Showing posts with label economic history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economic history. Show all posts
Monday, December 7, 2009
Four Problems with Spontaneous Order
This is the December 2009 discussion over on the CATO blog and is provocative. Well worth a read.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
How the World Got Modern
How the World Got Modern
This post is well worth reading - a sample
To put it another way, there are a series of explanations given for the distinctive features of modernity, each identifying one factor as being the critical one and then going on to claim that this factor either first appeared in Europe or was present there to a greater degree than elsewhere. A non-exhaustive list of such models and the scholars associated with them would include increased capital accumulation (Robert Solow); legal pluralism and a distinctive notion of law (Harold Berman); economic institutions, especially property rights (Douglass North, Nathan Rozenberg); geography (Eric Jones, Jared Diamond); accessible fossil fuels (Kenneth Pomeranz); a different way of thinking about knowledge and technical innovation (Lynn White, Joel Mokyr); greater intellectual openness (Jack Goldstone); a particular kind of consciousness, associated with certain religions (Max Weber, Werner Sombart); divided and constrained political power (Eric Jones, several others); a distinctive family system (Deepak Lal, many demographers); population growth past a critical level (Julian Simon); a higher social status and cultural valuation of trade and enterprise (Deirdre McCloskey); trade and the benefits of specialization (Adam Smith and many others); the role of entrepreneurs (Joseph Schumpeter, William Baumol); some combination of these (David Landes).
This post is well worth reading - a sample
To put it another way, there are a series of explanations given for the distinctive features of modernity, each identifying one factor as being the critical one and then going on to claim that this factor either first appeared in Europe or was present there to a greater degree than elsewhere. A non-exhaustive list of such models and the scholars associated with them would include increased capital accumulation (Robert Solow); legal pluralism and a distinctive notion of law (Harold Berman); economic institutions, especially property rights (Douglass North, Nathan Rozenberg); geography (Eric Jones, Jared Diamond); accessible fossil fuels (Kenneth Pomeranz); a different way of thinking about knowledge and technical innovation (Lynn White, Joel Mokyr); greater intellectual openness (Jack Goldstone); a particular kind of consciousness, associated with certain religions (Max Weber, Werner Sombart); divided and constrained political power (Eric Jones, several others); a distinctive family system (Deepak Lal, many demographers); population growth past a critical level (Julian Simon); a higher social status and cultural valuation of trade and enterprise (Deirdre McCloskey); trade and the benefits of specialization (Adam Smith and many others); the role of entrepreneurs (Joseph Schumpeter, William Baumol); some combination of these (David Landes).
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
"How Wars, Plagues, and Urban Disease Propelled Europe’s Rise to Riches"
"This column explains why Europe’s rise to riches in the early modern period owed much to exceptionally bellicose international politics, urban overcrowding, and frequent epidemics."
Cruel windfall: How wars, plagues, and urban disease propelled Europe’s rise to riches, by Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, Vox EU: In a pre-modern economy, incomes typically stagnate in the long run. Malthusian regimes are characterised by strongly declining marginal returns to labour. One-off improvements in technology can temporarily raise output per head. The additional income is spent on more (surviving) children, and population grows. As a result, output per head declines, and eventually labour productivity returns to its previous level. That is why, in HG Wells' phrase, earlier generations "spent the great gifts of science as rapidly as it got them in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life" (Wells, 1905).
How could an economy ever escape from this trap? To learn more about this question, we should look more closely at the continent that managed to overcome stagnation first. Long before growth accelerated for good in most countries, a first divergence occurred. European incomes by 1700 exceeded those in the rest of the world by a large margin. We explain the emergence of this income gap by a number of uniquely European features – an unusually high frequency of war, particularly unhealthy cities, and numerous deadly disease outbreaks.
Cruel windfall: How wars, plagues, and urban disease propelled Europe’s rise to riches, by Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, Vox EU: In a pre-modern economy, incomes typically stagnate in the long run. Malthusian regimes are characterised by strongly declining marginal returns to labour. One-off improvements in technology can temporarily raise output per head. The additional income is spent on more (surviving) children, and population grows. As a result, output per head declines, and eventually labour productivity returns to its previous level. That is why, in HG Wells' phrase, earlier generations "spent the great gifts of science as rapidly as it got them in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life" (Wells, 1905).
