This book consists of more than 120 factual statements-each illustrated by a page of color charts and explained in a page
of text-that provide a broad picture of the U.S. economy. The following summary is meant to convey the scope and the major themes of the book.
Herbert Stein, a former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, had long been a senior fellow at AEI before his death in September 1999. His other books available from the AEI Press include What I Think: Essays on Economics, Politics, and Life (1998); On the Other Hand: Essays on Economics, Economists, and Politics (1995); and Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic Policy from Roosevelt to Clinton (revised edition, 1994). Murray Foss, who was the senior staff economist in charge of forecasting for the Council of Economic Advisers, is a visiting scholar at AEI.
Our best overall measure for gauging economies of different sizes is the per capita gross domestic product-the sum of the total
output of goods and services produced within the borders of a country, divided by the population. Total output per capita is significantly higher in the United States than in other large "rich" countries. Comparisons for 1998 based on the purchasing power of different local currencies-rather than exchange rates-show that the per capita GDP of the United States was 15
percent above Switzerland's, 25 percent above Canada's and Japan's, and 33 percent above Germany's. For both Sweden and the United Kingdom, the margin was 43 percent or more