How Did Laissez Faire Economics Affect The Economy

Paul Casillas US History & Geography Ch. 12

Lesson1 1. The GNP measures the value of all goods and services produced in a country in one year. 2. entrepreneurs were the most important because they discovered new things 3. The US was successful at industrialization due to its abundant natural resources, its large workforce, and many technological innovations. 4. I would argue that, in its original form, the invention from this period that has had the most impact on my daily life is the refrigerator, simply because I use it every day and because food storage in the modern world would be radically different without it. 5. Laissez-faire economics promoted industrialization by allowing companies to work and develop as the markets and their balance

3. Railroads helped American businesses expand by giving them access to new markets, allowing goods to be shipped and purchased faster, and through the consumption of large amounts resources. 4. The transcontinental railroad transformed the west physically through its presence and the mass amount of work that had to be done to build them, and most abstractly by bringing it closer to the rest of the union and by bringing about the system of time zones. 5. Government grants to railroads resulted in large scale corruption due to the fact that it placed a large amount of money, in the form of land, and power in the hands of a few individuals who were not regulated or controlled at all. Lesson3 1. Corporations used vertical and horizontal integration to grow by, in the case of the former, acquiring every part of the production process and, thus reducing its operating costs. In the case of the latter, companies grew by acquiring other companies in its industry, thereby taking over most, if not all, of the market. 2. Trusts and holding companies allowed the creation of unofficial monopolies by allowing their owners to control a vast network of ostensibly different and competing companies, through the trusts and

4. Compared to small businesses, large corporations are able to profit and produce more, due to their increased scale, and weather recessions and poor economic conditions better due to their lower operating costs and their larger sizes. 5. Business strategies, such as monopolization, pooling, and price cutting, were used to weaken or eliminate a company's competition. Lesson 4 1. A closed shop refers to a company agreement only to hire union members, whereas a lockout refers to an anti-union tactic in which a company refuses to let any of its employees onto the premises. 2. Mandate, command, order 3. Common features of labor unrest included a drop in wages, some form of corporate/government resistance, violence, and the collapse or failure of the strike. 4. Workers in the late 1800s tried to form unions in order to fight back against what they saw as unfair practices by companies and to increase their bargaining power in this dispute. 5. Government and business hostility, tension and disunity amongst workers and unions, and a lack of legal protection made it difficult for workers to create large industrial unions. 6. New industrial unions were different from older trade unions in that they accepted a more