The relation of theoretical economics to empirical historical analysis has been one of the central problems of economic historians ever since the recognition of economic history as a separate discipline. Recent studies in logic and philosophy, by constructing new frames of meaning for both theory and history, have opened up several avenues for a fresh approach to this and other problems of importance to the historian and the economist.

One of the recent tendencies in the United States has been the movement away from private methods of finance to finance through government agencies, a trend that has been particularly noticeable during periods of national catastrophe such as wars and depressions. In these periods we have seen, in addition to other sources of government financing, the use of the War Finance Corporation during World War I and the use on a far larger scale of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Great Depression and World War II.

During World War II two thirds of a total expenditure for industrial facilities of approximately $25 billion was directly financed by the government. In contrast, during the three-year period of 1917–1919, only about one tenth of the $6 billion in new facilities under construction was directly financed by the government.

One might have supposed that historians, largely occupied as they have been with the activities of ruling classes, would have been among the first to study systematically the problem of the recruitment and tenure of elites. This problem is an especially interesting one in a country such as the United States which has had no official caste systems and no legally established hereditary hierarchies. Yet most American historians have shied away from it. Few of them have even raised questions about the locus and transmission of power or status in modern times. Moreover, those who have discussed in particular the ascent of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century business leaders have tended to attribute their success simply to the possession of more shrewdness or trickiness or more pluck or luck or other private qualities than competitors who failed to rise; the very few historians who have considered social determinants such as family background or work experience have, by stressing the alleged values of poverty or of starting business in boyhood, placed their emphasis, as we shall see, quite at the opposite pole from where it belongs.