History of the overall amount of wealth in America...1776-present (WW2, war)

[madison999]

If there was a chart from 1776 to now, showing the overall amount of wealth in the US possessed by Americans and where it came from, what would it look like?

Free trade trumpeters always say the only way for a nation to build wealth is to export...but where has our wealth come from over the years? Wasn't most of it imported until the 1900's when half the time the rest of the world was destroyed and couldn't build anything? Was previous growth not from people bringing their money here from other countries to invest in the opportunities and then really profiting off of one another?

We have trade deficit now, and taxes drive some investment money away...trying to gain perspective.

I don't know if the people in the economics section would know as much as in this one...

[Dd714]

It all depends on how you define wealth. Although, there are plenty of graphs on net worth out there, just google it.
You don't build wealth by exporting products necesarrily, that's one way, but you build wealth by increasing the value of what you have. In terms of history - In the US we were fortunate to have a country rich with resources, a highly motivated and productive workforce, and an open market system that rewarded the creation of wealth.

A trade deficit in itself is OK because you still have internal consumption of goods and other complex factors such as exchange rates, it's when the market is overrun with surplus good that wealth suffers.

[NJGOAT]

The global measure of a nation's wealth is GDP. In particular GDP per capita. This chart shows US GDP per capita from 1700 until 2008 versus several other countries: UK, Japan, Germany, China and India.



A couple of things to point out...

1. The United States, even when we were the 13 Colonies, was a wealthy area on par with most of Europe.

2. The United States was a massive exporter of agricultural goods and raw resources throughout its existence and after the Industrial Revolution it became a large exporter of manufactured goods as well.

3. The United States operated the world's largest mercantile fleet almost from the beginning of the nation's existence. Our interventions along the Barbary Coast as well as early conflicts with Britain and France all arose from issues pertaining to the freedom of American registered merchantmen.

4. WW2 certainly catapulted the US far ahead of the rest of the world, but the rise of the US to be the preeminent economic power began after the Civil War and by the turn of the 20th century, in terms of total GDP, the US surpassed the British Empire as the world's largest economy as illustrated in this graph:



The rest of your questions are a little more economics based and there are plenty of theories around them. However, the foundation of wealth building is taking a basic resource and "adding value". One can add value in many ways from turning raw resources into finished goods or by taking a resource abundant in one area and transporting it to where it is needed. Much of the early American economy was based on the latter where cotton and wheat from the United States was needed to fuel European industry.

[thatguydownsouth]

Heh. You could literally do a thesis on this topic. Good luck trying to sum it all up in a forum post.