How America Became an Economic Superpower
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Er, the American push westwards was quite nightmarish and genocidal, and US homesteaders appropriated land much like Hitler planned to do.
As for why the USSR didn't turn into the US, it's probably related to poor economic organization, too much resources put into the military, too little international trade, and a dependency on primary resources like oil, with all those factors and others interacting in fun ways.
The other thing is that the US sits on very wealthy land that's in the temperate zone. Large amounts of Russia is difficult to access and the viable parts spend more of the year affected by bad weather. You can even see it in the national stereotypes - the US citizen wears a t-shirt and jeans, the Russian citizen wears an ushanka and heavy coat.
Similarly, once the US conquered the west, it was in a situation where there was no real credible military threat bordering it - it could afford to shift more defence spending to power projection rather than home defence. It's not to say political ideologies had nothing to do with the differences in success stories, just that ideology alone is not responsible.
That makes it sound as if Russia and the former USSR are one and the same. They're not.
A better way to restate that sentence is, "The USSR under delivered, in spite of its vast resources - natural and human/intellectual."
And you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why. In an atmosphere where fear and uncertainty rules, individual and group creativity suffers.
Russia is doing better in that area, though there's still a lot of room for improvement. But it is a young country. Some old habits from the former USSR still lingers, which is expected given that most of the current leadership grew up in the former USSR. It take at least one generation to shake bad habits.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/20/business/east-germany-s-ec...
Some would suggest it was the lack of incentives to independently pursue success. There's little point in working hard to get ahead if it is going to be taken from you.
(This is why the political scene is so hard to decipher, nobody in russia pays any attention to the stated aims or motives and conspiracy theories are the default mindset)
Think about eminent domain and how it has and can be used against those with a property that the ruling class needs to have.
That might seem like a stretch, but not if you're at the receiving end.
It wasn't productive like the US territory was. It was mostly inhospitable tundra. The bolsheviks weren't an economic superpower for the same reason the canadians aren't.
> Still to this day, Russia underdelivers, given its vast resources --natural and human/intellectual.
Russia is the 8th largest economy in the world.
Russia's problem is that their vast territory is also their achilles heel. They stole land from japan and skorea and every other nation on its border. China, germany, turkey, ukraine, iran, mongolia, etc...
Their land is a blessing AND a curse. Russia can't fully trade with china or japan because of territorial issues. So they didn't fully capitalize on japan's economic miracle. And now they aren't fully capitalizing on china's economic miracle.
Politics and power are an unforgiving discipline. If russia keeps missing out on opportunities and keeps falling behind, the russian empire is going to collapse. Doesn't matter how many nukes they have or now powerful they think they are.
What separates the US and russia is this. After ww2, russia stole a bunch of islands from japan and annexed it. That's why japan and russia still haven't signed a peace treaty. The US returned okinawa. We didn't steal it so we can have normal relations with japan.
Maybe you have a point, but it's not the whole point. I think they wear a heavy shackle of ancient culture. One which has acclimatized them over centuries to a serf-state mindset they have not broken out of. It's very patriarchal (or statist). The state is their master in more ways than one. It'll take a cultural shift in the newer generations to shake it and allow them to achieve their potential.
I think the Spaniards (or Iberians), given their religion, were way more accepting of other peoples and readily mixed --which is why you end up with so many meztizos in LAm --whereas initial NA settlers were less likely to reproduce with FN peoples.
Ah, but the official mythology is that they used every part.
Sure. They herded massive groups of buffalo off buffalo jumps, which are essentially small cliffs, so that they'd fall and crush each other when they went off the edge, and they'd use every part of all of the hundreds of full-grown buffalo they killed.
But everyone knows the White Man invented waste. Thus it was, thus it must ever be.
But I'm open to the idea if you have more than just hand-waving to offer.
I, for one, disagree with the idea that the "buffalo jump" was all that prevalent and had a measurable impact, compared to the whites driving the buffalos to what they are now....
I lived next to one. Try again.
So? That doesn't make it "prevalent", and even less makes it important next to white era's extinction of buffalo.
The only thing "I lived next to one" proves is that at least one existed. And we knew that already -- we also knew a lot more than one existed.
I am not.
No, he just took it 3-4 orders of magnitude higher.
(And even as a white man, I see some racism in your comment).
In total over time, maybe. However, it is pretty clear who got the number of bison to less than 600 in the 19th century.
>Truth is that American's ancestors where quite genocidal among other things. To the point of almost exterminating most of North America's population. Just like the Buffalo.
If the point about the buffalo is correct, then how does this post otherwise misrepresent Native Americans? It seems like you latched onto this mention of buffalo to make a completely unrelated point about Native Americans.
