The Internet is the latest in a long succession of communication technologies. The goal of thiswork is to draw lessons from the evolution of all these services. Little attention is paid to technologyas such, since that has changed radically many times. Instead, the stress is on the steady growth...

The current push for bandwidth caps, tiered usage pricing, and other measures in both wireless and wireline communications is usually justified by invoking the specter of “bandwidth hogs” consuming an unfair share of the transmission capacity and being subsidized by the bulk of the users....

Technology appears to be making fine-scale charging (as in tolls on roads that depend on time of day or even on current and anticipated levels of congestion) increasingly feasible. Such charging also appears to be increasingly desirable, as traffic on roads continues to grow and costs and public...

The routes of early railways around the world were generally inefficient because the prevailing doctrine of the time called for concentrating on provision of fast service between major cities and neglect of local traffic. Modern planners rely on methods such as the "gravity models of spatial...

Gullibility is the principal cause of bubbles. Investors and the general public get snared by a "beautiful illusion" and throw caution to the wind. Attempts to identify and control bubbles are complicated by the fact that the authorities who might naturally be expected to take action have often...

Charles Mackay's book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" enjoys extraordinarily high renown in the financial industry and among the press and the public. It also has an extraordinarily low reputation among historians.This paper argues that Mackay's sins of commission...

It is well known that the great Railway Mania in Britain in the1840s had a great impact on accounting. This paper contributes a description and analysis of the events that led to this revolution, and of the key role played by Robert Lucas Nash in those events. He was a pioneer in accounting and...

The collapse of an investment mania usually reminds people that the phrase "This time is different" is dangerous. Recollections of this mantra then typically either state outright or at least imply that "It is never different." However, there is at least one counterexample to this cautious view,...

The British Railway Mania of the 1840s was by many measures the greatest technology mania in history, and its collapse was one of the greatest financial crashes. It has attracted surprisingly little scholarly interest. In particular, it has not been noted that it provides a convincing...

The first three sections illustrate how the British establishment viewed gilts mispricing around 1870, and how the markets reacted to a government debt conversion proposal of that year. This is followed by a section on general government policy towards investors in national debt instruments....