Category: History

*Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Kim Bowes, this is an excellent book, the best I know of on ordinary economic life in the Roman empire.  It also shows a very good understanding of economics, unlike some forays by archeologists.  Here is one excerpt:

On the income side, we’ve seen that unskilled wages, which were very low indeed, were also a very bad proxy for income.  Wages were usually part of a portfolio of income, a portfolio that all family members contributed to, but one still centered on own production — either farming or textile/artisanal work.  Unskilled wages supplemented own-production; they mostly weren’t equivalent to it.  Roman wagges, unlike modern wages, can’t be used as a proxy for income.

Gross income from own-production, particularly farming, appears to have been much higher than previously supposed.  Rotation strategies practiced by Italian and Egyptian farmers meant that per-hectare outputs were many times greater than alternate fallow models predicted, since outputs included not only wheat but also significant quantities of fodder and animals.  In the northwest provinces, where rotation was less common, outputs per hectare were lower but still included some hay and larger animal herds.  And every, high settlement densities and shrinking amounts of land would have urged farmers to achieve higher yields — in some places three or more times greater than previously supposed.  We can’t be sure they managed this, only that low yields would have been mostly unteanble and that farmers had the tools — rotation, manuring, weeding — to achieve higher ones.

Most working class Romans, by the way, bought their clothing rather than having to make it themselves.

Recommended, you can pre-order it here.

The Economic Geography of American Slavery

by  Tyler Cowen in

What would the antebellum American economy have looked like without slavery? Using new micro-data on the U.S. economy in 1860, we document that where free and enslaved workers live and how much they earn correlates strongly—but differently—with geographic proxies for agricultural productivity, disease, and ease of slave escape. To explain these patterns, we build a quantitative spatial model of slavery, where slaveholders coerce enslaved workers into supplying more labor, capture the proceeds of their labor, and assign them to sectors and occupations that maximize owner profits rather than worker welfare. Combining theory and data, we then quantify how dismantling the institution of slavery affected the spatial economy. We find that the economic impacts of emancipation are substantial, generating welfare gains for the enslaved of roughly 1,200%, while reducing welfare of free workers by 0.7% and eliminating slaveholder profit. Aggregate GDP rises by 9.1%, with a contraction in agricultural productivity counteracted by an expansion in manufacturing and services driven by an exodus of formerly enslaved workers out of agriculture and into the U.S. North.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Treb Allen, Winston Chen & Suresh Naidu.

My excellent Conversation with George Selgin

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and George discuss the surprising lack of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the New Deal, whether revaluing gold was really the best path to economic reflation, how much Glass-Steagall and other individual parts of the New Deal mattered, Keynes’ “very sound” advice to Roosevelt, why Hayek’s analysis fell short, whether America would’ve done better with a more concentrated banking sector, how well the quantity theory of money holds up, his vision for a “night watchman” Fed, how many countries should dollarize, whether stablecoins should be allowed to pay interest, his stake in a fractional-reserve Andalusian donkey ownership scheme, why his Spanish vocabulary is particularly strong on plumbing, his ambivalence about the eurozone, what really got America out of the Great Depression, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: But once we revalue gold, as you know, starting in 1933, you have manufacturing-output growth rates of 7 percent to 8 percent until we screw it up later on with some disinflationary pressures. How much better could we have done? Wasn’t that a pretty good performance?

SELGIN: It was pretty good, but it didn’t last very long. In fact, the New Dealers knew that it wouldn’t last very long. There are a couple of reasons why.

First of all, there was a big burst of output that was connected to the expectation that the NRA, the National Recovery Administration, was going to be coming into effect, because it was one of the early New Deal measures. It was going to artificially raise prices through controls. There was a boom that was based only on manufacturers’ desires to jump the gun and buy inputs and produce inventory before their own costs went up. That was part of the story.

Of course, when you’re coming out from the deepest depths of a depression with a banking crisis and all that, you would expect rather rapid growth to follow from the stabilization of the banking situation itself. I don’t want to deny that there was genuine progress during those early months of the New Deal, and I don’t want to deny that the New Dealers deserve credit for much of it, but it didn’t last. Of course, we all know it didn’t last.

Beyond that first period, once the NRA and associated programs for price controls kicked in, things started to slow down very rapidly. What kept the progress going after that — though at a slower rate — was mostly gold starting to rush in from Europe. It was rushing in only initially because of devaluation. After that, it was mostly rushing in because of fears of the consequences of Hitler coming to power and the possibility of war breaking out.

That’s the story of the early phase of the New Deal: a good start that didn’t last that long, except as a result of help from abroad that was quite unintentional help.

COWEN: Was revaluing the gold price the best way of reflating the economy? Because there were many proposals at the time. You shut down the domestic gold market as well. Could it have been done better?

