Economic History Services

EH.Net operates the Economic History Services web site and several electronic mailing lists to provide resources and promote communication among scholars in economic history and related fields. EH.Net is supported by the Economic History Association and other affiliated organizations: the Business History Conference, the Cliometric Society, the Economic History Society, and the History of Economics Society.

2009 HISTORY OF ECONOMICS SOCIETY CONFERENCE

2009 HISTORY OF ECONOMICS SOCIETY CONFERENCE
DENVER, COLORADO
JUNE 26-28, 2009

The 2009 meetings of the History of Economics Society will held at the University of Colorado Denver over June 26-29. Those wishing to submit a paper or propose a session may do so at http://www.hes-conference2009.com/.

The conference will begin with an opening reception on Friday, June 26 and will end mid-day on Monday, June 29. The meetings will be held at the University of Colorado Denver - Kenneth King Academic and Performing Arts Center at the University Downtown Denver Campus.

The campus location in lower downtown Denver affords easy walking access to hundreds of restaurants and a variety of hotels in all price ranges. The campus has extremely limited dormitory facilities mean that there will likely not be a dorm housing option available. Conference rates will be arranged with several hotels within easy walking distance of the campus. Direct flights from London and Frankfurt make this a very accessible location for those traveling from Europe. Registration information will be posted in due course.

If you encounter any problems with paper/session submission or have any other questions about the conference, email directly at HES2009@ucdenver.edu.

The Future of Capitalism - The Financial Times

Last week the Financial Times analyzed the future of capitalism in a series of thoughtful analysis.


Seeds of its own destruction

By Martin Wolf Published: March 8 2009
Lost through destructive creation

By Gillian Tett March 9 2009

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0d55351a-0ce4-11de-a555-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=ae1104cc-f82e-11dd-aae8-000077b07658.html
Adam Smith’s market never stood alone

By Amartya Sen Published: March 10 2009

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/8f2829fa-0daf-11de-8ea3-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=ae1104cc-f82e-11dd-aae8-000077b07658,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F8f2829fa-0daf-11de-8ea3-0000779fd2ac%2Cdwp_uuid%3Dae1104cc-f82e-11dd-aae8-000077b07658.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Findepth%2Fcapitalism-future
Now is the time for a less selfish capitalism

By Richard Layard Published March 11, 2009

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3f6e2d5c-0e76-11de-b099-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=ae1104cc-f82e-11dd-aae8-000077b07658,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F3f6e2d5c-0e76-11de-b099-0000779fd2ac%2Cdwp_uuid%3Dae1104cc-f82e-11dd-aae8-000077b07658.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Findepth%2Fcapitalism-future
Read the big four to know capital’s fate

By Paul Kennedy Published: March 12, 2009

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5e61e20c-0f44-11de-ba10-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=ae1104cc-f82e-11dd-aae8-000077b07658.html

The protectionist temptation: Lessons from the Great Depression for today

Barry Eichengreen Douglas Irwin
17 March 2009


What do we know about the spread of protectionism during the Great Depression and what are the implications for today’s crisis? This column says the lesson is that countries should coordinate their fiscal and monetary measures. If some do and some don’t, the trade policy consequences could once again be most unfortunate.

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3280

CIS 236 Web Based Teaching and Learning I

Mesa Community College is offering a sequence of entirely online professional development classes to assist faculty in online learning. The first course, CIS 236 Web Based Teaching and Learning I begins on March 23.

From Marginal Revolution

The most technologically progressive decade of the 20th century

Can you guess? According to economic historian Alexander Field, it is (controversially) the 1930s. Opening paragraph:

Because of the Depression’s place in both the popular and academic imagination, and the repeated and justifiable emphasis on output that was not produced, income that was not earned, and expenditure that did not take place, it will seem startling to propose the following hypothesis: the years 1929–1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history

2009 Horizon Report

Interesting project of emerging technologies for instruction:

A wiki documents the project.


Mobiles
A new generation of mobiles appeared on the market featuring multi-touch displays, the ability to access the Internet over increasingly higher-speed 3G networks or by using wifi, and the capability for sensing motion and orientation and reacting accordingly using built- in accelerometers.

Examples include math, music and computer information systems.

Cloud Computing

Examples include:

Media Studies. Using cloud-based applications like YouTube, a media culture course at Pitzer College in California tracks emerging up-to-the-moment social trends through real-time news clips and user-created content posted there. Similarly, courses at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, NY use YouTube and other cloud-based applications to host media that can- not be hosted using resources on campus.

Geo everything

Examples include:

Medicine. The University of Florida has used a 2-dimensional web-based Transparent Reality Simulation Engine to teach students how to operate medical machinery for several years. Recently, the addition of a GPS-enabled tablet device has allowed learners who are spatially challenged to experience the transparent reality visualization overlaid directly onto the real machine, enabling them to use the machine’s controls rather than a mouse as input to the simulation. Geolocation is used to track the tablet and align the physical machine with the visualization on the tablet.


