Peter Temin
Biographic Data
| ID | 371775 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Temin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Temin |
| SIGNATURE | TEMIN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8132-563X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 151 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 502 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 151 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1963 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Pliny’s Roman Economy: Natural History, Innovation, and Growth by Richard P. Saller
This book does not start out well. Saller writes, “Most recent efforts do not hold up to close scrutiny and so do not demonstrate sustained growth up to the Antonine Plague” (9). Saller cites Harper in this regard, but he fails to note Harper’s 2016 article that showed real wages increasing in Roman Egypt during those years.1Although wages are not strictly a proxy for the national product, rising wages are a good index of national income in an ag…
Slaves and the Roman Economy
This chapter presents an economic view of Roman slavery and the modern literature about it. The chapter starts by defining slavery and distinguishing positive and negative incentives to work. Roman slavery was ‘open’, while United States slavery was ‘closed’. The related roles of manumission, education, and skills are discussed and evaluated. The chapter considers Roman slavery as part of the Roman labour force, and combines imprecise estimates b…
Statistics in Ancient History: Prices and Trade in the Pax Romana
This chapter uses new data to extend the argument that there was an integrated wheat market in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. I explore the meaning of randomness when data are scarce, and I investigate how we recreate the nature of ancient societies by asking new questions that stimulate the discovery of more information. The case for a prosperous Roman society extending the length of the Mediterranean Sea is strong. This chapter…
Finance and Intangibles in American Economic Growth: Eating the Family Cow
The American economy changed rapidly since the World Wars as producers expanded new products and services in communication, computers and transportation. We kept track of this transformation through the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), a set of statistical constructs designed before these changes started. The national accounts stretched to accommodate these new and growing activities, but efforts to fit them into our measurement of na…
Taxes and industrial structure
Microeconomics assumes that business firms respond to changing costs and prices. Taxes impose costs of businesses, and tax breaks help industries grow. This paper discusses the dynamics of government actions, drawing on the end of the Bell System in the 1970s, and then reviews the history of tax breaks to a variety of large industries, from the oil industry to finance and real estate. It closes by placing the whole discussion in the framework of …
Words and Numbers: A New Approach to Writing Ancient History
The various forms of disciplinary training that historians receive can lead to different epistemologies and thus complicate attempts to advance interdisciplinary history. For example, the epistemologies of ancient and economic historians affect both their mode of research and their style of presenting results. The testing of hypotheses through the use of simple, small-sample regressions has distinct advantages, but this approach, as well as other…
The Vanishing Middle Class
This book analyses the American economy in the twenty-first century as a dual economy in the spirit of W. Arthur Lewis. Adapting the subsistence and capitalist sectors characterized by Lewis, the American dual economy contains a low-wage sector and a FTE (Finance, Technology, and Electronics) sector. The transition from the low-wage to the FTE sector is through education, which is becoming increasingly difficult for members of the low-wage sector…
The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
The Political Economy of Mass Incarceration and Crime: An Analytic Model
This article presents a model of mass incarceration in the United States, which has the largest proportion of its population imprisoned among advanced countries. Although the 1968 Kerner Commission recommended integrating blacks into the larger American community, political decisions pushed American judicial policies in the opposite direction. The model demonstrates that the United States has moved from one equilibrium position to another. It exp…
The vanishing middle class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor…
The American Dual Economy: Race, Globalization, and the Politics of Exclusion
