scholarly journals Antebellum U.S. Labor Markets

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Economy ◽  
Modern Economic Growth ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
European Immigration ◽  
The One

The United States economy underwent major transformations between American independence and the Civil War through rapid population growth, the development of manufacturing, the onset of modern economic growth, increasing urbanization, the rapid spread of settlement into the trans-Appalachian west, and the rise of European immigration. These decades were also characterized by an increasing sectional conflict between free and slave states that culminated in 1861 in Southern secession from the Union and a bloody and destructive Civil War. Labor markets were central to each of these developments, directing the reallocation of labor between sectors and regions, channeling a growing population into productive employment, and shaping the growing North–South division within the country. Put differently, labor markets influenced the pace and character of economic development in the antebellum United States. On the one hand, the responsiveness of labor markets to economic shocks helped promote economic growth; on the other, imperfections in labor market responses to these shocks significantly affected the character and development of the national economy.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 123-126
Author(s):  
David J. Bodenhamer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Health Safety ◽  
Plural Noun ◽  
Atlantic Seaboard ◽  
The One

The United States does not operate today under the Constitution ratified in 1788 or the Constitution as completed by the Bill of Rights in 1791 or even the one revised by the Reconstruction amendments. Nor is it the same nation. The United States, then a plural noun and now a collective one, has grown from thirteen states hugging the Atlantic seaboard to fifty states spread across a continent and beyond. It has experienced a civil war that ended one social and political regime and ultimately ushered in another far different from anything most people could have imagined in 1776 or even in 1865. From its beginnings as a second-rate country with a tiny navy and army, it has grown to become a global economic and military superpower. It is a democratic republic in which democracy weighs far more heavily in its constitutional and societal calculus than the framers would have endorsed. Its citizens vest government with the responsibility for safeguarding their prosperity, health, safety, and welfare in ways alien to the experiences of the founding generation....

Antebellum Puzzle

2015 ◽  
pp. 750-764
Author(s):  
Lee A. Craig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Modern Economic Growth ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
The Us ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
The 19Th Century

Since the late 18th century the long-run trend in economic growth—conventionally measured by real gross domestic product, income, and wages—has been positive in the United States and throughout Europe. However, in the 19th century, many Western countries, including the United States, experienced stagnation and even cyclical downturns in the biological standard of living—as measured by, for example, the expectation of life and adult stature—thus creating the “antebellum puzzle,” so named because the downturn began in the decades before the US Civil War. This puzzle suggests that industrialization and modern economic growth were accompanied by an increase in inequality and a decrease in the consumption of net nutrients.

Capital, Labor, and State: The Battle for American Labor Markets from the Civil War to the New Deal. By David Brian Robertson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 320p. $75.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 216-217
Author(s):  
Andrew Battista
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Public Management ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
The United States ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
American Labor

This important new study argues that American labor markets have been and are governed by employers to a degree unique among Western capitalist democracies; that this pattern of governance is the outcome of crucial struggles among unions, employers, and middle-class labor reformers from the Civil War to the New Deal; and that American political institutions strongly shaped the struggles and their outcome. In the nineteenth century, all Western countries largely protected employer control of hiring, firing, wages, hours, and working conditions, but in the twentieth century nations other than the United States began to curb employer prerogatives and extend worker protection in the form of labor regulations, trade union and collective bargaining laws, public management of labor supply and demand, and work insurance (the four major types of policy in Robertson's framework). In the United States, fewer such protections were established, and the fragmented federal and state labor policies that were enacted were often undermined by lax enforcement or court rulings. On the eve of the New Deal, Robertson shows, U.S. employers had a degree of autonomy in labor markets unparalleled in European and other industrialized countries.

scholarly journals Clarifications of a Puzzle: The Decline in Nutritional Status at the Onset of Modern Economic Growth in the United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 1129-1153 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Komlos ◽  
Brian A'Hearn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
Negative Selection ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Labor Market Conditions ◽  
Modern Economic Growth ◽  
Random Samples ◽  
Physical Stature ◽  
Modern Economic

Bodenhom, Guinnane, and Mroz (2017) are critical of anthropometric research using based on non-random samples. Declining height trends in military and prison data, they argue, are artifacts of negative selection during favorable labor market conditions. We study height trends in the United States in the antebellum decades, which coincided with the onset of modem economic growth. We find that neither the historical evidence nor their own statistical analysis support their views. The decline in physical stature in the decades before the Civil War was real, as Zimran (2019) has also shown.

Labor Monopsony in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-29
Author(s):  
Eric A. Posner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Market Power ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Market Concentration ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Low Wages

Most labor markets are monopsonistic, meaning that employers have market power and can suppress wages below the competitive rate. Among the various sources of market power is concentration: the usually small number of employers who compete to offer a type of job to workers. At one time, economists assumed that labor markets were competitive, and largely ignored the phenomenon of labor market concentration. Recent empirical work, relying on newly available databases, has established that labor market concentration is a serious problem in the United States and may account for a wide range of pathologies, including low wages, inequality, and stagnant economic growth.

Economic Growth in the United States, 1790 to 1860

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Weiss
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gdp Per Capita ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Modern Economic Growth ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The U.S

In the early 21st century, the U.S. economy stood at or very near the top of any ranking of the world’s economies, more obviously so in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), but also when measured by GDP per capita. The current standing of any country reflects three things: how well off it was when it began modern economic growth, how long it has been growing, and how rapidly productivity increased each year. Americans are inclined to think that it was the last of these items that accounted for their country’s success. And there is some truth to the notion that America’s lofty status was due to the continual increases in the efficiency of its factors of production—but that is not the whole story. The rate at which the U.S. economy has grown over its long history—roughly 1.5% per year measured by output per capita—has been modest in comparison with most other advanced nations. The high value of GDP per capita in the United States is due in no small part to the fact that it was already among the world’s highest back in the early 19th century, when the new nation was poised to begin modern economic growth. The United States was also an early starter, so has experienced growth for a very long time—longer than almost every other nation in the world. The sustained growth in real GDP per capita began sometime in the period 1790 to 1860, although the exact timing of the transition, and even its nature, are still uncertain. Continual efforts to improve the statistical record have narrowed down the time frame in which the transition took place and improved our understanding of the forces that facilitated the transition, but questions remain. In order to understand how the United States made the transition from a slow-growing British colony to a more rapidly advancing, free-standing economy, it is necessary to know more precisely when it made that transition.

Towards a Bourgeois Revolution? Explaining the American Civil War

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ashworth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The North ◽  
Wage Labour ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cost ◽  
North And South

Abstract This paper introduces arguments from Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic1 to suggest that the Civil War arose ultimately because of class-conflict between on the one hand, Southern slaves and their masters and, on the other, Northern workers and their employers. It does not, however, suggest that either in the North or the South these conflicts were on the point of erupting into revolution. On the contrary, they were relatively easily containable. However, harmony within each section (North and South) could be secured only at the cost of intersectional conflict, conflict which would finally erupt into civil war. The Civil War was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ not only because it destroyed slavery, an essentially precapitalist system of production, in the United States but also because it resulted in the enthronement of Northern values, with the normalisation of wage-labour at their core.

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