The Personal Web

Examples include:

First-Year Composition at UWF
http://collegewriting.us
The University of West Florida employs between 70 and 90 instructors each semester to teach first-year composition. This website serves as a resource for teachers and students, ensuring that all classes are on the same schedule and working with up-to-date material. It also includes an online assessment rubric that instructors can use to evaluate and record student work.

Semantic Aware

Examples:

Law. A prototype project at the Autonomous University of Barcelona assists newly appointed judicial officials in resolving complex legal questions based on collected information from prior cases. Developed for the Spanish General Council of the Judiciary, the system uses contextual information to suggest solutions to problems that new judges might typically refer to more experienced judges, potentially speeding up the legal process.


Smart Objects

Examples include:

Archaeology. The way that a single smart object connects to a network of information is useful for many disciplines. Consider a student or researcher examining a group of objects from an archaeological dig. A tag attached to the label of each object, when scanned with a mobile device like a camera-enabled phone, would instantly bring up photographs of other objects from the dig, video of the dig site, maps, and any other media or information associated with the area.

Teaching Economic History of the United States

A number of us include American History in our teaching loads. I thought that for those of you who have not considered the FTE on the ground program EFIAH - the info below might be of interest - especially if you live near Ohio or an interested in Vegas.

EFIAH

June 23 - 26, 2009	Federal Reserve Bank1	Jacksonville, FL	Open
July 21 - 24, 2009	Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland2	Cleveland, OH	Open
July 27 - August 1, 2009	The Tuscany Suites	Las Vegas, NV	Open

² commuter program; priority given to Northeastern Ohio residents; $425 stipend available

http://www.fte.org/teachers/programs/history/dates.php

Other resources include (for your summer reading)

Hamilton's Blessing
by John Steele Gordon
(Gordon will be the honors speaker at MCC on April 15 - my students and I will get to hear his presentation -"The Origins of American Affluence")

Hamilton's Curse
by Thomas DiLorenzo

One Nation Under Debt: Jefferson, Hamilton and the History of What We Owe
by Robert Wright

Report on MPS Meeting in NYC

Report on MPS Meeting in NYC

This past weekend I attended the special meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society was the called to address the financial crisis that we are facing. Speakers included Nobel Prize economists such as Ned Phelps and Gary Becker; famous economic thinkers such as Anna Schwartz, Arnold Harberger, Axel Leijonhufvud, and Harold Demsetz; leading economic policy makers such as Richard Cooper and Justin Lin; major contemporary economic theorists and policy makers such as John Taylor; leading financial journalists such as Martin Wolf; and perhaps the leading financial historian of our age Niall Ferguson. The program was put together by Deepak Lal.

Ferguson worries that right now we are in the midst of the “Great Repression”, where our governments – not New Zealand’s though – are actually repressing the financial crisis with their (our) vast resources, but that the crisis won’t go away because the stimuluses are misdirected.

The most common question Ferguson is asked is whether this crisis proves the “death of capitalism”. His response is “no, but it is the death of Basle 2” – the ineffective attempt by global financial regulators as recently as 2004 to ensure that a mess just like this one wouldn’t happen. Similarly, the Sarbanes-Oxley law of 2002 was a US congressional attempt to do much the same thing, constraining investment banks and auditors, but with little macro benefit.

Moral Bankrupcty

Megan McArdle, over at The Atlantic, makes a very key point:


Undoubtedly many of my readers think that that sort of thing is different because we don't have a moral obligation to repay our debts to corporations the way we do to people. This strikes me as fundamentally wrongheaded in two ways. First, the bourgeois belief that an honorable man repays his debts if he is able is one of the unnoticed underpinnings of a stable, prosperous democracy. Countries that believe that one can pick and choose whom one is obligated to repay on the basis of how good a person the lender is, how tight their relation to you, or whatever, are low-trust societies with extremely high transaction costs and underdeveloped markets. If you think you're only obligated to repay regular folks like yourself, then no one but your close friends and family will lend you money. This makes capital formation tricky.

Presidential rankings from HHN

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
Presidential Rankings

Predictably, last year's presidential election and the subsequent inauguration of Barak Obama brought forth a new set of historical rankings of United States presidents.

Hummel summarizes three books that deals with the presidency and lists his least worst and worst presidents.

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Liberty & Power: Group Blog

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
Presidential Rankings

Predictably, last year's presidential election and the subsequent inauguration of Barak Obama brought forth a new set of historical rankings of United States presidents. The London Times presented their rankings in October, whereas C-Span offered theirs on February 15. These rankings are always based on surveys of prominent historians, political scientists, and other scholars, and as the Wikipedia entry on the subject reveals, the variation since the first Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., poll of 1948 is fairly minimal. Conventional historians and political scientists suffer from a nationalist bias that makes them appreciate a strong executive who lastingly contributes to the growth of central authority. They thus have a particular weakness for wartime presidents. Unless the commander-in-chief turns out to be utterly inept, war allows him to show off forceful, dynamic leadership, which is what impresses these authorities.

