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During World War II there was a "shotgun wedding" forged in the processes of designing feedback mechanisms used to control gunfire targeting fast-moving enemy aircraft. Hendrik Bode perceived the shotgun marriage as a union of the classic regulator approach and long-distance telephone communications engineering. Norbert Weiner took the wedding description a step further by nesting communication engineering into a statistical mechanics framework in which the information engineer had to filter the useful signal from the useless noise. A main goal in designing weapon-fire control systems was to use negative feedback loops to ensure the stability of a system that was always in a transient mode. In the 1950s, control engineers such as Arnold Tustin, Bill Phillips, and Charles Holt offered their new analytic tools of block diagrams of systems with feedback loops, stability criteria, and physical analogues to model the economy, realize the promise of stability of employment and prices, and avoid another depression similar to that of the 1930s. By the early 1970s Paul Samuelson and the rational expectations theorists were primed to be receptive to a second, Cold War shotgun wedding in control engineering. Richard Bellman described it as a marriage of classical optimization theory and the probabilistic theory of stochastic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malcolm Rorty is best known to historians of economics as the primary organizer and founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research. This article situates Rorty's interest in economics against the backdrop of his early career in telephone engineering at American Telephone & Telegraph. I argue that distinct structural features of telephone engineering in general, and AT&T in particular, created overlaps between the practices of engineering and economics, and also opened space for Rorty to craft a broader vision for the "statistical control of business" through quantitatively informed management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cities of San Diego and Tijuana have long been economically interdependent. Today, each represents the bifurcated character of the new economy wherein low wage labor in Mexico is used to underwrite the quality of life for the middle class in the United States. This article traces the political origin of this economic structure. Instead of a top-down orchestration of neoliberal governance, the contours of the New Economy were formed through a process of contestation: a battle between international capital and its demands for profit and San Diego's white middle class homeowners dedicated to maintaining their quality of life by resisting border integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a view of the important economic trends likely to unfold over the next 10 years. Significant factors will include population growth, labor participation, annual hours worked per employee, the unemployment rate, productivity per worker hour, and inflation. Investment advisers will gain insight about the long-term prospects for interest rates and equity investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a broad overview of the potential impact of low inflation (deflation) on U.S. financial markets and institutions. It is argued that the contemporary experience of Japan and the historical experience of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s offer only limited insights into the potential impact of low inflation (deflation) on today's U.S. financial system. A number of potential implications arc discussed including a decline in secondary market trading and a trend towards reintermediation. In addition, low inflation/deflation is likely to have a material effect on bank duration and convexity exposures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the success that Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has had in maintaining the financial stability of the U.S. as seen by low levels of inflation and high economic growth. The author notes that this success can be seen as even greater when one examines how other countries have struggled and dealt with financial crises during this same time period. The author outlines some of Greenspan's policy contributions, examines global capital flows and discusses capital market efficiency under Greenspan.

Long-term estimates of expected return on equities are typically derived from U.S. data only. There are reasons to suspect that these estimates are subject to survivorship, as the United States is arguably the most successful capitalist system in the world. We collect a database of capital appreciation indexes for 39 markets going back to the 1920s. For 1921 to 1996, U.S. equities had the highest real return of all countries, at 4.3 percent, versus a median of 0.8 percent for other countries. The high equity premium obtained for U.S. equities appears to be the exception rather than the rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document that ownership by officers and directors of publicly traded firms is on average higher today than earlier in the century. Managerial ownership has risen from 13 percent for the universe of exchange-listed corporations in 1935, the earliest year for which such data exist, to 21 percent in 1995. We examine in detail the robustness of the increase and explore hypotheses to explain it. Higher managerial ownership has not substituted for alternative corporate governance mechanisms. Lower volatility and greater hedging opportunities associated with the development of financial markets appear to be important factors explaining the increase in managerial ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the returns of forward and futures contract rates for U.S. Treasury bills (T-bills) using a model of asset choice. The model considers the Lagrangian multiplier, forward-futures spread (FFS), stochastic endowments, transaction costs, secondary markets, consumption and time periods. The author compares the FFS for two historic data sets: June 1967-September 1979 and October 1979-July 1982. The author also considers the effect of monetary policy set by the U.S. Federal Reserve upon the T-bill market.

This article examines financial innovations and presents information on the interest elasticity of money demand. The authors attempt to provide empirical evidence on the interest elastic money demand function and examine the temporal nature of money demand's interest elasticity. Their findings indicate that the interest elasticity of money did not increase during the years 1915-1979 ion the U.S. They suggest that this finding supports the notion that financial innovations have not increased interest elasticity.

