… is from page 6 of the original edition of the late Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott’s 1964 volume, Manpower in Economic Growth:
The most brilliant innovation in economic growth may well be the willingness to consider innovation itself as a permanent regimen. What was strikingly new about America was such willingness.
DBx: To be fair, the British, starting in the 18th century, first opened this door. (As Lebergott notes a few lines above the ones quoted here, “Inventions occur everywhere; innovations do not.”) But Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries opened this door more widely and stormed through it with singular gusto, vigor, and success.
