Posted Fri, 2010-02-05 10:48 by backend
Gerben Bakker, University of Essex
Introduction
Like other major innovations such as the automobile, electricity, chemicals and the airplane, cinema emerged in most Western countries at the same time. As the first form of industrialized mass-entertainment, it was all-pervasive. From the 1910s onwards, each year billions of cinema-tickets were sold and consumers who did not regularly visit the cinema became a minority. In Italy, today hardly significant in international entertainment, the film industry was the fourth-largest export industry before the First World War. In the depression-struck U.S., film was the tenth most profitable industry, and in 1930s France it was the fastest-growing industry, followed by paper and electricity, while in Britain the number of cinema-tickets sold rose to almost one billion a year (Bakker 2001b). Despite this economic significance, despite its rapid emergence and growth, despite its pronounced effect on the everyday life of consumers, and despite its importance as an early case of the industrialization of services, the economic history of the film industry has hardly been examined.
This article will limit itself exclusively to the economic development of the industry. It will discuss just a few countries, mainly the U.S., Britain and France, and then exclusively to investigate the economic issues it addresses, not to give complete histories of the industries in those countries. This entry cannot do justice to developments in each and every country, given the nature of an encyclopedia article. This entry also limits itself to the evolution of the Western film industry, because it has been and still is the largest film industry in the world, in revenue terms, although this may well change in the future.
Posted Fri, 2010-02-05 10:44 by backend
James I. Stewart, Reed College
American farmers have often expressed dissatisfaction with their lot but the decades after the Civil War were extraordinary in this regard. The period was one of persistent and acute political unrest. The specific concerns of farmers were varied, but at their core was what farmers perceived to be their deteriorating political and economic status.
The defining feature of farm unrest was the efforts of farmers to join together for mutual gain. Farmers formed cooperatives, interest groups, and political parties to protest their declining fortunes and to increase their political and economic power. The first such group to appear was The Grange or Patrons of Husbandry, founded in the 1860s to address farmers’ grievances against the railroads and desire for greater cooperation in business matters. The agrarian-dominated Greenback Party followed in the 1870s. Its main goal was to increase the amount of money in circulation and thus to lower the costs of credit to farmers. The Farmers’ Alliance appeared in the 1880s. Its members practiced cooperative marketing and lobbied the government for various kinds of business and banking regulation. In the 1890s, aggrieved farmers took their most ambitious steps yet, forming the independent People’s or Populist Party to challenge the dominance of the unsympathetic Republican and Democratic parties.
Posted Fri, 2010-02-05 10:19 by backend
William J. Collins, Vanderbilt University
Before the Civil Rights Movement, housing market discrimination was common and blatant, especially against African Americans but also against Jews and other minority groups.1 This essay focuses on the treatment of African Americans, but readers should keep in the mind the pervasiveness of housing discrimination around 1950. By “discrimination,” I mean (as usual in economics) the differential treatment of market participants on the basis of their race or ethnicity -- for example, the refusal to rent an apartment to a black family that is willing and able to pay a rental price that would be acceptable if the family were white. Proponents of fair housing laws, at the local, state, and federal levels, hoped that the laws would effectively limit housing market discrimination.
Around mid-century, many barriers inhibited African Americans’ residential mobility, including racially restrictive covenants among white property owners, biased lending practices of banks and government institutions, strong social norms against selling or renting property to blacks outside established black neighborhoods, and harassment of blacks seeking residence in otherwise white neighborhoods (Myrdal 1944, Abrams 1955, Meyer 2000). Since then, the potentially adverse effects of housing discrimination on blacks’ accumulation of wealth through housing equity and on blacks’ access to high quality schools, jobs, and public goods have been widely discussed (Kain 1968, Oliver and Shapiro 1995, Yinger 2001). A related literature has sought to understand the apparent connection between residential segregation, in part a legacy of housing market discrimination (Kain and Quigley 1975), and a variety of adverse socioeconomic outcomes (Massey and Denton 1993, Cutler and Glaeser 1997, Collins and Margo 2000).
