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
This is a blog about economics, history, law and other things that interest me.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
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.
Sunday, October 18, 2015
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.
Thursday, September 24, 2015
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.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
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
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2015
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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.
Round table on Edward Baptist's Half has Never Been Told
The September Journal of
Economic History has a round table of reviews of Edward Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been told, with
reviews by Alan Olmstead, Jonathan Pritchett, Trevon Logan and Peter Rousseau. They
each address different aspects of the way that Baptist misrepresents the
historiography of American slavery and makes things up. Thanks to Alan Olmstead
for mentioning one of my
blog posts on the book. Many of the points noted in these reviews are similar to ones that I and Pseudoerasmus
made about the book shortly after it came out, around the same time it was
getting glowing reviews in places like the New York Times Book Reviews. I found
Logan’s review particularly interesting when it stepped away from what is
typically thought of as economic history. He concludes
I think as an economic historian I was so offended by the
books portrayal of economic historians I may have missed some of the bigger
problems.
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