Robert Higgs
Biographic Data
| ID | 479469 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Higgs |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Higgs |
| SIGNATURE | HIGGS R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2909-6555 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 265 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
A Ascensão Do Ocidente Representou a Ascensão Da Liberdade E Da Opulência
The US exit from Afghanistan in 2021, at the same time as it haunted the world, rekindled the memory of the historically experienced differences between East and West. Out of the commonplace that the COVID-19 Pandemic makes China focus on the sanitary, military, political and economic protagonism of geopolitical ruptures, the rest of Asia, for most Westerners, sounds like a territory prone to exoticism, archaism and , to some extent, to internati…
Tracing the curation of Indigenous knowledge in a biopiracy case
This study presents a constructivist grounded theory study of curation and biopiracy of the San people’s knowledge about Hoodia. The “discoveries” and records of the Hoodia species by Carl P. Thunberg, Francis Masson, as well as the recorded experience of Rudolf Marloth, led to scientific experiments and commercial trials in an attempt to develop slimming drugs. This study has identified key layers and knowledge domains that have added new layers…
The Complex Course of Ideological Change
Ideologies are somewhat coherent, rather comprehensive belief systems about social relations, each such system having cognitive, moral, programmatic, and solidary aspects. Such belief systems have played a critical role in determining the nature of the economic order and the size of government, among other things, but scholars have yet to formulate a convincing account of how and why ideological change occurs. In this article, the author discusse…
Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society
Wartime Socialization of Investment: A Reassessment of U.S. Capital Formation in the 1940s
During World War II, the U.S. government displaced private investors. According to NIPA data for the period 1942–1945, net private investment was negative 99.4 billion. Although economists have credited this government investment with various contributions to wartime and postwar economic growth, the bulk of it had little or no value beyond its immediate contribution to winning the war. This episode dramatically exposes a fundamental but false ass…
On Ackerman's Justification of Irregular Constitutional Change: Is Any Vice You Get Away With a Virtue
From Central planning to the Market: The American Transition, 1945–1947
The orthodox view of U.S. reconversion after World War II relies on unacceptable GDP figures for the wartime economy and misinterprets the low level of unemployment during the war. For the postwar transtition, the emphasis on consumer demand financed by drawing down liquid assets accumulated during the war is inconsistent with the facts. The success of the transition depended on the reestablishement of “regime certainty,” which in turn depended o…
God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America
From the worship of Michael Jordan to the downfall of O.J. Simpson, it has become clear that sports and sports heroes have assumed a role in American society far out of proportion to their traditional value. In this powerful critique of present-day American popular culture, Robert J. Higgs examines the complex and increasingly pervasive control that sports wield in shaping the national self-image. He provides a thoughtful history and analysis of …
God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America
Journal Article God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America, by Robert J. Higgs. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995, xv + 383 pp. $39.95 (clth), $15.95 (pbk) Get access Thomas C. Langham Thomas C. Langham Our Lady of the Lake University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 58, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 100–101, https://doi.org/10.2307/3712114 Published: 01 January 1997
God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America
Journal Article God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America. By Robert J. Higgs. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. xvi, 383 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8131-1923-5. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-8131-0853-5.) Get access James S. Olson James S. Olson Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 3, December 1996, Page…
War and Comparative Politics
War and leviathan in twentieth-century America
Coercion is not a societal constant: Reply to Samuels
Warren Samuels maintains that every society has a constant amount of coercion and order, which vary only in terms of who gains and who loses, because every society has a government that establishes property rights. In making these arguments, Samuels exaggerates the extent to which governmental decisions predetermine the workings of a market society, and he fails to recognize that, with regard to the attainment of specific socioeconomic outcomes, …
The Cold War Economy: Opportunity Costs, Ideology, and the Politics of Crisis
Federalism, State Action, and “Critical Episodes” in the Growth of American Government: Reply to Ballard Campbell
Ballard Campbell claims to have identified “flaws in [the] analytical perspective” I employed in Crisis and Leviathan (1987). My sins of omission, he alleges, arise from concentrating on the growth of federal economic powers, thereby losing sight of the various noneconomic dimensions of government and “ignoring the reality of federalism in the United States,” especially before 1930. The upshot is “an imbalance that distorts the history of America…
