Published by EH.Net (July 2022).

Bas van Bavel, Daniel R. Curtis, Jessica Dijkman, Matthew Hannaford, Maïka de Keyzer, Eline van Onacker, and Tim Soens. Disasters and History: The Vulnerability and Resilience of Past Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. x + 231 pp. $29.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1108477178.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Ilan Noy, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

History’s path is strewn with disasters, and at least this reader did not require any convincing that the history of disasters and disasters’ impact on history are both worthy topics of a book-length investigation. Van Bavel, Curtis, Dijkman, Hannaford, de Keyzer, van Onacker, and Soens collaborated in writing a book that aims to provide a comprehensive description of the insights learnt from investigating the global history of disasters. And, indeed, the book delivers on this promise, and provides the interested reader with many nuggets of insights and ideas to ponder. The authors, a group of mostly historians and sociologists from the Low Countries, cover a long time span (from the Pre-Christian Mediterranean Basin to the West Africa Ebola epidemic of 2014), a varied geographic terrain, and several types of mostly sudden-onset disasters. They further elucidate on how historical developments are both catalysts for disasters, shape their impacts and their immediate aftermath, and are also affected by disasters in the long term, throughout a sometimes decades-long recovery process.

I first approvingly note that the authors managed to make the book “open access.” The book is available as a PDF file, for free, on the publisher’s website (Cambridge University Press). Given the primacy of disaster concerns in many places — including in very disadvantaged ones — it is important that this book be made available to anyone who might benefit from its insights. And, indeed, it does provide insights that can be beneficial to the puzzled policymaker who is tasked with reducing disaster risk, improving disaster risk management or the post-disaster emergency phase, or with designing policies for long-term community recovery.

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake-fire-tsunami disaster was perhaps the first modern disaster — one about which a lot of data were collected, and which was international in its scope. It is the prototypical event the authors aim to learn from and indeed describe. Many of the themes that constantly crop up – for example the role of inequality in shaping the impact, the immediate response, the longer-term recovery, and the potential for disasters to change governance and legal institutions – were all clearly present in the 1755 event. However, instead of vertiginously ranging across space and time and picking examples from these diverse places and time periods, the book could have benefitted from diving into a few example events and describing them more thoroughly. History, after all, is often hidden in the details.

As the authors note, “disasters can be understood and explained only by placing them in their social, economic, political, and cultural contexts.” This would be the conventional historical argument. At the same time, they also believe in the external validity of the lessons one can learn from past disasters to inform our behaviour before, during, and after the disasters that are destined to occur.  As an economist, I share this aspiration for external validity. Determined to learn global contemporary lessons from very specific circumstances, however, the authors sometimes stray too aggressively in that direction (for example, in their discussion about unequal mortality burdens and the deaths of clergy in a 1693 earthquake in Sicily which toppled many churches). But these are quibbles, and overall, the book manages to provide many insights, based on a lot of examples.

Many of the terms used by the authors — e.g., vulnerability, resilience, adaptation, mitigation, exposure, and even disaster — have multiple definitions, which often diverge across the various disciplines that study disasters. For example, economists (my tribe) and historians do not define resilience in the same way, and seismic engineers define this term differently from either. As such, I think it is incumbent on us to try and speak in the same language, rather than hoping others will grasp our own. The authors themselves seem to define some terms differently across chapters, and that may further confuse the reader.

Fortunately, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) have produced simple glossaries, defining many of these contentious terms. We ought to start using them. Economists frequently pay little attention to such heated terminological disagreements, and largely adopt the view that what looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and is understood by most people to be a duck, should be called a duck. It is perhaps regrettable that the authors are too polite and end up discussing these terminological disagreements at length. They thus miss several opportunities to move us away from rather pointless disagreements and toward a consensus shaped by the IPCC and UNDRR.

One other quibble is that most of the history they cover focuses on high-income countries and their travails (with a specific and understandable focus on the Low Countries). Disasters, however, are more consequential in other parts of the world, parts which are poorly served by limited historical scholarship and hence by the authors themselves. Clearly, we need to do better as the most difficult challenges for disaster risk management are in those parts of the world we know least about. The authors readily acknowledge this lacuna, but as happens only too frequently, they are unable or unwilling to fill in what is lacking.

What is mainly lacking for me, as an economist, is quantifications. The authors describe myriad ways in which disaster dynamics are shaped by culture, by institutions, by economic structures, and by other mechanisms, but they almost never try to describe the magnitude of these channels, or indeed determine which ones are more important. Even when discussing the main global database that measures disaster impacts (EMDAT — collected by a research centre at the University of Louvain), they inaccurately define the criteria it uses (p. 63) and do not mention the quantifications it contains.

Finally, the book was published in 2020, but it was written before a new coronavirus variant somehow escaped its zoonotic host and changed our thinking about the possible ways in which epidemics could evolve and affect us. Indeed, our assessments as to which countries are more resilient to this type of disaster shock proved completely off the mark; unexpectedly, countries like Vietnam or Taiwan (or my own country, New Zealand) proved to be much more successful in handling the pandemic than the United States, the United Kingdom, or indeed all the rest of Europe. Had we done more historical research, on the 1918 Influenza pandemic for example, would we have been able to predict that?

I do hope that the authors, having observed the last three years since they finished writing this book, are now hard at work on a sequel, one that tries to take all the insights learned from historical disasters, and especially from past epidemics, and consider them in reference to the very diverse local experiences that we have all observed and lived through since COVID-19 emerged.

Ilan Noy is the Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Economics of Disasters and Climate Change and recently authored (with Tom Uher) “Four New Horsemen of an Apocalypse? Solar Flares, Super-volcanoes, Pandemics, and Artificial Intelligence” in that journal.

Copyright (c) 2022 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (July 2022). All EH.Net reviews are archived at https://www.eh.net/book-reviews.

Published by EH.Net (July 2022).

Ben S. Bernanke. 21st Century Monetary Policy: The Federal Reserve from the Great Inflation to COVID-19. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022. xxvi + 480 pp. $35.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1324020462.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Lanny Ebenstein, Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Ben Bernanke’s 21st Century Monetary Policy is sure to become a classic work on the history of the Federal Reserve System in the postwar era to the COVID-19 recession. It will be required reading for all future students of and officials at the Fed. Bernanke’s perspective is shaped by two fundamental virtues: his academic work as a scholar of the Fed and of monetary policy and his practical work as a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and, from 2006 to 2014, its Chair. Both virtues are displayed in this excellent book.

Bernanke’s description of Fed policymaking will be enlightening to most. There has not really been a work on the history of the Fed that has captured the public or academic minds since Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963). Friedman’s mantra, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” became implanted in popular consciousness, and his monetary interpretation of the Great Depression–that the primary source of the depression was a monetary collapse initiated by the Federal Reserve System or which, in any event, the Fed could largely have forestalled–became the conventional scholarly wisdom.

On the basis of favorable comments Bernanke made at Friedman’s 90th birthday party in 2002–“I would like to say to Milton …: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we [the Fed] did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again” (p. xvii)–it is sometimes mistakenly thought that Bernanke is basically a Friedmanite monetarist. As he makes clear in 21st Century Monetary Policy, however, Bernanke is fundamentally a Keynesian in analytic apparatus and perspective: “So-called Keynesian economics, in a modernized form, remains the central paradigm at the Fed and other central banks” (p. vii). Friedman’s mantra is replaced by Bernanke’s dictum: “Although growth in the money supply and inflation bear some relation in the long run, at least in certain circumstances, in the short run the connection can be unstable and difficult to predict” (p. 35). For Bernanke–as with his predecessors and successors at the Fed–monetary policy, except in unusual circumstances, is basically interest rate policy.

The early chapters of 21st Century Monetary Policy on the Fed from the 1960s through the 1990s have many nuggets of information and provide great insight into theoretical analysis at the Fed to this day. William McChesney Martin, Chair of the Federal Reserve from 1951 to 1970, famously said that the Fed’s job is to “take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going,” that is, to raise interest rates in order to stem inflation as economic growth increases. This is the policy to which Martin and his successors have largely adhered. Bernanke’s outlook is that inflation is usually conditioned by “changes in economywide demand for goods and services [emphasis in original]” and “shocks to supply rather than demand” (p. 12), with significant emphasis on “expectations”: “Debates about the determinants of inflation expectations and about how central banks can affect those expectations have been central to the analysis and practice of monetary policy since at least the 1960s, if not earlier” (p. 13). Friedman’s focus on money supply is hardly a factor in the analysis.

