Tue Oct 18 13:02:05 EDT 2005
Recommendations for Reading (and Re-Reading): Whaples
Below are a few works that I’ve recently added into the mix in my
American economic history class.
1. Richard Steckel and Jerome Rose, editors, _The Backbone of History:
Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere_ (Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
One of the primary themes of my economic history class is the gains that
can be made by quantifying knowledge. When I first began teaching, the
quantitative frontier was only a few hundred years back, which caused
much frustration, as I wanted to pick up the story of American economic
development in the pre-historic past.
Steckel and Rose’s book (and other related work) has changed things
dramatically. This volume, the product of a massive NSF-funded project,
brings together over fifty scholars to systematically assess the health
of North, South, and Central Americans using skeletal remains dating
from over seven thousand years ago to the early twentieth century. The
team created a database of 12,520 skeletons’ health-related
characteristics – focusing on tooth development and decay, anemia,
infections, trauma, degenerative joint disease, and stature. Following
an explanation of these measures’ significance are fourteen chapters
that carefully examine remains from sixty-five sites and attempt to
place them into a broader understanding of each location’s history. The
concluding chapters, which I assign in class, draw provocative
implications from this comparative history – most importantly that the
Western Hemisphere was no “Garden of Eden” before European contact and
that health levels declined substantially _before_ contact – that “life
_became_ ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ for the typical person with the
rise of agriculture, government and urbanization.” The collection is
not without short-comings, which I encourage students to address –
concerns such as the representativeness of the skeletal remains – and
the findings are open to alternative interpretations, which I prod
students to consider. It is an especially provocative counterpoint to
the standard Malthusian model of pre-modern history, which we analyze in
class.
2. David Barker, “Was the Alaska Purchase a Good Deal?”
I’m not sure if this working paper has been published. I discovered it
when it was announced on EH.NET’s abstract service.
The purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, ridiculed in 1867
as "Seward's Folly," is now often viewed as a shrewd business deal.
This paper presents an estimate of cash flow from Alaska to the federal
government from 1867 to 1990 and finds that its net present value was
_less_ than the purchase price -- suggesting that kickbacks from Russia
to U.S. legislators might have influenced the purchase price. The paper
is a nifty example of how to do a comprehensive present value
calculation and to separate costs from benefits – which are so easy for
undergraduates to confuse. It gets the class talking about
counterfactuals and the integration of markets. If the U.S. hadn’t
bought Alaska, it probably would have ended up in British hands and
become part of Canada. Would this have denied me and you the access to
Alaska’s natural bounties?
3. Robert Fogel, “Reconsidering Expectations of Economic Growth after
World War II from the Perspective of 2004,” NBER Working Paper 11125,
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11125.
Written for a festschrift, this is vintage Fogel, showing that forecasts
of economic growth at the close of World War II were uniformly too
pessimistic -- that economists and almost everyone else have a track
record over the past hundred and fifty years of undue pessimism about
the future. It closes with an anecdote from Fogel’s teacher Simon
Kuznets. One of the points Kuznets made in class “was that if you
wanted to find accurate forecasts of the past, don’t look at what the
economists said. The economists in 1850 wrote that the progress of the
last decade had been so great that it could not possibly continue. And
economists at the end of the nineteenth century wrote that the progress
of the last half century has been so great that it could not possibly
continue during the twentieth century. He said you would come closest
to an accurate forecast if you read the writers of science fiction. But
even the writers of science fiction were too pessimistic.”
I mention these points near the beginning of the semester and ask my
students to imagine themselves back at the old Wake Forest campus a
hundred years ago -- _before_ air conditioning -- and to imagine their
reaction if I were to hand them a table comparing incomes per capita
around the globe at the beginning and end of the twentieth century. (I
hand out a sheet, based on Angus Maddison’s numbers, which makes these
exact comparisons.) Would they believe that _every_ country would see
its economic standard of living rise, that the rich country’s incomes
per capita would rise by factors of five, six, seven and eight; that
China’s average income would climb nearly ten fold and Japan over
eighteen fold? Virtually everyone concludes that this table would have
been dismissed as a deluded, sci-fi fantasy.
4. David Wells, _Our Burden and Our Strength, or, A Comprehensive and
Popular Examination of the Debt and Resources of our Country, Present
and Prospective_ (New York, 1864), reprinted in William Barber, editor,
_The Development of the National Economy: The United States from the
Civil War through the 1890s_ (London, 2005).
Not every economist was pessimistic about growth back in the 1800s.
David Wells argued as the Civil War wound down that, contrary to popular
opinion, the Union’s massive war debt (which we’ve now calculated to
exceed 30 percent of GDP) would not difficult to repay in light of the
prospective expansion of the nation’s income and tax-paying capacity.
This is a truly insightful essay that lays out a raft of quantitative
information to build a case that history subsequently proved to be
largely correct. It’s fascinating for students to compare the
historical record with Wells’ predictions and Wells includes an
interesting discussion of the value of an immigrant in light of the
value of a slave.
Wells focuses on wealth, rather than income, arguing that “wealth makes
wealth” -- and convincing the reader that the U.S. possessed
considerable wealth, tapped and untapped. He concludes, “enough
statistics ... have been given to satisfy our readers that the country
cannot be destroyed, or even crippled, by any probable future debt; and
to induce every loyal man, as he reflects upon our resources as a nation
to ‘Thank God and take courage.”