The article discusses fiscal and monetary policies in the United States and argues for an easier monetary policy. The author argues that there is need for a greater demand stimulus for economic recovery, and states that the recession is a deliberate consequence of monetary policies adopted by the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1979. The author states that though gains against inflation have improved between 1979 and 1984, 'victory' cannot yet be claimed in the battle to raise it. The article also discusses the economic hardships in Europe and Japan and the high debt obligations of Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. The article describes how large federal deficits damage the possibility of economic recovery.

The article discusses business forecasts for the U.S. in 1985 and their impact on marketing strategy. The publication the "Journal of Marketing" conducted a readership survey to evaluate the potential developments in macro-marketing in 1985 and predictions for marketing and business. The overall assessment by the respondents was that consumerism and other social pressures in business will not go away and will likely increase in 1985. The respondents also speculated that concern for the physical environment would have less impact on business in 1985. The survey revealed an overall agreement that technology would be a major factor in overcoming ecological and resource problems.

What are the causes of the current wave of consumer unrest? What are the goals of consumer protest groups? How are they organized? Who supports them? In this article, the consumer movement of the 1960s is examined and comparisons made with the consumer movements of the early 1900s and the 1930s.The analysis suggests new answers to the questions raised and a basis for predicting the future course of consumerism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the place of wholesaling in the larger context of distribution in the United States from 1929 to 1954. Reviewing the statistics since the year 1939, the author seeks to define the source of the increase in wholesaling success, asking if the increases are to be attributed to the increase in prices, the overall economy, or if the wholesale market has gained market position. The article addresses changes in business, wholesale expenses, the revolution in food distribution, and the advent of chain stores. The article addresses the wholesale response to chain stores through retailer owned wholesale houses and voluntary wholesaling, using the establishment of Super Valu Stores, Inc. as an illustration.

This article presents information on the household demand for savings deposits in the U.S. during the years 1921-1965. The author discusses the role that savings bonds play in the financial structure of the U.S. noting that they represent the principal source of funds for savings banks and savings and loan associations and represent a quarter of commercial banks deposits as well. The author notes that it is the competition for savings deposits among commercial banks, the U.S. government in the form of savings bonds and the private intermediary system that has fueled the growth of financial intermediation in the U.S.

This article presents a discussion on several papers that examined postwar economics in the U.S. The author discusses the government bond holdings of life insurance companies and the common stock shares purchased by colleges and universities with money from endowments. The author also discusses a paper that examined some of the philosophical forces that have shaped investment activity in the U.S. The author explores how the purchasing power theory had been applied by investors in their financial decision making. The author also discusses trends in securities prices following the end of World War II.

The article focuses on U.S. foreign policy towards Russia during the term of U.S. President George H. W. Bush. Topics discussed include the effect of the U.S. economic revival following the Cold War and Russia's economic collapse on U.S.-Russian relations, the ways in which Bush's foreign relations activities as U.S. Vice President during the presidential term of Ronald Reagan helped him with his own foreign policies when he succeeded Reagan as president and the strategies employed by Bush to build a positive relationship with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Also discussed are the lessons that the 2018 U.S. government can learn from the foreign policies of Bush during the early 1990s.