The Fed Chair to whom Bernanke gives the most praise is Paul Volcker, who served from 1979 to 1987. Bernanke credits Volcker for having the wisdom and tenacity to initiate and maintain the high interest rates between 1979 and 1982, which, in the form of the federal funds rate, reached 20 percent in 1980–the highest ever, before or since. As a result of Volcker’s “war on inflation” (p. 36), as Bernanke and others have called it, inflation “dropped from about 13 percent in 1979 and 1980 to about 4 percent in 1982 … Thus, in only a few years, the Fed largely reversed the increase in inflation built up over a decade and a half” (p. 36).

Bernanke’s appraisal of Alan Greenspan’s long span as Fed Chair from 1987 to 2006 is somewhat more, at least to this reviewer, mixed. Though he gives Greenspan high marks for managing the domestic and, to a significant extent, world economies for most of his tenure in office, it cannot be gainsaid that the roots of the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession emerged during Greenspan’s chairmanship. Bernanke sagely observes: “The extended rise in the Fed’s [interest] policy rate likely contributed to the decline in housing prices that began in the summer of 2006” (p. 106).

With respect to his own transformative chairmanship, Bernanke recounts the aggressive and unprecedented actions the Fed took to diminish the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession. He persuasively argues these actions were necessary to prevent the meltdown of the American and world financial systems and thereby economies. About the only criticisms I would offer here of his presentation is that he does not adequately incorporate into his analysis the impact of nonfinancial factors, such as increasing energy prices and demographic changes, on economic activity, but this is perhaps not an entirely fair cavil to make against a work whose title states it concerns monetary policy.

21st Century Monetary Policy: The Federal Reserve from the Great Inflation to COVID-19 extends to 2021 and includes thinking on the future of Federal Reserve and its policy, but it is probably best to defer discussion of these subjects as a result of their proximity to the present. Bernanke believes that a historical approach is the best way to understand “how the Fed’s tools, strategies, and communication have evolved to where they are today” (p. xi). All interested in the history of the Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve policy, and the theory underlying Fed policy will want to read this book.

Lanny Ebenstein is a Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of ten books and many articles on economic and political history, history of economic thought, and public policy.

Copyright (c) 2022 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (July 2022). All EH.Net reviews are archived at https://www.eh.net/book-reviews.

Published by EH.Net (July 2022).

Mary Elisabeth Cox. Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany, 1914-1924. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xviii + 383 pp. $105 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-882011-6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Timothy W. Guinnane, Philip Golden Bartlett Professor of Economic History, Emeritus, Yale University.

Embargoes and blockades have long been a feature of warfare. During World War I, both the Axis and Entente powers tried to prevent their enemies from trading, especially with neutrals. The Royal Navy’s surface blockade proved both more effective and less damaging to relationships with other countries than did Germany’s submarine warfare. Both sides justified blockades as necessary to prevent their enemies from importing material necessary for making war. Cox focuses on a part of the blockade that was harder to justify: stopping combatants from importing food. Preventing food imports had a military logic. Soldiers eat, of course, and every farmer released from agricultural work could be a soldier. Yet the clear-eyed understood that blocking food imports made war on civilians.

Food shortages led most combatants to adopt rationing schemes. Rationing did not overcome all of the supply shortfalls, however, and debates about the effects on civilians have never stopped. The impact on German civilians has been especially contentious. First, Germany’s economic structure, among the Axis powers, made it especially vulnerable to food-supply interruptions. Prior to the war, external sources accounted for at least 20 percent of total German calories. German farmers relied heavily on fertilizers, most of which had been imported. Wartime demands on labor and other inputs such as draft animals also strained domestic production. If anything, Germany would have wanted to import more, not less food during World War I.  Second, the nutritional deprivation of German civilians during and just after the war supports a narrative about the Treaty of Versailles. To some, the Treaty’s harsh reparations provisions reflected a deliberate effort to make the German people suffer for decades. The deprivation induced by food blockades, in that light, looks like a first step.

Mary Elisabeth Cox provides a comprehensive account of this entire episode and its effect on German civilians. She begins with the law and military strategy behind the World War I blockades and ends with the post-war efforts to feed the German population, especially its children. Her empirical core relies on several remarkable anthropometric studies from the war and immediate post-war periods. For most of these studies, Cox can draw on published data summaries (for example, the mean height of all boys in a particular school class) to conduct more analysis than appeared in the original work. Her statistical work forms the basis for her judgements about how the food shortfalls affected the various components of the civilian population. She concludes, with considerable justification, that the wartime blockade harmed women, children, and the poor much more than other social groups in Germany.

The anthropometric studies reflect a pre-war interest in measuring the human body, especially for children, and a growing concern about the fate of children during the war. None of them are ideal, but together they allow Cox to address the several facets of her question. A wartime sample of Leipzig families yields rare evidence on the intra-household implications of the blockade. Some observers claimed that German mothers mitigated the impact of food shortages by, in effect, starving themselves to protect their children. The Leipzig study’s results are consistent with that view. A different study from Straßburg includes both rural and urban children, and thus allows Cox to address the claim that farmers profited at the expense of urban dwellers. A composite collection published after the war has information on more than 570,000 children from 2,343 school classes and supports an all-German view not possible from the local efforts.

The post-war anthropometric studies reflect one biological and one political issue. Adults who face a temporary calorie shortfall typically recover, sometimes with long-term damage to their health. Children are more vulnerable to malnutrition. Nutritional deprivation reduces height and weight below what one would expect for a given age; it also hinders the development of the brain and other organs. However, if the deficits are made good, the affected person may enjoy a period of “catch-up” growth and reach what would otherwise have been their expected height. Some of the post-war studies document this phenomenon: German children who were unusually short or underweight in 1918 grew rapidly once they had access to adequate food.

The second motivation for the post-war anthropometric studies reflects the startling fact that the end of military conflict did not bring the end of the blockade.  For some eight months after the November 1918 Armistice, the Entente powers and the United States maintained most of the wartime embargo. As Cox notes, some wanted the blockade in place to pressure Germany into accepting the ultimate peace terms. Others (less openly) supported the continued blockade to punish the Germans.

Formally ending the embargo did not return German food supply to its pre-war situation. Neither the government nor private German entities had resources to buy food in the quantities necessary. Transportation was also a problem; wartime underinvestment left the rail system weakened, and the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to give all of its merchant marine and much of its railroad rolling stuck to the Allies.  Cox devotes considerable space to the various post-war efforts to feed the Germans, many of which focused on children. Several foreign entities stepped in: the U.S. government in the form of the United States Food Administration (led by Herbert Hoover, the future president); private efforts spearheaded by German-American groups, by Quaker organizations, and by Save the Children (then a British charity created for this purpose); and even the Swiss government. These bodies succeeded in feeding millions of German children to a standard such that many of them experienced, according to the anthropometric studies, considerable catch-up growth.

The anthropometric studies Cox uses have the great virtue of disciplining wild statements made at the time and since. In some cases, her analysis shows patterns the original study’s authors might not have appreciated. Germany’s food-rationing program intended to make sure all social classes had enough to eat, but the anthropometric data show that the poor and working classes suffered more than others. This finding will surprise few, but it illustrates the imperfections in Germany’s food-rationing schemes. (These imperfections were not limited to Germany, of course.) There may be larger implications in her results: morale among soldiers and civilians alike deteriorated in the last years of the war, and the clear, differential impact of the food shortages by social class may be one reason why. The anthropometrics also shows interesting nuances in the post-war relief efforts. While poorer children were shortest at the end of the war, after the war, their heights recovered more rapidly than did the heights of affluent. Relief agencies claimed they focused on the worst affected. It seems they did.

Cox’s research shows that the blockade significantly affected the height and weight of Germans, especially children, during and just after the war. Thus the policy was not harmless to civilians, as some on the Entente side asserted, and as some earlier historians concluded. On the other hand, the data do not suggest significant, life-long stunting for those measured after the post-war food-aid programs took effect. To be clear, the right counterfactual is complex: the data show that the blockade itself did a lot of damage. Without the post-war efforts, that damage might have been much more widespread and permanent. The general conclusion (food embargoes harm civilians) differs from the historically specific conclusion (in this case, post-war programs mitigated much of the harm.)

None of the usual quibbles and cavils can undermine the core lessons in Cox’s statistical analysis.  Critics might argue with her emphasis on the Entente embargo alone, however. The social-class differences in the anthropometric results hints at a domestic policy failing. Her brief discussion of the domestic turmoil following the November 1918 Armistice also does not do justice to what most historians call a Revolution. Even if the embargo had ended with the Armistice, conditions in Germany would have made food distribution difficult.

The German government claimed that 800,000 civilians died as a direct result of the embargo. While various levels of government collected detailed and usually accurate statistics, such claims, like any that involve a counter-factual, are hard to evaluate. Excess wartime mortality among German civilians had many causes, some under government control. Cox does little with the mortality question, which is an understandable decision, but some discussion would have conveyed a better sense of the polemics involved in the blockade. Some contemporaries worried that about a generation of stunted children; many more made extravagant claims about deaths.

