ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by looking at the definitions of social savings offered in the new economic history of railways and the kind of counter-factual economies implied by their deployment in exercises in quantitative history. For Wales Hawke social saving is the cost of replacing the particular development in a given year or the percentage of national income that would have to be rediverted to sustain the economy without an innovation. Fishlow, Hawke and Metzer calculate consistently in terms of their definitions and associated counterfactuals which were designed to measure the transport savings railroads provided as a historical fact. Fogel's definition of social saving falls between the ceteris paribus assumption employed by Hawke, Fishlow and Metzer and the kind of counterfactual required to measure the contribution of railroads to the observed rate of economic growth achieved by different countries. The chapter illustrates estimation of social savings in discussions of relationship between railways and economic growth in Britain, America or Russia.