Of course they are.
We shouldn't use this to neutralize who did the really horrible things to whom though. They were the victims here.
The disease hypothesis is bullshit. Some retard wrote a silly book about it and nytimes pushed it like it was gospel.
The royal proclamation of 1763 set the border between the colonists and the indians at the appalachian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763
Even after disease supposedly wiped out the indians, we could only push the indians past the appalachians in the 1760s.
Settlers were paid for each indian scalp they got. Indian men, women and children were hunted and slaughtered wholesale.
Idiots like Jared Diamond might try to absolve our sins by lying about how the indians died. But the truth of how the west was won is no so convenient. It was brutal and rapacious.
I mean, we didn't even push the natives past the appalachian mountains until the 1760s and that idiot jared diamond wants us to believe the natives essentially died off in the 1500s.
Do you have any sources for that. The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.
It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.
Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.
Yes, it called history and biology. Disease doesn't work that way and history proves it didn't work that way.
> The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.
Sure, but jared diamond's silly book is what made it mainstream. No serious historian takes that theory serious because science and history says that didn't happen.
> It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.
North American civilization didn't get completely destroyed until well after the civil war when mass european migration and the invention of machine guns, the expansion of railroads, etc gave american settlers a huge advantage.
> Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.
And like I said, the border that the colonists and the indians drew in 1763 was the appalachian mountains. The colonists were confined to a tiny sliver of land on the eastern seaboard. If disease wiped out the natives, why would the colonists take so little land? Why would the border between "america" and indian lands be divided in such a manner.
The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.
Highly doubtful. The Dorset culture probably died off due to change in climate and their failure to adapt rather than inuits traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to kill the dorset.
Not to mention that these dorset was a tiny population already in significant decline.
There is a world of difference between the inuits and dorsets. Hell the norse and europeans were in contact with dorset long before the inuit. Perhaps it was european "disease" or raids that wipe them out...
Nobody really knows. But what we know is that they were a dying peoples long before the inuits came around.
It's simply not plausible that such a widely dispersed culture would disappear in such a short time due to climate change.
Disease transmitted from Norse settlers/traders being the cause is also not plausible, as the Dorset disappeared first in the Western stretch of Northern N. America, where the Thule were expanding from, rather than the East, where they would have first had contact with the Norse. Competition from an invasive culture, the Thule, is the likely cause.
Absolutely. But lets also not pretend that the natives were racially motivated genocidal maniacs either.
> The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times.
Sure. But they need to do so in order to survive. And lets not forget that we hunted the comanche like animals and wiped them out. Settlers were encouraged to hunt indians and bring their scalps in exchange of money.
> There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture.
Even if they were the most peaceful buddhists, they would have been wiped out. We wanted their land and they simply had no choice. It's pretty idiotic to blame the comanches for fighting back.
> It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves.
It was wrong no matter what century you are in.
> We simply don't have the context to judge them.
If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.
What happened to the natives was the greatest extermination campaign in history. The holocaust was a joke compared to what happened to the natives.
To emphasize this point, there are more jews in the US than there are natives...
All the rest are good points, but this is an emotional non-sequitur. The reason we don't have context to judge is because we live lives of comfort today, we have no idea what it was like to move into the Wild West and the danger and hardship that entailed.
Of course I agree genocide is bad, that doesn't make me equipped to judge people who lived 200 years ago based on hazy historical generalities.
The American version was also very slow-motion and not all that universal. If you take the tack of "We Shall Remain", that part of Manifest Destiny looks cast around the time of King Phillip's War. Throw in Jackson's denial of Worcester v. Georgia...
Various figures treated the Amerind at least as distinctly human, just ... unfortunately placed. General George Crook seems to be one of the more sympathetic. I'm also biased by Daniel Goldhagen's work in what he calls "eliminationism" and it's not clear that the... management of the Amerind qualifies, by his own words. IMO, Goldhagen clarifies many of the touchy rough edges of "genocide" in an attempt to make it distinct from plain old warfare.
> On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed.
I think the guy forgot that for most of its existence, the British empire was powered by slave labor, and that the cotton plantations of the US were also powered by slave labor.
Even modern, industrial economies of today are in a sense powered by slave labor. Visit the sweatshops in the Brooklyn and Queens boroughs of NYC to see first-hand what slave labor is like. I've not visited Bangladesh or China, but I can imagine what the sweatshops in those places are like.
> I think the guy forgot that for most of its existence,
> the British empire was powered by slave labor, and that
> the cotton plantations of the US were also powered by
> slave labor.