Federalism, State Action, and "Critical Episodes" in the Growth of American Government: Reply to Ballard Campbell
Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s
Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is t…
Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Historical Economics: Art or Science
Charles P. Kindleberger's writing has ranged widely in the past, from international economics to such specialized topics as the Marshall Plan. In recent years, however, his perspective has shifted to one that tempers the rigidity of technical economics with the flexibility of the liberal arts. Historical economics, drawing on history, politics, cultural anthropology, sociology, and geography, bridges the gap between abstraction and fact engendere…
Eighteen problematic propositions in the analysis of the growth of government
Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Journal Article Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. by Robert Higgs. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990. xxxii + 295 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $19.95.) Get access James C. Schneider James C. Schneider University of Texas, San Antonio Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 3, December 1991, Page 1144, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078…
Military Expenditure: The Political Economy of International Security
Journal Article Military Expenditure: The Political Economy of International Security. Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical Contemporary Perspectives. The Economics of Defence Spending: An International Survey. Get access Military Expenditure: The Political Economy of International Security. By SAADET DEGER and SOMNATH SEN (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xii+186. ISBN o 19 829141 8.)Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical C…
Origins of the corporate liberal state
Martin J. Sklar's The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, a revisionist account of the early antitrust laws in particular and the political economy of the Progressive Era in general, offers a wealth of detailed research and a particularly valuable reinterpretation of the jurisprudence of antitrust law during the period 1890–1911. A neo‐Marxist framework of analysis, however, detracts from the work and causes Sklar to misread the valu…
Do legislators' votes reflect constituency preference? A simple way to evaluate the Senate
Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
Race, Skills, and Earnings: American Immigrants in 1909
On December 5, 1910, the Immigration Commission presented its voluminous report to the Congress. Though the report covered a multitude of topics, a central theme was that the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were earning less than the “old” immigrants from northwestern Europe because the newcomers were willing to accept a lower standard of living. “They were,” the commission concluded, “content to accept wages and conditions whic…
Mortality in rural America, 1870–1920: Estimates and conjectures
Contractual Mix in Southern Agriculture since the Civil War: Facts, Hypotheses, and Tests
In the South after 1865, workers and property owners employed a variety of contracts-wage payment, crop sharing, and land rental-to bring together cooperating resources in agricultural production. The contractual mix varied over time and space, depending on the relative resource endowments of the contracting parties, the prevailing risk conditions, and the transactions costs of alternative contractual arrangements. To understand the contractual m…
Cycles and trends of mortality in 18 large American cities, 1871–1900
Race, Tenure, and Resource Allocation in Southern Agriculture, 1910
This paper investigates the organization of southern agricultural enterprise in 1910, with special regard for the interrelations of race, land tenure conditions, and the allocation of resources. After surveying the distribution of farmers and land among the major racial and tenure classes, I seek to answer two main questions. First, what determined the distribution of farm rental contracts between share-rent and fixed-rent forms, and did the tena…
Participation of blacks and immigrants in the American Merchant class, 1890–1910: Some demographic relations
Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s
Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is t…
Cotton, corn, and risk in the nineteenth century: Another view
Crisis, bigger government, and ideological change: Two hypotheses on the ratchet phenomenon
War and Comparative Politics
Patterns of Farm Rental in the Georgia Cotton Belt, 1880-1900
The story of the post-bellum reorganization of southern agriculture has been told many times, and the main features of the transition from slave to free labor are well known. Throughout the cotton economy the initial experiments with wage labor gave way to share-rent tenancy; later fixed-rent tenancy became common as well. That these changes resulted from an adjustment process in which both landlords and laborers increasingly recognized different…
Do legislators' votes reflect constituency preference? A simple way to evaluate the Senate
American Inventiveness, 1870-1920
This paper extends the wealth-maximization model of invention in a new direction by taking into account the costs of information and by relating those costs to the urban-rural distribution of the population. The major empirical finding, obtained through a multiple regression analysis, is that the proportion of the population in urban areas and the number of inventions per capita were closely associated during the 1870-1920 period for a cross sect…
The Complex Course of Ideological Change
