The US economy is resilient, and COVID proves global econ is too.

By one measure of the U.S. economy, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the past 100 years look like one long joyride to prosperity.

Market crashes, recessions and depressions, wars, pandemics, and other economic shocks all appear as mere bumps in the road. On average, the Dow climbed 9% a year.

The truth on the ground was more complex. Millions suffered during economic downturns, and a half-million died in overseas conflicts. America faced down fascism, communism, and terrorism even as fractures along political, class, race, and gender lines at times turned our streets, and seats of power, into battlegrounds.

And yet, the economy and the market churned on.

If there’s one lesson we’ve learned from delving into Barron’s archives in our centennial year, it is this: Don’t underestimate the resilience of the U.S. economy and stock market. We saw that theme time and again as we published a series of retrospective pieces during 2021—and the resilience is strikingly evident still.

When the Covid-ravaged economy contracted in 2020, it was just the 19th time since 1920 in which real gross domestic product had declined, year over year. And nine of those years came between 1930 and 1949, a result of the Great Depression or post–World War II demobilization.

Even 2020 seems like an outlier, with growth expected in 2021 and 2022, despite recent downgrades prompted by the Omicron outbreak.

Big GDP jumps also were limited to the volatile ’30s and ’40s. Mostly, it has been a steady rise in GDP, from an estimated $670 billion in 1920 to a record $21.43 trillion in 2020. That’s a 30-fold increase, meaning that U.S. GDP has grown about 10 times as fast as the population, which has tripled from 106 million in 1920 to 331 million a century later.

America was a smaller, poorer, and very different place 100 years ago. Most folks lived on farms, without electricity or indoor plumbing. Horses outnumbered automobiles. Business and politics were the sole province of white men. Women had the vote but were still second-class citizens. Jim Crow laws made sure that Blacks weren’t fully emancipated.

The country also was in the grip of the Depression of 1920-21, the nation’s worst economic downturn to that point. It was a heck of a time for Clarence W. Barron to start a financial newsweekly. But he had seen the U.S. change from an agrarian to an industrial nation, and he felt there was no stopping the American business spirit.

He was right. Entrepreneurs from Henry Ford and Thomas Edison to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have, to paraphrase Facebook’s founder, moved fast and broken things, turning new technologies into life-changing new industries.