Who wrote Alfred Sloan's My Years with General Motors?

a. Alfred Sloan

b. John McDonald

c. Alfred Chandler

d. A group of more than 20 persons, known and unknown

Fans of the old Groucho Marx quiz show might be tempted to choose answer a. John McDonald, in his posthumous memoir being reviewed here, argues for b. But I am inclined to think the best answer is d.

The goal of Christopher Freeman and Francisco Louçã's book As Time Goes By is to provide an overarching treatment of economic development in the United States and Europe since 1750 within the framework of the “long wave” tradition. A subsidiary goal, which occupies the first part of the book, and prepares the ground for the second, is to criticize macroeconometric and cliometric methodologies in economic history and to promote an approach based on the writings of Joseph Schumpeter and Nikolai Kondratiev.

Julian Simon made fundamental contributions to the literature on population economics between the mid-1970s and his premature death in 1998. His ideas were controversial, often extremely so. Even more than Esther Boserup, Simon became practically a cult figure, symbolizing the argument that population growth has propitious effects on economic growth. He repeated this argument in paper after paper, and book after book, contradicting the doomsayers and the neo-Malthusians. He emphasized the obvious, but frequently glossed-over, fact that human capital has to be embodied in human beings; thus the more people born, the more human capital there will be, and the higher will be the probability of significant new knowledge being created, the more scientists there will be, and the faster will be the pace of technological change. Simply put: people are “the primary causal variable” (p. 15) in economic growth.

This book, crammed with characteristically Baumolian insights, encompasses three main parts: one explaining how oligopolists' virtuous rent seeking has been the engine propelling long-term economic growth in free-market economies; one showing how the tools of microeconomics can be applied to analyze technological innovation; and one proposing a macroeconomic endogenous growth model with richer innovation-dependent features than those found in the models pioneered by Paul Romer (Journal of Political Economy, October 1990) and others.

Since Gunnar Adler-Karlsson in 1968 published the first attempt at a comprehensive study of the West's “economic warfare” against the Soviet Bloc (Western Economic Warfare, 1947–1967: A Case Study in Foreign Economic Policy. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell), there has been a thin but persistent stream of studies covering the same subject. Adler-Karlsson's title was exaggerated. His theme was one instrument of Western commercial policy, namely the embargo on exportation of so-called “strategic goods” to the Soviet Bloc and China. Because almost all documentation on this subject was still secret when he wrote, his approach was quantitative, relying on the measurement of differences in trend over twenty years between Western exports to the Eastern bloc and to other destinations. Unrefined though this approach was, it remains the one book on the subject which proceeds from trade statistics to policy. The opening of documentary sources has reversed that process. Diplomatic historians have used government records to show how wide were the differences, and sometimes the practices, among Western countries in implementing the embargoes. Their most salient theme has been the demonstration from written records that the decisions about which goods to embargo were genuinely collective and that, in particular, the influence of Britain as an intermediary was surprisingly important in shaping the form and overall impact of these policies. However unilateralist the American hegemon may now be, in the 1950s it was not so. The sustained growth of Europe's economic strength was vital to America's own security; trade embargoes which threatened that growth were not enforced. On the basis of this documentation political scientists have been able to formulate theories of commercial “warfare,” of which Michael Mastanduno's Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) has received the most acclaim.

It is impossible to summarize and critique this book adequately in a short review. Its author is a leading historian of economic thought, skilled in many disciplines, imaginative and penetrating in analysis, and possessed of knowledge, brilliance, and pixie-like cynicism. His More Heat than Light (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) traced the origins of twentieth-century economics to a mimicking of nineteenth-century physics and mathematics in order to achieve the status of “science.” This book traces the social construction of high theory in economics during World War II and the Cold War to the influence of John von Neumann's general theory of automata and the military funding of basic economic science. Like his earlier book, this is history of economics on a massively ambitious scale—a theory of the entire postwar period.

This book, written for the most part by established authorities in their respective fields, deals with aspects of abolition and its consequences in the Americas, India, and Africa. Writers on the Americas contribute to the ongoing debate over the meaning of freedom by investigating how slaves in the Caribbean and the United States defined freedom, and what the limitations of free status proved to be. The centerpiece of these articles, which also deal with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the British Caribbean, is Carolyn Fick's comprehensive study of emancipation in Haiti. It traces the formulation and gradual implementation (1791–1830s) of the ex-slaves' concept of freedom: to command their own labor, to work their own land, and to sell their own surplus (p. 21). This concept was shared by ex-plantation slaves throughout the British Caribbean, and after 1838 it was realized wherever land was available. But Toussaint L'ouverture (and, in varying degrees, his successors) gave priority to regenerating plantation-based export surpluses to finance and defend the newly established state—and this required enforced gang labor. Curtailment of freedom improved productivity, but in the teeth of popular resistance, laborers bargaining as slaves had done to improve their terms of work, and at the price of creating an unbridgeable gap between the laborers and the state (p. 23). But in the longer run, “the internal logic of revolution from below … triumphed”: Haiti became a peasant-based society (p. 35).

