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Today's Economic History: Tim Taylor: Fear of Cheap Foreign Labor in the Long Depression: 1873-1879 (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Tim Taylor: Fear of Cheap Foreign Labor in the Long Depression: 1873-1879: "The US economy was in a continuous recession for 65 months from October 1873 to March 1879....
...Samuel Bernstein offered one of the classic descriptions of the Long Depression in his 1956 article, "American Labor in the Long Depression, 1873-1878" (Science & Society, Winter 1956, 20:1, pp. 59-83, available through JSTOR).... Estimates of the [non-farm] unemployment rate for the later part of this period often exceeded 20%.... For those with a job, real wages fell by half. Even those real wages were often paid in the form of company scrip....
Morning Must-Read: Barry Eichengreen: Greece in Light of the Past and Future of the Euro - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
“I’m strongly of the view that 1929-1931 and 2008-2010 were cut from the same cloth…
…broadly speaking, whereas 1920-1922 was a fundamentally different animal… caused by monetary tightening by the Federal Reserve designed to wring inflation out of the economy, not by deeper economic and financial imbalances
Morning Must-Read: Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor: Monetary Policy and Housing Prices: Lessons from 140 Years - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor: Monetary Policy and Housing Prices: Lessons from 140 Years: “Housing played a major role in the Global Crisis…
…and some worry that the ultra-low interest rate environment is inflating new housing bubbles. Using 140 years of data from 14 advanced economies, this column provides a quantitative measure of the financial stability risks that stem from extended periods of ultra-low interest rates. The historical insights suggest that the potentially destabilising by-products of easy money must be taken seriously
Weekend Reading: Peter Temin (1997): Two Views of the Industrial Revolution (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Peter Temin (1997): Two Views of the British Industrial Revolution:1
ABSTRACT: There are two views of the British Industrial Revolution in the literature today. The more traditional description sees the Industrial Revolution as a broad change in the British economy and society. This broad view of the Industrial Revolution has been challenged by Crafts and Harley who see the Industrial Revolution as the result of technical change in only a few industries. This article presents a test of these views using the Ricardian model of international trade with many goods. British trade data are used to implement the test and discriminate between the two views of the Industrial Revolution.
Today's Economic History: 1870 as the Inflection Point in Trade and Transport - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts transcendentalist author and activist Henry David Thoreau’s response to the coming of the railroad was: “get off my lawn!”:
To make a railroad round the world…. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere in next to no time and for nothing, but though a crowd rushes to the depot and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over–and it will be called, and will be, “a melancholy accident”…
Indeed, the very first day of operation of the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad, September 15, 1830, George Stephenson’s locomotive, The Rocket, killed the Right Honorable William Huskisson, former President of the Board of Trade–that is, he had been Britain’s Secretary of Commerce (in addition to Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, and Leader of the House of Commons).
The old rule-of-thumb before the railroad was that you simply could not transport agricultural goods more than 100 miles by land. Over that distance the horses or the oxen would have eaten as much as they could have pulled. Either find a navigable watercourse—and it had better be much closer than 100 miles—or find yourself stuck in self-sufficiency for anything other than small and light preciosities, without the ability to buy much made outside your local township that could not be purchased with the (low-value) spinning and weaving labor of your or your neighbors’ womenfolk. For Thoreau on Walden Pond, living deliberately, the fact that it took him a day to walk or ride into Boston was a benefit—part of living deliberately. But that is a (relatively) rich guy’s point of view.
The coming of steam coupled with the metallurgy to cheaply make the rails and the engines of the railroad made a difference. It made transport over land wherever the rails ran as cheap as travel up navigable watercourses or across the oceans had ever been. It made it much faster as well. This was a big difference for people who wanted to move about. The was a big difference for spoilable or time-sensitive goods. This was not much of a difference for durable staples over routes that had been and still could be travelled by water. And since most people had for good reason settled near the water routes, the railroad was a very welcome boost, but not that much more. For the rise of Mexico City—with no water routes to the coasts and thus the world economy—the railroad was a game-change. But for the rise of New York City the game-change was not the Iron Horse but rather the Erie Canal.
The true revolution in transportation? The one that mattered for everyone? That came not in the 1830s with the railroad. That came later: it was the iron-hulled ocean-going coal-fired steamship.
Evening Must-Read: "There Can Be No Partnership with the King": Regulatory Commitment and the Tortured Rise of England's East Indian Merchant Empire - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Dan Bogart: “There Can Be No Partnership with the King”: Regulatory Commitment and the Tortured Rise of England’s East Indian Merchant Empire: “The English East India Company helped build…
…Britain’s colonial empire, but the Company was not a leader in East Asian trade for nearly a century after its founding in 1600. This paper argues that its early performance was hindered by a problem of regulatory commitment. It gives a brief history of the torturous renegotiations over its monopoly trading privileges and the fiscal demands by the monarchy. It also analyzes the effects of political instability, warfare, and fiscal capacity on the Company’s investment in shipping tonnage. Regressions show the growth of shipping tonnage declined significantly when there were changes in government ministers, when Britain was at war in Europe and North America, and when shipping capacity exceeded central government tax revenues. The findings point to the significance of regulatory institutions in Britain’s development and its links with politics and war. They also provide an important case where regulatory uncertainty lowers investment.”
