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Greece from Postwar Orthodoxy to “Democratic Peronism”
The roots of the present Greek crisis lie in the political transformation of the country during the 1980s. (Disclaimer: Although this post is about Greek fiscal behaviour, I am not taking Germany’s...
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Toponyms & Ethnonyms: a brief ramble
Rambling about toponyms and ethnonyms in various languages. Branko Milanovic has revived interest in an older post of mine about the Polish language. From Twitter it appears that the tidbit from that...
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Economic Growth in Ancient Greece
Was there “intensive growth” in Classical Greece and was there something special about its causes ? Was it due to “inclusive institutions” ? This post assesses some claims of the “New Ancient History”....
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Ian Morris’s calculations about the ancient Greek economy
Addenda to the previous blogpost “Economic growth in ancient Greece“. I argue that certain estimates made by Ian Morris under-compute the implied growth rates in the “per capita income” of the ancient...
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Errata dentata: The History Manifesto Revisited
This post, a follow-up to my earlier posts “La longue purée” and “Jo Guldi’s Curiouser & Curiouser Footnotes“, examines the recent revisions made to The History Manifesto. Warning: the post may be...
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Fascism was left-wing ???
John Holbo at Crooked Timber revives an online debate which raged 7 years ago when a book called Liberal Fascism was published. His take focuses on Germany but mine puts more weight on Italy. I think...
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Nazi political economy
My previous post about the political orientation of fascists got a response from Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism. This is my brief response to his. Goldberg assumes that I was criticising...
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The “Invisible Blockade” against Allende’s Chile
Did an ‘invisible blockade’ by the United States fatally undermine the Chilean economy under the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73) ? Did it actually work ? Short answer: No. Note: this post is...
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Anachronism & Relevance in History: a comment on Steve Pincus
Anachronism and relevance are in tension. Historians (often) rail against the former and (often) pine for the latter. They can easily manage a bit of relevance by intervening in today’s political and...
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Markets & Famine: Amartya Sen is not the last word !
Whether markets help cause or exacerbate famines is one of the great questions of political economy. Cormac Ó Gráda’s recent book Eating People is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, its Past, and its...
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Educational Romanticism & Economic Development
An elaboration on Ricardo Hausmann’s article “The Education Myth“. This post also comments on a post at the Spanish group blog Politikon which criticises Hausmann’s views. The Harvard economist Ricardo...
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“Experimenting with Social Norms” in Small-Scale Societies
Social norms, institutions, and economic development. (A companion post to “Where do pro-social institutions come from?”) Although the main focus of “cultural evolution” research seems to be on the big...
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¿De donde vienen las instituciones prosociales?
[19 October 2015] Jesús Alfaro of the Autonomous University of Madrid has translated my previous post into Spanish: ¿De dónde vienen las instituciones prosociales?Filed under: Uncategorized
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Where do pro-social institutions come from?
aka “Cooperation, cultural evolution & economic development”. Where do ‘good’ or pro-social institutions come from ? Why does the capacity for collective action and cooperative behaviour vary so...
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The Baptist Question Redux: Emancipation & Cotton Productivity
Edward Baptist, the author of The Half Has Never Been Told, has been claiming since the publication of his book that a putative post-Emancipation drop in overall agricultural productivity in the...
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שׂבולת שׂמית
Stream-of-consciousness thoughts about why we say “Semitic” even though the root is “Shem”. And, yes, I know the Hebrew letters in the title say “semitic sibboleth” and not “shemitic shibboleth”. In my...
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ελαδιοξιδιολατολαχανοκαρυκευμα
A very brief history of Greek diglossia. Most people know that even after the collapse of the western Roman empire, the Catholic Church continued the Latin tradition. But centuries before Odoacer...
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The “Anthropology” of Financial Crises
Germany experienced little increase in unemployment during the Great Recession, and has found “internal devaluation” relatively easy and pain-free, unlike most other countries. Why ? Some observations...
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Plant breeding, not working slaves harder, drove cotton productivity gains in...
