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374 books match the query 'Economic History' and 7 start with n

cover of National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State

National Duties

Custom Houses and the Making of the American State

Gautham Rao

University of Chicago Press, 2016

A historical account of the relationship between the federal government and merchant capital in the formative years of the American Republic.

In the wake of the American Revolution, if you had asked a citizen whether his fledgling state would survive more than two centuries, the answer would have been far from confident. The problem, as is so often the case, was money. Left millions of dollars of debt by the war, the nascent federal government created a system of taxes on imported goods and installed custom houses at the nation’s ports, which were charged with collecting these fees. Gradually, the houses amassed enough revenue from import merchants to stabilize the new government. But, as the fragile United States was dependent on this same revenue, the merchants at the same time gained outsized influence over the daily affairs of customs houses. As the United States tried to police this commerce in the early nineteenth century, the merchants’ stranglehold on custom house governance proved to be formidable.

In National Duties, Gautham Rao makes the case that the origins of the federal government and the modern American state lie in these conflicts at government custom houses between the American Revolution and the presidency of Andrew Jackson. He argues that the contours of the government emerged from the push-and-pull between these groups, with commercial interests gradually losing power to the administrative state, which only continued to grow and lives on today.
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cover of National Saving and Economic Performance

National Saving and Economic Performance

Edited by B. Douglas Bernheim and John B. Shoven

University of Chicago Press, 1991

The past decade has witnessed a decline in saving throughout the developed world—the United States has the dubious distinction of leading the way. The consequences can be serious. For individuals, their own economic security and that of their families is jeopardized. For society, inadequate rates of saving have been blamed for a variety of ills—decreasing the competitive abilities of American industry, slowing capital accumulation, increasing our trade deficit, and forcing the sale of capital stock to foreign investors at bargain prices. Restoring acceptable rates of saving in the United States poses a major challenge to those who formulate national economic policy, especially since economists and policymakers alike still understand little about what motivates people to save.

In National Saving and Economic Performance, edited by B. Douglas Bernheim and John B. Shoven, that task is addressed by offering the results of new research, with recommendations for policies aimed to improve saving. Leading experts in diverse fields of economics debate the need for more accurate measurement of official saving data; examine how corporate decisions to retain or distribute earnings affect household-level consumption and saving; and investigate the effects of taxation on saving behavior, correlations between national saving and international investment over time, and the influence of economic growth on saving.

Presenting the most comprehensive and up-to-date research on saving, this volume will benefit both academic and government economists.
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cover of Native Pathways: American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century

Native Pathways

American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century

Brian Hosmer

University Press of Colorado, 2004

How has American Indians' participation in the broader market - as managers of casinos, negotiators of oil leases, or commercial fishermen - challenged the U.S. paradigm of economic development? Have American Indians paid a cultural price for the chance at a paycheck? How have gender and race shaped their experiences in the marketplace? Contributors to Native Pathways ponder these and other questions, highlighting how indigenous peoples have simultaneously adopted capitalist strategies and altered them to suit their own distinct cultural beliefs and practices. Including contributions from historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, Native Pathways offers fresh viewpoints on economic change and cultural identity in twentieth-century Native American communities. Foreword by Donald L. Fixico.
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cover of Nevada's Great Recession: Looking Back, Moving Forward

Nevada's Great Recession

Looking Back, Moving Forward

Elliott Parker

University of Nevada Press, 2017

Of all economic recessions experienced by the United States in the postwar period, the Great Recession that began in 2008 was the deepest, longest, and most destructive. Nevada was among the hardest hit states, its people reeling from the aftereffects, and the state government also experiencing a severe fiscal crisis. University of Nevada economics professor Elliott Parker and then-State Treasurer Kate Marshall make sense of what went wrong and why, with the hope the state will learn lessons to prevent past mistakes from being made again.
 