Hunger in War and Peace has the great virtue of considering an ugly episode from several different angles. Many quantitative historical accounts, perhaps especially those that rely on anthropometric methods, tend to focus on the numbers alone, leading to a sterile, context-free study. Some authors would content themselves with dry statistics on the height of Leipzig’s second-graders. Not Cox. Her nine chapters’ subject-matters cross several historical subfields. Her reading and considerable archival research took her to areas that one would expect from students of diplomatic or military history, or even historians of the United States. This broad perspective accounts in part for the book’s length. The length, unfortunately, also reflects some lack of discipline in the argument and prose. Some claims have little basis in her evidence; for example, “Hoover’s actions ushered in a new liberalism to the United States by creating government and privately sponsored social programmes” (p. 236). Some discussions do not seem relevant to the topic; Hoover’s personal motivations do not matter for his efforts in post-World War I Germany. A discussion of religious themes in the thank-you notes German children sent to their benefactors also seem a bit astray. She also claims repeatedly that this or that source was “forgotten” until she came along. This is an odd claim, especially when repeated; was it really forgotten, or were others simply not interested?

These are not serious flaws. Anyone interested in either the impact of war on civilian populations, or in Germany’s turbulent history in the first half of the twentieth century, should just follow her where she goes. This serious scholarship sheds new light on how World War I affected civilians.

Timothy W. Guinnane is Philip Golden Bartlett Professor of Economic History, Emeritus, Yale University. Recent publications include “Creating a New Legal Form: the GmbH” (Business History Review, 2021) and “We Do Not Know the Population of Every Country in The World for the Past Two Thousand Years” (Journal of Economic History, forthcoming.)

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Published by EH.Net (July 2022).

Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin. How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. x + 259 pp. $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1509540235.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Joel Mokyr, Departments of Economics and History, Northwestern University.

Full disclosure: this reviewer’s name appears on the back cover of this book having written an endorsement, known as a blurb. Given that in the 40 words of an endorsement one can say very little, this book merits a more detailed discussion.

Any scholar teaching economic history and wishing for an up-to-date survey of a large and important literature will find it useful to read this book to bone up on the recent research listed in the long and encompassing list of references. Furthermore, they should seriously consider having their students read it for their class. The book is a wide-ranging yet remarkably complete and accessible survey of the Great Enrichment, the emergence of modern and prosperous economies that provide us with a material standard of living that our ancestors could not have dreamed of. How and why modern economic growth occurred when and where it did, and how economists have tried to understand this phenomenon, is the theme of this book. It is written by two of the finest young senior scholars in our field, both with important contributions to the subject matter of this book.

Many of the issues this book raises are highly contentious in our profession, and for good reason: these are hard questions on which learned scholars can disagree and interpret the evidence in different ways. How much did institutions really matter? What was the role of culture in economic growth? Was geography destiny? What was the role of craft guilds in the economic development of early modern Europe? How to think about the role of imperialism and slavery in the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent growth of industrial powers? Were high wages good or bad for technological progress? Was war a positive factor in economic growth? Was the European Marriage Pattern a positive factor in the economic development of the Continent?

The ecumenical and balanced approach the authors take to these questions is much like the Rabbi in a famous Jewish story. According to the legend, a rabbi is holding court in front of a large audience of his pupils. A husband and wife appear before the rabbi, to discuss their troubled domestic life. First the husband gets to lay out his case, and he lists all the sins and vices of his wife. The Rabbi listens carefully and pronounces his verdict: the husband is in the right. Then his pupils appeal to him: you should hear the wife’s case as well. The Rabbi consents and listens to the woman lays out her powerful case against her lazy and violent husband. He then announces his second verdict: the wife is in the right. His best pupil protests: but Rabbi, how can they both be in the right? The Rabbi listens and pronounces: the pupil is right too.

Rubin and Koyama present balanced and fair surveys of made in the literature, but they are reluctant to take strong positions. Such an ecumenical approach sets them apart from Clark’s Farewell to Alms and McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity, where the authors take up similar issues but in a much stronger opinionated mode. That thoughtful and measured approach of the survey, its elegant and crystal-clear style, and the authors’ impressive knowledge of a large and complex literature make this book nothing short of ideal for teaching advanced courses on global economic history to economics students.

It is especially refreshing to see a book such as this that pays explicit attention to institutions and culture, two themes that until not so long ago were taboo in our field but now seem to play increasingly central roles. The book contains full chapters on each, and while the discussion is naturally far from exhaustive, the authors do an excellent job summarizing some of the best work in these areas. What remains, of course, unsolved is why different nations develop different institutions and how and why such institutions change over time and how exactly cultural beliefs help determine the institutions that society ends up with.

The one issue on which the book takes a relatively strong position is on the issue of European imperialism and the importance of slavery and the slave trade to the Industrial Revolution and the origins of Western technological leadership (chapter 6). In recent years the “new history of capitalism,” in its zeal to blame the West and Capitalism for all the ills of the world, has argued that the West grew rich largely at the expense of the Africans and Asians whom Europeans mercilessly enslaved, sold, and exploited. As more sophisticated and economically literate scholarship has shown, the famous thesis by Eric Williams and recent proponents (e.g., Berg and Hudson, 2021) that somehow the Industrial Revolution depended on European imperialism and the Atlantic slave trade cannot be seriously defended. While Atlantic ports have been shown to have been crucial for subsequent economic development (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, 2005), the exact causal chains are still unclear, and Koyama and Rubin stress sensibly that without institutional support for technological progress, without a rule of law and constraints on the executive, and without a comparatively inclusive society, no amount of colonialism and oppression of non-Europeans would have triggered modern economic growth.

The insight that economists have brought to this literature is that economic growth is fundamentally a positive-sum game: on a global level, the economic success of the West did not — on average — impoverish the Rest. In the long haul it made the entire world much richer than before — just not quite as rich as Europe and its offshoots (with some major exceptions such as Japan and Singapore). The causality is more complex. Whatever it was that made Europe learn to control energy and materials as well as run their economic systems better, also allowed them to manipulate and exploit Asians and Africans. But if anything was causal here, it was not that Imperialism caused the Industrial Revolution but the reverse: as Daniel Headrick in his classic work on the topic (1981) showed decades ago, what made western Imperialism possible above all was better technology (see also Hoffman, 2015).

Moreover, it is striking how poorly the historical fit between Imperialism of any kind and economic growth really is. The Roman Empire was the mother of all predatory empires, yet it did not industrialize and experienced only limited technological change. Eighteenth century China and Russia both added enormous stretches of land to their realms, with no noticeable effects on economic growth. The British Industrial Revolution coincided with the loss of the North American thirteen colonies. While Britain was a successful commercial and maritime nation, the Smithian gains from trade with its Empire — as Deirdre McCloskey (2010) has persuasively argued — were by themselves never enough to trigger the Industrial Revolution, much less create the Great Enrichment. In per capita terms, one of the largest colonial empires was the Dutch one in the East Indies, yet it did not help the Dutch industrialize until late in the nineteenth century. Belgium initiated its lamentable adventure in the Congo only after it had industrialized. Perhaps most strikingly, the European imperial venture collapsed after World War II, yet those were exactly the years during which economic growth in Europe was most rapid — with the exception of Russia (which maintained its colonial empire until 1991). In short, Koyama and Rubin conclude that colonialism and the slave trade “played a large role in the making of modern world” (a suitably vague statement) but that evidence is “mixed” on whether it was responsible for the world becoming rich (a polite pronouncement of a Scottish verdict: not proven).

Where the book truly shines is pointing out why the Great Enrichment was relatively late in coming and why the pre-1750 world — with a few exceptions — remained poor. The authors admirably survey the consensus that has emerged on the subject. Three major factors held the economies back. First, as neo-Malthusians such as Galor and Clark have maintained, before 1750 population growth in many cases wiped out the fruits of productivity growth, such as they were. Second, predators of various kinds and extractive institutions (North-Wallis-Weingast’s “natural state”) not only pillaged and plundered the riches of the few places that had been economically successful, they extinguished incentives to invest and innovate. Finally, until institutions had been established to govern and control the accumulation and dissemination of useful knowledge, the opportunities for sustained technological progress remained too limited. As the authors point out in admirable detail, the Industrial Revolution meant that these three brakes on economic progress slowly dissolved to create the Great Enrichment, first in a few economies in the West, then in more and more places around the world.

