Category: Economic History

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How Sweet It Was

Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, recently told the New York Times that economic opportunities for poor people in the United States may have been better in the 1960s than they are today. Could this be true?

Walker, an African-American, was born in 1959 in Lafayette, Louisiana, to a single mother and grew up in small towns in Texas, including Ames, an all-black town. His prospects might not have seemed bright but in fact he attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a law degree; he joined a prominent law firm, then the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), and subsequently entered the nonprofit world.

In the Times interview, Walker gave credit for his success to his mother, who was a nurse’s assistant, and to the federal childhood program Head Start. “I’m grateful to America, because I was a boy at a time when America believed in little poor black boys and girls living on dirt roads in shotgun houses in small towns across this country.”

He explains: “In 1965, I was sitting on the porch with my mother and a lady approached and told my mother about a new program called Head Start. And I was fortunate enough to be in the first class of Head Start, in the summer of 1965.”

1965? That was the year of the Watts (Los Angeles) riots, two years after Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, three years before King’s assassination, and a year after three young men were killed in Mississippi for trying to bring voting rights to blacks.

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Good News about the 1600s, Part I

The seventeenth century in Europe was bloody and violent. Some examples: a continental war that went on for thirty years (1618-1648), three British civil wars (1639-1651),  naval wars between England and the Netherlands (1652-1674), and military efforts to rein in France’s Louis XIV and the Spanish Hapsburgs.

At the same time, however, economic changes were quietly occurring, laying a foundation for the Industrial Revolution. That’s the little-known subject of this post.

“What happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a wholesale shift of industry, including rather sophisticated sectors, from city to countryside,” writes Jan de Vries in his informative book Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750.[1]

This shift from cities to rural areas is not the typical “Industrial Revolution” story, which says that peasants were forced off the farm and into the cities, making them available for burgeoning industrial factories. To some extent that did happen later, but manufacturing in England and other parts of western Europe started in rural areas, not cities.  Here’s how, according to de Vries.

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How Did We Get Land-Grant Colleges?

Land-grant colleges are state schools founded to teach “agricultural and mechanical arts.” Today, many are among the nation’s largest research universities. In this post I’ll share some thoughts about how they came about.

Let’s begin with conventional wisdom. Land-grant colleges  “emerged from an idealistic concern for the adaptation of existing educational resources to a changing society . . . .” [1] Oddly, this somewhat grandiose explanation for the land-grants comes from John Simon, a historian who deftly investigated the politics behind the 1862 act that authorized such schools. He also recognized that the typical American didn’t have much truck with higher education in the mid-nineteenth century.  One agricultural school was called the “Farmers’ High School” because the title “Farmers’ College” would sound too fancy.

Yet Simon’s statement reflects a still-prevailing image of the idealistic movement for land-grant colleges. Continue reading “How Did We Get Land-Grant Colleges?”

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An Economist Who Understood History

Robert H. Nelson died suddenly last December, while he was in Helsinki, Finland, to give a talk. Nelson was a respected—and unconventional—economist. In preparing a memorial essay about him, I read through many of his writings and saw how an economist can use history to gain insight. In this short space I’d like to concentrate on just one topic—federal land management in the United States.

In the early 1980s Nelson worked for the Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis (otherwise known as the “Office of Smart Guys,” according to my husband, who directed the office at the time). Part of his research involved reviewing the history of federal land ownership.

He made two important discoveries.

First, he discovered the utter failure of federal “scientific management” of land.[1] The federal government owns large swaths of land in the West because the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth century halted its dispersal to the private sector. Suspicious of big companies (the trust-busting Theodore Roosevelt was a hero), Progressives thought that big projects like managing land should be in the hands of the federal government, which would hire experts and leave them free to manage “scientifically” without political interference.

For the most part, it didn’t work.

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How Grim the Reaper?

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured Steven Pinker, a well-known philosopher and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. What interested the Chronicle most was Pinker’s optimism. As interviewer Tom Bartlett said, ”Pinker writes that intellectuals hate ‘the idea of progress’ while happily enjoying its multitudinous comforts (‘they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia’).”[1] Pinker, in contrast, believes that “today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth,” as he wrote in the New Republic in 2007.

It does seem that many intellectuals are pessimistic about the future and also pessimistic about the past. That is, they devalue the progress that has taken place. For example, the status of women has changed enormously since the 1960s. (When I started working, prominent magazines like Time didn’t hire women reporters, just researchers who worked with male reporters). But Laurie Penny, a London writer, recently disparaged the positive story of “empowerment” she was taught to believe in. She can’t get beyond the fact that “behind every one of the brave and brilliant women I sketched in my schoolbooks were a great many men who tried to destroy her.”[2]

Robert J. Norell wrote a devastating book about the experience of Jim Crow (the racial segregation following Reconstruction and continuing until the civil rights movement). The book, The House I Live In, was written partly to show how much race relations have improved in the United States. But (unlike his more recent Up from Slavery, about Booker T. Washington) it received a cold shoulder,  especially from academics. The story of progress is not all that attractive, it seems.

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