Sheilagh
Ogilivie on the Champagne fairs.
This is a blog about economics, history, law and other things that interest me.
Monday, December 28, 2015
Monday, December 21, 2015
Since My Last Post
The end of
the semester has kept me away from this blog for a while. Once grading was
done, Mary and I went up to Mercatus to see Eric Chaney present his
research on “Religion and the rise and Fall of Islamic Science” at the Washington Area Economic
History Seminar. Here
is the version of the paper available on his page at Harvard.
We also went
up to Philadelphia for a couple of days. We had dinner at our favorite
restaurant, Pumpkin, and at Fork, which was also very good. While I’m
at it, we usually stay at the Palomar and have breakfast
at Schlesinger’s
Also went to
the Art Museum this
is my favorite thing there.
In the world
of economic history
There is a
new Chinese Economic History
blog. Among other things, it has a number of interesting interviews.
In addition
to the usual collection of interesting papers Journal of
Economic History has four essays on the future of economic history.
Bakker, Crafts
and Woltjer put out a new
working paper “A vision of the
Growth Process in a Technologically Progressive Economy: the United States,
1899-1941.”
“Abstract
We develop new aggregate and sectoral Total Factor Productivity
(T FP ) estimates for the United States between 1899 and1941 through better coverage
of sectors and better measured labor quality, and show TFP –growth was lower than
previously thought, broadly based a cross sectors, strongly variant intertemporally,
and consistent with many diverse sources of innovation. We then test and reject
three prominent claims. First, the 1930s did not have the highest TFP –growth of
the twentieth century. Second, TFP –growth was not predominantly caused by four
leading sectors. Third, TFP –growth was not caused by a ‘yeast process’
originating in a dominant technology such as electricity.”
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Historians on Edward Baptist
Al Zambone
and Bob Elder discuss the book on the podcast Historically Thinking.
Trevor Burnard discusses
Baptist’s responses to his critics. Burnard
writes that “repeatedly, Baptist puts himself up as the authority on slave
testimony; places himself as the judge of what is contained in slave testimony,
and suggests that all of his critics are deficient because they don’t take
slave testimony as seriously as he does.”
I tried to
explain Baptist’s position to someone by pointing out that he seems to believe he speaks for the enslaved the way the Lorax speaks for the trees. The only difference is that the trees did not speak, the enslaved did.