1.
I will be in Montreal this week at the
meeting of the Economic and Business History Society. Here
is the program. I’ll be presenting a paper on “Trust Company Failures in
New York State, 1875-1925.”
Abstract
Despite what appeared
to be lax regulation and rapid growth, trust companies rarely failed. These few failures, however, provide a path to understanding the overall success of trust
companies in New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Failures played a disproportionate role in shaping the rules and regulations
that governed trust companies, and the resolution of each failure provided
additional information about how the laws and regulations would be implemented.
These failures shed light on issues of corporate governance and financial
stability that are still relevant today.
2. This
blog made the Intelligent Economist’s list of The Top
100 Economics Blogs of 2016.
Anton Howe’s
Capitalism’s Cradle is another
economic history focused blog on the list.
3.
Pseudoerasmus' blog, which should also be on the list, has some new posts: Did Inequality Cause the First
World War?; Inequality
and the First Globalization, and Economic
History Readings
4. By
the way, for those of you who do not know, Pseudoerasmus is the name of a
person who blogs and tweets, mostly about economic history and development.
Most people seem to assume that that Pseudoerasmus is a pseudonym.
Consequently, some people refer to him as an anonymous blogger.
He recently contributed to discussion about the history of
capitalism at the Junto and published a long blogpost about the Lenin-Hobson
theory of World War I as it appears in Branko Milanovic’s recent book.
Richard Drayton argued with Pseudoerasmus in the comments
section over at the Junto. Drayton concluded his part of the exchange with the
following:
I’m rather intrigued by a
chap, and there’s too much chap coming out of your prose for me to go for
gender neutral pronoun, who spends so much of his time writing aggressive
anonymous critiques of — and these are only the ones I’ve noticed — David
Armitage, Steve Pincus, Ed Baptist, Sven Beckert. These are, or have become,
high profile figures, who have produced substantial original work which has
been widely received and even often forcefully and critically responded to. Why
not publish these pieces with your name behind it? It begins to look rather
mean spirited, even envious, and as if you are afraid to defend your position in
public, or afraid that somehow whoever you are would diminish the respect with
which your opinions are received?
I, on the other hand, am intrigued by a chap who seems so
much more concerned with who people are than with what they have to say. The
last line is the most intriguing. Are
you “afraid that somehow whoever you are would diminish the respect
with which your opinions are received?” What does that mean? Are we
absolved from considering the logic and evidence that someone presents if they
are not a high profile figure? Or, perhaps he just takes the same approach to argument that people like Baptist and Cowie do. All you
have to do is note that someone is an economist (or a sociologist in the case
of John Clegg) before dismissing their argument.
Milanovic’s response
to the blogpost by Pseudoerasmus challenging his interpretation of the cause of
World War I was to retweet it.
No comments:
Post a Comment