Category: History

Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic

I am setting aside most of the cultural and “macro” issues, and just considering policy, in my latest Bloomberg column.  Excerpt:

Consider agriculture. If you fly over Hispaniola, you can see a notable difference between the Haitian and Dominican sides of the border. The Dominican side has plenty of trees, whereas the Haitian side is denuded. Much of that can be explained by Haiti’s history of weaker property rights. A “tragedy of the commons” has led to systematic exploitation of Haitian land.

The deforestation of Haiti dates from at least 1730, when French colonial policies, timber exports and the clearing of the land for coffee production all did damage. That hurt the prospects for Haitian agriculture, but much of the tree-clearing took place in the middle of the 20th century. Haitians have long used charcoal as an energy source, which led to unchecked deforestation, soil erosion and desertification. Thus, despite its beautiful natural setting, most of Haiti does not appear green and sparkling.

In the Dominican Republic, deforestation is also a problem — but not nearly on the scale of Haiti. Forests still cover about 40% of the country’s land (estimates for Haiti have ranged as low as 2%). The Dominican Republic has some national parks and reforestation programs, and developed alternative energy sources to reduce the demand for charcoal. Forest cover, and the quality of the soil, made a comeback. The country is also working toward selling its reforestation for carbon credits, giving it further economic incentive to protect its land.

To the extent that the Dominican Republic still experiences deforestation, it often comes from livestock cultivation, a far more economically productive activity than gathering wood for charcoal.

To citizens of wealthy countries, these differences may not sound enormous. But agriculture is an important driver of early economic development. Surpluses from agriculture enable the accumulation of savings, which finances broader commercial investment and helps people start small businesses. The economy obtains a base for diversifying into manufacturing, as happened in East Asia. Ethiopia’s double-digit growth spurt, before the recent tragic civil wars, also was rooted in agricultural productivity gains.

Today the Dominican Republic is essentially self-sufficient in food, including rice. According to the US government, Haiti now relies on imports for “a significant portion of the agricultural products it consumes,” including 80% of its rice. In 1981, by contrast, food imports were only 18% of the Haitian diet.

There are further arguments at the link.

Some triumphs of 19th century liberalism

Here is an outline of part of my lecture.  I presented “free trade” (NB: it wasn’t totally free), the classical gold standard, and some modicum of free immigration (not everywhere) as three successful and mostly stable pillars of 19th century classical liberal achievement.  Of course that was for limited parts of Western Europe and North America only, and with major exceptions for women, blacks, and more.  Nonetheless, something in that formula worked, at least when it was actually appplied.  Here is the outline:

Extreme trade protectionism after Napoleonic Wars

Later sliding scale for tariffs, maybe 50% rate of effective protection?

Complete free trade for Corn [wheat] during the 1840s, Cobden and Bright and Anti-Corn Law League

Terms of trade arguments: Robert Torrens, J.S. Mill

Protectionism does best when inelastic demand for your exports, elastic demand for your imports (two-country model)

The tariff in essence helps your buyers collude as one

That can outweigh the efficiency losses from the tariff

Removing labor from the corn sector also can boost British manufactures

What were terms of trade for GB then?

Jeffrey Williamson paper 1990 – Repeal helped the working class, hurt the landlords

Doug Irwin (EJ, 2021) – Efficiency-neutral but broadly egalitarian

American farmers were big winners

Greatest liberal triumph of the 19th century?

The other great triumph – the classical gold standard – dating from 1815-1914

Price-specie flow mechanism

Overvalued exchange rate – 1815, 1920s for Britain

Nassau Senior, Four Lectures on the Transmission of Precious Metals, 1827

Henry Thornton, An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain, 1802 – prices, interest rates, exchange rates

How good a song is Quarter to Three?

You know, the 1961 #1 hit by Gary U.S. Bonds?  I’ve been thinking about this question for months.  I feel a good amount is at stake.  If songs such as Quarter to Three (or done live with dancers) are still great, our assessment of early times risesconsiderably.  But if they are dispensable throw-aways, the history of popular music (and film) in the earlier twentieth century needs to be rewritten.

What makes the song such a classic?  Claude praises “the upbeat rhythm, engaging call-and-response vocals, relatable lyrics, catchy melody, historical context, and instrumental breaks,” but none of those seem quite scarce or special enough to elevate the tune to classic status.  With a bit of prodding Claude also cited “raw, unpolished energy,” a genuine sense of fun, and “chemistry amongst the performers.”  To that you might add a creative use of repetition and small, stepwise changes, plenty of syncopation, and the hooks are iconic.  The use of echo and phase shifting looks to the future, and the shuffle-like groove drew on calypso influences and also ska.  Nonetheless the chord structure, while effective, is hardly revelatory.

So I’m still wondering — if a song has that ineffable “something” — how much is that the product of our collective imaginations?  How much is it real and objectively there?  Or does a Generation Z teen, with a very different ear, dismiss it as muddled and mediocre rather than memorable?  After all, Gary’s career was not replete with enduring creations.

A critic could allege the dance lyrics are ordinary and the production sloppy.  But was that all part of the calculation?  Wikipedia relates:

The single was recorded with very rough sound quality (compared to other records at the time). Producer Frank Guida has been quoted on subsequent CD reissues that his production sound was exactly what he wanted it to sound like.

Bob Roman wrote:

The song opens with muffled crowd noise and a bandleader counting off the beginning of a song. It’s not a live recording, but it sounds like one — and not even like a good one. It sounds like an amazing party happening down the street — wild, frenzied, mysterious, its sound obscured by what might as well be a couple of sets of walls. In any era, it’s crazy that a record this lo-fi managed to hit #1. In the pre-Beatles era where labels were pushing cleaned-up teenage dreamboats, it seems especially strange.

So we’ve got amazing hooks, controlled chaos, and extreme innovation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzyhogPKV54

The song also has a lineage.  Bill Wyman put it on one of his solo albums.  It inspired Dion’s “Runaround Sue.”  Bruce Springsteen played it regularly in his concerts, and later worked with Gary, writing songs for him and doing two albums together.  Most importantly, Paul McCartney references it in his Sgt. Pepper classic “When I’m Sixty-Four“:

If I’d been out ’til quarter to three, would you lock the door?

In essence Paul is teasing us with the notion that the 64-year-old McCartney might someday still be out there, dancing, rather than knitting tea cozies on the Isle of Wight.  And true to Straussian form, Paul released the dance song “Dance Tonight” when he was sixty-four, days before turning sixty-five.

In 1963, during a Beatles European tour, Gary U.S. Bonds was the headliner for them.

You will note that the lineage of the song runs mostly through white performers, though Gary U.S. Bonds was black (or possibly mixed race).  Perhaps one special feature of Quarter to Three is how it spans black and also white R&B, a rare feature at the time but hearkening back to the much earlier years of the blues, when black and white musical styles could be hard to distinguish.  In addition to the Caribbean vein, Gary could span Latino styles as well.

Just as we are finding it impossible to rebuild Notre Dame cathedral as it was, a mere sixty-three years later could any of us still make something akin to “Quarter to Three”?  Or have we lost those “technologies”?

I, for one, have decided to vote in favor of masterpiece status for Quarter to Three.  At least for now.  And by the way Gary U.S. Bonds is still on tour.

19th century British economic thought (another outline for my class)

1760-1830, typically considered peak of Industrial Revolution

Malthus, first decade of the 19th century

Ricardo’s Principles, 1817

Theory of rent

Theory of comparative advantage

The machinery question

Ricardo, The High Price of Bullion, 1810

Bullionist debates, Napoleonic wars, Ricardo and Malthus and Thornton

Ricardian equivalence, thinking in terms of systems and models

The Ricardians: James Mill and James Ramsey McCullough

The reign of classical economics, Nassau Senior

Poor Law debates

Unions and working hours

Ricardian socialists

John Stuart Mill: 1806-1873

Synthesis with French and Germans

Karl Marx

Shruti Rajagopalan interviews Doug Irwin

Doug of course is one of the top trade economists.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript, from the same wonderful Mercatus team that brings you CWT.  Here is one excerpt:

