Richard von Mises (1883–1953), the younger brother of Ludwig, had an Apollonian genius. He was a leading probabilist and statistician of the world, a leading engineer and designer of airplanes for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a leading philosopher of “positivism.” Von Mises was rational and measured, a man of observations and proportions. Though too modest to say so, he was a hero in his own story of scientific philosophy. A Harvard professor, von Mises was also learned in the humanities: his Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939 [1951]) is painted with images from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Goethe, and in equal proportions with the positivist icons of Mach and Comte and Kant (pp. 401–04). Von Mises owned and loved the world's largest collection of Rilke poetry before bequeathing the collection to Harvard's Houghton library. But von Mises believed his Dionysian self to be rhetorically separable from the positivist-scientist self, and lower. He tried to peel rhetoric away from science and gaze at its logical and empirical clarity. Abraham Wald was his student. His theory of collective probability influenced the econometrics of Trygve Haavelmo. Yet econometricians and philosophers younger than Arnold Zellner have never heard of Richard von Mises.

Feeling panicky? Elmus Wicker might be able to explain why. In 1996, he authored The Banking Panics of the Great Depression (New York: Cambridge University Press); now, pushing the frontiers of our knowledge forward (and chronologically backward!), he has tackled the late nineteenth century in the United States. In this new book Wicker asks an interesting and important question: Were banking panics different under the National Banking System than they were under the Federal Reserve System?

There is a widespread impression among students of American financial history that, in the period immediately following the panic of 1837, American financiers engaged in sharp practices amounting to the wholesale deception of British bankers and European investors. This impression has been fostered especially in connection with the well-known episode of the partial or complete repudiation of state bonds by Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, Michigan, and Florida in the 1840's. According to the charge, the large British bankers originally transacted business in the United States only through old and established bankers and agents. This enabled them to avoid the more speculative securities. Much of the distribution of bonds in England was done through three British firms, which were prominent in the merchant-banking business for the American trade: Thomas Wilson & Co., Timothy Wiggin & Co., and Geo. Wildes & Co.—popularly known as the 3 W's. A change for the worse occurred—so the charge runs—when these firms were forced to suspend payments because of the financial strain in England and the United States in 1837. After the resumption of specie payments in the United States the following year, a more speculative type of American banker, assisted by high-pressure salesmen who were sent to England, was prominent in financiering. These agents were so persuasive that they involved the British bankers in the wildest of schemes, and these bankers, in turn, disposed of American securities to equally innocent investors.

The Kentucky tax lists from 1800 to 1860 permit a study of both the trend in per capita wealth and the change in the relative distribution of wealth in this strategic state from the time of its inception to the Civil War. Real wealth per capita is judged to have increased 2.4 percent a year from 1800 to 1840, and 2.8 percent from 1840 to 1860. Relative inequality remained roughly constant, with the Gini coefficient .80 in both 1800 and 1860 for adult free males. The number of properties held by various individuals was surprisingly unequal in distribution in 1800 and 1820.

David Parish is remembered today by readers of historical fiction as a colorful character in Hervey Allen's picaresque novel, Anthony Adverse, and students of American history know him as an underwriter of one of the loans that enabled the United States to wage the War of 1812. His career was far more important than his present-day reputation would suggest; for he was an international financial adventurer of the type that flourished during the Napoleonic era, when the spirit of nationalism had only begun to shackle men's thoughts and actions.

For reasons that were exogenous or predetermined, the ex ante propensity to invest out of income in the United States declined in the 1920s while the ex ante propensity to save increased. The consequent ex ante surplus available for saving drove up asset prices. Higher asset prices produced a substantial wealth effect on consumption, converting ex ante saving into ex post consumption. Output was consequently maintained at high employment. Eventually asset markets reacted to excessive price levels. Then the momentum of falling asset prices released and reinforced the weight of “surplus” saving.

A low rate of growth of world demand for cotton figures prominently in recent attempts to understand the post-bellum retardation of the southern economy. Gavin Wright, especially, stresses this factor in several articles and a recent book.1 Using-sophisticated regression techniques to estimate the rate of growth of demand for American cotton during both the ante- and post-bellum eras and the magnitude of the change in the rate between them, Wright finds a decline of more than two thirds. Such an occurrence could hardly have helped the South make a prompt recovery from the Civil War.

Among the commodities which could profitably be shipped to the English plantations in America, a parcel of human beings was not the least remunerative. The colonists demanded labor, and were willing to pay for it. For a hundred years after the founding of Virginia this demand was met by the transportation and sale of white indentured servants recruited in Great Britain and Ireland, and so great was the volume of this business that the servants made up about three quarters of all immigrants coming to the colonies south of New York. During the eighteenth century their exclusive sway was gradually disputed by German redemptioners and Negro slaves, yet indentured servants continued to play a vital part in colonial life and to form an important element in colonial trade. The progenitor of many a proud American family found himself landed upon these shores not so much on account of his desire to seek freedom as because his person could be advantageously exchanged for a quantity of tobacco, lumber, or sassafras root.

The President of this Association is like a species of short-lived insect, whose only function in life is to lay an egg, and then to die. Yet, like the walking candle, a President has this brief moment on stage, and his obscurity before and after it makes him determined to burn all the more brightly.

The downside of Chandler's success is that it has placed the large enterprise and the American economy on a pedestal, next to which eveiy other case appears a fumbling effort towards their apparent virtues. As some of the individual country studies in CAH show, well before even Chandler set out on this mission, American management consultants such as McKinsey were “exporting” the M-form company structure as their nostrum for all the world's business ills. As is shown in Fear's chapter and in several others, this involved a very simplistic diagnosis ofwhat those ills consisted of. The M-form conferred substantial advantages at a certain time and place in the evolution of industry, but it was no panacea. Furthermore, as I have suggested previously, its aetiology for comprehending its own prognoses was too shallow.

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.

This book, crammed with characteristically Baumolian insights, encompasses three main parts: one explaining how oligopolists' virtuous rent seeking has been the engine propelling long-term economic growth in free-market economies; one showing how the tools of microeconomics can be applied to analyze technological innovation; and one proposing a macroeconomic endogenous growth model with richer innovation-dependent features than those found in the models pioneered by Paul Romer (Journal of Political Economy, October 1990) and others.