Joshua Rosenbloom provides a superb study of the operations of the U.S. labor market between the Civil War and World War I. The book weaves fascinating descriptions of the various ways in which employers and workers established connections together with clear summaries of an extensive amount of background quantitative work. Although the analysis is firmly grounded on a series of more technical statistical studies, most of the book does not emphasize econometrics. Instead, the findings are effectively summarized using graphs, simple means and telling anecdotes that illustrate the experiences of many workers. The book is beautifully written and can be used by economists, historians, and both graduate and undergraduate students to obtain a clearer understanding of how markets work.

Gene Smiley provides here a narrative overview of the causes and consequences of the Great Depression. The book is intended for a general audience, and evidences a solid command of the range of literature devoted to this remarkable period. The text lacks footnotes or references, but concludes with a comprehensive annotated bibliography covering the major sources from which he has drawn. Although Smiley's approach is relatively nontechnical, readers may nevertheless not be able fully to appreciate its nuances without at least an elementary course in microeconomics and an intermediate level course in macroeconomics. Thus it may be most suitable as supplementary reading in economic history courses.

In this book, Jeff Singleton provides a detailed history of relief programs prior to and during the Great Depression. He also assesses the obstacles to welfare reform since the 1930s, and he generally argues for more reliance on social insurance and public employment as alternatives to means-tested welfare programs. The book will be of interest to scholars seeking to understand the details and evolution of relief institutions before and during the New Deal, as well as to those interested in the historical origins of modern policy.

Christopher Armstrong's book is concerned with a topic of remarkable timeliness following the wave of financial scandals—Enron et al.—which shook the American economy in 2002. The timing of the book could not have been better as it deals with crucial issues: information asymmetries, investor protection against manipulations of information, scope and type of regulation needed to insure “full, true, plain disclosure,” and the behavior and ethics of brokers, promoters, and other insiders. The fact that it covers Ontario in the four decades since World War II shows that the issues are perennial and never likely to be outmoded.

With meticulous detail, Bruce Gardner provides insight into the evolution of U.S. agriculture over the 100-year period between 1900 and 2000. In doing so, Gardner reflects on several facets of agriculture, such as innovation, on-farm productivity, the declining number of farms, the income status of U.S. farmers, and the role of government agricultural policy. Much of Gardner's analysis relies on census data, which are fraught with shortcomings. Definitions that seem straightforward, such as “farm” or “farm operator,” are actually quite complicated, so even a seemingly simple task such as tracking the number of farms over time is not trivial. Gardner skillfully addresses the challenges presented by the deficiencies of census data.

In this well-written, documented, and technically complete book, Hugh Gorman describes the response of the American petroleum industry to pollution over the course of the twentieth century. The industry, which grew and matured during this period as an integral part of modern industrialization, faced serious, and often dramatic pollution problems. They were inherent in production from common oil pools that encouraged haste, waste, and excessive surface storage; in transportation through pipelines and tanker trucks and ships; and in refining and storing complex hydrocarbons that easily escaped into the air, soil, or aquifers. Reaction to pollution brought new technologies, organizational forms, firm collaboration, and regulation—all of which are described and documented from primary and secondary sources throughout this volume. Gorman partitions efforts to address pollution into two “ethics”—an efficiency ethic that characterized industry action through the 1960s and an environmental ethic that came into being in the 1970s. The efficiency ethic describes antipollution efforts to reduce the costly wastes associated with extraction and shipment, including saving lost oil from “gusher” wells and leaky tanks and pipelines, as well as capturing natural gas and water voided in production that could be re-injected and used to propel oil to the surface. Efficiency also required greater productivity and less waste in refining through reducing vapor and hydrocarbon discharges and recycling acids and other chemicals. The firms could capture the benefits of internalizing the externalities associated with these pollutants. In tables 2.1 and 4.3 Gorman lists some of the pollution and waste-related problems encountered in oil production, shipment, and refining that were addressed effectively by firms without much government intervention. He describes the role of the major trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, in generating information for oil firms to reduce externalities.

Before I had even finished reading the first chapter of Diane Macunovich's new book, three things were crystal clear:

People matter: a society's demographics need to be considered explicitly when trying to understand or to forecast its economic behavior.

Einstein's conclusions about relativity apply to economies: changes in the relative size and age composition of a population can lead to major changes in its social and economic behavior.

Economic demographers rule! From now on, users of long-term forecasting models will need to include information on changes in age structure and cohort size if they wish to forecast events more than a few years ahead.