Summary : New cultivars of cotton led to an unprecedented rise in the productivity of US southern cotton in the 60 years before the American Civil War. The Economist magazine may have said some stupid...
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Baptism by Blood Cotton
The underlying claim in Edward Baptist’s “oral economic history” of slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, is that slave owners, through the scientific...
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La longue purée
In The History Manifesto, two historians, Jo Guldi of Brown and David Armitage of Harvard, urge their peers to turn away from microhistory and go back to doing Big History in the longue durée tradition...
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Jo Guldi’s Curiouser & Curiouser Footnotes
In The History Manifesto, historians Jo Guldi, the Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History at Brown, and David Armitage, the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the History...
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“State Capacity”& the Sino-Japanese Divergence
Why China did not industrialise before Western Europe may be a tantalising and irresistible subject, but frankly it’s a parlour game. What remains underexplored, however, is the more tractable issue of...
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Did inequality cause the First World War? Contra Hobson-Lenin-Milanovic
The “Hobson-Lenin Thesis”: inequality, ‘underconsumption’, capital exports, imperialism, and the Great War In a small section in his new book, Branko Milanovic argues that the First World War was...
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Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Reductionist Summary
Historian Sven Beckert’s widely acclaimed book, Empire of Cotton, is a good agrarian, business, and labour history of a single commodity. But as economic history it’s not so good. I think many readers...
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Random thoughts on critiques of Allen’s theory of the Industrial Revolution
{ This post is mostly stringing together my scattered tweets over the past couple of weeks. I’ve had numerous discussions on this subject with Vincent Geloso, Judy Stephenson, Ben Schneider, Benjamin...
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The Bairoch conjecture on tariffs & growth
{ Note: This post describes and summarises a literature on 19th century growth & trade. I do not necessarily endorse its findings. This post is intended as largely descriptive. } There is a vast...
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The Napoleonic blockade & the infant industry argument: caveats, limitations,...
Some reservations about, and limitations of, the Napoleonic blockade paper on the infant industry argument that’s making waves. (Major caveat to the paper: protection persisted for decades after the...
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Tariff Protection of British cotton 1774-1820s
British Tariff Protection after 1774: Competition, Innovation, & Misallocation, plus a note on Weaving This is an addendum to a post about the Calico Acts, which had prohibited within Britain the...
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The Calico Acts: Was British cotton made possible by infant industry...
Many “global historians” argue that the British cotton industry was the product of (unintentional) infant industry protection from Indian competition in the 18th century. The various Calico Acts...
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Labour relations & textiles: addenda
This post contains related topics and disjointed observations as addenda to “Labour repression & the Indo-Japanese divergence” in cotton textiles. (Lack of) Japanese industrial policy in cotton...
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Labour repression & the Indo-Japanese divergence
There used to be more research and debate on the negative effects of labour resistance on economic development, but that topic has been crowded out by the intense focus on inequality of recent years....
View ArticleDebate with Matt on India, China, Cuba, Korea, etc.
Below I quote the lengthy exchange I had with Matt on India, China, Cuba, South Korea, etc. in the comments section of another blog. Since our debate was off-topic, Matt and I have agreed to move it...
View ArticleIdeology & Human Development
How real are Cuba’s accomplishments in health and education since the revolution? How do they compare with the situation prior to the revolution? Was the Soviet Union’s subsidy to Cuba crucial to its...
View Article大東亞共現代性圏
I just noticed Tyler Cowen had blogged a Boston Globe article about the number of loanwords in various languages (is there something from the press Cowen will not blog ?), and his own take was to ask,...
View ArticleProto et al., “Higher Intelligence Groups Have Higher Cooperation Rates in...
This is a description of Proto, Rustichini & Sofianos, “Higher Intelligence Groups Have Higher Cooperation Rates in the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma”. The text was originally embedded in the longer...
View ArticlePolish Illiquidity Preference
If Monty Python decided to resdesign Slavic phonology, they might take some inspiration from Polish. What do the following names have in common ? Lech Wałesa Mikołaj Kopernik (Copernicus) Łódź (as in...
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