Podcasts I Listen To

I saw Tim Harford’s list of best podcasts. I agree with some, but thought he missed some good ones. I don’t know if these are the best, but they are podcasts that I often listen to while working out or walking the dog.

Podcasts for Anyone Interested in Economics.

Planet Money

The Indicator

Freakonomics Radio

EconTalk

Odd Lots

FT Alphachat

Podcasts for Economists. The discussions on these shows tend to be directed more toward an audience of economists.

Macro Musings

Economics Detective

Economic Rockstar

EconTalk Econ Talk is usually directed toward a broad audience, but some episodes are directed more toward economists.

History Podcasts That I Like

Ben Franklin’s World

Age of Jackson

New Books in History

Historically Thinking

A Podcast That I Do Not Like

Revisionist History (link intentionally omitted). I listened to the episode on country music, which I love. If you are interested in having someone that knows nothing about country music explain to you what they think country music is about you should listen to it.

Free and Unfree Labor: The Political Economy of Capitalism, Share-Cropping, and Slavery

The UCLA Center for Social Theory and Comparative History hosted an event on the topic of Free and Unfree Labor in March. Below is a link to the page that has an audio recording. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be video.

Free and Unfree Labor: The Political Economy of Capitalism, Share-Cropping, and Slavery

Speakers:

Gavin Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History, Stanford University and author of Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (2018) and Slavery and American Economic Development (2006). Professor Wright will present on "Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism.”

Suresh Naidu is Associate Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Professor Naidu will present on "Labor Markets in the Shadow of American Slavery.”

John Clegg is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at NYU. His paper is entitled “The Real Wages of Whiteness.”

Wright tells why Eric Williams, Barbara Solow, and Joseph Inikori are right about the importance of British development during the Industrial Revolution and Ed Baptist is wrong about the importance of slavery for American economic development during the 19^th century. He also has some positive things to say about the recent work of historians like Caitlin Rosenthal and economists like Trevon Logan.

Naidu talks about the importance of the overall repressiveness of the South as a prerequisite for repression on individual plantations.

Clegg talks about his work on wages of poor whites. It seemed the most preliminary and most difficult to assess without access to the actual paper, or at least the tables and graphs. He points to the recent work of Keri Leigh Merritt, but it was not clear to what extent he regards his work as either supporting or contradicting hers.

Economic & Business History Society

The annual conference of the Economic & Business History Society is going on now in Finland. Unfortunately I was not able to go to the conference this year. It looks like they put together a great program.

They are livestreaming the keynote by Deirdre McCloskey at 10:30 eastern time.

I should also note that the society's journal Essays in Economic & Business History is now listed in the Chartered Association of Business Schools Academic Journal Guide. Congratulations to the editor, Jason Taylor, the associate editors, and the editorial board.

Industrial Revelations

I think most people have a very vague notion of what the Industrial Revolution was, and descriptions and pictures are not particularly helpful. You really need to see a spinning wheel, a spinning jenny, and a water frame at work to appreciate what was happening in the 1700s. I have been fortunate enough to visit some great museums and see some of these things at work, but I don’t have the opportunity to do that with my students. That is where Industrial Revelations comes in handy. There are several seasons of Industrial Revelations, and I haven’t had time to watch them all, but the first season with Mark Williams (aka Arthur Weasley) is great for showing many important technological changes during the Industrial Revolution. Here is a link to the textile episode, which I think is one of the best.

Stop Telling Kanye to Read Ed Baptist

Since Kanye West decided that the World had spent enough time paying attention to people that are not him, I have seen a number of suggestions for Kanye’s education. More than a few have been along these lines

If he were to read Baptist, Kanye, like many of Baptist’s other readers, could learn all sorts of things that are not true. He could learn that

1.       Before Ed Baptist, economists and historians did not believe that slave owners were profit seeking capitalists. Many historians and almost all economic historians viewed slavery as a profit seeking enterprise.

2.       Slave produced cotton accounted for more than 60% of GDP. Baptist made up numbers and summed them in an approach to national income accounting that defies all logic.

3.       The pushing system was a term that enslaved people used. Ed Baptist made up the term (see section 4.1; on second thought, just read the whole thing).