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 18:41 by backend
Jerry Mushin, Victoria University of Wellington
The establishment, in 1999, of the euro was not an isolated event. It was the latest installment in the continuing story of attempts to move towards economic and monetary integration in western Europe. Its relationship with developments since 1972, when the Bretton Woods system of fixed (but adjustable) exchange rates in terms of the United States dollar was collapsing, is of particular interest.
Political moves towards monetary cooperation in western Europe began at the end of the Second World War, but events before 1972 are beyond the scope of this article. Coffey and Presley (1971) have described and analyzed relevant events between 1945 and 1971.
The Snake
In May 1972, at the end of the Bretton Woods (adjustable-peg) system, many countries in western Europe attempted to stabilize their currencies in relation to each other's currencies. The arrangements known as the Snake in the Tunnel (or, more frequently, as the Snake), which were set up by members of the European Economic Community (EEC), one of the forerunners of the European Union, lasted until 1979. Each member agreed to limit, by market intervention, the fluctuations of its currency's exchange rate in terms of other members' currencies. The maximum divergence between the strongest and the weakest currencies was 2.25%. The agreement meant that the French government, for example, would ensure that the value of the French franc would show very limited fluctuation in terms of the Italian lira or the Netherlands guilder, but that there would be no commitment to stabilize its fluctuations against the United States dollar, the Japanese yen, or other currencies outside the agreement.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 18:33 by backend
David Mitch, University of Maryland Baltimore County
In his introduction to the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776, p. 1) states that the proportion between the annual produce of a nation and the number of people who are to consume that produce depends on "the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied." In recent decades, analysts of economic productivity in the United States during the twentieth century have made allowance for Smith's "skill, dexterity, and judgment" of the labor force under the rubric of labor force quality (Ho and Jorgenson 1999; Aaronson and Sullivan 2001; DeLong, Goldin, and Katz 2003). These studies have found that a variety of factors have influenced labor force quality in the U.S., including age structure and workforce experience, female labor force participation, and immigration. One of the most important determinants of labor force quality has been years of schooling completed by the labor force.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 18:21 by backend
Donald J. Harreld, Brigham Young University
In just over one hundred years, the provinces of the Northern Netherlands went from relative obscurity as the poor cousins of the industrious and heavily urbanized Southern Netherlands provinces of Flanders and Brabant to the pinnacle of European commercial success. Taking advantage of a favorable agricultural base, the Dutch achieved success in the fishing industry and the Baltic and North Sea carrying trade during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries before establishing a far-flung maritime empire in the seventeenth century.
The Economy of the Netherlands up to the Sixteenth Century
In many respects the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic inherited the economic successes of the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands. For centuries, Flanders and to a lesser extent Brabant had been at the forefront of the medieval European economy. An indigenous cloth industry was present throughout all areas of Europe in the early medieval period, but Flanders was the first to develop the industry with great intensity. A tradition of cloth manufacture in the Low Countries existed from antiquity when the Celts and then the Franks continued an active textile industry learned from the Romans.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 18:19 by backend
Geoff Cunfer, Southwest Minnesota State University
What Was "The Dust Bowl"?
The phrase "Dust Bowl" holds a powerful place in the American imagination. It connotes a confusing mixture of concepts. Is the Dust Bowl a place? Was it an event? An era? American popular culture employs the term in all three ways. Ask most people about the Dust Bowl and they can place it in the Middle West, though in the imagination it wanders widely, from the Rocky Mountains, through the Great Plains, to Illinois and Indiana. Many people can situate the event in the 1930s. Ask what happened then, and a variety of stories emerge. A combination of severe drought and economic depression created destitution among farmers. Millions of desperate people took to the roads, seeking relief in California where they became exploited itinerant farm laborers. Farmers plowed up a pristine wilderness for profit, and suffered ecological collapse because of their recklessness. Dust Bowl stories, like its definitions, are legion, and now approach the mythological.
