David Warsh has an elegant essay that focuses on what I might call America's economic soul. The essay touches on the Easterlin paradox, the history of economic thought, and American literature, all wrapped around a book review of Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction, by Philip Fisher:
But what does he know about economics? The answer, of course, is plenty. Being a sharp observer can take you a long way in a field that has relatively little instinct for introspection.
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Turner [originator of the idea that the closing of the frontier would change America into a quasi-European state--Kane edit] was wrong, Fisher says. The unmistakable newness of America in the nineteenth century made it possible for its authors to sketch a philosophy for living permanently with newness, in the form of competitive technological capitalism. It was in those years that “America became a culture willing to pay the deep costs of obsolescence and lost towns as part of what might be called the bargain of invention,” he writes. And in a series of chapters on the Charles River Bridge decision, on Emerson and Whitman, on Melville and slavery, on Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells and the rise of professionalism, on regionalism and realism in literature, he produces one compelling insight after another from the cornucopia of American literature, none more dazzling than the gloss he puts on the famous episode in which Tom Sawyer paints his Aunt Sally’s fence.
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