Beck 276: "The combined efforts of the Italians, Dutch, and British made it possible for growth to quadruple between 1500 and 1870, but it was only after 1870, with America's post-Civil War industrialization and arrival on the world stage as an economic force, that growth began to accelerate at the rates we've all become used to over the last century. By 2000, the level of total world GDP stood at more than $63 trillion, eighteen times its level when the twentieth century began."
"To live through the hundred years from 1870 to 1970 was to experience the fastest and most profound transformation of daily life in history."
see Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth
"In the 1950s, world real GDP [corrected for inflation] grew at an averahe annual rate of 4.5 percent. In the 1960s, that figure jumped to roughly 5.5 percent, which is astounding. A car company that started the decade making some 100 cars a week and then grew at a rate of 5.5 percent each year would be making some 170 cars a week ten years later, a 70 percent increase. Apply that increase to the economic production of everything in the world, and it is not hard to understand why so many people felt themselves to be living in the midst of an economic miracle." (280)
"This [era] was so successful that it was easy to miss the source of its fragility, which was that the whole thing depended on growth continuing to increase at its spectacular pace. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the American expansion, just like the three major capitalist expansions that preceded it, hit its limits, and growth began to slow down [...] As low-cost firms began to eat into the profits that American manufacturers were by this point accustmed to, Aaron Benanav writes, 'rates of industrial ouptut growth in the US began to decline starting in the late 1960s. This was the beginning of the deindustrialization process that came to dominate American political debate [...] The United States responded by taking the dollar off the gold standard and dismantling the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1971. The hope was that eliminating the dollar's gold peg and allowing its price to fall would make American-manufactured goods more competitive internationally