The words also evoke powerful graphic images taken from art and literature. Consider these lines from the opening chapter of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939):
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 18:18 by backend
Marc T. Law, University of Vermont
Throughout history, governments have regulated food and drug products. In general, the focus of this regulation has been on ensuring the quality and safety of food and drugs. Food and drug regulation as we know it today in the United States had its roots in the late nineteenth century when state and local governments began to enact food and drug regulations in earnest. Federal regulation of the industry began on a large scale in the early twentieth century when Congress enacted the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. The regulatory agency spawned by this law – the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – now directly regulates between one-fifth and one-quarter of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and possesses significant power over product entry, the ways in which food and drugs are marketed to consumers, and the manufacturing practices of food and drug firms. This article will focus on the evolution of food and drug regulation in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century until the present day.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 18:11 by backend
Ingrid Henriksen, University of Copenhagen
Denmark is located in Northern Europe between the North Sea and the Baltic. Today Denmark consists of the Jutland Peninsula bordering Germany and the Danish Isles and covers 43,069 square kilometers (16,629 square miles). 1 The present nation is the result of several cessions of territory throughout history. The last of the former Danish territories in southern Sweden were lost to Sweden in 1658, following one of the numerous wars between the two nations, which especially marred the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Following defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, Norway was separated from Denmark in 1814. After the last major war, the Second Schleswig War in 1864, Danish territory was further reduced by a third when Schleswig and Holstein were ceded to Germany. After a regional referendum in 1920 only North-Schleswig returned to Denmark. Finally, Iceland, withdrew from the union with Denmark in 1944. The following will deal with the geographical unit of today’s Denmark.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 18:06 by backend
Michael Haines, Colgate University
Every modern, economically developed nation has experienced the demographic transition from high to low levels of fertility and mortality. America is no exception. In the early nineteenth century, the typical American woman had between seven and eight live births in her lifetime and people probably lived fewer than forty years on average. But America was also distinctive. First, its fertility transition began in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century at the latest. Other Western nations began their sustained fertility declines in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, with the exception of France, whose decline also began early. Second, the fertility rate in America commenced its sustained decline long before that of mortality. This contrasts with the more typical demographic transition in which mortality decline precedes or occurs simultaneously with fertility decline. American mortality did not experience a sustained and irreversible decline until about the 1870s. Third, both these processes were influenced by America's very high level of net in-migration and also by the significant population redistribution to frontier areas and later to cities, towns, and suburbs.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 17:44 by backend
Robert Stanley Herren, North Dakota State University
"The Council of Economic Advisers was established by the Employment Act of 1946 to provide the President with objective economic analysis and advice on the development and implementation of a wide range of domestic and international economic policy issues" (Economic Report of the President 2001: 257). Although it has been the most enduring and important result of the Employment Act of 1946, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) was not the legislation's major focus. As the Second World War ended, many feared that the United States would return to being a depressed economy. Many felt that the United States had the ability, through discretionary fiscal policy, to prevent such an economic collapse but needed legislation to force the federal government to promote continued economic prosperity. Thus, Keynesian economists in government convinced their congressional allies to introduce the Full Employment Act of 1945. Because critics thought the proposed legislation would result in higher inflation, the final legislation (Employment Act of 1946) included vague goals of "maximum production and employment consistent with price stability."
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 17:39 by backend
B. Zorina Khan, Bowdoin College
Introduction
Copyright is a form of intellectual property that provides legal protection against unauthorized copying of the producer’s original expression in products such as art, music, books, articles, and software. Economists have paid relatively little scholarly attention to copyrights, although recent debates about piracy and "the digital dilemma" (free use of digital property) have prompted closer attention to theoretical and historical issues. Like other forms of intellectual property, copyright is directed to the protection of cultural creations that are nonrivalrous and nonexclusive in nature. It is generally proposed that, in the absence of private or public forms of exclusion, prices will tend to be driven down to the low or zero marginal costs and the original producer would be unable to recover the initial investment.