I do think people overlook the importance of the Mississippi in the growth of the US. It is an amazing route for goods right in the middle of the country. Even today, barge traffic is a huge driver of export goods.
// on a side note - I am pretty sure I will disagree with this book if the article is any indication, although I will have to read the book first. The 1800s (laws & transportation) were very important for the US and it could be said the early 1900s did a number on economic freedom. The one line in the article can be argued. Also, 1945 was not as important as 1946-48 for the baby boom.
The US cotton plantations were part of a primarily agricultural economy, which is arguably a different thing than an industrial economy. There was industry, but it was mostly not slave based.
Cotton, Antebellum cotton, was the - the feedstock for the British textile portion of the Industrial Revolution - which was in Britain, the main event. Cotton went "offline" during the American Civil War so the Brits simply found other sources elsewhere in the Empire.
IMO, we can view American chattel slavery as in an intermediate state between Mercantilist ... modes and Capitalist modes. Once a royal patent on a trade system was granted, it was very difficult for a king to control the patent holder. See also Adam Smith...
Once (proto) capitalism began in earnest in the U.S., slavery presented challenges to the establishment of law that proved insurmountable. Free labor in the North also saw fit to take up arms against slavery. Lincoln saw this clearly and it's worth taking him both metaphorically/poetically as well as literally.
It's all a tangled mess of counterfactuals. The aristocrats in the South were definitely riding the tiger, and could not afford to compromise on the Peculiar Institution.
The threat of losing your job if you don't work under stipulated conditions, especially when those conditions are live threatening, creates a slave-labor condition.
Sure, you could quit, but you've got bills to pay and mouths to feed, so you slave on.
Take what's happening to foreign workers in Qatar, for example. There's really no direct threat of violence, but workers die daily because the working conditions are that dangerous.
The US didn't become a superpower only because of its natural resources and immense territory, yes, but I think it may have played a part.
Because when Americans do it, it's forgivable, inconsequential, wholesome, even valiant, but when Germans do it, it's monstrous.
The article attributes most of American strengths to geographical advantages and previous geopolitical moves. It's quite a long article, and even if you don't agree with Stratfor views, I would really recommend reading it.
[1] : http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united-states-p...
To sum it up in one word: Rivers. It seems somewhat counter intuitive, but the article explains how a network of navigable rivers makes all the difference. If the factors in an economy are Land + Labor + Capital, rivers drastically increase the capital side of things. Generally it costs 10X less to ship goods via water as opposed to over land. Countries that are well connected by rivers can ship things much more cheaply and as a result have a lot more money to re-invest in growth. Arid farming plains and having few access points for hostile neighbors also help a lot, but rivers make a big difference. This Stratfor report had several other unexpected insights along these lines and was definitely worth the read.
"It is worth briefly explaining why Stratfor fixates on navigable rivers as opposed to coastlines. First, navigable rivers by definition service twice the land area of a coastline (rivers have two banks, coasts only one). Second, rivers are not subject to tidal forces, greatly easing the construction and maintenance of supporting infrastructure. Third, storm surges often accompany oceanic storms, which force the evacuation of oceanic ports. None of this eliminates the usefulness of coastal ports, but in terms of the capacity to generate capital, coastal regions are a poor second compared to lands with navigable rivers."
This is just after explaining all the economic benefits to a river system like that of the Mississippi. I am just wondering now about the time after which the ice caps have receded and the river system in question occupies more land; would it be wrong to think that this could possibly increase its potential economic output?
http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_26504408/mississippi-...
It's from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. It shows the amount of freight (by value, tons, and ton-miles) for each transportation method.
Water (not just the mississippi, but all inland waterways and costal barges) is 6% by tons, 1% by value, and 9% by ton-miles.
The larger the economy gets, the more goods must be shipped via other modes. At the end of the day, only so much can fit on the Mississippi.
From a little farther in the same article "The water transportation system, including coastal and inland-waterway barge service, is critically important for the transportation of heavy, bulky grains, clays, gravels, etc."
It goes on to talk about adding capacity to the waterways. Plus, you seem to be skipping the multimode column.
> The larger the economy gets, the more goods must be shipped via other modes. At the end of the day, only so much can fit on the Mississippi.
The report you cite is basically is talking about the need for more capacity of our roads. The Mississippi River barge transport is not going away (and expanding) because it is cheap with good infrastructure.
