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A wide-reaching exploration of how technological advancements influence and shape productivity and economic growth.

Current technological developments in several industries, such as the rise of artificial intelligence and innovations associated with the green energy transition, are likely to have significant and wide-ranging effects. This volume explores the implications of rapid changes in advanced technology and considers how to conceptualize and model these advances and improve measures of productivity and economic growth. The study of these issues is facilitated both by new methods for using and integrating disparate data sources and by the availability of new data sources. The chapters in this volume leverage these developments to offer fresh insights into long-standing issues in productivity analysis and technological change.

In the 1980s, troubled Americans saw interest rates in the United States climb to an alltime high, unemployment grow to over 10 percent, the federal deficit reach near monumental proportions, and the world economy as a whole fall stagnant.

Why did a once booming world economy give way to stagflation? Economist W. W. Rostow finds the roots of the problem in the phenomenon he terms the Barbaric Counter-Revolution—the effort to wring inflation out of the economic system by the rigorous application of a restricted rate of increase in the money supply. This policy was launched by the Carter administration in October 1979, reinforced by President Reagan in mid 1980, and abandoned in August 1982. In the end, it provided the United States with no mechanism for rapid recovery that did not bring with it a return to high interest rates, resumed inflation, and, soon, another recession.

In what he terms a Civilized Synthesis, Rostow sets forth a series of new policies that would permit rapid, sustained growth with inflation under control. He argues that fiscal and monetary policy must be joined by an incomes policy that would gear the rate of increase of wages and salaries to the average rate of increase in productivity. He explores how this could be accomplished within the context of American politics and existing institutions. Finally, Rostow identifies four directions for investment that, together, would yield economic and social benefits.

In this expert insider’s account of the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, William Black lays bare the strategies that corrupt CEOs and CFOs—in collusion with those who have regulatory oversight of their industries—use to defraud companies for their personal gain. Recounting the investigations he conducted as Director of Litigation for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Black fully reveals how Charles Keating and hundreds of other S&L owners took advantage of a weak regulatory environment to perpetrate accounting fraud on a massive scale. In the new afterword, he also authoritatively links the S&L crash to the business failures of 2008 and beyond, showing how CEOs then and now are using the same tactics to defeat regulatory restraints and commit the same types of destructive fraud.

Black uses the latest advances in criminology and economics to develop a theory of why “control fraud”—looting a company for personal profit—tends to occur in waves that make financial markets deeply inefficient. He also explains how to prevent such waves. Throughout the book, Black drives home the larger point that control fraud is a major, ongoing threat in business that requires active, independent regulators to contain it. His book is a wake-up call for everyone who believes that market forces alone will keep companies and their owners honest.

Throughout the fourteenth century AD/eighth century H, waves of plague swept out of Central Asia and decimated populations from China to Iceland. So devastating was the Black Death across the Old World that some historians have compared its effects to those of a nuclear holocaust. As countries began to recover from the plague during the following century, sharp contrasts arose between the East, where societies slumped into long-term economic and social decline, and the West, where technological and social innovation set the stage for Europe's dominance into the twentieth century. Why were there such opposite outcomes from the same catastrophic event?

In contrast to previous studies that have looked to differences between Islam and Christianity for the solution to the puzzle, this pioneering work proposes that a country's system of landholding primarily determined how successfully it recovered from the calamity of the Black Death. Stuart Borsch compares the specific cases of Egypt and England, countries whose economies were based in agriculture and whose pre-plague levels of total and agrarian gross domestic product were roughly equivalent. Undertaking a thorough analysis of medieval economic data, he cogently explains why Egypt's centralized and urban landholding system was unable to adapt to massive depopulation, while England's localized and rural landholding system had fully recovered by the year 1500.

Narrates how big business guided policy and expanded the state in early twentieth-century Britain.

During World War I, British businessmen streamed into government service. When Britain faced unprecedented economic challenges after the war’s end, civil servants turned to the same businessmen with whom they had worked. The result was a durable public-private network of both bureaucrats and executives: the business state.

In this book, Ian Kumekawa throws light on the previously obscured and hidden world of the business state and the economic thinking of its administrators. He breaks new methodological ground by treating the state and business together as a single entity. Twentieth-century states, he argues, were porous networks in which lines between business and governance were not clearly defined. In liberal democracies, the term “business-friendly” has long been understood as synonymous with laissez-faire. The Business State explores the historical limits of that assumption by focusing on Britain, the self-identified small, liberal state par excellence. In doing so, the book shows how a liberal democracy was effectively co-opted by private interests and explores how actively assisting big business became not just acceptable—but a political necessity.

The Cancer Stage of Capitalism is a modern classic of critical philosophy and political economy, renowned for its depth and comprehensive research. It provides a step by step diagnosis of the continuing economic collapse in the US and Europe and has had an enormous influence on new visions of economic alternatives.

