More and more capitalism and slavery

Now Baptist responds to Clegg at the Junto. Have I ever mentioned that the Junto is one of the best blogs out there. I think I have. I find Baptist's response to be about as well reasoned and persuasive as his other work.

Even More on Capitalism and Slavery

The Junto Blog post regarding slavery and capitalism prompted a discussion in the comment section, which Edward Baptist joined in on. He argued that he had not misrepresented the work of Olmstead and Rhode but then doubled down and presented an even more misleading version of their work.

Baptist writes that

 “I argue that they adopt a new system around 1800, more or less, as evidenced by the narratives of survivors, which is supported by the very existence of systematic cotton-picking data itself. (It’s unclear, in Olmstead and Rohde’s argument) why their data even exists.)  

In their paper in the Journal of Economic History, Olmstead and Rhode state that planters kept record books of the pickings of individual slaves and that

“Failing to meet picking standards had severe consequences. In 1834 S. A. Townes of Marion, Alabama threatened to "make those bitches go at least 100 [pounds] or whip them like the devil.” In the 1830s Dr. J. W. Monett of Mississippi asserted that after weighing an individual's daily picking, masters would whip slaves for light or trashy picking. On several occasions, Louisiana planter Bennet Barrow ordered a whipping for all hands because the output was too low. As yet another example, John Edwin Fripp of South Carolina recorded "popping" and "switching" his slaves for light picking. On the Mississippi plantation of John Quitman and Henry Turner, a number of slaves ran away rather than face punishment for light or trashy picking.”

In other words, they argued, based on the evidence, that the slaveholders used the combination of detailed record keeping and whipping to maximize the productivity of slaves. In addition, they found that the average pounds of cotton picked by a slave increased over time. 

There are essentially two ways that this increase over time could have occurred. First, slaves could have been forced to pick closer to the maximum that they were physically capable of. Second, the maximum that they were physically capable of picking increased over time. O & R argue for the second explanation. Improved plants enabled slaves to pick more cotton in a given amount of time. In other words, slaveholders used physical coercion to force slaves to pick at maximum picking rates and through plant breeding they were able to increase this maximum amount that a person was physically capable of picking overtime.

Baptist’s alternative seems to be that the maximum remained relatively stable (he acknowledges that improved plants may have played some role), but planters became more effective at forcing people to produce up to the maximum. But this explanation poses several problems.

1.      

Why were early slaveholders so bad at pushing people to their capacity? Keep in mind that all the records on picking are from slaveholders who kept picking books, yet picking rates in the 1820s appear to have been well less than half of those in the ‘40s and ‘50s.  

2.      

Why didn’t these techniques carry over to other crops (sea island cotton and sugar)

The two problems are illustrated with the following figures from  O & R. 

Finally, Baptist now seems to make much of the claim that productivity fell after the war, suggesting that this somehow contradicts O & R's argument. He claimed that there was a consensus on the decline in productivity. I pointed out that there was not a consensus on the issue and that the data used to estimate productivity after the war are not strictly comparable to that from the antebellum picking books. Personally, I suspect there was probably a decline in productivity. But a decline in productivity is consistent with O & R’s argument. Why? Because they assumed that physical coercion was used to push slaves throughout the period. If you remove it productivity will fall. Pseudoerasmus notes in the comments section at the Junto that the sources Baptist cites are more consistent with O & R's argument than they are with his.

Some Big Question Economic History

Joel Mokyr on the Culture of Growth

Working paper by Koyama, Moriguchi and Sng on the development of state capacity in China and Japan.

And Mokyr on the Needham Paradox

More on Capitalism and Slavery

There is more discussion of capitalism and slavery over at the Junto, prompted by Robin Balckburn's review of Emprire of Cotton and John Clegg's essay in the most recent issue of Critical Historical Studies.  Clegg points out a number of problems with the arguments made by Baptist and Beckert, which I (here, here and here)  and Pseudoerasmus had noted. Clegg also argues that for the new history of capitalism to be fruitful it needs to grapple with the definition of capitalism.

Christine Exley the Economic Rockstar

The latest edition of Economic Rockstar Podcast features Christine Exley of the Harvard Business School. Among other things, she talks about how she came to study economics at the University of Mary Washington.

