Summary of Alan Greenspan & Adrian Wooldridge's Capitalism in America , livre ebook

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43 pages

English

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The term colony evokes images of exploitation and marginalization. However, America was extremely fortunate in that it was blessed with rich resources and a relatively liberal regime.
#2 The Constitution created America’s unique democratic society, in which the majority could not trample on people’s rights to own private property, engage in trade, and keep the fruits of their labor.
#3 America was born in the American Revolution, but was still a subsistence economy. The country’s financial system was primitive compared with the mother country’s. Americans grew their own food, spun their own cloth, made their own clothes, and most tiresomely, made their own soap and candles from vats of boiled animal fat.
#4 Americans were prisoners of climate and ignorance. They did not have up-to-date information about what was happening in the world, and it took weeks for news to travel from one region to another.

Sujets

Business

Economics

Economic History

Informations

Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	24 juillet 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9798822547506
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Insights on Alan Greenspan & Adrian Wooldridge's Capitalism in America
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The term colony evokes images of exploitation and marginalization. However, America was extremely fortunate in that it was blessed with rich resources and a relatively liberal regime.

#2

The Constitution created America’s unique democratic society, in which the majority could not trample on people’s rights to own private property, engage in trade, and keep the fruits of their labor.

#3

America was born in the American Revolution, but was still a subsistence economy. The country’s financial system was primitive compared with the mother country’s. Americans grew their own food, spun their own cloth, made their own clothes, and most tiresomely, made their own soap and candles from vats of boiled animal fat.

#4

Americans were prisoners of climate and ignorance. They did not have up-to-date information about what was happening in the world, and it took weeks for news to travel from one region to another.

#5

During the American Revolution, the government did not have the basic information about the country that it needed to make decisions. The government started collecting data on the population in 1840, and on manufacturing and agriculture in 1840.

#6

America was rich in trees, and English settlers commented on how many more trees there were than in deforested England. They saw the lineaments of civilized life in America’s mass of trees: furniture for their houses, fuel for their hearths and smithies, masts and hulls for their boats, parts for their machines.

#7

The American economy was severely damaged during the War of Independence, and it took decades to recover. The war devastated America’s fragile economy. Rival armies destroyed towns and homesteads, and British warships disrupted trade.

#8

After the war, America struggled to find its place in a changed world. The country experienced its greatest economic income slump ever, and the government lacked the ability to raise revenue in the form of taxes. Nonetheless, the American treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, put the nation’s public finances in order.

#9

America’s real GDP grew by an average of 3. 7 percent a year from 1800 to 1850. Income per head increased by 40 percent.

#10

The panic of 1819 was America’s first experience of a financial crisis in peacetime. The pattern of boom and bust cycles was set in 1837, 1857, 1873, 1884, 1893, 1896, and 1907.

#11

The American culture was extremely open and dynamic. It was reinforced by two powerful influences: Protestants valued hard work as a proof of virtue, and the Enlightenment questioned the value of hierarchy and authority.

#12

The American Dream was to have a job that allowed you to work anywhere, any time, and any day of the week. The need for labor was so great that it changed the balance of power: Americans had the option of saying Take this job and shove it.

#13

Many entrepreneurs were combined technical and commercial savvy. Deere created a national network of travelers to sell his plows, and satisfied demand by creating a national network of sales agents. McCormick pioneered many of the staples of modern business.

#14

Americans were so productive in part because they had a reasonable confidence that they would enjoy the fruits of their labor. The Patent Act of 1790 turned America into a single intellectual market and gave inventors exclusive rights for fourteen years.

#15

Americans were also successful at making horses more productive. They practiced horse eugenics by selecting the best horses for breeding, and they used horses in all sorts of clever ways.

#16

The canal era was triggered by the construction of the Erie Canal from Albany, New York, to Buffalo, New York, in 1817. It cut the costs of shipping goods by 75 percent and the time involved by 67 percent. It spurred westward expansion: Buffalo became a jumping-off point for the lakes and helped turn lakeside cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago into urban hubs.

#17

The first application of steam engines was to transportation, and they were used to create the first steam-powered transportation devices, boats. American railroads were built much faster than their European counterparts, and they were able to acquire rights-of-way much easier because the country was so empty.

#18

The American railway boom was very American. It was a lot of creative destruction, with many rail barons going bust spectacularly. The railroads were also extremely efficient, which allowed them to cut the cost of overland transportation by 96 percent.

#19

The third revolution was an information revolution. Information-starved Americans realized the importance of the old adage that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The most important breakthrough in information was the telegraph, which dramatically reduced the time it took to send information.

#20

The telegraph, which was an early form of the telephone, allowed for global communication. It was difficult to lay the cable across the ocean, but it was worth the effort. The cable reduced the time lag for sending a message across the Atlantic by ship to about an hour or two.

#21

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the birth of a succession of national societies such as the American Bible Society, the American Education Society, and the American Anti-Slavery Society.

#22

Economic growth increased people’s standard of living. America was a young republic powered by revolutionary ideals and dedicated to the god of growth. However, America was also divided by two different visions of the good society: one dynamic and the other static.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

There were many different versions of America in this era, and the country was able to draw from these different traditions to help build its economy.

#2

From 1776 to 1865, America was split into two groups, industrial modernizers and agrarian slaveholders. The dispute between them determined the course of American history.

#3

Jefferson and Hamilton were two of the Founding Fathers, and they constantly argued about the future of America. Jefferson believed that America’s survival depended on its ability to promote manly virtues, while Hamilton believed that economic progress would lead to moral progress.

#4

Jefferson hated Hamilton’s method for promoting economic progress, just as he hated the progress itself. He believed that America was beginning to look like Hamilton’s commercial economy, and he began to worry that he was behind the times.

#5

Jefferson was a pragmatist and an opportunist who used Hamiltonian means to pursue Jeffersonian ends. He purchased Louisiana from Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803, which hugely increased America’s territory. It also gave a boost to the commercial forces that Jefferson had once feared.

#6

Andrew Jackson was the figure who reconciled the agrarian and industrial visions of America. He was a populist, and he strongly supported sound money and the gold standard. He reduced the federal debt to zero for three years in a row for the first and last time in American history.

#7

For its first seven decades as a nation, the United States was divided into two different economies: the capitalist economy of the North and the slave-owning economy of the South. New England was a land of textile mills powered by water, while the South was a land of plantations powered by slaves.

#8

The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of innovation in the textile industry, as northern textile makers turned their region into a spinning and weaving powerhouse. The power loom, which allowed factories to weave yarn into cloth under a single roof, reduced the cost of production by half.

#9

The Yankees, as they spread to the Midwest, revolutionized agriculture as well as industry. They created the infrastructure of a modern commercial nation. The South fell under the sway of King Cotton.

#10

The invention of the cotton gin gave an ancient evil a new lease on life in the South. By 1860, about 4 million of America’s 4. 5 million African Americans were slaves, and almost all of them were owned by Southern planters.