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looked to be more or less back on an Enlightenment path and catching up with the rest of the civilized world—letting go of the hopelessly obsolete and irrational, changing dramatically when necessary. Despite powerful backlashes along the way (the South’s replacement of Reconstruction with Jim Crow, the fundamentalist Christian upsurge of the early 1900s, the resistance to civil rights a half-century later, the insidious and ongoing systemic racism), over the long run the country was more open to the new than fixated on the past. Progress fitfully prevailed. For most of the twentieth century, most Americans seemed to have permanently learned lessons about the mortal dangers of pathological nostalgia and resistance to change, so that a large governing majority remained committed to making America perpetually new.

To recap:
While not everything new is good or desirable, an exceptional openness to the new was America’s factory setting.
We call the desirable new progress .
From the late 1700s to the late 1900s, economic growth helped make the United States perpetually new, thus enabling social progress.
Economic growth comes overwhelmingly from incorporating new technologies into the way work is done.
    I want to return to that last point, and to what I said earlier about how, just as the United States was giving birth to itself 250 years ago, the steam-powered industrial revolution began turning a society of farmers and artisans into one of workers tending machines in factories and elsewhere, thereby permitting the U.S. economy to grow and grow.
    That’s all true, but it’s not the whole truth. Because as I’ve said, and as I’ll now explain in more detail, every economy, including ours, is a political economy. So here’s a crucial fifth point:
One way or another, we chose and choose as a society how to make economic use of new technologies and of the new wealth that results from economic growth.
    Of course, when I say “as a society,” I mean the people who exercise effective power over the choices a society makes. For instance, even before the game-changing steam-powered contraptions of the industrial age came along after 1800 and transformed the nature of more and more jobs, bosses for a century or two had been redesigning work to suit themselves. During this so-called industrious revolution, manufacturers began gathering their artisanal workers each day into buildings that they began calling factories. Thus gathered, a Cornell University historian of work explains, “the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits.”
    The industrial revolution’s great American celebrity promoter Eli Whitney became famous in the 1790s, just out of Yale, for inventing a machine that was at the center of America’s industrial revolution—a new, improved cotton gin that mechanized the process of removing the dozens of seeds from each cotton boll. At the time, growing cotton was a new and very small part of American agriculture. One worker using just his or her hands spent a whole day to produce one pound of clean cotton. But using Whitney’s gin, that output suddenly leaped to twenty or twenty-five pounds per day. In the early 1800s, cotton replaced tobacco as the biggest U.S. export, and production increased 3,000 percent over the next half-century.
    The cotton gin is a perfect illustration of the economic fact to which I keep returning: a new technology makes workers more efficient, increased productivity results in more profits, and the economy grows. But as I’ve also said, every economy is a political economy, and the story of the cotton gin is also an extreme illustration of that fundamental truth. Cotton growing happened in the South, of course, and the people whose productivity dramatically improved were enslaved African Americans, at