The classic account of industrialisation was David Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), which argued that economic transformation was rooted in three crucial substitutions: of ‘machines ... for human skill and effort’, of ‘inanimate for animate sources of power’, and of ‘mineral for vegetable or animal substances’ as raw materials.

In​ 1880 Britain could with some justification be called the ‘workshop of the world’: it produced more than 20 per cent of global industrial output and about 40 per cent of the world’s manufactured exports. In the nearly half-century since Samuel published his essay of that name, historians have done much to undermine the narrative of an ‘industrial revolution’ bookended by the invention of the spinning jenny in 1764 and the New Poor Law of 1834.

The hallowed American dream is thegold standard by which politicians and voters alike are meant to measurequality of life as each generation pursues its own definition of happinessunfettered by the restraints of birth (who your parents are) or station (theposition you start out from in the class system).

“We’ve moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism.”

And essentially, we became what’s called a rent-seeking economy, not a productive economy. So, when people in Washington talk about American capitalism versus Chinese socialism this is confusing the issue. What kind of capitalism are we talking about?