Dr. john Psarouthakis
Executive Editor
One hundred years and more ago most Americans were still living and dying by their muscles. The overwhelming majority used their brawn to extract food from the topsail, or to extract resources from deep in the Earth, or – in increasing numbers – to hammer raw materials into some kind of usable product.
At the same time, business was also a creature of muscle. Building a railroad was not a subtle enterprise. Clear-cutting a million acres of trees was not a subtle enterprise. Pulling all the iron or gold or oil out of a particular region was not a subtle enterprise. Though I might add that even then a good engineer came in handy. I’ll let you guess what discipline I was educated in.