By the way it's always nice when somebody actually tries to double check somebody else's research especially when you hear numbers that seemingly just sound crazy. Maybe another factoid, GDP or GNP for all practical purposes wasn't rigorously done by the government until about 1944. I believe a large part of our viewpoints on what happened in the 1800s is primarily based upon census data. But obviously if you're trying to measure a 7 year event Using census that happens every 10 years, there's going to be a lot of gap in the whisker chart.

Is 20% on railroad actually crazy? We spend 20% on make-work for the healthcare industry.

In a majority agrarian economy where a lot of output doesn't go toward GDP (e.g. milking your own damn cow to feed milk to your own damn family won't show up) I would expect "new hotness" booms to look bigger than they actually are.