I describe the American economy in the twenty-first century as a dual economy in the spirit of W. Arthur Lewis. Similar to the subsistence and capitalist economies characterized by Lewis, I distinguish a low-wage sector and a finance, technology, and electronics (FTE) sector. The transition from the low-wage to the FTE sector is through education, which is becoming increasingly difficult for members of the low-wage sector because the FTE sector h…
The Rise and Fall of Economic History at MIT
This article recalls the unity of economics and history at MIT before the Second World War and their divergence thereafter. Economic history at MIT reached its peak in the 1970s, with three teachers of the subject to graduates and undergraduates alike. It declined until economic history vanished both from the faculty and from the graduate program around 2010. The cost of this decline to current education and scholarship is suggested at the end of…
The Roman market economy
The quality of life for ordinary Roman citizens at the height of the Roman Empire probably was better than that of any other large group of people living before the Industrial Revolution. The Roman Market Economy uses the tools of modern economics to show how trade, markets, and the Pax Romana were critical to ancient Rome's prosperity. Peter Temin, one of the world's foremost economic historians, argues that markets dominated the Roman economy. …
Ancient Roman Finance
Roman Market Economy
Price Behavior in the Roman Empire
This chapter takes the scattered price data that have survived in order to make an index of Roman inflation. The index cannot describe the details of inflation, but it allows comparison between periods of time. The chapter suggests that the persistent inflation of the late Roman Empire came from political instability at the top of the hierarchy. It also raises an important problem in going from correlation to causation—the identification problem.…
Roman Microeconomics
This section contains most of the material that I anticipated gathering when I drew up my research plan in Roman economic history more than a decade ago. I surveyed these markets briefly in the initial research plan I took around at the Oxford conference where everyone laughed at me. That proposal grew into ...
Economic Growth in a Malthusian Empire
This chapter examines Rome's lack of an industrial revolution. Without this momentous change, Rome was subject to Malthusian pressures that limited its economic growth. Yet Malthusian economies can have economic growth, which means having rising standards of living. The Malthusian theory of population change argues that changes in productivity lead to changes in the size of the population, but leave the level of per capita income. The chapter sho…
Growth Theory for Ancient Economies
This chapter reviews the theory of economic growth and the problems of measuring it. It reveals that scholars trying to understand Roman macroeconomics are in far worse shape than economists dealing with more recent economies. A brief survey of some existing research on the level of Roman and Greek income shows that there is a variety of data that could be used to estimate Roman economic growth. An index of human welfare might seem appropriate to…
The contribution of economics
Economics is about the allocation of resources. In the modern industrialized world, most goods and services are allocated through transactions, which in turn are mostly purchases and taxes. Goods are largely the outputs of early modern economies, while services – particularly labor services – are more typically the inputs. To understand how an economy works, we need to consider how inputs are directed to provide the outputs that people desire. Th…
Roman Macroeconomics
This final section brings together my thoughts and speculations on the implications of the preceding chapters on individual markets. When I began working on Roman economics, I did not think there was enough information to deal with macroeconomic questions of economic growth and the size of the economy. I still believe that the shortage of information makes these questions difficult and elusive. I hope that readers who have followed me so far in m…
Economics and Ancient History
This chapter asserts that the economy of the early Roman Empire was primarily a market economy. The parts of this economy located far from each other were not tied together as tightly as markets often are today, but they still functioned as part of a comprehensive Mediterranean market. There are two reasons why this argument is important. First, it brings the description of the Roman economy as a whole into accord with the fragmentary evidence ab…
Data and Hypothesis Tests
The Romans talked and wrote constantly about prices. It seems obvious that they must have been using these prices in their daily lives to leave us so many price quotes. Yet there has been doubt over the years whether the Roman economy was dominated by markets. I reviewed a small corner of this debate in ...
