in
2005, just over 153.4 million full-and part-time employees went to work in the United States. Not a
single one of them was truly an “average American,” not in a nation of 313 million people with roots
in virtually every nation and culture in the world, living in huge metropolitan cities or out of-the-way
hamlets, and in every sort of community in between.
Just 1 percent of the workforce was engaged in farming, forestry, and fishing. Construction,
transportation, mining and utilities provided work for 11 percent. Nine percent worked in
manufacturing; 2 percent in wholesale trade; 10 percent in retail trade; 10 percent in professional and
business services; 2 percent in information, media and software; 6 percent in finance, insurance and
real estate; 21 percent in education and health care; 8 percent in arts, entertainment, hotels and food
services, and 4 percent in other services. Government employed 5 percent of the workforce.
In 2010, American workers received $7.8 trillion in wages or salaries, by far the largest source of
income for the nation’s 117 million households. These households also received $1.9 trillion in
dividends and interest payments from their savings and investments, $1.1 trillion in employer
benefits, and $2.3 trillion in government social benefits, for which they contributed $1 trillion in
social insurance payments.
The United States has the world’s most open borders based on the volume of trade that enters and
leaves the country. In 2011, the United States was the largest importer and third largest exporter of
merchandise goods and led all nations in the import and export of commercial services. In that year,
the United States exported $2.1 trillion in goods and services, but imported $2.6 trillion, producing a
trade deficit of about $558 billion. The United States had a $179 billion surplus in the trade of
commercial services such as airline travel and financial services, but it had a deficit of $737 billion
in traded goods.
The strongest U.S. export goods in 2011 were motor vehicles and parts, natural gas and other
petroleum products. Some other major exports were pharmaceutical preparations, industrial
machines, semiconductors, organic chemicals, telecommunications equipment, electrical apparatus,
and civilian aircraft.
Manufactured goods made up about 41 percent of total exports, industrial supplies and materials
about 24 percent, with agricultural products far behind at 6 percent. Although traditional U.S.
customers—Canada, the European Union, and Japan—are the top recipients of American exports,
China, India and developing countries receive nearly half of U.S. shipments.
Imports have risen much faster than exports. In 2004, for example, more than one-third of all
manufactured products purchased by U.S. consumers were imported. In 1972, the figure was just 11
percent.
The value of the dollar compared to other leading world currencies has been a critical factor in
U.S. manufacturing competitiveness. In two periods—the mid-1980s and 1997-2002—the dollar’s
value was high, making U.S. exports relatively more expensive and imports cheaper. In both periods,
the country’s trade deficit grew sharply. The dollar’s decline during 2002-2008 helped boost U.S.
exports.
But apart from currency issues, a rising tide of global competition, particularly from countries with
lower labor costs, has pushed American manufacturers to new competitive strategies. A 2005 study
by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis disclosed a trend among U.S.-headquartered major
multinational corporations. U.S.-based divisions cut employment and capital investments at home but
increased jobs and investments significantly at their foreign units. The annual output of the foreign
affiliates that year increased by more than twice that of the parent company in the United States. The
study suggests that U.S. multinationals were relying increasingly on bringing in foreign-made
components, including those from their overseas affiliates, and then including them in their final
products.

INVESTING IN RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

American investments in research and development (R&D) and education have been a bulwark of
U.S. trade competitiveness. The U.S. Manufacturing Institute has listed important new technologies on
which U.S. companies rely, including computer-aided design, robotics, just-in-time inventory
controls, and radio frequency identification technology used in tracking the flow of goods from
factories or warehouses to stores.
The institute also reports that U.S. manufacturers are leaders in applying the new science of
nanotechnology, which harnesses the distinctive physical properties of individual molecules to create
improved products. Nanotechnology is producing lighter, stronger, and more rustproof motor vehicle
components. It creates stainproof clothing and military armor, and it greatly extends the shelf life of
bottled products.
But U.S. industry leaders warn that the long-standing U.S. lead in R&D spending is shrinking. Total
R&D spending by China, Ireland, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan was expected to
exceed the U.S. total before 2010. The United States increased R&D investments by nearly 40 percent
between 1995 and 2005, but China’s investments tripled during those years, albeit from a much
smaller base.

SUPPORT FOR FARMERS

In the early 20th century, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than half of the U.S.
workforce was employed by the small, diversified, rural, and family-run farms responsible for most
of the nation’s foodstuffs. Today, U.S. agriculture is concentrated on a small number of very large,
specialized farms employing less than 1 percent of U.S. workers. The acreage of the average farm has
tripled since 1940, and half of U.S. farm sales come from the largest 2 percent of all farming
operations. American farmers received $285 billion for their crops and livestock, plus $12 billion in
direct government payments in 2007. Farm imports totaled $70 billion, while exports came to $82
billion.
Federal programs to shore up farmers’ incomes arose in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The
goals were to assure minimum farm prices for specific farm commodities and to further support farm
prices by paying farmers to limit production. Although consumers bore the cost of the resulting higher
food prices, many considered this approach reasonable when most farms were small and farmers’
incomes were relatively low.
Federal policies began to change in the 1970s as foreign export markets grew in importance and
U.S. agriculture shifted away from predominantly small farms to large family holdings and corporate
farming. Federal legislation in 1996 replaced price supports on specific commodities with direct
payments to farmers based on historical production, but gave farmers flexibility on how much of their
land to farm.
Until the 1980s, half of the U.S. farm exports were major bulk commodities such as wheat, corn,
soybeans, cotton, and tobacco. Livestock accounted for 10 percent of exports. Horticulture products,
led by fruit and vegetables, accounted for 9 percent. Today, livestock makes up 16 percent of farm
exports; horticulture products, 21 percent; and bulk commodities, 36 percent.
As with manufactured goods, fluctuations in the dollar’s value against other currencies produced
shifts in agricultural trade. But the changing tastes of American consumers played an important part,
too. In the early 1980s, an American consumed, on average, 810 kilograms of food a year, of which
72 kilograms was imported, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. In 2002, consumption had
climbed to 900 kilograms and imports per person averaged 118 kilograms. As U.S. household wealth
increased in the late 1990s and early 2000s decade, consumers spent more on imported high-value
farm products, from wine and beef to cut flowers. American wheat, corn, and other bulk exports
remained competitive because of the high productivity of farmland, the expansion of large-size family
and corporate farming, and agricultural technologies. Ethanol, most of it refined from corn, made up
nearly 3 percent of U.S. motor fuel in 2005.
American farmers have readily adopted genetically altered crops since their introduction in 1996.
Genetically altered soybeans and cotton need less herbicide to control weeds. These varieties now
make up more than 70 percent of all soybean and cotton acreage planted in the United States. Cotton
and corn have been engineered to resist insects by producing their own toxins, and these varieties are
also gaining rapid acceptance in the United States.
But genetically engineered crops remain controversial because of critics’ concerns about their
environmental impact and some public misgivings about the technology generally. The ultimate
response of consumers and governments around the world to this science will have major
consequences for U.S. agriculture.
 CHAPTER 4
Competition and the American Culture
Competition has remained a defining characteristic of the U.S. economy grounded in the American
Dream of owning a small business.

Some of the wealth amassed in the economy goes to good causes. Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates, shown here with
a Mozambique vaccine trial patient, has made philanthropy his new job.
© AP Images

“Americans…are also hustlers in the positive sense: builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard
workers, inventors, organizers, engineers, and a people supremely generous.”
WALTER McDOUGALL
2004

Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian-born economist, coined the term “creative destruction” in 1942 to
describe the turbulent forces of innovation and competition in Western economies. He called it the
“essential fact about capitalism.” The “incessant gales” of markets cull out failing or
underperforming companies, clearing the way for new companies, new products, and new processes,
as he put it.
Creative destruction was a philosophy that appealed to critics of the New Deal social and
economic intervention that took hold during the Great Depression, and it maintains an influential
following today. “I read Schumpeter in my 20s and always thought he was right,” said former Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, “and I’ve watched the process at work through my entire career.”
Today “destructive technology” is the label for change-forcing innovation and technology.
The juxtaposition of creation and destruction captures the ever-present tension between gains and
losses in the American market economy. The process has never been without critics and political
opponents. But because the winners have substantially outnumbered the losers, the churn of
competition remains a defining characteristic of the U.S. economy.
Outsiders often equate the U.S. economy with its largest corporations and what they make and do.
They may be surprised, then, by the vital part that small businesses play. Napoleon is said to have
dismissed England as “a nation of shopkeepers.” The phrase could also be applied in considerable
degree to the United States, whose shop owners and other small businesses account for over half of
the private-sector U.S. workforce and economic output, excluding farming. (“Small” businesses are
defined as having fewer than 500 employees.)
A typical American town or suburb of more than 10,000 people is populated with individual
business owners and small firms—car dealers; accountants and lawyers; physicians and therapists;
shoe repairers and cleaning establishments; flower and hardware stores; plumbers, painters, and
electricians; clothing boutiques; computer repair shops; and restaurants of a half-dozen ethnic flavors.
Many of the small retailers compete with national chains boasting billions of dollars in revenue and
thousands of employees.
 Despite the odds against them, small businesses account for a vast majority of job growth,
particularly as major manufacturing companies trim employment in the face of stiff global
competition. In 2004, for example, the number of jobs in small businesses grew by 1.9 million overall
from the year before. Larger companies with 500 employees or more lost 181,000 net jobs.
(Economists point out that many small businesses provide goods and services to large companies and
thus are tied to their fortunes.)

SMALL BUSINESSES AT THE ECONOMY’S CORE

American entrepreneurs remain eager to risk their own savings to start small businesses despite the
potential for failure that Schumpeter’s model predicts. The widely published and sometimes
embroidered story of American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin was a potent symbol of aspiration
and perseverance for generations of Americans, “defining our image of ourselves, shaping our sense
of possibility,” says author Peter Baida.
The 15th child of a Boston soap and candle maker, Franklin quit school after two years to work in
his brother’s printing business. He learned the printing trade and accounting, became the American
colonies’ most noteworthy publisher and inventor, and then played his storied role in the struggle for
national independence. Since Franklin’s time, Americans have hailed leading inventors and
entrepreneurs as icons of opportunism, from Thomas Edison to Apple’s Steve Jobs.
Millions of entrepreneurs try to create their own versions of success. Government data show that,
in 2006, an estimated 650,000 new employer-owned businesses were started up and 565,000 went
out of business, out of a total of around 6 million such businesses nationwide. Similar ratios of births
and deaths among small businesses are repeated year after year.
One obvious reason why so many Americans choose this path is the relative ease of starting a
business. Professions such as law, medicine, and accounting have stiff licensing requirements. But
compared to other Western economies, the United States offers an open road to a would-be business
owner. The contrast with some Third World economies is monumental. A study by the Peruvian
economist Hernando de Soto found that it took 289 days to open a small garment workshop in Lima,
Peru. The absence of a vibrant small-business class is not due to a lack of entrepreneurs, he argued.
In 1993, an estimated 150,000 vendors worked the streets of Mexico City, to cite but one example.
But these vendors were blocked from becoming full-fledged business owners by many hurdles, de
Soto says, including rigid class barriers, laws that discourage property ownership, and bureaucracies
intent on preserving the status quo. In the United States, change is a way of life.

THE CHANCE TO START AGAIN

If it is easy to launch a business in America, it is also relatively simple to try again after a failed
attempt. The philosopher Erich Fromm said that the “freedom to fail” was essential to overall
freedom, and the adage is often cited as a basic tenet of American economic life.
U.S. bankruptcy laws govern business failures. The U.S. Congress has tried to strike a balance that
recovers as much of a failed company’s assets as possible for lenders and creditors, while providing
financial protections that can allow some entrepreneurs to gain a fresh start. The bankruptcy process
may differ for individuals, small enterprises, and large, publicly owned corporations.
A small business that cannot pay its bills usually will go through what is called a liquidation,
selling all of its assets to pay what it can to its creditors. Some of the business’s debts are paid ahead
of others, and a bankruptcy court appoints a trustee to see that the process follows the rules. Banks
and other “secured” lenders are high on the repayment list, as are most employee wages. But if there
are public shareholders, these owners—who have assumed more risk in exchange for greater
potential reward—are on the bottom and often get nothing as the business closes its doors.
Large companies that can’t cope with their debts may choose what is called a Chapter 11
bankruptcy process, which allows a company to stay in business while it tries to recover. If the
company still has valuable assets or some cash coming in, and if its crisis seems temporary, creditors
may choose to take less than full repayment of their claims initially to let the business survive and
continue repaying its creditors. In this case, too, shareholders might be wiped out, but the business
can survive.
Bankruptcy law also enables individuals to escape unmanageable debts and start over, although
they may lose their homes. This escape route can be crucial for people who lose their jobs or for
families facing heavy medical bills, for example.
The bankruptcy laws are part of the American cultural belief in the second chance. This story is
woven deeply into the national fabric of migration and settlement that began with the first boatloads
of European arrivals and never stopped. French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville found in the
1830s an innate restlessness among Americans, who were constantly changing course “for fear of
missing the shortest road” to success and happiness.
The historian Frederick Jackson Turner, marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s 1492 landing
in the New World, defined the American frontier as an integral cultural catalyst. The steadily
changing frontier, lying ever west of existing settlements, was a magnet for migration, pulling
footloose Americans ever westward, Turner wrote in 1893. He attributed distinctive aspects of the
predominant American character—individualism, risk taking, suspicion of authority, and optimism—
to this frontier experience.

