At H-SHEAR Daniel Feller writes about Standards of Accuracy in Historical Scholarship in recent works by Johnson and Baptist and starts an interesting discussion.
This is a blog about economics, history, law and other things that interest me.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Friday, April 10, 2015
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.
Sunday, April 5, 2015
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."
" 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."
Monday, March 23, 2015
Friday, March 20, 2015
Open Access and Predatory Publishing
“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.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
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.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)