Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Henry Clay, Edward Baptist, and the Whipping Machine

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Along with the term “pushing system” that Baptist invented and attributed to slaves and his fictional estimate of the economic impact of s...
Wednesday, September 5, 2018

That's Just Econ 101 Part 2

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The other day I said that when someone says something is just Econ 101 you can be confident it is probably not Econ 101. I have a couple m...
Monday, August 20, 2018

Productive and Unproductive Error

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The list of new working papers this morning from nep-his contained one by Richard Langlois, “The Fisher Body Case and Organizational Econ...
Wednesday, August 15, 2018

That's Just Econ 101

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The other day my wife and I were talking about how people like to use phrases like “that’s just Econ 101”. Unfortunately, statements that...
Tuesday, June 12, 2018

How I Became a Business Historian (a bit of shameless self-promotion)

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Yesterday, the June issue of Enterprise & Society , the journal of the Business History Conference , arrived, and my paper Trust Comp...
Monday, June 11, 2018

Was Slavery Central to American Economic Development?

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Antebellum Economic Growth  Last week on Twitter Matt Yglesias raised a question about changes in how historians interpreted slavery...
Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Podcasts I Listen To

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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, b...
Monday, June 4, 2018

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

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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 ...