Retired public historian Walter Dunn has given us a good, old-fashioned narrative economic history that describes the importance of the frontier during “a crucial time in American history filled with turmoil that ruptured a once amicable relationship between the thirteen colonies and Great Britain” (p. 1). Dunn is no econometrician, but his work shows a solid understanding of neoclassical economic principles. His writing is sharp and clear, if generally unexciting due to the overwhelming number of detailed examples that he often supplies.

Why les tristes tropiques have become the world's major sump of poverty has been analyzed from various perspectives, producing varying judgments on the complicity of the foreign powers who had “opened up” the tropics to foreign settlement, trade and investment. This volume's basic theses are that ecological degradation from the expansion of tropical agricultural and silvicultural exports have been a major source of socioeconomic damage to the tropics and that, especially in the past century, U.S. consumer demand and enterprise have dominated the external forces propelling this adverse dynamic.

Until his untimely death Zvi Griliches was an important contributor to the measurement and interpretation of productivity growth in the United States and elsewhere. Economists working in this area have been principally concerned with trends in two key measures of productivity: labor productivity, or output per hour, and multifactor or total factor productivity (MFP). Growth in labor productivity is the growth in real output less growth in hours, and multifactor productivity growth is the growth in real output less a weighted average of growth of inputs conventionally measured, with the weights corresponding to shares of factors in national income. The former measure is the most important determinant of growth in our material standard of living as measured by growth in per capita real output. The latter variable, subject to some qualifications, gives us some measure of the impact on economic growth of scientific and technical progress in different periods. The two are closely related, since growth in labor productivity can be decomposed into a portion accounted for by capital deepening (rise in the ratio of capital services per labor hour) and the “residual” contributed by growth in MFP.

Richard von Mises (1883–1953), the younger brother of Ludwig, had an Apollonian genius. He was a leading probabilist and statistician of the world, a leading engineer and designer of airplanes for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a leading philosopher of “positivism.” Von Mises was rational and measured, a man of observations and proportions. Though too modest to say so, he was a hero in his own story of scientific philosophy. A Harvard professor, von Mises was also learned in the humanities: his Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939 [1951]) is painted with images from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Goethe, and in equal proportions with the positivist icons of Mach and Comte and Kant (pp. 401–04). Von Mises owned and loved the world's largest collection of Rilke poetry before bequeathing the collection to Harvard's Houghton library. But von Mises believed his Dionysian self to be rhetorically separable from the positivist-scientist self, and lower. He tried to peel rhetoric away from science and gaze at its logical and empirical clarity. Abraham Wald was his student. His theory of collective probability influenced the econometrics of Trygve Haavelmo. Yet econometricians and philosophers younger than Arnold Zellner have never heard of Richard von Mises.

The ultimate success of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), negotiated by 27 nations in 1947, would have been hard to predict at the outset, given its lack of enforcement tools and dependence on the United States for leadership. What explains the GATT's achievements in the areas of tariff reduction and trade expansion, as argued by Donald Beane, is the adoption of a more pragmatic rather than ideological approach to problem-solving, along with a growing reliance on multilateral negotiations as the dominant position of the United States eroded. Lurking behind the scenes was the long-running battle between the U.S. Congress and the president over the role each would play in trade policy.

The story of the Luddite risings has all the ingredients for an excellent popular history: drama and excitement, poverty and exploitation, youthful resistance, violence and murder, romance and repression. Thanks to legal, Home Office, and newspaper evidence, and thanks especially to the work of earlier historians, Brian Bailey is able to convey a lively narrative of events which includes many telling details about the major protagonists. The book is at its best in the short chapters on the major attacks on properties and persons in Yorkshire and elsewhere, and in sensitively discussing the reaction of the authorities, the trials, and the punishments of offenders. There are however many weaknesses and trouble-some aspects to this book. Most historians would wish to challenge the value of a book that aims at a comprehensive account of the sequence of events, free from detailed interpretation of the sort that Bailey sees as clouding other works (p. iv). They will also be troubled by the many assertions that are unsupported by evidence, from rejection of the conventional account of the origin of the term “Luddite” (p. xi), to assessment of George Mellor's motivation (p. 142), to the notion that Midland framework knitters were “dull and unimaginative” (p. 15)! There are also many overblown statements and assumptions, which would immediately be questioned by any historian of the period, such as the development of “a class war”(p. xvii), and the narrow definition of “political” in discussion of communities which were, after all, engaged in a struggle over control of the means of production. Some would argue that this is inherently “political.” And if the “small, dark people of Celtic origin” (sic, p. 15) who comprised the Midlands workforce were so apolitical, one might ask why news of the prime minister's assassination in May 1812 was greeted in Nottingham with great joy, exultation, bonfires, flags, and drums (E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. 2d ed. Harmonsdsworth: Penguin, 1968: 932). It is a pity that Bailey appears to draw so little from Thompson's research (and particularly from his debates with Church and Chapman), except where he is rejecting Thompson's interpretation of Luddite motivations. Others will be unhappy with Bailey's superficial tin-pot psychology in attempting to rehabilitate the role and meaning of “mob behaviour” (pp. 148–51), and with the sparse footnoting and limited bibliography (no journal articles, few books published since 1990), which make it difficult to gauge exactly what has been drawn from primary sources and what has been derived from other secondary literature.