At the end of the day, as the authors sum up in chapter 11, in 2022 “the world is rich.” Almost anywhere one lives in this world, material life is in all likelihood better that it was a century, let alone a millennium, ago. A rising tide lifted most ships on the planet, but rather unequally, and while global poverty and famine are a fraction of what they were in 1800, they are still with us — mostly because of incompetent or tyrannical governance. What is perhaps worth noting, however, is that while technology keeps advancing, with novel breakthroughs opening new horizons in material sciences, molecular genetics, energy physics, and much more, there seems to be little if any long-term progress in the institutions that underlay the economic miracles of the past two centuries. Not only do countries with weak institutions such as Russia seem to lack the capability to adopt more inclusive and open governance, but even in nations long committed to the Enlightenment visions of freedom, human rights, and democracy, the institutions that helped make us rich seem ever more fragile. The conflict between ever-more powerful technology and the brittle polities that deploy it may be the greatest challenge to our future.

References

Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2005. “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth.” The American Economic Review 95 (2005), pp. 546-579.

Berg, Maxine, and Pat Hudson. 2021. “Slavery, Atlantic Trade and Skills: a Response to Mokyr’s ‘Holy Land of Industrialism’” Journal of the British Academy, Vol. 9, pp. 259–281.

Clark, Gregory. 2007. A Farewell to Alms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Galor, Oded. 2011. Unified Growth Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Headrick, Daniel R. 1981. The Tools of Empire. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hoffman, Philip T. 2015. Why Did Europe Conquer the World? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

McCloskey, Deirdre. 2010. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

North, Douglass C., John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University, and Sackler Professor, (by special appointment) at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv University. His most recent book is A Culture of Growth (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Copyright (c) 2022 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (July 2022). All EH.Net reviews are archived at https://www.eh.net/book-reviews.

Published by EH.Net (June 2022).

(Editor’s note: Because this review covers two books, Global Economic History and The Industrial Revolution, we have posted it twice, with one posting for each title, for the sake of easier searches.)

Robert C. Allen. Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xiv + 170pp. £8.99 (paperback), ISBN 978–0–19–959665–2.

Robert C. Allen. The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xiv + 150pp. £8.99 (paperback), ISBN 978–0–19–870678–6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Avner Offer, Professor Emeritus of Economic History, All Souls College, University of Oxford.

These two books are already classics. Robert Allen has spent decades investigating the cause of modern economic growth from early modern times to the 20^th century. He developed a metric for economic welfare, the minimum household subsistence basket, which has been estimated globally over the whole period, and an analytical framework for understanding the drivers of economic growth. These two books distil his findings and opinions. The learning is worn lightly: the books are reliably expert but are also succinct and highly readable. For the subject they cover, there is nothing better.

The first title, on global economic growth, is breath-taking in its grasp. It describes and accounts for the process of economic growth over five centuries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For each historical period and for each region the argument, framed in terms of cause and effect, delves down to the detail of institutions, technology, and welfare, supported by illuminating graphs and tables, most of them from data assembled by Allen himself. The past is sometimes allowed to speak in its own voice. The story is driven by a deep curiosity about how things work, for the ways that people and firms conduct themselves, with a hands-on relish for the feel of physical machinery. All this makes for a compelling read, and the books are deservedly very popular. The second of them, on the British Industrial Revolution, has all the virtues of the first, and adds an excellent chapter on social and political impacts which affirms a pessimistic view of worker welfare in a period of soaring business wealth. This grand project has encountered some controversy. Although firm in his own views, Allen also gives a generous hearing to other interpretations and especially those that stress the role of culture, knowledge, science, and civil society. If there is any partiality at all, it is not ideological but methodological.

The core issue is defined by Allen as why modern economic growth, and why initially in Britain and Europe more generally. Up to the 18^th century, China and India together dominated global manufacturing and had a large export trade with Europe, porcelain from China, fabrics from India. Why did manufacturing shift from the east to the west during the 19^th century, and why did it shift back again by the end of the 20^th century? Implicitly underlying the argument is a neoclassical (Cobb-Douglas, Solow) model in which growth arises from the combination of capital, labour, and technological innovation. The pace and direction of growth are determined by the relative costs of these factors. In 18^th century Britain labour was already costly in consequence of pre-industrial progress on a broad front, while capital was relatively cheap as a result of trading profits and large landowner rents. Hence there was a strong incentive for labour-saving technological innovation at the outset of the Industrial Revolution, and for the ensuing mechanical and chemical breakthroughs which gave Britain its industrial leadership. Where hands were cheaper there was no incentive to replace them with costly machines. In a process of incremental innovation Britain’s mechanised industry became the lowest-cost producer and dominated industrial exports worldwide for several decades.

But that cannot be the whole story, as Allen recognizes. If it is only a matter of the relative prices of capital and labour, why could capital not move to Asia, employ Asian labour, and export to Britain at even cheaper prices? That is what happened in the 20^th century, when Britain and the United States de-industrialised and saw their manufacturing move offshore within the space of a few short decades, stranding the abilities and skills of manufacturing workers at home.

To adequately tell the story of modern economic growth Allen needs to bolt on several extensions, which in the end make it a different model from the one that merely responds to relative prices. As he tells it, the initial triggers were actually two windfalls, firstly the maritime expeditions which opened up access to new commodities and created new markets and a great deal of wealth, part of it arising from the forcible enslavement of Africans.  Two centuries later this was followed by the serendipity of easily accessible coal in the United Kingdom. Both of these windfalls are taken to be necessary conditions for the growth that ensued. Countries less favourably positioned could eventually catch up and substitute for the missing factors and for the stimulus of high wages, by means of a standard ‘development package’ made up of removal of internal trade barriers, external tariffs, domestic transport development, an effective financial system, and mass education and literacy. First implemented in the United States in the early decades of the 19^th century, these policies were advocated influentially by Friedrich List in Germany (1841). The package was implemented successfully in continental Europe, but with mixed results in Latin America a century later, due to the economies there not being large enough to deploy manufacturing at a large enough scale.

The standard package provides a hint as to why capital could not be successfully exported to India to mechanise it early in the 19^th century. As Allen shows in the case of the British Industrial Revolution, what counted was not only the price of labour but also its quality. While Indian workers were illiterate, about half of British ones could already read and write at beginning of the 19^th century. Technical innovation in Britain took place within a rich ecosystem of a mature, articulate, urbanised civil society, with enterprise, science, curiosity, debate, and an elaborate subdivision of labour. For countries too far behind to implement the ‘standard package’ there was also a ‘Big Push’ catch-up option. Development was anticipated by heavy investment applied top-down in strategic sectors in manufacturing, agriculture, and education. First down this route were the Japanese, followed by the Soviet Union, and then successfully in Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China.

Allen’s books are satisfying to read as an acute historical account of economic development globally, but their theoretical framework is somewhat ad hoc. By stopping mostly at the end of the 19^th century they largely ignore intrinsic limitations of economic growth as an ultimate source of welfare. Applying another perspective can reveal a different weighting and significance for the crucial factors. One such perspective is the discipline of economics itself as it arose in the cauldron of the Industrial Revolution, namely the classical economics of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, and John Stuart Mill. Unlike the neoclassical economics which followed, the factors of production were initially labour, capital and land, the latter factor representing the benefits and costs of location and the bounty of natural resources. It has been argued that Nature was taken out of economics (or rather taken for granted entirely) from the 1870s onwards by neoclassical economists wary of Henry George’s proposals for concentrating taxation on land (Gaffney and Harrison, 1994).

Restoring land as a factor has several explanatory advantages. It embraces overseas discovery not as an inexplicable windfall but as an expansion of the Earth’s exploitable surface, and takes analytical account of the crucial role of distance in trade. It places a decisive emphasis on fossil fuel, not only as ‘cheap energy’ available in particular locations, but as a force multiplier which leveraged muscular effort by more than an order of magnitude. Arguably this was a sufficient condition for economic growth once the technical problems of extraction were solved by means of the Newcomen steam engine and its successors. From that point of view technological development was an extended effort to harness and deploy this force multiplier for human requirements, a process that was necessarily slow and uneven, yet eventually became the main driver of modern economic growth. Without the energy surge of coal, technical innovation in itself would have been of little or no avail.

One of Allen’s key concepts is the minimum subsistence basket, which forms the unit of account. It does not include rent as the cost of location, only a standard 5% addition for housing. One of the costs of urbanisation, however, is much higher location rents. When these are taken into account the terminal multipliers of living standards which he provides, especially in the West, are too high, and provide an overestimate of well-being which continues up to the present. In the big metropolitan cities today location rents can make up to a quarter of the cost of living, ignoring other costs of congestion like air pollution and travel time. In the Habakkuk thesis (mentioned by Allen) the high wages in North America are caused by the abundance of land and are otherwise inexplicable in his account of economic growth there: the land factor again.