Part of the debate about copyright exists because it is still not clear whether state enforcement is necessary to enable owners to gain returns, or whether the producers of copyrightable products respond significantly to financial incentives. Producers of these public goods might still be able to appropriate returns without copyright laws or in the face of widespread infringement, through such strategies as encryption, cartelization, the provision of complementary products, private monitoring and enforcement, market segmentation, network externalities, first mover effects and product differentiation. Patronage, taxation, subsidies, or public provision, might also comprise alternatives to copyright protection. In some instances "authors" (broadly defined) might be more concerned about nonfinancial rewards such as enhanced reputations or more extensive diffusion.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 17:05 by backend
John Lyons, Miami University
Lou Cain, Loyola University Chicago and Northwestern University
Sam Williamson, Miami University
Introduction
In the 1950s a small group of North American scholars adopted a revolutionary approach to investigating the economic past that soon spread to Great Britain and Ireland, the European mainland, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. What was first called "The New Economic History," then "Cliometrics," was impelled by the promise of significant achievement, by the novelties of the recent (mathematical) formalization of economic theory, by the rapid spread of econometric methods, and by the introduction of computers into academia. Cliometrics has three obvious elements: use of quantifiable evidence, use of theoretical concepts and models, and use of statistical methods of estimation and inference, and an important fourth element, employment of the historian's skills in judging provenance and quality of sources, in placing an investigation in institutional and social context, and in choosing subject matter of significance to history as well as economics. Although the term cliometrics is used to describe work in a variety of historical social and behavioral sciences, the discussion here focuses on economic history.
A quantitative-analytical approach to economic history developed in the interwar years through the work of such scholars as Simon Kuznets in the U.S. and Colin Clark in Britain. Characteristic elements of cliometrics were stimulated by events, by changes in economics, and by an intensification of what might be called the statistical impulse.
First, depression, war, the dissolution of empires, a renewal of widespread and more rapid growth in the Western world, and the challenge of Soviet-style economic planning combined to focus attention on the sources and mechanisms of economic growth and development.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 16:46 by backend
Kent Deng, London School of Economics (LSE)
China has the longest continually recorded history in the premodern world. For economic historians, it makes sense to begin with the formation of China’s national economy in the wake of China’s unification in 221 BC under the Qin. The year 1800 AD coincides with the beginning of the end for China’s premodern era, which was hastened by the First Opium War (1839–42). Hence, the time span of this article is two millennia.
Empire-building
Evidence indicates that there was a sharp difference in the economy between China’s pre-imperial era (until 220 BC) and its imperial era. There can be little doubt that the establishment of the Empire of China (to avoid the term of “the Chinese Empire" as it was not always an empire by and for the Chinese) served as a demarcation line in the history of the East Asian Mainland.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 16:41 by backend
Randall L. Patton, Kennesaw State University
Paul Krugman (1993, p. 5) has written that "the most striking feature of the geography of economic activity…. is surely concentration" (emphasis in the original). There are few better examples of highly concentrated economic activity than the U.S. carpet industry. Today, carpet mills located within a 65-mile radius of Dalton, Georgia, produce about 85% of the carpet sold in the U.S. market. The U.S. industry accounts for about 45% of the world's carpet production. While many segments of the textile industry have struggled in the post-World War II era, carpet makers have prospered. The U.S. carpet industry also exemplifies the southward drift of textile production within the United States during the twentieth century. Indeed, it is probably useful to conceptualize the U.S. carpet industry as two distinct industries with different trajectories. The early American carpet industry was, like other textile segments, a product of borrowed (from the United Kingdom) technology and skill that struggled throughout its existence against imports. The second American carpet industry grew from deep southern roots and utilized locally developed technology and skills. The second industry also came along at just the right time to ride the boom in consumer spending associated with the economic golden age that followed World War II.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 16:25 by backend
Robert Whaples, Wake Forest University
Andrew Carnegie (November 25, 1835-August 11, 1919) rose from poverty to become an industrial magnate, as well as a prolific and influential writer. His writings celebrated individualism, competition, economic growth and democracy, and challenged the wealthy to practice a philanthropy that would elevate mankind.
When the Carnegie family emigrated from Scotland to western Pennsylvania, poverty compelled thirteen-year-old Andrew to work as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory at $1.20 a week. Making opportunities for himself, working hard, and learning fast, he quickly rose, becoming successively a messenger boy, telegraph operator, secretary to one of the Pennsylvania Railroad's superintendents, and finally superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad's western division in Pittsburgh at age twenty-three in 1859. During the Civil War, Carnegie helped organize the repair of the rail system around Washington, DC and then organized the Telegraphers Corps. While still working for the railroad during the war, he organized a partnership to manufacture railroad bridges.
