The U.S. has the biggest economy in the world. When looking at economy it basically boils down to day-today survival. In How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes the book presents the idea that without any tools to catch the fish, the three men are stuck trying to catch one fish a day for survival, and that’s all they are able to do that day. But the start of something new began when one of the three men, Able, risked losing out on a day of food to build something we now know as a fishing net. This is how Able changed the islands economy for good. Throughout the book we learn that in order for an economy to grow, we need to learn to take risks. Americans are typically known to save 10% of their incomes annually. This discipline helped to finance our growing industrial activity, and helped people through unexpected hardships. But throughout the years americans have begun spending more money than they consume, due to the fact that they have been blindsided by the money passing through borders and our way of printing money. Of course on a single island, this would be impossible. In order to build a stable economy, you need to be able save a certain percentage of your income, but also be able not to spend more than you actually make.
What we can take away from the book is that once the island’s population began to increase, the spending money and production began to become an issue. When becoming in debt you can either work something out, or just print off the money to pay off the debt. With building an economy and keeping it running comes responsibility and tactic. As it shows in the book, it is not wise to bite off more than you can chew, because you're most likely to lose what you wanted and some of what you had already had.
As you can see, an economy begins with the will to take risks and try your darn hardest to build off of the little you have. Throughout the book I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. Depending on the population, people willing to work, and what your objective is I believe achieving a perfect economy is really hard. An economy boils down to this literal definition: the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services.