How could an economy ever escape from this trap? To learn more about this question, we should look more closely at the continent that managed to overcome stagnation first. Long before growth accelerated for good in most countries, a first divergence occurred. European incomes by 1700 exceeded those in the rest of the world by a large margin. We explain the emergence of this income gap by a number of uniquely European features – an unusually high frequency of war, particularly unhealthy cities, and numerous deadly disease outbreaks.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Kaldor Facts
From Economist's View
The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital, by Charles I. Jones and Paul M. Romer, NBER WP 15094, June 2009 [open link]: 1. Introduction ...[I]t is easy to lose faith in scientific progress. ... In any assessment of progress, as in any analysis of macroeconomic variables, a long-run perspective helps us look past the short-run fluctuations and see the underlying trend. In 1961, Nicolas Kaldor stated six now famous “stylized” facts. He used them to summarize what economists had learned from their analysis of 20th-century growth and also to frame the research agenda going forward (Kaldor, 1961):
1. Labor productivity has grown at a sustained rate.
2. Capital per worker has also grown at a sustained rate.
3. The real interest rate or return on capital has been stable.
4. The ratio of capital to output has also been stable.
5. Capital and labor have captured stable shares of national income.
6. Among the fast growing countries of the world, there is an appreciable variation in the rate of growth “of the order of 2–5 percent.”
Redoing this exercise nearly 50 years later shows just how much progress we have made. Kaldor’s first five facts have moved from research papers to textbooks. There is no longer any interesting debate about the features that a model must contain to explain them. These features are embodied in one of the great successes of growth theory in the 1950s and 1960s, the neoclassical growth model. Today, researchers are now grappling with Kaldor’s sixth fact and have moved on to several others that we list below.
One might have imagined that the first round of growth theory clarified the deep foundational issues and that subsequent rounds filled in the details. This is not what we observe. The striking feature of the new stylized facts driving the research agenda today is how much more ambitious they are. Economists now expect that economic theory should inform our thinking about issues that we once ruled out of bounds as important but too difficult to capture in a formal model.
Here is a summary of our new list of stylized facts, to be discussed in more detail below:
1. Increases in the extent of the market. Increased flows of goods, ideas, finance, and people — via globalization as well as urbanization — have increased the extent of the market for all workers and consumers.
2. Accelerating growth. For thousands of years, growth in both population and per capita GDP has accelerated, rising from virtually zero to the relatively rapid rates observed in the last century.
3. Variation in modern growth rates. The variation in the rate of growth of per capita GDP increases with the distance from the technology frontier.
4. Large income and TFP differences. Differences in measured inputs explain less than half of the enormous cross country differences in per capita GDP.
5. Increases in human capital per worker. Human capital per worker is rising dramatically throughout the world.
6. Long-run stability of relative wages. The rising quantity of human capital relative to unskilled labor has not been matched by a sustained decline in its relative price.
In assessing the change since Kaldor developed his list, it is important to recognize that Kaldor himself was raising expectations relative to the initial neoclassical model of growth as outlined by Solow (1956) and Swan (1956). When the neoclassical model was being developed, a narrow focus on physical capital alone was no doubt a wise choice
The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital, by Charles I. Jones and Paul M. Romer, NBER WP 15094, June 2009 [open link]: 1. Introduction ...[I]t is easy to lose faith in scientific progress. ... In any assessment of progress, as in any analysis of macroeconomic variables, a long-run perspective helps us look past the short-run fluctuations and see the underlying trend. In 1961, Nicolas Kaldor stated six now famous “stylized” facts. He used them to summarize what economists had learned from their analysis of 20th-century growth and also to frame the research agenda going forward (Kaldor, 1961):
1. Labor productivity has grown at a sustained rate.
2. Capital per worker has also grown at a sustained rate.
3. The real interest rate or return on capital has been stable.
4. The ratio of capital to output has also been stable.
5. Capital and labor have captured stable shares of national income.
6. Among the fast growing countries of the world, there is an appreciable variation in the rate of growth “of the order of 2–5 percent.”
Redoing this exercise nearly 50 years later shows just how much progress we have made. Kaldor’s first five facts have moved from research papers to textbooks. There is no longer any interesting debate about the features that a model must contain to explain them. These features are embodied in one of the great successes of growth theory in the 1950s and 1960s, the neoclassical growth model. Today, researchers are now grappling with Kaldor’s sixth fact and have moved on to several others that we list below.
One might have imagined that the first round of growth theory clarified the deep foundational issues and that subsequent rounds filled in the details. This is not what we observe. The striking feature of the new stylized facts driving the research agenda today is how much more ambitious they are. Economists now expect that economic theory should inform our thinking about issues that we once ruled out of bounds as important but too difficult to capture in a formal model.
Here is a summary of our new list of stylized facts, to be discussed in more detail below:
1. Increases in the extent of the market. Increased flows of goods, ideas, finance, and people — via globalization as well as urbanization — have increased the extent of the market for all workers and consumers.