Desiring greater autonomy, Carnegie left the railroad in 1865 to run his own enterprises. He marketed bonds and invested in oil and railway sleeping cars, but his primary business was iron-making. Introducing the cost-accounting techniques of the railroad industry and hiring trained chemists, he ruthlessly adopted procedures that cut per-unit costs and soon emerged as one of the industry's dominant forces. Following a personal demonstration Carnegie decided to adopt Henry Bessemer's new technology and enter the steel industry, building the Edgar Thompson Works in 1873, just as the Panic of 1873 hit. His deep financial resources allowed him to buy up his hard-pressed partners' stakes cheaply and gain a majority share of the enterprise.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 16:24 by backend
Terry Crowley, University of Guelph
Oscar Douglas Skelton (1878-1941) provided the essential bridge between the founding of Canadian economic history by Adam Shortt in the late nineteenth century and its larger development by Harold Innis from the 1920s to the 1950s. More than Shortt, Skelton was the first to identify the parameters of the economic history of the northern dominion. Long before Canada became officially independent of Britain in 1931, Skelton’s writings hypothesized a nation that he saw coming into existence on the basis of colonial economic activities. These ventures were forged in both private and public spheres in defiance of a vast geography that otherwise would have prohibited the formation of a national identity.
As one of the earliest professionally trained political economists, Oscar Skelton turned to history after acquiring a distaste for intellectual attempts to make the world conform to theoretical paper sketches purporting to elucidate immutable laws. The diachronic methods of historical study appeared to him to provide knowledge with more satisfying richness and complexity than the synchronic approaches of the more theoretically minded. As a scholar who was also a public intellectual intimately involved in the political and economic currents of his time and place, Skelton taught at Queen’s University in Kingston (Ontario), published extensively in a variety of media, and eventually became Undersecretary of State for foreign affairs and the closest advisor of two Canadian prime ministers, William Lyon Mackenzie King and Richard Bedford Bennett.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 16:24 by backend
Livio Di Matteo, Lakehead University
Introduction1
From a macro perspective, Canadian quantitative economic history is concerned with the collection and construction of historical time series data as well as the study of the performance of broad economic aggregates over time.2 The micro dimension of quantitative economic history focuses on individual and sector responses to economic phenomena.3 In particular, micro economic history is marked by the collection and analysis of data sets rooted in individual economic and social behavior. This approach uses primary historical records like census rolls, probate records, assessment rolls, land records, parish records and company records, to construct sets of socio-economic data used to examine the social and economic characteristics and behavior of those individuals and their society, both cross-sectionally and over time.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 15:53 by backend
Bernard Attard, University of Leicester
Introduction
The economic benefits of establishing a British colony in Australia in 1788 were not immediately obvious. The Government's motives have been debated but the settlement's early character and prospects were dominated by its original function as a jail. Colonization nevertheless began a radical change in the pattern of human activity and resource use in that part of the world, and by the 1890s a highly successful settler economy had been established on the basis of a favorable climate in large parts of the southeast (including Tasmania ) and the southwest corner; the suitability of land for European pastoralism and agriculture; an abundance of mineral wealth; and the ease with which these resources were appropriated from the indigenous population. This article will focus on the creation of a colonial economy from 1788 and its structural change during the twentieth century. To simplify, it will divide Australian economic history into four periods, two of which overlap. These are defined by the foundation of the 'bridgehead economy' before 1820; the growth of a colonial economy between 1820 and 1930; the rise of manufacturing and the protectionist state between 1891 and 1973; and the experience of liberalization and structural change since 1973. The article will conclude by suggesting briefly some of the similarities between Australia and other comparable settler economies, as well as the ways in which it has differed from them.
