The US has the largest economy in the world. How did it get there? It is a history of booms and busts; science and technology; and heroes and scoundrels.

1. United States of America
Economic Powerhouse

2. Beginnings
• Alexander Hamilton
• Federalism
• Strong Nation State
• Strong Executive
• Central Bank
• Stock Market
• Manufacturing
• National Debt
• Taxes
• Standing Army
• Thomas Jefferson
• States Rights
• Small National
Government
• Agriculture
• No Taxes
• No Army; just Militias

3. Ideal of Self Made Man
• Benjamin Franklin
– Autobiography
– Early to Bed, Early to
Rise
– A Penny Saved,

4. Manifest Destiny
• Natural Resources
• Louisiana Purchase
• Rivers
• Westward Movement
• 1849: Gold!!!

5. Industrial Revolution

6. Civil War
• Industrial North
• Agricultural South
• Slavery

7. Reconstruction
• Railroads
• Telegraph
• Morse Code

8. Gilded Age
• Standard Oil
• John D. Rockefeller
• JP Morgan
– US Steel
– Con Edison
• Railroad Tycoons
– Leland Stanford
– Huntington
– Jay Gould
– Commodore Vanderbuilt

9. Teddy Roosevelt
• Monopolies
• Anti Trust Legislation

10. Great Depression
• October 29, 1929
• Black Monday
• Bank runs
• Unemployment
• Homeless
• FDR

11. WW II
• Industrial might
• DC3
• Tanks
• Petroleum Fuels
• Liberty Ships
– Henry Kaiser
• Ammunition
• Science
– Vannevar Bush
– Alfred Loomis
• Radar
• Atom Bomb
– Leslie Groves
– Robert Oppenheimer

12. Alfred Loomis
The Untold Story of the American
Entrepreneur Who Helped Build the Atomic
Bomb and Defeat the Nazis.
Legendary financier, philanthropist, and
society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the
most visionary scientific minds of the
twentieth century -- Albert Einstein, Werner
Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and
others -- at his state-of-the-art laboratory in
Tuxedo Park, New York, in the late 1930s. He
established a top-secret defense laboratory
at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering
research into new, high-powered radar
detection systems that helped defeat the
German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest
Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist,
he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund
research in nuclear fission, which led to the
development of the atomic bomb.

13. Science and War
• The Chemists won WW I
• The Physicists won WW II
• The Mathematicians will win WW III
– Cyber war

14. Post War Boom
• Pent up Demand
• Cars
– Motels/Interstate Hwys
• Homes
– Suburbs/BBQs
• GI Bill
– University Education
• Marshall Plan
– Rebuild Europe

15. 60s
• Social Change
• Counter Culture
• Civil Rights
• Women’s Movement
• Space Race
• Vietnam
– Guns and Butter

16. Yuppies
• Hippies get acquisitive
and become lawyers
• Women enter the
workforce in big
numbers

17. Silicon Valley
• HP
• Fairchild
• Intel
• Microsoft
• Apple

18. WWW
• Internet
• Web
• WiFi
• Cellular Networks
• Smartphones
• How do these tools
effect productivity?

19. Financial Crisis 2008
• Housing Market
• Securitized mortgages
• Ratings Agencies
• Bad bets on housing
market
• Derivatives
• CDS
• Leverage

20. Recovery
• Labor sluggish
• Automation
• Robots and AI
• Race Against the
Machines
• Corporate Profits
Recovered
• Wages Stagnant