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.

Adding to the growing list of retrospective studies of shopping and consumption is this engaged survey of the impact of American retail trade on community culture and social interaction. Although the author (a city planner in Washington, DC) is broadly within the tradition of Jane Jacobs and other critics of the commercialization of urban space, hers is a contemporary, well-informed, and nuanced judgment of the impact of malls, remote retail, big box stores, and other expressions of contemporary shopping. Even though this book may not meet the expectations of the professional historian, it does attempts to put very present-minded concerns about the social impact of contemporary retailing trends into a historical context.

The author, a retired UCLA economist, has written a number of highly specialized transportation studies. In his Lake Michigan Passenger Steamers much as in his Great Lakes Car Ferries and American Narrow Gauge Railroads, George W. Hinton acknowledges that “the principle purpose is to provide antiquarian scholarship” (p. xi). Here we learn about the wooden and steel, sailing and steam ships that operated on Lake Michigan from the early nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century. Although some attention is devoted to the interlake trade, the passenger lines that draw most of the author's attention are those that served Lake Michigan points exclusively.

Alex Field is an eminent economic historian who has made important contributions to the field. In this book he shows the ambition and the erudition to venture into a wider area, and criticize the entire practice of economics and the social sciences in our time. The paradox he raises in this book has been widely discussed in recent years. It is that the standard model of economics starts off with the assumption that the individual is rational and utility maximizing, and thus will behave in certain predictable ways, among them that they will play “defect” in strategic games that have the nature of one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma. Yet in the real world people are nicer and less selfish than the grim neoclassical model predicts. Altruism—acting against one's direct interest—is an important part of economic behavior. The interesting phenomenon, says Field, is not only that we drop anonymously gold coins in a Salvation Army box or serve without pay on boring university committees. The important things are acts of omission: members of human society do not normally commit acts of aggression and treason even when we have a chance to do so and they are demonstrably to our advantage.

The title of this book attests to the fact that the author “communed” with Max Weber's famous thesis whilst doing her own research. She is absolutely at one with Weber—and Keynes!—in insisting that there is a spirit of capitalism, an irrationality underlying rational calculation whereby one continues to work even when one's needs have been met. Spirit of this sort is held to be a cultural idiosyncracy rather than an a universal norm. However, this spirit has nothing to do with religion, not least for the central reason given by Tawney—namely that Protestant reformers sought to control the economy quite as much as did their predecessors. The author offers us a bold and sustained alternative view: economic growth resulted from one thing and one thing only—the presence of nationalism.

In this imaginative and readable book, Andrew Godley argues that culture matters in economics, and that some cultural traits encourage entrepreneurship, and therefore material prosperity, more than others. More specifically, he joins debates among British historians over the causes for Britain's relative economic decline around the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that British culture was in fact anti-entrepreneurial and concludes that this was likely to have had a negative impact on the country's economic fortunes. This is, therefore, really a book about Britain and its economic culture. Though it certainly has interesting insights into Jewish history as well; the author uses the Jews primarily as a “control group” in his historical “experiment.”

This conference volume brings together a collection of papers dealing with the monetary arrangements of "peripheral" countries in the later part of the nineteenth century, with occasional excursions in the interwar years. It comprises an introduction (written by the two editors plus Agustin Llona Rodriguez) and six chapters. These chapters cover respectively the experience of six Latin countries: three are European and three are Latin American. The three European experiences are dealt with by Giuseppe Tattara (Italy), Jaime Reis (Portugal), and Pablo Martin Acena (Spain). The chapters dealing with Latin American countries are written by Winston Fritsch and Gustavo H. B. Franco (Brazil), Agustin Llona Rodriguez (Chile), and Jose Antonio Ocampo (Colombia).

The author of this ambitious volume tackles the question: why is the United States rich and Brazil poor? Given the importance of the question and the promising comparative approach, readers of this JOURNAL will be tempted to look into John DeWitt's book. Unfortunately, they are likely to be disappointed. The author claims that internal and external factors combined to generate growth in the United States and to breed underdevelopment in Brazil. The external factors hinge on the purported unfairness of the international system. Brazil, according to DeWitt, was “a weak state that could be treated like a palooka and pummeled with impunity” (p. 113). The internal factors of growth or backwardness adduced in the book are based on a series of case studies of regions or industries, such as coastal towns or whaling, along with generalizations about plantation economics. Although there are many useful insights sprinkled throughout the book, the methodology and bibliography are confused and outdated: there are no time series or statistical tests employed in the text; quantitative data are few and almost entirely descriptive; and no mention is made of recent publications emphasizing institutions and factor endowments as sources of economic divergence between the United States and Latin America. In particular, it is troubling that no mention is made in the text or bibliography to Stephen Haber's edited volume, How Latin America Fell Behind (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1997). This omission prevents DeWitt from addressing the standard text in the literature and severely detracts from the volume's credibility.

This short book has a novel thesis, which is that the degree of factor mobility at the national level influenced the politics of foreign-trade policies. When factor mobility was high, tariff legislation was class legislation. When mobility was low, tariffs were decided by interest-group competition. Michael Hiscox brings data on mobility to bear on the history of foreign trade policies of the six countries—the United States, Britain, France, Sweden, Canada, and Australia—over the last one or two hundred years or so, devoting a chapter to each. He then tests his ideas quantitatively on U.S. congressional voting between 1924 and 1994, finding that, when the indicators of factor mobility were low, an “interest group theory” better explains U.S. tariff politics than does a “class legislation theory” (and the reverse when mobility was high).

For those taken in by the title of this book (as I was, in agreeing to review it) this volume will be a disappointment. It turns out to be a collection of lectures which, as the author tells us, “reflects the development of my interests in recent years, involving themes such as the rise of East Asia, Protectionism, and cultural, institutional, and structural changes [mldr ] all informed by my original professional perspective as an economic historian” (p. xvi).

In this engaging book, David Galenson formulates a complex question about modern art that he tries to answer with statistics, analysis, and exposition, enlivened with a rich sprinkling of well-chosen quotes. Posing an initial question “At what stage of their lives have modern painters normally done their best work?,” he finds that this age varies widely from artist to artist. This leads to the central problem: “is it by chance that some have made their greatest contributions early in their careers, and others late in theirs, or is there some general explanation that accounts for the variation?” (p. 4).

This volume explores phenomena frequently noted (yet seldom analyzed) in the scholarly literature: the profound similarities in the industrialization processes and the contemporary political economies of Germany and Japan. These parallels—not just in the early stages of industrialization, but through the experiences of depression and war, and on to the rise of postwar “miracle” economies in both nations—are often casually ascribed to the late-developer effect, to the strategic imitation of German economic institutions in Japan, or to cultural factors, from lingering “feudal remnants” to enduring “traditional” social structures. Tagging the economic regimes which had evolved in Germany and Japan by the 1970s “nonliberal” capitalist systems, the essays in this collection seek to investigate systematically “the many similarities between the two capitalisms, the no less intriguing differences between them, and the differences between the two and Anglo-American ‘standard capitalism’” (p. xiii). More specifically, this volume examines “the origins of some of the social institutions that have constrained the spread of free markets within the capitalist economies of Germany and Japan while providing them with alternate mechanisms of economic governance” (p. 5). Throughout, the contributors argue for a more subtle, historically grounded, and systematic understanding of the distinctive practices and institutions of the German and Japanese “nationally embedded capitalisms.”

The central theme of this book is the interplay of women's employment and the macro-economy in postwar Germany and Japan. David Kucera introduces the distinction between two possible types of flexibility in the labor market. The first occurs in the absence of interference with the market mechanism from laws or institutions. This flexibility may reduce unemployment and increase the response time to shocks, at the cost of low wages and insufficient training. In the second type of flexibility, a buffer group provides this flexibility, while core workers are protected from the vagaries of the market and receive training and high wages. Kucera argues that by using women as a buffer group to protect men, Japan is able at a macro-level to reap the benefits of both the “low-road” and “high-road” approaches. Bolstering this argument, and showing that Germany pursues instead the simpler “high-road” strategy, is the most important aim of the book.

In the 1970s the United States had far higher wages than the rest of the developed world; 1979–1981 median weakly earnings of men in full-time employment were $609 in 1998 prices, compared to an average of $419 across six other developed countries. However, the United States also had a higher unemployment rate; in 1973 it was 4.8 percent compared to an average of 2.1 percent in 11 other countries. Fast forward two decades. Median real wages in the United States, although still higher than in the other countries, had fallen 5.5 percent whereas in the other countries they had increased an average of 22.6 percent. However, whereas the unemployment rate in the United States fell slightly over the period, it skyrocketed in most of the other countries, averaging 8.2 percent in the European Union in 1999. By the late 1990s the United States also differed from the rest of the developed world in a number of other labor-market outcomes. The U.S. had: a lower average duration of unemployment and less prevalent long-term unemployment, higher labor-force participation rates among both men and women, longer average hours of work over the course of the year, and greater earnings inequality.