John Steele Gordon

“This prosperity was widely shared among the population. Although in the 1770s the top 20 percent of the population owned about two-thirds of the wealth, while the bottom 20 percent owned only 1 percent, that raw datum gives a distorted picture because it does not take time into account. (Modern statistics do exactly the same thing, now usually for tendentious, political reasons.) The population of British North America was a very young one, and children usually do not possess significant wealth. As people get older they tend to get richer, and that was certainly true in the thirteen colonies. One economic historian has calculated that of the colonial population in their forties, only about 8 percent would have been considered poor by the standards of the day, and even fewer in their fifties.”
― John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power

“In one of history’s great coincidences, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. It destroyed the intellectual underpinnings of the mercantilism on which the economic policies of Western nations had been based for two hundred years. It showed in example after example, each more powerfully argued than the next, that unfettered trade, both within and without the country, and a government that did not take sides as individuals competed in the marketplace resulted in greater prosperity for all and thus greater power for the country as a whole. Many of the Founding Fathers had read Smith, and all knew the thrust of his arguments.”
― John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power