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Title: A New Look at U.S. Agricultural Productivity Growth, 1800-1910

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 1996

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Abstract: A debate has recently been re-ignited over the pace of long-run productivity growth in nineteenth-century agriculture. Before 1966 the view was one of accelerated productivity over the course of the century, and this view was confirmed by the statistics on farm gross product published in 1960 by Marvin Towne and Wayne Rasmussen. The appearance in 1966 of Stanley Lebergott's labor force series changed this traditional perspective. When combined with Towne and Rasmussen's output figures, Lebergott's figures suggested that productivity growth was slower after the Civil War than before, calling into question the more plausible pattern of postbellum increases. A few historians were skeptical of these new findings, but were unable to dispute the seemingly solid foundation upon which they were built. Finally in 1993, Thomas Weiss argued that the skeptics were in fact correct to be wary of Lebergott's revisions.Clearly, a major determinant of agricultural productivity estimates is the number of workers one attributes to the agricultural sector and, in particular, how one deals with the category labeled "Laborers (not specified)" and arbitrarily allocated to the nonagricultural sector by the Census Bureau. Weiss created a revised agricultural labor force series that allocated such laborers in a more reliable way than Lebergott had done. This reallocation of the unspecified laborers eliminated the unexplainable high rise in productivity in Lebergott's series during the period from 1820 to 1840, a rise that had been responsible for much of the perceived postbellum slowdown in agricultural productivity. Weiss's new and more accurate series displayed marked increases in output per worker after the Civil War. The rather puzzling finding in Weiss's study, however, is the dramatically sharp and inexplicable increase in agricultural productivity during the 1860s.In this note we make three contributions to the productivity debate: a systematic technique for allocating laborers to agriculture, a correction to Weiss's output per worker estimates for the period from 1860 to 1900, and a confirmation of the traditional view.

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Authors: Zahrt, Elizabeth; Geib-Gundersen, Lisa

Periodical (Full): The Journal of Economic History

Issue: 3

Volume: 56

Pages: 679-686

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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