John McMurtry argues that our world disorder of unending crises is the predictable result of a cancerous economic system multiplying out of all control and destroying ecological, social and organic life - a process he describes as 'global ecogenocide'. In this updated edition he explains the ‘social immune response’ required to fight the ‘macro cancer’, something which has already been shown in developments such as the Occupy movement and the democratic social transformation of Latin America.

In an official global culture increasingly destructive of life, this book shows the necessity and possibility of building a sustainable society based on a universal commitment to life and nature.

From the $700 billion bailout of the banking industry to president Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package to the highly controversial passage of federal health-care reform, conservatives and concerned citizens alike have grown increasingly fearful of big government. Enter Nobel Prize–winning economist and political theorist F. A. Hayek, whose passionate warning against empowering states with greater economic control, The Road to Serfdom, became an overnight sensation last summer when it was endorsed by Glenn Beck. The book has since sold over 150,000 copies.

The latest entry in the University of Chicago Press’s series of newly edited editions of Hayek’s works, The Constitution of Liberty is, like Serfdom, just as relevant to our present moment. The book is considered Hayek’s classic statement on the ideals of freedom and liberty, ideals that he believes have guided—and must continue to guide—the growth of Western civilization. Here Hayek defends the principles of a free society, casting a skeptical eye on the growth of the welfare state and examining the challenges to freedom posed by an ever expanding government—as well as its corrosive effect on the creation, preservation, and utilization of knowledge. In opposition to those who call for the state to play a greater role in society, Hayek puts forward a nuanced argument for prudence. Guided by this quality, he elegantly demonstrates that a free market system in a democratic polity—under the rule of law and with strong constitutional protections of individual rights—represents the best chance for the continuing existence of liberty.

Striking a balance between skepticism and hope, Hayek’s profound insights are timelier and more welcome than ever before. This definitive edition of The Constitution of Liberty will give a new generation the opportunity to learn from his enduring wisdom.

This book argues that the current financial turmoil signals a crisis in globalisation that will directly challenge the free market economic model.

Graham Turner shows that the housing bubbles in the West were deliberately created to mask the damage inflicted by companies shifting production abroad in an attempt to boost profits. As these bubbles burst, economic growth in many developed countries will inevitably tumble. The Japanese crisis of the 1990s shows that banks and governments may struggle to contain the fallout. The problem has not been limited to the US, UK and Europe: housing bubbles have become endemic across wide swathes of emerging market economies. As the West slides, these countries will see an implosion of their credit bubbles too, shaking their faith in the free market.

Turner is an experienced and successful economic forecaster, whose opinions are sought by large international banks and top financial journalists. Drawing from his first hand experience of the Japanese property crash of the 1990s, he presents his analysis in a clear and persuasive style, showing that the end of housing market growth spells disaster for neoliberal globalisation.

A meticulous examination of the history and roots of economic inequality within the United States.

This volume refines and extends the economic history literature on economic inequality in the United States. Economic inequality manifests itself on various dimensions, including access to resources and economic security, as well as access to education and opportunities for migration, marriage, and other important life decisions. Measuring inequality and studying its variation over time and in response to economic shocks such as recessions and wars deepen our understanding of how the economy operates and can inform the design of public policies. The studies in this compendium present comprehensive evidence on income distribution during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on new data on wages and prices. They also consider disparities in economic well-being that are reflected in outcomes other than wage and salary income, such as homeownership and marriage. The volume also presents new evidence on the effects of income inequality on social outcomes. It concludes with an intellectual history of “human capital,” a core concept in the economic analysis of the underpinnings of labor market inequality.

The untold economic story of Britain’s Gulf Coast frontier.

This is the first book-length investigation of the economy of British West Florida and the extent to which it was economically viable given that it had been an economic failure for Spain. In it, author Robin Fabel explores both the territory's economy and history but also analyzes previously neglected but key aspects of British West Florida, including the maritime life of the province, the institution of slavery, and the potentially great immigration scheme sponsored by the Company of Military Adventures.

The British divided Florida into two colonies: East Florida and West Florida. West Florida comprised the area between the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, and Mississippi rivers, and from the Gulf of Mexico north to thirty-two degrees twenty-eight minutes north latitude, roughly the latitude of modern-day Jackson, MS and Montgomery, AL. In the geographic center of the colony were Mobile, Alabama and Pensacola, Floriday. British West Florida included parts of the states of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi and existed from 1763 until 1783 at the end of the American Revolutionary War. 

Fabel contrasts the founding of Georgia, where slaves were initially excluded, with West Florida, where the slave trade became important economically. The British believed that only enslaved Blacks could labor successfully in the hot climate. Fabel gives an account of how owners employed enslaved people, how rare it was for slaves to be emancipated, and the passage of slave laws for West Florida. Fabel also explores British West Florida’s trade with Native Americans and the Caribbean islands, as well as the colony's relationships with neighboring Spanish and French communities.

Fabel's work offers an engaging and accessible account of the history of an expansive region of colonial North America during a fluid period of colonial history before American independence.

 

A revelatory history of how the Federal Reserve finances American power.

