'Growing Public offers economic historians, policy analysts, development gurus, and the general public - all of whom have reason to be deeply concerned about the growth implications of fiscal policy - the most comprehensive historical and econometric examination of the essential value of public expenditures I have seen anywhere. His lens of inquiry encompasses everything from early modern European charitable activities to the apex of the late-twentieth-century welfare state, from the 'Old Poor Law' to the rise of public schooling, from old-age pensions in the west to social transfers in the developing world. By the conclusion of this tour, the reader is left with a clear view of a world in which public expenditures on human welfare not only do no harm to national growth trajectories, but one in which investment in the infrastructure of human capital formation is itself growth-enhancing. This core finding of Lindert's exhaustive research will appear radical, perhaps even heretical, to a generation trained in neo-classical economics, but he arrives at it by employing the best of the theory and methodology of that discipline. As such it will be hard to refute.' Anne E. C. McCants, Associate Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.