Economic History

The population base in both the United States and Japan is growing older and, as those populations age, they provoke heretofore unexamined economic consequences. This comparative volume, the third in the joint series offered by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Japan Center for Economic Research, explores those consequences, drawing specific attention to four key areas: incentives for early retirement; savings, wealth, and asset allocation over the life cycle; health care and health care reform; and population projections. Given the undeniable global importance of the Japanese and U.S. economies, these chapters shed light on the complex correlations between aging and economic behavior. This work not only deepens our understanding of the Japanese and American economic landscapes but, through careful examination of the comparative social and economic data, clarifies the complex relation between aging societies, public policies, and economic outcomes.

This book is about fundamental economic theory, but it maintains that economics is meaningless outside the framework of history.

It therefore analyses the evolution of some leading economies since the Industrial Revolution.

It opens with a critical discussion of some earlier attempts to expound a theory of history, notably, the so‐called ‘new economic history’ or ‘cliometrics’ and then the ideas of two outstanding social scientists—Kondratiev and Schumpeter.

They were both concerned with major qualitative as well as quantitative changes in evolving economic systems, with the explanation of such revolutionary transformations and with their periodization.

Our book too is concerned with exploring these problems, but it offers deep criticism both of Kondratiev's ‘long wave’ theory and of Schumpeter's attempt to reconcile this theory with the equilibrium models of Walras.

Like Keynes, we emphasize some of the limitations of purely econometric models and insist on the great importance of ‘semi‐autonomous’ institutions and subsystems of society, which influence the economy and are influenced by it in a process of mutual interaction and adjustment.

Although in recent times the technology subsystem has been extremely dynamic and influential in the evolution of the economy, it is essential to consider also the political, cultural, and science subsystems, all of which have a vital role in achieving that degree of congruence in the social system necessary for successful economic growth.

This approach is illustrated in those chapters of the book that are devoted to a historical account of five successive technological revolutions, i.e. water‐powered mechanization, steam‐powered mechanization, electrification, motorization, and computerization.

Statistical evidence of the great significance of these technological revolutions for structural change in the economy is found in the changing composition of the leading cohort of the hundred largest firms.

Evidence of the social conflicts and tensions engendered by each structural crisis of adjustment is found in the statistics of days lost in strikes, as well as in political conflicts over the regulatory regime and in international markets.

This book tells the story of an academic department that underwent rapid, wrenching changes at a time and in a place that one would not have expected them to have occurred. The time was the late 1960s through the 1970s and the place was a US public university heavily dependent on state funding. The Cold War was raging, the US public was fearful of communism and the Soviet Union, and politicians were speaking to these fears for political ends. And the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was in turmoil. In this environment a significant proportion of that department's visible faculty of traditional economists was rapidly created and, in spite of the anti-Marxist political climate and the dependence of the University on state politicians for funding, quickly replaced by a significant visible group of Marxian economists. The story told covers the particulars of the background for these events relating to the University of Massachusetts, the political activism of the period, and the state of the economics profession. It describes the events themselves in considerable detail, the multi-year turmoil within the Economics Department associated with them, the eventual resolution of that turmoil into an intellectually exciting and friendly atmosphere, the significance of the events in terms of academic endeavor, and their legacy for the economics profession.

This is a major comparative study of big business in Britain, France and Germany across the twentieth century. It provides an analysis, based on a wealth of empirical data, of the character and performance of the major companies in each country at five benchmark years: 1907, 1927, 1953, 1972 and 1989. Particular attention is given to size, sectoral distribution, profits and profitability, and survival and growth. It also focuses on business leadership, both at professional and social levels. It considers the competence of top businessmen and major aspects of the decision‐making process, and places business elites within the context of social and political developments. It challenges widely held assumptions about, in particular, entrepreneurial failure in Britain, the power of German big business, France's backwardness and modernity, and sociocultural determinants of business performance. It concludes to a clear British advance well into the 1950s and European convergence thereafter, despite the persistence of strong national characteristics of business organization. The latter, however, are unlikely to have had much impact on the performance of each country's leading business enterprises.

Much of the discussion of Russia's recent post-Communist history has amounted, both in Russia and the West, to a series of monologues by strong-minded people with starkly divergent views. In contrast, the author of this book's conversations with influential, intelligent participants and observers provide the reader with a broad, nuanced view of what has and has not happened in the last 14 years, and why. Conversations from Russia thus serve as a reference volume, both for academics who study Russia and for laypeople who only have vague perceptions of what has occurred in Russia since the collapse of Communism. In conversations with important figures like Boris Yeltsin, George Soros, Anatoly Chubais, and Yegar Gaidar, the author considers questions like why the Soviet Union fell apart under Gorbachev, what went wrong with economic reforms after Gorbachev, whether the privatization of Russian assets could have been managed differently, and what the prospects are for the Russian economy in the near future. She ties the interviews together with an introduction, ultimately reaching her own judgment on each issue considered in the conversations.

Despite recent corporate scandals, the United States is among the world's least corrupt nations. But in the nineteenth century, the degree of fraud and corruption in America approached that of today's most corrupt developing nations, as municipal governments and robber barons alike found new ways to steal from taxpayers and swindle investors. This book explores this shadowy period of United States history in search of better methods to fight corruption worldwide today. The chapters address the measurement and consequences of fraud and corruption and the forces that ultimately led to their decline within the United States. The chapters show that various approaches to reducing corruption have met with success, such as deregulation, particularly “free banking,” in the 1830s. In the 1930s, corruption was kept in check when new federal bureaucracies replaced local administrations in doling out relief. Another deterrent to corruption was the independent press, which kept a watchful eye over government and business.

This book is a systematic interdisciplinary account of the history of unprecedented technical advances that took place in Europe and North America during the three pre-WWI generations and of their truly epochal consequences. It takes a close look at four classes of fundamental innovations: formation, diffusion, and standardization of electricity-generating systems and the distribution and uses of this most versatile form of energy; invention and rapid adoption of internal combustion engines, the dominant prime mover in transportation; the unprecedented pace of the introduction of new materials and industrial chemical syntheses; and the birth of a new information age thanks to the new means of communication. These chapters are followed by an evaluation of the lasting impact these advances had on the 20th century, that is, the creation of high-energy societies engaged in mass production aimed at improving standards of living.