As two ships pass in the night: the short story of American economic development

This chapter’s subtitle is the “The short story of American economic development.†It is a review of the more prominent themes and developments described in our history. It harkens back to the Chapter 1 model, the drivers of economic development policy, the characteristics of economic development, and the two ships, Progressivism and Privatism, that each launched an approach to economic development that has continued from 1789 to twenty-first-century contemporary economic development. From the diffusion of political cultures, through population mobility to the formation of jurisdictional economic bases, the development of three distinct competitive hierarchies—to the arrival of a polycentric post-suburbia, a 50-state competitive systems, a global comparative advantage hierarchy and an incredibly politicized contemporary economic development. It’s all there. The chapter ends with a challenge. What emerges to the author is a need for mainstream economic development and community development to come together, sing a few bars of “Kumbaya†and recognize, if nothing else, that both face a common enemy: decline—chiefly in the form of a competitive global comparative advantage hierarchy that renders the concept of a geographic fixed asset meaningless. The mission of economic development in a developed nation as the United States seems more to cope with the vicissitudes of Schumpeter’s creative destruction. Economic development’s ultimate task today is no longer producing pure growth, but managing and coping with opportunities and threats unleashed by creative destruction. Mainstream economic development and community development each cope better with one of the two sides of creative destruction. The need is, somehow, to find a way to blend each other’s strengths to face a common enemy.