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.
This is a blog about economics, history, law and other things that interest me.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
The History of Corporations and Securities Markets
Leslie Hannah’s keynote address to the Economic and Business
History Society, “The
Origins, Characteristics and Resilience of the “Anglo- American” Corporate
Model,” is now online.
Mary O’Sullivan argues that J.P. Morgan’s role needs to be
re-examined in “Too
Much Ado About Morgan’s Men: The U.S. Securities Market, 1908-1914.”
Friday, March 6, 2015
A Tale of Two Plantations
I have recently written about some new books on the history
of slavery that I did not like. I just finished one that I really did like: A
Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia
by Stephen Dunn. It is a remarkable work, following the lives of hundreds of
slaves on two large plantations: Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy on the
Northern Neck of Virginia, not far from where I live. The bloggers at the Junto devoted several days to
discussion of the book and an interview with the author. One of the things that
I most enjoyed was the description of the process of historical
research. I thought this book was a great example of the historian taking his
reader along with him to the archives, describing the difficulties in finding
sources, the limits of those sources, and how he made certain inferences from
those sources.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Burnard and Baptist on the History of Slavery
I posted a link to Trevor Burnard’s review of The
Half Has Never Been Told in Slavery and Abolition. The review raises many of
the issues that I and Pseudoerasmus had
previously raised in our blogs. Because the journal also published Baptist’s reply I thought I
would review my take on the book and Baptist’s reply to some of the criticism.
My understanding of Baptist’s book is that he attempts
to develop the following chain of reasoning.
1. Slaveholders
were capitalists, seeking profits by physically coercing, i.e. torturing slaves
to produce more.
2. Over
time slaveholders increased productivity in cotton picking.
3. More
intense (or more effective) coercion was the source of increased productivity.
4. The
increases in cotton production were the driving force behind American economic
growth.
5. Therefore,
American capitalist development was driven by increasingly intense exploitation
of slaves.
Link 1. The first link in the chain is the strongest.
It is also the least novel. No one disputes that slaveholders physically abused
slaves to force them to work harder. The only real disputes have been about the
extent to which rewards were used relative to the extent to which punishment
was used. Fogel and Engerman leaned toward an emphasis on positive incentives.
Research since Time on the Cross, leans
the other way. Gutman showed the flaws in TOC analysis of whipping. Rick
Steckel demonstrated that heights of slaves were significantly lower than
whites, consistent with inadequate nutrition. The available evidence suggests
that the amount of labor that African Americans supplied after emancipation was
much less than they had supplied under slavery. And, although one might
question the extent to which they are representative, numerous slave narratives
and autobiographies provide evidence of extensive use of whipping and other
forms of torture.
Baptist, however, also tries to portray his view of
slaveholders as capitalists as a shift in historical understanding, and this is
one of the points upon which Burnard criticizes his book.
Baptist replies to Burnard
in
my introduction, I suggest that historians have not done enough to show the
relationship
between
nineteenth-century changes in the Southern slave economy on the one hand,
and
the emergence of industrial and financial capitalism in the USA on the other.
Here
Burnard
is miffed that I do not begin with a recitation of historiographical begats and
begottens.
True enough, in this trade-press book, I chose to eschew the traditional long
historiographical
slog of a monograph’s introductory chapter.
But in his book he does not just suggest that
historians have not done enough. He declares that
“during the
late antebellum years, northern travelers insisted that slave labor was less
efficient than free labor, a point of dogma that most historians and economists
have accepted.”
This statement is demonstrably false and misleads
readers about the historiography of slavery. there have been
surveys of economic historians that show that more than two-thirds would agree
that slave agriculture was efficient relative to non-slave agriculture. It has
been more than a half century since Conrad and Meyer showed that investment in
slaves had a return comparable to other potential investments. Fogel and
Engerman long ago argued that slave agriculture was as dynamic a version of
capitalism as existed anywhere in the United States. In awarding the Nobel Prize to Fogel in 1993, the Nobel committee
stated that “Fogel showed that the established opinion that slavery was an
ineffective, unprofitable and pre-capitalist organization was incorrect. The
institution did not fall to pieces due to its economic weakness but collapsed
because of political decisions. He showed that the system, in spite of its
inhumanity, had been economically efficient.”
