This short book has a novel thesis, which is that the degree of factor mobility at the national level influenced the politics of foreign-trade policies. When factor mobility was high, tariff legislation was class legislation. When mobility was low, tariffs were decided by interest-group competition. Michael Hiscox brings data on mobility to bear on the history of foreign trade policies of the six countries—the United States, Britain, France, Sweden, Canada, and Australia—over the last one or two hundred years or so, devoting a chapter to each. He then tests his ideas quantitatively on U.S. congressional voting between 1924 and 1994, finding that, when the indicators of factor mobility were low, an “interest group theory” better explains U.S. tariff politics than does a “class legislation theory” (and the reverse when mobility was high).

For those taken in by the title of this book (as I was, in agreeing to review it) this volume will be a disappointment. It turns out to be a collection of lectures which, as the author tells us, “reflects the development of my interests in recent years, involving themes such as the rise of East Asia, Protectionism, and cultural, institutional, and structural changes [mldr ] all informed by my original professional perspective as an economic historian” (p. xvi).

In this engaging book, David Galenson formulates a complex question about modern art that he tries to answer with statistics, analysis, and exposition, enlivened with a rich sprinkling of well-chosen quotes. Posing an initial question “At what stage of their lives have modern painters normally done their best work?,” he finds that this age varies widely from artist to artist. This leads to the central problem: “is it by chance that some have made their greatest contributions early in their careers, and others late in theirs, or is there some general explanation that accounts for the variation?” (p. 4).

This volume explores phenomena frequently noted (yet seldom analyzed) in the scholarly literature: the profound similarities in the industrialization processes and the contemporary political economies of Germany and Japan. These parallels—not just in the early stages of industrialization, but through the experiences of depression and war, and on to the rise of postwar “miracle” economies in both nations—are often casually ascribed to the late-developer effect, to the strategic imitation of German economic institutions in Japan, or to cultural factors, from lingering “feudal remnants” to enduring “traditional” social structures. Tagging the economic regimes which had evolved in Germany and Japan by the 1970s “nonliberal” capitalist systems, the essays in this collection seek to investigate systematically “the many similarities between the two capitalisms, the no less intriguing differences between them, and the differences between the two and Anglo-American ‘standard capitalism’” (p. xiii). More specifically, this volume examines “the origins of some of the social institutions that have constrained the spread of free markets within the capitalist economies of Germany and Japan while providing them with alternate mechanisms of economic governance” (p. 5). Throughout, the contributors argue for a more subtle, historically grounded, and systematic understanding of the distinctive practices and institutions of the German and Japanese “nationally embedded capitalisms.”

The central theme of this book is the interplay of women's employment and the macro-economy in postwar Germany and Japan. David Kucera introduces the distinction between two possible types of flexibility in the labor market. The first occurs in the absence of interference with the market mechanism from laws or institutions. This flexibility may reduce unemployment and increase the response time to shocks, at the cost of low wages and insufficient training. In the second type of flexibility, a buffer group provides this flexibility, while core workers are protected from the vagaries of the market and receive training and high wages. Kucera argues that by using women as a buffer group to protect men, Japan is able at a macro-level to reap the benefits of both the “low-road” and “high-road” approaches. Bolstering this argument, and showing that Germany pursues instead the simpler “high-road” strategy, is the most important aim of the book.

In the 1970s the United States had far higher wages than the rest of the developed world; 1979–1981 median weakly earnings of men in full-time employment were $609 in 1998 prices, compared to an average of $419 across six other developed countries. However, the United States also had a higher unemployment rate; in 1973 it was 4.8 percent compared to an average of 2.1 percent in 11 other countries. Fast forward two decades. Median real wages in the United States, although still higher than in the other countries, had fallen 5.5 percent whereas in the other countries they had increased an average of 22.6 percent. However, whereas the unemployment rate in the United States fell slightly over the period, it skyrocketed in most of the other countries, averaging 8.2 percent in the European Union in 1999. By the late 1990s the United States also differed from the rest of the developed world in a number of other labor-market outcomes. The U.S. had: a lower average duration of unemployment and less prevalent long-term unemployment, higher labor-force participation rates among both men and women, longer average hours of work over the course of the year, and greater earnings inequality.