Another Rant on Cotton and Growth

This is one of the reasons why books like Empire of Cotton and The Half has Never Been Told irritate me so much. People like Harold Myerson start spreading their misinformation in newspapers like the Washington Post. Myerson writes that

“For much of the 20th century, the prevailing view of the North-South conflict was that it had pitted the increasingly advanced capitalist economy of the North against the pre-modern, quasi-feudal economy of the South. In recent years, however, a spate of new histories has placed the antebellum cotton economy of the South at the very center of 19th-century capitalism. Works such as “Empire of Cotton,” by Harvard historian Sven Beckert, and “The Half Has Never Been Told,” by Cornell University historian Edward E. Baptist, have documented how slave-produced cotton was the largest and most lucrative industry in America’s antebellum economy, the source of the fortunes of New York-based traders and investors and of British manufacturers. The rise in profitability, Baptist shows, resulted in large part from the increased brutalization of the slave work force.”

Was the prevailing view that the South was quasi-feudal? No. Anyone who had read any economic history in the last 60 years knew better.

Was slave produced cotton the largest and most lucrative industry? No. Cotton was the largest export, but not the largest product; both wheat and corn exceeded cotton in the value of crops produced (based on estimates from De Bows Statistical View). Cotton production amounted to about 4 % of GDP.

 

Have they documented how slave produced cotton was the source of the fortunes of New York based traders and investors? No. I think this will be rather difficult for them to do. According to Albion’s Rise of New York Port, in 1860 only $12.4 million worth of cotton was exported from New York, while more than $96 million was exported from New Orleans, smaller southern ports like Charleston and Savanah also exported more cotton than New York. Cotton accounted for a small share of the more than $120 million in exports from New York. Moreover the $233 million in imports that came through New York dwarfed the value of exports from the port. In other words, cotton accounted for a relatively small share of the shipping activity in New York. In addition, while some New York investors no doubt profited from slavery, at least some others saw slavery as a liability in financial markets. When Lewis Curtis of the Farmers Loan and Trust Company wrote to the Rothschilds in June 1838, trying to interest them in bonds to finance railroad construction in Michigan, he underlined that “it is a Free State and Slavery is prohibited.”  I do not know that the Rothschilds cared, but Curtis clearly thought they might. The bottom line is that we do not yet know the extent to which fortunes of New York traders and investors were built on cotton. So far, it has only been asserted; it has not been established with evidence.

Maybe I am wrong, but at least I will tell you what evidence I am basing my conclusions on.

Cheap as Chips

An essay on open access from the blog of the Omohundro Institute.

" Debates about Open Access often take place at a level of abstraction that privileges not simply clichés about technology (“Information wants to be free”) and statements of moral principle (“Impeding the circulation of knowledge hinders human progress”) but also assertions about out-of-control costs.  The comparator in these conversations, in short, is never an order of french fries.  Instead, it’s the thousands upon thousands of dollars charged by commercial publishers for access to STEM journals.  And fair enough.  There are discussions that need to be had about access to scholarship and the transfer of resources from educational institutions to private companies.  (For Karin’s recent contribution to those discussions, see her guest post on the Scholarly Kitchen blog.)  But those conversations must also recognize that there are other realities out there."

Some new stuff

Cohen and Mandler on silent changes to the History Manifesto.

The preliminary program for BHC EBHA is up.

Lindert and Williamson income estimates for colonial America.

Open Access and Predatory Publishing

LSE Impact Blog has an essay by Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella  on Open Access:

“Although predatory publishers predate open access, their recent explosion was expedited by the emergence of fee-charging OA journals. Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella argue that librarians can play an important role in helping researchers to avoid becoming prey. But there remains ambiguity over what makes a publisher predatory. Librarians can help to counteract the misconceptions and alarmism that stymie the acceptance of OA.”

They have some valid points, but there is also much that I disagree with. They spend too much time criticizing Jeffrey Beall for not being sufficiently supportive of OA. In addition, they confuse the issue of low quality and predatory. There are a lot of low quality journals out there, but they do not charge large fees to publish papers on line, they do not advertise that you can have your paper published in a month, they do provide some peer review and editing. They do not face up to the costs of the rush to OA, especially attempts to mandate publication in OA journals.

Open access is not the same thing as predatory. Open access means that people can view a piece of scholarship without having to pay a fee, either directly or indirectly through their school or employer. Predatory journals exist to make money by selling false information. The false information that they sell is that the papers in them have been published in a peer reviewed journal. Academics pay the predatory publisher to say that their paper has been published in a peer reviewed journal; the academics then put the lie into their cvs and their annual activity reports and their tenure and promotion files. After examining a number of these journals I am convinced that it is all too easy tell legitimate publishers from predatory publishers.   The researchers that publish in these fake journals are not being preyed upon; the people that are led to believe that these researchers are publishing in peer reviewed journals are the prey.  Beall’slist is really more of a tool for these people than it is for researchers.

