Category: Books

I’ve been rereading some of the essays in Ben Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression, which of course is self-recommending.  I thought this passage summed up some relevant truths:

Our [with Martin Parkinson] own view is that the New Deal is better characterized as having "cleared the way" for a natural recovery (for example, by ending deflation and rehabilitating the financial system), rather than as being the engine of recovery itself.

Bernanke notes that there were "remarkably strong" productivity gains throughout much of the 1930s, even though there was no capital deepening.  This is a central puzzle which any account of the New Deal, or New Deal recovery, must incorporate.  These gains seem to span more sectors than could be accounted for by New Deal policy alone, and note that most government interventions, even good ones, don’t bring productivity gains over such a short time horizon and in such a regular and sustained fashion. 

Bernanke does suggest that some of the gains came from forced unionization and "efficiency wage" effects and yes that would credit the New Deal.  But I doubt that is the best hypothesis and of course it contradicts the traditional account of profit-seeking behavior from businesses (why weren’t they paying the higher wages in the first place?).  Rick Szostak’s work suggests that the New Deal saw lots of labor-saving, process innovations, which meant both high productivity gains and pressure on labor markets at the same time.  In my view most of these gains were simply the result of working through the implications of the earlier fundamental breakthroughs of the preceding twenty years.

Whatever is the case (and we genuinely don’t know), these productivity gains are central to the story of New Deal recovery.  Roosevelt may deserve credit for some of them, or for allowing them to proceed, but don’t assume that the New Deal caused such gains just because you see them in the gross data. 

You can find different drafts of the relevant Bernanke-Parkinson paper here, with various forms of gating.

The single most important determinant of camp survival was the number of men in POW camps.  If everyone had been in a camp holding 7,500 men, survival probabilities would have been less than 60 percent instead of more than 80 percent.  With greater camp populations survival probabilities would have been even lower.  Another important determinant of camp survival was age.  Had all men been of Thomas Withington’s age (47), only 70 percent of them would have survived.  The next most important determinants of camp survivial were the number of friends, rank, and height.  Men who were not either commissioned or noncommissioned officers fared poorly, as did those with no friends and those of Hnery Haven’s height.

Of course that is from the Civil War and it is from the new book by Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn.  Here is my previous post about the book, see also the links suggested by Matt in the comments.  You can buy the book here.

Company socioeconomic and demographic diversity was the single most important predictor of desertion [in the Civil War].

Age and occupational diversity were especially important.  For all-black regiments, former slave status (or not) and plantation of origin are important diversity measures for predicting desertion.

That is from the forthcoming book by Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn.  I have not yet finished it but I believe this book will make a big splash.  Here is the book’s home page.  Here is a blog post by Matt Kahn on the book.  Here is Matt Kahn on holding hands.

Can you say longue durée?  If so (or if not), here’s the new book by Barry Cunliffe, with the subtitle 9000 B.C.-AD 1000 indicating a coverage of murky yet critical millennia.

It’s a history of Europe which blends economic geography and economic archaeology.  The underlying question is how Europe became so innovative and the answer has much to do with trade and migration.  Imagine a more balanced and grounded Braudel.  The explanation of the "Neolithic package" and its spread across Europe is stunning.  I loved it when the author broke away from a passage about Phoenician trade routes to explain some odd lines in Homer.  If you are wondering, Cunliffe is a moderate neo-migrationist.  The photography and the color plates of the art are lovely.  You can learn how to view the Roman Empire as an "interlude" and as a break from the major story and how to understand 800-1000 A.D. as a period of rebalancing.  And you get passages like this:

…the actual return in calorific value for the effort expended in collecting [shellfish] is comparatively small.  A single red deer would be worth fifty thousand oysters!  That said, the value of shellfish is that they are always available and can be substituted when other food sources run short.

If you enjoy early economic history, this is a must, noting that it does not have the titillating feel of a popular science book.  It is my pick for best non-fiction book of the year so far.

Here is the book’s home page.  Here is one short review.  Here is a Times review.  You can buy an excellent long review (LRB) here.

Buy the book here (at $26 the per page price is low) to learn why economic archaeology should win a Nobel Prize someday.

Investors preferred closed-end funds to mutual funds because closed-end funds offered the possibility of greater returns due to their use of leverage and the history of their shares trading at premiums.

That’s about the 1920s.  It is from Matthew P. Fink’s quite interesting and useful The Rise of Mutual Funds: An Insider’s View.

I can’t decide if that is a very good or a very bad title.  Nonetheless the book itself is excellent.  The author, Rose George, stresses:

To be uninterested in the public toilet is to be uninterested in life.

You also learn that toilets may have saved more lives than any other human invention, public toilets are disappearing in London and many other cities, and that many Kenyans have "helicopter toilets," which start with the use of a plastic bag.  My favorite moment in the book is this:

After five hours of my questions, Mr. Tanaka shyly offers two of his own: "Why don’t English people want high-function toilet?  Why is Japan so unique?"

Definitely recommended and yes it is a serious book too.