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Abstract:Institutions affect economic outcomes, but variation in them cannot be directly linked to environmental factors such as geography, climate, or technological availabilities. Game theoretic approaches, based as they typically are on foraging only assumptions, do not provide an adequate foundation for understanding the intervening role of politics and ideology; nor does the view that culture and institutions are entirely socially constructed. Understanding what institutions are and how they influence behavior requires an approach that is in part biological, focusing on cognitive and behavioral adaptations for social interaction favored in the past by group selection. These adaptations, along with their effects on canalizing social learning, help to explain uniformities in political and social order, and are the bedrock upon which we build cultural and institutional variability.

Institutions affect economic outcomes, but variation in them cannot be directly linked to environmental factors such as geography, climate, or technological availabilities. Game theoretic approaches, based as they typically are on foraging only assumptions, do not provide an adequate foundation for understanding the intervening role of politics and ideology; nor does the view that culture and institutions are entirely socially constructed. Understanding what institutions are and how they influence behavior requires an approach that is in part biological, focusing on cognitive and behavioral adaptations for social interaction favored in the past by group selection. These adaptations, along with their effects on canalizing social learning, help to explain uniformities in political and social order, and are the bedrock upon which we build cultural and institutional variability.

Multifactor productivity growth in the U.S. economy between 1919 and 1929 was almost entirely attributable to advance within manufacturing. Distributing steam power mechanically over shafts and belts required multistory buildings for economical operation. The widespread diffusion of electric power permitted a shift to single story layouts in which goods flow could be optimized around work stations powered by small electric motors. Within this framework, as well as opportunities to produce a variety of new products, economies of scale and learning by doing permitted rapid and across the board gains in manufacturing productivity. The sector contributed 83 percent of the 2.02 percent per year overall advance in the private nonfarm economy in this ten year period. The Depression years witnessed manufacturing MFP growth that was not as uniformly distributed as it had been during the twenties, and only half as rapid: 2.60 as opposed to 5.12 percent per year. As a consequence, and in spite of a rise in the sector's share, manufacturing accounted for only 48 percent of PNE MFP growth between 1929 and 1941. Yet overall growth in MFP was by far the highest of any comparable period in the twentieth century - 2.31 percent per year. This resulted from combining a manufacturing contribution which by any standard of comparison other than that of the 1920s was world class, with spillovers from government financed infrastructural investment that enabled rapid advance in other parts of the economy, particularly transport and public utilities and wholesale and retail distribution. MFP growth between 1989 and 2000 was more than twice what it had been during the years 1973-89, but less than a third that registered between 1929 and 1941. Within manufacturing, advance was narrowly concentrated within the old SIC 35 and 36, virtually all of this attributable to information technology (IT). IT was also responsible for some MFP growth in using industries, notably wholesale and retail distribution and securities trading. This paper questions the common practice of also crediting IT with the portion of capital deepening's effect on labor productivity associated with the accumulation of specific IT capital goods.

Gene Smiley provides here a narrative overview of the causes and consequences of the Great Depression. The book is intended for a general audience, and evidences a solid command of the range of literature devoted to this remarkable period. The text lacks footnotes or references, but concludes with a comprehensive annotated bibliography covering the major sources from which he has drawn. Although Smiley's approach is relatively nontechnical, readers may nevertheless not be able fully to appreciate its nuances without at least an elementary course in microeconomics and an intermediate level course in macroeconomics. Thus it may be most suitable as supplementary reading in economic history courses.

As European influence extended across the oceans, all regions of recent settlement faced the challenge of devising means for distributing, by sale, lease, or grant, lands originally held or used by aboriginal populations, and at the same time defining the political relationship between the frontier and the existing states. One of the most sweeping instances of legislation addressing this issue took place in the early years of the United States where, in exchange for the cession of claims on western lands by the original thirteen states, the federal government under the Articles of Confederation agreed to convert the public domain into private holdings as quickly as possible.

Because of the Depression's place in both the popular and academic imagination, and the repeated and justifiable emphasis on output that was not produced, income that was not earned, and expenditure that did not take place, it will seem startling to propose the following hypothesis: the years 1929–1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history.1 The hypothesis entails two primary claims: that during this period businesses and government contractors implemented or adopted on a more widespread basis a wide range of new technologies and practices, resulting in the highest rate of measured peacetime peak-to-peak multifactor productivity growth in the century, and secondly, that the Depression years produced advances that replenished and expanded the larder of unexploited or only partially exploited techniques, thus providing the basis for much of the labor and multifactor productivity improvement of the 1950's and 1960's.