*Unequal Gains*

That is the forthcoming book by Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, and the subtitle is American Growth and Inequality since 1700.  The sections on recent America, while unobjectionable, are ordinary, but the early coverage of American history is very interesting indeed.  Here is one excerpt:

Why the Old South reversal of fortune?  A benign part of the story seems to have been that the colonial South was still a labor-scarce frontier region with high returns to coastal land producing export crops, like indigo, rice, and tobacco. Its decline after 1774 was echoed in two other frontier cases many decades later.  One was the dramatic relative decline of the West South Central income per capita between 1840 and 1860 — from 60 percent of the U.S. average to just 9.5 percent above it…The other was the loss of the Pacific region’s gold-discovery-generated super-incomes after the 1850s and early 1860s (the Pacific states were 213.3 percent above the US average in 1860, and the mountain states were 30.5 percent above).

I hope to report on other interesting sections of the book soon; it is due out in April.  Again, most business cycles in history have been real business cycles.

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