SELGIN: Yes, it could have been done better. I think that what should have happened was immediate devaluation of the dollar. It was clear by the time Roosevelt took office, the gold standard, as it had been, had to be at least suspended because the New York banks had run out of gold essentially. That was not something there was much choice about.

Then the question was, “Okay, what are we going to do going forward?” As I said, what I think they should have done was to just plan on a devaluation of the dollar, get it over with as quickly as possible. You don’t announce that plan before you’ve suspended gold payments because that’s just going to make the run on gold worse. Once you’ve suspended, then you can go ahead and proceed with the devaluation.

What Roosevelt did was to engage in this crazy gold purchase program for quite a few months, based on a harebrained theory by a fellow named George Warren, who was very influential. They toyed with the price of gold. The theory was that if you raise the price of gold, other prices will start going up. Didn’t happen. Eventually, after many months, general prices had hardly risen at all.

Finally, Roosevelt picked a value for the dollar, a proper devaluation. Confirmed it, put it into effect, and at that point, things started to improve. That’s what should have happened.

By the way, this is as good a time as any to mention, this is what Keynes would have recommended and did recommend. He scolded or criticized Roosevelt for following Warren’s theories instead. I think that on this and many other scores, Keynes’s advice about dealing with the Depression was actually very sound. The myth is that Roosevelt was following it when, in fact, most of the time, he wasn’t.

Recommended, informative throughout.  I am happy to recommend George’s new and excellent book False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947.  Plus George now owns a rather large number of donkeys…

John Nye on Joel Mokyr (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

I became an economic historian because I thought then and still believe economic history is more scientific than most of economics. It is/was not afraid to combine rigorous analysis with softer, more verbal theory and analytic narrative.
The Nobel underestimates how important it was that Joel who first promoted the distinction between Smithian growth and Schumperterian growth.
That is, Smithian growth is that growth which emerges from trade and well functioning markets. But societies that experienced Smithian growth usually did not overcome the Malthusian trap enough to provide sustained per capita income growth.
Schumpeterian growth was that based on innovation, which is a combination of creative invention AND the ability to successfully market a viable commercial product that changes the industry. The two do not, and prior to the 18th century only rarely came together.
Furthermore, he later added the idea of knowledge noting that inventing things — such as the imperial Chinese –without a deep understanding of the underlying theory behind the invention’s success limited the extent to which that idea could propagate.
As I tell my students, even when the US was still a minor power (such as the early 19th century) it was already a major innovator with items like the cotton gin, the sewing machine and the American system of manufactures. This idea of systematically making products with interchangeable parts took decades or more to become a true reality, but the Americans were the first to take this seriously at a high level.
Joel understood all this and our discussions on this subject have continued to this day.
Note, that because of the nature of his work, Joel did not get a top 5 pub till the late 2010s. By today’s standards, he would not have gotten tenure at most strong and second tier departments in the world. This shows the limits of the current. The old system where top schools balanced judgment against publication record — which GMU strives to promote — was a better source of truly innovative talent than the mechanical formulas promoted in most of worldwide academia.

Tanmay Khale on the decline in iconic songs over time (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

https://x.com/wdavidmarx/status/1977162349107900770?s=46

A model that would explain this (which seems plausible to me for how judges generate these lists):

1. Come up with some metric for assessing works which is normalized such that the overall distribution is constant over time, usually by normalizing a metric that isn’t constant over time.

E.g. (a sports example) touchdowns scored by quarterback -> percentile of touchdowns scored by quarterback among currently active quarterbacks.

The metrics are less concrete for art, but I think people try to make similar adjustments in art as they do in sports (to make the distributions constant over time). The motivation that the judges would give for this is that one should assess each contribution based on how exceptional it was for its time.

2. Classing an achievement as “great” when it’s at least a certain percentile compared to whatever preceded it, by one of the metrics above. (“Oh wow, Johnson’s X was far more Y than anything preceding it, what an innovative work!”)

1. and 2. together will basically guarantee that you’ll have (by that definition) fewer great works over time; in the simple case where you’re looking for something that’s better than everything before it by some metric where the distribution is constant over time, the chance of observation n being better than everything preceding it is 1/n…

I don’t claim that judges are doing exactly this, but they only have to be doing some of this (e.g., their assessment criterion is 20% something like this) for it to lead to the behavior highlighted in the Twitter post!

The case for a Nobel to Joel Mokyr

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is GPT-5 making the case.  Excerpt:

A micro‑foundation for growth: “useful knowledge,” its two forms, and the Industrial Enlightenment

Mokyr’s signature contribution is to put knowledge—not just capital, labor, or “institutions” in the abstract—at the center of modern growth. In The Gifts of Athena and subsequent papers and lectures, he distinguishes between:

  • Propositional knowledge (“knowledge what” about natural regularities), and

  • Prescriptive knowledge (“knowledge how” about techniques and production).