Posted Thu, 2010-02-04 15:51 by backend
Timothy Cuff, Westminster College
Historical anthropometrics is the study of patterns in human body size and their correlates over time. While social researchers, public health specialists and physical anthropologists have long utilized anthropometric measures as indicators of well-being, only within the past three decades have historians begun to use such data extensively. Adult stature is a cumulative indicator of net nutritional status over the growth years, and thus reflects command over food and access to healthful surroundings. Since expenditures for these items comprised such a high percentage of family income for historical communities, mean stature can be used to examine changes in a population’s economic circumstances over time and to compare the well-being of different groups with similar genetic height potential. Anthropometric measures are available for portions of many national populations as far back as the early 1700s. While these data often serve as complements to standard economic indicators, in some cases they provide the only means of assessing historical economic well-being, as “conventional” measures such as per capita GDP, wage and price indices, and income inequality measures have been notoriously spotty and problematic to develop. Anthropometric-based research findings to date have contributed to the scholarly debates over mortality trends, the nature of slavery, and the outcomes of industrialization and economic development. Height has been the primary indicator utilized to date. Other indicators include height-standardized weight indices, birth weight, and age at menarche. Potentially even more important, historical anthropometrics broadens the understanding of “well-being” beyond the one dimensional “ruler” of income, providing another lens through which the quality of historical life can be viewed.
This article:
Posted Mon, 2010-02-01 19:12 by backend
Roger L. Ransom, University of California, Riverside
The Civil War has been something of an enigma for scholars studying American history. During the first half of the twentieth century, historians viewed the war as a major turning point in American economic history. Charles Beard labeled it "Second American Revolution," claiming that "at bottom the so-called Civil War - was a social war, ending in the unquestioned establishment of a new power in the government, making vast changes - in the course of industrial development, and in the constitution inherited from the Fathers" (Beard and Beard 1927: 53). By the time of the Second World War, Louis Hacker could sum up Beard's position by simply stating that the war's "striking achievement was the triumph of industrial capitalism" (Hacker 1940: 373). The "Beard-Hacker Thesis" had become the most widely accepted interpretation of the economic impact of the Civil War. Harold Faulkner devoted two chapters to a discussion of the causes and consequences of the war in his 1943 textbook American Economic History (which was then in its fifth edition), claiming that "its effects upon our industrial, financial, and commercial history were profound" (1943: 340).
Posted Mon, 2010-02-01 19:08 by backend
Lawrence H. Officer, University of Illinois at Chicago
The gold standard is the most famous monetary system that ever existed. The periods in which the gold standard flourished, the groupings of countries under the gold standard, and the dates during which individual countries adhered to this standard are delineated in the first section. Then characteristics of the gold standard (what elements make for a gold standard), the various types of the standard (domestic versus international, coin versus other, legal versus effective), and implications for the money supply of a country on the standard are outlined. The longest section is devoted to the "classical" gold standard, the predominant monetary system that ended in 1914 (when World War I began), followed by a section on the "interwar" gold standard, which operated between the two World Wars (the 1920s and 1930s).
Posted Mon, 2010-02-01 19:03 by backend
Thomas N. Maloney, University of Utah
The nineteenth century was a time of radical transformation in the political and legal status of African Americans. Blacks were freed from slavery and began to enjoy greater rights as citizens (though full recognition of their rights remained a long way off). Despite these dramatic developments, many economic and demographic characteristics of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century were not that different from what they had been in the mid-1800s. Tables 1 and 2 present characteristics of black and white Americans in 1900, as recorded in the Census for that year. (The 1900 Census did not record information on years of schooling or on income, so these important variables are left out of these tables, though they will be examined below.) According to the Census, ninety percent of African Americans still lived in the Southern US in 1900 -- roughly the same percentage as lived in the South in 1870. Three-quarters of black households were located in rural places. Only about one-fifth of African American household heads owned their own homes (less than half the percentage among whites). About half of black men and about thirty-five percent of black women who reported an occupation to the Census said that they worked as a farmer or a farm laborer, as opposed to about one-third of white men and about eight percent of white women. Outside of farm work, African American men and women were greatly concentrated in unskilled labor and service jobs. Most black children had not attended school in the year before the Census, and white children were much more likely to have attended. So a typical African American family at the start of the twentieth century lived and worked on a farm in the South, did not own its home, and was unlikely to have its children in school.