Maddison’s international panel data show that technically it was the faster growth rate of the US economy that led to its overtaking the United Kingdom as economic superpower. We explore the contributing factors. Identifying the land-grant college system triggered by the 1862/1890 Morrill Acts (MAs) as a major contributor, we develop this hypothesis theoretically and test it via difference-in-differences regression analyses viewing the MAs as the experiment, the United States or US states as treatment groups, and the United Kingdom as the chief control group in the country-level comparisons. Using national and state-level data, we estimate that the MAs produced sizeable educational and economic returns that catapulted the United States into its leading status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the career of journalist and critic Barbara Ehrenreich. Born to a mining family, Ehrenreich's experience of upward mobility formed the biographical context for her critique of professional ideology—a critique at the heart of her entire career. Her diagnosis of the New Left's failure and the New Right's triumph emerged from her analysis of the "professional-managerial class." Her journalism amounted to an effort to translate across the cultural gulf between the proletariat and the professional class in which she counted herself a reluctant member. Her bestseller Nickel and Dimed was the culmination of this project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Leonard's 2016 book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era argues that exclusionary views on eugenics, race, immigration, and gender taint the intellectual legacy of progressive economics and economists. This review essay reconsiders that legacy and places it in the context within which it developed. While the early generations of scholars who founded the economics profession in the United States and trained in its departments did indeed hold and express retrograde views on those subjects, those views were common to a broad swath of the intellectual elite of that era, including the progressives' staunchest opponents inside and outside academia. Moreover, Leonard anachronistically intermingles a contemporary critique of early-twentieth-century progressive economics and the progressive movement writ large, serving to decontextualize those disputes-a flaw that is amplified by the book's unsystematic approach to reconstructing the views and writing it attacks. Notwithstanding the history Leonard presents, economists working now nonetheless owe their progressive forebears for contributions that have become newly relevant: the 'credibility revolution,' the influence of economic research on policy and program design, the prestige of economists working in and providing advice to government agencies and policy makers, and the academic freedom economists enjoy in modern research-oriented universities are all a part of that legacy. (JEL A11, B15, D82, J15, N31, N32) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence suggests that the differences in rates of technical progress across sectors are time-variant, implying that the bias in technological change is not constant. In this paper, we analyze the implications of this non-constant sectoral biased technical change for structural change and we assess whether this is an important factor behind structural transformations. To this end, we develop a multi-sectoral growth model where TFP growth rates across sectors are non-constant. We calibrate our model to match the development of the U.S. economy during the twentieth century. Our findings show that, by assuming non-constant biased technical change, a purely technological approach is able to replicate the sectoral transformations in the U.S. economy not only after but also prior to World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operation Condor was a transnational network of organized state-sponsored terrorism that targeted Communist “subversion.” It was operational in the second half of the 1970s. The key member countries were Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil (Peru and Equador joined the network later on, with a more marginal role). Based on declassified documents from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva and on U.S. documents of various origin, this article will assess the development of the Condor network and the U.S. reaction to such manifest acts of state-sponsored terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much recent research on US labour markets has turned to tracing out the dramatic changes that accompanied and followed the events of the Great Recession (2007-2009). But to date this research has led to more temporal as opposed to spatial detail about those changes. This paper uses an online data set to assess the relative economic health (performance) of the US's more than 350 metropolitan labour markets during and after the Great Recession. These data address both the current level (e.g. unemployment rate) and the recent trend (e.g. 3-year job growth) in the economic health of those labour markets. Multivariate analysis generates one sub-index for level and a second sub-index for trend and then an overall performance index is calculated. But, after recognising that heterogeneity in these labour markets exists according to their different sizes, this paper re-examines those online data using four separate population size classes. New indices are then generated reflecting the relative sizes of the metropolitan labour markets and the new rankings that follow differ in important ways from the original rankings. The findings also indicate a disjuncture now exists between the economic health of Snowbelt versus Sunbelt cities. Coming immediately out of the Great Recession the average economic health of Northern cities is much better than that of Southern cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large and significant. This paper asks why. The answer is not found in technical time series matters nor in systematically more expansionary monetary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future. (JEL D72, E23, E32, E65, N12, N42) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on increase in crowdfunding in large scale real estate and infrastructure projects around the globe. Topics discussed include democratisation of finance by the practice of raising money from a large number of people through the Internet, impact of the U.S. economic cycle on the real estate sector across the American metropolis, and massive public investment programs under former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration.

In the XIXth century, the British Empire dominated the world economy. In the last century, the United States of America (USA) became the economic superpower of the world. The US-led post-war world economic order had the following two strong pillars: the principle of fixed parities and US dollar standard and the principle of nondiscrimination and free trade. Also, the Bretton Woods institutions clearly expressed the US post-war dominance of the world economic order. A new economic order is going to be set up in the world, dominated by Asia. The paper aims at presenting an analysis of the old world economic order and the birth of a new order. Our methodological approach is based on a literature review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the factors and processes that help regions sustain economic growth has become a topic of increasing interest in recent years. We examine factors associated with the length of ‘growth spells’ for the 184 largest regions in the United States from the period 1990–2011. We find that growth duration is positively related to a number of factors one might expect, including lower levels of reliance on manufacturing and a higher proportion of the population with middle education levels. However, we also find that the length of growth spells is strongly related to lower levels of metropolitan income inequality and to measures of social and spatial segregation, suggesting that more equitable and more integrated regions are better able to sustain growth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Milton Friedman died in , right before the onset of the Great Recession. Unfortunately, we will never know how Friedman would have interpreted this event. However, we can draw some inferences from his published views on the Great Depression, as well as his views on more recent monetary policy, especially in Japan. It seems likely that Friedman would have blamed the Fed for insufficiently expansionary monetary policy during 2008 and 2009, a view that is quite different from the conventional conservative interpretation of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the history of the Medicine Lodge Peace Treaty between the Native Americans and the U.S. troops in October 1867. Other topics mentioned in this article include the role of the 20th century U.S. economy with special attention to the Great Depression, the role of Sergeant I-See-O, and the anniversary as well as various celebrations of this peace treaty.