Cotton holds much meaning for economic historians; it brings to mind the industrial revolutions of Europe and Japan, as well as the economic and social fabric of the American South both before and after the Civil War. Yet nothing so weighty as social transformation is entertained in this book; instead the authors chronicle the transformation of cotton from crop to “brand”—with its own logo—as cotton's share of the raw-fiber market recovered from a long decline. Timothy Curtis Jacobson and George David Smith's work is a study of how organizations moved the U.S. cotton industry from supply to demand management and coordinated the stages of production in a setting in which incentives did not favor vertical integration. That story in itself has interest as a case study in marketing and industrial organization. Its hero is “Cotton Incorporated,” formed in 1971 to promote marketing, support research and development, provide technical support for fiber users worldwide, and organize elements in a coherent fashion.

Political scientist Ruth O'Brien's Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace grapples with the difficult issue of American policy toward dis-abled workers. In doing so, O'Brien presents a detailed and complex history that covers the evolution of disability policy and law over the course of the twentieth century. Crippled Justice displays a sophisticated understanding of a variety of relevant disciplines: political science and public policy, the histories of the behavioral and medical sciences, and political history and law. O'Brien's central theme is the struggle to change the nation's disability policies. She ably documents the shift from a traditional view that saw the disabled as maladjusted individuals in need of rehabilitation to the contemporary notion, urged by disabled rights activists among others, that the disabled need no rehabilitation, but instead that society needs to adapt the workplace to their needs.

By the mid-1980s, the city of Detroit had become an icon in U.S. urban history. Many saw it as the most extreme example of what went wrong in Northern industrial cities in the late twentieth century. The sequence of events is well known: the rapid influx of African American migrants from the South, combative reaction from the white community, civil unrest culminating in the 1967 riot, white flight, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the development of a desperately poor, socially alienated, primarily black underclass. Other cities experienced similar events, but Detroit's descent was certainly among the most dramatic.

Little mentioned in the huge literature on rising wage inequality in the United States is the distinction between permanent and transitory differences across individuals. Transitory differences can perhaps be cushioned by borrowing and saving, but permanent differences cannot, so we should care whether the large increase in measured inequality represents transitory or permanent components. Unfortunately, permanent and transitory components of wages cannot be separated using the cross-sectional data employed by most researchers.

The 1990s, particularly the last half of the decade, presented a special challenge to the conventional wisdom. Few would have asserted that unemployment could be pushed much below (or possibly even to) 5.5 or 6.0 percent without an unacceptable acceleration in the rate of price inflation. This consensus came from the acceptance of the Phillips curve and the NAIRU (nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment), and so ingrained was this orthodoxy that most policymakers accepted it. Is the NAIRU dead?

The Russell Sage Foundation and the Century Foundation believed that the 1990s required a closer examination to see what we could learn from this seemingly unusual period. They asked Robert Solow and Alan Krueger to assemble the set of topics and authors that resulted in this volume. The book is divided into four parts.

Constantine J. Spiliotes makes a substantial new contribution to the literature on presidential decision making. Spiliotes seeks to bring together two largely separate literatures: presidential studies and rational choice theory. This is a formidable task: Economists and rational-choice political scientists typically view traditional presidential studies as excessively anecdotal for the purpose of establishing generally applicable theories, and presidential-studies scholars typically view rational-choice models as excessively abstract and parsimonious for the purpose of understanding the complexities of the presidency.

Who wrote Alfred Sloan's My Years with General Motors?

a. Alfred Sloan

b. John McDonald

c. Alfred Chandler

d. A group of more than 20 persons, known and unknown

Fans of the old Groucho Marx quiz show might be tempted to choose answer a. John McDonald, in his posthumous memoir being reviewed here, argues for b. But I am inclined to think the best answer is d.

This book, crammed with characteristically Baumolian insights, encompasses three main parts: one explaining how oligopolists' virtuous rent seeking has been the engine propelling long-term economic growth in free-market economies; one showing how the tools of microeconomics can be applied to analyze technological innovation; and one proposing a macroeconomic endogenous growth model with richer innovation-dependent features than those found in the models pioneered by Paul Romer (Journal of Political Economy, October 1990) and others.

It is impossible to summarize and critique this book adequately in a short review. Its author is a leading historian of economic thought, skilled in many disciplines, imaginative and penetrating in analysis, and possessed of knowledge, brilliance, and pixie-like cynicism. His More Heat than Light (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) traced the origins of twentieth-century economics to a mimicking of nineteenth-century physics and mathematics in order to achieve the status of “science.” This book traces the social construction of high theory in economics during World War II and the Cold War to the influence of John von Neumann's general theory of automata and the military funding of basic economic science. Like his earlier book, this is history of economics on a massively ambitious scale—a theory of the entire postwar period.

In the 1970s Robert Lucas's research revolutionized the study of business cycles, and in 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for this work. However, in 1985 he had already decided that, “I did not look forward to the prospect of spending the latter half of my career trying to hang on to what I had done in the first half” (p. 2). Thus, he embarked on a new task: understanding economic growth.