RAJAGOPALAN: I have a different question on Adam Smith. We’re all taught Adam Smith’s division of labor, specialization, economies of scale, the cliff notes version of that. Then, we learn about absolute advantage in about five minutes. Then, we set it aside and start thinking about comparative advantage.The first question I have is does Adam Smith’s basic model of division of labor, specialization, and economies of scale anticipate the comparative advantage trade models, or does it actually undermine the comparative advantage trade models in the way that Krugman wrote about or something else?IRWIN: I think that Adam Smith has a broader view of trade, a much richer view of trade than what I would think is of the narrower David Ricardo theory of comparative advantage. If you have to read one of the two, read Adam Smith because it’s much more fun to read. Reading David Ricardo is more like reading a textbook in the sense that he doesn’t have this broad historical sense and these new rich ideas and how they’re interacting that leaves a lot to the imagination and leaves a lot to future research to flesh out.He’s saying, “England can produce wine and cloth. Here are the labor coefficients, and we’re going to do this static comparison between England and Portugal.” That’s a very narrow way of thinking about trade.RAJAGOPALAN: So badly written, you want the wine by the end of it.IRWIN: There’s a wonderful quote by George Stigler saying: “the only thing that someone will take away from reading Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is that they need a bottle of wine to get through it,” or something along those lines.RAJAGOPALAN: I agree.IRWIN: Adam Smith isn’t technically as sophisticated if you will, but in terms of the ideas, they’re very sophisticated. Obviously, he wasn’t thinking in terms of an economic model directly, but it’s a much richer overall discussion of trade that I think you can learn a lot from, even reading today.RAJAGOPALAN: When you see the world today, what do you think the world looks like more? Does it look more like Ricardian comparative advantage and the more recent models like Heckscher–Ohlin, and those things that came about? Do you think it really looks like the Adam Smith story, which is much more nuanced, pay attention to what’s happening in the domestic economy in terms of division of labor, specialization, and that is the lead-in to foreign trade, which is so deeply entangled with domestic trade?IRWIN: Well, I hate to waffle, but I think you need a little bit of both. It depends on the question, depends on the country, depends on the issue that you’re examining. These are just tools that you draw to help out your understanding of a particular situation. I will confess I’m a little bit more in favor of Adam Smith. I’ve always said that his theory of trade, and in particular his analysis of trade policy, which I think is underrated, is very sophisticated, and very wise, and has a lot to say to us today.RAJAGOPALAN: Beautifully written, if I may add.

There are now 100 episodes of Ideas of India, here is a link to all of them.  And here is my own earlier CWT with Doug.

Revisiting the T-Mobile-Sprint Merger

T-Mobile’s takeover of Sprint was controversial among analysts. “If this merger is not anticompetitive,” Eleanor Fox, a trade regulation and antitrust law professor at New York University, told reporters in 2020, “it is hard to know what is.” Yale economist and antitrust scholar Fiona Scott Morton delivered her verdict on the deal in a co-authored 2021 article: “The era of aggressive price competition in wireless is over.” The authors predicted that the wireless industry, whittled down to a big three, would “nestle into a cozy triopoly.”

The prediction proved wrong. Average monthly mobile subscription fees dropped sharply. In the three years before the merger, according to government price data, mobile charges declined in real terms by about 8%. In the three years following the merger, the real price decline has been nearly 12%.

These trends were even more impressive given dramatically improving network performance. Before the merger, the top four U.S. carriers delivered data download speeds averaging about 26 megabits per second, nearly all via 3G or 4G. By early 2023, with 5G deployments spreading, Verizon and AT&T data flowed 24% to 39% faster, while T-Mobile was more than three times as fast as before. T-Mobile’s high-speed coverage had also expanded; half of its connections were via 5G by January 2023, against just 10% to 20% for its rivals.

…Further evidence that the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint was pro-competitive was seen with Verizon and AT&T share prices. From 2018 to 2023, Verizon and AT&T stock prices declined sharply, losing more than a third of their real value. The postmerger marketplace was a great victory for T-Mobile but a blow for its rivals. The cozy-cartel thesis collapsed.

That’s the excellent Tom Hazlett writing in the WSJ–useful facts to remember when thinking about the current rise of antitrust.

