Manpower in economic growth: the American record since 1800

In parts II and III a basis of vantage is provided for those who would construct their own inference and conclusions. The variety of new statistical series on employment, unemployment, wages, and cost of living presented there suggest new measures of the trend in our real output. They point to somewhat different conclusions as the extent and timing of our growth advances than do existing measures of real product. The new wage measures report a pattern of stability and advance that differs from earlier estimates, which typically applied only to factory workers or to other partial totals of the labor force. And the new employment measures, when combined with new GNP estimates of Kuznets, imply different changes in labor requirements per unit of output than those asserted by prior studies.
The present work probably has too much history for most statisticians, too many statistics for most historians, and too much economies to suit either group. Yet its major shortcoming is probably that it benefits too little from what these separate yet complementary disciplines can offer. Hopefully the exceptionally able group beginning to rewrite economic history for our generation will remedy this lack. And it is to be anticipated that a partial effort of one person will be superseded by substantial endeavors that take full advantage of both modern machine computation. procedures and the multitudinous materials in archives and libraries that are ready for the gleaning.