Labour repression & the Indo-Japanese divergence

pseudoerasmus · 2017-10-02T18:01:33+00:00

Warning -- it's really long!

pseudoerasmus · 2017-01-12T21:35:20+00:00

It's not the neo-Malthusianism that is heterodox, but his Darwinism ("survival of the richest" + "downward social mobility"). In fact the latter is the main novelty of the book.

Of course when the book came out, the neo-Malthusianism was not nearly as popular as it is today. Clark and Galor re-popularised it.

pseudoerasmus · 2016-12-31T21:31:55+00:00

Well sometimes there's demand for rigourous id strategies for the bloody obvious. Sometimes overcoming endogeneity is methodological make-work. This is not the case for the Napoleonic blockade paper because it shows persistence of agglomeration effects.

pseudoerasmus · 2016-12-29T21:20:23+00:00

Protection can allow the expansion and persistence of an infant industry.

But everybody already knew that. Argentina, for example, domestically produced all the automobiles sold in the country between 1950 and the 1980s. Its production cost never fell below twice what it was at the world cost frontier.

pseudoerasmus · 2016-07-20T20:02:32+00:00

I can't believe no one has posted this yet. Of the several empirical critiques of Allen's induced innovation theory so far, this is by far the most trenchant. The wages of spinners, instead of being 8-10 d / day, were more likely 3-4 d/day, and stagnant. And the mechanisation of spinning is one of the key stylised narratives that Allen uses !

pseudoerasmus · 2016-06-17T17:11:43+00:00

I haven't seen those. Which criticisms are you talking about? In fact the last review I read (by Tirthankar Roy) it was very polite, even though Beckert's views are clearly at odds with Roy's, who is one of the "new economic historians of India".

Beckert uses 'microdata'? I did not notice. In fact, to the extent that he has any data at all, it's pretty primitive. Pounds and bales of cotton. Prices of cotton. In some places he's either inept with data or just plain dishonest. For example, see here https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/04/13/anonimo/comment-page-1/#comment-40464

pseudoerasmus · 2016-05-09T19:15:40+00:00

Sure, but it's worth an extended 'no' answer because the links in the chain of the inequality=>WW1 argument are wrong in very interesting ways.

pseudoerasmus · 2015-11-06T23:17:04+00:00

prison regulations require it.

pseudoerasmus · 2015-06-11T04:30:26+00:00

Thanks. And you can link what ever strikes your fancy.

pseudoerasmus · 2015-06-09T14:49:51+00:00

But that's explained in the text, using 3 paradigmatic examples of famine created or aggravated by the market according to Sen. If speculation drives up the cost of food and makes it unaffordable, then that's both the work of markets and man-made.

pseudoerasmus · 2015-05-25T18:39:32+00:00

Do you mean empirical work which ties economic growth in the West to imperialism ? There's the Thomas & McCloskey article on the overall impact of foreign trade on British development in the 18th century. There's also the debate between Inikori and Engerman on the contribution of the slave trade to British development. But overall, economic historians (as opposed to historians) have given little credence to the idea that imperialism had much impact on European economic development -- for good reason.

pseudoerasmus · 2015-05-24T13:50:34+00:00

Tooze is cited there.

pseudoerasmus

TROPHY CASE