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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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Economic History Link Dump 15-01-2015
A haphazard mass, a chaotic carnival, a Bikini Atoll, of links relating to economic history, political economy, and allied matters. I also have brief comments on some of the links. I just decided to...
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The Little Divergence
Summary : A “great divergence” between the economies of Western Europe and East Asia had unambiguously occurred by 1800. However, there’s a growing body of opinion that this was preceded by a “little...
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Samples of Greek & Latin, Restored Pronunciation
Some MP3 samples of the “restored” pronunciation of classical Greek and Latin. I’ve long been a fan of attempts to reconstruct the pronunciation of ancient Greek and Latin. I’ve embedded MP3 snippets...
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Debate 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 a blogpost by HBDchick. Since our debate was off-topic, Matt and I have agreed to...
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Ideology & 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...
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Argentina’s Exclusion from the Marshall Plan 1948-50
In the comments section of an unrelated blogpost, the commenter Matt doggedly argues that the Truman administration deliberately prohibited the European beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan from using...
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The Mystery of US Behaviour in the World
Summary : (Part 4 of 4) I argue that American behaviour on the world stage defies any rational explanation. I also question whether the United States has derived much economic benefit from its activist...
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The Balance Sheet of US Foreign Policy 1940-2013
Summary : (Part 3 of 4) I argue that commenter Matt’s view of US foreign policy, as presented in Part 1, makes no sense because the “returns” from that investment climate are laughably low. I present a...
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A Very Brief History of Foreign Investment
Summary : (Part 2 of 4) As the prelude to a critique of commenter Matt’s view of American foreign policy presented in Part 1, I sketch a brief history of foreign investment as context. Fear not the...
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The Political Economy of US Foreign Policy
Summary : (Part 1 of 4) I critique commenter Matt’s argument that, at the deepest level, American foreign policy has sought a “favourable investment climate” for itself in the Third World. Part 2 : A...
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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,...
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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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Links 18 July 2014
I’m not intending to do “weekly links” or anything, but I wanted to highlight a blogpost by Victor Mair : what the Dungan language sounds like from snippets of the movie “Jesus” dubbed in Dungan. This...
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Azar Gat’s Nations
I saw Razib Khan‘s review of Azar Gat’s Nations : The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. Without intending to make it that long I posted a 1000-word comment there. Then...
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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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Der Todd des Euro
Part 1. The French anthropologist-demographer Emmanuel Todd, who is becoming increasingly fashionable in the Anglosphere, is also a scathing critic of the euro. I examine his “anthropological” views of...
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