2. Accelerating growth. For thousands of years, growth in both population and per capita GDP has accelerated, rising from virtually zero to the relatively rapid rates observed in the last century.
3. Variation in modern growth rates. The variation in the rate of growth of per capita GDP increases with the distance from the technology frontier.
4. Large income and TFP differences. Differences in measured inputs explain less than half of the enormous cross country differences in per capita GDP.
5. Increases in human capital per worker. Human capital per worker is rising dramatically throughout the world.
6. Long-run stability of relative wages. The rising quantity of human capital relative to unskilled labor has not been matched by a sustained decline in its relative price.
In assessing the change since Kaldor developed his list, it is important to recognize that Kaldor himself was raising expectations relative to the initial neoclassical model of growth as outlined by Solow (1956) and Swan (1956). When the neoclassical model was being developed, a narrow focus on physical capital alone was no doubt a wise choice
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
"Education and Technology: Supply, Demand, and Income Inequality"
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz say that "the educational slowdown caused much of the recent rise in economic inequality," and that "the future of inequality and this nation depend on increasing the supply of highly educated workers,"
From Economists View
From Economists View
Thursday, June 25, 2009
The 36th Annual Conference of the History of Economic Society
2009 Annual Conference
Denver, Colorado
The 36th Annual Conference
of the History of Economic Society will be held June 26-29, 2009 at
the University of Colorado Denver.
There is an optional reception on Friday, June 26. Conference
sessions will begin on the morning of Saturday, June 27. The
conference will run until mid-day on Monday, June 29. For
travel accommodations, please try to plan on leaving Monday in the
late afternoon or evening. The airport is only a 40 minute taxi ride
from downtown Denver.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Vernon Smith's autobiography
It's called Discovery -- A Memoir and I enjoyed it very much. If you, like me, wish that more books were just a bit wilder, weirder (I mean that in the good sense), and real, you will like this one. Here's one brief bit:
...I will grow up to be a loner, protecting myself from distractions, but thereby projecting an image of aloofness that was never part of what I felt inside.
It's a hard book to summarize.
If you think you might be interested, you probably are, One Amazon reviewer writes:
'Discovery' is an unfiltered, entertaining read. There is no spin, no self-serving revisionism here. A most original and influential economist tells the reader what happened, what he thought, and how he thinks.
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/05/vernon-smiths-autobiography.html
...I will grow up to be a loner, protecting myself from distractions, but thereby projecting an image of aloofness that was never part of what I felt inside.
It's a hard book to summarize.
If you think you might be interested, you probably are, One Amazon reviewer writes:
'Discovery' is an unfiltered, entertaining read. There is no spin, no self-serving revisionism here. A most original and influential economist tells the reader what happened, what he thought, and how he thinks.
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/05/vernon-smiths-autobiography.html
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
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.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
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
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
Friday, March 13, 2009
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.
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
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
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Summer reading
Thinking about summer reading these have some interesting perspectives on the question of liberty and responsibility
The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution - Bernard Bailey
The case of Thomas Hutchinson sees to be worth thinking about, it seems that he was as committed to personal liberty as were the Sons of Liberty, yet he was so concerned about the impact of the chaos that might be associated with radical change.
In reading The Glorious Cause by Middlekauff I was struck by the violence with which the Sons of Liberty attacked dissent (both neutral and loyalist) and I have been reflecting on the differences between the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
Hayek contrasts liberalism that evolved in the UK and US with that on the continent, particularly France and I wonder to what extent the differences in this ideology shaped the differences in the respective revolutions.
This posting was prompted by a very provocative retrospective over at the Mises blog - from Rothdard's Egalitarianism As a Revolt Against Nature.
"The true test, then, of the radical spirit, is the button-pushing test: if we could push the button for instantaneous abolition of unjust invasions of liberty, would we do it? "
http://mises.org/story/2993
The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution - Bernard Bailey
The case of Thomas Hutchinson sees to be worth thinking about, it seems that he was as committed to personal liberty as were the Sons of Liberty, yet he was so concerned about the impact of the chaos that might be associated with radical change.
In reading The Glorious Cause by Middlekauff I was struck by the violence with which the Sons of Liberty attacked dissent (both neutral and loyalist) and I have been reflecting on the differences between the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
Hayek contrasts liberalism that evolved in the UK and US with that on the continent, particularly France and I wonder to what extent the differences in this ideology shaped the differences in the respective revolutions.
This posting was prompted by a very provocative retrospective over at the Mises blog - from Rothdard's Egalitarianism As a Revolt Against Nature.
"The true test, then, of the radical spirit, is the button-pushing test: if we could push the button for instantaneous abolition of unjust invasions of liberty, would we do it? "
http://mises.org/story/2993
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