Americans are taught a reassuring story about their country’s success. The United States became prosperous, powerful, and free because the framers wrote an exceptional Constitution. The miracle of Philadelphia produced the miracle of America.
The story appears in classrooms, campaign speeches, judicial opinions, and serious scholarly works. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson have argued that institutions securing property and constraining expropriation help separate rich nations from poor ones. But the popular American version takes that insight and turns it into something much stronger – and misguided: that our prosperity flowed from our particular constitutional design, and that altering it would put the wealth at risk.
And it is that mistake that matters, because the belief that the Constitution produced American economic prosperity makes any serious proposal for constitutional reform appear reckless.
But the United States did not become rich primarily, or even largely, because of the Constitution’s particular design. It became rich because it occupied an extraordinarily favorable continent, possessed vast natural resources, attracted millions of immigrants, developed an enormous internal market, protected commerce through ordinary law, and benefited repeatedly from historical fortune.
Prosperity did not flow from constitutional perfection or even its particular design – just the opposite. Prosperity has given the Constitution a legitimacy it does not deserve.
Begin with geography. The United States is protected by two oceans and bordered by comparatively weak and friendly neighbors. Historian C. Vann Woodward described this advantage as “free security.” Unlike the major powers of Europe, the United States did not spend centuries defending vulnerable borders against large neighboring armies. As a result, it devoted far more of its resources to farms, railroads, factories, universities, and cities.
The continental interior was equally consequential. The Mississippi River system provided some of the world’s richest agricultural land and a vast natural transportation network. The Great Lakes industrial region had access to enormous deposits of iron ore and coal. Texas and the plains held vast reserves of oil and gas. These were geographic and geological gifts, not constitutional achievements.
Then there was the scale of the country. As transportation improved, the United States developed an enormous integrated domestic market. Manufacturers could produce goods for consumers across a continent. Farmers could sell crops to growing cities. Workers and capital could move across state lines. Businesses could expand without confronting a new language, currency, customs regime, or national government every few hundred miles.
And finally there was the enormous benefit of immigration. Roughly 20 million immigrants arrived between 1870 and 1920, supplying labor, entrepreneurial energy, technical knowledge, and population growth precisely when the country was industrializing. Later generations continued to start companies, staff universities, develop technologies, and expand the workforce.
A truthful account must also acknowledge what else built the wealth. Enormous American fortunes rested on enslaved labor, the seizure of Indigenous land, and racial subordination enforced by law. During much of the period in which the United States became an economic giant, it was not functioning as an inclusive constitutional democracy. Women could not vote. Black Americans were subjected to slavery and then Jim Crow. Asian immigration was restricted by statute.
Here the Constitution was not a bystander. As ratified, it counted three-fifths of the enslaved population when allocating congressional representation, increasing the political power of slave states. It required the return of people who escaped slavery and prevented Congress from ending the international slave trade before 1808. If we want to credit the original Constitution with a direct contribution to early American wealth, its abhorrent and immoral protection of slavery is the clearest one available.
Historical fortune played a central role as well. By 1890, the United States had become the world’s leading industrial power. Two world wars then devastated its principal competitors while leaving the American homeland and industrial base intact. After 1945, the United States emerged with unmatched manufacturing capacity and enormous influence over the institutions of the new international economic order. That outcome was not written in Philadelphia.
Of course, favorable geography and abundant resources have not made every well-endowed country prosperous. Take Argentina as an example. It possessed fertile farmland, extensive natural resources, and a period of mass European immigration. At the beginning of the twentieth century, its per-capita income ranked among the highest in the world. It then spent much of the century falling behind countries it once rivaled.
And all this occurred even while its constitution of 1853 borrowed heavily from the American model, adopting federalism, a three-branch national government, a bicameral legislature, and presidential government. Juan Bautista Alberdi, whose work strongly influenced the Argentine charter, believed that constitutional liberty, immigration, foreign investment, and protection for property and commerce could help unlock Argentina’s prosperity.
Argentina initially prospered and then diverged. Historians and economists still debate why, and the range of explanations — weak political institutions, eroded checks and balances, unstable and inward-looking economic policy, insufficient investment in human and physical capital, adverse international shocks — cautions against reducing its experience to a single cause. But the comparison helps establish a key point: geography and resources alone are not enough. Neither is borrowing the machinery of the American Constitution.
Lasting prosperity requires stable institutions, predictable rules, investment in people, openness to innovation and exchange, and protection against arbitrary government action. None of those are a result of the Electoral College, equal representation of states in the Senate, life tenure for federal judges, an amendment process requiring approval from three-quarters of the states, or most of its other provisions.
Consider what laws actually govern and facilitate American commerce: state rules of property, contracts, corporate governance, secured transactions, and commercial dealing and federal law governing securities, banking, and a national market. None of which are enshrined in the Constitution nor depend on preserving the Constitution’s particular electoral, legislative, judicial, or amendment structures.
Comparison confirms the point. Other developed democracies – including Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries – all protect property, enforce contracts, and constrain arbitrary government power under constitutions very different from our own. They have different electoral systems, legislative structures, judicial arrangements, and amendment procedures. Their prosperity has not depended on adopting the American constitutional model.
Nor has American prosperity depended on preserving the original constitutional settlement. The country’s economic rise survived a Civil War, the abolition of slavery, the Reconstruction Amendments, the creation of a national administrative state, the New Deal’s transformation of federal authority, the growth of modern civil rights, and repeated reinterpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court. That history should change what we believe constitutional reform would risk. The economic case for constitutional stasis is not really a case for the Constitution’s existing design. It is a case for the rule of law, secure property, enforceable contracts, predictable government, and an integrated continental market. Any serious reform proposal must preserve those things. None requires preserving every compromise reached in 1787 or every feature of the constitutional structure that has grown around it.
I have argued elsewhere for a reordering of the United States into an American Union that would allow two sovereign democratic republics to adopt modern constitutions while retaining a common defense, a single currency, free movement of people, and an integrated internal market. Whatever one thinks of that proposal — or of other approaches to constitutional reform — it should be judged on its political, legal, and practical merits, not rejected on the mistaken assumption that altering the framers’ design would destroy the foundations of American prosperity.
Fear of economic disruption should not place the Constitution beyond reconsideration. America’s prosperity rests on foundations far broader and more durable than one largely outdated governing document.
The Constitution certainly did not make America rich — and fear of losing a prosperity it did not create should not prevent us from asking whether it is time for an update.
Jordan Karp is a lawyer and writer based in New York with a keen interest in American political culture, institutional reform, and civic life.
