Rothman on Slavery and Capitalism

Joshua Rothman has written an essay on the new history of capitalism and slavery. In it he illustrates some of the fundamental problems with the recent work in this area.

First, he perpetuates the misleading historiography that claims the new historians of capitalism have overturned the old orthodoxy that slavery was apart from capitalism, pretending that economic historians had not been making that argument for over a half century.  

Second, although he acknowledges that there have been critics, rather than addressing their claims, he writes them off as a matter of dogma rather than analysis. Evidently it is dogma to oppose inaccurate historiography. And it is dogma to expect a historian not to make up evidence. I am willing to say that I subscribe to this dogma.

Yet, as Rothman points out, this work seems to appeal to many people. It seems particularly timely as people worry about the ongoing effects of financial crises, increasing inequality and racial discrimination. This appeal is in some ways the most fundamental problem with the new history of capitalism. “Like my book because I claim that capitalism was the driving force behind the brutality of slavery.” “Like my book because it shows that slavery was the driving force behind American economic growth.” Numerous fans of Baptist’s book have observed that he showed that slave grown cotton accounted for half of economic activity in 1836. But anyone no one who actually reads pages 321 and 322 can fail to see that the numbers are made up and then aggregated in ways that make no sense. People have, however, chosen to overlook that if they like the conclusion. And this is the most fundamental problem: people evaluating someone’s work based upon how well it fits their preconceptions rather than the actual quality of the work. 

Some Economic History Links

Bob Higgs on Doug North

The list of papers being presented at Clio sessions at ASSA.

Sheilagh Ogilivie on the Champagne fairs.

Michalopoulos and Papaioannou on the effects of the “Scramble for Africa”

Since My Last Post

The end of the semester has kept me away from this blog for a while. Once grading was done, Mary and I went up to Mercatus to see Eric Chaney present his research on “Religion and the rise and Fall of Islamic Science” at the Washington Area Economic History Seminar. Here is the version of the paper available on his page at Harvard.

We also went up to Philadelphia for a couple of days. We had dinner at our favorite restaurant, Pumpkin, and at Fork, which was also very good. While I’m at it, we usually stay at the Palomar and have breakfast at Schlesinger’s

Also went to the Art Museum this is my favorite thing there.

In the world of economic history

There is a new Chinese Economic History blog. Among other things, it has a number of interesting interviews.

In addition to the usual collection of interesting papers Journal of Economic History has four essays on the future of economic history.

Bakker, Crafts and Woltjer put out a new working paper  “A vision of the Growth Process in a Technologically Progressive Economy: the United States, 1899-1941.”

“Abstract

We develop new aggregate and sectoral Total Factor Productivity (T FP ) estimates for the United States between 1899 and1941 through better coverage of sectors and better measured labor quality, and show TFP –growth was lower than previously thought, broadly based a cross sectors, strongly variant intertemporally, and consistent with many diverse sources of innovation. We then test and reject three prominent claims. First, the 1930s did not have the highest TFP –growth of the twentieth century. Second, TFP –growth was not predominantly caused by four leading sectors. Third, TFP –growth was not caused by a ‘yeast process’ originating in a dominant technology such as electricity.”

Historians on Edward Baptist

Al Zambone and Bob Elder discuss the book on the podcast Historically Thinking.

Trevor Burnard discusses Baptist’s responses to his critics. Burnard writes that “repeatedly, Baptist puts himself up as the authority on slave testimony; places himself as the judge of what is contained in slave testimony, and suggests that all of his critics are deficient because they don’t take slave testimony as seriously as he does.”

I tried to explain Baptist’s position to someone by pointing out that he seems to believe he speaks for the enslaved the way the Lorax speaks for the trees. The only difference is that the trees did not speak, the enslaved did.

More on Doug North

I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned Doug’s influence on the teaching of economics. The Economics of Public Issues (19^th edition) is still in print, though the first edition is still, in my opinion, the best. Like all successful entrepreneurs North and Miller attracted competitors and influenced the way material is presented in standard textbooks. Doug told me it sold enough to put three sons through Stanford. The book came about as a result of his returning to teaching principles of economics after several years of not having done so.   He finished his lecture on perfect competition with some reference to agricultural markets and asked if there were any questions. A student stood up in the back of the lecture hall. Doug asked him what his question was and the student said “That’s bullshit.” Doug said if you’re so smart why don’t you tell us all about it. Turned out the guy grew up on a farm in Eastern Washington and knew all about how the government interfered with agricultural markets. Doug said he knew that he couldn’t keep giving textbook lectures, but he didn’t know what he should do. He had been working with the Seattle City Council and began his next class with a statement about how many rapes and murders the council had voted to allow, illustrating the consequences of choices about how to allocate spending in the city. Doug ended up writing stories about the economics of crime, abortion, baseball, marijuana etc. He said it was Roger Le Roy Miller’s idea to turn these stories into a book. It sold so well as a textbook that they tried to sell a trade version called Abortion, Baseball and Weed. It bombed; people weren’t ready for freakonomics yet.

I also wanted to note that a couple of couple of places (e.g. NY Times) have mentioned that Doug’s father dropped out of school to become an office messenger. What they did not mention was that his father went on to become vice-president of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Doug’s uncle, his father’s younger brother, eventually became the president of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. I had the impression that he was quite proud of his father. He said that his father was always the one to give the speech when they wanted to get the agents fired up. Doug’s dissertation was a pretty traditional economic history of the life insurance business, with a focus on the Armstrong Investigation. I seem to recall that he said his family was not particularly pleased with his essentially airing the family’s dirty laundry.

Here are some tributes to Doug by people who knew him well

Yoram Barzel remembers Doug at University of Washington

John Nye has both a personal reflection and a review of Doug’s contribution to economics.

