Slide 2. Power point… Slavery differed in the North and the South
The net present value and the internal rate of retur
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POWER POINT 7
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- After Williamstown...
- Robert Fogel (1926-2013)
| The net present value and the internal rate of return
Remember from the previous slide that: The IRR of investing in slavery (Conrad and Meyer) was 6.25%. This rate of return was the same as railway bonds, which shows that slavery was profitable. After Williamstown... -Two decades later Robert Gallman recalled that the Williamstown “conference did more than put the ball in motion … It also set the tone and style of the new economic history and even forecast the chief methodological and substantive interests that were to occupy cliometricians for the next twenty-one years.” -Douglass North proclaimed that a “revolution is taking place in economic history in the United States ... initiated by a new generation of economic historians” intent on reappraising “traditional interpretations of U.S. economic history.” -Robert Fogel said that the “novel element in the work of the new economic historians is their approach to measurement and theory,” especially in their ability to find “methods of measuring economic phenomena that cannot be measured directly.” Robert Fogel (1926-2013) Robert Fogel’s study of the impact of railroads on American growth in the nineteenth century. -At the time of its publication, economists believed that modern economic growth was due to certain important industries (like railways) having played a vital role in development. -Fogel set out to measure this impact, which he did with extraordinary precision. -He constructed a counterfactual to highlight the contributions of the railways to the growth of the American economy. -He famously found that the railroad was not absolutely necessary in explaining economic development and that its effect on the growth of GNP was minimal. -Not only did it generate a spate of parallel studies (of Russia, Mexico, Brazil, England, and Scotland, to cite only five) -it provided a methodological foundation for the systematic study of economic history and long-term economic growth. Download 0.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
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