The late J. M. Blaut, a geographer who passed away in November 2000, had a pet theory. Europe's political and economic domination of the rest of the world in the past four centuries or so was due to a single event: the almost happenstance discovery of America's treasures in 1492 by Europeans, who then used these resources to subjugate the rest of the world and to create a capitalist system that produced the Enlightenment, modern science, the Industrial Revolution, and all the rest.

Malthus, Medicine and Morality is a collection of essays marking the bicentenary of the publication of Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. They vary considerably in subject matter, as is inevitable given the nature of Malthus's work. The Essay managed to be both a scientific investigation into demographic history and an intervention into the political debates on the French Revolution. It built its argument on a particular theory of mind and human behavior. Because it linked wealth and poverty to population, the Essay became part of the political economy of the time. Malthus gave his name, though not his imprimatur, to the birth-control movement in the nineteenth century. Not only were the Essay's arguments widely and approvingly quoted at the time, they also provoked a resolutely anti-Malthusian current of thought. Though the Essay's argument is apparently simple, this obscures a wealth of ambiguity and dense argumentation in the text, made more so by the constant revisions Malthus carried out for subsequent editions. What this collection does is to begin to deconstruct Malthus and unravel all the various elements that make up the phenomenon of “Malthusianism.”

Currency Crises is a collection of papers by leading thinkers on the subject, all presented at a 1998 NBER conference. Paul Krugman edits the volume and asks aloud what the reader can only silently wonder: Why is yet another conference on such a well-established research field necessary? The answer, according to Krugman, is that “despite two decades of research on the causes and consequences of such crises, important issues are either unresolved or require a fresh look in the face of new experience” (p. 2). This is made immediately clear in the pages that follow. The volume contains applications of new models to old crises, as well as new ways of thinking about recent episodes. It also treats different types of currency crises, including not only those that can and do occur in industrial countries (usually because of policy inconsistencies), but also the breed of animal that rears its head in emerging markets.

The importance of monetary policy in regime changes lies at the heart of Ton Notermans's study of “socia1 democratic economic policies.” Notermans distinguishes two general regime types, one “social democratic,” emphasizing economic growth and employment as its long-term objectives, the other “liberal,” targeting price stability. Based on the experience of five European countries (Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands), he analyzes three major changes of macroeconomic policy regime in Europe since the First World War. The first is the restoration of the international gold standard in the 1920s, after the years of inflation and exchange-rate instability following the First World War. This regime change reestablished fixed exchange rates as the overriding policy objective, and employed restrictive monetary policy to accomplish this end. The gold-standard regime slowed growth, increased unemployment, and sent world prices into a deflationary spiral. The next regime change was abandonment of the gold standard in the 1930s, in the wake of which individual countries reoriented policy towards economic growth and low unemployment, favoring especially low interest rates and exchange-rate adjustment. The third regime change, beginning in the 1970s and stretching into the 1980s, shifted emphasis from economic growth and employment to disinflation, and returned to restrictive monetary policies as the preferred instrument to achieve this goal.

Who among us journeymen academics, injected with truth serum, would not spill out an elephantine burden of resentments? Who among us, with sufficient lubrication, would not discourse eloquently on the idiocy of referees and editors, on contributions overlooked, colleagues overcompensated, grants rejected, and insights neglected? When the burden becomes too great, I suggest that you turn to this most unpromising of books, and read the story of Mabel Florence Timlin. Mabel Timlin, age 26 in 1917 and without a college degree, was a “good average teacher” in the elementary school in Bounty, Saskatchewan. This same Mabel Timlin finally completed her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Washington in Seattle at age 50, after 24 years of hand-to-mouth existence at the fringes of the economics department at the University of Saskatchewan. In the depression years her compensation was so meager that she, a women in her middle years, lived in one room in a house shared with students. But her thesis was a path-breaking exposition and development of the New Keynesian economics that she developed from mimeographed notes of a seminar by Keynes in London in 1934, passed to her by a colleague. Her authority on this new economics became so respected that in 1945 she gave seminars at Harvard and Columbia expositing Keynesian economics to such luminaries as Wassily Leontieff.

This book offers historical perspectives on the origins and purposes of state-owned enterprises in the United States and Western Europe, the performance of these companies, and the growing dissatisfaction with public ownership, culminating in a wave of privatizations over the past twenty years. It combines analytical essays on various aspects of public ownership with a series of country cases (Germany, Italy, Britain, France, Spain, Austria, and the United States). As is often the case with edited volumes, not all the contributors see eye-to-eye. The sharpest contrast is between the paean to the developmental state offered by Erik Reinert on the one hand, and the neoliberal understanding that informs the concluding essay by Louis Galambos and William Baumol on the other. For Galambos and Baumol, the experience of public enterprise teaches us that “there is no substitute for the profit motive and the rigors of fierce competition in eliciting growth of output, productivity, and innovation from the individual firm” (p. 308). The other authors, while closer to Galambos and Baumol's position than to that of Reinert, nonetheless offer a more nuanced perspective on public ownership.

These fascinating essays show why Americanization is both more and less than it seems. On the one hand, the authors argue, the superiority of American production methods remains a widely accepted thesis in the historiography of postwar economic growth. On the other hand, they show that the diffusion of American practices collided at every stage with active efforts by Europeans and Japanese to shape postwar reconstruction according to their own visions. The result was a panoply of hybrid outcomes, rather than any simple process by which superior American models supplanted local practices.