Germany experienced little increase in unemployment during the Great Recession, and has found “internal devaluation” relatively easy and pain-free, unlike most other countries. Why ? So…| pseudoerasmus
This post contains related topics and disjointed observations as addenda to “Labour repression & the Indo-Japanese divergence” in cotton textiles. (Lack of) Japanese industrial poli…| pseudoerasmus
Many “global historians” argue that the British cotton industry was the product of (unintentional) infant industry protection from Indian competition in the 18th century. The various Ca…| pseudoerasmus
Some caveats and reservations about the Napoleonic blockade paper on the infant industry argument that’s making waves. My caveat: protection persisted for decades after the blockade and may h…| pseudoerasmus
British Tariff Protection after 1774: Competition, Innovation, & Misallocation, plus a note on Weaving This is an addendum to a post about the Calico Acts, which had prohibited within Britain t…| pseudoerasmus
{ This post is mostly stringing together my scattered tweets over the past couple of weeks. I’ve had numerous discussions on this subject with Vincent Geloso, Judy Stephenson, Ben Schneider, …| pseudoerasmus
Historian Sven Beckert’s widely acclaimed book, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism, is a good agrarian, business, and labour history of a single commodity. But as economic h…| pseudoerasmus
The “Hobson-Lenin Thesis”: Inequality, Imperialism, and the First World War In a small section in his new book, Branko Milanovic argues that the First World War was ultimately caused by…| pseudoerasmus
Edward Baptist, the author of The Half Has Never Been Told, has been claiming since the publication of his book that a putative post-Emancipation drop in overall agricultural productivity in the Am…| pseudoerasmus
AKA “Cooperation, cultural evolution & economic development”. Where do ‘good’ or pro-social institutions come from? Why does the capacity for collective action and coope…| pseudoerasmus
[19 October 2015] Jesús Alfaro of the Autonomous University of Madrid has translated my previous post into Spanish: ¿De dónde vienen las instituciones prosociales?| pseudoerasmus
Social norms, institutions, and economic development. (A companion post to “Where do pro-social institutions come from?”)| pseudoerasmus
An elaboration on Ricardo Hausmann’s article “The Education Myth” arguing that education is an overrated tool of economic development. This post also responds to a criticism of Ha…| pseudoerasmus
Whether markets help cause or exacerbate famines is one of the great questions of political economy. Cormac Ó Gráda’s recent book Eating People is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, its Past,…| pseudoerasmus
Anachronism and relevance are in tension. Historians (often) rail against the former and (often) pine for the latter. They can easily manage a bit of relevance by intervening in today’s polit…| pseudoerasmus
Did an “invisible blockade” by the United States fatally undermine the Chilean economy under the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73)? Did it actually work? Short answer: No.| pseudoerasmus
My previous post about the political orientation of fascists got a response from Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism. This is my brief response to his.| pseudoerasmus
John Holbo at Crooked Timber reprises a debate which raged 7 years ago when a book called Liberal Fascism was published. His take focuses on Germany but mine puts more weight on Italy. I think the …| pseudoerasmus
This post, a follow-up to my earlier posts “La longue purée” and “Jo Guldi’s Curiouser & Curiouser Footnotes”, examines the recent revisions made to The History Ma…| pseudoerasmus
Addenda to the previous blogpost “Economic growth in ancient Greece”. I argue that certain estimates made by Ian Morris under-compute the implied growth rates in the “per capita i…| pseudoerasmus
Was there “intensive growth” in Classical Greece and was there something special about its causes ? Was it due to “inclusive institutions” ? This post examines some claims o…| pseudoerasmus
Rambling about toponyms and ethnonyms in various languages.| pseudoerasmus
The roots of the present Greek crisis lie in the political transformation of the country during the 1980s. (Disclaimer: Although this post is about Greek fiscal behaviour, I am not taking Germany&#…| pseudoerasmus
Why China did not industrialise before Western Europe may be a tantalising and irresistible subject, but frankly it’s a parlour game. What remains underexplored, however, is the more tractabl…| pseudoerasmus
In The History Manifesto, historians Jo Guldi, the Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History at Brown, and David Armitage, the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the History De…| pseudoerasmus
In The History Manifesto, two historians, Jo Guldi of Brown and David Armitage of Harvard, urge their peers to turn away from microhistory and go back to doing Big History in the longue durée tradi…| pseudoerasmus
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, thr…| pseudoerasmus
Summary : New cultivars of cotton led to an unprecedented rise in the productivity of US southern cotton in the 60 years before the American Civil War. The Economist magazine may have said some stu…| pseudoerasmus
A very brief history of Greek diglossia.| pseudoerasmus
Stream-of-consciousness thoughts about why we say “Semitic” even though the root is “Shem”. And, yes, I know the Hebrew letters in the title say “semitic sibbolethR…| pseudoerasmus
I just noticed Tyler Cowen had blogged a Boston Globe article about the number of loanwords in various languages (is there something from the press Cowen will not blog ?), and his own take was to a…| pseudoerasmus
Below I quote the lengthy exchange I had with Matt on India, China, Cuba, South Korea, etc. in the comments section of another blog. Since our debate was off-topic, Matt and I have agreed to move i…| pseudoerasmus
This is a description of Proto, Rustichini & Sofianos, “Higher Intelligence Groups Have Higher Cooperation Rates in the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma”. The text was originally e…| pseudoerasmus
{ Note: This post describes and summarises a literature on 19th century growth & trade. I do not necessarily endorse its findings. This post is intended as largely descriptive. } There is a vas…| pseudoerasmus
If Monty Python decided to resdesign Slavic phonology, they might take some inspiration from Polish.| pseudoerasmus
There used to be more research and debate on the negative effects of labour resistance on early industrialisation, but that topic has been crowded out by the intense focus on inequality of recent y…| pseudoerasmus