Economic growth is currently on course to exhaust the resources required for human life by warming up the climate and running down water supplies and usable energy. We are running out of ‘land’ in its broad economic connotation. Growth threatens to undermine itself, and may well turn out to have been a reversible phase in human development. The untrammelled and destructive pursuit of gain is exacerbated by the meliorist bias of neoclassical growth theory. The current economic analysis of climate draws on the same optimistic Solow growth theory to dismiss the dire predictions of climate scientists, thus acting to slow down preventive action and making disaster more likely. In contrast, substituting usable energy for technological change in growth models provides a third driver for growth which is as measurable as labour and capital, which has a good long-run empirical fit (Hall and Klitgaard, 2010; Warr, et al., 2011). Technology, the imponderable factor in current growth theory, can also spring unwelcome surprises. General artificial intelligence, a prospective form of Schumpeterian creative destruction, threatens to make humanity itself redundant.

Allen knows about most of these complications, and this review is too short to do justice to the richness and subtlety of his account. These studies provide a landmark outline of global economic growth and the British Industrial Revolution in alignment with mainstream economic thinking today. After more than two centuries of reflection and writing, these admirable works also highlight how much still remains to be understood.

References

Gaffney, M., and F. Harrison. ‘Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem against Henry George’. Pp. 29-122 of Corruption of Economics, ed. M. Gaffney. London: Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) in association with Centre for Incentive Taxation Ltd, 1994.

Hall, C. A. S., and K. A. Klitgaard. Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy. New York: Springer, 2012.

Warr, B., R. Ayres, et al. `Energy Use and Economic Development: A Comparative Analysis of Useful Work Supply in Austria, Japan, the United Kingdom and the US during 100 years of Economic Growth’. Ecological Economics 69: 1904-1917 (2010).

Avner Offer (https://sites.google.com/view/avoffer) is Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History, All Souls College, University of Oxford. His most recent book is Understanding the Private-Public Divide: Markets, Governments, and Time Horizons (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Copyright (c) 2022 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (June 2022). All EH.Net reviews are archived at https://www.eh.net/book-reviews.

Published by EH.Net (June 2022).

(Editor’s note: Because this review covers two books, Global Economic History and The Industrial Revolution, we have posted it twice, with one posting for each title, for the sake of easier searches.)

Robert C. Allen. Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xiv + 170pp. £8.99 (paperback), ISBN 978–0–19–959665–2.

Robert C. Allen. The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xiv + 150pp. £8.99 (paperback), ISBN 978–0–19–870678–6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Avner Offer, Professor Emeritus of Economic History, All Souls College, University of Oxford.

These two books are already classics. Robert Allen has spent decades investigating the cause of modern economic growth from early modern times to the 20^th century. He developed a metric for economic welfare, the minimum household subsistence basket, which has been estimated globally over the whole period, and an analytical framework for understanding the drivers of economic growth. These two books distil his findings and opinions. The learning is worn lightly: the books are reliably expert but are also succinct and highly readable. For the subject they cover, there is nothing better.

The first title, on global economic growth, is breath-taking in its grasp. It describes and accounts for the process of economic growth over five centuries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For each historical period and for each region the argument, framed in terms of cause and effect, delves down to the detail of institutions, technology, and welfare, supported by illuminating graphs and tables, most of them from data assembled by Allen himself. The past is sometimes allowed to speak in its own voice. The story is driven by a deep curiosity about how things work, for the ways that people and firms conduct themselves, with a hands-on relish for the feel of physical machinery. All this makes for a compelling read, and the books are deservedly very popular. The second of them, on the British Industrial Revolution, has all the virtues of the first, and adds an excellent chapter on social and political impacts which affirms a pessimistic view of worker welfare in a period of soaring business wealth. This grand project has encountered some controversy. Although firm in his own views, Allen also gives a generous hearing to other interpretations and especially those that stress the role of culture, knowledge, science, and civil society. If there is any partiality at all, it is not ideological but methodological.

The core issue is defined by Allen as why modern economic growth, and why initially in Britain and Europe more generally. Up to the 18^th century, China and India together dominated global manufacturing and had a large export trade with Europe, porcelain from China, fabrics from India. Why did manufacturing shift from the east to the west during the 19^th century, and why did it shift back again by the end of the 20^th century? Implicitly underlying the argument is a neoclassical (Cobb-Douglas, Solow) model in which growth arises from the combination of capital, labour, and technological innovation. The pace and direction of growth are determined by the relative costs of these factors. In 18^th century Britain labour was already costly in consequence of pre-industrial progress on a broad front, while capital was relatively cheap as a result of trading profits and large landowner rents. Hence there was a strong incentive for labour-saving technological innovation at the outset of the Industrial Revolution, and for the ensuing mechanical and chemical breakthroughs which gave Britain its industrial leadership. Where hands were cheaper there was no incentive to replace them with costly machines. In a process of incremental innovation Britain’s mechanised industry became the lowest-cost producer and dominated industrial exports worldwide for several decades.

But that cannot be the whole story, as Allen recognizes. If it is only a matter of the relative prices of capital and labour, why could capital not move to Asia, employ Asian labour, and export to Britain at even cheaper prices? That is what happened in the 20^th century, when Britain and the United States de-industrialised and saw their manufacturing move offshore within the space of a few short decades, stranding the abilities and skills of manufacturing workers at home.

To adequately tell the story of modern economic growth Allen needs to bolt on several extensions, which in the end make it a different model from the one that merely responds to relative prices. As he tells it, the initial triggers were actually two windfalls, firstly the maritime expeditions which opened up access to new commodities and created new markets and a great deal of wealth, part of it arising from the forcible enslavement of Africans.  Two centuries later this was followed by the serendipity of easily accessible coal in the United Kingdom. Both of these windfalls are taken to be necessary conditions for the growth that ensued. Countries less favourably positioned could eventually catch up and substitute for the missing factors and for the stimulus of high wages, by means of a standard ‘development package’ made up of removal of internal trade barriers, external tariffs, domestic transport development, an effective financial system, and mass education and literacy. First implemented in the United States in the early decades of the 19^th century, these policies were advocated influentially by Friedrich List in Germany (1841). The package was implemented successfully in continental Europe, but with mixed results in Latin America a century later, due to the economies there not being large enough to deploy manufacturing at a large enough scale.

The standard package provides a hint as to why capital could not be successfully exported to India to mechanise it early in the 19^th century. As Allen shows in the case of the British Industrial Revolution, what counted was not only the price of labour but also its quality. While Indian workers were illiterate, about half of British ones could already read and write at beginning of the 19^th century. Technical innovation in Britain took place within a rich ecosystem of a mature, articulate, urbanised civil society, with enterprise, science, curiosity, debate, and an elaborate subdivision of labour. For countries too far behind to implement the ‘standard package’ there was also a ‘Big Push’ catch-up option. Development was anticipated by heavy investment applied top-down in strategic sectors in manufacturing, agriculture, and education. First down this route were the Japanese, followed by the Soviet Union, and then successfully in Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China.

Allen’s books are satisfying to read as an acute historical account of economic development globally, but their theoretical framework is somewhat ad hoc. By stopping mostly at the end of the 19^th century they largely ignore intrinsic limitations of economic growth as an ultimate source of welfare. Applying another perspective can reveal a different weighting and significance for the crucial factors. One such perspective is the discipline of economics itself as it arose in the cauldron of the Industrial Revolution, namely the classical economics of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, and John Stuart Mill. Unlike the neoclassical economics which followed, the factors of production were initially labour, capital and land, the latter factor representing the benefits and costs of location and the bounty of natural resources. It has been argued that Nature was taken out of economics (or rather taken for granted entirely) from the 1870s onwards by neoclassical economists wary of Henry George’s proposals for concentrating taxation on land (Gaffney and Harrison, 1994).

Restoring land as a factor has several explanatory advantages. It embraces overseas discovery not as an inexplicable windfall but as an expansion of the Earth’s exploitable surface, and takes analytical account of the crucial role of distance in trade. It places a decisive emphasis on fossil fuel, not only as ‘cheap energy’ available in particular locations, but as a force multiplier which leveraged muscular effort by more than an order of magnitude. Arguably this was a sufficient condition for economic growth once the technical problems of extraction were solved by means of the Newcomen steam engine and its successors. From that point of view technological development was an extended effort to harness and deploy this force multiplier for human requirements, a process that was necessarily slow and uneven, yet eventually became the main driver of modern economic growth. Without the energy surge of coal, technical innovation in itself would have been of little or no avail.

