Development of the American economy.

• Position: Bureau News

The NBER's Program on Development of the American Economy met in Cambridge on March 6. Program Director Claudia Goldin of Harvard University organized the meeting. These papers were discussed:

2. Zorina Khan, NBER and Bowdoin College, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, NBER and University of California, Los Angeles, "Institutions and Democratic Invention in 19th Century: Evidence from the Great Inventors of the United States, 1790-1930"

John J. Wallis, NBER and University of Maryland, and Barry. R. Weingast, Stanford University, "Equilibrium Impotence: Why the States and Not the American National Government Financed Infrastructure Investment in the Antebellum Era"

Price V. Fishback and Shawn Kantor, NBER and University of Arizona, and Todd C. Neumann, University of Arizona, "New Deal Work Relief and Private Wages"

Eric Hilt, NBER and Wellesley College, "Incentives in Corporations: Evidence from the American Whaling Industry"

Kris J. Mitchener, NBER and Santa Clara University, and Marc Weidenmier, NBER and Claremont McKenna College, "Empire, Public Goods, and the Roosevelt Corollary"

Using a dataset encompassing over 400 "great inventors" born between 1740 and 1885 and active in the United States, Khan and Sokoloff highlight a crucial institution whose role in accounting for the remarkably broad socioeconomic composition of invention in the United States during the 19th century has not been fully appreciated. The U.S. patent system was revolutionary in its extension of property rights in technology to an extremely wide spectrum of the population. Moreover, it was exceptional in recognizing that it was in the public interest that patent rights, like other property rights, be clearly defined, well enforced, and transacted easily. The authors demonstrate that those 19th century skeptics who contended that only an elite segment was capable of truly important invention, and therefore that an extension of property rights in technology to the general population would have no beneficial effect on the pace of technical progress, were wrong. Individuals of humble origin and limited formal schooling were much more likely to invest in inventive activity in the United States than in Britain, and indeed were prominent among the "great inventors" through the 19th century, not only because of the far lower cost of obtaining a patent, but also because the examination system facilitated the use of a patent as a general asset that could be sold, licensed, or offered as...