This book collects Lucas's writing (from 1985 to 1997) on economic growth. In his words, its “general theme … is the attempt to adapt modern growth theory, originally developed to describe the behavior of the industrialized economies, to obtain a unified understanding of rich and poor economies alike in a world of vast income and growth rate differences” (p. 1). This theme is carried through an introduction and five chapters, four of which have been published previously as journal articles.

Islands are natural laboratories for the study of biological phenomena in general, and diseases and epidemics in particular; their isolation makes them ideal places to study the biological and social processes that combine to cause disease patterns. Questions such as the minimum community size to permit continuous (endemic) transmission of a disease are ideally answered by isolated populations of varying sizes, and islands are an approximation to this. This is especially true historically, before fast ships and airplanes made islands less socially isolated. Island Epidemics is a tour d'horizon by three scientists whose prior work—much of it also as a trio—eminently qualifies them to survey this fascinating and important intersection of history, epidemiology, biology, geography, and the social sciences in general. The book is not only an assessment of the state-of-the-science of island epidemiology, but also an intellectual history of the subject, with accounts of how key breakthroughs were made, and by whom.

This book consists primarily of the proceedings of a conference held at Evora in Portugal in May 1996 to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Bank of Portugal. The conference comprised two parts, the first involving (central) bank archivists and the second monetary historians. This book covers only the contributions of the monetary historians, though there were a sizeable number of these: 11 papers treat the history of central banks in 17 countries—the United Kingdom; France, Spain; Germany, Japan; Sweden, Finland; Portugal; Italy; Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia; the United States, Canada; Argentina, Brazil and Mexico—plus the IMF and the BIS. In addition there is an introduction by two of the three editors, and a concluding comment by Barry Eichengreen, which latter reads more like an earlier introduction, since it refers both to a paper (by Marc Flandreau) presented at Evora but published elsewhere in the meantime, and to another paper (by Michael Collins), which clearly was totally rewritten (and with a new joint author) between the conference and publication; overall perhaps an indication of problems in the publication process?

In his acknowledgments Edgar Jones explains that this book started as a commission to the London School of Economics Business History Unit, and was later transferred to Glaxo as an in-house project. At all points Jones worked closely with Glaxo staff, an association that is reflected in his extensive use of company documents and interviews with past or present company personnel. Company support is also evident in the handsome production of the book, which includes many photos, some in color. This much said, and taking note of the celebratory tone suggested by the subtitle, this is a work of scholarship by a trained economic historian and should be welcomed as an important addition to the still-under-populated genre of company histories of the pharmaceutical industry. Jones's study reaches back to the nineteenth-century origins of the company in general merchandising, and forward to the merger with SmithKline Beecham in 2000 that resulted in one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Its chronological center lies in the half century 1935–1985, which witnessed the transformation of the company.

World income per capita has multiplied by 13-fold over the past millennium, even as population grew by a factor of 22. This is just one of the results emerging from Angus Maddison's most recent book. To readers familiar with his previous work, the new volume will appear as an impressive extension of his efforts to reconstruct long-run trends in the world economy. Together with an extension of his path-breaking work on capitalist development since 1820, Maddison assesses the evolution of the West and its connections with the world development since the year 1000. This global perspective and millennial reach are the book's major novelties.

This is an ambitious, stimulating, and well-written book. Haim Ofek is concerned with the origin of the human propensity “to truck, barter, and exchange,” as Adam Smith put it. The author notes that while many animals engage in forms of nepotistic exchange (behavior that can be accounted for by the Hamilton kin-selection mechanism), humans are the only species to engage systematically in exchange with nonkin conspecifics. Rather than viewing these behaviors as cultural artifacts reflective of generations of development after the onset of the Neolithic revolution, Ofek seeks to situate their origin much earlier, in the two-million-year Pleistocene era; indeed, he views exchange, in conjunction with climactic stabilization, as a sufficient condition for—the cause, rather than a consequence of—the Neolithic revolution.

The substantial rise in life expectancy and the related decline in morbidity (or sickness) are great triumphs of the past 200 years. This book tells the story of this dramatic improvement in the human condition, which is sometimes called the health transition. Although James Riley has done considerable research in the area of health history, the field is so vast that any book of this scope must be based predominantly on the studies of other scholars. He does an admirable job of distilling the research findings for a general audience.

These two books have one element in common, the International Monetary Fund. For the rest, they differ in virtually every dimension. James Boughton, Assistant Director of the fund's Policy Development and Review Department, writes a colossal history of the institution for the period 1979–1989; his insider's perspective is inherently sympathetic to the institution and its main actors. Paul Blustein, a financial journalist of the Washington Post, describes the fund's handling of the financial crises of 1997–1999 in Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, Russia, and Brazil; as an outsider, he has no institutional allegiance and, as a matter of fact, his assessment of the fund is negative. There are other differences, to be sure: Boughton's is a heavily researched history, rich not only in institutional knowledge but also in theories and policy debates; Blustein's focuses almost exclusively on the policy aspect. Boughton relies primarily on archival material, whereas Blustein on interviews with key policy makers, both inside and outside the fund. Boughton writes for an audience of economists and policy makers, Blustein for the educated but unspecialized. Boughton's work reads like a treatise, Blustein's like a novel.