Yes and no. People nowadays really don't even remember the end of World War I. Russian troops began shooting their officers and marching back to St. Petersburg and Moscow. Earlier that year were the massive Nivelle mutinies of French enlisted men. There were the German naval mutinies of 1918, followed by a powerful but ultimately failed revolution in Germany by communists (put down by the socialist-run government - echoes of the French communist party ending the 1968 left-communist uprising which caused de Gaulle to flee France). Hungarian workers had an uprising and established a Soviet republic in 1919, which lasted until it was defeated by an invasion by Romania. Italy saw the Biennio Rosso with factory occupations in Turin etc. which were finally ended when Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. As late as 1976 the Italian communist party was getting over 1/3 of the vote in Italy, with the Socialist party (with a hammer and sickle emblem) getting 9% of the vote, and the left-communist Maoists getting over half a million votes (never mind the non-voting anarchists/autonomists).
Europe mobilized its population twice in the twentieth century. The first time Russia became communist, the second time everything east of Steppin to Trieste became communist. With Europe needing the US with NATO, Marshall plan, Gladio etc. to keep post-WWI western Europe (Spain, Italy and France) from becoming communist. Eventually Europe's capitalists learned going to war with one another's countries didn't help them all that much.
I like how you gloss over the fact that Russian occupation and military domination of eastern Europe, rather than populist uprising of leftist movements, is what caused the latter.
Hungary established a soviet republic on its own in 1919, so it's obvious there was a populist wellstream of worker's organizations to pull from. It's also obvious the post-1945 Hungarian people's republic was a popular government - if it wasn't, the USSR wouldn't have had to invade Hungary in 1956. Because Imre Nagy would have never become prime minister if the USSR had imposed the government by Russian occupation and military domination.
For example, the author claims that Germany lost its chance to conquer Europe and the U.S. This is very misleading, and here's why.
Even though Germany rose to the Europe's most industrial and populous nation state following the unification of 1871, its production capacity was incomparable to that of the combined outputs of its western rivals. That is why Otto von Bismarck wanted the newly established Empire to stay out of any conflicts (and this is why he got fired by the more aggressive Wilhelm II).
The U.S. at that time was nobody. It was still undergoing the post-Civil War recovery and the Industrial Revolution JUST arrived on the continent. No European nation was interested in conquering the largely agrarian society.
Germany didn't miss a chance. It had neither the capacity nor the will to conquer the U.S.
I doesn't seem the author is saying that Germany wanted to conquer the US. Germany wanted to create the equivalent of a US on continental Europe by annexing large landed regions and populations to get parity with the US on natural resources and population.
The US was an APEX power and had been for a long time. Nobody could conquer it. To claim the US was a nobody is a laughable.
> It was still undergoing the post-Civil War recovery
After the civil war, the US fielded the greatest army in the world and it's economy was growing because it was shifting to westward expansion. We took over territory bigger than western europe. Not only that, the US was the largest producer of oil BY FAR at that time.
> the Industrial Revolution JUST arrived on the continent.
It just arrived in european mainland as well relatively speaking...
> No European nation was interested in conquering the largely agrarian society.
No european nation could. Let's stop pretending any european country had any hope.
A european country conquering the US in the 1800s is like costa rica conquering the US today. It's laughable.
During the civil war, the US developed much of the military technology that was used in the first world war a few decades later.
In addition, to your points, after the civil war, the U.S. had the largest number of guns in civilian hands of any country by far. The populace was so well armed that an invasion would have been ridiculous.
The U.S. also had the largest economy in the world at the time, a population about the same size as Germany, and had the Atlantic Ocean situated between itself and an invading army.
By the 1870s the U.S. had a large iron and steel industry and in less than 20 years later (by 1889) the U.S. was producing more steel than Great Britain.
Furthermore, the U.S. had the second largest navy in the world at the end of the Civil War--a navy that was very modern since it was largely composed of new ships built during the war. The U.S. Navy was also the most experienced by far with modern naval combat since they were the first country to use ironclads in battle. Granted the Navy rapidly declined in size after this time period, but given that the buildup happened in only 4 years in the first place, new ships could have been rapidly brought online if a war broke out.
The U.S. was also covered in railroads and telegraph lines by this time that they could use to coordinate movements and rapidly deploy troops--this was a huge advantage not available to an invading army.
The idea of a European power invading the U.S. after the civil war is definitely laughable.
What about the silver standard that was used in previous centuries? Oh, the West spent it all buying spices from China. They tried getting it back by getting the Chinese addicted to opium and selling them that, but that didn't last long. So change the rules: use gold instead of silver as the standard! Until the 1970's anyway when the standard had changed to uranium.
The US dollar and S&P 500 has outperformed all peers
US GDP growth has exceeded nearly all counties, including emerging markets (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile Russia, EU, Australia, Canada and Japan all having problems due to falling oil and stagnation.
