Since the 1970s manufacturing’s share has declined to little over 10 percent of total US output. Over the same period, unemployment has averaged between 5 and 6 percent during the onset and maturation of a new economic era in information and telecommunications. The overwhelming majority of jobs are now in services which attributes for around 85 percent of total US economic output. The overwhelming majority of jobs are now in services which attributes for around 85 percent of total US economic output.
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Unlike today, where the closure of factories and their relocation is blamed for falling incomes and wealth disparities, similar economic and social concerns were experienced and repeated at the commencement of large-scale industrial production.
When US Steel floated in 1901 it brought 265 steel plants and 168,000 workers under a single corporate structure. Organised by J Pierpont Morgan, funding this corporate colossus involved a combination of $200 million in public share subscriptions, equity swaps, and the issue of mortgage bonds. Morgan’s reputation as an industry consolidator began with the merging of electric utility companies into what became General Electric in 1892. During the same decade Morgan was a robust acquirer of rail companies that were dubbed “Morgan’s Roads.”
Henry Ford grew up on a farm in Dearborn Michigan. It is true that he didn’t have the education of, say, Sam Walton of Wal-Mart who also grew up on a farm and was university educated. Henry Ford, however, was no less inquisitive than Sam Walton or Walt Disney who too up on a farm and completed several college courses. A voracious want to acquire knowledge is published characteristic of billionaires post the gilded age. That want to acquire knowledge should not automatically be confused with attaining formal educational qualifications.
On the site of New York’s Empire State Building once stood mansions owned by the Astor families. William Waldorf Astor (1848-1919) owned one of two family mansions that stood side by side. He was a fourth generation Astor and heir to one of America’s first great fortunes amassed by his […]
In business, competitive pursuits are for market share or stock ownership. Vanderbilt would overcome recurring setbacks to master both. Undeterred by adversity, Vanderbilt grew a transcontinental fleet which he later sold to the Accessory Transit Company. At the age of seventy, what the Commodore had experienced in his quest for control of the Accessory Transit Company would stand him strong to gain control of the New York Central.
Most of America’s legendary family fortunes were built often by one man between the years of the Civil War and the turn of the century. The longevity of the Astor family wealth contrasts with those continuing with business roots including Busch (1876) Cargill (1865), Du Pont (1802), Mellon (1860), Rockefeller (1870).
There is a type of radical whose adverse verdict about capitalist civilisation rests on nothing except stupidity, ignorance or irresponsibility, who is unwilling to grasp the most obvious facts, let alone their implications. Joseph Schumpeter