Some recent history and economic history

The latest issue of History Now from the Gilder Lehrman Institute is about the history of the blues and jazz. It has this nice list of links to music.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about state capacity and the evolution of norms. I think it is safe to say many economist historians regard both as essential to understanding long run economic performance.

On state capacity, here is Koyama on Salter on Johnson and Koyama. And here is Koyama on Political Decentralization and Innovation in early modern Europe and The Economist covers the work of Anderson, Johnson and Koyama on poor harvests and violence.

On the evolution of norms:

Pseudoerasmus “Where Do Pro-Social Institutions Come From?” originally published as a blog post but recently published on Evonomics.

Peter Turchin writes that

“Cultural Evolution is a new interdisciplinary field whose intellectual roots go back only to the 1970s (unless, of course, you count Charles Darwin; but in a sense any new development in evolutionary science can be traced to Darwin). In this new field, “culture” is defined as information, which can affect human behavior, that is socially transmitted—through books and manuals, by teaching, or simply by observing and imitation. Cultural variants are information packages that cause people to behave in alternative ways. Cultural Evolution, then, studies how and why frequencies of cultural variants change with time, just as biological evolution focuses on the changing frequencies of genetic variants.”

       

Of course North placed a great deal of emphasis on the importance of changing beliefs (especially in Structure and Change and later works) but this also reminds me of Veblen, who argued that “institutions are, in substance, prevalent habits of thought with respect to particular relations and to particular functions of the individual and of the community” and that "the evolution of society is substantially a process of mental adaption on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to circumstances in the past." He argued that these prevalent habits of thoughts influenced both the objectives that people sought to achieve and the means that they perceived to achieve them. Consequently, their evolution should be the primary concern of economists.

In addition, Jared Rubin and Murat Iyigun have a paper on the Ideological Roots of Institutional Change

BTW there is actually a connection between the first link and the last link in this post.