The elaborate Chinese standard histories, which, if all translated, would fill several hundred thick volumes, provide illuminating information about many aspects of economic history. In this paper, I shall present a passage that enables us to estimate the gold stock of the Chinese at the beginning of the Christian era, a type of information rarely available.

In his History of the Former Han Dynasty, Ban Gu (writing about A.D. 80) has occasion to illustrate the stinginess of a usurping emperor, Wang Mang, and enumerates his wealth as follows:

At this time [A.D. 23], in the inner apartments of the Wei-yang Palace, ten thousand catties of actual gold were put into one chest and there still remained sixty chests. In each office for storage of the Yellow Gate and of the Intendant of Palace Parks and in the workshops of the Master of Recipes, there were also several chests. The Imperial Treasury at the Ch'ang-lo Palace and the Bureau of Equalization and Standards in the capital in addition stored very much cash, silk, pearls, jade, and valuables.

For many years Arthur Young (1741–1820), greatest of all English agricultural publicists, was closely associated with the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, established in London in March 1754. Each year the Society of Arts, as it soon came to be called, offered premiums for desirable inventions and improvements in such diverse fields as agriculture, manufactures, chemistry, colonies and trade, and the polite arts. In his numerous books Young frequently commented on the activities of the Society, while the eight volumes of Young manuscript letters in the British Museum contain scattered references to his relations with the Society. A large portion of this article is based, however, upon the manuscript records of the Society of Arts, which I was permitted to examine and use through the courtesy of Mr. Charles Durant Cassidy, librarian and examinations officer, and Dr. Frank R. Lewis, assistant secretary. These records consist of minutes, letters, unpublished transactions, and especially records of the various committees which examined all applications for premiums and made the awards. Among the records are eight unpublished manuscript letters written by Young, two of which are reproduced as an appendix to this article.

Economics, as it is frequently taught nowadays, consists largely of supply and demand curves. Within their graceful lines are contained the wisdom of the ages—the key to the past and the barometer of the future. If superimposed on one another, these curves have all the esthetic quality of dynamistic drawings. So completely have they dominated economic thinking that when a group of economists considered the possibility of founding an Economic History Association, their first impulse was to establish a demand curve. This was done, as Professor Heaton has intimated, by Miss Anne Bezanson, who canvassed the field. She discovered that four hundred people could be counted upon immediately to support a Journal of Economic History.

Problems persist despite efforts to solve them because those efforts are irrelevant, inadequate, or unsupported. A behavioral structure consisting of the philosophy of the system in which the problem resides, its institutions, administration, and the operation that implements its policies is devised to analyze persistent problems such as inequality, underdevelopment, and inflation. As a chronic problem in the United States and other capitalist economies, inflation reflects a contradiction within the behavioral structure. Its resolution requires reinstatement of perfect competition, which is improbable, or change of the philosophy, which is revolutionary and equally improbable; hence, inflation will persist regardless of the measures taken against it.

Locomotive inspection was among the most important Progressive Era federal workplace regulations. Inspection rules were enforced by a new Bureau of Locomotive Inspection, which claimed credit for subsequent safety improvements. Relying on published and unpublished data this article assesses these claims. Literary sources suggest that the bureau achieved compliance by emphasizing regulatory benefits and that its activities sharply reduced locomotive defects through the 1920s, in part by reducing agency problems. A model for 1923–1932 reinforces this conclusion, but suggests that the safety gains came at high cost. After 1932 safety improvements stagnated, for inspection ran out of steam.

This article examines barriers that impeded the accumulation of land by African Americans in the postbellum South with a new data set of real estate transactions from 1880 Tennessee. We find that rates of purchase by African Americans differed little between plantation and non-plantation regions. We also find that parcels sold in plantation regions were relatively small, suggesting that African American accumulation of land was not hindered by plantation owners refusing to subdivide their properties. Additionally, we find blacks paid more than whites per acre of quality-constant land, although literacy at least partially mitigated the racial price discrimination.