West Virginia University’s Joshua Hall is the very definition of an academic entrepreneur: someone who notices a misalignment in production and realigns it. This collection, edited by Hall and historian Marcus Witcher of Huntingdon College, is an example of such entrepreneurship and a timely contribution in light of the ways in which economics — and public choice economics in particular — have come under fire from the “new history of capitalism.”

I talked with Hall about this project at the 2019 Southern Economic Association meeting. He described his and Witcher’s strategy for the collection: they looked for interesting papers that have circulated or sat in filing cabinets for quite some time — decades, in some cases — unpublished. This is how they got contributions from a mix of young, more established, and very prominent scholars. There are a lot of names that will be very familiar to readers of the public choice literature and there are contributions from several prominent economic historians.

Suffice it to say that I am sympathetic to this project (and, I should acknowledge, professionally and personally acquainted with some of the contributors). Hence, I worried that I would have too-great expectations for the project. Nonetheless, it largely does not disappoint. Some of the contributions are straightforward cliometric — quantitative/​historical — analysis applied to political issues. Others read like proposals or proofs of concept. Some of the analyses, like the papers by Phil Magness on southern secession and Jayme Lemke and Julia Norgaard on the role of “club women” in the provision of public goods, are counterexamples — critics might say the exceptions that prove the rule — to the criticism that public choice ignores issues of race, class, and gender.

What scholars should write / The set begins promisingly with a contribution from King’s College economist Vincent Geloso that marries one of the traditional concerns of public choice theory — public debt and budgeting — with the oppression of a minority and an explanation of the American Revolution. Geloso studies the expulsion of the French-speaking Acadians from Atlantic Canada beginning in 1755 and points out some familiar tropes that will be familiar to observers of oppression. (For instance, the Acadians were “lazy” according to stereotypes). He explains how their expulsion was basically a land grab by British settlers cloaked in bias against French-speaking Catholics and the language of security. It was, he argues, part of a fiscal debacle that contributed to the American Revolution.

The volumes in Public Choice Analyses of American Economic History contain several contributions on the American founding specifically and the less-than-perfect compromises that made the U.S. Constitution possible. A chapter by University of Akron economist Robert McGuire evaluates a handful of these compromises in a manner that changed my belief that the Electoral College was created specifically to protect slavery and the slave interest.

This is followed by an argument from University of Central Arkansas economist David Mitchell that “the economic theory of regulation provides a better analytical framework for understanding the changes in U.S. tax policy” than that developed by Robert Higgs in his 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan. A public choice perspective on the history of regulation and subsidy is especially useful.

UCLA economic historian Dora Costa explains how public health insurance would not have benefited workers much beyond what they already had. That idea is consistent with historian David T. Beito’s From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State and economist John Murray’s Origins of American Health Insurance. What mattered, Costa argues, was replacing lost earnings rather than securing health care, which likely did not have much value at the time. It raises an interesting question for modern public policy: would we get more bang for the next buck we spend if we spend it on something like sanitation as opposed to health care?

In addition to these, the collection offers studies of such topics as the determinants of federal grants to states, the compromises that led to the U.S. Constitution (including interesting analyses of the 1783 nationalist movement and the Federalist and Anti-Federalist information networks), analysis of the political economy of veterans’ benefits, labor regulation, banking regulation, mining regulation, the Apollo program, home rule, education, political partisanship, immigration restrictions, women’s suffrage, the provision of local public goods by “club women,” and rent-seeking in antebellum banking.

The two most important contributions, I think, are those by economic historians Magness and Howard Bodenhorn. Magness offers a novel explanation of southern secession in terms of protecting government aid to the slave regime. With the election of Abraham Lincoln, it appeared to the slave-owning elite that the federal gravy train was slowing and they would need to establish a different one in a new national capital in Montgomery, AL or, later, Richmond, VA.

As Bodenhorn notes in his contribution (which appears as the final chapter in the collection), “While the private seeking of private monopoly is now economically insignificant, nineteenth-century America was built on it.” If he is right — and I think he is — then we need public choice analysis if we are to understand American economic history. His paper is a model of the kind of works scholars should write: a theoretically, quantitatively, and historically rigorous estimate of the drag on the economy from the rent-seeking society. Readers of Regulation know that institutions matter and we are better off if the rules encourage production rather than predation. Bodenhorn offers a useful step toward helping scholars figure out just how much better off we might be without institutions encouraging as much institutionalized theft.

The timing for this collection is right, given the recent emphasis on the supposed link between slavery and American economic growth.

Some criticisms / Hall and Witcher do what good editors do with collections like these: reduce search costs and bring good papers into a single place. The collection suffers, however, from a lack of clarity of purpose. The papers are public choice analyses and they are about American economic history. They are, however, assembled without apparent rhyme, reason, or unifying themes. The papers bounce from topic to topic seemingly randomly. Given that it is a three-volume collection, they would have done well, I think, to assemble the papers topically or chronologically. The collection would have benefited from having all the papers on banking, for example, put together, with at least some idea as to how they complement one another.

Moreover, the collection would have been much improved by an editors’ introduction explaining what they were doing. It would be useful to know at the outset that some of the papers are vintage unpublished papers by leading scholars, and it would be especially useful to know what warrants their publication now. Having taught both economic history and public choice, it is pretty obvious to me why the public choice paradigm is a useful — even essential — way for thinking about the past, but it might not be so obvious to a lot of readers. In particular, a lot of historical analysis explains historical change in terms of people’s interests. What, we might wonder, are the important differences between a public choice analysis or a more traditional historical analysis following, for example, in the Marxist tradition? The not-yet-converted, I suspect, will read the papers in this collection and continue in their unbelief.

That said, the papers collected in these volumes suggest potentially fruitful directions for further research (some of which I am working on myself). In all, Hall and Witcher have assembled a series of essays by younger and more established scholars that fill a gap in our understanding of American economic and political history. The timing is right, too, in light of recent emphasis on the supposed link between slavery and American economic growth and claims made about the (alleged) racially problematic roots of public choice theory in Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains and the growing body of work drawing on her claims. (See “Buchanan the Evil Genius,” Fall 2017.)

Unfortunately, these books are priced for university libraries: the three volumes together run about $270. For the scholar interested in public choice, American economic history, or both, the volumes would be worth an email to Interlibrary Loan — or a visit by the Springer table at the next conference to see how deep a discount they are offering.