Early French economics, my lecture notes

Early French moralists, some of them Jansenists:

Pierre Nicole, La Rochefoucauld, etc. Invisible hand, idea of “mechanism”

Pascal, Pensées, 1669, probability and expected value

17th century mercantilism, Louis XIV, Colbert

18th century, Galiani (Italian), French debates on bread and bread prices

1748, Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, analysis of commerce

Diderot, Voltaire, Encyclopedia, rationalism

Beccaria (Italian), law and economics

Physiocrats (they bore me)

Turgot, 1767, liberal principles, stresses accumulation

Condorcet – stresses growth and progress

1789 French Revolution, Napoleon

Much of French economic thought ends up libertarian, e.g., the Ideologues

J.B. Say, Say’s Law, 1803, passim

French pick up on different strands in Smith

Fourier, Proudhon, and Utopian Socialism

1830 — Bourbon Restoration

1838 – Augustin Cournot

1844 – Jules Dupuit, French engineering tradition

Bastiat and free market tradition

1860 — Anglo-French Free Trade Treaty

1873 — Leon Walras, marginalism and general equilibrium theory

My notes/outline on the rise of Scottish economic thought

1650s, wars with England, invasions, Cromwell repels the Scots

1690s – Darien Scheme in Panama, Scots more generally grow interested in empire

1707 – Union with England

Scotland keeps its Presbyterian church and laws

Scotland never settled by Rome, for a long time closer to France

Post Glorious Revolution, many Scots still loyal to the Stuart monarchy, recurring theme

Jacobites – loyal to James, who was expelled by the Glorious Revolution

Glasgow – tobacco and sugar trade

Edinburgh – Intellectual, educational, and administrative center

Overall good educational system at multiple levels

Frances Hutcheson – born in Ireland to Scots family, key works in the 1720s, beauty, approbation, ethics, 1729 starts professorship in Glasgow

1739-40 – David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature

1745 – Major Jacobite uprising

Post-1745: The Highlanders and the clan system starts its true decline

Linen, cotton, wool, jute industries

Good schools, good universities, competitive, English-language, no class system

1748 – David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

1750s – David Hume’s essays on economics

1755 – 1.3 million people in Scotland

1759 – Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

1762 – Ossian [James Macpherson], beginnings of Scottish romanticism

1767 — Adam Ferguson – Essay on Civil Society, progress, commercial society, militarism

1776 – David Hume dies

1776 – Wealth of Nations

The sciences: the physician and chemist William Cullen, the agriculturalist James Anderson, chemist and physician Joseph Black, natural historian John Walker, and James Hutton, the first modern geologist.

Late 18th century – onset of Scot inventors/tinkerers, most of all James Watt and the steam engine

Is Science a Public Good?

Science seems like a public good; in theory, ideas are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. But the closer we look at how ideas actually spread and are used in the world, the less they seem like public goods. As I am fond of pointing out, Thomas Keller wrote a literal recipe book for the dishes he served at his world famous French Laundry restaurant and yet, the French Laundry did not go out of business. Ideas are in heads and if you don’t move the heads, often the ideas don’t move either.

In a new NBER working paper, The Effect of Public Science on Corporate R&D by Arora, Belenzon, Cioaca, Sheer & Zhang, (Tyler mentioned it briefly earlier) the authors make a similar point:

…the history of technical progress teaches us that abstract ideas are also difficult to use. Ideas have to be tailored for specific uses, and frequently, have to be embodied in people and artifacts before they can be absorbed by firms. However, such embodiment also makes ideas less potent sources of increasing returns, turning non-rival ideas into rival inputs, whose use by rivals is easier to restrict. Our findings confirm that firms, especially those not on the technological frontier, appear to lack the absorptive capacity to use externally supplied ideas unless they are embodied in human capital or inventions. The limit on growth is not the creation of useful ideas but rather the rate at which those ideas can be embodied in human capital and inventions, and then allocated to firms to convert them into innovations.

