Unleashing the Second American Century ─ Four Forces for Economic Dominance

An optimistic, fact-based look at how four transformational forces?unrivaled manufacturing depth, soaring levels of creativity, massive new energy sources, gigantic amounts of capital available?will propel the U.S. to new economic heights

In Unleashing the Second American Century, business expert Joel Kurtzman shows conclusively that all the talk about the relative decline of the United States is not only baseless?it's dead wrong.

A widely-held misconception is that ?America doesn't make things anymore.” But the U.S is by far the world's dominant manufacturing power, and most of what we make is recession-proof. America also has a stunning level of talent and creativity in the world's fastest-growing economic sectors, such as biotech, pharmaceutical, computer hardware and software, and telecommunications. Due to shale and gas, America has the world's largest energy reserves, and is more favorably endowed than even the Middle East. Finally, America has an unprecedented amount of capital now idle?approximately $4.4 trillion, a sum that is about $1 trillion larger than the German economy, the world's fourth largest.

As Kurtzman shows, when the business community fully grasps the opportunities in the U.S., prosperity will return?and much faster than we now think possible.

Joel Kurtzman is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, a nonprofit, non-partisan think tank, where his research focuses on globalization and its risks. Kurtzman is a member of the editorial board of MIT Sloan Management Review and a senior fellow at the Wharton School’s SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management. Earlier in his career, Kurtzman was the editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, founding editor-in-chief of Strategy + Business magazine, a business editor and columnist at The New York Times, and global lead partner for thought leadership and innovation at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. He lives in Santa Monica, CA.