Yields still rock bottom due to huge demand for low yielding debt
America is not just pulling ahead of the rest of the world, it's running circles around it.
I hate to be the bearer of good news, but America, for all its flaws, is still the envy of the world. Its fastest-growing, most innovative tech companies and its most prestigious institutions of higher learning, such as the Ivy League, Caltech and MIT, are inundated with applicants from foreigners. Foreigners also can’t get enough of America’s most expensive real estate, nor can they get enough of America’s low yielding debt. If we really were in a ‘post America’ era as the left insists we are, none of this would be happening.
The US economy has hardly been in a slog, especially compared to the rest of the world. The last quarter of GDP was revised to 5% – the fastest growth since 2003.
I'll toast our success after we unwind QE and a reasonable fraction of the bottom 70% have jobs and wages that support buying a house.
We still have TBTF banks that can implode again, just like in 2007. We still count military spending and excess medical spending on the plus side of the GDP and productivity ledgers. We still have disturbing quality of life issues in policing, the Drug War, education, and health.
Let's say Putin wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and invades some FSU nations. Still complacent?
There is nothing virtuous about “caring” compassionate” “progressives” demonstrating how caring and compassionate and progressive they are by spending money yet to be earned by generations yet to be born.
Do you have a source for that? According to Wikipedia, the US ranked 151st for year 2013. Did they make such a huge jump in ranking in 2014? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_g...
The US might have REAL GDP growth. It's population grows about 1% per year. How much more GDP above this 1% does the US really have?
This being said. How do you measure GDP growth? In money? Your would have to subtract inflation. How do you measure inflation? Increase in money supply?
Would be interesting to see the GDP growth based on energy consumption: http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-...
Maybe someone has the statistics for the last 100 or at least last 20 years.
Energy consumption is not 100% correlated, as there are different patterns of trade than there used to be.
A more interesting question is why we focus so much on national numbers, as most of the large forces in the economy are international. Keeping score at the national level creates things like the inequality of income illusion, where global inequality is decreasing while inequality in many countries is increasing.
Solid economic growth in the 70ies, then a big dip around 1980, a smaller around 1988, then solid growth in the 90ies until around 2004. Then decline. I would trust this model much more than any government announced GDP growth.
Reminds a little bit to Sow jet Russia. They had a tractor manufacturing plant with state given output increases they had to match. They were not able to fulfill the quota but since output (like many other things) were measured in "tons of tractors produced" the solution to the problem was easy. While they did not produce more tractors, the tractors became heavier and heavier every year...
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_d_nus_mbbl_a_cur.htm
The vehicle fleet has been significantly improved in the period you are talking about:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/13/c...
So even though petroleum consumption has been flat or whatever, miles driven have expanded by ~2x:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA
I doubt it's as noticeable, but housing and appliances have also improved over that period (the average energy efficiency of newer buildings is probably the biggest effect, but better appliances and lighting probably manage to show up).
Decline after 2004? sure.. it went from 100 quadrillion Btu to 97 in 2013.
There are structural issues with how America works that has prevented trickle-down economics from being a reality.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/08/why-britain...
There are only 3 countries in the world (Luxemburg, Switzerland, and Norway) with a higher median household disposable income than the U.S. (using PPP) [1].
Obviously this doesn't tell the whole situation since most of Europe provides more government services, but the U.S. also has a lower tax burden (which isn't fully taken into account in disposable income because of VAT).
Yet the number of folks who want to come to the US is unending, including folks from Western Europe, SK and Japan.
1) All those people are average where they are coming from.
2) All those peopke are coming to America expecting to end up as average Americans.
3) All those people have an accurate understanding of the economic conditions they are coming from and those experienced by the average American.
Otherwise, it's a complete non-sequitur.
Elberto34, of all the clowns you are the funniest one. ;-)
Debt as a percentage of GDP is a way to quantify what the confidence is likely to be, but that's a convenient estimate, not reality. Confidence is paramount, and that's difficult to quantify.
The essential point is that nobody seriously expects America to default on its loans.
And, no, the rantings and hysteria aside, China can't "call in" loans. That's not how it works. Bonds have a maturation date, decided in advance.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.
As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — you know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
I especially like his use of the Invisible Hand in that. Of course these days (courtesy of Sterling), it is the Invisible Crazy Robot Hand - http://www.wired.com/2010/05/the-invisible-crazy-robot-hand/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency#Currencies_used_...
Given my laypersons knowledge of Tammeney Hall, the early 20th century labour gangs and so on, it seems incredible that America is not subject to more such problems - but what did it do right - and is it still doing it right?
Huh? Compared to what, paid labor?