Alan Macfarlane is a distinguished British social anthropologist, celebrated for giving that discipline an historical turn. He is the author of important books claiming that the English had become “individualist”—in familial matters as much as in economic life—in the late Middle Ages. This view had the mixed blessing of an endorsement by Sir Keith Joseph, the intellectual powerhouse of early Thatcherism, thereby making Macfarlane a decidedly controversial figure. The present book draws on these early views, but is very much the product of sustained interaction with the thought of the late Ernest Gellner (who spent most of the last years of his life at Cambridge chairing the department in which Macfarlane teaches). What we are offered in this book then is a summary of a particular line of argument, drawing on philosophy and anthropology, which speaks to the interests of economic historians in a slightly abstract but decidedly high-powered manner. The presupposition of the whole is stated in the title, albeit that the “riddle” is in fact twofold. One riddle is the blocking of sustained development: given human ingenuity and obvious early development, why was it that most agrarian civilizations eventually hit some sort of ceiling? The second conundrum then concerns the fundamental breakthrough to capitalist and industrial modernity.

In the 1970s Robert Lucas's research revolutionized the study of business cycles, and in 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for this work. However, in 1985 he had already decided that, “I did not look forward to the prospect of spending the latter half of my career trying to hang on to what I had done in the first half” (p. 2). Thus, he embarked on a new task: understanding economic growth.

This book collects Lucas's writing (from 1985 to 1997) on economic growth. In his words, its “general theme … is the attempt to adapt modern growth theory, originally developed to describe the behavior of the industrialized economies, to obtain a unified understanding of rich and poor economies alike in a world of vast income and growth rate differences” (p. 1). This theme is carried through an introduction and five chapters, four of which have been published previously as journal articles.

Islands are natural laboratories for the study of biological phenomena in general, and diseases and epidemics in particular; their isolation makes them ideal places to study the biological and social processes that combine to cause disease patterns. Questions such as the minimum community size to permit continuous (endemic) transmission of a disease are ideally answered by isolated populations of varying sizes, and islands are an approximation to this. This is especially true historically, before fast ships and airplanes made islands less socially isolated. Island Epidemics is a tour d'horizon by three scientists whose prior work—much of it also as a trio—eminently qualifies them to survey this fascinating and important intersection of history, epidemiology, biology, geography, and the social sciences in general. The book is not only an assessment of the state-of-the-science of island epidemiology, but also an intellectual history of the subject, with accounts of how key breakthroughs were made, and by whom.

This book is one in a series, “Themes in World History,” edited by Peter Stearns, who is also the author of two of the three volumes produced thus far, including this one. The series is designed to provide supplementary reading for undergraduate history students, and if this volume is any guide, the underlying assumption about the target audience is that it is barely literate. With a limited vocabulary and simplified sentence structure, Stearns introduces his putative charges to a new “ism”—consumerism—and proceeds to chart the emergence and development of this force from its western point of origin (“The discovery of significant consumerism, of the modern sort, in eighteenth-century Western Europe was a major historical find” [p. 15]) to the rest of the world and up to the present day.

This book consists primarily of the proceedings of a conference held at Evora in Portugal in May 1996 to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Bank of Portugal. The conference comprised two parts, the first involving (central) bank archivists and the second monetary historians. This book covers only the contributions of the monetary historians, though there were a sizeable number of these: 11 papers treat the history of central banks in 17 countries—the United Kingdom; France, Spain; Germany, Japan; Sweden, Finland; Portugal; Italy; Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia; the United States, Canada; Argentina, Brazil and Mexico—plus the IMF and the BIS. In addition there is an introduction by two of the three editors, and a concluding comment by Barry Eichengreen, which latter reads more like an earlier introduction, since it refers both to a paper (by Marc Flandreau) presented at Evora but published elsewhere in the meantime, and to another paper (by Michael Collins), which clearly was totally rewritten (and with a new joint author) between the conference and publication; overall perhaps an indication of problems in the publication process?

