Michael Lind, in his new book, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States, provides a groundbreaking account of how a weak collection of former British colonies became 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, Lind argues, government and business, labor and universities, have worked together as partners in a never-ending project of economic nation building. As the United States struggles to emerge from the Great Recession, Land of Promise demonstrates that Americans, since the earliest days of the republic, have reinvented the American economy—and have the power to do so again.
Program starts at 6:30 p.m. and will end at 7:30 p.m.
Light appetizers will be provided starting at 6:00 p.m.
Please arrive early; space is not guaranteed.