How long did it take for early rapid capitalist transformations to benefit the majority of the population? This essay examines three presumed success cases, concluding that rapid capitalist development took at least five decades to benefit the majority. A neglected political force for success was the effectiveness of local public and quasi-public institutions in creating wide networks of transportation and other public investments responsive to changing market requirements. Economists today should pay close attention to distributional benefits and local government effectiveness before urging western brands of capitalism on countries where failures to benefit the majority threaten severe political instability.

Although largely neglected in most histories of the French Revolution, the central government’s persistent budget deficit was a factor of paramount importance. The fiscal crisis inherited from the monarchy defied solution because of the war of attrition fought by economic interest groups. The struggle produced radical changes in macroeconomic policy to shift the burden of adjustment, altering the course of and prolonging the Revolution.

Based on a large sample from Parisian notarial records, this article examines the long-term private credit market in Paris in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and analyzes how it was affected by government-caused redistribution. It estimates the level of private indebtedness from 1662 to 1789, explains the problems the credit market faced, and determines who profited and who lost when government defaults, banking reforms, and currency manipulations struck private borrowers and lenders. It concludes by accounting for the expansion of the credit market in the last half of the eighteenth century.

During the 1920s, federal personal income tax rates, which had been dramatically increased during World War I, were sharply reduced. These tax rate cuts have often been cited as an example of a successful supply-side policy, but they have also been criticized as policies designed primarily to benefit the wealthy. We argue that a primary motive for the tax cuts of the 1920s was the desire to reduce the tax avoidance by wealthier individuals that occurred as a result of the previous tax rate increases and that the tax cuts enacted did reduce tax avoidance.

Numerous empirical studies indicate that, as a result of rent-seeking behavior, public-sector workers are overcompensated relative to their private-sector counterparts, with pensions representing part of the difference. I present a history of the Federal Employees Retirement Act of 1920 and show that rent seeking by federal workers cannot explain several features of the act. Instead, I argue that the act represented an optimal incentive contract between Congress and civil service employees in which civil servants accepted mandatory retirement and a compensating wage differential in exchange for the federal pension plan.

Estimates of total and per capita product for Barbados are derived for 1665 and 1666 and 1699 to 1701 from trade statistics and new data on the distribution and composition of produce entered into the customs books of the island. The share of exports in total product–central to the estimate of total product–is linked to the share of the labor force in the export sector. Per capita Barbados product is estimated to have been one- to two-thirds higher than in England and Wales, and per capita exports are estimated well above those of their Chesapeake counterparts.

This study uses a sample drawn from the 1880 Manuscript Census of Colorado to investigate the influence of individual and regional characteristics on the labor force participation rates of both single and married women in areas with different production characteristics. Results show that the determinants of labor force participation differ considerably for single and married women, but they also show strong consistency within each group. Labor force participation rates are also influenced by general economic and social conditions.

Few economic historians have addressed the impact of poor health on economic productivity.1 This relationship, neglected and poorly understood, is the subject of my dissertation. Specifically, the dissertation examines the effect of a chronic debilitating disease on agricultural productivity in the American South between 1860 and 1940. As is well known, per capita gross agricultural output dropped sharply during the Civil War decade and remained low until 1910. Contrary to what one would expect, between 1870 and 1910 agricultural output was lowest in sandy soil regions and highest in regions composed mostly of clay soil. A rapid expansion of per capita agricultural output occurred after 1910. The income decline of the Civil War decade and subsequent increase of the post-1910 era were also related to soil region, with the greatest income swing occurring in sandy soil regions.

The United States population has grown older. Increases in life expectancy and a low fertility rate have dramatically changed the composition of the population. This change in the age composition of the population has led to concerns over the viability of the Social Security system. One way to increase the solvency of the Social Security system would be to increase participation rates among the elderly.

Although in the last two decades there have been literally hundreds of studies of postwar minimum wage legislation, there have been but a handful of studies of the first federal minimum wage, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), and no studies of the state laws that preceded it.1 My dissertation attempts to bridge this gap by examining the political economy and effects of early American minimum wage legislation.

The dissertation argues for a distinction between two varieties of price deflation, one offset by declining costs, the other induced by declining profits. Where the second type of deflation occurs, the usual result is contraction of output, income, and employment. We can roughly measure the relative amounts of cost and profit deflation underway in different situations. Price declines usually aggravate profit downturns, and in some cases directly cause them. An international profit deflation that (except for its milder consequences) anticipated that of 1929 to 1932 occurred during 1891 to 1896.

Problems of poverty are exacerbated by uncertainty.1 This uncertainty means that one role of an income-assistance system is insurance, which in the modern world has often taken the form of government welfare or unemployment insurance. However, various private methods have also been important. The episode known as the Lancashire cotton famine reveals this institutional diversity in a region with a dominant geographically concentrated industry. A cyclical downturn in the cotton textile industry coincided with the Union blockade of Southern ports during the American Civil War, bringing four years of distress to the towns in the cotton manufacturing district concentrated in Lancashire. The unanticipated and unprecedented depth and duration of this shock unveiled both the responses of preexisting income assistance institutions and the institutional change that occurred to spread income losses after the cotton famine struck.

Rarely are judgements of entrepreneurial failure and technological backwardness rendered as harshly as when they are rendered upon Britain in the early 1900s.1 The use of old technologies in manufacturing and transportation are claimed to have locked Britain onto a lower growth path than would have followed if new technologies had been used instead. Technological backwardness, it has been said, was a shackle and Britain lagged behind because of it.2Thorstein Veblen made this argument and marshalled a specific example: “silly little bobtailed carriages [railway wagons].”3In my dissertation I argue that the small coal wagons were not technologically backward, as Veblen and others since have claimed.

Given the topics addressed by the three North American dissertations–old-age and disability pensions by Dora Costa, minimum wages by Andrew Seltzer, and hookworm disease by Garland Brinkley–I have subtitled my comments: “The Old, the Poor, and the Sick in American Economic History.” We observe that these dissertations address the effects of policies aimed at such seemingly inescapable human afflictions as aging, disability, poverty, and disease. Despite this observation, these are not tales of gloom. After all, as the authors themselves inform us, the old and disabled get pensions, the poor get minimum wages, and the sick get healed. So, each dissertation contains something to reassure the Dr. Pangloss–or the Dr. Stigler–in all of us. Here, however, the similarities between them end, with one notable exception–and that is the uniformly high quality of the scholarship they display.

You have just heard from three people whose dissertations I helped select to be finalists for the Gerschenkron prize for the best dissertation on a non-U.S. country's economic history. They have now had a chance to tell you a bit of what their works are about. I could also do the same, but I will not. The reasons, at least to me, are obvious: (1) in writing them, they spent a lot more time than I did in reading them; (2) they are all long, and I only have a short time up here; (3) there are people in this audience who know far more about each of these subjects than do I, and I try to exercise some discretion when parading my ignorance (although I do think a Chinese economic historian—who first wrote on early twentieth-century Shanxi province's agricultural markets—being assigned the task of reading umpteen dissertations regarding “the rest of the world's economic histories, none about China,” has some rich irony within); and (4) that is not my job as I perceive it.