American Whaling

There is a nice piece in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson on the American whaling industry in the nineteenth century. The US once dominated the enterprise but after the Civil War it declined rapidly and by the twentieth century was practically nonexistent. The standard explanation -- declining numbers of whales and competition from petroleum -- is inadequate to explain the rapid extinction of the American whaling industry. Why did it collapse and what does that imply for our present economic circumstances? Read the article and find out here.