This article surveys the history of tourism in America from colonial times to World War II. In that time there were substantial increases in the numbers of tourists, in the extent to which middle-income classes participated, and in the number and type of tourist destinations; but most of that growth may have been confined to the period after World War I. The growth of income and reduced costs of travel no doubt explain most of the growth, but some cultural factors helped to shift out the demand curve. The industry also possesses characteristics that should make further study of interest to economic historians. “I am moved to confess that day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion have grown more and more pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encumbered them flitted one by one out of my mind.”Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, p. 488.Mark Twain

In this study we show that French foreign investment from the end of the nineteenth century until the eve of the First World War was driven by economic and financial considerations. This refutes the hitherto accepted thesis that French capital exports were motivated by diplomatic and political factors. By using economic modeling that combines microeconomic and econometric approaches, we show that the geographic distribution of French financial flows was consistent with rational economic behavior.

This article tests the importance of human capital in explaining convergence across the states from 1880 to 1950. Human capital matters to a state's income level and to its growth rate through technological diffusion. The South, whose overwhelmingly agricultural society relied more heavily on work experience than formal education, and whose racial discrimination in school resource allocation lowered human capital accumulation of both blacks and whites, presents a unique pattern. The South's low human capital levels following the Civil War and its active postbellum resistance to education reduced its speed of conditional convergence toward the rest of the nation.

In this article we investigate the possibility that a regulatory regime designed to maximize the profitability of the early Dutch whaling industry could have simultaneously guaranteed the biological sustainability of the eastern Arctic Bowhead whale. We find that policies with economic profit as the sole objective could have saved the whales, as well as increasing the incomes of the whalers, under assumptions commonly made in fisheries models. However, the necessary assumptions are implausible. Under more historically relevant assumptions we find that regulation could not have simultaneously increased profits and preserved the stock of whales.

If replacing welfare with private charity has increased the self-reliance of the poor, the benefits would be observed in the charity organization movement of the late nineteenth century. Inebriation would subside, the heart would be cheered, earnings would rise, the “broken” would be “complete,” dependence would wither, and the classes would converge. If the benefits were large, they would have been large in Indianapolis—the beacon of charity in a Coasean landscape. The hypotheses are tested in hazard models using a sample from 25 years of household-level caseworker manuscripts. The evidence is not suggestive in the direction of hope.

The existing literature on the economy of medieval England views the practice of convertible husbandry as a more efficient alternative to regular common fields. The article challenges this view by measuring the productivities of the systems, which are found to be approximately equivalent. In interpreting this finding, it is suggested that edaphic conditions and wrongful managerial practices account for the poor performance of convertible husbandry during the Middle Ages, whereas the greater productivity achieved by the system in the early modern period is attributed to the introduction of fodder legumes, such as clover, which were absent in previous centuries.

During World War II, the U.S. government displaced private investors. According to NIPA data for the period 1942–1945, net private investment was negative $6.2 billion, and net government investment was positive $99.4 billion. Although economists have credited this government investment with various contributions to wartime and postwar economic growth, the bulk of it had little or no value beyond its immediate contribution to winning the war. This episode dramatically exposes a fundamental but false assumption that underlies official data on capital formation: that all expenditures for durable producer goods or munitions form genuine capital. There are circumstances which make the consumption of capital unavoidable. A costly war cannot be financed without such a damaging measure …. There may arise situations in which it may be unavoidable to burn down the house to keep from freezing, but those who do that should realize what it costs and what they will have to do without later on.

Ludwig von MisesMises, Interventionism, p. 52.

The issue of why productivity growth during the British industrial revolution was slow despite the arrival of famous inventions is revisited using a growth accounting methodology based on an embodied innovation model. The results highlight the relatively small and long-delayed impact of steam on productivity growth even when capital deepening is taken into account. Even so, technological change including embodiment effects accounted entirely for the acceleration in labor productivity growth that allowed the economy to achieve “modern economic growth.”