Category: History

My history of economic thought reading list

History of Economic Thought syllabus

The honor code applies to this class. Accommodations will be made for disabilities in accord with the policies of George Mason University.

Your grade is 2/3 based on your paper, 1/3 based on a final exam. You are required to submit short progress reports on your paper on a regular basis.

Reading list:

Commerce, Culture, & Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith, edited by Henry C. Clark.

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations.

Tyler Cowen, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?, free and on-line.

GPT-4, paid version, mandatory, $20 a month.

Phind (free, good for giving you reliable references)

Perplexity.AI, free, usually better than Google these days

The internet

I will assign other readings, predominantly on-line, depending on the topics we end up covering.

We need more talk of progress

Image

Here is the underlying John-Burn Murdoch FT piece, pointer here.  And a text excerpt:

Ruxandra Teslo, one of a growing community of progress-focused writers at the nexus of science, economics and policy, argues that the growing scepticism around technology and the rise in zero-sum thinking in modern society is one of the defining ideological challenges of our time.

I am pleased that Ruxandra is now also an Emergent Ventures winner.

My podcast with Brink Lindsey

He is starting a new podcast and I am perhaps the first episode?  There is video and text and audio.  Here is an excerpt:

Lindsey: Did they recognize early on that you were different and that they had a job to do to push you, or no?

Cowen: Well, my father thought I was weird, so he thought I was different, but it would’ve been easier for him if I had, say, been a football player in the way that he was captain of his high school football team. He accepted what I became but I was not obviously doing things he had done. My mother was very open-minded. But when I was quite young, I’m not even sure how young, she took me repeatedly to the public library. At first, it was a Carnegie library in the town of Kearney, New Jersey, but later to Bergen County libraries. And without those library trips, I would’ve been very different. And then my father’s mother, my grandmother, lived with us for a while and she taught my sister how to read. And I was about two and I learned by looking over her shoulder. And so my grandmother had to big influence on me. And my grandmother loved to read. She loved Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, John O’Hara, and also liked Ayn Rand even though she was not a partisan of any one of those things. So my grandmother too was a real influence.

And:

Lindsey: You’re now known for your incredible diversity of intellectual interests. Was that from the start? Did your curiosity just naturally pull you in a million different directions, or was there some point where you recognized, “Hey, my specialty is breadth and I need to lean into that”?

Cowen: Well, I think when I was quite young, I was much more conservative in the small-c sense of that word. I didn’t have an interest in traveling. I was more reserved. If you’re a chess player when you’re a kid, that’s extremely narrow. And that was the main thing I did with a bit of science fiction. So the breadth, I think, came gradually and most of all in my very late teens with classical music, beginning to travel. So I don’t think it was in me at the beginning in any obvious way.

Lindsey: But it came out in adolescence?

Cowen: Yes. But someone looking at me at age seven would not have predicted breadth later on.

Interesting throughout…and do subscribe to Brink’s Substack.

The economics of dinosaur brand names

But unlike a full-grown T. rex, which would be about the size of a city bus, this dinosaur was more like the size of a pickup truck.

The specimen, which is now listed for sale for $20 million at an art gallery in London, raises a question that has come to obsess paleontologists: Is it simply a young T. rex who died before reaching maturity, or does it represent a different but related species of dinosaur known as a Nanotyrannus?

The dispute has produced reams of scientific research and decades of debate, polarizing paleontologists along the way. Now, with dinosaur fossils increasingly fetching eye-popping prices at auction, the once-esoteric dispute has begun to ripple through auction houses and galleries, where some see the T. rex name as a valuable brand that can more easily command high prices.

Here is more from the NYT.

A City Not a Museum

Good Binyamin Appelbaum piece on the difficulties of building in NYC. The data will be familiar but I especially appreciate this vibe which we need more of:

I hope someday I’ll be walking with my children on the Lower East Side or the Upper West Side or Brooklyn Heights. We’ll pass one of the places where my ancestors lived, and the building will be gone. In its place will stand an apartment building, housing a new generation of New Yorkers.

See also my piece Against Historical Preservation where I wrote:

…a confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ancestor’s ingenuity and aesthetic vision. A nation in decline looks to the past in a vain attempt to “preserve” what was once great. Preservation is what you do to dead butterflies.

A textual analysis of Enlightenment ideals

Using textual analysis of 173,031 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture evolved to manifest a heightened belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the language of science and religion beginning in the 17th century. Second, scientific volumes became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, industrial works—especially those at the science-political economy nexus—were more progress-oriented beginning in the 17th century. It was therefore the more pragmatic, industrial works which reflected the cultural values cited as important for Britain’s takeoff.

That is from a new research paper by Ali Almelhem, Murat Iyigun, Austin Kennedy, and Jared Rubin.

