If employers make so much money, why don't workers hire machines and expertise and make the money instead? This question has generated a large body of writing, including Stephen Marglin's much-cited article “What Do Bosses Do?” Marglin draws on history to argue that the employer, who added nothing to technical efficiency, used specialization of tasks to divide labor and impose himself as boss, thereby creating an artificial, unproductive role. These arrangements were embodied in domestic industry and were reinforced when employers turned to the factory system as a more effective disciplinary mode. This article argues that such a thesis misreads history and is essentially ideological.

This article presents an analysis of empirical research on the course of agricultural prices and wages in Maryland over the century 1750 to 1850. An attempt has been made to present the data in a form comparable to other studies for other regions. In addition to the long-term movement of price and wage series the paper focuses on the use of these data to draw inferences on changes in the standard of living and productivity growth.

Early banks in New England functioned not as commercial banks in the modern sense but as the financial arms of extended kinship networks. These groups used banks to raise capital for their diversified enterprises and give their operations a stable institutional base. Because entry into banking was essentially free, favoritism in credit markets—the usual affliction of such a system—seems to have been unimportant. Instead, the economy as a whole benefited from the ease with which capital could be mobilized for industrial development.

This paper is concerned with the relative efficiency of farming in open fields or enclosures in England. It uses surveys covering the acreage, yield, and output of the principal grain crops for the period 1795–1801, initially concentrating in some detail on selected but widely distributed English counties before concluding with a section which summarizes the data for England. Efficiency meant improvements in per unit acre yields and in total parish output. But it also had important implications for total agricultural productivity because the land which was saved by improved farming in enclosures was used to promote a better balance between arable and animal farming.

The Irish immigrations during the First Industrial Revolution serve to complicate any assessment of Britain's economic performance up to the 1850s. This paper estimates the size of the Irish immigrations and explores its impact on real wages, rural-urban migration, and industrialization. Using a general equilibrium model, the paper finds that the Irish did not play a significant role in accounting for rising inequality, lagging real wages, or rapid industrialization.

The debate over the health and nutrition of slaves has focused on the typical working adult. Height and mortality data, however, indicate that the greatest systemativ variation in health and nutrition occured by age. Nourishment was exceedingly poor for slave childrenm but workers were remarkably well fed. The unusayal growth-by-age profile for slaves has implications for views on the postwar economic fortunes of blacks, the interpretation of findings of other height studies, and conceptions of slaveowner decision making, the slave family, and the slave personality.

The development of new machinery in nineteenth-century American canning followed two paths. Automative, labor-saving devices were developed to replace labor in unskilled tasks while deskilling, human-capital-saving machinery was designed to make craft labor more replaceable. Cannery operators appear to have focused on deskilling machinery as the key to greater managerial control over production. Craft workers through organizational power and pressing for higher wages seem to have stimulated the early and sustained search for deskilling machinery. Because human-capital-saving machinery allowed wage cuts, they could be adopted prior to their being used as labor-saving devices.

Municipal involvement in the finance of fine arts museums raises the question: Just which market failure serves to rationalize this public subsidy? Two contenders are prominent in the literature: decreasing costs and education externalities. The relationship of price to marginal cost provides an operational test to distinguish among the two rationales. Scattered data from the 1880s and 1890s as well as contemporary discussion indicate that, implausible as it may seem now, education externalities constituted the operational justification for the public subsidy.

Inflation in Germany from 1919 to 1923 resulted from the accumulation and the anticipation of government deficits. Inflationary expectations depended therefore on fiscal news. Allied demands for reparations, the occupation of the Ruhr, and domestic revolts were important negative news and led to increased inflation. Tax reforms and eventually the end to government deficits were important positive news and ushered in periods of price stability. Political events were fiscal news as they changed the chances for the government to balance the budget.

The Greek hyperinflation started during the Axis occupation and was the result of an excessive reliance by the puppet government on the inflation tax. The inflation reached a peak in November 1944 after liberation. The Greek government undertook three stabilization efforts spread over eighteen months before price level stability was achieved. The final effort involved fiscal reform and the creation of an independent supracentral bank. Controversy surrounds the origin and nature of the transition costs involved in stabilizing an economy. The Greek stabilization cannot resolve all the issues raised.