The question of whether science is a public good is not merely technical but has significant implications. If science is a public good, markets will likely underproduce it, making government subsidies to universities crucial for stimulating R&D and economic growth. Conversely, if ideas are embodied and thus closely tied to their application, government funding for university research might not only fail to enhance economic growth but could also hinder it. This occurs as subsidies draw scientists away from firms, where their knowledge directly contributes to product development, towards universities, where their insights risk becoming lost in the ivory tower. (Teaching scientists who then go on to careers in the private sector is much more likely to be complementary to productivity growth than funding research which pulls scientists away from the private sector.)

In a commentary on Arora et al., the Economist notes that growth in universities and government science has coincided with a slowdown in productivity.

Universities have boomed in recent decades. Higher-education institutions across the world now employ on the order of 15m researchers, up from 4m in 1980. These workers produce five times the number of papers each year. Governments have ramped up spending on the sector. The justification for this rapid expansion has, in part, followed sound economic principles. Universities are supposed to produce intellectual and scientific breakthroughs that can be employed by businesses, the government and regular folk. Such ideas are placed in the public domain, available to all. In theory, therefore, universities should be an excellent source of productivity growth.

In practice, however, the great expansion of higher education has coincided with a productivity slowdown.

Arora et al. present detailed empirical evidence causally linking the productivity slowdown to the expansion of government science. Government science has yielded smaller-than-expected productivity improvements due to significant trade-offs. Subsidies have moved heads out of firms and into universities and for many firms this shift of talent has not only reduced the firms’ capacity to generate ideas (crowding out) but has also impaired their ability to adopt academic innovations. As the authors write:

…productivity growth may have slowed down because the potential users—private corporations—lack the absorptive capacity to understand and use those ideas.

The great Terence Kealey made many of these points much earlier in his important book, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research (here is an online precis). Kealey, however, was challenging a beautiful theory, supported by the great and good of the economics profession, by pointing to an ugly practice. Arora et al. show that the beauty of the theory may have misguided us and that “the vast fiscal resources devoted to public science…probably make businesses across the rich world less innovative” (quoting the Economist).

The Gershwins on free trade (that was then, this is now)

In 1927, George and Ira Gershwin put on a musical satire about trade and war entitled Strike Up the Band.  The plot centres around a middle-aged US cheesemaker, Horace J. Fletcher of Connecticut, who wants to corner the domestic dairy market.  When Fletcher hears that the US government has just slapped a fifty per cent tariff on foreign-made cheese, he sees dollar signs.  High tariffs mean his fellow citizens will have little choice but to ‘buy American’.  What’s more, the tariff’s impact soon reaches beyond the national market to sour the country’s trade relationships.. Swiss cheesemakers are particularly sharp in their demands for retaliation.  Fletcher surmises that a prolonged Swiss-American military conflict would provide the necessary fiscal and nationalistic incentives to maintain the costly tariff on foreign cheese in perpetuity.

To make his monopolistic dream of market control a reality, Fletcher sees to it that the tariff spat between the two countries leads to an all-out war.  He first creates the Very Patriotic League to drum up support for the Alpine military adventure, as well as to weed out any ‘un-American’ agitation at home.  The Very Patriotic League’s members, donning white hoods reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, go about excising all things Swiss from the nativist nation.  Not even the classic adventure The Swiss Family Robinson escapes notice: it gets rebranded The American Family Robinson.  With domestic anti-war dissent quelled, Fletcher next orchestrates a military invasion of Switzerland.  The farcical imperial intervention ends with a US victory.  But just as the war with Switzerland winds down and a peaceful League of Cheese established, an ultimatum arrives from Russia objecting to a US tariff on caviar.  And, it’s implied, the militant cycle repeats.

That is from the new and interesting Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World, by Marc-William Palen.

My TLS essay on the Clinton administration

Here is the link, I am reviewing a bad book on the Clinton administration (A Fabulous Failure, by Lichtenstein and Stern).  Here is one excerpt:

Clinton-era welfare reform is another area where many commentators go astray, and Lichtenstein and Stein are no exception. The Clinton pronouncement “I have a plan to end welfare as we know it” has stuck in people’s minds. The reality is that, after Clinton-era welfare reforms, America spent more money on helping the poor. Welfare payments were attached to work requirements, but the states could redeploy federal money to programmes other than simple welfare payments, so funds for childcare, college scholarships, food stamps and tax credits for the poor all went up. The rate at which children fall into poverty has declined steadily. A significant Medicaid expansion followed under President Obama.