In the early twenty-first century, the choice of monetary regime has again become a matter of political and economic debate. The European experiment in monetary union is being watched, with a mixture of hope and fear, by policymakers in the Americas, and most likely in Asia as well. Perhaps this explains the resurgence of interest in the battles over monetary regimes in the nineteenth century, when a world that had been more or less bimetallic for several centuries switched to the gold standard. Why did it happen? Why did it happen then? Was it a change for the better or not? What were the relative contributions of economic determinism, network externalities, and global capitalism? It is this “range of territory” (now I understand why this cliché is overused!) that Ted Wilson addresses, arguing—albeit in a multicausal framework—for the importance of network externalities, and suggesting that the gold standard occurred by default rather than design. Britain went on gold early and somewhat accidentally; Germany, France and the United States followed; aspiring borrowers on the periphery did not have much choice—if they wanted access to international capital markets—so they followed, too.

This collection of essays comparing the economic systems of the world's second- and fifth-largest economies raises some fascinating issues. Japan and Italy began their economic development at roughly the same time in the nineteenth century and, in important respects, from the same starting points; moreover, both economic systems have deviated considerably from the Anglo-American model of capitalism. The confrontation of the economic histories of the two nations raises a number of issues which have, up to now, been neglected or taken for granted. Each of the chapters focuses on a specific theme, including industrial organization, corporate governance, the labor market, the banking system, and, on a more micro-level, the silk industry. Many of the chapters are co-authored by economists from both countries, to ensure completeness of coverage and factual accuracy.

In his acknowledgments Edgar Jones explains that this book started as a commission to the London School of Economics Business History Unit, and was later transferred to Glaxo as an in-house project. At all points Jones worked closely with Glaxo staff, an association that is reflected in his extensive use of company documents and interviews with past or present company personnel. Company support is also evident in the handsome production of the book, which includes many photos, some in color. This much said, and taking note of the celebratory tone suggested by the subtitle, this is a work of scholarship by a trained economic historian and should be welcomed as an important addition to the still-under-populated genre of company histories of the pharmaceutical industry. Jones's study reaches back to the nineteenth-century origins of the company in general merchandising, and forward to the merger with SmithKline Beecham in 2000 that resulted in one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Its chronological center lies in the half century 1935–1985, which witnessed the transformation of the company.

World income per capita has multiplied by 13-fold over the past millennium, even as population grew by a factor of 22. This is just one of the results emerging from Angus Maddison's most recent book. To readers familiar with his previous work, the new volume will appear as an impressive extension of his efforts to reconstruct long-run trends in the world economy. Together with an extension of his path-breaking work on capitalist development since 1820, Maddison assesses the evolution of the West and its connections with the world development since the year 1000. This global perspective and millennial reach are the book's major novelties.

This is an ambitious, stimulating, and well-written book. Haim Ofek is concerned with the origin of the human propensity “to truck, barter, and exchange,” as Adam Smith put it. The author notes that while many animals engage in forms of nepotistic exchange (behavior that can be accounted for by the Hamilton kin-selection mechanism), humans are the only species to engage systematically in exchange with nonkin conspecifics. Rather than viewing these behaviors as cultural artifacts reflective of generations of development after the onset of the Neolithic revolution, Ofek seeks to situate their origin much earlier, in the two-million-year Pleistocene era; indeed, he views exchange, in conjunction with climactic stabilization, as a sufficient condition for—the cause, rather than a consequence of—the Neolithic revolution.

The substantial rise in life expectancy and the related decline in morbidity (or sickness) are great triumphs of the past 200 years. This book tells the story of this dramatic improvement in the human condition, which is sometimes called the health transition. Although James Riley has done considerable research in the area of health history, the field is so vast that any book of this scope must be based predominantly on the studies of other scholars. He does an admirable job of distilling the research findings for a general audience.

These two books have one element in common, the International Monetary Fund. For the rest, they differ in virtually every dimension. James Boughton, Assistant Director of the fund's Policy Development and Review Department, writes a colossal history of the institution for the period 1979–1989; his insider's perspective is inherently sympathetic to the institution and its main actors. Paul Blustein, a financial journalist of the Washington Post, describes the fund's handling of the financial crises of 1997–1999 in Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, Russia, and Brazil; as an outsider, he has no institutional allegiance and, as a matter of fact, his assessment of the fund is negative. There are other differences, to be sure: Boughton's is a heavily researched history, rich not only in institutional knowledge but also in theories and policy debates; Blustein's focuses almost exclusively on the policy aspect. Boughton relies primarily on archival material, whereas Blustein on interviews with key policy makers, both inside and outside the fund. Boughton writes for an audience of economists and policy makers, Blustein for the educated but unspecialized. Boughton's work reads like a treatise, Blustein's like a novel.