United States Transport Advance and Externalities: A Comment

Thomas Weiss

The Journal of Economic History, 1968, vol. 28, issue 4, 631-634

Abstract: Approximately two years ago Stanley Lebergott took issue with the finding “that the rise of the railroads was relatively unimportant” to the American economy of the nineteenth century (p. 438). Lebergott dis-missed the low estimates of social savings as “startling but uninteresting,” and offered an alternative estimate of railroad importance. He asked the important question “by how much the railroad reduced real costs of transport from those that would have prevailed under a regime of wagoners and boatmen” (p. 441). He approached the answer by way of two other questions. Given cost and technological data, “what was the maximum volume of goods that could be distributed per year by a mile of canal and by a mile of railroad where both could reasonably be built? And how great was that volume per dollar of investment?” (p. 422). Using nineteenth-century data in his inimitably artistic manner, Lebergott fashioned an answer suggesting that the consequences of railroad construction were “surely the stuff of significant economic change” (p. 466).

Date: 1968
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