The Most Technologically Progressive Decade of the Century

Because of the Depression’s place in both the popular and academic imagination, and the repeated and justifiable emphasis on output that was not produced, income that was not earned, and expenditure that did not take place, it will seem startling to propose the following hypothesis: the years 1929–1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history.1 The hypothesis entails two primary claims: that during this period businesses and government contractors implemented or adopted on a more widespread basis a wide range of new technologies and practices, resulting in the highest rate of measured peacetime peak-to-peak multifactor productivity growth in the century, and secondly, that the Depression years produced advances that replenished and expanded the larder of unexploited or only partially exploited techniques, thus providing the basis for much of the labor and multifactor productivity improvement of the 1950’s and 1960’s

Economics, Biology, and Culture: Hodgson on History

This book addresses what the author claims, with considerable justification, to be the foremost challenge confronting the social and behavioral sciences today: the problem of historical specificity. Hodgson poses the question by asking whether we need different theories to understand social and economic behavior in different societies at different stages of their development. He answers the question in the affirmative, and criticizes the economics profession for suggesting that there is one universal model or theory equally suited to all economies and societies at all times. He faults the profession further for no longer worrying much or conducting serious debate about this issue, a development he attributes to the eclipse and eventual demise of institutionalism and historical economics in England, Germany, and the United States

U.S. Economic Growth in the Gilded Age

In the immediate postwar period, Moses Abramovitz and Robert Solow both examined data on output and input growth from the first half of the twentieth century and reached similar conclusions. In the twentieth century, in contrast with the nineteenth, a much smaller fraction of real output growth could be swept back to the growth of inputs conventionally measured. The rise of the residual, they suggested, was an important distinguishing feature of twentieth century growth. This paper identifies two difficulties with this claim. First, TFP growth virtually disappeared in the U.S. between 1973 and 1995. Second, TFP growth was in fact quite robust between the end of the Civil War and 1906, as was in fact acknowledged by Abramovitz in his 1993 EHA Presidential address. Developing a revised macroeconomic narrative is essential in reconciling our interpretation of these numbers with what we know about scientific, technological, and organizational change during the gilded age

Economic Growth and Recovery in the United States, 1919-1941

The first part of this chapter provides an overview of what lay behind record productivity growth in the US economy between 1929 and 1941. The second part considers the role of rigidities and other negative supply conditions in worsening the downturn and slowing recovery. While arguing consistently that the overarching explanation of the Great Depression will and should continue to emphasise a collapse and slow revival in the growth of aggregate demand, the chapter spends relatively little time on what drives this. The emphasis of the chapter is on aggregate supply—both the broad array of positive shocks that propelled potential and, eventually, actual output forward, and the negative conditions which, in interaction with aggregate demand, may have increased the size of the output gap and prolonged its persistence. An appendix offers discussion and updated calculations of productivity growth rates for the critical period 1929–41

The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Current Crisis

In the past year, a rising tide of antagonism to the New Deal has formed among some economists and writers, claiming that the New Deal policies made the Great Depression worse. Is there any basis in fact to New Deal denialism? The noted economic historian Alexander Field has closely studied the period. He shows the central weaknesses of these arguments and makes a strong case that the New Deal made a remarkable contribution to the U.S. economy and the American way of life

John Kenneth Galbraith

Galbraith, John Kenneth (15 Oct. 1908-29 Apr. 2006), economist and author, was born in Iona Station, Ontario, Canada, to Archibald Galbraith and Sarah Catherine Kendall. Galbraith, who advanced and reinterpreted institutionalist and Keynesian traditions in economics while promoting a liberal and progressive political agenda, was arguably the best-known and most influential economist and public intellectual of his generation. He published dozens of books, served in a number of high-level government positions, and, as a faculty member at Harvard University for more than a quarter of a century, advised every Democratic president from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Galbraith\u27s political education began at the hands of his father, who was active in agrarian politics in Ontario. Galbraith\u27s formal education at the outset was rudimentary. It began at a one-room school on Willy\u27s Sideroad and continued for four years at Dutton High School, followed by a fifth year at St. Thomas High School (the additional year necessitated by inadequate elementary school preparation). He matriculated at Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, where he pursued a B.Sc. in agricultural economics. His major was animal husbandry. In a Time interview he later described OAC as not only the cheapest but probably the worst college in the English-speaking world. Approaching graduation, and seeking wider horizons, he applied for and won a Giannini Fellowship in Agricultural Economics, and in 1931 journeyed westward and to the United States to pursue graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley. By all accounts (including those of the FBI) he now became a much stronger student, although he was aware that students and faculty in the regular economics department considered those in the department of agricultural economics as second class. His doctoral dissertation, which in retrospect Galbraith viewed as without distinction, examined county expenditures in California

Communications

The communications sector of an economy comprises a range of technologies, physical media, and institutions/rules that facilitate the storage of information through means other than a society\u27s oral tradition and the transmission of that information over distances beyond the normal reach of human conversation. This chapter provides data on the historical evolution of a disparate range of industries and institutions contributing to the movement and storage of information in the United States over the past two centuries. These include the U.S. Postal Service, the newspaper industry, book publishing, the telegraph, wired and cellular telephone service, radio and television, and the Internet

Social Preferences in Small‐Scale Societies

This volume reports on a cross‐cultural investigation of social preferences in 15 small‐scale, non‐Western societies. Participants from all 15 groups played the ultimatum game with members of their own culture; subjects from a subset also played dictator and voluntary contribution to public goods games. The bulk of the book (Chapters 4 through 14) consists of reports by the field workers (mostly anthropologists). Each chapter includes ethnographic information, a description of how members of the group make their living, details on the experimental protocols and results, and some discussion. Although none of the results are consistent with the predictions of the standard rational choice model (as has been true in earlier work), group average offers and rejection frequencies in these experiments display more variation than has been observed in experiments using university students from developed Westernized societies. The editors report that little of this variation can be accounted for by individual economic or demographic variables, such as gender, age, education, or wealth. On the other hand, group dummies account for quite a lot, and social preferences seem to be stronger in groups experiencing greater market integration or whose economic mode offers greater opportunities for gains from cooperative enterprise

French Optical Telegraphy, 1793-1855: Hardware, Software, Administration

The relatively stable contribution of technological change to aggregate growth masks technological trajectories which are, at the sectoral level, often highly discontinuous. For decades, even centuries, the capabilities used to produce a particular good or service may continue essentially unchanged or with relatively minor evolutionary modifications. Sometimes without much warning a breakthrough innovation will create a new technological paradigm, along with an accompanying gale of creative destruction, which is then followed by a period of consolidation within a maturing framework

Schelling, von Neumann, and the Event that Didn’t Occur

Thomas Schelling was recognized by the Nobel Prize committee as a pioneer in the application of game theory and rational choice analysis to problems of politics and international relations. However, although he makes frequent references in his writings to this approach, his main explorations and insights depend upon and require acknowledgment of its limitations. One of his principal concerns was how a country could engage in successful deterrence. If the behavioral assumptions that commonly underpin game theory are taken seriously and applied consistently, however, nuclear adversaries are almost certain to engage in devastating conflict, as John von Neumann forcefully asserted. The history of the last half century falsified von Neumann’s prediction, and the “event that didn’t occur” formed the subject of Schelling’s Nobel lecture. The answer to the question “why?” is the central concern of this paper