ABSTRACT
Understanding America's rise as the dominating economic power of the twentieth century requires a sense of its economics. While one must plunge into economic theory, even into its depths, it is less difficult than it appears. One can avoid the rebarbative mathematics that specialized language economists like to employ today. Economics addresses the elemental needs of existence: every person is a practicing economist and possesses the practical experience and capacity to think about his or her economic actions. A history of economic theory is an account, indeed a bookkeeping account, of the substance of history and life. Economics became more complex when the Commercial Revolution, expanding with the opening of the New World, began to lift the European heartland out of the simple agricultural economy of medieval times. For good and ill, David Ricardo led economics toward purity rather than comprehensiveness and deduction over induction.
