A Note on the Fabulous Founding Fathers By Jose Piñera Measured in today's dollars, the gross national product (GNP) of the United States in 1820 was $12 billion, only a fraction of China's GNP of $200 billion and India's of $111 billion. By 1900, the GNP of the United States had risen to $313 billion. Today it is more than $10,000 billion, by far the largest in the world. How did this free society achieve such an spectacular development? In great part, thanks to the institutions and philosophy bequeathed to the United States by its Founding Fathers (Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, among others). The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers are master works that provided the most solid and stable philosophical, political, economic and moral underpinnings to the new nation. I "discovered" the Founding Fathers in Boston. Thanks to the great teachers in my undergraduate studies at the School of Economics at the Catholic University in Chile (the "Chicago Boys" incubator), I was able to self-educate myself in various other subjects during my doctoral program at Harvard. I still remember one summer devoted to reading the books of the great thinkers on liberty (Adam Smith, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Frederic Bastiat, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper, etc.) and studying in depth the lives and work of the Founding Fathers. Thwarted by the chaos in my country from investigating a theme on Chile for my PH.D. dissertation, I even toyed with the idea of calculating the "present value" of the Founding Fathers. However, the topic was too "out of the box" and I ended writing a thesis on international trade. Nonetheless, the more I think about the ultimate root of the problems in most countries of the world, the more I return to the legacy of the fabulous Founding Fathers.