Sunday, October 21, 2018

Accounting for Slavery

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I got around to reading Caitlin Rosenthal’s Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management . Rosenthal does not need me to sing her praise...
Thursday, October 18, 2018

Accounting for Capitalism

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I read Michael Zakim’s new book Accounting for Capitalism: The world the clerks made last week. I saw Tyler Cowen’s brief review on Marg...
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...