12 Quotes by Robert J. Gordon

But the cable cars did not last long. They had disappeared from the streets of most cities by 1900 and from Chicago by 1906, and they remain to this day only in the single city of San Francisco, where they are primarily a tourist attraction.

The event happened at noon on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. That moment was a pivotal episode in world history as Leland Stanford pounded a golden spike with a silver hammer and in an instant ended the isolation of California and the Great West from the eastern half of the United States.

Chief among these headwinds is the rise of inequality that since 1970 has steadily directed an ever larger share of the fruits of the American growth machine to the top of the income distribution.