{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02280237937871778, 'fraction_numerical': 0.02015862524785195, 'mean_word_length': 4.877669902912621, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The World Between the Wars, 1919–39: An Economist's View. By Joseph S. Davis. Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Pp. viii + 436. $16.00

Joseph S. Davis figured among America's leading economists in the years between the wars. Director of Stanford's Food Research Institute from 1921 to 1952, he generated a steady flow of scholarly and popular studies on world food supplies and particularly on wheat production. His interests extended well beyond agriculture, however, and he made his mark in the public arena as an adviser on matters of economic policy as much as he did in the groves of academe. In 1918-1919, he served as a statistician with the Allied Maritime Transport Council and the American Shipping Mission in London. There he came to the favorable attention of Dwight Morrow and Herbert Hoover; Morrow later enlisted his help in preparing analyses of the French and Mexican economies, while Hoover arranged his appointment as a technical expert on the Dawes Committee and subsequently tapped him in 1929 to head the Federal Farm Board. Enjoying exceptional health and vigor in what he described as the "so-called retirement years," Davis held membership on the Council of Economic Advisers from 1955 to 1958. The scrupulously documented work presented here, an unusual combination of interpretive scholarship and personal reflections, appeared shortly before Davis's death in April 1975 at the age of eighty-nine. Those who have read Davis's commentaries on world affairs published in the Harvard Economic Service Weekly Letter during the 1920s, or who have relished the closely-reasoned memoranda bearing his signature that turn up in the papers of that era's leading statesmen, will find the author's forthright mode of expression unimpaired by the passage of time. In fact, though Davis actually wrote The World between the Wars in the last decade of his life, he drew on files meticulously gathered over a period of half a century. The view is one of an American of his generation: Davis deals with the world economy only insofar as it impinged on developments in the United States. And, since his chief concern is to explain the causes of the Great Depression, the work focuses on the years 1919 to 1933 and treats the following period fleetingly. Within these limits, however, Davis has surveyed an awesome mass of scholarship. He underscores the difficulty of economic forecasting and exhibits considerable charity toward contemporary decision-makers whose crystal balls proved unreliable. But he shows no such indulgence for more recent writers (among them John Kenneth Galbraith) whom he judges to be guilty of the sins of loose thinking or sloppy scholarship. At first, the reader may question whether some half-forgotten article or book review is really significant enough to warrant a lengthy footnote of reproof. Yet, in the end, he is grateful to Davis for conducting his bibliographical tour so frankly. Davis distinguishes himself by an ability to recreate the texture and