Burnard and others
have also questioned Baptist’s use of approaches usually associated with
fiction to describe the slave experience. This is not my style and it is
generally not what I like to read. On the other hand, as long as it is clear
when he is trying to use historical imagination to enhance our understanding I
don’t think it is necessarily illegitimate as a technique.
Link 2. There is considerable evidence that productivity
of cotton production increased. Baptist, however, did not produce this evidence
Paul Rhode and Alan Olmstead did. Baptist cites them, but he cites an old working
paper rather than the paper that was published in the Journal of Economic
History several years ago.
Link 3.
Baptist misrepresents Rhode and Olmstead on the source of productivity increase.
They argue that the increase was due to improvements in cotton plants. They not
only provide evidence for increased productivity, they provide evidence that increase
in productivity were largest in areas where there was the most development of
new cotton plants. This evidence is the reason that they argue that plant
breeding was the primary source of productivity increase. They did not just
assume that it must have been improved knowledge about plant breeding. Baptist uses
their evidence on an overall increase in productivity but does not address
their evidence that productivity increased at different rates in different
parts of the South.
It is plausible that slaveholders got better at
coercion over time. They could have, for instance, made more extensive use of
the record books that form Olmstead and Rhode’s primary source to more
effectively determine their use of force. The trouble is that Baptist does not
show that coercion increased over time or respond to the evidence that
differences in plants caused the increases in picking productivity. Link 3 is
weak.
Link 4. This link
is the weakest. It is also not new. In the 1960s, Doug North essentially argued
that cotton exports were the driving force in antebellum growth because they
were at the center of interregional trade between the South, the West, and the
North. However, evidence since then has accumulated that tended to undermine
this theory. The South was not dependent on the West for food. Northern
development was driven largely by intra- regional rather than inter-regional
trade (see, for instance, Lindstrom on Philadelphia or more broadly, David
Meyer on industrialization).
The fundamental problem is that although cotton was
a large part of exports, exports were not a large part of GDP. Consequently,
cotton only accounted for about 4 percent of GDP. Baptist seeks to deal with
this through a bit of imaginative accounting. As I have pointed out previously
Baptist simply makes up the numbers for his calculation.
He replies to Burnard’s criticism of his calculation
Or
consider my ‘back-of-the-envelope’ calculation on page 321 of my text.
‘Economic historians
.
. . don’t work out GNP by “back of the envelope” calculations’, Burnard huffs.
Here is
what
two of the finest economic historians of the nineteenth-century USA say about
how
they
‘work out’ historical GNP estimates:
All
pre-1929 estimates are based on fragmentary data that were not originally
collected
for
the purpose of making national product estimates. This means that the
series
are less precise than the official estimates. Moreover, the further back in
time
these estimating methods are pushed, the more degraded the quality of existing
data
and the more scarce reliable detailed series become. These problems force the
investigator
to fill the gaps with interpolated data, rough estimates, and conjectured
relationships
between available and missing data. (PaulW. Rhode and Richard Sutch,
‘Estimates
of National Product Before 1929’, in Historical Statistics of the United
States,
Millennial Edition On Line, ed. Susan B. Carter et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University
Press, 2006), 3–12) In addition, careful readers will realize that whatever the
strengths or weaknesses of the speculations and conjectures which I undertake
on page 321, the exercise is not actually one of ‘working out GNP’.
This is a red herring. Interpolating and estimating
based upon conjectured relationships are not the same as just making things up.
Economists that make this calculations document the methods and the evidence
that they use to make these estimates. Baptist just throws numbers out, with no
rational or documentation. In addition,
although he says here that he is not working out GNP, in his book he refers to
GNP as a measure of economic activity and then concludes by telling us that nearly
half of economic activity can be attributed to cotton production by slaves.
