merica was middle-class for the very start - the people who came first were hyper-strivers from England. There were no vested interests, no ranks, no….

By 18th century standards, they [Great Britain] were the freest, most dynamic, most willing to challenge tradition and authority. They had the highes….

We demonstrated what you could do when a band of entrepreneurs settles an empty country with vast resources. The Chinese have a billion people and ar….

John D. Rockefeller was certainly the first to create a consumer product that was sold literally throughout the entire world. Those blue 5-gallon can….

The drive to scale in almost every endeavor. The British went very large scale in ship building and a few other industries. Their steel plants were b….

Credit is the air that financial markets breathe, and when the air is poisoned, there's no place to hide..

Military power tends to be a function of economic power, and the British Navy was the essential capability for establishing the imperial sway - which….

After I finished the Tycoons - on post-Civil War development - I realized how much I didn't know about the first half of the century, even though the….

My neck is too arthritic to snap around. The big shift in my perspective that happened in the writing process, however, was the paramount importance ….

I would speculate that a critical mass of the population has to internalize a middle class outlook first. International aid experience has demonstrat….

The evolution was always to greater scale and speed. Other countries did that here and there - GB in textiles, Germany in steel - but we went in that….

Business schools tend to focus on topics that are suitable to blackboards, so they overemphasize organization and finance. Until very recently, they ….

The kind of precision manufacturing epitomized in the armories, while it was important, was only a small share of the economy until quite late in the….

Land Grant College Act is the jewel of Republican reform. It had not occurred to any other country to educate their farmers and workers. When the Bri….

The paradigm of the development of natural resource-based industry - meatpacking, lard, timber, iron and coal, grain. Cincinnati's lard processing pl….

It wasn't openly talked about very much, in the sense that people said they wanted to beat GB at this or that, but there would however be sidelong co….

It may not be replicable: One of the hardest transition that a developing country can make is the transition to middle-class status. Governments have….

n truth, we don't know a whole lot of what Simeon North did. He did manage to match John Hall's ability to make interchangeable parts, but it's not c….

It's clear that North took some original steps in that direction, but Hall probably had the most complete approach and should get the most credit. Bu….

Whitney proved to be a competent manufacturer, but wasn't an original inventor to any important degree. Thomas Blanchard was a true genius: his stock….

I find her [Frances Trollope] simply delightful, even in her prejudices and cantankerousness. It is a gift to an author to find a funny, wry, percept….