He argues that sustained growth arises when a society builds positive feedback between the two: deeper scientific understanding makes techniques improvable, while new techniques generate puzzles that push science forward. This is the Industrial Enlightenment: a culture that expects progress, rewards it, and knits together savants and artisans in a “Republic of Letters,” a kind of 18th‑century knowledge commons with rules for open exchange, replication, and credit…

In The Enlightened Economy and A Culture of Growth, Mokyr shows that the British/European break‑out ca. 1700–1850 was propelled less by isolated “heroic” inventions or factor prices alone and more by a cultural–epistemic shift: an elite market for ideas in a politically fragmented Europe created exit options for heterodox thinkers and incentives for rulers to compete for talent. This account complements rather than denies other forces (coal, wages, property rights), but it explains persistence—why growth became self‑sustaining.

…Joel Mokyr changed how economists explain the onset and persistence of modern growth. He supplied a historically grounded, analytically sharp account of how societies produce, organize, and circulate knowledge so that it becomes self‑amplifying. That account has not only reshaped economic history; it has supplied live ammunition for growth theory and for policy in a world where intangible, recombinable knowledge is the main engine of prosperity. The 2025 Nobel Committee’s decision to honor him alongside Aghion and Howitt simply makes explicit what many researchers have long recognized: innovations power growth, and Mokyr showed us how societies build the machinery that powers innovations.

Here is Mokyr in scholar.google.com.  Read The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena and A Culture of Growth.  I have benefited most from The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.  You can ask Joel just about anything concerning the Industrial Revolution and he will have an amazingly well-thought answer.  He has a new book coming out in November, with Tabellini and Greif.  It is correct to consider him as an “Enlightenment thinker.”  Brian Albrecht has a good thread on this.  And see Matt Yglesias.  Note also that Mokyr barely has a presence in the “top five” journals.

New archaeology tranche for Emergent Ventures

by  Tyler Cowen in

Just apply at the normal site.  Here is a description of what we are up to and what we are looking for:

  • We are giving archaeology-specific EV grants
  • Emphasis on projects enabled by tech (AI/CV, lidar, synthetic aperture radar and hyperspectral imagery, open source data, etc)
  • Flexible on cost or duration of projects
  • All circumstances encouraged (grad student funding a project she’s working on, swe wanting to take a few months off to work on something, high school student side project, etc)
  • Ideas below are by no means comprehensive or the edges of the search area – just starting points for exploration for people interested in the field that don’t have a specific idea in mind yet

Examples of ideas:

For these notes I thank Mehran Jalali, a former EV winner in this area, who also will serve as one of the referees.  When you apply, just indicate that your request is for archaeology.  Soon this will be a formal category on the application itself, if somehow you are already ready to apply tomorrow a.m., just use the word in your project description.

We thank Yonatan Ben Shimon for his generous support of this tranche.

Ian Smith’s memoir *Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes he used to run Rhodesia, and yes it is costly to buy this book because no one wants to reprint it, for obvious reasons.  Nonetheless it is a fascinating look into an era and its dissolution.

Smith is a wonderful writer, and remarkably erudite, more so than virtually any politician today.  He also is delusional almost beyond belief.  As the title of the memoir indicates, the story is all about the different parties who betrayed him.  The British, the South Africans, and also some of his fellow Rhodesians.  He blames almost everybody else, without considering the possibility that the Rhodesian system of “one white for every seventeen blacks, and without equal rights” (as was the ratio circa 1960) simply was never going to work.

He calls the Rhodesian human rights record “impeccable,” but you will find another perspective from GPT-5.

He loves to inveigh against South African apartheid, which he considered very bad publicity for the broader project of civilizing the southern cone of the African continent.  He insisted that Rhodesia had nothing similar.

Unlike many contemporary writers, he often is willing to tell you what he really thinks, for instance:

Hilgar Muller certainly put on a good performance, full of drama and emotion, the kind of thing these foreign-affairs types have got to perfect if they are going to do their job.  He need not have bothered as far as I was concerned, for I am far too experienced and down to earth to be influenced by such tactics.

The closest he ever comes to blaming himself, his party, or his decisions is when he writes:

Our crime was that we had resisted revolutionary political change.

Or he writes:

I myself certainly prefer having dealings with some of these honest-to-goodness black people, than with the two-faced liberals of the Labour Party or the Fabian Society.

“Recommended” is not exactly the word I wish to use here, but I can report that I read the whole thing.

