It’s not a comfortable time for our country right now. For some reason, perhaps due to our enforced confinement, my husband and I started remembering family stories—our own family histories, good, bad, indifferent. Stories in which personalities peek through the misty past.
I’d love for you to share such stories, those that you like to tell but may not have an audience for, especially if you have exhausted the patience of children and grandchildren. To me these stories bring the past alive. Here are two of mine:
First story:
My great-grandfather’s parents came from Ireland in 1837 and farmed in Ohio. (I always praise the potato because without it they [and thus I] would probably not have been born, and they were lucky to miss the horrible famine of 1847). Their son John was born in 1847 in Ohio. Like many countrymen, the family moved west around 1860. They reached St. Louis, where they were to wait for a boat to take them up the Mississippi to Wisconsin. The family briefly dispersed, with plans to meet at the port. But John, then aged 14, never arrived. Continue reading “You and I Are What History Is About”
Last week I wrote about the Transportation-Communication Revolution that has fostered economic growth around the world.[1] Yes, it may have sped up the international spread of the coronavirus but, if so, that is a short-run effect. Prosperity has been the long-run result.
In the late nineteenth century another transportation-communication revolution took place, as railroads enabled products to be sold over vast geographical distances.[2] In the United States this led to the emergence of mass marketers like Montgomery Ward and Sears, which sent catalogs, products and even kits for building houses all around the country.
I have criticized economists for oversimplifying issues,[1] but I must say that sometimes they cut through the Gordian knot of difficult historical questions. That has just happened with an article by Joseph Connors, James D. Gwartney, and Hugo M. Montesinos.[2]
For decades, almost since Arnold Toynbee coined the term, there has been a debate over whether the Industrial Revolution increased or reduced the standard of living, especially for workers. Was the nineteenth century a period of “massive and continuous” progress, or were the Marxists right in saying that “capitalism both in its evolution and present form must be evil”?[3]
Connors et al. will have none of that debate because they have come up with a revolution that, by important measurements, has had even more impact than the Industrial Revolution. It is happening now around the world, affecting nearly everybody, not just those in England or Western Europe. Continue reading “Forget the Industrial Revolution”
As I have stated before, historians are often influenced by what’s going on around them when they write about the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, the newly-independent countries looked as though they might experience their own industrial revolutions. That led to an interest among historians in the early Industrial Revolution. [1]
Economists caught the enthusiasm, too. They viewed the great potential of these countries and expected an Industrial Revolution—what W. W. Rostow called these countires’ “take-off.” [2] But that period of enthusiasm was followed by disillusionment. It turned out that many countries failed to achieve the take-off that seemed right at their doorstep.
I suggest that the economists were looking at the wrong things.
More than 20 years ago in an article for the Journal of Private Enterprise [3] I wrote about economists’ views of development as reflected in Paul Samuelson’s famous textbook. (That’s the one you probably read in your first economics class if you are of a certain age.)
I looked at Samuelson’s treatment of international development in four editions of the textbook, 1951, 1961, 1964, 1985. In them he reveals both his own views and those of other leading development economists.