Fortunately, libertarians have begun to challenge the Statist bias of presidential ranking. One of the first works to do so was a Mises Institute collection (to which I contributed a chapter), published back in 2001 and edited by John V. Denson: Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom. More recently the Cato Institute has published Gene Healy's The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power (2008), and the Independent Institute has published Ivan Eland's Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty (2008). Only Eland's book actually ranks all the presidents, although the Denson volume contains a wonderful article by economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway offering a tentative ranking based on the growth of government.

I have been privately circulating for some time my own rankings, so I thought this might be an appropriate occasion to update and unveil them to the general public. They differ significantly in some respects from Eland's. I cut off obviously before Barak Obama and don't count William Henry Harrison, who was in office only a month. The one ranking I've actually elaborated on in print is my choice of Martin Van Buren as the least bad president. The article appears both in the Independent Review and the Denson collection (which kept my preferred title, "Martin Van Buren: The American Gladstone"). And of course, my book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, implicitly explains why I rank Abraham Lincoln the worst.

Except for the first ten in both the "Least Bad" and the "Most Horrible" categories, my judgments are all subject to some revision. Further study or arguments might persuade me to shift them around slightly. One of the most important criteria in my rankings is the body count. I have the idiosyncratic belief that presidents merit high marks for keeping the country out of war rather than dragging it into one. Overall my rankings are based on explicitly libertarian criteria. Those who rolled or held back government intervention get points, those who increased government power lose them.


Least Bad U.S. Presidents (starting at best):

1. Martin Van Buren
2. Grover Cleveland
3. Calvin Coolidge
4. Warren G. Harding
5. Thomas Jefferson

Most Horrible U.S. Presidents (starting at worst):

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. Woodrow Wilson
3. Harry Truman
4. Franklin D. Roosevelt
5. Lyndon Johnson
6. George W. Bush
7. Theodore Roosevelt
8. George H. W. Bush
9. Herbert Hoover
10. John Adams
11. William McKinley
12. James Madison
13. James Knox Polk
14. John F. Kennedy
15. George Washington
16. Millard Fillmore
17. John Quincy Adams
18. William Howard Taft
19. John Tyler
20. Jimmy Carter
21. Franklin Pierce

Peace and Free Trade - Cafe Hayek

Peace and Free Trade

Don Boudreaux

"If soldiers are not to cross international borders, goods must do so" - so wisely said a now-forgotten aide to F.D.R.'s Secretary of State Cordell Hull. And Ed Glaeser makes this important case in yesterday's Boston Globe. Here's his closing paragraph:

Other countries provide us with clothes, cars, markets for exports, and lending for the government and banks. Shutting our markets will make life more expensive for us and hurt the rest of the world. In the 1930s, legislators embraced high tariffs, but putting America first led to a devastating world war. Today, US lawmakers need to choose hope over fear, and stick with free trade.

From Greg Mankiw's Blog

Somewhere, Milton Friedman is smiling

According to a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey, 59% of voters still agree with Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address statement that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”. Only 28% disagree, and 14% are not sure.

2009 Teaching Economics Conference Cal State Fulleton

Worth Publishers is proud to sponsor a series of one-day teaching symposia meant to explore our economic and teaching landscape in these uncertain times. In partnership with premiere Economics Departments across the country, Worth publishers is committed to bringing educators together to meet with leading faculty, administrators, authors, and economists to attend workshops and to trade insight and teaching strategies. Our distinguished list of speakers represents leading economists and educators from across the country including 2008 Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman.

Blog from the seminar.

Krugman slides - here.

We received an updated version of


http://www.krugmanonline.com/books/the-return-of-depression-economics-and-the-crisis-of-2008.php

Agenda - http://www.worthpublishers.com/econsymp09/socal/agenda.html

April 24 and 25th meeting at

Tangeman University Center
University of Cincinnati
Uptown West Campus
265 Tangeman University Center
Cincinnati , OH 45221-0220


http://www.worthpublishers.com/econsymp09/midwest/agenda.html

Foundation for Teaching Economics

Understanding Liberty and Choice:
Free Trade and Globalization

Featured speaker:
Russell Roberts, author of The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity and The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protection.


Co-sponsored by Liberty Fund, Inc.


When: May 14-16, 2009

Where: Washington D.C., Hotel TBD

What: Working conference, including:

* Keynote address and extended Q and A with Russell Roberts.
* Required pre-conference readings (298 pages) and 2.5 hours of podcasts.
* Small group Socratic seminars.