Unlike historians whose principle aim is to construct plausible narratives of social evolution, economists seem drawn as if by some powerful pheromone to the policy implications of their historical investigations. The present 17 essays offered in celebration of the late Charles Feinstein's retirement reflect that fatal attraction; each draws a moral for the future from an examination of the past. The papers are organized in three groups. The first analyzes the sources of economic growth; the second considers the way political choices affect economic outcomes; the third surveys the methods by which economic outcomes are valued. Taken together, the essays provide an excellent representation of a certain kind of historical scholarship.

Jan de Vries opens the first set by extending and documenting his hypothesis that the growth in material welfare in northern Europe between 1650 and 1820 was mainly due to increased participation by household members in market-oriented work. He attributes the change to a shift in preferences towards market-supplied goods. His moral is that economists should take tastes into account when considering changes in factor supply. In the following essay, Jane Humphries constructs a microeconomic argument that the English apprenticeship system was exceptionally well suited to induce investment in marketable skills. Her moral is that institutional design matters, though her specific instance is impossible to assess without testing it against the default of Continental apprenticeship. Stephen Broadberry presents his findings on the growth and productivity of human capital in Britain, Germany, and the United States. The most interesting one is that the significant widening of the U.S./U.K. productivity gap occurred after 1973, which suggests it was due to the expansion of postsecondary education. As to whether apprenticeship is superior to other forms of training, no moral can be drawn. The next essay by Paul David and Gavin Wright examines technology by comparing the dynamo and the integrated circuit as general purpose technologies. This account of the timing and consequences of the electrification of manufacturing deserves a place on any syllabus in twentieth-century economic history. Its moral is that complementarities matter and that technologically driven productivity surges are unpredictable. Nick von Tunzelman directs attention to the form of institutional research. He concludes that the British system modeled on the university laboratory probably encouraged greater originality than the American system, which being modeled on the hierarchical business corporation was more tightly focused on practical results. Each system has its merits and its flaws.

The second group of essays engages politics. Nicholas Crafts shows that the East Asian escape from backwardness was achieved more by raising the quantity of factor inputs than by creating conditions for sustained improvement in their productivity. The moral here is that institutions created to solve one problem may block solutions to another. Christopher Davis and James Foreman-Peck consider the post-Soviet reforms in Russia by comparing them with British conversion to a peace-time economy after the two world wars. Not surprisingly, they find that the British did a better job, though one wonders whether the comparison of Britain with an economy that had abolished private property for more than seven decades is appropriate. Any moral may be misleading. Carol Leonard's comparison of the failed de-collectivization of Soviet agriculture with the mitigated success that attended the post-Emancipation privatization of the peasant commune is more plausible. In both cases privatization was held back by the perceived risks of going it alone. In the recent episode, that risk was greatly amplified by the total absence of private farms from which the needed information could be obtained. The feedback between the number of peasants choosing to go private and the level of risk perceived by those on the margin of choosing to do so imposes local path-dependence. The geographical patterns suggest that the extremely strong incentives provided by physical proximity to major urban markets have been necessary to tip the balance. The moral here is that history really does matter.

The Soviet essays illustrate the heavy hand of the past on the economic present. That hand is clearly visible in Francis Wilson's beautiful essay on of South Africa's post-Apartheid transformation. He shows how the system of temporary permits by which employers organized a supply of migrant labor for the mines and plantations—which pre-dated Apartheid by several decades—depressed the economic development of the sending districts by regularly removing a significant proportion of able-bodied males. His story of how labor markets have affected the geographical patterns of social investment has certain analogies with the economic history of the American South. The next two essays are about money. In their essay on the integration of the Italian monetary system Leandro Conte, Gianni Toniolo and Giovanni Vecchi show that the regional differences in short-term interest rates on commercial paper survived formal integration by several decades. The essay echoes recent doubts about the degree of monetary integration in the United States after the Civil War. Finally, Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin document the inertial force of the “faith-based economics” that informed bankers and politicians in the 1920s and 1930s.

The last section looks at results in historical perspective. Avner Offer's survey of social indicators suggests that the resurgence of GDP as the main measure economic performance at the expense of broader indicators showing slower growth in subjective welfare reflects a general conservative trend towards valuing factor productivity over social and economic equality. Anthropometric measures of well-being are reviewed by Roderick Floud and by Timothy Leunig and Hans-Joachim Voth. Floud shows that the major rise in British height and body mass occurred in the cohort born between 1915 and 1940. Leunig and Voth observe that the height metric loses its usefulness as average European height approaches the physiological maximum, it ceases to be a measure of changing living standards. Anne Digby and Sheila Ryan Johannson take up the question of the potential contributions of traditional and scientific medicine. They suggest that although science has provided powerful means of curing disease, folk wisdom may hold greater potential for preventing it. The final papers take up social insurance. Peter Solar and Richard Smith compare English and Continental systems of poor relief in search of a model appropriate to the coming European common market in labor. Mark Thomas and Paul Johnson review the social security “crisis,” and not surprisingly find that the privatized systems prevailing before the advent of tax-financed schemes cannot be pasted onto a twenty-first-century economy.

These are all good essays, some of them spectacularly so. Charles Feinstein has been duly honored by them.