Posted Mon, 2010-02-01 18:56 by backend
Erik D. Craft, University of Richmond
Introduction
The United States Congress established a national weather organization in 1870 when it instructed the Secretary of War to organize the collection of meteorological observations and forecasting of storms on the Great Lakes and Atlantic Seaboard. Large shipping losses on the Great Lakes during the 1868 and 1869 seasons, growing acknowledgement that storms generally traveled from the West to the East, a telegraphic network that extended west of the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Seaboard, and an eager Army officer promising military discipline are credited with convincing Congress that a storm-warning system was feasible. The United States Army Signal Service weather organization immediately dwarfed its European counterparts in budget and geographical size and shortly thereafter created storm warnings that on the Great Lakes alone led to savings in shipping losses that exceeded the entire network's expenses.
Posted Mon, 2010-02-01 18:45 by backend
Stephen A. Brown, Uniform Code Council
Beginnings of the Bar Code
In 1949, a young graduate student was wrestling with the concept of automatically capturing information about a product. He believed that the dots and dashes of Morse code would to be a good model, but he could not figure out how to use those familiar patterns to solve his problem. Then, one day as he relaxed at the beach, he idly drew dots and dashes in the sand. As his fingers elongated the dashes he looked at the result and said, "Hey, I've got it."
Three years later that graduate student Joseph Woodland and his partner received a patent on what began as lines in the sand, and the linear bar code was born. Much to the inventor's surprise, however, it was not a rapid commercial success. Fifteen years were to pass before the first commercial use of the bar code. It was not a particularly successful use.
Bar codes were placed on the sides of railroad freight cars. As the freight car rolled past a trackside scanner, it was to be identified and, inferentially, its destination and cargo. The system failed, however, to take into account that freight cars bounced as they passed the scanner. Consequently, the accuracy of the scanning was poor.
Posted Mon, 2010-02-01 18:41 by backend
William M. Boal, Drake University and Michael R. Ransom, Brigham Young University
What is Labor Monopsony?
The term "monopsony," first used in print by Joan Robinson (1969, p. 215), means a single buyer in a market. Like a monopolist (a single seller), a monopsonist has power over price through control of quantity. In particular, a monopolist can push the market price of a good down by reducing the quantity it purchases. The tradeoff between price paid and quantity purchased is the supply curve that the monopsonist confronts. A competitive buyer, by contrast, confronts no such tradeoff -- it must accept a price determined by the market. A monopsonized market will therefore be characterized by a smaller quantity traded and a lower price than a competitive market with the same demand and other costs of production.
Monopsony power, like monopoly power, results in economic inefficiency. This is because the monopsonist avoids purchasing the last few units of a good whose value to the monopsonist is greater than their marginal cost, in order to hold down the price paid for prior units. In principle, inefficiency from monopsony can be mitigated by a well- placed legal price floor, which removes the monopsonist's power over price and eliminates its incentive to restrict the quantity it purchases. A modest price floor forces the monopsonist to take price as given and increase its purchases toward the level of competitive buyers. However, if the price floor is too high, the monopsonist will reduce its purchases -- just as competitive buyers would do in response to a price floor -- and inefficiency recurs.
Posted Mon, 2010-02-01 18:21 by Anonymous
Robert E. Wright, University of Virginia
Early U.S. commercial banks were for-profit business firms, usually structured as joint-stock companies. Many, but by no means all, obtained corporate charters from their respective state legislatures. Although politically controversial, commercial banks, the number and assets of which grew quickly after 1800, played a key role in early U.S. economic growth.1 Commercial banks, savings banks, insurance companies and other financial intermediaries helped to fuel growth by channeling wealth from savers to entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs used the loans to increase the profitability of their businesses and hence the efficiency of the overall economy.
Description of the Early Commercial Banking Business
As financial intermediaries, commercial banks pooled the wealth of a large number of savers and lent fractions of that pool to a diverse group of enterprising business firms. The best way to understand how early commercial banks functioned is to examine a typical bank balance sheet.2 Banks essentially borrowed wealth from their liability holders and re-lent that wealth to the issuers of their assets. Banks profited from the difference between the cost of their liabilities and the net return from their assets.