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION AT THE TOP OF THE ECONOMY

Creative destruction is evident at the top of the economy in the rise and decline of the largest, most
powerful U.S. corporations.
One measure is the survey of the 50 largest industrial companies published annually by Fortune
magazine. In 1990, the top-50 list featured companies with household names and an international
reach, many dating back to the early 20th century, including General Motors, Ford Motor Company,
DuPont, Eastman Kodak, and the predecessors of Exxon Mobil. These businesses similarly reflected
the heyday of U.S. manufacturing: Manufacturers held 31 of the 50 places, followed by 12 energy
companies and seven consumer products suppliers.
The 2007 rankings document the consequences of globalization, the decline of goods production in
favor of services, and the rise of health care as a major need for an aging population. On the 2007
Fortune list, the largest U.S. non-financial company was Wal-Mart Stores. Its $351 billion in revenue
narrowly exceeded revenues of energy giant Exxon Mobil. The number of manufacturers among the 50
largest industrial firms was down to 20. Mergers had reduced the energy companies to eight in all.
Taking the place of the displaced manufacturing and energy firms were 10 retailers, including Wal-
Mart, its rival Target, and Home Depot and Lowe’s, the leading home improvement and construction
materials retailers. Also in the top 50 were six health industry companies and three companies
focused on moving a steadily growing volume of food, goods, and documents around the country—
United Parcel Service, FedEx, and Sysco, the largest distributor of food products. Kodak, Xerox,
International Paper, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, and Bristol-Myers Squibb had fallen far out of the top
50 in 2007.
The global economic expansion has profoundly altered U.S. business. But so have domestic forces
of change. At the beginning of the 20th century, some of America’s dominant businesses were called
to account by reformers crusading for better working conditions and pure food. The movement was
revived in the 1960s through a one-man attack on the safety of American-built automobiles by Ralph
Nader, an attorney and activist. Nader’s 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, singled out the small
General Motors Corvair sedan. GM retaliated by investigating Nader’s private life in an apparent
effort to discredit him. GM’s chairman called Nader “one of the bitter gypsies of dissent who plague
America.” But Nader’s campaign against the nation’s No. 1 automaker registered with the American
mood. Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 to set automobile
safety standards.

CORPORATIONS PUSH BACK

“Ambition must counter ambition,” James Madison wrote in 1788 in Federalist 51, an effort to
defend the proposed U.S. Constitution he had done so much to shape. American businesses and their
opponents actively play the role Madison anticipated, presenting and defending their interests in
Washington and state capitals.
The word “lobbying” as a name for these campaigns dates back at least to 18th-century Britain. In
the Gilded Age of rapid U.S. economic expansion after the Civil War, lobbying by railroad promoters
took the form of outright bribes “where it will do most good,” as one railroad trustee put it, spent on
congressmen who could determine railroad routes. Today, lobbyists who contact members of
Congress for their clients must register and publicly disclose their activities. Their direct
contributions of money to members of Congress are limited and must be revealed.
Critics of lobbying say it represents a corruption of the democratic process, giving large
contributors the strongest voice. Defenders reply that the lobbyist is exercising a constitutionally
guaranteed right to petition the government and that lawmakers cannot properly perform their duties
without understanding the various sides of controversial issues—details that lobbyists are eager to
provide.
In any event, lobbying is a growth industry. In 1975, lobbyists reported spending $100 million to
make their cases in Washington. In 2005, the U.S. Capitol had 17,000 registered lobbyists (200 of
them former members of Congress), and their spending totaled $2.5 billion. There is hardly a cause of
any size that is not part of this campaign, but business groups lead the list of registered lobbyists.
Between 1998 and 2006, five U.S. industries reported spending a total of $1 billion or more on
lobbying.
A profound internal challenge to America’s business establishment in the past quarter-century came
not from regulators or “gypsies of dissent,” but from investors. In the 1980s, an industry sprang up
centered on Wall Street and focused on taking over underperforming publicly owned corporations. In
1981, DuPont, a diversified manufacturer of chemical-based products, made a bid to purchase the oil
giant Conoco. A bidding frenzy followed as Canada’s Seagram liquor distiller and Conoco rivals
Texaco and Mobil sought to beat DuPont’s price. Conoco’s $7.8 billion merger with DuPont equated
to a purchase price of $98 for each share of Conoco stock, twice the share price before DuPont made
its move. The largest corporate merger to that time, it created stunning financial gains not only for
Conoco stockholders, but also for speculators who purchased the oil company’s shares and for the
Wall Street investment bankers and lawyers who worked on the deal.
The acquisition of Conoco opened a wild new chapter in U.S. business history. Bidding wars
broke out to seize control of companies whose low stock prices left them vulnerable. New tactics
appeared, such as “greenmail” by investors and speculators who bought significant shares of a
company and then threatened a takeover unless the company repurchased their shares at a higher
price. Corporate “raiders” such as T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, and Sir James Goldsmith became
celebrities. Corporate leaders accused them of financial piracy. The raiders countered that by
purchasing shares of “mismanaged” companies, they made rightful claims on behalf of all
shareholders to the companies’ true value.

JUNK BONDS AND TAKEOVERS

Adding to the turmoil was an explosive increase in leveraged buyouts, or LBOs. The targets of this
strategy were companies whose stock prices appeared depressed because of poor management or
because of Wall Street’s misreading of the companies’ potential. Outside investors or a company’s top
managers would seek to buy a company from public shareholders by offering an above-market price.
The leverage in this case was debt. The typical LBO was financed primarily by loans that would be
issued by the company once the new owners had succeeded in taking it over. Interest payments on
these loans were tax deductible, lessening both the cost and financial risk of the LBO and encouraging
LBO organizers to offer their bonds at relatively high yields to investors.
Traditionally, high-yielding but riskier debt securities were offered by companies in trouble and so
were known as “junk bonds,” but LBO promoters argued that these bonds were not as risky as many
investors had assumed. A 1978 change in federal rules permitted regulated corporate pension funds to
invest in LBO debt, opening a vital source of financing to the LBO movement. Insurance companies,
mutual funds, and savings and loan banks were other major buyers of junk bonds.
In the first half of the 1980s, LBO transactions increased sixfold. In 1988, an estimated $200
billion in junk bonds had been issued, a boom in Wall Street deal-making not seen since J.P. Morgan’s
day, said Business Week magazine. Shareholders benefited from the premium prices on LBO offers.
Wall Street investment and law firms collected handsome fees, and LBO owners stood to profit
enormously if the plans succeeded. It was the “great, infallible money-making machine” of the
decade, said finance professor Roy C. Smith.
The downside was the destructive half of Schumpeter’s creative destruction model. To meet debt
payments, new owners often had to sell off poor-performing divisions or shrink payrolls, and then
employees lost jobs. Companies that had been fixtures of communities for years were sold or
dismantled. A top executive of a leading U.S. automobile tire company said that the LBO was
“created in hell by the devil himself.”
The LBO process depended on a healthy economy with buyers eager to purchase the unwanted
parts of LBO companies, on investors’ confidence in junk bonds, and on a permissive regulatory
climate. But the economy slowed at the end of the 1980s, and investor confidence was jarred by
scandal. The billion-dollar deals tempted some of Wall Street’s best-known bankers and lawyers to
cheat, violating federal securities laws by tipping off one another on upcoming but unannounced
deals, manipulating stock prices, and issuing fraudulently false financial statements. The Wall Street
firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, the leading junk bond financier, admitted felony securities violations
in 1988, paid a record $650 million fine, and wound up in bankruptcy court.
 The corporate raiding frenzy subsided in the 1990s after Drexel’s demise was followed by heavy
losses for junk bond investors generally. The 1990s boom in technology stocks absorbed larger and
larger amounts of investors’ money until that speculative stock surge collapsed in 2000. After a few
years, however, a new wave of corporate acquisitions swelled up. It was led by private investment
funds whose clients pooled their capital and borrowed additional funds to purchase companies whose
profits and stock market prices had slumped, creating possible bargains for the investors.
Unlike some takeovers by 1980s raiders, investment funds such as the Blackstone Group and the
Carlyle Group aimed not just to cut costs, but to improve the company’s results. The private managers
sought to take a company public, selling shares on U.S. stock markets. If the company was performing
better than during its last public incarnation, the share prices would be correspondingly higher and the
private investors would reap extraordinary gains. The list of companies acquired by such private
equity funds included the Hertz Corporation car rental company, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer movie
studios, Burger King, Chrysler, and TXU, the largest electric utility in Texas.
In 1992, private equity investments totaled just $21 billion. In 2006, private equity firms bought
control of 654 U.S. companies for a total of $375 billion, evidence of the constant turnover in
American business that Schumpeter would have instantly recognized.

COMPETITION AND THE AMERICAN CULTURE

How did competition and disruptive change become accepted as part of the American economic
culture?
The first European settlers in the New World braved the perilous Atlantic crossing for varied
reasons. Some sought a new land where their religious beliefs would escape persecution. Others
sought gold or the fountain of youth or the passage to India. Many simply dreamed of a new chance in
life. But most shared the reality that they would have to build their new world from the bottom up.
From the first fragile settlements, Americans pushed westward, inventing and reinventing their
society in the face of constantly changing opportunities and hazards. Historian Walter A. McDougall
has called the United States “the most dynamic civilization in history,” adding, “nowhere else has
more change occurred in so short a span. America was not just born of revolution, it is one.”
Many Americans believed that God, the Creator, the Almighty—whom they saw in many different
ways—blessed their struggle to create a new nation. In 1630, John Winthrop, the governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, had called his settlement a “city on a hill. The eyes of people are upon
us.” President Woodrow Wilson, in 1915, told a group of new American citizens, “you have taken an
oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race.”
And Winthrop’s metaphor became a favorite of President Ronald Reagan, as the 20th century neared
its close.
This sense of mission fortified the willingness of many Americans to seize the land and build a
new country and a strong economy. And it helped instill in the American people a lasting streak of
optimism.
“With optimism went a sense of power and of vast resources of energy,” said the historian Henry
Steele Commager. “The American had spacious ideas, his imagination roamed a continent, and he
was impatient with petty transactions, hesitation, and timidities. To carve out a farm of a square mile
or a ranch of a hundred square miles, to educate millions of children, to feed the Western world with
his wheat and his corn, did not appear to him remarkable.”
 Idealism and self-interest prevailed alongside one another. McDougall argues that stripped to
essentials, America was, and remains, a nation of hustlers. In Freedom Just Around the Corner,
McDougall described his dilemma: “Shall I portray Americans as individualists or community
builders, pragmatists or dreamers, materialists or idealists, bigots or champions of tolerance, lovers
of liberty and justice for all, or history’s most brazen hypocrites?” In fact, all of these traits have been
obvious throughout the American experience, he said.
The common denominator McDougall saw was a scrappy drive to hustle, to get ahead and improve
one’s circumstances. “Americans take it for granted that ‘everyone’s got an angle,’ except maybe
themselves,” he wrote. “Politicians, lawyers, bankers, merchants, and salesmen are considered guilty
until proven innocent.” Americans were “hustlers in the sense of self-promoters, scofflaws,
occasional frauds, and peripatetic self-reinventors,” he said. But he added, “They are also hustlers in
the positive sense: builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard workers, inventors, organizers,
engineers, and a people supremely generous.”
The first American settlers brought with them the principles of Britain’s complex, diverse, and
opportunistic market economy, and applied them on the new soil. But the British model was changed
by the ideals of liberty and democracy that promised opportunity. As Princeton University’s Anne-
Marie Slaughter put it, “From nothing to something is what we mean by the American Dream—from
rags to riches, from a log cabin to the White House, from a Kansas farm to a Hollywood studio. It is a
story of making and remaking ourselves as far as luck and hard work will carry us.”

