Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

by Alan Greenspan

In telling this story, this book will focus on three organizing themes: productivity, creative destruction, and politics. Productivity describes society’s ability to get more output from a given input. Creative destruction defines the process that drives productivity growth. Politics deals with the fallout of creative destruction. The first is a technical economic issue. The second is an economic issue that also touches on some of the most profound problems of social philosophy. The third takes us far from the world of charts and numbers into the world of practical politics.