Yet the authors state that “The Era of Big Government is Over” in the section on welfare reform. If you squint you can see periodic references to the fact that Clinton-era welfare reform was not entirely radical, but nonetheless they write that this was “a drastic reform of the welfare system … that did in fact repudiate its New Deal heritage”. Calling the policy “an utterly misogynist step backward”, they note that Clinton’s “reputation as a heartless neoliberal was hereby well advanced within the ranks of progressive America”. Again, argument by adjective displaces the numbers.

And here is my summary judgment:

Too often the authors’ substantive arguments are presented in an “argument by adjective” form, relabelling events, institutions and individuals with negative adjectives or connotations, but without providing enough firm evidence. They write as if describing a policy reform as not having done enough for labour unions is per se a damning critique…

I can’t help but feel this work is largely directed at an internal Democratic Party dialogue. The basic premisses, or even the interpretations of the facts, don’t need to be argued for much. But good Democrats need to be told how to think about their own history. If strong labour unions are a sine qua non for social and economic progress, and if all good (and bad) things come together, how would the rest of history, including that of the Clinton administration, have to read? The notion that such stifling readings have become part of the problem, rather than the solution, does not appear in Nelson Lichtenstein’s and Judith Stein’s book.

I had turned down the previous invitation to review, because I didn’t think the book in question was good enough.

Matriline versus Patriline: Social Mobility in England, 1754-2023

Greg Clark may well be the most important social scientist of the 21st century. His use of historical data informed by evolutionary theory and genetics is a unique contribution to social science with important and challenging results.

Clark’s latest paper (with Neil Cummins) makes a simple but striking point. If the primary systematic determinant of social outcomes is genetic then we expect the father and the mother to contribute equally (each giving half their genes). If, on the other hand, the primary determinant is social then we expect widely different mother-father contributions in different societies and at different times and for different characteristics. Fathers ought to matter more in patriarchies, for example, and mothers more in matriarchies and gender-egalitarian societies. Similarly, if social factors are determinative, we would surely see a rising contribution of mothers to child outcomes as the social power of women rises (you can’t use your mother’s contacts in the legal profession to get a job, for example, if your mother was never a lawyer.) Similarly, if social factors are determinative we would expect mothers to be more important perhaps for characteristics determined early and fathers for characteristics determined late.

As Clark and Cummins write:

Social institutions and conventions would suggest that social status will often be more strongly transmitted between generations on either the patriline or the matriline. The factors favoring stronger transmission on the matriline are the much greater involvement in all societies of mothers in the care and education of children. The greater time investment of mothers in childcare is found in all societies, even those such as in contemporary Nordic countries where gender equality is the most advanced. Thus we would on the human capital interpretation of social outcomes expect a greater maternal than paternal connection in the modern world. However, a countervailing force in earlier times was the greater access of fathers to resources, and professional contacts. Also since in earlier years only fathers had occupations and educational qualifications, the father could be much more of a model for the outcomes of sons. It is thus uncertain whether the paternal or maternal line would better predict social outcomes in any earlier society. But we would expect the paternal effect to be greater in high status groups, and the maternal effect greater in average or lower class families.

What we find with the FOE data, however, is that in 27 out of 31 child outcomes (other than wealth) examined across marriages in the years 1754-1995, the patriline and matriline had a predictive ability for child outcomes that was not statistically distinguishable at the 5% level. In the four cases where the coefficients differed significantly, in three the maternal effect was greater, and in one the paternal effect. Thus for most social outcomes – literacy, age at beginning work, age at leaving schooling, higher education, and occupational status – mother and fathers appear always to contribute roughly equally. The one clear exception is wealth, where always patriline wealth is a much stronger predictor of child wealth than is matriline wealth.

…The results suggest, however, that the mechanism of transmission is largely independent of parental time interacting with children. The results reported above are thus consistent with the finding of Clark (2023) that the pattern of inheritance of most social outcomes in England 1600-2022 was consistent with direct additive genetic transmission. Such transmission would imply a symmetry of mother and father predictive effects.

