Suchergebnisse

There are times when researchers must struggle through the weeds and pass up the easier roads chosen by Crane's wayfarer. Such a time has come for research on the growth and structure of the English economy before and during the Industrial Revolution. Our rational preference for the easier roads has caused us to apply increasing amounts of our abundant analytical cleverness to an endowment of empirical raw materials that has grown relatively slowly. But the Law of Diminishing Returns applies to historical research as well as to other activities, and the relatively generous inputs of analysis have lowered their marginal returns and created a condition of raw material scarcity. The returns to hacking through the archival weeds for new raw materials now seem high.

Intuition tells us that the scarcity of space on the earth's surface should be closely tied both to population growth and to economic growth. Population growth should make land more scarce by raising the demand for food and private space and by raising the supply of labor, a factor of production that must cooperate with land. Intuition says that economic growth should tend to do the same, all things considered. The demand for food, a prime land-using product, would be expanded little by a rise in per capita incomes, but the rent on land should be bid up somewhat by the growth of other inputs into production, such as skills and man-made equipment. Intuition also suggests that land scarity should in turn retard the growth of population and per capita incomes. If space, privacy, and food are expensive, children should seem relatively costly. At the same time, higher space rents should mean slower economic growth than would be experienced if man could manufacture extra land cheaply.

Careful handling of an eclectic data set reveals how unequal were the incomes of different classes of Russians on the eve of Revolution. We estimate incomes by economic and social class in each of the fifty provinces of European Russia. On the eve of military defeat and the 1905 Revolution, Russian income inequality was middling by the standards of that era, and less severe than is inequality today in China, the United States, and Russia itself. We note how the interplay of some distinctive fiscal and relative-price features of Imperial Russia might have shaped the now-revealed level of inequality.