One of Allen’s key concepts is the minimum subsistence basket, which forms the unit of account. It does not include rent as the cost of location, only a standard 5% addition for housing. One of the costs of urbanisation, however, is much higher location rents. When these are taken into account the terminal multipliers of living standards which he provides, especially in the West, are too high, and provide an overestimate of well-being which continues up to the present. In the big metropolitan cities today location rents can make up to a quarter of the cost of living, ignoring other costs of congestion like air pollution and travel time. In the Habakkuk thesis (mentioned by Allen) the high wages in North America are caused by the abundance of land and are otherwise inexplicable in his account of economic growth there: the land factor again.

Economic growth is currently on course to exhaust the resources required for human life by warming up the climate and running down water supplies and usable energy. We are running out of ‘land’ in its broad economic connotation. Growth threatens to undermine itself, and may well turn out to have been a reversible phase in human development. The untrammelled and destructive pursuit of gain is exacerbated by the meliorist bias of neoclassical growth theory. The current economic analysis of climate draws on the same optimistic Solow growth theory to dismiss the dire predictions of climate scientists, thus acting to slow down preventive action and making disaster more likely. In contrast, substituting usable energy for technological change in growth models provides a third driver for growth which is as measurable as labour and capital, which has a good long-run empirical fit (Hall and Klitgaard, 2010; Warr, et al., 2011). Technology, the imponderable factor in current growth theory, can also spring unwelcome surprises. General artificial intelligence, a prospective form of Schumpeterian creative destruction, threatens to make humanity itself redundant.

Allen knows about most of these complications, and this review is too short to do justice to the richness and subtlety of his account. These studies provide a landmark outline of global economic growth and the British Industrial Revolution in alignment with mainstream economic thinking today. After more than two centuries of reflection and writing, these admirable works also highlight how much still remains to be understood.

References

Gaffney, M., and F. Harrison. ‘Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem against Henry George’. Pp. 29-122 of Corruption of Economics, ed. M. Gaffney. London: Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) in association with Centre for Incentive Taxation Ltd, 1994.

Hall, C. A. S., and K. A. Klitgaard. Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy. New York: Springer, 2012.

Warr, B., R. Ayres, et al. `Energy Use and Economic Development: A Comparative Analysis of Useful Work Supply in Austria, Japan, the United Kingdom and the US during 100 years of Economic Growth’. Ecological Economics 69: 1904-1917 (2010).

Avner Offer (https://sites.google.com/view/avoffer) is Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History, All Souls College, University of Oxford. His most recent book is Understanding the Private-Public Divide: Markets, Governments, and Time Horizons (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Copyright (c) 2022 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (June 2022). All EH.Net reviews are archived at https://www.eh.net/book-reviews.

Published by EH.Net (June 2022).

Walter Stahr. Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln’s Vital Rival. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021. x + 836 pp. $35 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-5011-9923-3.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Jane Flaherty, retired Visiting Lecturer, Texas A&M University, and Instructor, Blinn College.

Of all the members of President Abraham Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals”’ few have been criticized as much as Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Earlier biographers and chroniclers of the time suggested he was “inordinately ambitious” (Niven, 190), “cold and aloof” (Blue, 322), having “no experience in finance,” and therefore “a tremendous liability” (Thomson, 24). Walter Stahr, an attorney and the author of four historical biographies, provides a needed corrective to these interpretations of a pivotal person in American economic history.

Chase was born in New Hampshire in 1808. His family joined the waves of migrants who left New England for western opportunities, settling in Cincinnati. Chase “found his life work” in 1841 as an anti-slavery political leader who dedicated his career to uplifting African Americans, first as runaway slaves and then as free citizens (86). “Freedom is national; slavery is local and sectional,” Chase stated in 1850, the sentiment that became the foundation of the Republican Party (157). Chase served as a U.S. Senator representing Ohio as a Free Soil-Democrat (1849-1855); Governor of Ohio (1855-1860); Treasury Secretary in President Lincoln’s administration (1861-1864); then Chief Justice of the United States (from 1864 until his death in 1873).

Chase has long puzzled historians. His multiple party affiliations have been attributed to his ambition to become president (he was thwarted in 1860, 1864, and 1868). Stahr, however, shows that Chase helped create three different political parties (the Liberty Party, the Free-Soil Party, and the Republican Party), all with the primary focus on opposition to the expansion of slavery (not abolition). Although young Chase “imbibed some federalist ideas – especially about banks and commerce” (9), “revered Jefferson” (28), declared himself a Whig in his political youth, and was a strong critic of President Andrew Jackson, Chase later embraced many of the tenets of Jacksonian political economy: currency reform, skepticism of state banks, and tariffs for revenue, not protection. As governor of Ohio, Chase called for creation of a state railroad regulation commission, an idea far ahead of its time. Chase advocated frugality in governance; as part of this effort, he and Francis Spinner hired women to work in the Treasury Department as a way to keep personnel costs down.  This helped open “white collar” work for women. Stahr ably argues that as a legal representative, then director, of the Lafayette Bank, combined with his role as governor of Ohio, Chase had far more experience in fiscal policy than most antebellum Treasury secretaries.

Chase’s actions during and after the Civil War seem to contradict his earlier economic beliefs. Although frugal and averse to protective tariffs, Chase oversaw the largest expansion of the federal budget and rise in tariff rates in U.S. history at that time, the growth of an unprecedented federal debt, the introduction of “Greenbacks” (fiat currency), and the launch of the internal revenue system that remains in place to this day. Hiring Jay Cooke to market over $1 billion in war bonds raised questions of corruption and a congressional inquiry. Cooke and Chase developed an intimate relationship. Cooke gave personal loans to Chase and frequently served as a host for Chase’s daughters when they traveled. Cooke also gave expensive gifts, though not direct bribes, to Chase and his family. Yet Chase considered himself very principled and never broke the ethical rules of the time. Chase’s successor in the Treasury Department, William P. Fessenden, rehired Cooke to market bonds because Cooke’s efforts were cost-effective.

In another incongruity, Chase established the national banking system that, by the end of the nineteenth century, concentrated power in the New York banking community. Stahr skillfully shows how these developments occurred, yet unfortunately shies from considering the considerable impact of these changes.

Chase ended his career as Chief Justice of the United States. Two Supreme Court cases in particular demonstrate the contradictions of Chase’s legacy. In Hepburn v. Griswold (1870), “Old Greenbacks” wrote the majority opinion declaring that debts taken before the Civil War could not be paid with legal tender notes created during the war (this decision was later reversed). On the other hand, in Veazie Bank v. Fenno (1869) Chase wrote the majority opinion upholding a 10 percent tax on state banknotes. “… if a particular tax bears heavily upon a corporation, or a class of corporations, it cannot … be pronounced contrary to the Constitution.” (618) Here Chase vigorously defended his actions as Treasury Secretary. As with many Republican politicians, the exigencies of war created demands that forced Chase to moderate his economic beliefs for the greater goals of prosecuting the war and ending slavery.

Stahr portrays a more humane Chase who was deeply religious, but not sanctimonious; a man who suffered multiple personal tragedies. By the age of 56, he had buried four children, nine siblings and his parents (467). He was devoted to his surviving daughters, Kate and Nettie. They brought him joy and sorrow (both married unfaithful alcoholics). During the Civil War, Kate emerged as a Washington, D.C. socialite whose unstable marriage, expensive tastes, and political ambitions often vexed Chase.

Although EH.Net readers might wish for more structural economic analysis, Stahr’s book provides an important addition to the literature on the political and economic history of the Civil War era. It should be read for a fuller understanding of this dedicated political and intellectual leader in the anti-slavery and early civil rights advocacy.

References

Blue, Frederick J. Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1987.

Kearns Goodwin, Doris. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster (paperback edition), 2006.

Niven, John. Salmon P. Chase: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Thomson, David K. Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on The Union. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

Jane Flaherty (jflaherty@tamu.edu) is a retired Visiting Lecturer at Texas A&M University, and an Instructor at Blinn College. She is currently working on a study of Justin S. Morrill and the fiscal changes that occurred during the Civil War.

Copyright (c) 2022 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (June 2022). All EH.Net reviews are archived at https://www.eh.net/book-reviews.

Published by EH.Net (June 2022).

Timothy Kehoe and Juan P. Nicolini, eds. A Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America, 1960-2017. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 586 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1517911980.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Leonardo Weller, Associate Professor, São Paulo School of Economics, and Research Fellow, University College London.

A Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America, 1960-2017 is a vast and informative book edited by Timothy Kehoe and Juan Pablo Nicolini. In 586 pages, forty-six authors describe in detail the macroeconomic ups and downs of 11 countries: Mexico plus the whole of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking South America. The book has the merit of analysing small economies, such as Paraguay, as thoroughly as regional giants like Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina: each country receives a main chapter and a couple of comments. This tour de force is the result of a series of international workshops carried out during the “The Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America Project.”

