Although in the last two decades there have been literally hundreds of studies of postwar minimum wage legislation, there have been but a handful of studies of the first federal minimum wage, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), and no studies of the state laws that preceded it.1 My dissertation attempts to bridge this gap by examining the political economy and effects of early American minimum wage legislation.

Historians and economists have long been in need of index numbers to measure both the volume (real value) of activity that is undertaken to produce process or product innovations over time, and also a counterpart index that might capture the outcome of that activity (the volume of inventions) that come on stream year after year. For purposes of measurement the first index can in principle be equated (within tolerable limits of accuracy) with the real annual expenditures on research and development as recorded (at least for recent times) in governmental, corporate, company, and other accounts. Alas, for years before 1914 national or even industry-wide research and development expenditures are very rarely recorded in a form that might allow for the construction of an index number.

The dissertation argues for a distinction between two varieties of price deflation, one offset by declining costs, the other induced by declining profits. Where the second type of deflation occurs, the usual result is contraction of output, income, and employment. We can roughly measure the relative amounts of cost and profit deflation underway in different situations. Price declines usually aggravate profit downturns, and in some cases directly cause them. An international profit deflation that (except for its milder consequences) anticipated that of 1929 to 1932 occurred during 1891 to 1896.

The past 20 years have witnessed a thorough reassessment of the basic features of nineteenth-century Ireland’s economic experience. Much of this reassessment was focused on the Great Famine of the 1840s, but the post-Famine period (which means, for the purposes of this essay, from the Great Famine to the Great War) has undergone its own quieter but no less complete reassessment. The two books under review here convey the flavor of this new research.

Every so often a maverick knight sets off into the dark forest looking for the Holy Grail of “why isn’t the whole world developed?” In this book, which has the heavy bibliographical armor of the genre and 40 pages of appendices too, John Powelson reports on his quest. He claims to have found in a concept called “power diffusion” a significant part of the answer to two related questions: why did the modem economy first appear in northwestern Europe and Japan, and what characteristics of those regions account for their ability to sustain economic growth? Growth is to him the serendipitous outcome of seemingly unconnected events, and he defines sustained growth as that which lasts a century or more.

Problems of poverty are exacerbated by uncertainty.1 This uncertainty means that one role of an income-assistance system is insurance, which in the modern world has often taken the form of government welfare or unemployment insurance. However, various private methods have also been important. The episode known as the Lancashire cotton famine reveals this institutional diversity in a region with a dominant geographically concentrated industry. A cyclical downturn in the cotton textile industry coincided with the Union blockade of Southern ports during the American Civil War, bringing four years of distress to the towns in the cotton manufacturing district concentrated in Lancashire. The unanticipated and unprecedented depth and duration of this shock unveiled both the responses of preexisting income assistance institutions and the institutional change that occurred to spread income losses after the cotton famine struck.

Rarely are judgements of entrepreneurial failure and technological backwardness rendered as harshly as when they are rendered upon Britain in the early 1900s.1 The use of old technologies in manufacturing and transportation are claimed to have locked Britain onto a lower growth path than would have followed if new technologies had been used instead. Technological backwardness, it has been said, was a shackle and Britain lagged behind because of it.2Thorstein Veblen made this argument and marshalled a specific example: “silly little bobtailed carriages [railway wagons].”3In my dissertation I argue that the small coal wagons were not technologically backward, as Veblen and others since have claimed.

Is it worthwhile to read biographies of economists? Does the person’s life affect the formulation of his or her theory? How much influence can a person have on the sweep of history? These, of course, are some of the oldest questions scholars grapple with, whether in the guise of the New Criticism in literature, the role of individual contributions to the progress of science, or the balance between volition and determinism in history itself.

Given the topics addressed by the three North American dissertations–old-age and disability pensions by Dora Costa, minimum wages by Andrew Seltzer, and hookworm disease by Garland Brinkley–I have subtitled my comments: “The Old, the Poor, and the Sick in American Economic History.” We observe that these dissertations address the effects of policies aimed at such seemingly inescapable human afflictions as aging, disability, poverty, and disease. Despite this observation, these are not tales of gloom. After all, as the authors themselves inform us, the old and disabled get pensions, the poor get minimum wages, and the sick get healed. So, each dissertation contains something to reassure the Dr. Pangloss–or the Dr. Stigler–in all of us. Here, however, the similarities between them end, with one notable exception–and that is the uniformly high quality of the scholarship they display.