Ideologies are somewhat coherent, rather comprehensive belief systems about social relations, each such system having cognitive, moral, programmatic, and solidary aspects. Such belief systems have played a critical role in determining the nature of the economic order and the size of government, among other things, but scholars have yet to formulate a convincing account of how and why ideological change occurs. In this article, the author discusse…
Wartime Socialization of Investment: A Reassessment of U.S. Capital Formation in the 1940s
During World War II, the U.S. government displaced private investors. According to NIPA data for the period 1942–1945, net private investment was negative 99.4 billion. Although economists have credited this government investment with various contributions to wartime and postwar economic growth, the bulk of it had little or no value beyond its immediate contribution to winning the war. This episode dramatically exposes a fundamental but false ass…
From Central planning to the Market: The American Transition, 1945–1947
The orthodox view of U.S. reconversion after World War II relies on unacceptable GDP figures for the wartime economy and misinterprets the low level of unemployment during the war. For the postwar transtition, the emphasis on consumer demand financed by drawing down liquid assets accumulated during the war is inconsistent with the facts. The success of the transition depended on the reestablishement of “regime certainty,” which in turn depended o…
Landless by Law: Japanese Immigrants in California Agriculture to 1941
The Japanese occupy a unique place in the history of America's immigrants. They were denied the privilege of naturalization (until 1952), forbidden to purchase or lease farm land (in California, 1913-1956), driven from their homes by the wartime evacuation and confined in concentration camps (1942-1945). Yet the Japanese are now one of the most successful of all ethnic groups in America. The narrative of this remarkable experience has been writte…
Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
Journal Article Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. By Robert Higgs. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. xxi + 350 pp. $24.95.) Get access Joel H. Silbey Joel H. Silbey Cornell University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 3, December 1988, Pages 973–974, https://doi.org/10.2307/1901655 Published: 01 December 1988
God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America
Journal Article God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America. By Robert J. Higgs. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. xvi, 383 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8131-1923-5. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-8131-0853-5.) Get access James S. Olson James S. Olson Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 3, December 1996, Page…
The Cold War Economy: Opportunity Costs, Ideology, and the Politics of Crisis
Coercion is not a societal constant: Reply to Samuels
Warren Samuels maintains that every society has a constant amount of coercion and order, which vary only in terms of who gains and who loses, because every society has a government that establishes property rights. In making these arguments, Samuels exaggerates the extent to which governmental decisions predetermine the workings of a market society, and he fails to recognize that, with regard to the attainment of specific socioeconomic outcomes, …
The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865-1914: An Essay in Interpretation
Journal Article The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865–1914: An Essay in Interpretation. By Robert Higgs. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971. xv + 143 pp. Maps, charts, tables, appendix, bibliography, and index.) 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 59, Issue 3, December 1972, Pages 718–719, …
Williamson and Swanson on city growth: A critique
Colonial New England Demography: A Sampling Approach
HIS paper presents a more broadly based collection of quantitative evidence than has previously been available on the demography of colonial New England. This subject has recently attracted considerable research, but existing studies suffer from a serious restrictioneach deals with only a single town.' Unfortunately, each town was to a large extent a special case; the demographic characteristics of each were shaped by a variety of strictly local …
Military Expenditure: The Political Economy of International Security
Journal Article Military Expenditure: The Political Economy of International Security. Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical Contemporary Perspectives. The Economics of Defence Spending: An International Survey. Get access Military Expenditure: The Political Economy of International Security. By SAADET DEGER and SOMNATH SEN (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xii+186. ISBN o 19 829141 8.)Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical C…
Williamson and Swanson on city growth: A critique
Colonial New England Demography: A Sampling Approach
HIS paper presents a more broadly based collection of quantitative evidence than has previously been available on the demography of colonial New England. This subject has recently attracted considerable research, but existing studies suffer from a serious restrictioneach deals with only a single town.' Unfortunately, each town was to a large extent a special case; the demographic characteristics of each were shaped by a variety of strictly local …
Regional Specialization and the Supply of Wheat in the United States, 1867-1914: A Comment
