Quote:
Originally Posted by Rain Man
I've read that John D. Rockefeller was by far the richest American ever if you measure it as a percent of the nation's wealth in his era. In fact, this link by Forbes shows that he was 1.53 percent of the entire U.S. GDP. That's pretty impressive. Bill Gates, by contrast, is 0.58 percent, which is still impressive, but he's a housemaid compared to Rockefeller.
http://www.forbes.com/asap/1998/0824/032.html |
Interesting analysis. I never even heard of the last guy on the list (#7), Alexander Stewart.
Best book on Rockefeller is "Titan", by Ron Chernow. He also wrote a very good one on J.P. Morgan and the entire Morgan "dynasty", called House of Morgan.
I finished reading the book on Vanderbilt (Cornelia?! WTF?!?!, it's Cornelius) -- The First Tycoon.
They are all very good reads if you're interested in economic history stuff, because economic history by itself is painfully dry, but if you study how people interacted with the world around them in terms of economics, then it becomes much livelier.
Chernow also wrote the seminal book on Alexander Hamilton, which obviously also has alot of economic stuff involved (the debt funding scheme, etc.)