The Sullivan Signal: Harvard’s Failure to Educate and the Abandonment of Principle

The current Harvard disaster was clearly signaled by earlier events, most notably the 2019 firing of Dean Ronald Sullivan. Sullivan is a noted criminal defense attorney; he was the director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and he is the Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, he advised President Obama on criminal justice issues, he represented the family of Michael Brown. He and his wife were the first black Faculty Deans in the history of the college.

Controversy erupted, however, when Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team. Student protests ensued. The students argued that they couldn’t “feel safe” if a legal representative of a person accused of abusing women was also serving in a role of student support and mentorship. This is, of course, ridiculous. Defending an individual accused of murder does not imply that a criminal defense attorney condones the act of murder.

Harvard should have educated their students. Harvard should have emphasized the crucial role of criminal defense in American law and history. They should have noted that a cornerstone of the rule of law is the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, irrespective of public opinion.

Harvard should have pointed proudly to John Adams, a Harvard alum, who defied popular opinion to defend hated British soldiers charged with murdering Americans at the Boston Massacre. (If you wish to take measure of the quality of our times it’s worth noting that Adams won the case and later became president—roughly equivalent to an attorney for accused al-Qaeda terrorists becoming President today.)

Instead of educating its students, Harvard catered to ignorance, bias and hysteria by removing both Sullivan and his wife from their deanships. Harvard in effect endorsed the idea, as Robby Soave put it, that “serving as legal counsel for a person accused of sexual misconduct is itself a form of sexual misconduct, or at the very least contributes to sexual harassment on campus.” Thus Harvard tarred Sullivan and his wife, undermined the rule of law and elevated the rule of the mob. Claudine Gay, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, contributed to the ignorance, bias and hysteria. (It’s also notable, that Sullivan also criticized Harvard’s handling of the investigation of Roland Fryer as being “deeply flawed and deeply unfair.” This may have been Sullivan’s real sin, as the investigation of Fryer was under Dean Claudine Gay.)

Thus, we see in the Sullivan episode disregard for free speech, unprincipled governance in which different rules are applied to different actors in similar situations, and a bending to the will of the mob, all issues which have repeated themselves under the Gay regime. Sad to say, however, that these flaws were not so much ignored at the time as lauded.

Harvard followed the mob and when the mob turned and the season changed it had left itself no defense.

Addendum: See also Tyler, My thoughts on the Harvard mess.

Mark Skousen reviews *GOAT*

An excellent review, here is one excerpt:

Oddly enough he leaves out several economists who many consider possible GOATs: From the British school, David Ricardo (Milton Friedman’s favorite); from the Monetarists, Irving Fisher (whom James Tobin ranked “the greatest economist America has produced”); from the Austrians, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard (which the Mises Institute would consider leaving out unforgiveable); from the Institutionalists, Thorstein Veblen (who Max Lerner called “the most creative American social thought has produced”) and Max Weber (the “one man” that Frank Knight admired); and from the Marxists, Karl Marx (which they would consider his omission a cardinal sin). Cowen tells me he may write a short monograph on Marx (email dated November 22, 2023).

He also excluded the big three of the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s: Carl MengerWilliam Stanley Jevons, and Leon Walras.

Do read the whole thing, and note I may write more on the Marginal Revolution as well, the revolution that is not the blog!

And here is Mark’s daughter, doing a skating back flip on ice.

*Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative*

That is the new memoir from Glenn C. Loury, and I cracked it open right away, here is one excerpt:

But now Harvard is looking to retool its ailing Afro-American Studies department, and Tom [Schelling] serves on the committee whose job it is to recruit new faculty worthy of the institution.  The chair of that committee is the distinguished black historian Nathan Huggins, who has recently taken the helm in Afro Studies at Harvard.  Apparently my Econometrica paper on intergenerational transfers had gotten their attention, and my writing on the dynamics of racial income differences has piqued their interest.  I’m just six years past my PhD and they’re offering a joint appointment as full professor of economics and of Afro-American Studies.  The appointment would make me the first black tenured professor in the history of Harvard’s economics department.  I like the sound of that.  In the past, the timing hadn’t quite felt right for Harvard.  But now it does feel right, and I have the sense that if I say no a third time, they won’t be calling again.

You can pre-order the book here, it is self-recommending of course.  And here is my earlier Conversation with Glenn Loury.

*The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights*

That is the new book by David Beito, and the subtitle is The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance.  Here is the closing passage:

If Roosevelt’s civil-liberties reputation meant anything to mainstream Americans at the end of the 1950s, it was not for witch hunts against gays in the navy, mass surveillance of private telegrams, crackdowns on free speech, inquisitorial investigations, sedition prosecutions, or the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps.  Far more central in the memories of most was his authorship of the four freedoms and the Fair Employment Practices Committee and the appointment of Black and Douglas to the Supreme Court.  But that was not the whole truth, or even the beginning of the whole truth.