The book starts with a theoretical proposition, the “Framework for Studying the Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America,” which lays the ground for the case studies that follow. The framework is a conceptual model developed by the editors and Thomas Sargent along the lines of Milton Friedman’s monetarist theory. It proposes that economies are either in monetary or fiscal dominance. The former is virtuous: sound public accounts and a central bank committed to low inflation maintain macroeconomic stability and deliver growth. The opposite happens under fiscal dominance: dovish central banks print money to finance large budget deficits. According to the authors, this framework explains “all economic crises in Latin America,” which have been the “result of poorly designed or poorly implemented macrofiscal policies.”

The choice of focusing on bad policymaking is justifiable. In almost all countries, governments committed to industrialisation pushed for fast economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s. The costs of expansionism were high inflation and an external debt boom that resulted in a regional crisis in the early 1980s, after the Federal Reserve increased interest rates. Hyperinflation and stagnation turned those years into a “lost decade.” Countries that consolidated public finances and insulated central banks from political pressure have fared better since the 1990s. Chile and – to a smaller degree – Peru and Colombia are success stories. Those that continued insisting on unsound policies fared worse. Argentina and Venezuela are the most notorious examples, but they are not alone: the governments of Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador have also compromised financial stability in the recent past.

Poor policymaking has indeed condemned Latin America to a series of crises. However, this framework does not explain all the unfortunate – and numerous – financial events that have taken place in the region since the 1960s.

Several cases that fail to fit the framework appear conspicuously in the chapters on small countries. Uruguay faced crises because of Argentina’s 1989 and 2001 debacles. It did not matter that the Uruguayan government had improved its finances in the late 1980s and developed strong monetary institutions in the 1990s; the economy was too exposed to its troubled neighbour to be immune to the financial cataclysms coming from the other side of the River Plate. Contagion also explains why Paraguay’s inflation was in double digits in the 1980s despite negligible seigniorage. In his comment, Roberto Chang correctly states that “the link between fiscal imbalances and inflation is quite weak.” What is more, macroeconomic prudence did not promote development. Paraguayans would be better off with more and better public goods, perhaps even at the cost of a less balanced budget.

The framework also fails to adequately explain many events in large countries. A monetary reform that indexed the Brazilian economy in the 1960s kept inflation high no matter what happened to fiscal policy. Inflation reached the hundreds in the early 1980s, when the government reacted to the debt crisis with austerity. Inertial inflation only came to an end when the 1994 Real Plan tackled the indexation issue. The authors point out that the Franco administration conducted fiscal consolidation in that year, but the policy was not persistent, and the subsequent Cardoso administration ran a primary deficit. Nevertheless, the government still managed to maintain inflation at single digits. While Brazil stabilised, Mexico faced a perfect political storm that culminated in the Tequila Crisis. The Mexican peso depreciated, the economy entered a recession, inflation soared, and the sovereign debt almost went into default. However, Felipe Meza’s chapter provides evidence that the economy was in monetary dominance.

To understand Latin America’s recurrent crises one ought to study macroeconomic mismanagement, and that is why this book is valuable. Yet two other sources of financial instability are also important: external shocks and politics. Several authors acknowledge that world markets played a role, albeit subject to economic policy. Peru faced a harsh “lost decade” while mineral prices were low. The terms of trade did not recover until the 2000s, but the economy stabilised and grew in the 1990s thanks to a new policy orientation. Ecuador’s fiscal policy has been procyclical, expanding when oil prices are high. That may explain why growth is so erratic and finance is so unstable – the country has lacked a national currency since 2000.

However, few case studies take politics into account (the Bolivian and Mexican chapters are exceptions). Without studying political economy, one will not be able to answer a fundamental question: why is economic policy so persistently unsound in Latin America? Income concentration may be an answer. On one hand, populist leaders thrive with short-sighted pro-poor policies that expand the budget and raise inflation. That is especially likely when economic conditions are favourable, which may explain why presidents like Ecuador’s Correa implemented policies that are procyclical with movements in the terms of trade. On the other hand, small but strong rent-seeking elites capture the state, resulting in low taxation and bad policies designed to enrich a few well-connected players.

Inequality is almost unmentioned in the book (the well-balanced chapter on Bolivia is again an exception). Yet it is hard to forget that Latin America is among the world’s more unequal regions. The recent social unrest in Chile is a reminder that even the regional champion in economic growth and orthodox policymaking is not immune to problems derived from income concentration. Without appraising how inequality fuels peronismo, Francisco Buera and Nicolini finish their chapter by lamenting that “Argentine society has not learned its lesson.” Why a country fails to “learn” a lesson remains an open question.

Leonardo Weller is Associate Professor at the São Paulo School of Economics and Research Fellow at UCL. He researches the history of state finance in Latin America.

Copyright (c) 2022 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (June 2022). All EH.Net reviews are archived at https://www.eh.net/book-reviews.

Published by EH.Net (June 2022).

Stephen J. Macekura. The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and Its Critics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. 320 pp. $27.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0226736303.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Daniel Gallardo-Albarrán, Rural and Environmental History Group, Wageningen University.

One major line of inquiry in economic history concerns the measurement of economic development in the long run. Over the past two decades, the field has thrived by furthering our understanding on important questions on the timing of the ‘Great Divergence’ or the consequences of industrialization for living standards (among others). However, there are issues at the core of this research strand that are often swept aside or are insufficiently tackled, as a result of using price-adjusted Gross Domestic Product (GDP), wages and similar metrics capturing purchasing power or economic output. For instance, which changes in an economy should count as economic development? How are narratives of long-term living standards influenced by the assumptions underpinning our measurement frameworks? These questions are of paramount importance to anyone interested in measuring or understanding long-run development, and Macekura’s work provides useful insights into them.

The Mismeasure of Progress presents a sweeping history of dissent, conflict, and disagreement around the concept of Gross National Product (GNP) and the growth paradigm, i.e., the idea that societies should maximize national income. Macekura follows the professional and intellectual trajectory of a number of experts who were crucial in developing and measuring GNP and GDP and establishing the system of national accounts, along with major critics of this endeavor. The book ultimately shows that the story does not end well for those critics who aspired to fundamentally change how societies measure national income and its preeminence in academic and policy circles, since GDP prevailed after all. However, knowing how their ideas developed is important to put in historical perspective current arguments against GDP.

The book contains six chapters as well as an introductory and a concluding chapter. The former sets the stage and draws parallels between current and past growth measurement critics. The development of the main argumentation of the book begins in the first chapter, which deals with a critical question: how did policy circles and the academic community come to associate living standards with GNP so narrowly? Before Simon Kuznets submitted his report on national income to the American Senate in 1934, concerns about the condition of the working classes triggered initiatives to gather information on different (non-income) aspects of people’s lives. For instance, the International Labor Organization conducted cross-national social surveys to measure workers’ access to food and shelter, and national statistical offices amassed data on suicides, crime rates, etcetera. However, the Great Depression and the Second World War consolidated national income statistics as a priority for policy makers, who used them to manage tight budgets and to mobilize large amount of resources for the war economy.

The construction of national income statistics and their adoption for economic policy was far from a smooth process, as the second and third chapters show. Already in the 1930s and 1940s, experts identified limits of national income as meaningful metric of economic activity and thus were skeptical of its usefulness to understand the economy of countries in different stages of development. Macekura illustrates this by highlighting the work of Phyllis Deane, a British economist tasked with measuring the economic capacity of the colonies in the 1940s. Her work in Zambia led her to criticize the national accounts as a clear comparable framework of economic activity, since it did not take into account that unwaged female labor and self-subsistence output were an important part of Zambian household production. In addition, a number of critics argued that the pursuit of growth had negative side effects for the natural environment and society, including greater poverty and inequality. The influential report Limits to Growth published by MIT in 1972 argued that ecological constraints would lead to a decline in population and living standards. An overemphasis on maximizing GDP was therefore misleading since economic growth had environmental costs that were not properly accounted for. Similarly, others argued that the pursuit of rationality and efficiency resulted in a spiritually aimless society too focused on mass consumerism.

Chapters four and five describe the crisis suffered by the growth paradigm in the 1970s and the search for alternatives that followed. The dependency of industrialized countries on fossil fuels (e.g., coal, oil) and other minerals (e.g., copper, zinc, lead) became increasingly clear to experts and the general public, as energy consumption surged after 1950 and economies suffered from the energy crisis of the 1970s prices when oil prices skyrocketed. For many, capitalist growth would ultimately lead to social disruption and conflict, although not everyone agreed. Intellectuals in the Global South saw maximizing GDP as a way to achieve prosperity and therefore opposed a zero-growth policy agenda in developing countries, which some even considered a new form of imperialist oppression. These discussions provided fertile ground for the development of social indicators that could replace GDP. Two influential metrics in this respect, which did not succeed in the end, were the Physical Quality of Life Index by Morris David Morris and the Measure of Economic Welfare by William D. Nordhaus and James Tobin.

