History of Business

Speaker

Paul Tiffany

Senior Lecturer (Emeritus)

Hass School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

Paul Tiffany’s Biography

CFP® Eligible; CIMA®, CPWA®, CIMC®, and RMA℠ Pending

Duration: 1 Hour

This is a required session for Year 1.  Dates offered are below.

Option 1: Wednesday, February 17th at 12:00pm ET

Option 2: Thursday, February 25th at 12:00pm ET

Pre-work: Three pre-recorded webinars

In this Year 1 required lecture, Professor Tiffany reviews the historical evolution of the American economy from the beginnings of the Republic up to present day.  Professor Tiffany will provide a course overview video followed by 3 pre-recorded lectures in addition to 2 live sessions. These videos will provide background content so that the live sessions can focus on key issues and allow sufficient time for participant Q&A, input, and discussion. 

Course Description

The first video (30-45 minutes, “Foundations”) will begin with an emphasis on the foundations for future economic growth that were created at the beginning of the Republic, and which will take us up to 1865.  In this we will emphasize how America differs from essentially all other nations of the world with its direct focus on individual property rights that were to be exercised in a capitalist market economy— rights captured in the Constitution-- that continue down to the present time, and which in many respects continues to define the nation’s political issues.  We will then proceed to show how the fledgling new nation began to build an infrastructure to allow for economic expansion, including the development of an agricultural economy that relied on cheap labor and constant land acquisition.

The second video (45-60 minutes, “The Rise of ‘Big Business’”) will cover the period following the Civil War up until World War I, when a set of critical trends converged that were to shape, by the end of the 19th Century, the emergence of an industrial economy dominated by the large firm—outcomes in significant conflict with the vision of the Founding Fathers.  This period is often recognized as the “Robber Baron” era of “creative destruction” and in which the entrepreneurial "Schumpeterian Hero" leveraged new technologies that profoundly transformed America and laid the groundwork for the nation’s global economic dominance in the 20th Century.

In the third and final video (75-90 minutes, “The American Century—and Beyond…?”) Professor Tiffany will bring the discussion up to the present time. We will first review how the US economy sank into the Great Depression following the frothy “Roaring Twenties,” and then how the outbreak of World War II set the stage for the emergence of the so-called “American Century” and the nation’s remarkable economic growth and prosperity up to the 1970s.  Yet it was at this point that underlying problems began to surface, even though a second "Schumpeterian Era of Creative Destruction" was creating the "new economy" of technology-dominated businesses in the latter decades of the 20th Century.  More significantly, the simultaneous advent of “globalization” emerged that by the start of the 21st Century began to threaten US world dominance through the rise of China and other emerging nations.  This session will necessarily discuss both the origins and consequences of the "Great Recession” of 2008 and will conclude with President Trump’s attempt to “Make America Great Again” in the profoundly changed 21st Century global economy. And this, in turn, will bring us to the commencement of the Biden Administration as it faces the central issue of sustaining America’s economic dominance going forward.  Can the country rise to the occasion under new leadership? This third and last session of the course will leave time for what should be a robust discussion of this existential question.

Learning Objectives:
  • To inform participants of the broader economic trends of the past and how these trends can affect the direction of the American economy in the 21st Century.
  • To provide participants with an appreciation of how business development and economic progress in America are closely related to the broader political, social, and legal trends that have evolved in this nation over its historical evolution.
  • To stimulate participant thinking about how the changing global political-economic environment will affect economic progress in the United States in the coming decades as the nation confronts a determined rival for global pre-eminence.