Human Capital

Abstract

The graphs in the following chapters show the patterns of change in the United States economy revealed by official statistics from (mostly) 1929 to 1989. They give us a picture of the economy over time that would have been impossible to produce earlier. I remember my old teacher, Professor Joseph Schumpeter, once saying, ‘How nice economics was before anybody knew anything’. This was so even back in the 1930s. Herbert Hoover certainly had very little idea of what was going on around him. And Franklin Roosevelt was almost as ignorant, although much more successful. Now we do at least have a partial picture of what has gone on and what is going on. There are a good many deficiencies, but there is still enough information to make an important difference to our image of the world and, one hopes, to public policy. There was no Council of Economic Advisors or Economic Report of the President in 1929. What we now know about the economy may be very rough and incomplete, but it is a great improvement on the ignorance that prevailed prior to 1929.