In the last three decades as some manufacturing has moved to other countries, the US economy has more than trebled by moving up the economic ladder through continuous innovations, past outdated manufacturing to services and the production of knowledge.

FORBES: Stop Wasting Foreign Aid: Let's Import Millions Of New College Students Instead

The incredible advances that have been made to medicine and health care in the developed world over the past 100 years have been based on continuous development, on marginal improvements, each one driving the next advance and each one building on the last, until we have reached the stage we are at now.

FORBES: Let's Finally Get the Fundamentals of Healthcare in Place in Africa

And of course, there has been continuous pressure in the past few years from environmentalists to eat more local and seasonal food.

BBC: Blue sky

The past thirty years has been a continuous deregulation of our economy and effective tax rates as a low as they have been since before World War Two.

FORBES: Suicide by Sequestration

Crude oil, basis the continuous contract, has closed higher for the past three years.

FORBES: Yearly Charts Show Key Levels for 2012