Without links 3 and 4, the final link in the chain
also fails. What we are left with is a book that documents the abuse of slaves
and their movement west. These are important and, at points, Baptist handles
them well. There isn’t, however, much that is new.
As an economist I also feel the need to comment on
the exchange between Burnard and Baptist regarding economics. In his book
Baptist frequently feels the need to tell people what economists think or say. Almost
invariably, he ends up showing how little he knows about economics. I have already described his trouble with GDP,
but here are two additional examples.
“it
led to continuous increases in productivity per person- what economists call “efficiency.”
Page 112
Productivity refers to output per unit of input. Productivity
per person is like saying output per person per person. There are several
different definitions of efficiency. None are the same as productivity. In
other words, this is not what economists call efficiency.
“For
decades before the financial crisis of 2008, most economists dogmatically
insisted the behavior of the market and its actors was inevitably rational. Yet
a few brave souls insisted that the history of bubbles, booms and crashes showed
a clear historical record of mass irrational economic behavior.” Page 270
In most of economists, rationality is a pretty
narrow concept having to do with preferences. It requires things like
1. For
any two bundles of goods a person either prefers one to the other or indifferent
between the two
2. If
bundle A is preferred to bundle B, and bundle
B to bundle C, then A is preferred to C
There is absolutely nothing in this conception of
rationality that implies that people have perfect information or that things
will always work out well. Many economic models analyze how things might not
work out well if people asymmetric information. A few people may have used the phrase
rational market, but it is not the typical use of the word rational among economists. Many economists do refer to
efficient markets. Ironically, the efficient market hypothesis implies that markets
follow a random walk; they are not predictable.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Economic History Videos and a Podcast
Barry
Eichengreen by way of Finance: Past,
Present and Future.
Gavin
Wright on Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution at
New Books in History
Monday, March 2, 2015
Review of Half Has Never Been Told
Trevor Burnard reviews The Half Has Never Been Told in Slavery and Abolition.
flawed research design."
I have had similar thoughts myself.
"This book has been the subject of a minor scandal as a result of a negative review in the
Economist in which the author was accused of writing advocacy rather than history. An
ensuing controversy led to an apology and the withdrawal of the review. But the
Economist’s withdrawal of a spiteful review does not necessarily mean that this is a good
book. Indeed, it is a poor book. It is badly written, sometimes spectacularly so. It is
inadequately researched and shows a lack of familiarity with economic theory. It is
overblown and full of overstatements. Most disturbingly, however, it is sloppy,
indeed scandalously deficient, in its referencing. These deficiencies are so serious as
to cast considerable doubt about the capacity of the author to present evidence properly.
In short, a lot of the book is just made up, as a deliberate strategy arising from a
flawed research design."
I have had similar thoughts myself.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Koyama on the History Manifesto
Mark Koyama reviews the History Manifesto. In it he mentions Pseudoerasmus' post on the many errors in the book.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
The rise and fall of economic history
Peter Temin describes the rise and fall of economic history
at MIT in the History of
Political Economy and an un-gated version here.
Temin also talks about the costs of not
having actual economic historians, even if you do have people who write about
history.
MIT isn’t the only place to experience a rise and fall of
economic history. My grad school (for my econ Ph. D.) has pretty much completely turned its back on
economic history. When I was there we had Douglass North, John Nye, and, for
the last year or so, Sukoo Kim. There was a well-attended history lunch every
week. Doug retired. John went to George Mason. Soks is still there, but my
understanding is that he is not very involved in the economics department.
History is not listed as a field for graduate students. The economists that
replaced the economic historians have demonstrated the potential problems
associated with model makers using the past without consideration for the
historians concerns with context and source criticism. Boldrin and Levine use
the example of James Watt to argue against patents. On the actual influence of
Watt’s patent see Selgin and Turner “Strong
Steam, Weak Patents” JLE 2011 or Bottomley’s British
Patent system During the Industrial Revolution.