Chapter six closes the main argumentation of the book by covering the revival and later debate of the growth paradigm during the last decades of the 20^th century. The reliance on market mechanisms to reactivate the stagnating economies of the 1970s gave further impetus to the idea that maximizing national income will lead to long-term economic and social stability. However, and unlike the predominance of the growth paradigm in the 1940s and 1950s, the arguments and initiatives of critics reached a much broader audience than before. One example is the well-known Human Development Index that was embraced by the United Nations to enrich public discussion about international development in 1990. Even though this and other measures quantifying the environment and female work did not end up replacing GDP, they have significantly broadened the ideas around what constitutes development and how to advance it.

My main quibble with The Mismeasure of Progress is that it remains mostly descriptive. It excels at presenting the origins of dissent around GDP and the growth paradigm, and how some concepts and metrics emerged, changed, and at last were discarded. However, it would have been useful and interesting if Macekura had explained in detail why such ideas were ultimately ignored. To be sure, some parts give hints at why that was the case, but I missed a chapter (or various sections) providing a systematic review of various explanations and how they compare against each other. In addition, although this is a minor criticism, there is some argument repetition in a few parts that could have been avoided by referring the reader to other chapters.

Overall, this is an interesting book that complements earlier work on the origins and evolution of GDP (by Diane Coyle) as well as more technical work on how GDP mismeasures important aspects of citizens’ lives (by Marc Fleurbaey and Didier Blanchet). I think the first three chapters are particularly valuable for teaching purposes to chart the complicated origins of national income and how economists, far from a homogeneous group interested in advancing a specific agenda, fought against some of the very things the international community value most these days, such as gender equality, sustainability, or inequality. And perhaps this is one of the key lessons to extract from it: there is a long tradition of experts arguing that growth is non-neutral and we can learn from their history to craft more compelling alternatives to measure living standards in both history and the present. Agreeing on a definition or metric of progress is elusive and maybe impossible, but having public discussions about the shortcomings of our measurement frameworks will bring us closer to something that resembles a consensus worth pursuing.

Daniel Gallardo Albarrán is assistant professor in Economic History at Wageningen University, where he researches the roots of global health inequality and their implications for global welfare disparities. He is currently conducting a project funded by the Dutch Research Council on the determinants of clean water and sanitation since 1850 from a global perspective, and he manages the research portal Long-Run Health Matters (www.lrhmatters.com).

Copyright (c) 2022 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (June 2022). All EH.Net reviews are archived at https://www.eh.net/book-reviews.

Published by EH.Net (June 2022).

William Quinn and John D. Turner. Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020. viii +288 pp. $24.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-108-42125-6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Mary Tone Rodgers, Professor of Finance, State University of New York at Oswego.

In this easily read book, William Quinn and John D. Turner of Queen’s University Belfast do not identify new explanatory variables as causes of bubbles, booms and busts—instead, they find a way to categorize variables already well established in the literature to make the causes more easily understood. Indeed, the primary contribution of the work is the creation of a fire metaphor to understand financial bubbles and the thorough application of the metaphor to twelve episodes in history of financial bubbles, booms and busts.

Dozens of metaphors and analogies were used during the 2008 subprime crisis, as financial adviser Gary Karz (2014) has described. Karz quotes the following from Tim Geithner’s book Stress Test:

“One afternoon that summer, I tried to lighten up the mood at the New York Fed with an impromptu contest for the best metaphor for what was happening to the financial system. “I’ve heard ‘the wheels coming off the bus’,” I said. “We’ve talked about the engines falling off the plane.” The usual suspects were wildfires and earthquakes, hundred-year storms and hundred-year floods. We also discussed cancer and contagion, sweaters unraveling and boulders rolling down a hill. I relayed one I had first heard from Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein: ‘The rivets are coming off the submarine.’”

So why do Quinn and Turner select fire as their metaphor? Because, they argue, unlike natural phenomena such as storms, hurricanes, or floods, fires can be extinguished by humans, just as financial bubbles, once underway, can also be extinguished by humans.

Deirdre McCloskey (1995) has written about the importance of the metaphor as an effective literary device for economists. “Metaphor is often a serious figure of argument, not an ornament” (p. 215). As she puts it, metaphors depend upon similarities between knowledge domains. By carrying knowledge about two different domains, a metaphor is likely to carry more information than a literal direct equivalent (Noveck, et al., 2000). Because metaphors can be more convincing than their literal equivalent, the choice of metaphor is consequential. In the case of Quinn and Turner’s book, the metaphor powerfully transmits the authors’ intention to say that just as fires are dangerous, so too are financial bubbles dangerous.

The authors use the fire metaphor to ask and answer analogous questions: what does it take to start a fire (how do bubbles start), what does it take to extinguish a fire (how do bubbles burst), and what are the consequences of a fire (are the net effects of a bubble good or bad, big or small). Just as oxygen is necessary to support a fire, marketability of securities is a necessary condition to start a bubble. Just as fuel is necessary to let a fire burn, money or credit is necessary to let a bubble expand. Just as heat is necessary for fuel to combust into flame, speculation is needed for the bubble to enlarge. The authors argue that the catalyst to ignite the fire is a spark; the catalyst to start a financial bubble is technological innovation or a change in government policy. They argue that to extinguish a fire, one must remove one of the three legs of the triangle: oxygen, fuel or heat. Similarly, to burst a bubble, one removes marketability, money or credit, or speculation with either policy tools or introduction of new information to market agents.

To estimate the consequences of a burst bubble, the authors move from summarization and categorization to data gathering and analysis. For each of the twelve episodes, they estimate the size of the burst bubble’s effect on the real economy and suggest ways the bubble may have done both harm as well as good to the real economy.

The secondary contribution of the book is the systematic coverage of the twelve bubbles in ten chapters with each chapter formatted using common sections: history, causes, and consequences of the bubble. The British bicycle mania of 1896-1898, the Australian land boom of 1888-1893, and the Chinese stock market bubble of 2015 are likely less well known to the EH.Net audience, so the coverage by the authors may present suggestions for further research, whereas for the better-known episodes like the dot-com bubble of 2000 and the sub-prime bubble of 2008 the metaphor mainly summarizes a familiar academic literature.

The book clearly appeals to a wide audience; it won a Best Book of 2020 award from the Financial Times and by 2021 was already in its fourth printing. But our unique EH.Net audience might find some sources of dissatisfaction with it. It’s hard to neatly categorize all the explanatory variables developed in the academic literature about bubbles into each of the three legs of the fire triangle. It’s plausible, for example, that information asymmetry, a condition associated with bubbles (Asako, et al., 2017), could fit into any of the three legs of the fire triangle, not just one leg. It could be understood as a reduction in marketability, or a reduction in credit to borrowers, or a reason speculation ends. While the broader public might not think twice about such issues, our audience might puzzle over them. Additionally, EH.Net readers would likely miss a review of how banking institutions evolved over the centuries covered in the book. A chronicle of changing institutional context might shed light on how the fire metaphor could itself have evolved over time.

In conclusion, the value of book’s metaphor is its simplicity, the hallmark of any useful model. While not all the causal variables studied in the literature necessarily fit into the metaphor, the authors include enough of them so that readers can make more sense of how bubbles form, expand, and burst. On the whole, the fire metaphor proves to be a very useful way to simplify complexities of bubbles.

References

Asako, Yasushi; Funaki, Yukihiko; Ueda, Kozo; and Uto, Noboyuki. “Asymmetric Information Bubbles: Experimental Evidence.” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute. Working Paper No. 312, April 2017. Accessed June 5, 2022. https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/institute/wpapers/2017/0312.pdf

Karz, Gary, CFA. “Global Financial Crisis Analogies, Metaphors and Vocabulary.” Investor Home. October 8, 2014. Accessed June 5, 2022. investorhome.com/crisisanalogies.htm

McCloskey, Deirdre. “Metaphors Economists Live By.” Social Research 62(2): 215-237 (Summer 1995).

Noveck, Ira; Bianco, Maryse; and Castry, Alain. “The Costs and Benefits of Metaphor.” Metaphor and Symbol 16(1&2): 79-91.

Mary Tone Rodgers, DPS, CFA, is the Marcia Belmar Willock Professor of Finance at the State University of New York at Oswego. She is currently working on a book with Jon R. Moen for Cambridge University Press, working title J. P. Morgan: Architect of the Modern American Response to Financial Crises.

Copyright (c) 2022 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (June 2022). All EH.Net reviews are archived at https://www.eh.net/book-reviews.