Central banks, we are told, are economic superpowers that must remain independent of modern democratic governments. The US Federal Reserve’s presumed insulation from politics affords it autonomy and credibility to control inflation and promote economic stability—or so the story goes.

In The Fiscal Fed, Will Bateman offers a deeply sourced, empirical history that shows the Fed’s primary function is actually, and has always been, fiscal—sustaining the market for Treasury borrowing that makes up the difference between federal spending and federal revenue. Bateman combs Fed meeting transcripts, staff notes, financial accounts, and legal documents to trace loans and public-debt purchases since the central bank’s founding. The result is a milestone work that reveals how, for most of the Fed’s history, its transactions were aimed at government financing—either by providing cheap credit to close budget gaps or by manipulating yields on government debt. The Fed’s support for government finance is a feature, not a bug, of American economic institutions.

A revelatory economic history of America's Gilded Age—and how it wasn't just the Robber Barons who benefited.

The Gilded Age, spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was when Americans got rich. Or, rather, some Americans got rich. Because as much as the era is synonymous with staggering economic growth, it also doubles as America’s cautionary tale for the perils of leaving rich people and institutions unregulated. It was the time of extractive industrialists, worker exploitation, stifled economic mobility, and racial exclusion—lessons that the United States learned the hard way.

Vincent Geloso contests this traditional narrative by revisiting the math in this new empirical account of the Gilded Age. The Great Enrichment is an economic history of America’s rise to affluence, a period that doubled as a remarkable rise of the country’s economic floor. The conventional contrast of Robber Barons against huddled masses is, in Geloso’s analysis, unsubstantiated by economic data. The Gilded Age was the first egalitarian enrichment that humanity witnessed—a time when both rich and poor benefited in ways that were seismic, albeit unequal. Yet the net result was a great leap forward, not the lamentable birth of modern inequality.

Geloso marshals an expanded set of economic measures to account for factors not typically included in the Gilded Age economic story. The Great Enrichment sets a new standard for empirical history in one of America’s most consequential—and perhaps misunderstood—periods.

What lies at the center of the Mexican colonial experience? Should Mexican colonial society be construed as a theoretical monolith, capitalist from its inception, or was it essentially feudal, as traditional historiography viewed it? In this pathfinding study, Enrique Semo offers a fresh vision: that the conflicting social formations of capitalism, feudalism, and tributary despotism provided the basic dynamic of Mexico's social and economic development.

Responding to questions raised by contemporary Mexican society, Semo sees the origin of both backwardness and development not in climate, race, or a heterogeneous set of unrelated traits, but rather in the historical interaction of each social formation. In his analysis, Mexico's history is conceived as a succession of socioeconomic formations, each growing within the "womb" of its predecessor. Semo sees the task of economic history to analyze each of these formations and to construct models that will help us understand the laws of its evolution. His premise is that economic history contributes to our understanding of the present not by formulating universal laws, but by studying the laws of development and progression of concrete economic systems.

The History of Capitalism in Mexico opens with the Conquest and concludes with the onset of the profound socioeconomic transformation of the last fifty years of the colony, a period clearly representing the precapitalist phase of Mexican development. In the course of his discussion, Semo addresses the role of dependency—an important theoretical innovation—and introduces the concept of tributary despotism, relating it to the problems of Indian society and economy. He also provides a novel examination of the changing role of the church throughout Mexican colonial history. The result is a comprehensive picture, which offers a provocative alternative to the increasingly detailed and monographic approach that currently dominates the writing of history.

Originally published as Historia del capitalismo en México in 1973, this classic work is now available for the first time in English. It will be of interest to specialists in Mexican colonial history, as well as to general readers.

São Paulo is one of the few places in the underdeveloped world where an advanced industrial system has grown out of a tropical raw-material-exporting economy. By 1960 there were 830,000 industrial workers in the state, producing $3.3 billion worth of goods. It had become Latin America’s largest industrial center.

This is a study of the early years of manufacturing in São Paulo: how it was influenced by the growth and decline of the coffee trade; where it found its markets, its credit, and its labor force; and how it confronted the competition of imports. The principal focus, however, is on the manufacturers themselves, whose perceptions of their opportunities determined how industrialization was brought about. Warren Dean discusses their social origins, their connections with other sectors of the elite, their attitudes toward workers and consumers, and their view of the potentialities of economic development. He analyzes the political activities of the manufacturers, to discover both how they promoted their interests and how they confronted the larger challenge of social and political transformation.

Paradoxically, the industrialization of São Paulo is not a “success story” of private entrepreneurship. Until after World War II manufacturing grew quite slowly, and its hallmarks were always low productivity, technical backwardness, and consumer hostility. More than half of the state’s present large-scale factory production and nearly all of its heavy industry was built by foreign capital or state enterprise, not by privately owned firms. Dean shows that this outcome is partly a consequence of the historical experience of domestic manufacture.

Throughout the book the author points out the “peculiar articulations” of the industrial system of São Paulo—the significant social and political interests that determined what kinds of development were possible. The result is an exposition of an unusual case study in twentieth-century economic development.