John Wallis provides a really good review of Doug’s contributions to social sciences.

Barry Weingast’s tribute to Doug is my favorite so far. As soon as I saw the quote beginning with “Listen, Bub” I could heard Doug’s voice.

Just Listen

In response to this Huffington Post article Jaci Evan's (a former student of mine who is about to finish her  Ph. D. at U. of Maryland) wrote this on Facebook.  Please listen to her.


"There are so many things I could write here that it's hard to choose. But I think I'll say this: I still remember the first time an adult man made me feel sexualized and unsafe. I was 12. That memory has stuck with me to this day, and it was the first of a countless number of times that it has happened since. So when your girlfriend says that your neighbor's behavior makes her feel unsafe, don't say you think it sounds normal, just listen. When she says she doesn't think she'd enjoy travelling to that country known for men who grope women on the subway or cat-call on the streets, don't tell her she's being too sensitive about it, just listen. When she gets upset about those "good old boy" songs involving rape that so many frats get in trouble for these days, don't tell her that they don't really mean it, just listen. Your reality isn't hers, and her thoughts are valid. They come from horrific experiences in her past and in her knowledge of horrific experiences in her friends' pasts. Just listen."

Doug North

My friend Tawni Hunt Ferrarini told me this morning that Doug North passed away last night. Douglass C. North was, of course, a Nobel Memorial Prize winner in Economics. I first, discovered his work while I was a graduate student in economic history at the London School of Economics in 1984-85. I read “A Framework for Analyzing the State in Economic History” published in a special issue of Explorations in Economic History dedicated to his dissertation adviser M.M. Knight. I still love the way he used such a simple model to think about such a complicated problem. When I decided to go back to graduate school to pursue a Ph.D. in economics, I wanted to study with him. I became his research assistant and he was the chair of my dissertation committee. He was everything I had hoped for as a professor and more than I could have imagined as a human being. I felt like I had won the lottery. I still feel that way.

I wanted to write about what he meant to me, both intellectually and as a friend, but I can’t. Maybe another day I will, but not today. 

Coase on Lighthouses and Economics

Earlier this week Daniel Shestakov noted the publication of a new paper on lighthouses by Erik Lindberg. He and I then had a brief exchange on twitter about whether or not the work since Coase’s (1974) paper had supported or contradicted his contentions. It got me thinking that maybe I had missed something in the more recent work. I went back and looked at some of the papers. I’m still not entirely certain what Shestakov’s position is, but it seemed to me that he was claiming that recent work had supported the theorists rather than Coase. I still don’t see it that way.  Theory suggests that if a good is non-rival and non-excludable that there will be a free rider problem and that the outcome will be inefficient in the sense that it will not maximize the sum of consumer and producer surplus. Coase did not set out to refute the theory. He simply argued that it did not necessarily apply in the case of a commonly used example: the lighthouse. The extent to which a good is non -rival and non-excludable is an empirical question. Coase argued that in some cases lighthouses were not in fact non-excludable. In some cases it is not prohibitively costly to charge the users for the service. It seems to me that recent work has not refuted this claim.

My interpretation of Coase’s paper is that it was really much more about economic methods than it was about lighthouses or public goods. The paper was about the way that economists like Samuelson didn’t bother to study the history of lighthouses before using them as an example of a public good. The primary claim of the paper was that the theory of public goods did not necessarily apply to lighthouses because in some cases it was possible to make the people who used the lighthouse pay for the service provided. Specifically, it was possible to identify which lighthouses a ship had benefited from and charge them accordingly at the time they docked. Coase described the finance and operation of private lighthouses as follows:

It was, for instance, much like a private toll bridge. Coase may actually overstate the extent to which the government set price distinguished the case of lighthouses from most goods. He was clearly aware of the extensive role of government in the provision of lighthouses, and he made no effort to hide this from his readers. Coase, however, characterized the government’s involvement as being not substantially different than the provision of other goods by private companies:

Responses to Coase’s paper seem to fall into two categories.

1.      

Government was extensively involved in the so called private lighthouses. Therefore, the lighthouses were not as private as Coase suggested. It has even suggested that it is ironic that Coase chided other economists for not getting their facts straight and then failed to do so himself.

2.       Coase’s speculation about the relative efficiency of private provision is unsupported by the evidence.

Van Zandt (1993) falls into the first category. Van Zandt, however, does not seem to disagree with Coase’s description of the finance and operation of lighthouses. Instead, he disagrees with the interpretation. His primary argument is that the “public” versus “private” dichotomy is not very useful. Coase seems to have agreed with Van Zandt in so far as Van Zandt notes that Coase suggested that there may be an even wider variety of institutional arrangements than he considers.

Bertrand (2006) agrees with Van Zandt that there was extensive involvement of the government in the so-called private lighthouses. She claims at one point that “We have thus shown that Coase, in his account of the English lighthouse system, underestimates the importance of government, and conversely overestimates the appropriateness of individual initiative (Bertrand 400).” But like Van Zandt she has not actually shown that the lighthouses were financed and operated differently than Coase described. People obtained charters from the government, which set the fees and was sometimes directly involved in the collection of these fees. But Coase said all of that. He never suggested that the government was not at involved. He never even suggested that it was not extensively involved.

Bertrand also argues that Coase overestimated the efficiency of the private lighthouses. The problem here is that Coase’s argument wasn’t about the relative efficiency of the private versus public provision. He did little more than speculate about them in the conclusion of the paper, and suggest that more research needed to be done.

Finally, Lindberg (2015) adds a comparative perspective as well as details about the amount of fees collected. Perhaps, most importantly, I think he moves in the direction originally suggested by Coase. He analyzes the actual lighthouse systems that existed in different places and times to try to understand what might explain the differences in institutional arrangements.