PRAISING WORK
The original contours of the American economy were defined by a culture that elevated conscientious
work into a national value. “In the beginning America was the land and the land was America,” wrote
anthropologist and businessman Herbert Applebaum. Unlike Britain, the New World offered the
promise of landownership to the typical settler, at least once the Native American peoples had been
driven off. But the land was useless without an investment in “backbreaking and continuous work,”
Applebaum added. The farmer had to master a dozen tradesman’s skills. The tradesman had to farm.
Necessity bred a deep strain of individualism within the communal settlements that spread across the
land.
As the American colonies prospered and then combined in their unlikely Revolutionary War
victory, Americans increasingly viewed work not merely as a requisite of survival but as the path to
success.
“Significant numbers of Americans believe that anyone, high or low, can move up the economic
ladder as long as they are talented, hardworking, entrepreneurial, and not too unlucky,” wrote Yale
University law professor Amy Chau. This belief helps explain the relative weakness of class-based
political movements in the United States and the acceptance—however grudgingly—by most
Americans of greater disparities in wealth than are found in other developed nations, Chau and other
commentators say.
The sociologist and political economist Max Weber, writing a century ago in his influential The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argued that Protestant religions helped build
capitalism’s foundation by endorsing hard work, honesty, and frugality. That spirit survives, but in
changing forms, says the urban studies theorist Richard Florida.
In his 2005 book, The Flight of the Creative Class, Florida argues that the protest movements of
the 1960s and 1970s eventually sparked new perceptions of work. Increasingly not just hard work,
but fulfilling, interesting, fun work became the goal of the baby-boom generation that dominated the
U.S. economy in the last third of the 20th century.
But even this cultural turn reflected traditional American traits. A streak of pragmatism, skepticism,
and contrariness runs deep in the American character, historians say. “The American’s attitude toward
authority, rules, and regulations was the despair of bureaucrats and disciplinarians,” writes
Commager.
American history suggests that whatever future form it takes, the individualism and contrariness
that seem wired into the national culture will continue to fuel Americans’ hustling, striving nature.
 CHAPTER 5
Geography and Infrastructure
Education and transportation help hold together widely separated and distinct regions.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became a steelmaking center at the confluence of rivers, coal beds, and rail.
© Gianna Stadelmyer/Shutterstock

“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may… serve
as a laboratory and try novel social and economic experiments…”
JUSTICE LOUIS BRANDEIS
U.S. Supreme Court
1932

As a continental nation spanning much of the territory between two great oceans, the United States is
blessed with tremendous natural resources: a treasure of forests, seacoasts, arable land, rivers, lakes,
and minerals. School atlases of North America once located important economic resources with
simple icons placed on a map: office skyscrapers marking the Eastern Seaboard’s metropolitan
centers; factories flanking the Great Lakes industrial belt; stacks of wheat and grazing livestock on the
Great Plains; cotton in the Old South and eastern Texas; coal in the Appalachian Mountains of the
East and on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains; iron ore in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range; oil
wells in the Southwest, California, and Alaska; timber and hydropower in the Southeast and
Northwest.
Of course these resources were found in many places. The area around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
became a center of steelmaking because of the nearby coal deposits and its rail and river connections
to the rest of the country. Gary, Indiana, and Birmingham, Alabama, were big steel cities, too. John D.
Rockefeller’s oil fortunes were made in Pennsylvania, but Texas’s plains, the coastal states along the
Gulf of Mexico, southern California, and Alaska also sheltered large oil preserves. Even so, those
old schoolbook maps correctly pinpointed the different centers of America’s resource wealth from
which the economy grew.
A similar 21st-century economic map would look very different. Old manufacturing cities around
the Great Lakes have lost hundreds of thousands of production jobs over the past two decades. Other
metropolitan areas have grown on the strength of their technology and finance sectors. Even so, the
American economy retains its strongly regional character.

A NATION OF REGIONS
Distinct regions emerged in America’s first century as immigrants from different lands moved to parts
of the country where their skills might best be suited and their families welcomed. Scandinavian
farmers landed in Minnesota; Jewish immigrant tradesmen from Europe’s cities settled in New York
and other major northern cities; Mexican farm workers beat a path to California’s orchards and fields.
Settlers followed kinsmen, creating clusters of common customs that took root in each region.
Journalist Dan Morgan has observed that orderly New England “Yankees” moving from their homes
in the northeastern United States to Ohio laid out plans for future towns with schools and courthouses
“before the first harvest was in.” German immigrants erected sturdy dairy barns in Pennsylvania, built
to last, and they did, as one generation followed another. Farmers and townspeople in the East sought
land or fortune on western frontiers, braving life-threatening challenges. Those who made it
implanted a strong individualistic strain that still characterizes the western outlook.
This clustering of people, skills, and resources fostered the emergence of distinct regional
identities and personalities. Journalist Joel Garreau, in his book The Nine Nations of North America,
suggests that the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean contain separate North American
regions with different, defining characteristics. The U.S. regions are New England; the old industrial
states around the Great Lakes; the South with its historical legacies and new economic dynamism; the
breadbasket of farmlands from the Midwest to the Great Plains; the thinly settled wilderness and
desert regions along the Rocky Mountains; the center of Latino presence in Texas and the Southwest;
the nucleus of environmental activism along the Pacific Coast; and the tip of Florida with its ties to
the Caribbean.
“Some are close to being raw frontiers; others have four centuries of history. Each has a peculiar
economy; each commands a certain emotional allegiance from its citizens. These nations look
different, feel different, and sound different from each other,” Garreau wrote. “Some are clearly
divided topographically by mountains, deserts, and rivers. Others are separated by architecture,
music, language, and ways of making a living. Most importantly, each nation has a distinct prism
through which it views the world.”
Differences in character affected how each region developed. An example is water. The first
settlers reaching America from Britain brought with them the traditions of English common law.
Owners of “riparian” property—on the banks of lakes and rivers—had the right to claim use of the
“natural flow” of water past their lands. But this principle was tested by economic competition. Mill
owners, key players in the northern colonies’ economy, could claim competing rights to the same
river.
To settle these disputes, American courts created the doctrine of “reasonable use.” It is, in effect, a
requirement that users fairly share water resources. What was reasonable in these disputes varied
from state to state and region to region, but it often meant that a bigger mill or factory could make a
greater claim on a river’s flow than a smaller one. The factory cities that sprung up along the rivers of
the northeastern United States owed their existence to shared water supplies.
The California gold rush of 1848 led to an entirely different doctrine, one that met the miners’
needs and would shape the uses of water throughout the West. A miner finding a gold seam would
claim the land and water from the nearest creek to wash dirt away from the precious nuggets. The
miner’s claim established a “first-in-time, first-in-use” priority allowing him to take as much water as
he required.
After the gold rush ended, the miners’ approach to water rights became an established custom.
Unlike the principle of shared resources in the East, the miners’ “prior appropriation” doctrine, as it
became called in the West, allowed pioneering developers to claim vast amounts of water to support
the expansion of cities in arid Southern California and other southwestern states and to help western
farmers grow crops on dry land by tapping immense underground water aquifers without limitations.
Los Angeles and Las Vegas exist as metropolitan cities today because of the western water rights
doctrine.
The example of water rights illustrates the variety of regional policies, laws, and practices that
emerged within a diverse Union. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis framed the case for
the diversity of state policies in a widely noted dissenting opinion on a 1932 case before the court: “It
is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens
choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest
of the country.” States remain laboratories of policy innovation in education, energy supply, and
public transportation.

UNIFYING FORCES
The landscape of U.S. history is covered with travelers’ paths. The economic blight throughout the
South after the U.S. Civil War sent thousands of Scotch-Irish immigrants and their children drifting
westward to find open farms in Texas and native American Indian territory. “When conditions became
intolerable, they exercised their ultimate right as Americans—the right to move on,” Dan Morgan
wrote. They chalked “GTT” on abandoned front doors and departed. Their neighbors knew the
initials meant “Gone to Texas.”
The Great Depression and dust storms of the 1930s forced the greatest migration in the nation’s
history, as 300,000 people from Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas headed for California’s
fertile central valley. Fearful California authorities raised a sign in Tulsa, Oklahoma, warning, “No
Jobs in California. If you are out of work keep out!” But the Okies, as they were called, went anyway.
The movement of people was triggered by both opportunity and necessity. A long-running migration
of African Americans out of the South continued throughout the 20th century as farm mechanization
displaced hand labor. The greatest transition began during World War II, when northern steel and auto
factories offered jobs to African Americans to fill wartime vacancies. Economic necessity prevailed
over traditions of racial bias.
New England’s textile industry over the past century gradually moved to the South, where land was
cheaper and labor unions weaker. In recent decades, foreign auto and truck companies have set up
factories across the South, welcomed by growth-minded business and civic leaders. Today, once-
empty towns in Wyoming are filling up with newcomers taking jobs in the state’s expanding coal
industry.
The mobility of American workers is well documented. One study in the past decade reported that,
on average, U.S. college graduates would work for 11 employers before retirement. The U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics calculated that college graduates would hold 13 different job positions, counting
promotions and changes of employers, before reaching 38 years of age.
The willingness of Americans to “get up and go” is recorded by the national census taken every 10
years. The 1990 U.S. census found that just 60 percent of the country’s people were living in the same
state where they were born. And that average concealed considerable variations among the states.
Eighty percent of Pennsylvanians surveyed in that census, and more than 70 percent of residents of
other states, including Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Mississippi, were living in their
birth state. But only 30 percent of Florida’s residents could say the same.
Migration continued in the beginning of the 21st century. From 2000 to 2004, the northeastern
United States lost a net average of 246,000 residents a year, and the Midwest’s population declined
by an average 161,000 people a year. But the South gained 352,000 people a year on average. In the
West, Pacific Coast states lost an average 75,500 residents a year, but the Rocky Mountain states
gained an average 130,000.

UNIFYING FORCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Even as immigration, resources, and culture helped define regional differences, other economic and
cultural forces worked to break down regional barriers and integrate more closely the nation’s
regional economies. These included a common currency, a legal system that recognized the rights of
property ownership, and federal laws creating uniform policies for commerce among the states. A
crucial linkage was the development of the country’s transportation infrastructure, which smoothed
the flow of goods among all the regions.
The need for transportation networks was clear from the start. It was George Washington’s dream
to connect Virginia and other eastern states to the Ohio Valley—then the nation’s frontier—through a
canal from Washington, D.C., across the Appalachian Mountains to Ohio. But money was scarce, and
construction did not begin until 1828. Before the canal’s completion in 1850, hundreds of steamboats
were working the Mississippi River and regional railroads crisscrossed the populated eastern states.
Rail and steam had made the canal obsolete before its completion.
Samuel F.B. Morse’s development of the telegraph received crucial funding from the federal
government: a $30,000 grant enabled him to run a telegraph line from Baltimore, Maryland, to
Washington, D.C., in 1844. The determined inventor triumphed when the line instantly and magically
transmitted to Washington the results of the presidential nominating conventions held in Baltimore,
using the dot-and-dash letter code Morse had created.
Morse’s telegraph was an early demonstration of the key role that the U.S. government would play
in promoting science and commerce, a role that has continued to the present through the funding of the
U.S. space program, cancer research, and advanced energy systems. Morse believed that the
government, having bankrolled the project, should build and run a nationwide telegraph network, just
as it delivered the mail. But Washington officials were not interested, and Morse and his partners
formed a private company to run telegraph wires between Washington and New York. Five years
later, 19,000 kilometers of lines had been strung. That number was doubled by armies during the
Civil War. Before Morse’s death in 1872, telegraph lines extended 400,000 kilometers, opening a
coast-to-coast communications capability that was indispensable to the economy’s growth.
The federal government alone had the authority and capital to launch the 19th century’s greatest
infrastructure project—the transcontinental railroad. President Abraham Lincoln signed the
legislation creating a nationally chartered corporation to undertake the immense project. Two
companies got the task of building the lines, one starting in Omaha, Nebraska, the other in
Sacramento, California. The hazardous project, which had to cross deserts and overcome western
mountain ranges, employed 10,000 workers, including European settlers, freed slaves, and Chinese
immigrants.
The railroad united the nation from coast to coast. Grain, coal to make steel and illuminating gas,
copper, iron ore, petroleum, timber, clothing to supply new city department stores and consumer
catalog businesses, foodstuffs—even fruit in newly created refrigerator cars—all could cross the
country in search of markets. A trip from New York to China, which had taken 100 days around South
America’s forbidding Cape Horn, now could be completed in 30 days thanks to the continent-
spanning railroad.
 In 1912, the automobile was still a toy of the wealthy. But industrialist Carl G. Fisher, whose
company made automobile headlights, saw the possibilities of a coast-to-coast highway and
organized a campaign to create it with public contributions. The 5,456-kilometer route was called the
Lincoln Highway, and by 1925 it ran from New York to San Francisco. At the project’s start,
improved highways covered less than half of the route. Sections of the route followed historic
pathways blazed by Native Americans, colonial settlers, Civil War armies, and the Pony Express
mail service. Called “America’s Main Street,” it forged the first connection between commerce and
the automobile and inspired the construction of the Interstate Highway System beginning in the 1950s.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower had made the arduous cross-country trip by truck as a young
Army officer in 1919 and conceived of a modern limited-access highway system that would buttress
America’s internal defenses. Strongly promoted by the influential automobile and oil industries, the
government-funded highway network was under construction by 1956. Its initial route plan was
completed in 1992 at a cost of $114 billion—10 times the projected budget—and paid for almost
entirely by taxes on gasoline sales and other user fees.
By 2004, the road network covered 75,408 kilometers. It accelerated the movement of city
dwellers to suburbs, encouraged the spread of industry from older commercial centers in the North
into the South and West, and established the trucking industry as a rival for railroads in shipping
freight. It also put more Americans on the road, and the resulting increases in their already-expanding
demands for oil-based motor fuels would dominate the country’s energy policy debates.

CREATING A NATIONAL AUDIENCE

The United States is often considered a comparatively decentralized country, one with a federal
government, and yet one in which individual citizens identify strongly with their regions, states, and
municipalities. To some extent this was a function of the country’s great size, and of technological
limits. Nineteenth-century advances such as the telegraph and the transcontinental railroad helped to
bridge this distance.
But it was broadcasting—radio, then television—that helped to create truly nationwide audiences,
a more common culture, and a truly national economic market. Americans living thousands of miles
apart could experience domestic and global events simultaneously. Radio news broadcasts from the
1920s on delivered momentous news happenings, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats,”
and popular sporting events.
Broadcasting in America mostly has evolved along a privately owned, publicly regulated model.
While radio and television stations are licensed by the federal government and are required to serve
the public interest, most also are run to generate profits for their private-sector owners, who achieve
this by selling advertising time. These product pitches prime the pump of consumer spending. The
country’s top advertisers spent $150 billion promoting their wares in 2006, with 44 percent of that
going to television, 40 percent to newspapers and magazines, 7 percent to radio, and nearly 7 percent
more to fast-growing Internet advertising.
Advertising is the information source that underpins competition and promotes the consumer choice
essential for a mass-market economy. Critics also charge that advertising promotes excessive
materialism and unwise spending impulses.

THE POWER OF EDUCATION

Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, told all who
would listen that winning the war of independence from England had been hard enough. Still harder
would be the challenge of making democracy work. To fulfill that task, the new self-governing nation
had to create a broad system of free public education.
“The form of government we have assumed has created a new class of duties to every American,”
Rush said in 1783. Believing that humankind was “improvable,” Rush and other founders wanted
education to be useful. But it also had a central political purpose: Education was essential to equip
citizens to use the power of the ballot wisely.
The question was how, and at first also who. In the nation’s early decades, states followed many
paths in expanding public education, at least to the sons of white Americans. Native Americans were
excluded. African-American children in the North had separate schools; the children of slaves
received no schooling. Young girls were typically taught homemaking skills.
The reforms that would make American education a model for the world got their strongest initial
push from Horace Mann, who served as secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education
beginning in 1837. He grew up in poor circumstances and could attend school only part time, but,
with help from tutors, he attended college and then spent the rest of his life promoting a then-
revolutionary educational philosophy.
Mann campaigned for free, taxpayer-supported public schools that both rich and poor children
would attend together. While these public schools would be managed locally, Mann advocated an
encompassing system of educational improvement to apply best-teaching methods and to assess
schools’ performance. Mann’s preferred curriculum would seek to instill general Protestant moral, as
opposed to religious, precepts, and it would aim to foster a nonpartisan patriotism. Beyond that,
Mann argued that schools must strive for the highest scholarship, teaching students to educate
themselves for roles in the economy and society.
States across the country gradually adopted Mann’s ideas, thus raising the quality of broadly
available public education. Schools in poor areas and the racially segregated parts of the South
received substantially fewer resources than other school systems, a gap that has narrowed but not
been fully eliminated since the start of federal antipoverty and educational programs in the 1960s.
While debates about education methods have persisted at least since Horace Mann’s day, one
precept widely shared by most Americans is that a nation’s wealth includes not just its citizens’
private property, but also those citizens’ capacity to better themselves, says historian Lawrence A.
Cremin. “Granting its flaws, its imperfections, and even its several tragic shortcomings,” Cremin
says, the U.S. education system stands “among the two or three most significant contributions the
United States has made to the advancement of world civilization.”
By the end of the 19th century, a wide range of colleges and universities had been opened. They
included elite private universities, a group of colleges opened for African Americans, and a system of
land-grant universities established by Congress to provide education in “agriculture and mechanical
arts.” The land-grant schools have evolved today into state universities with tens of thousands of
students.
Education was a cornerstone of U.S. economic success. The 1940 federal census reported that one-
quarter of Americans over the age of 25 had attended high school and 4.6 percent had graduated from
college. A 2007 census survey found 44 percent of Americans over age 25 had graduated from high
school, 17 percent had attended college but not earned a degree, and 27 percent were college
graduates.
 At the end of World War II, Congress funded scholarships to help veterans attend college, and the
percentage of men attending colleges climbed rapidly. The percentage of women over age 25 who had
attended college did not increase significantly until after 1980. But by 2005, the percentage of women
over 25 with some college education exceeded the percentage for men, reflecting the impact of the
women’s movement and the desire of, or need for, women to join the workforce.

REGIONAL CENTERS
As international competition and foreign trade became larger factors in the U.S. economy during the
first decade of the 21st century, a shift of jobs away from the older centers of factory production
accelerated. The regions gaining jobs have been regional centers where technology and finance are
strongest, as shown by government data on job gains and losses for major U.S. cities from 2000 to
2007.
While job growth throughout the United States averaged less than 1 percent a year during those
seven years, Huntsville, Alabama, a center of U.S. space technology, had a 42 percent increase in
“professional, scientific, and technical” jobs. Austin, Texas, where semiconductor production has a
strong footing, had a 22 percent gain in the same category of technology jobs. In Northern Virginia,
whose economy is built on the presence of major contractors who work on the federal government’s
technology missions, jobs in the professional and scientific category expanded by 31 percent from
2000 to 2007, and computer system design jobs grew by the same percentage.
In contrast, Chicago, America’s “second city” and the centerpiece of the old manufacturing
Midwest, lost 19 percent of its goods-producing jobs over those seven years. South Bend, Indiana,
another old factory city, lost 18 percent of its goods-producing jobs. Detroit, Michigan, home of the
U.S. car industry, suffered a 35 percent drop in goods-producing jobs.
Well before the start of the 21st century, many had concluded that America’s economy could no
longer prosper simply by employing Yankee ingenuity to convert its wealth of natural resources into
products for sale at home and abroad. Nor could it rely on older industries that had been centerpieces
of state and regional economies to hold their places in competitive markets.
Since the 1980s, many local officials have tried to stimulate their economies by investing in their
region’s education and technology resources. Some governors have created technology
“greenhouses”—giving space in research facilities to help entrepreneurs develop new products and
processes. Universities have developed courses to equip scientists and engineers with specific skills
needed by local companies.
Such regional strategies lost momentum in the 2000s decade as the economy grew and
unemployment shrank. But the steep recession that began in 2008 was expected to renew interest in
these policies.
 CHAPTER 6
Government and the Economy
Much of America’s history has focused on the debate over the government’s role in the economy.

Rachel Carson, a government scientist, raised concerns about pesticide use that led to government environmental regulation.
© Underwood & Underwood/Corbis

“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change....There was a
strange stillness....The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and
could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the
dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and
woods and marsh.”
RACHEL CARSON
Silent Spring
1962

The United States was established on the mutually reinforcing principles of individual enterprise and
limited governmental influence. The rage of the American colonists over a range of taxes imposed by
the British Crown helped trigger the Revolutionary War in 1775. “Taxation Without Representation”
was a battle cry. The new republic’s first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, succeeded
in establishing a national bank but lost his campaign for a federal industrial policy in which
government would promote strategically important industries to strengthen the nation’s economy and
its military defense.
But this predisposition toward free enterprise was not absolute. From the beginning, the country’s
governments—federal, state, and local—have protected, regulated, and channeled the economy.
Governments have intervened to aid the interests of regions, individuals, and particular industries.
Just how far the government should go in doing this always has been a central political issue.
The legal justification for economic regulation rests on a few sections of Article I of the U.S.
Constitution. These give Congress authority to collect taxes and duties, borrow on the credit of the
nation, pay the federal government’s debts, create and regulate the value of U.S. currency, and
establish national laws governing bankruptcies and the naturalization of immigrants. States were
barred from taxing trade with other states. The Constitution’s authors recognized that the young
country had far to go to match European scientific and industrial leadership; in part for this reason,
they empowered Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights to profit from their creations
for a limited period.
The most general—and controversial—constitutional language on the economy lies in the 16 words
of Article I, Section 8, which authorize Congress to “regulate commerce” with foreign nations, with
the native American Indian tribes, and among the states. This application of the commerce clause to
the states has been used during the past century to justify far-reaching government programs on issues
the Founding Fathers could never have imagined.
Interpretation of the commerce clause divides Americans who want an activist federal government
from those who advocate a more limited central authority. The U.S. Supreme Court has often been
called on to resolve disputes over the reach of the commerce clause. Some of the important 19th-
century decisions interpreted the clause narrowly, finding that, while shipments of goods along rivers
that passed several states were covered by the commerce clause, manufacturing was a local activity
and not covered.
But the court’s decisions grew more expansive in the 20th century, upholding important New Deal
programs affecting employment and agriculture. In the 1960s, the judiciary broadly interpreted the
term “interstate commerce,” as it held that Congress did possess the power to pass the landmark civil
rights laws that forbade private businesses from engaging in racial discrimination. In these cases the
courts carefully scrutinized the evidentiary record for ties to interstate commerce, in one instance
finding it in the wheat used in the hot dog rolls served by a “private” club that practiced
discrimination in membership. Beginning in the 1990s, a number of Supreme Court rulings sought to
narrow those earlier decisions by focusing the commerce clause on controversies directly centered on
economic activities.
Although economic regulation has diminished since the 1970s, its protections still play an essential
role, affecting the health of workers; the safety of medicines and consumer products; protection of
motorists and airline passengers, bank depositors and securities investors; and the impact of business
operations on the environment.