The Political Economy of Preindustrial Korean Trade
Preindustrial Korea had little foreign trade in spite of the advantage of being a small peninsular country. We present a theory of political economy to show that the preindustrial Korean policy of suppressing private trade, like that of China, only can be explained by noneconomic factors such as the consideration of externalities and rulers' incentives, bounded rationality of policymakers, and the path dependence of history. It was a rational or …
The Great Recession & the Great Depression
In the depths of the Great Depression, \nJohn Maynard Keynes wrote that “[p]racticalmen, \nwho believe themselves to be \nquite exempt from any intellectual influence, \nare usually the slaves of some defunct \neconomist.”1 This acute observation \nis applicable to our current Great \nRecession as well. In fact, the newly discredited \nideas are not all that different \nfrom the old, suggesting that Keynes may \nhave overestimated people’s abilit…
Financial Intermediation in the Early Roman Empire
I evaluate the effectiveness of financial markets in the early Roman Empire in this article. I review the theory of financial intermediation to describe a hierarchy of financial sources and survey briefly the history of financial intermediation in eighteenth-century Western Europe to provide a standard against which to evaluate the Roman evidence. I then describe the nature of financial arrangements in the early Roman Empire in terms of this hier…
The end of one big deflation
Labor Scarcity and the Problem of American Industrial Efficiency in the 1850's
Europeans have been coming to America and commenting about the nature of American technology for over a century. Despite the evident economic changes in the course of this century, the comments on the differences between American and European technology—or, more properly for the nineteenth century, on the differences between American and British technology—have stayed remarkably constant. The factors noted by a few British visitors of the 1850's,…
The organization of the grain trade in the early Roman Empire
Rome was an exceedingly large city at the start of the Roman Empire, and it required massive grain imports to feed its population. We argue that Roman merchants organized these imports and that they used a variety of mechanisms to deal with the informational problems of long-distance trade at that time. They used general institutions of Rome, such as its legal and social structures, as well as specific mercantile institutions, such as contracts, …
Iron and Steel in Nineteenth Century America
Journal Article Iron and Steel in Nineteenth Century America Get access Iron and Steel in Nineteenth Century America. By P. Temin. (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965. Pp. viii + 304. $7.50.) Nathan Rosenberg Nathan Rosenberg Purdue University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 76, Issue 304, 1 December 1966, Pages 927–929, https://doi.org/10.2307/2229123 Published: 01 December …
The Gold Standard and the Great Depression
This paper considers why political leaders and central bankers continued to adhere to the gold standard as the Great Depression intensified. We do not focus on the effects of the gold standard on the Depression, which have been documented elsewhere, but on the reasons why policy makers chose the policies they did. We argue that the mentality of the gold standard was pervasive and compelling to the leaders of the interwar economy. It was expressed…
Reckoning with Slavery. A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery
Journal Article DAVID (P. A.), GUTMAN (H. G.), SUTCH (R.), TEMIN (P.) and WRIGHT (G.) Reckoning with Slavery. Get access Reckoning with Slavery. A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery. By P. A. David, H. G. Gutman, R. Sutch, P. Temin and G Wright. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Pp. xvi + 398. £8.75 hardback, £2.95 paperback.) Barry Supple Barry Supple University of Sussex Search for other works by this a…
Steam and Waterpower in the Early Nineteenth Century
The use of steam power in manufacturing has long been recognized as an important part of the English industrial revolution, but in studies of the United States the role of the steam engine in manufacturing has been overshadowed by its application in railroads. This paper attempts partially to redress the balance by examining the use of stationary steam engines in America about 1840. Section I explores the characteristics of the supply of stationa…
The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1914
The Economy of the Early Roman Empire
Many inhabitants of ancient Rome lived well. Tourists marvel at the temples, baths, roads and aqueducts that they built. Economists also want to understand the existence of a flourishing and apparently prosperous economy two millennia ago. Market institutions and a stable government appear to have been the combination that produced this remarkable result. This essay provides an economist's view of the Roman economy that emphasizes the role of mar…
Slavery: The Progressive Institution
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Two Views of the British Industrial Revolution
