Policy #2
The history of the American economy has been greatly impacted by the industrial revolution. Life as the people of this time knew it would have a big change ahead of them. The normal life of using your hands to produce products would become more of machines doing the manual work. There was a boom in population and income stemming from the economy becoming more efficient. The Industrial Revolution increased the supply of goods dramatically from the invention of a mass-production technique that was represented by Henry Ford. The majority of the increase of supply was largely seen in mining, steel, oil, transportation networks, communications networks, industrial cities, and financial centers, but also consumer goods. The concept of people not having to use their hands as much anymore was an important advancement. The time being saved was significant not to mention how efficient these steam powered machines were in production. Now the overall work time is being cut dramatically considering they could now have settings for machines to produce the work. At the same time, the workers needed to realize this meant there would be less jobs available for employees. There would be less work to manage, but this led to creating a bigger profit since there was not as much man power needed in the factory. This idea of having the machine do the dirty work sparked the importance of profits for the business leaders, which over time has arguably led to the greedy business leaders we have currently. So while the industrial revolution may have been a ground breaking innovative solution to eliminating the use of so many employees, at the same time the corrupted “profit maximization” minds were just in the early stages of development, with much more greed to come. There was a huge struggle between capitalism and democracy as well, which led to more favor of capitalism.