Claims about polygyny

by  Tyler Cowen in

The title of this piece is “High rates of polygyny do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market.”  I believe further investigation is warranted before drawing such conclusions, but here is the abstract:

Social scientists often assume that when men can marry multiple wives (polygyny), many other men will be unable to marry. Versions of this assumption feature prominently in theories of civil war, the evolution of monogamy, and the incel movement. Using census data from 30 countries across Africa, Asia, and Oceania, as well as data from the historical United States, we find no clear evidence that polygyny is associated with higher proportions of unmarried men in society. Instead, high-polygyny populations often have marriage markets skewed in favor of men, and actually, men in high-polygyny populations usually marry more than men in low-polygyny ones. These findings challenge entrenched assumptions and inform debates on marriage systems, societal stability, and human rights.

That is from a recent paper by Hampton Gaddy, Rebecca Sear, and Laura Fortunato.  At the very least, you hear the contrary story so often, and without firm documentation, that it is worth shaking the debate here a little bit.

Black Veterans and Civil Rights After World War I

by  Tyler Cowen in

Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, where they toiled primarily as menial laborers in segregated units. Leveraging novel variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, we document the pioneering role these men played in the early civil rights movement. Relative to observably similar individuals from the same draft board, Black men randomly inducted into the Army were significantly more likely to join the nascent NAACP and to become prominent community leaders in the New Negro era. We find little evidence that these effects are explained by migration or improved socioeconomic status. Rather, corroborating historical accounts about the catalyzing influence of institutional racism in the military, we show that increased civic activism was driven by soldiers who experienced the most discriminatory treatment while serving their country.

That is from Desmond Ang and Sahil Chinoy, newly accepted into the QJE.  Are we so sure the postulated mechanism is the correct interpretation for the results here?  Being in the military can have other intellectual influences too.  Via Alexander Berger.

Thiel and Wolfe on the Antichrist in literature

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jonathan Swift tried to exorcise ­Baconian Antichrist-worship from England. Gulliver’s Travels agreed with New Atlantis on one point: The ancient hunger for knowledge of God had competition from the modern thirst for knowledge of science. In this quarrel between ancients and moderns, Swift sided with the former.

Gulliver’s Travels takes us on four voyages to fictional countries bearing scandalous similarities to eighteenth-century England. In his depictions of the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Laputans, and Houyhnhnms, Swift lampoons the Whig party, the Tory party, English law, the city of London, Cartesian dualism, doctors, dancers, and many other people, movements, and institutions besides. Swift’s misanthropy borders on nihilism. But as is the case with all satirists, we learn as much from whom Swift spares as from whom he scorns—and Gulliver’s Travels never criticizes Christianity. Though in 2025 we think of Gulliver’s Travels as a comedy, for Swift’s friend Alexander Pope it was the work of an “Avenging Angel of wrath.” The Anglican clergyman Swift was a comedian in one breath and a fire-and-brimstone preacher in the next.

Gulliver claims he is a good Christian. We doubt him, as we doubt Bacon’s chaplain. Gulliver’s first name, Lemuel, translates from Hebrew as “devoted to God.” But “Gulliver” sounds like “gullible.” Swift quotes Lucretius on the title page of the 1735 edition: “vulgus abhorret ab his.” In its original context, Lucretius’s quote describes the horrors of a godless cosmos, horrors to which Swift will expose us. The words “splendide mendax” appear below Gulliver’s frontispiece portrait—“nobly untruthful.” In the novel’s final chapter, Gulliver reflects on an ­earlier promise to “strictly adhere to Truth” and quotes ­Sinon from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sinon was the Greek who convinced the Trojans to open their gates to the Trojan horse: one of literature’s great liars.

Here is the full article, interesting and varied throughout.

*Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the forthcoming book by Andrew Burstein, who is also author of the excellent Madison and Jefferson (with Nancy Isenberg).  I am sent many books on the founding and Founding Fathers, and while I find their average quality to be high, usually they do not grab my attention.  I have already read plenty in that area.  I also have consumed many books on Jefferson in particular,s Dumas Malone boring or magisterial?  But this one I read straight through, as it is simply…compelling.  Excerpt:

Three thousand copies of Esquisse were issued in 1795, nine years before the publication of Condorcet’s Collected Writings in twenty-one volumes [TC: when is the AI-assisted translation coming?].  As a systematic compendium of the philosophe’s outlook on all matters of human intervention and the “perfectability” of the species, the book advances through the stages of social development from early times in order to address the need for liberation of the progressive spirit through all available means of encouragement.  He applaus every perceptible advance toward closing the economic gap between the wealthy and everyone else, as well as equality under the law, rights of conscience, decolonization, and universal suffrage.  It is difficult to find another Enlightenment figure who went as far as Condorcet in envisioning a just society.

And:

President Thomas Jefferson, self-styled champion of republican methods, was putting his finger on the scale here.  It is hard to pretend otherwise.  With an unwarranted exercise of power aimed at weakening the Supreme Court, he was acting from a private need to humiliate a man who treated a nonelective position as a partisan platform.  While the emotion is quite understandable, Jefferson’s justice was purely retributive.

Recommended, you can pre-order here.