There are two views of the British Industrial Revolution in the literature today. The more traditional description sees the Industrial Revolution as a broad change in the British economy and society. This broad view of the Industrial Revolution has been challenged by Crafts and Harley who see the Industrial Revolution as the result of technical change in only a few industries. This article presents a test of these views using the Ricardian model …
Is it Kosher to Talk about Culture
This address considers the role of culture in economic history. It argues that AngloSaxon culture was an important factor determining where and when industrialization began and spread. The contrast between Anglo-Saxon individualism and Japan’s more collective culture also is important in understanding the differences between Japanese and American industrial practices today. I predict that Japan’s collective culture may give it an economic edge in…
Product Quality and Vertical Integration in the Early Cotton Textile Industry
This article explores differences between the cotton industries in England and America in the early nineteenth century. I show that the two countries produced almost entirely different products: the Enlish made fine fabrics; the Americans, coarse. The cause of this disjunction is found in the American tariff policy, whichwas influenced by the Massachusetts cotton manufacturers. Since coarse spinning promoted vertical integration, the American pro…
Labor Scarcity in America
Labor Scarcity in America Several years ago I wrote an article attempting to show that the United States had not been vis-a-vis Britain in the nineteenth century, using the conventional meaning of that term., This argument has been widely rejected and even more widely misunderstood, and so I return to it here in order to clarify the central issues involved. I do not want to confound or refute my critics. I want instead to dispel the confusion in …
Private borrowing during the financial revolution: Hoare's Bank and its customers, 1702-241
The financial revolution improved the British government's ability to borrow, and thus its ability to wage war. North and Weingast argued that it also permitted private parties to borrow more cheaply and widely. We test these inferences with evidence from a London bank. We confirm that private bank credit was cheap in the early eighteenth century, but we argue that it was not available widely. Importantly, the government reduced the usury rate in…
Credit rationing and crowding out during the industrial revolution: Evidence from Hoare’s Bank, 1702–1862
Soviet and Nazi economic planning in the 1930s
May 1990
The Beginning of the Depression in Germany
Freedom and coercion: Notes on the analysis of debt peonage in One Kind of Freedom
Interest Rate Restrictions in a Natural Experiment: Loan Allocation and the Change in the Usury Laws in 1714
This article studies the effects of interest rate restrictions on loan allocation. The British government tightened the usury laws in 1714, reducing the maximum permissible interest rate from 6% to 5%. A sample of individual loan transactions reveals that average loan size and minimum loan size increased strongly, while access to credit worsened for those with little social capital. Collateralised credits, which had accounted for a declining shar…
Socialism and Wages in the Recovery from the Great Depression in the United States and Germany
The sustained unemployment in the United States during the recovery from the Great Depression has proved difficult to explain, as has the rapid elimination of unemployment in Germany. I argue that employment in the United States was restricted by high wages, which government policy raised above the level of efficiency wages. Socialist control and military expansion by the Nazis reduced unemployment, but also held down consumption
The Origins of Central Banking in the United States
Journal Article The Origins of Central Banking in the United States. By Richard H. Timberlake, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. ix + 272 pp. Charts, tables, notes, and index. $18.50.) Get access Peter Temin Peter Temin Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 66, Issue 2, September 1979, Pages 391–392, https://doi.org/10.2307/1…
The Post-Bellum Recovery of the South and the Cost of the Civil War
In the last half of the nineteenth century the economy of the American South experienced three separate shocks which have been analyzed separately by different authors. This note synthesizes the literature and presents an integrated story in which the decline in the rate of growth of the demand for cotton (noted by Wright) and the results of emancipation on the southern labor supply (noted by Ransom and Sutch) had equal impacts on measured income…
A Market Economy in the Early Roman Empire
The economy of the early Roman Empire has been an object of study for at least the last century. The discussion has been marked by continuing debate, known sometimes as the primitivist/modern debate and at other times as the Finley debate, following his famous Sather lectures, The Ancient Economy . This paper is a contribution to this debate, written by an economist rather than an ancient historian. My purpose is to define the concept of a ‘marke…
The Composition of Iron and Steel Products, 1869-1909
