A year after the election, there is confidence in the higher expectations unfolding with the American economy. But there seems to be less certainty over how long they can last. Some clues perhaps can come from the Eisenhower Era, the leading economy of the 20th century.

The authors of Concrete Economics (Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong) recently cited "The Long Age of Eisenhower" as a "splendid example" of economic design. This economy did not invent itself, but grew from the foundations of Roosevelt's Depression economic matrix for the modern state and Harry Truman's foreign policy architecture after 1945.

To both, however, Eisenhower brought gifts of highly trusted leadership that built on these and other strengths. Our institutions - government, corporations, and unions - were strong then. Our national debt was low, our credit first among nations, the tax base healthy, and the American labor pool young, producing, and war trained. America from 1948-1973 was ready to unite, to spend, to expand. The lifting of Americans into the middle class was the dominant feature of the Eisenhower economy. A depression and war weary people now thrived in a new economic cycle that played out in a powerful stampede for cars, homes, and college. Any differences among those joining the middle class were ones of degree then, rather than kind.

There was great connectedness to things. With GI's home from the war, suburbanization came first. The pent up demand for housing for young families starting with Levittown in 1947 knew no parallel. (The social costs of the suburbs - energy usage, family labor sharing, race relations, and patterns of social loneliness - would come only later.)

Suburbs, of course, took roads. City grids could not host them. So the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System was born. It was the greatest public works project since the Pyramids. America's 40,000 mile highway system literally reshaped the economy, the national terrain, and society's expression of the American Dream.

Highways also meant mass production of cars. The American automobile proved the social force fanning all three markets - housing, cars, roads. These linkages remarkably fed and reinforced one another. They created vast momentum across the economy.

This incredible meshing did not stop there. Two other links would bend the shadow of the Eisenhower Economy far into the future. One was the missile race. After Korea as a land war meant a "bigger bang for the buck," the aerospace and missile industry penetrated the economy through its huge multiplying and sub-contracting decentralization effects.

As with aerospace, the electronics revolution was transformative. The world of semi-conductors, fiber optics, computers, the internet, and satellite technology allowed the "The Long Age of Eisenhower" to put a market structure and innovation floor in place for the future. Never had there been an economy like it.

Two later economic thrusts help show why. The first was the large capital and job expansion of the 1980's and 1990's. Eventually, however, and in hindsight, asset prices fueled to levels of unreality. Then, following the Great Compression in 2008 and the collapse of those very prices, enshrined public wisdom took form in an explosion of national debt. The post-Eisenhower economy had infinite gains in product customization and technology logistics, however.

But asset prices and debt are not economic orders of underlying strength. In both cases, ideology took precedence. A broad expanse in economic opportunity did not occur. In fact, stagnant wages and the loss of manufacturing over 35 years have not generated true American prosperity, helped American power in the world, or evolved an equitable distribution of population wealth in America.

A wish for a return of an Eisenhower Era economy is mainly sentimental. As brilliant as it was, we should wish for something else. The products of that economy - oil, concrete, and asphalt (from cars, houses, roads) - are not those we need. The Public Square also reminds us how assembling the future is never recreating the past, but letting it go.

It is too early to know if the current recovery is more than a spending spurt, but three lessons from the Eisenhower Era stand out. The first is a value proposition built on a vision of wide public empowerment over narrow economic ideology. Second is a national wealth equation founded on strong credit and debt capacity, and a large tax and labor skill base. The third pillar is a connectivity of reinforcing sector spreads and circulating flows of capital that act synergistically. The hallmark after all of the Eisenhower Era was its ability, ever optimistically, to go "round and round" for years (Cohen and DeLong).