January 12, 2026
US production of goods and services now stands at around $30 trillion dollars per year. This compares with output of $6.2 billion in 1790 in inflation adjusted numbers, using 2024 prices. That’s a multiple of over 4600. Population rose 87 times through 2024, while per person output rose 54 times.
We can calculate a moving sum of all output produced since 1790: it totals 1070 trillion dollars. Growth in GDP is a compounding process and cumulative GDP grows even faster. So over half of all output produced since 1790 was churned out this century. Half before 2001, half after 2001. Three quarters of all output created since 1790 was produced after 1980. And a whopping 90% of all output has been produced since 1956.
I don’t want to make too much out this calculation. Education, stable institutions, and a market price system are prerequisite for high income economies not wholly reliant on resource extraction. But to the extent that human and physical capital are embedded in GDP (strictly speaking, they are not the same though we’d expect a rough correlation) what the nation has produced and consumed since 1790 is mostly a result of the sweat and capacity of those who working in living memory.
Data taken from Measuringworth.com; prices updated to 2024.