A New Look at U.S. Agricultural Productivity Growth, 1800–1910

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.