PREFACE

I dedicate this book to Moses Abramovitz. Moe was chair of the economics department at Stanford when I was hired in 1974, just out of graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, and I worked with him closely as associate editor of the Journal of Economic Literature between 1981 and 1987. In the first part of my academic career I did not entirely grasp the significance of his groundbreaking work. I was exploring other topics, and only in the 1980s and 1990s, as I developed greater interest in macroeconomic issues, did his research come into clearer focus for me. I made the first formal presentation of the material in on the last day of November 2000 at a seminar at Stanford. I remember it distinctly because I was bleary-eyed, having spent most of the previous night helping to upload my sons college application to the University of Californias servers.

Moe had been sick and could not attend the seminar. He died the following day. I have always felt conflicted about this juxtaposition of events. Although we had had some preliminary discussions, I wish I could have engaged him more about this developing work. On the other hand, though there is some revisionism here with respect to the sources of growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I feel that in a way I contribute to his legacy by extending a style of research he pioneered. Moe was always a warm and gracious presence in the Stanford department, and I continue to run across his handwritten comments on various drafts of earlier work in my files. I miss him.

Many colleagues have given me valuable feedback as this research progressed. A special thanks to faculty at Santa Clara, in particular Kris Mitchener and Bill Sundstrom. It is not a stretch to say that Santa Clara has one of the finest economic history groups in the country. Most of the economics faculty is indeed research active, and the quality and impact of work it has produced rival that of many larger groups, including some with doctoral programs.

My friends at Stanford, including Ran Abramitzky, Paul David, Avner Greif, Petra Moser, Nate Rosenberg, and Gavin Wright, continue to provide a welcome sounding board for many of these ideas and are part of what makes the Bay Area and California such a great place to do economic history.

Thanks also to colleagues at other universities who have been especially helpful over the years. These include Greg Clark, Stan Engerman, Naomi Lamoreaux, Deirdre McCloskey, Tim Leunig, Peter Lindert, Joel Mokyr, Leandro Prados, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Joachim Voth. Apologies to many others not explicitly mentioned.

Thanks to Michael OMalley, who, by making me an offer I couldnt refuse, persuaded me to write this book and publish it with Yale.

And thanks to Ben Bernanke, who, as editor of the American Economic Review, had the good taste to accept my 2003 paper on the Depression.

Finally, thanks to my wife Valerie and our children, James and Emily, for tolerating the work habits of an academic and helping me make the work more accessible to a broader audience.

Early versions of material in this book benefited from presentations at numerous universities and conferences

These included seminars in the United States at Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Indiana, Michigan, the New School, Ohio State, Rutgers, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UC Riverside, Virginia, and Yale; in Canada at McGill, Queens, and Toronto; in Great Britain and Europe at the London School of Economics, All Souls College Oxford, Humboldt (Berlin), Sciences PO (Paris), Pompeu Fabreu/CREI (Barcelona), and Carlos III (Madrid); and in Australia/New Zealand at Adelaide, Melbourne, and Canterbury.