I subject some aspects of Roosevelt's "New Deal" to critical analysis, with particular attention to what is termed "liberal democracy". This analysis demonstrates the limits to reform, given the power of "vested interests" as articulated by Thorstein Veblen. While progressive economists and...

An 1890s loan book of the Bank A. Levy permits a detailed examination of the lending operations of a private bank in California during the National Banking Era (1864-1914). This period has been intensively analyzed at the macroeconomic level, but there are few microeconomic studies of banks....

The United Kingdom employed the McKenna rule to conduct fiscal policy during World War I (WWI) and the interwar period. Named for Reginald McKenna, Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–16), the McKenna rule committed the United Kingdom to a path of debt retirement, which we show was...

This paper studies the impact of global factors on patterns of basic research across countries and time. We rely on the records of major scientific awards, and on data dealing with global economic and historical trends. Specifically, we investigate the degree to which scale or threshold effects...

During World War II Americans were asked to salvage a long list of materials for the war effort including paper, tin, iron and steel, rubber, and even silk stockings and cooking fat. Stories about the salvage drives have become a staple in both popular and scholarly histories of the home front,...

The great surge in munitions production in World War II, which reached its peak in 1943, was produced by a building boom launched in 1941 and 1942. Resources were drawn rapidly to war production centers by financial incentives and other personal and corporate motives such as patriotism. This...

According to the standard accounts of the mobilization of resources in the United States during WWII, things went badly in the beginning because the agencies in charge were given insufficient authority and were mismanaged. But then in 1943 the story continues, the War Production Board installed...

This paper examines the U.S. Economy in World War II. It argues that the mobilization must be viewed as a rapidly evolving historical process rather than, as is often the case, a single differentiated event. For example, the employment of unemployed resources, a factor often cited to explain the...

During World War II the United States rapidly transformed its economy to cope with a wide range of scarcities, such as shortfalls in the amounts of ocean shipping, aluminum, rubber, and other raw materials needed for the war effort. This paper explores the mobilization to see whether it provides...

Do strong states affect the culture and actions of their citizens in a persistent way? And if so, can the capacity to tax, by itself, drive this effect? I study how the historical capacity of a state to collect taxes affects the decision of citizens to evade the mandatory military draft. I look...