Two Centuries of American Macroeconomic Growth From Exploitation of Resource Abundance to Knowledge-Driven Development

This monograph is concerned with the nature of the process of macroeconomic growth that has characterized the U. S. experience, and manifested itself in the changing pace and sources of the continuing rise real output per capita over the course of the past two hundred years. A key observation that emerges from the long-term quantitative economic record is that the proximate sources of increases in real GDP per head in the century between 1889 and 1999 were quite different from those which obtained during the first hundred years of American national experience. Baldly put, the economy's ascent to a position of twentieth century global industrial leadership entailed a transition from growth based upon the interdependent development and extensive exploitation of its natural resources and the substitution of tangible capital for labor, towards a the maintenance of an productivity leadership through rising rates of intangible investment in the formation and exploitation of technological and organizational knowledge. The study's scope is indicated by the following: