Hansen on Rosenbloom, ed., _Quantitative Economic History: The Good of Counting_

[Book Reviews in Economic and Business History]

Published by EH.NET (September 2008)

Joshua L. Rosenbloom, editor, _Quantitative Economic History: The Good 
of Counting_. London: Routledge, 2008.  xvii + 176 pp. $130 (hardback), 
ISBN: 978-0-415-77349-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Mary Eschelbach Hansen, Department of Economics, 
American University.


_Quantitative Economic History_ is a compact volume dedicated to the 
prolific Thomas J. Weiss.  Joshua Rosenbloom (Weiss’ colleague at the 
University of Kansas), in cooperation with contributors from among 
Weiss’ many students and collaborators, has certainly maximized the 
ratio of information to ink.  The volume is a worthy celebration of 
Weiss’ accomplishments.

Throughout his career, Weiss has scrutinized the details.  He is, for 
example, the authority on the details of the inconsistencies in census 
enumeration that make the construction of historical series on the size 
of the labor force so messy.  His efforts to straighten up our 
statistical house make our results more robust.  Rosenbloom places the 
volume in this context, and the contributors make the case by following 
his example.  Each of the seven papers is based upon a detailed 
accounting of historical fact.  Each fact is carefully considered in 
relation to the concept purportedly being measured.
The topics in the volume are as far-flung across the landscape of 
economic history as Weiss’ own work.  The volume begins with two studies 
in demography.  John Ermisch (University of Essex) contributes a history 
of non-marital births in England and Wales since 1845.  He accounts for 
increases in the rate of non-marital births by considering the effect of 
macroeconomic conditions on marriage (lower real wages inhibit marriage, 
even for already-pregnant women) and social interaction effects of 
cohabitation (cohabitation facilitated a decline in the stigma costs of 
non-marital births).  The accounting necessary to capture the effects of 
social interaction is based upon demographic histories constructed from 
interviews in Britain.  Louis Cain (Loyola and Northwestern) and Elyce 
Rotella (Indiana) argue that the decline in urban mortality in the early 
twentieth century was ultimately the result of epidemics.  Epidemics 
increased urbanites’ demand for city leaders to do something about 
water-borne illness.  At the same time, city leaders saw a dramatic 
decline in the cost of obtaining information about what, in fact, should 
be done.  Statistics on investment in city-owned infrastructure 
complement a careful narrative accounting of flows of information.

In the next three essays, contributors examine nineteenth and early 
twentieth century change in three different sectors: manufacturing, 
transportation, and agriculture.  Jeremy Atack (Vanderbilt) and Fred 
Bateman (Georgia) use samples from the manuscript censuses of 
manufactures, an extension of Weiss’ work with Bateman.  They show that 
firms with greater capitalization had lower average profits, but more 
predictable profits, than smaller firms.  Michael R. Haines (Colgate) 
and Robert A. Margo (Boston University) try to capture the treatment 
effects of connecting counties to rail networks between 1850 and 1860. 
They use a data set that links the most recent compilation of individual 
and county-level census data to manuscripts of the census of social 
statistics, as well as to geographic data on rail access in counties. 
Lee A. Craig (North Carolina State) and Matthew Holt (Purdue) contribute 
an accounting of the benefits of mechanical refrigeration to farmers and 
consumers.  They examine a long time series of corn and hog prices and 
demonstrate that refrigeration reduced the seasonal swings in prices 
long associated with poor harvests of corn.

The final two contributions return to labor-related issues.  Rebecca 
Holmes, Price Fishback (Arizona) and Samuel Allen (VMI) attempt to 
measure differences between states in overall intensity of regulation of 
labor markets during the Progressive Era.  They use federal reports of 
labor regulations enacted in the states and panel state-level economic 
data collected from a variety of sources.  Simple specifications reveal 
that labor law intensity was positively correlated with labor 
productivity, but exploratory fixed-effects models do not indicate that 
the laws, by themselves, affected labor productivity in a meaningful way 
when other differences between states are considered.  Joshua Rosenbloom 
and Gregory W. Stutes (Minnesota State-Moorhead) examine the usefulness 
of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series for 1870 as a source for 
the measurement of inequality of wealth.  They contribute to the 
literature on inequality and growth by exploiting the geographic 
dispersion within the 1870 sample.

It is, of course, possible to criticize the papers individually. The 
reader will want more concrete evidence that the best place to split 
Ermish’s long time series on non-marital births is World War II, even 
though the clearest discontinuity is in the late 1970s when unemployment 
associated with the oil crisis coincided with improvements in the 
availability of contraception and abortion.  The reader may wonder how 
the municipally-owned water systems described by Cain and Rotella 
compared to private systems. The reader will want Atack and Bateman to 
discuss the limits of their data to address important questions about 
both the life cycle of firms and the life cycle of capital:  Do small 
cap firms become larger cap firm through growth or through merger?  To 
what extent are profits in large cap firms limited by the vintage of 
their capital?   The economic geographer might object to the 
simplification of von Thunen’s prediction concerning the effect of 
railroad expansion on agriculture in the paper by Haines and Margo.  Von 
Thunen would have expected the crop mix, not only the value of farm 
output, to respond to transportation improvement.  The reader will 
wonder what quantitative evidence on the investment in refrigeration was 
rejected by Craig and Holt.  The reader will hope that Holmes, Fishback, 
and Allen plan to ask whether regulatory climate affected industrial 
employment and the ratio of skilled to unskilled labor.  And finally, 
the economic historian will want Rosenbloom and Stutes to provide more 
context for interpreting their estimate of inequality: how different 
does the U.S. in 1870 look from the U.S. later or from developing 
countries today?

Yet, no quibbles with individual contributors will reduce the usefulness 
of the volume.  Because of its breadth, the volume will be opened and 
referenced often.  Future students will open it expecting to extract the 
details.  But if they read carefully, they will take away more than the 
details.  They will learn how to scrutinize the details and improve upon 
them.  Professor Weiss will continue to teach about the good of 
counting, albeit indirectly, through the works assembled in his honor.


Mary Eschelbach Hansen is Associate Professor of Economics at American 
University.  Hansen, with co-author Brad Hansen, has been working 
towards a history of bankruptcy in the first half of the twentieth 
century.  “The Role of Path Dependence in the Development of U.S. 
Bankruptcy Law, 1880-1938” appeared in the _Journal of Institutional 
Economics_ in 2007; “Religion, Social Capital, and Business Bankruptcy, 
1921-1932” will soon appear in _Business History_; more will follow.

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