American Economic History [antikvár]

Preface In the past thirty years, research in American economic history, the "Cliometric Revolution," has caused considerable modifications in our view of the national past. A key reason for writing American Economic History, Third Edition is to take those contributions into account in a general treatment. 1 did not want to "throw the baby out with the bath water"; large parts of our economic biography remain relatively untouched by cliometric revisions. The new research findings have been integrated into the total picture of change and development. The ideal, as Douglas C. North writes, is to "explain the structure and performance of economics through time."' To do so, I have included a wide range of information, including legal and other institutional elements. Another motivation for undertaking the writing of American Economic History, Third Edition is our modern set of problems. A textbook of American economic history should take us from our earliest beginnings to the present. In rare cases, such as the early Norse settlement on this continent, the episode is a dead end. But for the most part, our present is explained by our past. The story of U.S. economic achievement in per capita income, technological leadership, and dynamic entrepre-neurship—a thriving free-market economy, together with a generous welfare state securely anchored in a growing economy—is the picture presented in textbooks leading up to, say, 1960. However, it is now the 1990s, and the situation is not as it was. If the roots of the changed economy of the 1980s lie before 1960, we must find those roots and explore them. It is most unlikely, after all, that an entire society could produce one result and then turn in its track and, using the same institutional technology, produce an entirely different outcome. The troub- les of the 1990s are as much the product of our past as was the seeming triumph of 1960. So, this enterprise involves a very considerable reappraisal of the entire American past. I do not wish to claim too much. The perspective of our history from the inflationary stagnation of the late 1970s and the 1980s is different than it was when an earlier generation of economic historians chronicled our victorious march through the troubles of the 1930s to the apex of American world prestige at the end of Eisenhower's presidency. The twentieth century is now nine decades old and accordingly, I have devoted more space to the discussion of this portion of our past than have my predecessors. In addition to integrating entirely new research findings into the story of our economic past, I have shifted the focus slightly to include a more extensive treatment of the law and institutional development than has been the case in more recent textbooks. And, since cliometrics has produced massive and fascinating revisions of our economic history, I have endeavored to include the major conclusions, while not emphasizing the background economic analysis. In doing this, I have tried to make cliometric findings accessible to students and to instructors who are not specialists in economics. While this may seem to slight some of the powerful and elegant work of the clio-metricians, I can trust them to reintroduce the cliometric fireworks in their own classrooms, and, meanwhile, everyone else can know, in summary, what the cliometricians have achieved by way of historical revision. ORGANIZATION OF THE TEXT The history of America's economy, presented here in mainly chronological order, has been divided