Echoes Dispatches From Economic History

Economix on how the incomes of physicians affect health-care costs
History News Network on important State of the Union addresses in history
Paul Krugman on disco-era macroeconomics
Marginal Revolution on what Friedrich Hayek would have thought about Obamacare
Greg Mankiw on the growth of the welfare state (chart)

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At the beginning of the 19th century, St. Valentine’s Day was of little note in American culture. It could easily have faded from the calendar out of Protestant indifference and civic irrelevance, forgotten right along with days dedicated to St. Agnes, St. Anne and any number of others.

Instead, St. Valentine’s Day suddenly surged in popularity in the 1840s. As Graham’s American Monthly announced in 1849, Feb. 14 “is becoming, nay, it has become, a national holyday.”

The civil-rights revolution of the 1960s is now firmly embedded in American civic culture, an inspiring story of courage in the face of violent oppression and age-old injustices finally set right.

Less well-known is that the demand for economic justice was one of the most successful and enduring features of that movement.

By fall 1932, Germany’s explosive political and economic turmoil, triggered by the Great Depression, seemed to be calming down. Although more than one third of the workforce had been unemployed early that year, the economy was now showing signs of life. The number of jobless dropped by almost half a million from June to October.

Better yet, the rampaging National Socialist Party’s fortunes looked to be slumping. Adolf Hitler, the party's leader, had lost in the April presidential election to aging Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Then in the November national election, the Nazis lost 34 of their 230 parliamentary seats, receiving just 12 million of the 36 million votes cast.

It is easy to look to early America as a moment of unshackled innovation. Yet in this respect the pre-Civil War period was especially problematic.

Then, intellectual property and human property were dual and dueling pillars of capitalist development, and for a vast swath of the population, invention was stifled under the crushing weight of slavery.

History News Network on the 100th anniversary of the income-tax amendment
Economix on 20 years of the Family and Medical Leave Act
Brookings Institution on the importance of optimism in discussing the economy
Marginal Revolution on falling earnings of college graduates (chart)
Wonkblog on what the new Monopoly cat piece tells us about the economy

Read more from Echoes online.

The announcement yesterday that the U.S. Postal Service will cease Saturday delivery starting in August highlights the core paradox of the system: that it should both serve a universal civic function and generate enough revenue to sustain its enormously expensive operation.

Since 1971, the postal service has been run as a business- like independent government agency. As e-mail and other forms of digital communication have proliferated and health-care costs have soared, the system’s finances have deteriorated.

United Fruit Co. in Guatemala. Aramco in Saudi Arabia. Blackwater in Iraq. We are familiar with a few private American companies that decisively shaped foreign policy. One of the first and ultimately most influential, however, is also the least known.

In December 1892, a group of Wall Street businessmen arrived by ship in the Dominican Republic. Earlier that year, the group had created the San Domingo Improvement Co. and bought all of the country’s foreign debt from a European financial company. Now the men came to Santo Domingo on a delicate mission -- coming to terms with Ulises Heureaux, the Caribbean republic’s fearsome dictator.

Americans in the early republic struggled to adjust as traditional relations of exchange and autonomy were transformed by new realities of markets, wages and growing inequality.

For each citizen who thrived in these conditions there were many more who failed to adjust. Everyone responded differently. But few rose to the moment as brilliantly, or as idiosyncratically, as Josiah Warren.

Late in January 1933, President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt met separately with his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, and Britain’s ambassador, Ronald Lindsay. Each session focused on one issue: How would the new chief executive handle the nagging problem of war debts?

During the war, the U.S. had advanced European countries about $10 billion in goods and credit. Following the July 1932 expiration of Hoover’s yearlong moratorium of payments, international readjustment discussions were scheduled for March 1933. European representatives hoped the new U.S. government would then articulate fresh policies. Many nations sought a sizable writedown of principal and interest because further postponement of due dates had proved politically impossible in the U.S.

Although typically glossed over in high-school textbooks, as a young and newly industrializing nation the U.S. aggressively engaged in the kind of intellectual-property theft it now insists other countries prohibit.