THE REACH OF ECONOMIC REGULATION

In the life cycle of an American business, the first step is the least regulated of all. An entrepreneur
seeking to form a new business need only register the company and record it with state tax authorities.
Those entering specific occupations may require licenses or certifications, but no permission is
required to create a company.
Another set of laws and rules govern the balance of the rights of employees to keep their jobs and
the rights of employers to fire workers who aren’t performing acceptably. The rules favor the
employer. In most U.S. states, people are considered “at will” employees, meaning they can be
discharged whenever the employer chooses, except under some specific situations where the
workers’ rights are protected. People may not be fired because of their race, religion, gender, age, or
sexual preference, although terminated employees will need to show that they were wrongfully
discharged if they want to recover their jobs. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, created in 1961, can sue employers to defend workers against unjust firing.
A federal whistle-blower law protects employees who disclose their employers’ illegal activities.
If an employer has cheated the federal government, a whistle blower may receive between 15 and 30
percent of the money recovered by the government because of the company’s wrongful conduct. In one
exceptional case, a former sales manager of a leading U.S. drug company received $45 million in
2008 as his share of the payment by the company that settled a federal investigation into alleged
improper marketing of drugs widely used in the government’s Medicaid program for low-income
patients.
For more than a century, Americans have debated how far the federal government should go to
prevent dominant companies from undermining economic competition. Regulation of businesses has
usually been of one or two types. Economic regulations have tried to combat abuses by monopolies
and, at times, establish “fair” prices for specific commodities. Social regulations aim to protect the
public from unsafe food or drugs, for example, or to improve the safety of motorists in their cars.
Federal regulation arrived with the railroad age in the 19th century. The power of railroad owners
to set interstate shipping rates to their advantage led to widespread complaints and protests about
discriminatory treatment that favored some customers and penalized others. In response, the Interstate
Commerce Commission, the United States’ first economic regulatory agency, was created in 1887.
Congress gave it the authority to determine “reasonable” maximum rates and require that rates be
published to prevent secret rate agreements.
The ICC set a pattern that would be followed by other Federal regulatory agencies. Its
commissioners were full-time regulators, expected to make independent, fact-based decisions, and it
played an influential role for nearly a century before its powers were reduced in the movement
toward government deregulation. The agency was abolished in 1995.
Another early regulatory agency was the Federal Trade Commission, established in 1914. It shared
antitrust responsibility with the U.S. Justice Department for preventing abuses by powerful companies
that could dominate their industries either singly or acting with other companies. By the end of the
19th century, the concerns about economic power had focused on a series of dominant monopolies
that controlled commerce in industries as diverse as oil, steel, and tobacco, and whose operations
were often cloaked in secrecy because of hidden ownership interests. The monopolies typically took
the form of “trusts,” with shareholders giving control of their companies to a board of trustees in
return for a share of the profits in the form of dividends.
More than 2,000 mergers were made between 1897 and 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt became
president and began his campaign of trust-busting against the “malefactors of great wealth,” as he
called the business tycoons he targeted. Under Roosevelt and his successor, President William
Howard Taft, the federal government won antitrust lawsuits against most of the major monopolies,
breaking up more than 100, including John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust; J.P. Morgan’s
Northern Securities Company, which dominated the railroad business in the Northwest; and James B.
Duke’s American Tobacco trust.
Congress in 1898 gave workers the right to organize labor unions and authorized government
mediation of conflicts between labor and management. During the New Deal, Congress enacted the
National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (usually called the Wagner Act after one of its sponsors),
which legalized the rights of most private-sector workers to form labor unions, to bargain with
management over wages and working conditions, and to strike to obtain their demands. A federal
agency, the National Labor Relations Board, was established to oversee union elections and address
unfair labor complaints. The Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938, establishing a national
minimum wage, forbidding “oppressive” child labor, and providing for overtime pay in designated
occupations. It declared the goal of assuring “a minimum standard of living necessary for the health,
efficiency, and general well-being of workers.” But it also allowed employers to replace striking
workers.
In the 1930s and the decades that followed, Congress created a host of specialized regulatory
agencies. The Federal Power Commission (later renamed the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission) was created in 1930 as an independent regulatory agency which would oversee
wholesale electricity sales. The Federal Communications Commission was established in 1934 to
regulate the telephone and broadcast industries. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934
was given responsibility for overseeing securities markets. These were followed by the National
Labor Relations Board in 1935, the Civil Aeronautics Board in 1940, and the Consumer Product
Safety Commission in 1975. Commissioners of these agencies were appointed by the president. They
had to come from both major political parties and had staggered terms that began in different years,
limiting the executive branch’s ability to replace all the commissioners at once and hence its influence
over the regulators.
 The Changing Union Movement

Organizers for the Office Workers Union stage a rally on Wall Street in New York City in 1936.
© Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

When president woodrow wilson traveled to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference at the end of World
War I, the U.S. delegation he assembled included Samuel Gompers, the slight, 69-year-old son of
poor Jewish immigrants from Holland by way of Britain. Gompers had risen from an apprentice
cigar maker in New York City to become president of the American Federation of Labor, the
country’s largest union organization.
Gompers’s leadership of the AFL during the turbulent birth of the union movement defined the
unique role of labor organizations in the United States. For most of the century that followed, despite
periods of violent conflicts with company managements, U.S. labor leadership never frontally
attacked the capitalist market structure of the nation’s economy. Its goal was a greater portion of the
economy’s fruits for its members. “We shall never cease to demand more until we have received the
results of our labor,” Gompers often said. But he also held that “the worst crime against working
people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.”
Although these goals sound today to be within the boundaries of mainstream political debate,
labor’s efforts to organize railroad, mine, and factory workers a century ago produced constant
confrontations, many of them violent and some deadly. The strike by steelworkers at Andrew
Carnegie’s Homestead, Pennsylvania, plant in 1892 caused a bloody fight pitting workers and their
families and friends against company-hired guards, and ultimately state militia. The core of the
dispute was a power struggle between workers and management over work rules governing the
plant’s operations. Although Carnegie said he favored unions, he backed the goal of his deputy,
Henry Clay Frick, of regaining unchallenged control over the plant. After a series of assaults,
gunfights, and an attempted assassination of Frick, the strike was broken. Gompers’s AFL would not
take the strikers’ side, and the plant remained non-union for 40 years.
But over the following decades, labor’s demand for a larger share of the economic pie and relief
from often brutal working conditions were adopted increasingly by political reformers and then
national political candidates. Even in the darkest years of the Great Depression, when a quarter of
the nation’s workforce was unemployed, American labor unions mostly concentrated on securing
higher wages and better working conditions and not on assuming traditional management
prerogatives to make fundamental business decisions. Nor did U.S. labor unions follow the example
of European unions by embracing radical politics or forming their own political party. American
labor instead typically used its financial and organizational clout, greatest in the industrial states of
the Northeast and the Midwest, to back pro-labor political candidates.
The legitimacy of organized labor was guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935,
commonly known as the Wagner Act. Part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the law
established the rules under which workers could form unions and employers would be required to
bargain with them, and also established a National Labor Relations Board to enforce those rules.
During the prosperous years following World War II, U.S. labor unions enjoyed their greatest
success. Automobile manufacturers, to cite one example, found it preferable to negotiate generous
wages and benefits, passing through the costs to American consumers.
But global and domestic developments gradually changed the economic climate in ways
unfavorable to industrial unions. Many U.S. manufacturers expanded or shifted operations to
southern states, where labor unions were less prevalent. Beginning in the 1980s, manufacturers
turned increasingly to foreign sources of products and components. When steel and other
manufacturing plants closed down across the northeastern and midwestern states, people started
calling the region the Rust Bowl, an echo of the devastating 1930s’ Dust Bowl erosion of
midwestern farmland. In the southern Sun Belt, much domestic industrial job growth focused on new,
nonunion factories established by foreign manufacturers, Japanese and German carmakers prominent
among them.
One symbolic moment in the relative decline of organized labor occurred early in the first
administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989). Ironically, Reagan came from a union
background; a successful actor, he rose to head the Screen Actors Guild, where he led a campaign to
block communist efforts to infiltrate the union. In 1981, Reagan confronted a strike by the
Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. The strike was illegal, as federal employees
were by law permitted in many cases to unionize but prohibited from striking “against the public
interest,” as the commonly used phrase went. Reagan gave the controllers 48 hours to return to their
jobs, then fired the 11,000-plus who refused to return, replacing them with new workers and
breaking the union.
The outcome reflected the American public’s lack of sympathy for public employee strikes, and it
also reflected waning union membership. At the end of World War II, one-third of the workforce
belonged to unions. By 1983, it was 20 percent, and by 2007, the figure had dropped to 12 percent.
One bright spot for organized labor was growth in the services sector, particularly among public
service employees such as teachers, police officers, and firefighters, whose jobs could not easily be
outsourced. This trend is illustrated by the growth of the Service Employees International Union,
whose ranks nearly doubled between 1995 and 2005 to reach 1.9 million members at a time when
industrial union rolls were shrinking. The SEIU represents workers at the bottom of the income
scale, including janitors, nurses, custodial workers, and home-care providers. Many of their jobs
lack health Insurance and other benefits that come with high-paid work. Another major union, the
National Education Association, represents more than 3 million public school teachers and
employees.
Labor organizations such as the AFL-CIO (an umbrella organization of many unions), SEIU, and
NEA assisted President Barack Obama’s successful 2008 election, helping staff his voter
registration and turnout drives. The unions hoped that the incoming Obama administration would
advance new legislation strengthening their efforts to organize workplaces.
THE ANTITRUST LAWS
The government’s antitrust authority came from two laws, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and the
Clayton Act of 1914. These laws, based on common law sanctions against monopolies dating from
Roman times, had different goals. The Sherman Act attacked conspiracies among companies to fix
prices and restrain trade, and it empowered the federal government to break up monopolies into
smaller companies. The Clayton Act was directed against specific anticompetitive actions, and it
gave the government the right to review large mergers of companies that could undermine
competition.
Although antitrust prosecutions are rare, anticompetitive schemes have not disappeared, as
economist Joseph Stiglitz says. He cites efforts by the Archer Daniels Midland company in the 1990s
in cooperation with several Asian partners to monopolize the sale of several feed products and
additives. ADM, one of the largest agribusiness firms in the world, was fined $100 million, and
several executives went to prison.
But the use of antitrust laws outside the criminal realm has been anything but simple. How far
should government go to protect competition, and what does competition really mean? Thinkers of
different ideological temperaments have contested this, with courts, particularly the Supreme Court,
playing the pivotal role. From the start, there was clear focus on the conduct of dominant firms, not
their size and power alone; Theodore Roosevelt famously observed that there were both “good
trusts” and “bad trusts.”
In 1911, the Supreme Court set down its “rule of reason” in antitrust disputes, holding that only
unreasonable restraints of trade—those that had no clear economic purpose—were illegal under the
Sherman Act. A company that gained a monopoly by producing better products or following a better
strategy would not be vulnerable to antitrust action. But the use of antitrust law to deal with dominant
companies remained an unsettled issue. Federal judges hearing cases over the decades have tended to
respect long-standing legal precedents, a principle known by its Latin name, stare decisis.
Court rulings at times have reflected changes in philosophy or doctrine as new judges were
appointed by new presidents to replace retiring or deceased judges. And the judiciary tends also to
reflect the temperament of its times. In 1936, during the New Deal era, Congress passed a new
antitrust law, the Robinson-Patman Act, “to protect the independent merchant and the manufacturer
from whom he buys,” according to Representative Wright Patman, who co-authored the bill. In this
view, the goal of antitrust law was to maintain a balance between large national manufacturing and
retailing companies on one side, and the small businesses that then formed the economic center of
most communities on the other.
This idea—that the law should preserve a competitive balance in the nation’s commerce by
restraining dominant firms regardless of their conduct—was reinforced by court decisions into the
1970s. At the peak of this trend, the U.S. government was pursuing antitrust cases against IBM
Corporation, the largest computer manufacturer, and AT&T Corporation, the national telephone
monopoly.

PROTECTING COMPETITION, NOT COMPETITORS

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration adopted a different philosophy, one advocated by academics
at the University of Chicago. The “Chicago school” economists argued that antitrust law should,
above all, protect competition by putting consumers’ interests first: A single powerful firm that
lowers product prices may hurt competitors, but it benefits consumers and therefore should not run
afoul of the antitrust law.
Robert H. Bork, an antitrust authority and federal appeals court judge, argued that “it would be
hard to demonstrate that the independent druggist or the grocery man is any more solid and virtuous a
citizen than the local manager of a chain operation.” The argument that small businesses deserved
special protection from chain stores “is an ugly demand for class privileges.”
This shift in policy was reflected in a climactic antitrust case against the Microsoft Corporation.
President Bill Clinton’s Justice Department filed an antitrust suit in 1998 against Microsoft, which
controlled 90 percent of the market for personal computer operating systems software. Microsoft
allegedly had used its market power to dominate a crucial new application for computers—the
browser software that links users to the Internet.
A federal judge ruled against Microsoft, but his decision was overruled by a higher appeals court
judge. A key factor in the latter decision was that Microsoft offered its browser software for free.
While that hurt its much smaller competitors, consumers benefited, and maximizing consumer interests
served the larger interests of the economy, the court ruled. Innovation would keep competition
healthy, according to this theory. President George W. Bush decided not to continue the Justice
Department’s case against Microsoft.
Widespread social regulation began with the New Deal employment and labor laws but expanded
in the 1960s and 1970s. Both Democratic and Republican presidents joined with Congress to act on a
wide range of social concerns.
Perhaps the most striking example of how public opinion affects U.S. government processes was
the sudden growth of the environmental movement as a powerful political force in that period.
Conservation of natural resources had motivated political activists since the late 19th century, when
California preservationist John Muir led campaigns to protect wilderness areas and founded the
Sierra Club as a grassroots lobbying organization for his cause.
The movement surged in new directions in the 1960s following publication of a best-selling book,
Silent Spring, written by government biologist Rachel Carson. She warned that the growing use of
chemical pesticides was causing far-reaching damage to birds, other species, and the natural
environment. They could threaten human health as well, she said. The chemical industry attacked
Carson as an alarmist and disputed her claims. But her warnings, amplified by media coverage, won
powerful support from citizens and the U.S. government. The movement led to a ban on the widely
used pesticide DDT and the formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 to
enforce federal environmental regulation.
Unlike the independent agencies created in the 1930s, the EPA was made a part of the executive
branch, subject to the president’s direction. This approach was followed later with other new
agencies, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1970 to prevent
workplace accidents and illnesses, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1972 to regulate
unsafe products. Because of the increased presidential control, these agencies’ regulatory policies
often change with the arrival of a new president.
Federal regulations have had profound impacts in reducing health risks facing industrial and
shipyard workers; improving the safety of medicines, children’s toys, and motor vehicles; and
improving the cleanliness and quality of lakes, rivers, and the air. OSHA, for example, requires
employers to create a workplace that is “free from recognized hazards” that cause or could cause
death or serious harm. The OSHA legislation has been used by the government, often following
demands by labor unions, to control workers’ exposure to a range of industrial chemicals that cause
or may cause cancer.
Debate about such regulation has often centered on whether there is adequate scientific evidence to
justify government action and whether compliance costs paid by businesses and their consumers are
worth the environmental gain. Academic and business critics of Rachel Carson, for example, argued
that eliminating DDT removed the most effective pesticide in the fight against mosquitoes that spread
malaria. In her time, Carson—who urged that DDT be controlled, not eliminated—tipped the public
debate in favor of precautionary government regulation that could address serious threats, even though
some scientific or economic issues were still being debated. The current debate over climate change
has reached a similar point.
As historians have observed, U.S. government priorities on economic and social issues have
seldom taken a straight, unbroken path, but instead have followed the swings of public opinion
between a desire for more regulation and one for unfettered economic growth. In the 1960s, a period
when Americans challenged the status quo on a number of fronts, many were willing to discount the
industry viewpoint in the debate over pesticide regulation and to support federal intervention to
protect the environment. In the 1980s, opinion reversed direction again.

