The development of economic thought (ET) of the mid-19th cent. is essentially a history of classical English political economy. The tenets of this school were communicated to the U.S., where the writings of Smith, Malthus, Mill, & Ricardo were adopted by early Amer. political economists. But there was also a strain of political economy in the U.S. at that time that opposed the adoption of the philosophy of classical political economy. This was the nationalistically-oriented Amer. school of ET, & the foremost member of this movement was Henry C. Carey. Contents: Political Economy in 19th-cent. America; A New Methodology & a Theory of Value; Distribution: Labor, Capital, & Land; Institutional Framework; & A Theory of Trade; A Theory of Econ. Develop.

"[An] ambitious economic history of the united States...rich with details." ?—David Leonhardt, New York Times Book Review How did a weak collection of former British colonies become an industrial, financial, and military colossus? From the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the American economy has been transformed by wave after wave of emerging technology: the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, computer technology. Yet technology-driven change leads to growing misalignment between an innovative economy and anachronistic legal and political structures until the gap is closed by the modernization of America's institutions—often amid upheavals such as the Civil War and Reconstruction and the Great Depression and World War II. When the U.S. economy has flourished, government and business, labor and universities, have worked together in a never-ending project of economic nation building. As the United States struggles to emerge from the Great Recession, Michael Lind clearly demonstrates that Americans, since the earliest days of the republic, have reinvented the American economy - and have the power to do so again.

Making the Modern American Fiscal State chronicles the rise of the US system of direct and progressive taxation.