4.       Economic historians don’t think slave owners used violence to coerce enslaved people. This is simply not true.

5.       Baptist shows that innovations in violence led to innovations in picking that drove increases in productivity during the antebellum period.  He never provides any evidence to support one of the central claims of his book. See the link for the previous point and this by Pseudoerasmus, and this by Olmstead and Rhode. I should also mention Trevor Burnard as one of the first historians to call out Baptist.

If we want Kanye to understand the brutality of slavery, how about Charles Ball, or Solomon Northup, or Harriet Jacobs? If you think he needs to read some professor, how about Daina Ramey Berry? Maybe if Kanye gets through these readings we can come up with some more, but let’s not contribute to the miseducation of Kanye West by telling him to read Ed Baptist’s terrible book.

P.S. Stop telling anyone to read Ed Baptist!

Thoughts on Kochs and GMU

1.       Cabrera sounds like Captain Renault. He should have actually said that he was “shocked – shocked to find that there were deals like this”

2.       The deals seem pretty stupid in terms of the level of involvement that the Koch’s wanted. I say stupid because they should have known that it would look bad when it came out, and it wasn’t necessary. As long as the president and provost want the money to keep coming in they will make sure the donor is happy.

3.       Provosts and presidents can do that because universities are like schoolyards.

4.       None of this alters the fact that Nancy MacLean engaged in historical malpractice.

5.       I will continue to judge academics at George Mason, whether they are in economics, Mercatus, the law school, or any other department or center, based upon what they do as individuals. That means that Mark Koyama and Noel Johnson are among the best economic historians working now, Robin Hanson and Arnold Kling are willing to play fast and loose with evidence to support their claims, and I still don’t understand why Tyler Cowen gets so much attention.

6.       This is the third time I have posted something critical of Democracy in Chains and I still haven’t gotten any Koch money.

Diane Lindstrom (1944-2018)

At the risk of making this seem like a blog of economic history obituaries, I think it is necessary to note the passing of Diane Lindstrom. Here is the obituary from the University of Wisconsin.

Along with Robert Gallman, Lawrence Herbst, Paul Uselding and others Lindstrom challenged the version of American antebellum growth presented in Doug North’s Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860. In Economic Growth Doug argued that growth was driven by a combination of cotton exports and interregional trade, in which Southern specialization in cotton generated demand for the products of farmers and manufacturers, driving growth in the rest of the country. Although some new historians of capitalism continue to cite the theory to demonstrate the central role of slavery in American economic development, Lindstrom and others had built a strong case against it by the mid-1970s.

She generated evidence to argue that the South was largely self-sufficient in grain:

Lindstrom, Diane. "Southern Dependence upon Interregional Grain Supplies: A Review of the Trade Flows, 1840-1860." Agricultural History 44, no. 1 (1970): 101-113.

And she went on to build an alternative explanation of growth based on the case of Philadelphia. She showed that the development in Philadelphia was largely driven by the regional market, rather than an inter-regional one:

Lindstrom, Diane L. "Demand, Markets, and Eastern Economic Development: Philadelphia, 1815-1840." Journal of Economic History (1975): 271-273; Lindstrom, Diane. Economic Development in the Philadelphia Region, 1810-1850. Columbia University Press, 1978; and Lindstrom, Diane. "American economic growth before 1840: New evidence and new directions." The Journal of Economic History 39, no. 1 (1979): 289-301.

Subsequent economic historians have expanded on her work. John Majewski, for instance, builds on Lindstrom’s argument by contrasting the case of Philadelphia with Virginia, showing how slavery led to conditions that did not promote strong local demand or support long term growth: A house dividing: Economic development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

I did not know her personally, but anyone interested in understanding American economic development needs to know the argument she developed and the evidence that she collected to support it.

By the way, if anyone is surprised that I, a student of Doug’s, am posting this you should know that the third edition of North’s Growth and Welfare in the American Past (coauthored with Terry Anderson and Peter Hill) states that “The spread of the cotton economy in the South and the development of the cotton export trade are elements of a well known story. It now appears, however, that economic historians have overemphasized the pattern of regional interdependence among the South, the West, and the Northeast (page 72)” and cites Lindstrom in the bibliography for that chapter. Doug once told me that the only good thing about getting old was that he knew lots of things that did not work.