THE TIDE TURNS AGAINST REGULATION

Historian Daniel Yergin sees a turning point in public support for regulation in America’s economic
stagnation of the 1970s, when oil prices and inflation soared, and employment and stock markets
slumped. Critics of regulatory activism had long charged that regulation stifled economic growth, and
they challenged government economic interventions as unwise and unfair.
With the economic malaise of the 1970s and early 1980s, more Americans and their political
representatives were willing to give business a freer hand in order to enhance economic growth.
“With time,” wrote Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw in The Commanding Heights, “competition
increasingly came to be seen as preferable to regulation.” Stephen Breyer, an important U.S. Senate
staff member in the 1970s, put it simply: “Why regulate something if it can be done better by the
market?”
Breyer, later a U.S. Supreme Court justice, was targeting the regulation of commercial airline
service by the federal Civil Aeronautics Board. The CAB set prices for air travel on all domestic
routes and decided which airlines would serve the cities around the country. It was a regulatory
tradeoff: In return for providing unprofitable air service to smaller cities, airlines were rewarded
with high prices and profits on busy routes between large cities. By the 1970s, this seemed like an
inefficient, costly approach. Competition could do better, Congress concluded, and in 1978, airline
deregulation was enacted. The CAB was closed down in 1985.
Although the costs and benefits of airline deregulation continue to be argued, competition
dramatically changed the industry. Prices did fall on heavily traveled air routes. New airlines sprang
up to challenge the industry leaders. The new airlines paid lower wages to pilots, mechanics, and
flight attendants and could charge less money for tickets. The older airlines lost ground, falling into
damaging quarrels with their unionized pilots and other employees. Many failed. Others merged
together to try to stay competitive. The number of people flying on domestic U.S. flights soared from
240 million in 1977 to 665 million in 2000. On the other hand, flights became more crowded, delays
and lost luggage problems grew, and more questions surfaced about the airlines’ safety and
maintenance practices. But the restructuring of the airline industry marked a clear turning point
toward a reliance on markets, not government, to make the economy work for the public.

THE REGULATION OF BANKING

Since the first years of the American republic, federal and state lawmakers and government officials
have struggled to determine the right level of regulation and government control over the banking
system. When banks can respond to market forces, innovation and competitive services multiply. But
competition’s downside has been a succession of banking crises and financial panics. Overly
aggressive lending and speculative risk taking that led to these crises have, in turn, led to political
demands for tighter controls over interest rates and banking practices. A new chapter in this debate
began in response to the 2008 financial crisis.
The U.S. banking and finance industries have been remade over the past quarter-century by
globalization, deregulation, and technology. Consumers can draw cash from automated teller
machines, pay bills and switch funds between checking and savings accounts over the Internet, and
shop online for home loans. As services have expanded, the number of banks has contracted
dramatically. Between 1984 and 2003, the number of independent banks and savings associations
shrunk by half, according to one study. In 1984, a relative handful of large banks, with assets of $10
billion or more, held 42 percent of all U.S. banking assets. By 2003, that figure was 73 percent.
New computer systems to manage banking operations gave an advantage to large banks that could
afford them. The dramatic expansion of world trade and cross-border financial transactions led the
largest banks to seek a global presence. New markets arose in Asia and other regions as banking and
investment transactions flowed instantly across oceans. These trends called for and were fueled by a
steady deregulation of U.S. banking and finance rules.
Historically, the banking industry has been split between smaller, state-chartered banks that
claimed close ties to their communities, and larger national banks whose leaders sought to expand by
opening multistate branch offices, saying their size made them more secure and efficient. This split
echoes in some ways the debates in America’s early days between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas
Jefferson over urban and rural interests.
Community banks prevailed early in the 20th century, but were devastated by the 1930s banking
crisis; their limited assets left them particularly vulnerable. The country’s urbanization after World
War II reduced the political power of rural legislators, undermining their ability to defend smaller
banks, and in 1980 banking deregulation got under way.
Until the 1980s, U.S. commercial banks faced limits on the levels of interest rates they could
charge borrowers or pay to customers who deposited money. They could not take part in the
securities or insurance businesses. And their size was restricted as well. All states protected banks
within their borders by forbidding entry by banks headquartered in other states. Many states also
protected small community banks with rules restricting the number of branch offices that big banks
could open inside the state. Almost all of these regulations were removed after 1980, leaving a
banking industry that was more competitive, more concentrated, more freewheeling and more risk
taking—and more vulnerable to catastrophic failures.
As banks expanded geographically, they sought also to enter new financial arenas, including ones
forbidden to them by New Deal era legislation that separated parts of the commercial banking and
securities industries. Banks were permitted to reenter the securities business in 1999, and many major
banks subsequently created unregulated divisions, called special investment vehicles, in order to
invest in speculative mortgage-backed securities and other housing-related investments.
 Congressional advocates of a looser regulatory regime argued that greater bank freedom would
produce more modern, efficient, and innovative markets. For a time, it arguably did. The U.S.
financial sector led the way during a period of unprecedented international expansion of banking and
securities transactions.
A McKinsey Global Institute study reported that from 2000 to 2008, the sum of all financial assets
—bank deposits, stocks, and private and government bonds—soared from $92 trillion to $167
trillion, an average annual gain of 9 percent and one that far exceeded the growth in world economic
output. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board during most of that period, said that
global financial markets had grown too large and complex for regulators to oversee them adequately.
It was for Congress, he argued, to pass new laws should it wish closer oversight. But as economist
Mark Zandi, author of Financial Shock, a book about the 2008 crash, says, “Legislators and the
White House were looking for less oversight, not more.”
At this writing, the 2008 financial crisis appears to have reversed the philosophical trend toward
greater reliance on markets and the assumptions about financial deregulation that had increasingly
held sway in the United States since the end of the 1970s. A public backlash against multi-million
dollar bonuses and lavish lifestyles enjoyed by leaders of failed Wall Street firms fed demands for
tighter regulation. Greenspan himself, who retired in 2006, told a congressional committee two years
later that “those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect
shareholders’ equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
 CHAPTER 7
A U.S. Economy Linked to the World
Despite political divisions, the United States shows no sign of retreat from global engagement in
trade and investment.

Rising imports from Asia such as these cargo containers unloaded in Tacoma, Washington, created political tension in the United
States.
© AP Images

Open trade “dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic
competition, with war.…”
SECRETARY CORDELL HULL
U.S. Department of State
1948

Trade ties the United States’ economy inextricably to the markets and economies of the rest of the
world. In 2010, the U.S. gross domestic product—the output of U.S.-based workers and property—
totaled nearly $14.5 trillion. Of that, $1.8 trillion came from exports to foreign destinations. Imports
into the United States were significantly higher, totaling $2.4 trillion.
In addition to traded goods and services, huge tides of financial transactions flow across global
borders. U.S. companies and individuals directly invest more than $2 trillion abroad annually, making
the United States the world’s largest direct investor in foreign economies. It also receives more
investment from outside its borders than any other nation. As a world financial capital, New York is
the center of an international hedge fund industry of private investors that amassed nearly $1.5 trillion
in assets at the end of 2006.
While U.S. exports add to the nation’s gross domestic product, the larger volume of imports
reduces it. The trade imbalance over the past decade has created a politically sensitive tradeoff: The
surplus of imports tended to lower prices paid by American consumers, but it also depressed wages
for some workers in industries facing foreign competition. The U.S. trade deficits have also
undermined the value of the U.S. dollar compared to other major currencies, increasing concerns
about the stability of the world’s financial markets, as described in chapter 8.
What does the United States export? The largest single category in 2010 was motor vehicles and
their parts and engines, totaling $112 billion. A group of refined petroleum products were high on the
list: plastic materials ($33 billion), fuel oil ($33 billion) and other petroleum products ($33 billion).
Semiconductors ($47 billion), pharmaceuticals ($47 billion), industrial machines ($43 billion),
organic chemicals ($34 billion), electrical apparatus ($32 billion), telecommunications equipment
($32 billion), medicinal equipment ($30 billion), and civilian aircraft ($30 billion) followed on the
list of major export industry categories.
 U.S. crude oil and gas imports totaled $282 billion in 2010. Americans imported $225 billion
worth of motor vehicles, engines, and parts that year, along with $117 billion in computers and
computer accessories, $81 billion in various kinds of apparel and textiles, $85 billion in
pharmaceuticals, $48 billion in telecommunications equipment, $38 billion in televisions and VCRs,
and $35 billion worth of toys and games. The variety of traded items spans virtually everything
Americans make, wear, use, or consume.
The United States is the world’s largest agricultural exporter, with one out of every three acres
planted for export, according to U.S. government surveys. The value of U.S. exports of farm products,
animal feeds, and beverages came to $108 billion in 2010. Imports were lower at $92 billion. The
total volume of U.S. farm exports rose by 17 percent between 1997 and 2007, and in that period,
American farmers exported 45 percent of their wheat, 33 percent of their soybean production, and 60
percent of their sunflower oil crops.
As economist Paul M. Romer has observed, imports rose from 12 percent of the U.S. gross
domestic product in 1995 to about 17 percent a decade later. Foreign money provides about one-third
of U.S. domestic investment, up from 7 percent in 1995. In other words, Romer says, “The U.S. is
more open to the global economy than ever before, and the links run in both directions.”
A commitment to expand global trade has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy since the final years of
World War II, when the United States and other victorious nations adopted a series of international
compacts to promote economic stability and growth. Trade restrictions and currency devaluations
were widely considered to have worsened the 1930s Great Depression by stifling international
commerce.
Through the formation of the United Nations and the agreements on international economic policies
reached at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference in the United States, the allied powers hoped to
replace the militant nationalism that led to the war with cooperative economic policies. During the
Cold War between the Soviet bloc and the West, trade liberalization with Europe and Asia became an
instrument of U.S. foreign policy and a way to promote market capitalism in emerging nation
economies.

