Immigration and Innovation

Here is an excellent editorial on immigration and innovation by Edward Schumacher-Matos in the the Washington Post.

Entrepreneurial immigrants have always played a leading role in American economic history. In 1789 Samuel Slater came from England, having memorized the latest innovations in cotton textile production.

North Conference

The Center for New Insitutional Social Science at Washington University has videos from the conference honoring Doug North.

Un-Freaknomics?

Forbes profile of Alvin Roth presents him as Un-Freakonomics.
"In contrast with the authors of bestselling books like Freakonomics, who are fascinated by obscure but intriguing questions like how to detect cheating by sumo wrestlers, Roth relishes real-world challenges." Much of Freakonomics was about crime and education, hardly obscure issues. I liked that Freakonomics presented economists as people who do research to try to find the answers to questions.
The problem with Freakonomics is the marketing, which was successful but dishonest. Graduating from MIT, teaching at Chicago, winning the John Bates Clark Medal, and publishing in top journals are not indicators that one has gone rogue. Exaggerting the novelty of Freakonomics does a disservice to people like Gary Becker, Douglass North and Roger Miller (who tried to sell a version of The Economics of Public Issues under the title of Abortion, Baseball and Weed), Dick McKenzie and Gordon Tullock, and many others.

The Neglected Field of Economic History?

This is the title of a forum in the latest issue of Historically Speaking, with contributions from Robert Whaples, Deirdre McCloskey, Werner Troesken, Phil Hoffman, and Joel Mokyr.

Shaping the American Economy

The June issue of the Gilder Lehrman Institute's online journal History Now focuses on American economic history with essays byJoyce Appleby, Richard Sylla, Brian Murphy, Roger Farmer, and T.J. Stiles.

What I'm Reading

Peter Rousseau "The Market For Bank Stocks and the Rise of Deposit Banking in New York City, 1866-1897" NBER Working Paper 15770

Although not traded as actively on the New York Stock Exchange as they had been in the past, the over-the-counter market for these securities was efficient and the local newspapers quoted bank stock prices on a regular basis. The prices revealed in this market became reliable sources of information about the soundness of these institutions. Most important,
ordinary depositors – mostly those not actually investing in bank stocks – used this information to choose among the options for placing their savings. It is in this way that the market for bank stocks in New York contributed to increased public confidence in the banking system and the observed rise in deposits.

Take Care the Living

Video of Jeff McClurken talking about his book Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia.