Showing papers by "Jane Humphries published in 1999"

Cliometrics, child labor, and the industrial revolution

Abstract: Ten years ago, Clark Nardinelli shocked conventional historians by reinterpreting child labor as a sensible response to the Industrial Revolution. Nardinelli's exculpation of child labor follows front the way in which he deploys neoclassical economic theory. How relevant is his neoclassical model to the early industrial economy, and how realistic is methodological individualism to the decisions that sent young children into the appalling work places of early industrial Britain? Rather than seeing neoclassical economics as a substitute for historical judgment, as Nardinelli suggests, I propose that we use it critically to probe the meaning and implications of child labor in its historical context.

Destined for deprivation: human capital formation and intergenerational poverty in nineteenth-century england

Abstract: A model illustrates the intergenerational transmission of poverty through the effects of shocks to family income on children's general education and health and subsequently on their capacity to work and earn as adults. Evidence for nineteenth-century Britain shows that being fatherless, and so likely poor, had an adverse effect on children's human capital acquisition. However, policy intervention in the form of the Old Poor Law blocked the transmission of poverty and avoided permanent pauperism. Even at an early stage of development, redistribution emerges as a positive contribution to economic growth, not a luxury that poor countries can ill afford.