The drive to scale in almost every endeavor. The British went very large scale in ship building and a few other industries. Their steel plants were bigger and much more advanced than ours after the Civil War, but we had blown past them by the mid-80s.

We demonstrated what you could do when a band of entrepreneurs settles an empty country with vast resources. The Chinese have a billion people and are running out of water. Tougher problem for sure.

Credit is the air that financial markets breathe, and when the air is poisoned, there's no place to hide.

I think it was the occasion of the final psychological break with Great Britain, in a way that had clearly not happened to that date, especially in New England and to som degree in the South.

It may not be replicable: One of the hardest transition that a developing country can make is the transition to middle-class status. Governments have to let go, people start insisting on following their own lights, etc.

Whitney proved to be a competent manufacturer, but wasn't an original inventor to any important degree. Thomas Blanchard was a true genius: his stock making machine was the daddy of all the industrial profiling machinery, like the 1870s universal milling machine, that was the especial American contribution to machining technology. By that time, the British conceded that machinery innovation had shifted to America.

The paradigm of the development of natural resource-based industry - meatpacking, lard, timber, iron and coal, grain. Cincinnati's lard processing plants looked a lot like JDR's oil refineries thirty years later.