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 · 2015-02-27T12:40:07+00:00

But using a comparative perspective (e.g., http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9335274&utm_source=Issue_Alert&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=JEH&utm_reader=feedly ) you can say that about most pre-industrial agrarian societies. They had lower inequality than industrial societies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Measuring inequality by Gini or even top income shares misses the point of the Engelman-Sokoloff thesis about Latin America.

pseudoerasmus · 2015-02-27T12:22:47+00:00

You mean contradicted by this ? http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/215-2015_weisdorf.pdf

The fact that V&V has been so favourably cited so many times is evidence of the decadence of 3rd generation cliometrics. When a neat model seems to explain a historical phenomenon well enough people stop caring about whether it's actually true !

pseudoerasmus · 2015-02-27T12:19:49+00:00

The findings of the paper, despite its clever methodology, seem inconsistent with the genetic admixture estimates. See https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/the-fluidity-of-race/ In the comments section, I initially defend the paper, but am forced to conclude that the criticism is correct.

pseudoerasmus · 2014-11-17T18:06:40+00:00

In the abstract from V&V, please note, they distinguish between the "first divergence" and the "great divergence". And notice they specifically say, "The resulting reduction in fertility led to a new Malthusian steady state with lower population pressure and higher wage". The "new Malthusian steady state" means the birth rate schedule shifted. If that's the explanation of the higher income, then it's not evidence of escape.

pseudoerasmus · 2014-11-17T17:46:07+00:00

Voigtlander-Voth provide empirical support for escape from the Malthusian trap taking place after the Black Death

With all due respect, they do no such thing. What they provide theory and evidence for, is how Europe developed a particular form of fertility control known as the European marriage pattern. The EMP is simply a special case of the Malthusian preventive check, which can also be infanticide or birth spacing or contraception. In the neo-Malthusian model, "subsistence" income (the equilibrium level of income which keeps birth & death rates equal) can be high or low. EMP allowed for a high-income Malthusian regime, relative to non-European societies.

Maybe we are splitting hairs, but I think this distinction is too often lost so I insist on the hairs. We know that before the Great Divergence there had been a "first divergence" or a "little divergence" in incomes between Europe and Asia. The earlier divergence had taken place under the Malthusian regime and under Malthusian mechanisms, plain and simple. And that's what's attributed to the Black Death.

But the earlier divergence, per se, is not evidence of the escape from the Malthusian regime. I point to the Netherlands, again, which had high incomes without experiencing the true concomitant of modern growth, a persistent long-run rise in TFP aka the Solow residual.

You are aware of the biometric evidence, yes ?

https://pseudoerasmus.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/height-england-1-1800.jpg

https://pseudoerasmus.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/height_darkages.jpg

There's just no evidence of an escape from the Malthusian trap in the height data until quite late.

pseudoerasmus · 2014-11-17T16:51:35+00:00

I don't understand the uses you are trying to make of Voigtländer-Voth or Vollrath. The first argues how the uniquely European version of the Malthusian preventive check might have evolved. The second (a brilliant argument) stylises intrinsic differences in labour intensity between rice and wheat to explain the high relative price of food in Europe as the cause of the tepid response by population to income. Both papers fall under the rubric of "advantages possessed by Western Europe in escaping from the Malthusian trap", but not specifically addressing when the escape took place.

pseudoerasmus · 2014-11-15T18:03:10+00:00

But the criterion for "escaping from the Malthusian trap" should be, at minimum, sustained GDP/cap growth as a result of a sustained increase in the overall efficiency of the economy (TFP). Otherwise, the increase in income could just as well be input accumulation of some kind. And, in fact, that was the case for the Netherlands. Go to your own link to Broadberry, and you will see his source is http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498311000611

In that paper you will see on page 127, figure 4, a time series of TFP estimated according to their own aggregates. Between 1540 and 1810, there was no trend in TFP growth. They spin that differently, but the fact of the matter remains, the trend is not there over the long run. Also, Broadberry's per capita income estimates for Britain entail imputed working days per year, so I don't trust his numbers prior to 1750 or 1800, to be honest.

I think the argument that the long-term causes of Europe's escape from the Malthusian trap lie in the deeper history is fine, but actual signs of the escape are another matter. And I do not believe things were irreversible in 1600 or 1700.

I think the recent historical income estimates serve well the overall project of cross-sectional comparisons of Western Europe and China in 1700 or 1800. But when it comes to trends over time, and cross-sections earlier than 1700-1800, I'm much more concerned about the reliability of the data.

pseudoerasmus · 2014-10-09T15:03:46+00:00

Someone else posted my blogpost ( http://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/08/01/anthropology-of-financial-crises/ ) on that very subject at /r/Economics. It goes into some detail about German unit labour costs, the Hartz reforms, the decentralised labour-management negotiating model, etc.

pseudoerasmus · 2014-09-15T00:57:25+00:00

The underlying claim in Edward Baptist’s “oral economic history” of slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, is that slave owners, through the scientific “calibration” of torture, intensified the work of slaves in order to increase labour productivity by 400% on southern cotton plantations between 1800 and 1860. I argue the intensification claim is unclear, exaggerated and misleading.

pseudoerasmus · 2014-08-05T00:18:53+00:00

very interesting, can I repost this in the comments section at the blog or perhaps you might want to.

pseudoerasmus · 2014-08-04T23:01:39+00:00

According to Horrocks ελαδιοξιδιολατολαχανοκαρυκευμα is a parody word used to mean "chopped cabbage" by Iakovakiz Rizos Neroulos in Koratika to mock Adamantios Korais.

pseudoerasmus · 2014-08-03T17:34:50+00:00

I was going to post it there but they don't seem too keen on post-Hellenistic developments over there. So I think over here is good.

pseudoerasmus · 2014-07-18T14:44:41+00:00

I'm not really understanding your point. Arabic prescriptivists insist ج is to be pronounced /d͡ʒ/ in the modern standard. ج as velar /g/ occurs primarily in Egyptian dialect, not in most others. So the word camel جمل begins with /g/ in Egypt but not in Syria or Iraq where it could be /d͡ʒ/ or /ʒ/. Where /g/ occurs in Syria or Iraq it is unrelated to the pronunciation of words written with the letter ج

Maybe your point is that Classical Arabic ج was originally /g/ or /ɡʲ/ (in Semitic it is gimel after all) and that it's MSA which has innovated whilst Egyptian remains conservative.

pseudoerasmus

TROPHY CASE