Jeffrey G. Williamson

Peter H. Lindert

Monograph presenting a macroeconomic analysis of the relationship of economic development to wealth and income distribution inequality trends in the USA from the historical 1770s to the 1970s - rejects the notion that inequality was a necessary precondition of economic growth, and argues that complex interactions among such variables as technological change, labour supply and capital formation were sources of economic disparity. Bibliography pp. 335 to 349 and graphs.

A Macroeconomic History

American Inequality

How does social spending relate to economic growth and which countries have got this right and wrong? Peter Lindert examines the experience of countries across the globe to reveal what has worked, what needs changing, and who the winners and losers are under different systems. He traces the development of public education, health care, pensions, and welfare provision, and addresses key questions around intergenerational inequality and fiscal redistribution, the returns to investment in human capital, how to deal with an aging population, whether migration is a cost or a benefit, and how social spending differs in autocracies and democracies. The book shows that what we need to do above all is to invest more in the young from cradle to career, and shift the burden of paying for social insurance away from the workplace and to society as a whole.

Making Social Spending Work

Reveals the relationship between social spending and economic growth and which countries have got it right and wrong.

Branko Milanovi?

Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using what are known as social tables, stretching from the Roman Empire 14 AD, to Byzantium in 1000, to England in 1688, to Nueva Espąa around 1790, to China in 1880 and to British India in 1947. It applies two new concepts in making those assessments -- what we call the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio. Rather than simply offering measures of actual inequality, we compare the latter with the maximum feasible inequality (or surplus) that could have been extracted by the elite. The results, especially when compared with modern poor countries, give new insights in to the connection between inequality and economic development in the very long run.

Measuring Ancient Inequality

Peter Lindert evaluates environmental concerns about soil degradation in two very large countries—China and Indonesia—where anecdotal evidence has suggested serious problems. In this book Peter Lindert evaluates environmental concerns about soil degradation in two very large countries—China and Indonesia—where anecdotal evidence has suggested serious problems. Lindert does what no scholar before him has done: using new archival data sets, he measures changes in soil productivity over long enough periods of time to reveal the influence of human activity. China and Indonesia are good test cases because of their geography and history. China has been at the center of global concerns about desertification and water erosion, which it may have accelerated with intense agriculture. Most of Indonesia's lands were created by volcanoes and erosion, and its rapid deforestation and shifting slash-burn agriculture have been singled out for international censure. Lindert's investigation suggests that human mismanagement is not on average worsening the soil quality in China and Indonesia. Human cultivation lowers soil nitrogen and organic matter, but has offsetting positive effects. Economic development and rising incomes may even lead to better soil. Beyond the importance of Lindert's immediate findings, this book opens a new area of study—quantitative soil history—and raises the standard for debating soil trends.

Peter H. Lindert

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