This paper is concerned with two questions: What was iron and steel used for in the course of the late nineteenth century? And how were the uses of iron and steel affected by changes in the methods of production of iron and steel? The first question asks what was the composition of the iron and steel industry's output, that is, what products were being produced. The second question asks if the changes in this composition were caused by changes in…
Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry
Journal Article Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry. By Peter Temin. (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1964. ix + 304 pp. Tables, notes, appendices, selected bibliography, and index. $7.50.) Get access Stanley L. Engerman Stanley L. Engerman University of Rochester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 52, Issue 2, September 1965, Pages 388–389, https://d…
Iron and Steel in Nineteenth Century America: An Economic Inquiry
The Epic of Steel
Steam and Waterpower in the Early Nineteenth Century
The use of steam power in manufacturing has long been recognized as an important part of the English industrial revolution, but in studies of the United States the role of the steam engine in manufacturing has been overshadowed by its application in railroads. This paper attempts partially to redress the balance by examining the use of stationary steam engines in America about 1840. Section I explores the characteristics of the supply of stationa…
Labor Scarcity and the Problem of American Industrial Efficiency in the 1850's
Europeans have been coming to America and commenting about the nature of American technology for over a century. Despite the evident economic changes in the course of this century, the comments on the differences between American and European technology—or, more properly for the nineteenth century, on the differences between American and British technology—have stayed remarkably constant. The factors noted by a few British visitors of the 1850's,…
Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry
Iron and Steel in Nineteenth Century America
Journal Article Iron and Steel in Nineteenth Century America Get access Iron and Steel in Nineteenth Century America. By P. Temin. (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965. Pp. viii + 304. $7.50.) Nathan Rosenberg Nathan Rosenberg Purdue University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 76, Issue 304, 1 December 1966, Pages 927–929, https://doi.org/10.2307/2229123 Published: 01 December …
Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America. An Economic Enquiry
The Causes of Cotton-Price Fluctuations in the 1830's
A Time-Series Test of Patterns of Industrial Growth
Labor Scarcity and the Problem of American Industrial Efficiency in the 1850's: A Reply
In a recent issue of this Journal , Ian Drummond took issue with my article discussing the relation of labor scarcity to British observations of American industrial efficiency in the 1850's. I tried to show that (1) the contemporary observations were not specific enough to show whether or not Americans were using the same technology as the British; (2) even if the observations showed that the Americans used the same technology as the British, it …
The Economic Consequences of the Bank War
The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1914
Regional Specialization and the Supply of Wheat in the United States, 1867-1914
The Jacksonian Economy
The Jacksonian Economy
Journal Article The Jacksonian Economy. By Peter Temin. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. 208 pp. Charts, tables, notes, appendix, and references cited. $5.50.) Get access Mary Young Mary Young Ohio State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 56, Issue 4, March 1970, Pages 910–912, https://doi.org/10.2307/1917545 Published: 01 March 1970
The Jacksonian Economy
Journal Article P. Temin. The Jacksonian Economy Get access The Jacksonian Economy. By P. Temin. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. Pp. 208. $5.50 (cloth), $1.95 (paper).) B. R. Mitchell B. R. Mitchell Trinity College, Cambridge. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 80, Issue 320, 1 December 1970, Pages 964–966, https://doi.org/10.2307/2229924 Published: 01 December 1970
The Jacksonian Economy
Regional Specialization and the Supply of Wheat in the United States, 1867-1914: A Reply
Franklin M. Fisher, Peter Temin, Regional Specialization and the Supply of Wheat in the United States, 1867-1914: A Reply, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Feb., 1971), pp. 102-103
Technological Change: The United States and Britain in the 19th Century
The Jacksonian Economy
General-Equilibrium Models in Economic History
In this paper, I will discuss three classic problems in economic history. I label them "classic" because they are problems of general interest that share the central characteristic of classic problems: an extensive literature has not led to general agreement. They are taken from the literature on the history of the United States because of the wealth of data and secondary material on this country's history, but they all have their analogues or re…
The Jacksonian Economy
The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities
Economics (102 works) · Political science (73 works) · History (67 works) · Law (47 works) · Economic history (35 works) · Business (32 works) · History (32 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (30 works) · Computer Science (29 works) · Keynesian economics (26 works)