Henry Luce, a founder of Time Magazine, coined the term “American century” to describe the twentieth century in which he lived and in which the United States became the world’s foremost power. But not even Luce could have foreseen America’s global position at the dawn of the twenty-first century, only 33 years after his death. Today, the United States is pre-eminent in the world militarily, technologically, scientifically, and culturally as no state has been since the apogee of the Roman Empire 1,800 years ago.

But this immense relative influence is possible only because the American economy makes it so. In 1998 the United States had a gross domestic product of $8.511 trillion. The second largest economy in the world, China’s, had just over half that, $4.420 trillion, if figured on a purchasing-power parity basis, which takes the local cost of living into account. Japan, which ranks number three in GDP, has an economy only about a third as large as that of the United States, $2.903 trillion. The greatest economic power of the nineteenth century, Great Britain, now ranks only seventh in GDP, at $1.252 trillion, only $152 million more than that of the state of California alone. Despite a recent modest slowdown and stockmarket tumble from once unimaginable highs, the American economy remains by far the strongest in the world.

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