Posted Mon, 2010-02-01 18:21 by Anonymous
Elmus Wicker, Indiana University
Prior to the passage of deposit insurance legislation in 1933 banking panics were a recurrent feature of U.S. banking history. Three phases of that panic experience can be identified depending upon the type of regulatory framework in place: the pre-Civil War era, the National Banking era, and the era of the Federal Reserve System. Federal regulation was absent in the antebellum period with panics in 1819, 1837, 1857 and incipient panics in 1860 and 1861. During the National Banking era, banking panics occurred in 1873, 1893, and 1907 with incipient panics in 1884 and 1890. After the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913, there were four full-scale banking panics, one in 1930, two in 1931, one in 1933 and a localized panic in Chicago in 1932. This article will examine post-Civil War banking panics only.
Panics as Financial Shocks
Banking panics belong to a general class of financial shocks, which include panics in the stock market, the foreign exchange market and the acceleration of commercial bankruptcies. Banking panics are only one type of financial shock and certainly not the most frequent.
A banking panic may be defined as a class of financial shocks whose origin can be found in any sudden and unanticipated revision of expectations of deposit loss where there is an attempt, usually unsuccessful, to convert checking deposits into currency. In the past banking panics were regarded as examples of irrational or inscrutable behavior. That has changed. More recently they have been treated as a rational depositor response to an asymmetric information deficit. This revival of interest in banking panic theory has renewed scholarly interest in what happened in specific panic episodes.
Posted Mon, 2010-02-01 18:21 by Anonymous
Robert Whaples, Wake Forest University
In the 1800s, many Americans worked seventy hours or more per week and the length of the workweek became an important political issue. Since then the workweek's length has decreased considerably. This article presents estimates of the length of the historical workweek in the U.S., describes the history of the shorter-hours "movement," and examines the forces that drove the workweek's decline over time.
Estimates of the Length of the Workweek
Measuring the length of the workweek (or workday or workyear) is a difficult task, full of ambiguities concerning what constitutes work and who is to be considered a worker. Estimating the length of the historical workweek is even more troublesome. Before the Civil War most Americans were employed in agriculture and most of these were self-employed. Like self-employed workers in other fields, they saw no reason to record the amount of time they spent working. Often the distinction between work time and leisure time was blurry. Therefore, estimates of the length of the typical workweek before the mid-1800s are very imprecise.
The Colonial Period
Based on the amount of work performed -- for example, crops raised per worker -- Carr (1992) concludes that in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake region, "for at least six months of the year, an eight to ten-hour day of hard labor was necessary." This does not account for other required tasks, which probably took about three hours per day. This workday was considerably longer than for English laborers, who at the time probably averaged closer to six hours of heavy labor each day.
Posted Mon, 2010-02-01 18:21 by Anonymous
William J. White, Research Triangle Institute
The farm tractor is one of the most important and easily recognizable technological components of modern agriculture in the United States. Its development in the first half of the twentieth century fundamentally changed the nature of farm work, significantly altered the structure of rural America, and freed up millions of workers to be absorbed into the rapidly growing manufacturing and service sectors of the country. The tractor represents an important application of the internal combustion engine, rivaling the automobile and the truck in its economic impact.
A tractor is basically a machine that provides machine power for performing agricultural tasks. Tractors can be used to pull a variety of farm implements for plowing, planting, cultivating, fertilizing, and harvesting crops, and can also be used for hauling materials and personal transportation. In the provision of motive power, tractors were a replacement for human effort and that of draft animals, both of which are still used extensively in other parts of the world.
Technical Description
The heart of a farm tractor is a powerful internal combustion engine that drives the wheels to provide forward motion. Direct ignition (diesel) and spark-driven engines are both found on tractors, just as with cars and light trucks. Power from the engine can be transmitted to the implement being used through a power take-off (PTO) shaft or belt pulley. The engine also provides energy for the electrical system, including the ignition system and lights, and for the most recent models, air conditioner, stereo system, and other creature comforts.
