No doubt you are subconsciously settling in to hear yet another speaker admonish you to "think big" and to "make the world better than you found it." In other times, these pieties might have been in order. These are not normal times; and this will not be a normal graduation speech. Its first characteristic will be its length. When Chancellor Herman called and asked me...]]> Sat, 23 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 For most of recorded history, economic growth was static. For centuries, the global economy grew, according to our best estimates, less than half a percentage point annually. Famous displays of wealth, such as the extravagances of the French Court, reflected the concentrating of wealth by duress within a stagnant economic system-not evidence of an economic system that knew how to make new wealth. By 1820, the industrial revolution was starting to change this dismal pattern. At that time, the United States would have been seen as a bad bet to participate in the world's first real economic expansion. Its enormous wealth in natural resources, locked away in remote forests and prairies, was...]]>