In a recent article in this Review, Franklin M. Fisher and Peter Temin [2] seek to illuminate the influence of regional specialization and the causes of Populism by estimating supply functions for wheat during the 1867-1914 period. Unfortunately, a fundamental error in their application of the model to the data mars the study. As a result their findings are difficult, if not impossible, to interpret, and I am skeptical that any light has in fact …
American Inventiveness, 1870-1920
This paper extends the wealth-maximization model of invention in a new direction by taking into account the costs of information and by relating those costs to the urban-rural distribution of the population. The major empirical finding, obtained through a multiple regression analysis, is that the proportion of the population in urban areas and the number of inventions per capita were closely associated during the 1870-1920 period for a cross sect…
Race, Skills, and Earnings: American Immigrants in 1909
On December 5, 1910, the Immigration Commission presented its voluminous report to the Congress. Though the report covered a multitude of topics, a central theme was that the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were earning less than the “old” immigrants from northwestern Europe because the newcomers were willing to accept a lower standard of living. “They were,” the commission concluded, “content to accept wages and conditions whic…
The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865-1914: An Essay in Interpretation
Journal Article The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865–1914: An Essay in Interpretation. By Robert Higgs. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971. xv + 143 pp. Maps, charts, tables, appendix, bibliography, and index.) 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 59, Issue 3, December 1972, Pages 718–719, …
The Study of Economic History: Collected Inaugural Lectures, 1893-1970
Economic History and the Social Sciences: Problems of Methodology
Science, Technology, and Economic Growth in the Eighteenth Century
Who Unbound Prometheus? Science and Technical Change, 1600-1800/ Peter Mathias. 2. The Diffusion of Technology in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution/A E Musson. 3 Some Statistics of the Industrial Revolution in Britain/T S Ashton. 4 The Natural History of Industry/Charles C Gillespie. 5 The Industrial Orientation of Science in the Lunar Society of Birmingham/Robert E Schofield. 6 Vitriol in the Industrial Revolution/Archibald Clow and…
Race, Tenure, and Resource Allocation in Southern Agriculture, 1910
This paper investigates the organization of southern agricultural enterprise in 1910, with special regard for the interrelations of race, land tenure conditions, and the allocation of resources. After surveying the distribution of farmers and land among the major racial and tenure classes, I seek to answer two main questions. First, what determined the distribution of farm rental contracts between share-rent and fixed-rent forms, and did the tena…
Mortality in rural America, 1870–1920: Estimates and conjectures
Transformation of the American Economy, 1865-1914: An Essay in Interpretation
Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company
Patterns of Farm Rental in the Georgia Cotton Belt, 1880-1900
The story of the post-bellum reorganization of southern agriculture has been told many times, and the main features of the transition from slave to free labor are well known. Throughout the cotton economy the initial experiments with wage labor gave way to share-rent tenancy; later fixed-rent tenancy became common as well. That these changes resulted from an adjustment process in which both landlords and laborers increasingly recognized different…
Participation of blacks and immigrants in the American Merchant class, 1890–1910: Some demographic relations
Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American economy 1865-1914
Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American economy, 1865–1914 is a reinterpretation of black economic history in the half-century after Emancipation. Its central theme is that economic competition and racial coercion jointly determined the material condition of the blacks. The book identifies a number of competitive processes that played important roles in protecting blacks from the racial coercion to which they were peculiarly vulnerable. …
Cotton, corn, and risk in the nineteenth century: Another view
Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914
Landless by Law: Japanese Immigrants in California Agriculture to 1941
The Japanese occupy a unique place in the history of America's immigrants. They were denied the privilege of naturalization (until 1952), forbidden to purchase or lease farm land (in California, 1913-1956), driven from their homes by the wartime evacuation and confined in concentration camps (1942-1945). Yet the Japanese are now one of the most successful of all ethnic groups in America. The narrative of this remarkable experience has been writte…
Mortality differentials within large American cities in 1890
The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century
Journal Article The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. By Gavin Wright. (New York: Norton, 1978. xv + 205 pp. Maps, charts, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $10.95.) Get access Robert Higgs Robert Higgs University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 66, Issue 1, June 1979, Page 153, https://d…
Cycles and trends of mortality in 18 large American cities, 1871–1900
Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914
Association Notes
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Edward franklin meeker (1943–1980)
Political science (36 works) · Economics (34 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Law (24 works) · Law (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · History (16 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (12 works)