My wife’s grad school
also moved away from economic history. While she was doing her graduate work at
Illinois they had Jeremy Atack, Larry Neal, Lee Alston, and Charles Calomiris.
Now, if they have an economic historian, I don’t know who it is.
Fortunately, it is also possible to name departments where
economic history is either on the rise or holding its position, with multiple
economic historians and consistent production of good Ph. D. students. UC
Davis, Yale, Vanderbilt, George Mason, and Northwestern are some of the schools
that come to mind. My apologies to the other good schools I did not mention.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Bankruptcy
Juan Sanchez of the St. Louis Fed looks at recent bankruptcies and concludes that
"BAPCPA clearly had an impact on the number of bankruptcies being filed. However, the exact impact may not be known for some time, since the recession hit right after the BAPCPA was implemented."
I agree that it is going to be difficult to determine the impact of BAPCPA (Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act) . Consumer bankruptcy is usually the end of a series of events: debt, default, and non-bankruptcy collection. There are a many things besides the bankruptcy law that play a role in the process.
Also from the St Louis Fed is this discussion of a symposium on the balance sheets of American families.
Friday, February 20, 2015
The Gold Standard
Here is my favorite gold standard political cartoon from an 1896 Harper's Weekly.
The cartoon shows godlbugs as widows, orphans and veterans. In other words, people living on fixed incomes. It reflects the view that the primary benefit of a gold standard was to place a constraint on the money supply.
However, from the St Louis Fed on U.S. economic performance under the gold standard from the St. Louis Fed: "the historical evidence indicates that neither a gold standard nor the absence of a central bank guarantees economic or financial stability."
Thursday, February 19, 2015
The end of capitalism?
Jeremy Rifkin says the end of
capitalism is coming. In the meantime, he will tell you about it for only $20,000 to $40,000.
History of Capitalism at the Legatum Institute
The Legatum Institute has a program on the History of Capitalism.
They are sponsoring a series of lectures, which are available online.
This one is Nicholas Crafts explaining why England was first to industrialize.
They are sponsoring a series of lectures, which are available online.
This one is Nicholas Crafts explaining why England was first to industrialize.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Bailyn, Wood and American History
I was a bit surprised when Wood suggested that historians
had not liked the Barbarous Years. I quickly looked at the reviews in AHR and
JAH. They weren’t really too negative. Archer thought that the book was “a marvelous
accomplishment and a testament to Bailyn’s standing as one of our finest
historians.” Pulsipher declared that it was the “kind of book that the word “magisterial”
was made for.”
I’m not sure to what extent Bailyn is regarded as an
economic historian, but his early work appeared in the Journal of Economic History and Explorations
in Entrepreneurial History as well as The
New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century .
Here is some more recent work on New
England merchants and credit by David Flynn and Jeremy Schwartz
Monday, February 16, 2015
Economic Growth
This last week I have been reading Sven
Beckert’s Empire of Cotton and Sheilagh Ogilvie and A.W. Carus Institutions
and Economic Growth in Historical Perspective. Both deal with the
relationship between institutions and economic growth.
Beckert’s book reminds me of the
old saying that “There is much here that is new and much that is interesting.
Unfortunately, that which is new is not interesting, and that which is
interesting is not new.” The interesting parts are the discussions of the
industrial revolution (mostly Robert Allen’s theory), the role of force in
promoting trade (Findlay and O’Rourke, and others, have made this
argument); the capitalist nature of slavery (Conrad and Meyer and Fogel and
Engerman said this a long time ago). What’s new is the argument that cotton,
slavery and empire were not just important parts of economic history, they are
the key to how
the west got rich and capitalism was born. The book falls into the popular “________
that changed the World” category, where you insert whatever it is you are
writing about into the blank. It places too much emphasis on one part of the
economy: cotton. This is particularly true for the United States. We see many
references to the importance of cotton as an export, but we never see any
information about how important exports were to U.S. growth. The problem is that
economic historians for more than half a century have been moving away from
simple monocausal arguments about economic growth. Beckert declares that slavery
was the first big business, not railroads. But the new history of
capitalism is on no firmer ground making slavery the driving force behind
economic growth than Rostow’s non-communist manifesto was in making railroads
the driving force. The only difference is that much of the evidence about
railroads the importance of railroads was developed after Rostow wrote.