OPEN TRADE AND FOREIGN POLICY

U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull said in 1948 that open trade “dovetailed with peace; high tariffs,
trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war.… If we could get a freer flow of trade…
freer in the sense of fewer discriminations and obstructions…so that one country would not be deadly
jealous of another and the living standards of all countries might rise, thereby eliminating the
economic dissatisfaction that breeds war, we might have a reasonable chance of lasting peace.”
In 1948, the United States and 22 other nations signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade,
a set of international rules that significantly reduced tariffs and other barriers to the international flow
of goods. Seven other rounds of trade negotiations followed as the GATT membership expanded,
leading in 1995 to the creation of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, with the
authority to oversee member nations’ compliance with trade agreements. The GATT process has
successfully lowered tariffs on most manufactured items, stimulating a vast increase in world
commerce far beyond the vision of the Bretton Woods organizers. The exception has been agricultural
tariffs, which have remained relatively high because of the political strength of the farming sector in
both wealthy and developing nations and the desire to safeguard essential food production.
Government subsidies and tariffs on farm products have long been politically controversial.
American farmers received $16 billion in various federal subsidies in 2004. U.S. agricultural tariff
rates average 12 percent, raising the price of foreign farm products by that amount overall. In the U.S.
Congress, representatives from urban areas tend to criticize the tariffs as an unjust tax on consumers
that isn’t necessary to support American farmers. Representatives from farm states counter that U.S.
tariffs are far lower than average farm tariffs in Europe (30 percent), Japan (50 percent), and India
(114 percent).
Subsidies affect farmers’ decisions about which crops to plant. U.S. wheat production has fallen,
for example, as many farmers have switched production to corn used in the manufacture of ethanol as
a motor fuel. The U.S. government provides a cash subsidy to ethanol blenders, which, in turn,
increases the price farmers receive for supplying corn. Farm subsidies are a confrontational issue
with developing nations, which have resisted pressures to open their markets further until the United
States agrees to lower its support for its farmers.
The theoretical argument for free trade, made more than two centuries ago by Scottish economist
Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, holds that all nations prosper if each concentrates on
manufacturing and trading goods where it has a particular advantage: France its wine, Britain its
woolens. On the flip side, for Britain to put a high tariff on French wines raises the price of all wines
for British consumers.
But theory and politics began to collide in the 1960s and early 1970s when the rising manufacturing
prowess of Japan and Germany began seriously to erode U.S. production in many industries,
including steel, automobiles, shoes, and textiles. The advantages of expanded trade would be enjoyed
across the entire population, as foreign products afford consumers new choices and, often, lower
prices. The costs of trade hit much more narrowly on particular industries and their employees whose
businesses slumped or failed.
The AFL-CIO, America’s largest and most influential labor organization, had initially supported
the postwar consensus on trade expansion. But it changed direction in 1970. The threat to its union
members from the spread of technology, the escalating flow of U.S. investments into foreign
businesses, and unfair trade practices by foreign governments could no longer be ignored, said its
chief lobbyist, Andrew Biemiller.
The greatest challenge to the United States in trade in the 1980s and early 1990s came from Japan.
As the Japanese rebuilt from World War II, they steadily created an array of export-focused industries
with world-class technologies and efficiencies. In steel, automobiles, consumer electronics, and
semiconductors, Japan’s successes were built on a cohesive cultural commitment to quality. But
Japan’s critics argued that its growing trade advantage also rested on unfair trade practices that
restricted competing imports from the United States and other rivals, giving Japanese firms a safe
haven in which to grow.

RESPONSES TO FOREIGN COMPETITION

Competition from Japanese automakers, whose costs were lower and automation more advanced,
pushed the American carmaker Chrysler Corporation to the edge of bankruptcy in 1979. Chrysler was
the third largest U.S. auto manufacturer. Its collapse would have cost hundreds of thousands of jobs at
its plants and those of its suppliers. It was saved by a $3.5 billion “bailout” by the U.S. government, a
flood of orders from the U.S. military, and the exuberant salesmanship of its chief executive, Lee A.
Iacocca. Two decades later, Chrysler was purchased by Germany’s Daimler-Benz and then sold to a
private-equity company. In 2009, Chrysler went through a bankruptcy reorganization, supported by
federal financial assistance, and sold its assets to a new ownership group including the United Auto
Workers retiree healthcare trust and Italy’s Fiat automaker. The U.S. government had a temporary
minority share.
Chrysler’s 1979 crisis opened a long debate over how the United States should advance its global
trading interests. During the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush,
politicians, economists, business leaders, and labor leaders advanced different strategies for
strengthening America’s international competitiveness. Some urged new initiatives, such as
government-business partnerships to target research efforts at technological breakthroughs in leading-
edge industries such as semiconductors. Others demanded stronger defenses against trading practices
by Japan and other nations that U.S. businesses and labor unions attacked as unfair. The policy
arguments often broke down on ideological lines, with liberal Democratic legislators calling for
more intervention and Republicans protesting that the government would fail if it tried to pick
winners among industries and interests.
In some sectors, notably steel production, U.S. firms faced foreign competitors that were owned or
controlled by their governments. These foreign firms were expected to keep expanding steel
production in order to build economic capacity and provide jobs—regardless of whether the steel
industry’s customers needed more output.
As a signatory to the WTO agreement, the United States seeks to resolve such trade disputes
through that organization’s multilateral process.
But U.S. law permits unilateral actions against countries that are found to violate U.S. trade law—
although such actions could expose the United States to retaliation by these countries. The 1974 Trade
Act authorizes the U.S. trade representative—a presidentially appointed official—to investigate
complaints of unfair trade practices and to impose penalties or sanctions against foreign companies
that violate American law. In 1984, the act was amended to define failure to protect intellectual
property as an unfair trade practice.
Threatened U.S. industries have lobbied Congress for protective quotas and tariffs and for relief
from what they saw as unfair trade practices.
U.S. companies also bring complaints to the U.S. International Trade Commission, an independent
U.S. government agency authorized to impose trade restrictions on foreign suppliers that violate fair
trade laws. U.S. textile, shoe, specialty steel, consumer electronics, and color television
manufacturers all demanded protection from import competition.
But U.S. foreign policy priorities often entered the picture. Rather than jeopardize relations with its
allies, the United States under several presidential administrations sought voluntary agreements to
limit imports of steel, for example, rather than unilaterally imposing sanctions.
 A Lesson in Creative Destruction

The U.S. steel industry survives in a reduced size, continuing research and development at this facility in Monroeville,
Pennsylvania.
© AP Images

The u.s. steel industry has faced a series of crises since the mid-1970s, when steel producers
engaged in a global battle for market share, profitability, and survival. The industry’s struggles
graphically illustrate the impact—both positive and negative—of creative destruction on American
manufacturing.
Benefits have accrued to the nation as a whole. The U.S. steel industry and its workers are three
times more productive today than in the 1970s. American steel companies have invested in
advanced processes that have dramatically boosted energy efficiency while reducing pollution and
health threats to steelworkers. The sharp rise in coal and other energy prices since 2000 has helped
U.S. steel producers that process their own raw materials.
On the ledger’s other side, steel industry employment plunged from 531,000 in 1970 to 150,000 in
2008. Steelmaking cities in the American industrial heartland were battered over these decades. In a
2006 interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recounted the impact of the
industry’s fall on his hometown of Gary, Indiana, a city founded by U.S. Steel Corporation a century
ago. The city “reflects the history of industrial America. It rose with the U.S. steel industry, reached
a peak in the mid-’50s when I was growing up, and then declined very rapidly, and today is but a
shell of what it was.”
In Europe and Asia, governments have directly intervened for more than a quarter-century to help
fund a massive expansion of steelmaking capacity. They have supported both official and unofficial
import barriers and turned a blind eye on secret market-sharing agreements, according to evidence
before the U.S. International Trade Commission and the European Union’s competition authorities.
While the United States has sporadically restricted imports, it has never developed a long-term
policy to bolster the American steel industry’s competitiveness.
International trade rules permit countries to defend domestic industries against the “dumping” of
imports in their home markets at “less than normal” prices. When recessions and financial crises left
world markets filled with surplus steel, the U.S. industry sought dumping penalties to combat low-
priced imports. In response, U.S. presidents tended to impose temporary limits on imported steel, or
arrange voluntary restraints, to ease the damage to American steel firms. But the U.S. steel industry
rarely got the sustained protection it sought. For a range of political and economic reasons, U.S.
 policy has tended to resist tough trade sanctions. Cheaper steel imports benefited the auto industry
and other steel users and helped restrain inflation. And Washington has been sensitive to the outcry
from foreign governments against proposed U.S. trade penalties.
The result is a U.S. steel market that is more open to foreign ownership and imports than are any
of its major rivals. In 2007, more than 30 percent of U.S. steel consumption was imported, a far
higher import share than one finds in the markets of major U.S. steel competitors Japan, Russia,
China, and Brazil.
U.S. STEEL Corporation, the company that J.P. Morgan founded in 1901, remains the country’s
largest steel manufacturer and is ranked 10th in the world based on 2007 output. Nucor, the upstart
U.S. producer that challenged “Big steel” by fabricating new steel from scrap melted in high-
efficiency furnaces, is third in the United states and 12th in the world.
The other major U.S. steel concern is a collection of commonly owned historic companies headed
by the former Bethlehem Steel, a major producer that sank into bankruptcy in the late 1990s. They
were bought at severely discounted prices by an American investor, Wilbur L. Ross, a specialist in
distressed asset acquisitions. Ross says his approach to buying failing companies and reclaiming the
salvageable parts is “a Darwinian thing.” he told Fortune magazine in 2003, “The weaker parts get
eliminated, and the stronger ones come out stronger. Our trick is to figure out which is which, try to
climb on to the ones that can be made into the stronger ones, and then try to facilitate the demise of
the weaker ones.”
In 2004, Ross sold the U.S. plants to India’s Lakshmi Mittal and his Mittal Steel company, which
then became part of the world’s largest steel producer in 2006 when Mittal merged with Europe’s
leading steelmaker, Arcelor. Today, U.S. Steel, Arcelor Mittal, and Nucor control more than half of
U.S. production. Ten percent is owned by Russian steel interests, another beneficiary of the
relatively open U.S. steel market.
Following the late 1990s’ financial crises, when low-cost foreign steel flooded the U.S. market,
more than 40 steelmakers, distributors, and fabricators filed for bankruptcy. At that time, the U.S.
steel industry owed more than $11 billion in “unfunded” pension obligations to a growing
population of retirees, debts that it could not pay. Bankruptcy was a way out.
U.S. bankruptcy law allows companies to revoke certain contracts, including pension
commitments, which can then be passed on to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a federal
agency that insures certain pension plans and pays promised benefits upon a company’s failure.
Steelworkers retired from the insolvent companies held on to most of their pension benefits thanks to
the PBGC, but they lost the retiree health insurance coverage also promised by their former
employees.
Trade restrictions imposed by former President George W. Bush, coupled with relief from some
industry retiree health care commitments, helped the U.S. steel industry recover during the economic
boom of the early 2000s. But the recession that began in 2008 has revived fears of steel surpluses,
particularly with the growth of state-supported steelworks in Brazil, India, and China. Steelmaking
capacity in those three countries now equals one-third of the world’s total, and the debate over fair
trade in steel is back on the world’s agenda.

A BOOST FOR TRADE EXPANSION

The case for trade expansion received a major, if unexpected, boost in the 1990s from the
administration of President Bill Clinton. Clinton’s predecessor, George H.W. Bush, had made a North
American Free Trade Agreement a centerpiece of his economic program, and it awaited
congressional action as the 1992 presidential campaign arrived. Some of Clinton’s advisers urged
him to back NAFTA to demonstrate his credentials as a “new Democrat”—one who embraced trade
and technology and was not beholden to the labor leaders who adamantly opposed the agreement.
Others warned Clinton that supporting NAFTA could cost him precious electoral votes in a campaign
that featured the independent candidacy of software billionaire H. Ross Perot, who predicted that
NAFTA would send jobs flying to Mexico with a “giant sucking sound.”
Stanley Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster, argued that backing NAFTA might afford important political
gains. Even though many voters were uneasy about the Mexican trade issue, they were not against
trade itself, Greenberg said. Voters in “new economy” states such as California, he asserted, wanted
an internationalist president. Clinton agreed, declaring he would seek to improve the agreement and
then support its passage. He went on to defeat Bush in the 1992 election. Perot received 19 percent of
the popular vote, a high-water mark for no-compromise opponents of trade expansion in a national
election.
After becoming president, Clinton made congressional approval of the NAFTA agreement one of
his administration’s top priorities, gathering a coalition of Republicans and pro-trade Democrats in
both the House of Representatives and the Senate to support it. An intense nationwide debate
followed, with American labor unions warning that U.S. workers would lose jobs to Mexico, and
with U.S. business leaders urging approval of the trade pact as a way of stimulating exports.
To win support from more Democrats, Clinton’s negotiators pushed Mexico and Canada to accept
two additions to the agreement designed to improve workers’ rights and environmental protection in
Mexico. These, it was thought, would help protect American labor by preventing Mexican producers
from cutting their costs at the expense of labor and environmental standards. Congress approved the
pact in 1993.
The debate about NAFTA’s economic impact continues. During the 2008 Democratic presidential
primary campaign in Ohio—a state that has lost 400,000 manufacturing jobs this decade—leading
contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each said they favored amending NAFTA to make it
fairer to workers. But they did not call for its repeal.
Following NAFTA’s approval, the United States sought regional trade agreements with Central
American nations and negotiated bilateral agreements with Israel, Jordan, Chile, and Singapore. But
opposition grew in the House of Representatives as imports cut more deeply into U.S. manufacturing
employment. Earlier trade agreements had succeeded in Congress largely because they could be
handled under special fast-track parliamentary rules that specified firm deadlines and forbade
amendments. U.S. officials said the rules preventing major congressional amendments were essential
since they locked in the terms reached by negotiators at the bargaining table. Congress could approve
or reject the pacts, but not change them. However, a renewal of the fast-track authority in 2002 passed
by just three votes in the House, and the authority was not renewed when it expired in 2007.
When President George W. Bush in 2008 sought congressional approval of a pending trade
agreement with Colombia, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, blocked it, asserting the House
would first have to consider measures to deal with the U.S. economy’s slowdown and to “address the
economic insecurity of America’s working families.”
More recently Congress, though still divided, has warmed to some trade agreements. President
Obama signed free trade agreements with Colombia, Korea, and Panama on October 21, 2011, but the
agreements have not been implemented as of this writing.