In other words, the U.S. government’s message to China and other nations today is “Do as I say, not as I did.”

Project Syndicate on Obama's return to an era of government activism
The Atlantic on how Londoners got word of the plague  
Economix on rare-coin inflation
Munich Personal RePEc Archive on monthly industrial output in China since 1983
History News Network on NASA's history of organizational problems

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The Moselle isn’t remembered for being one of the fastest steamboats on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, even though it was. Instead, it is usually remembered for its cataclysmic demise, a product of speed and shoddy construction, and especially for what followed.

The sudden and violent end of the Moselle, combined with other highly publicized riverboat explosions, prompted the creation of the first federal agency responsible for regulating American private industry.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, better known as Prince William and Kate Middleton, are expecting their first child in July.

Is it a boy? A girl? Twins? The jury is still out, but on one point there’s considerable certainty: Thanks to some ancient history, the future monarch will eventually inherit a sizable fortune and become the custodian of extraordinarily valuable state assets.

Part way through selecting his Cabinet, President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt departed Washington on Jan. 20, 1933, for a visit to a small, riverside Alabama town named Muscle Shoals. Though few knew it at the time, Roosevelt had big plans in mind: to harness the power of the Tennessee River through massive public construction projects that would provide tens of thousands of jobs and huge purchases of equipment and materials. Such projects would reinvigorate the upper South’s economy and provide hydroelectric power to the region and beyond.

During World War I, the Army Corps of Engineers began building an immense dam across the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, intended to generate power for adjacent plants making military explosives. The project employed more than 18,000 workers and involved about 1,700 temporary buildings.

Although Republicans in Congress agreed this week to suspend the U.S. debt limit for three months and forestalled another budgetary showdown, most commentators think the peace won’t last.

There’s sure to be a fight over automatic spending cuts scheduled to kick in March 1 (part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal), followed by a looming deadline for funding the government that could lead to a shutdown. And House Speaker John Boehner has vowed to block any long-term increase in the debt ceiling without corresponding spending cuts -- in effect, holding out the possibility of default as a means of controlling the country’s debt.

EconoMonitor on the historical relationship between government debt and financial crises
Free Exchange on the microfoundations of banking
Burt Folsom on economic lessons from "Downton Abbey"
The Big Picture on a history of the debt ceiling and government shutdowns
Library of Economics and Liberty on John D. Rockefeller's railroad rebates
Project Syndicate on the history of the dollar in international trade
The Exchange on the National Bankruptcy Archives

Read more from Echoes online.

U.S. television viewers are gorging on a diet of shows about weird and quirky forms of economic consumption. From the relatively innocuous “American Pickers” to the slightly irritating “Storage Wars” and the extremely disturbing “My Strange Addiction,” we can’t seem to get our fill of shows about oddball consumers.

“Hoarders” and “Hoarders: Buried Alive” are the most distressing of this genre. The obsessive, desperate and profoundly sad people featured in these reality shows have become the most famous hoarders since the eccentric and reclusive Collyer brothers were found dead in their Harlem mansion in 1947, entombed by more than 150 tons of stuff they had accumulated.

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual summary of unionization in the U.S. It reports that in 2012, the union-membership rate of wage and salary workers was 11.3 percent, compared with 11.8 percent in 2011. The trend has been downward for some time: Fifty years ago, the figure was almost 30 percent.

It’s conventional wisdom that the post-industrial workforce doesn’t want to be unionized. But survey data show that workers’ desire to join unions has been growing since the 1980s, and a majority of nonunion workers would now vote for union representation if given the opportunity. So if workers want unions, why is unionization falling?

This month marks 250 years since Barings Bank, one of the first significant international investment banks, opened its doors.

Much of Barings’s early success can be attributed to its willingness to invest in the development of the U.S. in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, despite the nation’s newly established credit and undeveloped economy. Without Barings’s involvement, the U.S. would probably be a very different place - - geographically and economically -- from what it is today.