Of course, one can make the argument
that “Plunder may not have directly fueled the Industrial Revolution, but
mercantilism and imperialism were an important part of the context within which
it originated, expanding markets and ensuring the supply of raw materials.” (Findlay
and O’Rourke, xx) But Findlay and O’Rourke already made this argument in Power
and Plenty.
Sheilagh Ogilvie and A.W. Carus Institutions
and Economic Growth in Historical Perspective is at the opposite extreme.
For them the devil is in the details. One of their key points is that it is not
really productive to consider the influence of one institution in isolation;
particular institutions can only be understood within the broader institutional
framework that they are a part of. Beckert should have given more consideration
to this point because the most obvious problem with his argument is that the
institutions at the center of his story (slavery, expropriation, and the use of
force to control trade) have existed for a long time. They did not lead to modern
economic growth. If Ogilvie and Carus are right understanding modern economic
growth might be hard work.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Pioneer Girl
I ordered a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography several months ago, but I just got it last week. The University of South Dakota Press underestimated the demand by a pretty wide margin. I did not read the any of Wilder's books until I was an adult and read them to my kids. I loved all the detail about life on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century. I remember great descriptions of things like how to build a log cabin and what the brake man did on a train.
http://pioneergirlproject.org/
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Financial History
John Turner on Financial History and Financial Economics
Sean Kenny and Anders Ogren on Corporate Governance of Regulation : Unlimited and Limited Banks Compared in the 1907 Crisis (the paper examines Swedish banks in the 1907 crisis)
It is nice to see some international perspective on 1907. In addition, the paper examines some of the same questions regarding regulation of financial institutions as my recent paper on trust companies in the Panic of 1907.
Sean Kenny and Anders Ogren on Corporate Governance of Regulation : Unlimited and Limited Banks Compared in the 1907 Crisis (the paper examines Swedish banks in the 1907 crisis)
It is nice to see some international perspective on 1907. In addition, the paper examines some of the same questions regarding regulation of financial institutions as my recent paper on trust companies in the Panic of 1907.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Some Digital History
A digital reconstruction of Washington, D.C. in 1814
The Junto is doing a week long roundtable review of Richard S. Dunn's A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia
And here is the website that goes with the book
The Junto is doing a week long roundtable review of Richard S. Dunn's A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia
And here is the website that goes with the book
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Monday, January 19, 2015
New Books in Business History
From the Exchange
If you are working on a book you might want to think about how to put capitalism in the title.
In his keynote address to the Economic and Business History Society when it met in Baltimore Lou Galambos discussed the success of history of capitalism as a brand.
If you are working on a book you might want to think about how to put capitalism in the title.
In his keynote address to the Economic and Business History Society when it met in Baltimore Lou Galambos discussed the success of history of capitalism as a brand.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
New Stuff on the History of Bankruptcy
Mary O’Sullivan “A Fine Failure: Relationship Lending, Moses
Taylor, and the Joliet Iron and Steel Company, 1860-1888,” Business History Review (Winter 2014) examines how one industrial failure
actually played out under the 1867 Bankruptcy Act. I found particularly
interesting the discussion of conflicts over jurisdiction and the attempts of
local courts to protect local interests, including employees and local
merchants.
M. Susan Murnane, Bankruptcy in an Industrial Society: A History of the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio. (University of Akron Press) provides a detailed study of
how bankruptcy courts actually operated over a long period of time. I learned a
lot about how referees were selected and how they operated.
Forecasting Recessions
Robert Shiller recently wrote about on the value of
economics. I agree with most of what he says, but he also seems to perpetuate a
myth about the inability of economists to forecast downturns in the economy.
