Jeff Biddle's recent book, Progress through Regression: The Life Story of the Empirical Cobb-Douglas Production Function, is a clearly told story of a theory and its implementation from its first proposal as a log-linear empirical relation linking outputs to inputs by Charles Cobb and Paul Douglas (1928), resulting in a plethora of highly critical, constructive, and supportive reactions, through to its acceptance as a substantive production function relationship in a wide range of research areas. The developments, and the continued criticisms and responses, are carefully discussed, building on extensive archival research.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 has three chapters surveying Douglas's published accounts of his production research commencing in 1927. Chapter 1 concerns time series; chapter 2, cross sections; and chapter 3, the many challenges he faced. The name Cobb-Douglas derives from Douglas's first published time-series study with Cobb (Cobb and Douglas 1928...
