'Social savings' is a cliometric concept to measure the benefit to society of technological improvements. The terms are defined, and the relationship between social savings and consumer surplus, total factor productivity and growth accounting measures is discussed. We critically outline Fogel's...

Razzell argues that the quality of smallpox recording in the Marine Society data set is so poor that ‘the impact of smallpox on average height cannot be settled by analysis of the Marine Society data set’. We believe that this grossly overstates the problems of the records, and is based on a...

In February 2008, French President Nicholas Sarkozy created a committee with a somewhat ungainly name, 'The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress', headed by Joseph Stiglitz, and advised by Amartya Sen. The aim of the Commission was to 'identify the limits of...

Between them our critics span the entire range of this Journal’s readership. On the one hand Razzell accuses us of ‘the abandonment of traditional scholarly procedures’. He argues that our plight ‘will provide a salutary lesson for the new economic history. No amount of sophisticated...

Using a new source of evidence we explore the geographical mobility of mid-nineteenth century seamen. Among seamen born outside London, the tall, the literate and those who could remember the exact day, month and year when they were born - characteristics that we suggest mark them out as men...

This paper reassesses and extends Hawke’s passenger railway social savings for England and Wales. Better estimates of coach costs and evidence that third class passengers would otherwise have walked reduce Hawke’s social savings by two-thirds. We calculate railway speeds, and the amount and...

In an influential article Saxonhouse and Wright argued that the quality of local cotton was the single most important factor in explaining national preferences for ring or mule spinning. For Britain, they argue that mills using more flexible mule spindles could exploit arbitrage opportunities...

New data on individual worker’s outputs show that New England ring spinners exhibited substantial on the job learning c. 1905. Despite this, variable capital-labour ratios meant high labour turnover reduced aggregate labour productivity only fractionally. The combination of variable...

This paper re-examines theories previously advanced to explain Lancashire’s slow adoption of ring spinning. New cost estimates show that although additional transport costs and technical complementarities between certain types of machine reduced ring adoption rates, these supply side...

This is a revised version of a previous working paper, of the same name, which incorporates corrections to errors in our estimates of TFP growth. This paper examines major privately-owned British railway companies before World War I. Quantitative evidence is presented on return on capital...