Disruption Disrupted

The Chronicle of Higher Education examines challenges to Clay Christensen’s theory of disruption. His The Innovator’s Dilemma has become one of the bestselling and most influential books on business strategy.  The historian Jill Lepore wrote an interesting critique of Christensen’s work   for the New Yorker last year. Now, Andrew King  and Baljir Baatartogtokh have a new paper in MIT Sloan Management Review, asking “How Useful is the Theory of Disruptive Innovation?” King and Brent Goldlfarb also have evidence of broader problems in empirical research in management (the problem they examine is not unique to management research). The Chronicle article is interesting both on the specific issue of Christensen’s theory but also on the difficulty King faced in publishing  a challenge to Christensen’s work:

“King and Tucci presented their findings at a conference in 1999. King recalls sitting at a restaurant soon after and a well-known figure in the field approached, shook his hand, and said, "You’re the guy who burst Christensen’s bubble." But it didn’t turn out that way. "We wrote a couple of papers, which we had to tone down a little bit because of the referees," says Tucci. The paper — working title: "Wrong. Wrong. Wrong." — was too polemical, they were told. When it finally appeared in Management Science, in 2002, the article had been smothered in theory and jargon. The published title: "Incumbent Entry Into New Market Niches: The Role of Experience and Managerial Choice in the Creation of Dynamic Capabilities." As Brent Goldfarb, an associate professor of management at the University of Maryland business school and friend of King, says, "You have to look really hard to realize King and Tucci slaughtered Christensen." - See more at: http://chronicle.com.ezproxy.umw.edu/article/The-Undoing-of-Disruption/233101/#sthash.LUXodkFg.dpuf

The historian's craft and economics

My paper (with Mary Eschelbach Hansen) “The historian’s craft and economics” is now available on First View at the Journal of Institutional Economics:

Abstract

History refers both to the past and to the systematic study of the past. Attempts to make a case for history in economics generally emphasize the first definition. There are benefits from increased attention to the past. This paper argues that significant benefits can be gained from increased attention to the systematic study of the past, the historian's craft. The essence of the historian's craft is the critical evaluation of sources. Failure to critically evaluate sources has the potential to lead to erroneous conclusions, whether one is using historical documents or more recently created data.

Economics really needs better critics

Per Byland recently complained that economists had killed economics

“What we have seen over the course of the last eighty years is a systematic dismantling of the contribution of economics to our understanding of the social world. Whatever the cause, modern economics is now not much more than formal modeling using mathematics dressed up in economics-sounding lingo."

I’m not sure that Bylund and Michael Lind would agree on much, but Lind also has seen the destruction of economics

 “Before World War II, economics — the field which had replaced the older “political economy” — was contested between neoclassical economics, which sought to model the economy with the methods of physics, and the much more sensible and empirically-oriented school of institutional economics. Another name for institutional economics was the Historical School. After 1945, the institutional economics associated in the U.S. with John Kenneth Galbraith was purged from American economics faculties, in favor of the “freshwater” (Chicago) and “saltwater” (MIT) versions of mathematical economics, which focused on trying to model the economy using equations as though it were a fluid or a gas.”

Either Bylund and Lind are completely out of touch with what economists are doing now or I am. Their critique of economics is an old one. I’m not sure it ever really applied, but it does not now. The American Economic Review and other top journals are full of empirical research, not lots of new papers about General Equilibrium.   

What sort of work do economists admire? Here are the John Bates Clark medalists since 1990. How many are known as pure theorists and how many are known for the empirical research?

1991	Paul R. Krugman	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States
1993	Lawrence H. Summers	Worldbank	United States
1995	David Card	Princeton University	Canada
1997	Kevin M. Murphy	University of Chicago	United States
1999	Andrei Shleifer	Harvard University	United States
2001	Matthew Rabin	University of California, Berkeley	United States
2003	Steven Levitt	University of Chicago	United States
2005	Daron Acemoğlu	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Turkey United States
2007	Susan C. Athey	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States
2009	Emmanuel Saez	University of California, Berkeley	France
2010	Esther Duflo	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	France
2011	Jonathan Levin	Stanford University	United States
2012	Amy Finkelstein	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States
2013	Raj Chetty	Harvard University	United States
2014	Matthew Gentzkow	University of Chicago	United States
2015	Roland G. Fryer, Jr.	Harvard University	United States

Bylund and Lind seem to think that economists all aspire to be Samuelson, Arrow or Debreu. Yes formal models with lots of imposing math are still to be found, but more often than not they lead in to empirical research.

Are there things that economist can do better? Yes. I, for instance wish that economists would give as much attention to the evidence that they use as they do to the formal model and the choice of econometric techniques. On the topic, Mary and I have a paper on “The Historian’s Craft and Economics” that I am happy to say was just accepted by Journal of Institutional Economics. I also wish they would give more attention to history generally, but I’m not really an unbiased source on that topic.