This is a different kind of economics book. Parker uses his expertise from doing research on the East Asian fiscal crisis to give profound insights into what happened and how to avoid future catastrophes. Marshall personalizes it by providing vignettes of what it was actually like to be in the trenches and fighting the inevitable political battles that came up, and counteracting some of the falsehoods that certain politicians were spreading about the recession.
 
Parker and Marshall’s book should be required reading for not only every single elected official in Nevada, but for any private citizen who cares about the public good.
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cover of New Economics and Its History, Volume 29

New Economics and Its History, Volume 29

John B. Davis, ed.

Duke University Press, 0

The history of economic thought has traditionally focused on the work of individuals no longer living. Recently, however, historians have begun to use their tools of analysis on the work of contemporary economists. New Economics and Its Writing compiles evidence of this shift, with thirteen essays by scholars interested in catalyzing conversation between contemporary economists and historians of economics.
This new focus requires new methods of analysis—historiographic strategies involving far greater archival resources, for instance, and often nontraditional resources, such as electronic records. Essays collected here address these changes and examine how this new emphasis on the work of living economists can and will entail interaction between the producer of theory and the historian, complicating the latter’s role. Chapters discuss topics such as the emergence of subdisciplines in economics, social-contextual perspectives on the writing of economics, the dynamics of idea development, and the recent incursion of noneconomic thinking—such as engineering methods and mathematical models—into economics.
New Economics and Its Writing shows that attention to recent, ongoing economics from historians of economics has the potential to revitalize and transform the history of economics as an area of investigation.

This volume is the 1997 Annual Supplement to the journal History of Political Economy. All 1997 subscribers will receive a copy of this book as part of their annual subscription.

Contributors. Timothy L. Alborn, Marcel Boumans, Joshua Cohen, John B. Davis, Ross B. Emmett, Paul Harrison, Daniel M. Hausman, Mary L. Hirschfeld, S. Todd Lowry, Steven G. Medema, Philip Mirowski, Philippe Mongin, S. Abu Turab Rizvi, Esther-Mirjam Sent


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cover of New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain

New World Gold

Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain

Elvira Vilches

University of Chicago Press, 2010

The discovery of the New World was initially a cause for celebration. But the vast amounts of gold that Columbus and other explorers claimed from these lands altered Spanish society. The influx of such wealth contributed to the expansion of the Spanish empire, but also it raised doubts and insecurities about the meaning and function of money, the ideals of court and civility, and the structure of commerce and credit. New World Gold shows that, far from being a stabilizing force, the flow of gold from the Americas created anxieties among Spaniards and shaped a host of distinct behaviors, cultural practices, and intellectual pursuits on both sides of the Atlantic.

Elvira Vilches examines economic treatises, stories of travel and conquest, moralist writings, fiction, poetry, and drama to reveal that New World gold ultimately became a problematic source of power that destabilized Spain’s sense of trust, truth, and worth. These cultural anxieties, she argues, rendered the discovery of gold paradoxically disastrous for Spanish society. Combining economic thought, social history, and literary theory in trans-Atlantic contexts, New World Gold unveils the dark side of Spain’s Golden Age.

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cover of No Way to Run an Economy: Why the System Failed and How to Put It Right

No Way to Run an Economy

Why the System Failed and How to Put It Right

Graham Turner

Pluto Press, 2009

In The Credit Crunch, Graham Turner predicted that banks would be nationalised and interest rates would be reduced too slowly to halt the crisis. His predictions were correct. His new book, No Way to Run an Economy, is the essential guide to the turbulent times ahead.

Turner recommended radical measures, such as quantitative easing, in early 2008 but argues that action has been taken too late and been too timid to make a real difference. He dissects the policy mistakes of the last 12 months including Obama's doomed market-led response to the crisis and the obsession of central banks with the red herring of inflation.

There is no doubt the economy is still in serious trouble, but Turner shows that learning from the mistakes made so far can prevent a situation worse than that of the 1930s crisis.

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