Tim Leunig

Time is money: a re-assessment of the passenger social savings from Victorian British railways

This paper reassesses and extends Hawke’s passenger railway social savings for England and Wales. Better estimates of coach costs and evidence that third class passengers would otherwise have walked reduce Hawke’s social savings by two-thirds. We calculate railway speeds, and the amount and value of time saved by railways. Initially small, time savings was three times fare savings by 1912, when total railway passenger social savings exceeded 13% of GDP. The transition from railways saving money to saving time came when railway technology stopped simply fulfilling existing demand more cheaply (travel for the affluent) and became a new good (travel for the masses).

Cities, Market Integration, and Going to Sea: Stunting and the Standard of Living in Early Nineteenth-Century England and Wales

A new source, 1840s Admiralty seamen’s tickets, is used to explore three anthropometric issues. First, did being born in a city, with its associated disamenities, stunt? Second, did being born near a city, whose markets sucked foodstuffs away, stunt? Third, did child labour stunt? Being born in a city stunted although the effect was limited except in the largest cities. In contrast, opportunities to trade did not stunt. Finally although adults who went to sea young were shorter than those who did not enlist until fully grown, going to sea did not stunt. Rather the prospect of plentiful food at sea attracted stunted adolescents, who reversed most of their stunting as a result. But child labour at sea was unique: wages were largely hypothecated to the child as food and shelter, rather than paid in cash that might be spent on other family members.

Were British Railway Companies Well Managed in the Early Twentieth Century

This paper examines major privately owned British railway companies before the First World War. Quantitative evidence is presented on return on capital employed (ROCE), total factor productivity (TFP) growth, cost inefficiency, and speed of passenger services. There were discrepancies in performance across companies but ROCE and TFP typically fell during our period. Cost inefficiency rose before 1900 but then was brought under control as a profits collapse loomed. Without the discipline of either strong competition or effective regulation, managerial failure was common. This sector is an important qualification to the conventional wisdom that late Victorian Britain did not fail.

Smallpox did reduce height: a reply to our critics

Between them our critics span the entire range of this Journal’s readership. On the one hand Razzell accuses us of ‘the abandonment of traditional scholarly procedures’. He argues that our plight ‘will provide a salutary lesson for the new economic history. No amount of sophisticated statistical analysis will provide a substitute for careful study of original sources.’ In contrast, Heintel and Baten use far more sophisticated statistical techniques - including a continuous kernel density estimator and truncation point estimators - in an attempt to justify their claim that our ‘conclusions are without empirical or statistical foundation.’ Because these two comments are so totally different we will look at each in turn.

Comment on Seat of Death and Terror

Oxley finds that smallpox consistently reduced heights, but that the fall was not statistically significant outside London or for juvenile Londoners. We demonstrate that inappropriate subdivision of the data into small samples explains the lack of significance she obtains. Further analysis of Oxley’s data shows that smallpox was a statistically significant cause of stunting, and that there were no differences in the effect by area. Juveniles exhibit greater stunting than adults, leading us to conclude that smallpox was not a proxy for overcrowding. That smallpox reduced height is important for anthropometric history: heights capture the effect of a truly awful disease.

Smallpox really did reduce height: a reply to Razzell

Razzell argues that the quality of smallpox recording in the Marine Society data set is so poor that ‘the impact of smallpox on average height cannot be settled by analysis of the Marine Society data set’. We believe that this grossly overstates the problems of the records, and is based on a careless reading of the original records on his part. Furthermore, insofar as his claim that some of the boys who are recorded as escaping smallpox had in fact suffered the disease, the direction of bias strengthens rather than weakens the statistical evidence that smallpox reduced height. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Spinning Welfare: The Gains from Process Innovation in Cotton and Car Production

Economists and economic historians want to know how much better life is today than in the past. Fifty years ago economic historians found surprisingly small gains from 19th century US railroads, while more recently economists have found relatively large gains from electricity, computers and cell phones. In each case the implicit or explicit assumption is that researchers were measuring the value of a new good to society. In this paper we use the same techniques to find the value to society of making existing goods cheaper. Henry Ford did not invent the car, and the inventors of mechanised cotton spinning in the industrial revolution invented no new product. But both made existing products dramatically cheaper, bringing them into the reach of many more consumers. That in turn has potentially large welfare effects. We find that the consumer surplus of Henry Fords production line was around 2% by 1923, 15 years after Ford began to implement the moving assembly line, while the mechanisation of cotton spinning was worth around 6% by 1820, 34 years after its initial invention. Both are large: of the same order of magnitude as consumer expenditure on these items, and as large or larger than the value of the internet to consumers. On the social savings measure traditionally used by economic historians, these process innovations were worth 15% and 18% respectively, making them more important than railroads. Our results remind us that process innovations can be at least as important for welfare and productivity as the invention of new products.

Surprisingly gentle confinement: British treatment of Danish and Norwegian prisoners of war during the napoleonic wars

ABSTRACT The Napoleonic Wars saw the British capture and incarcerate thousands of sailors in disused Royal Navy ships, the so-called prison hulks. Many Danes and Norwegians – navy personnel, privateers and merchant sailors – were thus interred. This article uses a new data source, the official record books kept in the National Archive at Kew, to test whether the prison hulks were as bad as popular perception might suggest. In doing so, we provide the first rigorous quantitative assessment of the Danish and Norwegian sailors’ prisoner experience. We find that death rates were surprisingly low, suggesting the quantity and quality of food and medical care was reasonable. Prison hulks were not ‘floating tombs’. The records also show which prisoners were released and exchanged, and when. Officers did well, reflecting the age old system of a gentleman’s honour. Privateers did worse than merchant sailors: those who took up arms were likely to serve longer as prisoners.

The Liberal Democrats And Supply-Side Economics

The coalition has given the Liberal Democrats the opportunity to demonstrate their support for – or opposition to – supply-side economics. The person who has done most on the supply side is Ed Davey, in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. In a remarkable legislative achievement for a Parliamentary Under Secretary in under two years in office, Davey ensured that the privatisation of Royal Mail reached the statute books, liberalised the terms and conditions for Post Office counters, and liberalised employment and retirement laws.