Shiiler states that “Indeed, economists failed to forecast most of the major
crises in the last century, including the severe 1920-21 slump, the 1980-82
back-to-back recessions, and the worst of them all, the Great Depression after
the 1929 stock-market crash.”
Read
more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/are-economists-good-by-robert-j--shiller-2015-01#IvJFopWQS6EmSZ2Z.99
I am
not going to address all of these recessions, but it is relatively easy to look
back to 1980. In the New York Times I find this
“the
April decline in the composite index was the fourth in the last six months and
comes at a time when many private economists are predicting a mild recession
during the last half of 1979.” New York Times
June 1, 1979 pg. D1.
And this
“Summarizing the latest Data Resources forecast, Miss Mosser
said that “the economy will at best slow down and at worst we’ll see a double
dip come the first of this year.” New
York Times Dec. 2 1980 pg. A1.
Not all economists agreed, but it is certainly not the case
that no one saw it coming.
Forecasting recessions with a reasonable degree of accuracy
is actually one of the easier things to do in economics. The yield curve, for
instance, is an easy to use and pretty reliable tool. If it is upward sloping the
chances of a recession in the near future are small. If it flattens out or
slopes downward the chances of a recession are pretty good. Anyone paying
attention to the yield curve should not have been surprised by our most recent
recession.
It is harder to forecast the severity of recession, but Shiller was one of a number of economists that
expressed concerns about the underlying strength of the economy in the time
leading up to the most recent financial crisis, suggesting that next recession
could be severe because of problems in financial markets.
Monday, January 5, 2015
Economics needs better critics
The Washington Post describes protests at the ASSA.
They suggest that students ask their economics professors
How does climate change factor into our study of economics?
Why is there nothing about Islamic economics in our curriculum?
Should we slow down fast money with a Robin Hood Tax?
The first question is odd because the discussion of market failures, such as degradation of the environment, is a prominent part of mainstream economics. Austrian economists think that mainstream economists talk about almost nothing but market failures. One of the people they targeted was Greg Mankiw. Mankiw is one of the most prominent supporters of increased taxes on negative externalities.
Why are they concerned about Islamic economics but not Catholic social theory? Are they also concerned that natural scientists teach theories based on religious beliefs?
I have no idea what it means to slow down fast money.
I am not what most people would regard as a traditional mainstream economist. I would like to see less attention to formal mathemtical models, and more attention to institutions, to history, and to narrative forms of explanation. But these people do not appear to have even a basic understanding of economics.
They suggest that students ask their economics professors
How does climate change factor into our study of economics?
Why is there nothing about Islamic economics in our curriculum?
Should we slow down fast money with a Robin Hood Tax?
The first question is odd because the discussion of market failures, such as degradation of the environment, is a prominent part of mainstream economics. Austrian economists think that mainstream economists talk about almost nothing but market failures. One of the people they targeted was Greg Mankiw. Mankiw is one of the most prominent supporters of increased taxes on negative externalities.
Why are they concerned about Islamic economics but not Catholic social theory? Are they also concerned that natural scientists teach theories based on religious beliefs?
I have no idea what it means to slow down fast money.
I am not what most people would regard as a traditional mainstream economist. I would like to see less attention to formal mathemtical models, and more attention to institutions, to history, and to narrative forms of explanation. But these people do not appear to have even a basic understanding of economics.
The Benefits of Doing Historical Research
Anthony Grafton and James Grossman in The American Scholar
"The best defense for research, however, is that it’s in the archive where one forms a scholarly self—a self that, when all goes well, is intolerant of weak arguments and loose citation and all other forms of shoddy craftsmanship; a self that doesn’t accept a thesis without asking what assumptions and evidence it rests on; a self that doesn’t have a lot of patience with simpleminded formulas and knows an observation from an opinion and an opinion from an argument."
In other words, doing history develops skills that all college graduates need.
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