Business History and the Great Divergence

Luca Zan and Kent Deng “Micro Foundations in the Great Divergence Debate: Opening Up a New Perspective” LSE Department of Economic History Working Paper No. 256 Jan. 2017

Abstract

Prevailing approaches in historical studies adopt a macro view and place an overwhelming emphasis on the Industrial Revolution as a major discontinuity in Western development. On the contrary, recent research in accounting, management and business history has suggested a different direction. When opting for a micro-level focus, crucial discontinuities in management and accounting in the West can be traced back to the Renaissance Period. The paper thus searches for ‘micro foundations’ in managing and accounting practices to address the on-going debate on the East-West divergence. Despite the obvious problems with source availability, we outline a new research agenda for the debate.

Geoffrey Jones Business History, the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence Harvard Business School Working Paper 18-004

Abstract

This working paper provides a business history perspective on debates about the Great Divergence, the rise of the income gap between the West and the Rest, and the more recent Great Convergence, which has seen a narrowing of that gap. The literature on the timing and causes of the Great Divergence has focused on macro analysis. This working paper identifies the potential for more engagement at the micro level of business enterprises. While recognizing that the context of institutions, education, and culture plays a role in explanations of wealth and poverty, the paper calls for a closer engagement with the processes of how these factors translated into generating productive firms and entrepreneurs. The challenges of catching up were sufficiently great in the Rest that initially ethnic and religious minorities held significant advantages in raising capital and trust levels, which enabled them to flourish as entrepreneurs. Yet by the interwar years, there is evidence of a more general emergence of modern business enterprise in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Many governmental policies after 1945 designed to facilitate catch-up ended up crippling such emergent business enterprises without putting effective alternatives in place. The second wave of globalization from the 1980s provided more opportunities for catch-up from the Rest. Firms from emerging markets had the opportunity to access the global networks that replaced large integrated firms. There were also new ways to access knowledge and capital, including through management consultancies and hiring graduates from business schools. The upshot was the rise to global prominence of firms based in the Rest, including Foxcomm, Huawei, HNA, Cemex, and TCS.

Steinbaum on Public Choice

Marshall Steinbaum has published a sort of review of NancyMacLean's Democracy in Chains in which describes “the racist origins of Public Choice theory” and suggests that everyone should read Democracy in Chains “despite its rhetorical shortcomings.”

Steinbaum seems to unquestioningly accept MacLean’s claim that Buchanan’s “study of how government officials make decisions became “public choice economics.”” (MacLean xxiii) In making public choice theory and Buchanan's though synonymous, Steinbaum and MacLean strip public choice of all context other than that related to Buchanan. Buchanan, however, was only one of a number of people attempting to apply economic methods (rational choice and models) to the analysis of both politics and political philosophy. Duncan Black’s work was published before Buchanan, and Ken Arrow, William Riker, Vincent Ostrom, Amartya Sen and others were working on this approach in the 1950s and 1960s at the same time as Buchanan. To the best of my knowledge, none of them appear in Democracy in Chains. They are not listed in the index. The point is that there were a lot of people interested in applying the economic approach to politics. Many of them did not have the same normative preferences as Buchanan. It is this broader approach to public choice that you will find in Mueller’s text on the subject. It is even what you will find here at the Library of Economics and Liberty. Public choice is more than James Buchanan.

By the way, this is more of a defense of public choice theory than it is of Buchanan,Virginia, or UVA. The University of Virginia was an avowedly racist and sexist place in the '50s and '60s? UVA was both all white and all male (until the 1970s). To the best of my knowledge neither Buchanan or anyone of his colleagues at the time made any effort to change that. Of course that could be said of most of the men at UVA and a lot of other universities at the time. The liberty they were most concerned with seemed to be the liberty of men like themselves. 

I'll also say that I have no intention of reading the whole book. If you want to say I have no right to criticize it until I have read the whole thing, go ahead. I don’t care. I don’t have enough time to waste on historians that I do not trust. This is particularly true for a subject that I do not regard as my area of expertise. If it is nineteenth or early twentieth century American economic history I can quickly identify inconsistencies and errors, but for other topics I need to have some faith in the historian. For me the bottom line on MacLean’s book is still that there are numerous instances where she did not honestly represent her sources. Misrepresenting your sources is more than a rhetorical shortcoming.

Trust Company Failures and Institutional Change in New York, 1875-1925

My paper "Trust Company Failures and Institutional Change in New York, 1875-1925" is now available under First View at Enterprise and Society.

Here are the first two paragraphs

The State of New York created the first trust company in 1822, when

it granted a corporate charter to the Farmers’ Fire Insurance and

Loan Company, later renamed Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company,

and authorized it to act as a trustee. As the name suggests, Farmers

and other early trust companies, like the New York Life Insurance

and Trust Company and the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance

Company, also sold insurance, and they provided trusts as an alternative

to insurance. Trust companies later used their trust powers

to facilitate the development of corporate finance by serving as registrars

and transfer agents for corporate securities and as trustees for

corporate mortgages. Trust companies also accepted deposits; by the

middle of the nineteenth century, some of these deposits could be withdrawn

on demand including by check. Thus, by the late nineteenth

century, trust companies in New York occupied a unique position in

the financial system by combining functions associated with banks

with functions associated with trustees.

Between 1875 and 1925, the number of trust companies in New York

State increased from ten to 110, and the total resources of trust companies

increased more rapidly than those of state banks or savings

banks. Trust companies have been characterized as early examples

of “shadow banks,” operating outside the laws and regulations that

applied to commercial banks. However, as with other financial institutions,

New York State trust companies rarely failed. Between 1875

and 1925, the superintendent of banks only intervened eleven times

to deal with troubled trust companies, and in several of these cases

the trust company reopened. Despite this rarity, these failures provide

a path to understanding the overall success of trust companies.

The path leads through institutions: failures played a leading role in

shaping the institutions that governed trust companies. Consequently,

failures shaped the expectations and actions of everyone involved

with trust companies: depositors, shareholders, and executives.