Macroeconomic Growth: The United States in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The United States in the Nineteenth Century Since World War II, American economic historians have been preoccupied with growth. Initial efforts were directed toward establishing the pace and pattern of the nation's economic activity. By 1952, Kuznets had assembled sufficient evidence to demonstrate that by the I870s the United States had already achieved sustained, self-reinforcing growth. The origins of this growth were to be found in the first seven decades of the century although, as Kuznets pointed out, inadequate data precluded precise estimation of when it began. To overcome this barrier, historians turned to techniques eventually to be combined under the rubric of the new economic history. Already committed to quantification, they relied upon statistical inference and economic theory to reconstruct growth rates in the pre-Civil War era.1 As economic historians gathered long runs of aggregate data, they widened the scope of inquiry. Rather than attempt to identify the decade in which it all began, they sought to explain how and why sustained growth occurred. North in 1961 offered the first comprehensive analysis of pre-Civil War growth that combined theory and the new statistical base. His demand-oriented approach predominated in the I96os. In the past decade supply-side models, at once more sophisticated and more modest, have come into use. These models forego explaining the growth process and focus instead upon movements in key variables. This, in turn, has led