PATENTS, COPYRIGHT, TRADEMARKS

The innovation- and technology-driven information age has pushed the question of intellectual
property to the top of the world’s trade agenda. It is an issue with a long pedigree. Strict laws
protected the trade secrets of medieval crafts guilds but facilitated knowledge sharing among guild
members. By the 15th century, European rulers were granting patents to inventors and to foreigners
willing to introduce new technologies.
Since those early times, the lines of debate have been clearly drawn: Invention of products is
bolstered when inventors have a legal right to exploit their discoveries by gaining a monopoly on
their use. But if the protection extends too long, competition suffers and improvements are held back.
The question is how to strike the balance. The inventor can seek protection by securing a patent from
the federal government, but he or she is required to describe the invention in detail. The patent holder
must be prepared to enforce it, in court if necessary, by compelling those who use the invention either
to cease or else pay for their use. In some cases, inventors prefer to keep a process or formula secret
and not disclose it by seeking a patent. Perhaps the most famous example is the formula for the
ingredients of Coca-Cola, which has remained a business secret and is kept in the vault of an Atlanta,
Georgia, bank.
Recognizing the importance of protecting inventions and encouraging innovation, the authors of the
U.S. Constitution granted Congress sole authority to create patent and trademark laws. As President
George Washington’s first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, who had experimented with new
designs for plows, reviewed the country’s first patents until his diplomatic duties became too great.
U.S. patent and trademark policies have evolved steadily since then.
To receive a patent, an inventor must satisfy basic requirements: The invention must be of a kind
that can be patented, such as a machine or a manufacturing process; it must have a useful purpose, and
it must mark a significant advance over earlier products or processes. The maximum length of patent
protection is 20 years from the date of filing. Half of all U.S. patents are issued to foreign inventors.
The United States appears by far more open to foreign inventions than its major trading partners: The
Japanese Patent Office issued 90 percent of patents to Japanese inventors in 2002, for example.
The earliest intellectual property rights agreements were the 1883 Paris Convention on Patents and
the 1886 Berne Convention, which covered artistic and written works. The Patent Cooperation Treaty
of 1970, amended several times since then, creates a standard process for patent applications among
more than 100 countries.
The most important recent agreement is the 1994 Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights, or TRIPS, which sets out a minimum list of protections that signatories must provide and
requires that whenever a signatory nation grants its own citizens any intellectual rights, it must extend
the same rights to inventors from other signatory nations. “The problem of international [copyright]
piracy has become more acute in the digital age,” public policy scholar Suzanne Scotchmer says.
Modern copyright piracy involves software, music, movies, even textbooks.
The theft of trademarks, the illegal copying of products, and the piracy of books, software, and
recorded entertainment remain a serious and provocative issue for the United States, particularly in
its trade relations with China. Nine of every 10 U.S. content DVDs sold in China are pirated, the
Motion Picture Association of America complained to Congress in 2007. Companies in China
allegedly produce counterfeit auto parts and other products that are sold abroad under the name of
well-known U.S. manufacturers, according to the U.S. Motor Equipment and Manufacturers
Association. Similar protests have been made by U.S. pharmaceutical companies, who warn that
counterfeit Chinese medicines pose potential serious health threats to unsuspecting purchasers.
Dan Glickman, a former U.S. congressman who led the Motion Picture Association of America,
told Congress that, at the national level, Chinese officials express concern and will take limited
actions, but these actions don’t extend to effective controls within China’s provinces. Overall, trade
violation enforcement is “selective, it’s arbitrary, it’s intentionally vague in some cases. And in some
cases, it’s just not very well developed,” Glickman testified to a congressional committee.
When the United States supported China’s membership in the WTO, the expectation was that the
latter’s trade policies would converge with international rules. From a U.S. perspective, the need to
make the expectation a reality remains a major trade issue.
The economic interdependence of China and the United States symbolizes the sweeping growth of
trade and cross-border financial flows as the new century began. Historian Niall Ferguson describes
a symbiotic relationship between the two states he whimsically combined as “Chimerica.”
Inexpensive Chinese imports helped keep inflation low in the United States and helped put downward
pressure on U.S. wages. China reinvested dollars received for its goods in the United States to fund
U.S. deficits, helping keep U.S. interest rates low. “As a result, it was remarkably cheap to borrow
money and remarkably profitable to run a corporation…The more China was willing to lend to the
United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow.”
Then the debt bubble burst in 2008, creating a financial crisis that is stirring the debate among
Americans about the benefits of globalization and trade. A consensus favoring open trade has
prevailed in the United States for more than half a century, buttressed by the belief that America’s
creative, entrepreneurial economy has much more to gain than lose through economic engagement
with the world.
But these values are hardest to preserve during economic hard times, when foreign competitors
become natural targets for the frustrations of a country’s unemployed and foreign practices that appear
unfair feed protectionist feelings.
America’s continued political support for a free flow of trade and finance and its openness to the
world may depend on a continued prosperity for the large majority of its citizens, many experts say.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in 2007, “if we did not place some limits on the
downside risks to individuals affected by economic change, the public at large might become less
willing to accept the dynamism that is so essential to economic progress.” But America could not turn
its back on the rest of the world’s economy, even if it somehow chose to, and as the control of the
U.S. government changed hands in 2009, there was no sign of a retreat from global engagement.
 CHAPTER 8
A New Chapter in America’s Economic Story
The United States, in its democratic way, faces up to immense economic challenges.

President Barack Obama, shown with former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, faces the greatest economic challenges in
a generation while working with a Congress that is sharply divided politically.
© AP Images

“The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require broad sacrifice.”
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
United States of America
2010

The United States and much of the developed world escaped the worst of the possible outcomes
associated with the 2008 financial crisis. But the United States and other industrial nations still faced
high unemployment and unsatisfactory economic growth. Financial emergencies in several European
nations in 2010-2011 suggested that parts of the world’s banking system might remain vulnerable.
Several conclusions seemed inescapable. Economic globalization, which has linked banking and
trade on every continent and supplied real benefits to many, also enabled the financial market
contagion to spread worldwide. Leaders of the United States and other major economies agreed that a
new system of financial market supervision and regulation was needed to restore investors’ battered
confidence in markets and to revive investment.
In 2010 Congress passed and President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act covering banks
operating in the United States. This law is designed to:

Prevent banks and other financial firms from becoming “too big to fail” and thus requiring a
government bailout should they fall into financial difficulty.
Give regulators authority to take over and shut down troubled financial firms in an orderly way
before they threaten economic stability.
Prohibit banks from engaging in speculative investments with their own accounts as opposed to
executing instructions issued by a customer.
Identify and address risks posed by complex financial products and practices.
Give the Federal Reserve authority to regulate non-bank businesses such as insurance companies
and investment firms that predominantly engage in financial activities.
Regulate such potentially risky practices as over-the-counter derivatives, mortgage-backed
securities and hedge funds.
Protect consumers from hidden fees and deceptive practices in mortgages, credit cards and other
financial products.
Protect investors through tougher regulation of credit rating agencies.

The legislation left regulators to work out key details, and their actions would determine Dodd-
Frank’s effectiveness. Despite the recognition that leading economies should harmonize their bank
regulations, this goal had not been fully achieved as of early 2012.

SOARING DEFICIT
The emergency measures taken to stimulate the economy and shore up threatened financial institutions
drastically increased the federal budget deficit, which represents the difference between federal
spending and revenue. The federal budget had already gone into deficit during the George W. Bush
administration, starting in the 2002 fiscal year. President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package of new
government spending and tax cuts brought the deficit, as measured in proportion to the entire
economy, to a level not seen since the end of World War II. The deficit for fiscal year 2011 came to
$1.3 trillion, about 8.7 percent of economic output, down from 9 percent in 2010 and 10 percent in
2009.
A bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform appointed by Obama
concluded in 2010 that the nation was on “an unsustainable fiscal path.”
The commission noted that in 2011 the first of the Baby Boom generation of 78 million citizens was
becoming eligible for Social Security and Medicare (the health program for the elderly), increasing
the cost of these programs. If U.S. deficits continue to grow at the current pace, by 2025 federal tax
collections and other revenue would cover only interest payments on the federal debt and
“entitlement” programs (Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid, the health program for the poor;
veterans’ pensions and benefits). Nothing would be left for defense programs or federal support for
education, transportation, housing, research and all the rest of government services.
As the 2000s decade proceeded, foreign investors financed an increasing share of U.S. government
debt. In mid-2000, this debt totaled $1 trillion. Eight years later, the total was $2.7 trillion, with
foreign government-owned banks or “sovereign” investment funds holding the fastest-growing share.
Foreign entities used the U.S. dollars flowing overseas for manufactured goods and oil to purchase
U.S. Treasury securities and other U.S. government debt. The United States, in essence, was
borrowing from the future to finance current consumption.
U.S. government officials across the political spectrum agreed on the need to realign spending with
revenues although they disagreed over the best strategy for doing so. After Republican Party gains in
the November 2010 elections, passing legislation on spending and taxes became more protracted and
difficult. “The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require broad sacrifice,”
President Obama said. He proposed a policy of combining spending cuts with a tax increase for a
relatively small number of families with the highest incomes, but Republicans in Congress blocked
any tax rise.

INCOME DISPARITY
Another challenge facing economic policymakers and legislators was mounting evidence that
economic growth increasingly has concentrated income and wealth gains among a small minority of
the U.S. population.
Possible factors for this shift include: the decline in well-paid manufacturing jobs and a shift
toward lower-paid service employment, the growing employment disadvantages of less-educated
workers in a highly technical economy and the burden of rising medical care costs for America’s
lower- and middle-income families. Because of these and other factors, the average wage of U.S.
non-farm workers has not increased appreciably since 1980, after taking inflation into account.
Optimistic observers noted that the United States still could bring important resources to bear on
the economic challenges, among them its entrepreneurial culture, the depth and breadth of its
educational system and the freedom it afforded capital to seek the highest returns.
Applying these real strengths to the nation’s equally real challenges will be a great test for the
current generation of Americans. As Kent H. Hughes of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars writes, “It is hard to see how the United States will win the contest of ideas in the 21st
century without continued economic growth, technological innovation, improved education, and
broad-based equality of opportunity.”
Hughes adds that “the country will need to take steps to restore national trust in key institutions,
rediscover a sense of national purpose, restore its commitment to shared gains and shared sacrifices,
and renew its sense of American identity.” But it also is true that Americans have faced and
surmounted such challenges in the past, as President Obama reminded the nation in his 2009 inaugural
address. “Starting today,” he said, “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the
work of remaking America.”
Outline of the U.S. Economy
2012 Updated Edition
Published in 2012 by: Bureau of International Information Programs United States Department of
State
Bureau of International Information Programs
Coordinator: Dawn McCall
Executive Editor: Nicholas Namba
Editor in Chief: Michael Jay Friedman
Managing Editor: Bruce Odessey
design: David Hamill
Graphs: Erin Riggs
Photo Editor: Maggie Sliker

ISBN (paper) 978–1–622–39961–1

ISBN (PDF)) 978–1–622–39962–8
ISBN (ePub-fixed layout) 978–1–622–39963–5
ISBN (ePub) 978–1–622–39964–2
ISBN (mobi) 978–1–622–39965–9

FRONT COVER
Top illustration © Dave Cutler / Stock Illustration Source
Bottom illustration © Jane Sterrett / Stock Illustration Source
ABOUT THIS EDITION
This edition updates the 2009 revision by Peter Behr, a former business editor and reporter for the
Washington Post. Previous editions of this title were published by the U.S. Information Agency
beginning in 1981 and by the U.S. State Department since 1999.