Being open access does not prove that a journal is predatory. Not being open access does not prove that a journal is not predatory. There is, however, a connection between open access and predatory publishers. Legitimate open access journals have created an opportunity for predatory publishers by publishing online and charging fees. Predatory publishers mimic these features, but, unlike traditional journals they have no incentive to provide peer review and editing. Traditional journals have an incentive to engage in careful peer review and editing. They need to get people to buy their journal. The articles have to be good enough that universities, members of an association, or people in the field will be willing to pay to read them. Predatory publishers have no incentive to expend time and resources on peer review and editing. The last thing they want is to have anyone read the articles.  If you read something like this it will only make it harder to tell people that you thought you were publishing in a legitimate journal.

Personally, I do not see publication in traditional journals as incompatible with open access. I noted in a previous post that I went through a recent issue of The American Economic Review and was able to find an open access, or ungated, version of every paper.  In addition, we were hiring this year and pretty much everyone had a website with access to their job market paper. There are often some differences between the “ungated” version of a paper and published version of a paper; if you want to cite a paper you should probably get access to the published version. But if the issue is simply access to research results the ungated version will typically provide this. It seems to me that this general approach existed in economics for a long time. Even before widespread access to the internet economists distributed working papers.  Pretty much anyone who mattered had probably read your paper years before it appeared in print.  There may be reasons why this approach will not work in some disciplines. There may even be reasons it will not continue to work in economics, but advocates for open access journals need to acknowledge the problems they give rise to and the possible alternatives.

More on The History Manifesto

American Historical Review has Cohen and Mandler’s critique of The History Manifesto and Armitage and Guldi’s reply. Cohen and Mandler also have a rejoinder to Armitage and Guldi’s reply. I have previously referred to reviews of the Manifesto by Pseudoerasmus and Mark Koyama.

More on the "new history of capitalism"

The U.S. Intellectual History Blog has published an interesting essay by James Livingston on the new history of capitalism and Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams. The essay is part 3 of a 4 part series.

More on the recession of the early 1920s

I saw the other day that James Grant’s The Forgotten Depression had received an award from the Manhattan Institute. The book argues that the economy recovered quickly from a “Depression” in the early 1920s because the government did not intervene, and that this provides a lesson for our times. On the same day I read a new paper in the Journal of American History, “Before the Roar: U.S. Unemployment Relief after World War I and the Long History of a Paternalist Welfare Policy,” by Daniel Amsterdam.  You would think they were written about two different countries. Amsterdam describes numerous government responses (largely at the state and local level, but in some cases promoted at the federal level) to unemployment during the recession in the early 1920s.

I have to say, I find The Forgotten Depression and its reception a bit puzzling. It seems to me that the need to identify examples of times when the economy recovered quickly without government intervention is motivated more by politics than by economic theory or historical evidence. Why should a recovery be quick? If a credit boom leads to a severe misallocation of resources, why would we expect that reallocation after the boom would occur at any particular speed? Where is there in, for example, Austrian Business Cycle Theory a method of predicting how many months a recovery will take? Why, even in the absence of government intervention, might it not take years for reallocation to occur?

I can understand making an argument that, other things equal, markets should adjust more quickly when there are fewer restrictions placed upon them. But 1920 and 2008 are so far from other things equal it is difficult to make useful comparisons. The two periods differ fundamentally in terms of the source of the boom and bust. The misallocation of resources, by peacetime standards, was driven by the war.  In addition, Grant focuses on the federal government’s response to unemployment, but before WWII spending by state and local governments (as well as regulation) exceeded that of the federal government.  Just because the federal government did not do something in the past does not mean that government did not do it. One would need to look carefully at state and local actions to understand the role of “government” during the recession of the early twenties. Amsterdam does not provide a complete picture of state and local action, but it is a good start.

And, yes, I called it a recession, not a depression. If we choose to call the early twenties a depression then almost every downturn in U.S. history should be called a depression. Grant rejects recent estimates of historical business cycles by Christina Romer. Perhaps Romer’s estimates are in error, but I do not find the lyrics of “Aint We Got Fun” to be persuasive evidence that she erred.

The graph below shows percent change in Real GDP (1890-1950) based on the Millennial Edition of Historical Statistics (Ca 9). The recession of the early 1920s was simply was not unusually long or severe compared to other downturns.