If econs could hoop — The New Bazaar

That is my podcast with Cardiff Garcia, now on-line and with transcript too.  Cardiff proposed a novel approach:

Who is the Magic Johnson of economics? Who was the Adam Smith of basketball?

On this fun and oddball episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff speaks with Tyler Cowen, economist and author of GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?

Inspired by the sportswriter Bill Simmons, Tyler wrote his book from the standpoint of a fan—having fun, taking sides, admitting biases, unapologetically trying to entertain the reader instead of presenting sober (boring) analysis.

Cardiff and Tyler—both huge basketball fans—first discuss Tyler’s ranking of the great economists and his lament for what economics used to be. Tyler also gives his reasons for releasing the book as a ChatGPT trained on its text, the first such book of its kind.

Then begins the fun. They take turns finding analogs for the great economists from the history of the NBA. And they do the same in reverse for basketball’s own GOATs. Which economist changed the nature of the field similar to the way Steph Curry set off the three-point revolution? Is there an economist whose comprehensive genius rivaled the ability of LeBron James to engineer exactly the outcome he wants on the court? What basketball player matched the charisma, brilliance, and even investment success of Keynes?

And why does Cardiff argue that Tyler himself is the Charles Barkley of economists despite their differences in personality, size, and other obvious dimensions?

All throughout the chat, Tyler and Cardiff are exploring the common traits that lead to greatness in hoops, the social sciences, and perhaps other domains. A treat for fans of either economics or hoops, or who simply appreciate the virtues of fandom itself.

Recommended, for some (not all)!

From the beginning, “neoliberalism” was an obnoxious term

It was meant as an insult, implying that Mises – a marginalist – was trying to salvage 19th century liberal economics from the collectivist attacks of the Marxist left and the Nazi right, hence the “neo” moniker being attached.

One of the main promoters of this use was Othmar Spann, a rival of Mises on the University of Vienna faculty. Spann was a prominent proto-Nazi intellectual. In 1924 he added a disparaging chapter on “neoliberalism” to the new edition of his economics textbook.

By the time Mises arrived in Paris in 1938 for the CWL gathering, he had endured a decade and a half of simultaneous disparagement as a “neoliberal” by Nazis and Marxists. It should be no surprise that he was not keen to adopt the label himself.

Here is the full Phil Magness tweet storm.

What happened in 17th century England (a lot)

East India Company founded — 1600

Shakespeare – Hamlet published 1603

England starting to settle America – 1607 in Virginia, assorted, you could add Harvard here as well

King James Bible – 1611

The beginnings of steady economic growth – 1620 (Greg Clark, JPE)

Rule of law ideas, common law ideas, Sir Edward Coke – 1628-1648, Institutes of the Laws of England, four volumes

Beginnings of libertarian thought – Levellers 1640s

Printing becomes much cheaper, and the rise of pamphlet culture

John Milton, Aeropagitica, defense of free speech, 1644

King Charles I executed – 1649 (leads to a period of “Britain without a King,” ending 1660)

Birth of economic reasoning – second half of 17th century

Royal African Company and a larger slave trade – 1660

General growth of the joint stock corporation

Final subjugation of Ireland, beginnings of British colonialism and empire (throughout, mostly second half of the century)

Discovery of the calculus, Isaac Newton 1665-1666

Great Plague of London, 1665-1666, killed ¼ of city?

Great Fire of London, 1666

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667

Social contract theories – John Locke 1689

Bill of Rights (rights of Parliament) — 1689

Birth of modern physics – Newton’s Principia 1687

Bank of England — 1694

Scientific Revolution – throughout the 17th century, places empiricism and measurement at the core of science

The establishment of Protestantism as the religion of Britain, both formal and otherwise, throughout the century, culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

London – becomes the largest city in Europe by 1700 at around 585,000 people.

England moves from being a weak nation to perhaps the strongest in Europe and with the strongest navy.

Addendum: Adam Ozimek adds:

…first bank to print banknotes in Europe, 1661

Discovery of the telescope 1608

First patent for a modern steam engine 1602