Daniel B. Klein

Daniel B. Klein is an economist whose work with historian John Majewski on nineteenth-century plank-road fever provides a historical case study of how people learn from one another—and how that process can turn a promising solution into a mistaken consensus. Their research traces the roads from the transportation problem they were meant to solve through their rapid spread and eventual failure, revealing how early examples of success could overwhelm evidence that emerged more slowly.

Identity and Research

Klein appears in the account as an economist working with the historian John Majewski. Together they investigated the history of plank roads, a short-lived transportation innovation in the United States. Their work supplies the historical evidence for the book’s explanation of information cascades: situations in which people rely on the choices of those before them and, in doing so, may set aside their own information.

The episode sits within a broader question about social learning. Information is dispersed among individuals, so observing others can improve judgment; but the benefit depends on how that observation shapes decisions. Klein and Majewski’s case shows the danger of sequential imitation: visible adoption can be mistaken for proof, even when the initial choices rested on incomplete evidence.

The Transportation Problem and the Plank Road

The boom in internal improvements during the first half of the nineteenth century connected major towns through canals and railroads, while private companies built turnpikes. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 linked New York City to Lake Erie along a 363-mile route, halved travel time between the East Coast and the western interior, and cut shipping costs by 90 percent. Yet these networks did little for the many Americans living outside the towns they connected. Local roads remained poorly maintained: in wet weather they became muddy ruts, in dry weather dusty ones, and travel wore heavily on vehicles and draft animals.

George Geddes believed wooden plank roads could address that local problem. The design consisted of planks laid over two lines of timber and had been introduced in Canada in the early 1840s. Its superiority to a rutted path was apparent, but the economic question was whether it would last long enough to justify construction and maintenance costs. Geddes estimated a typical road would endure eight years. In 1846 he persuaded fellow residents of Salina, New York, to charter a company to build the state’s first plank road.

Expansion and Collapse

The Salina road succeeded, and plank-road construction spread first through New York, then across the mid-Atlantic states and the Midwest. Geddes became a spokesman for the industry, while other promoters advocated the roads in their own states. Within a decade, New York had 352 plank-road companies, and the United States had more than a thousand. The scale of adoption made the plank road seem like an established answer to a widespread infrastructure need.

The central assumption behind the boom proved false. The roads did not last the eight years Geddes predicted, much less the twelve years some enthusiasts anticipated. Klein and Majewski found that their actual lifespan was closer to four years, too short to make them economical for the companies responsible for maintaining them. By the late 1850s, it was apparent that plank roads were no transportation panacea. Nearly all had been abandoned by the end of the Civil War, although a few survived longer, including a thirteen-mile stretch along what is now Route 27A in Jamaica, Queens, which remained in operation until the 1880s.

Information Cascades and Significance

The plank-road episode illustrates an information cascade. The initial road in Salina succeeded, as did roads built soon afterward, giving people seeking a solution to local transportation an immediately visible model. As more roads appeared, the choice acquired legitimacy and consideration of alternatives diminished. The decisive weakness—the roads’ short working life—took years to become clear. By then, construction had spread across the country.

Klein and Majewski’s historical account makes the mechanism concrete: later choices can reflect not only a person’s own evidence but also the apparent evidence contained in others’ behavior. In the book’s restaurant example, early diners who happen by chance to receive misleading information choose the inferior restaurant; those who come later may follow its crowd even when their own information points elsewhere. The plank-road boom likewise demonstrates how a visible run of early successes can encourage imitation before the costs that ultimately invalidate a popular choice have had time to emerge.