There you go.  I don’t think these facts are much contested, though the accompanying mood affiliation hasn’t changed very much.

Salta (and Jujuy) notes

The food is excellent.  Don’t worry about choosing the right restaurant, just try to eat the simple things.  Corn products.  Beans.  Baked goods such as empanadas.  Don’t waste your time on the steak.  The food stalls in the Mercado Municipal are a good place to start, and many items  there cost fifty cents to a dollar.  The “sopa de mani” (peanut soup) is especially good, and almost identical to what you find in Bolivia.

The overall vibe in Salta reminds me of both northern Mexico and the older parts of the American Southwest.  And the adjacent parts of Bolivia.  It is hot, the cities are surrounded by beautiful scenery, and it still all feels rather wild.  Salta is also much safer than Buenos Aires, and you don’t see many beggars here.  In B.A. they are now asking for food rather than money.

There’s not much to do in Salta, as the central sights in town are the two mummified remains of young Incan girls in the archaeological museum.  They are memorable, as it feels like they are staring right back at you.

Spending time here will cure you of utopianism, and also of pessimism.  Whatever issues you might think are really important, most people here really don’t care about them or even know about them.

American brands at the retail level are not to be seen.  Nor will you run across Chinese or Indian merchants.  Perhaps a Syrian or Lebanese is to be found, but not in any great numbers.

Tyrone is accompanying me, and I asked him what he thinks.  As you might expect, he had only stupid rudeness in response.  Tyrone said that northern Argentina is the true essence of the Argentinean nation, and that everyone interested in Argentina should visit here.  In fact, having visited North Macedonia, he wishes to rename the country South Bolivia — were they not once part of the same Viceroyalty?  Is it not enough to share the same soup?  Do they not have broadly the same accent, devoid of all that B.A. slurring?  Was not the country born here in the north?  That is where the decisive battle for national independence was fought and won.  Do we not all agree with theories of deep roots?  It is not just who moves to your nation, but it is about how and where your nation was founded.  And for Argentina that is in the north, and with violence and corruption and economic decline.  Tyrone even wishes to hand over the rest of Patagonia to the Chileans, so that Argentina may better recognize its true self.

In the twisted view of Tyrone, the creation of the modernist city of Brasilia was a big success.  The real failure, hermetically hidden by some charming Parisian and Barcelona-style architecture, was the attempted modernist outpost of Buenos Aires, an immature and underdeveloped excrudescence from the real nation of chocro, horse saddles and the quebrada.  It tricked a few Johnny-come-lately migrants during the early 20th century, and neglected to tell them they still would be ruled by the ideas and the norms of the north.

Imagine thinking that you could govern a nation with high modernism and Freudian psychoanalysis — what folly!  And now, Tyrone tells us, we have the Milei revolution, attempting to replace one Viennese modernism — that of Freud — with the Viennese modernist revolution of Mises.  Good luck with that one, Tyrone says.  What kind of fool would think that the future of South America would be determined by a war across different Viennese modernisms?  Those mummified corpses still will rule the day, whether or not the feds balance the budget in the short term.  Desiccated ever-young girls are in perpetual deficit, no matter how the daily fiscal accounts may read.

I had to stop Tyrone right then and there, as he was explaining why the current hyperinflation probably was a good thing, as the only path to true dollarization and at least one symbolic unification with North America.  Tyrone was shouting that such symbolic unification nonetheless was impossible, and thus the corpses had brought in Milei to restore fiscal sanity and prevent dollarization and thus protect the true Incan and Andean nation.

Such thoughts are not allowed on Marginal Revolution, and so I am now trying to persuade Tyrone to visit Iguassu, in the hope that I can induce him to take a quick swim in those falls…

I hope the rest of you will visit northern Argentina nonetheless, and put all that nonsense aside.  The empanadas await you.

Vincent Geloso says “Ouch!” to PSZ

My Conversation with Fuchsia Dunlop

Here is the audio, video, and transcript, conducted over a long meal at Mama Chang restaurant in Fairfax.  Here is the episode summary:

As they dined, the group discussed why the diversity in Chinese cuisine is still only just being appreciated in the West, how far back our understanding of it goes, how it’s represented in the Caribbean and Ireland, whether technique trumps quality of ingredients, why certain cuisines can spread internationally with higher fidelity, what we can learn from the different styles in Indian and Chinese cooking, why several dishes on the table featured Amish ingredients, the most likely mistake people will make when making a stir fry, what Lydia has learned managing an empire of Chinese restaurants, Fuchsia’s trick for getting unstuck while writing, and more.

Joining Tyler, Fuchsia, and Lydia around the table were Dan WangRasheed GriffithFergus McCullough, and Sam Enright.

Here is one excerpt:

WANG: Yes, that’s right. If I can ask a follow-up question on this comparison between India and China. Maybe this is half a question also for Tyler. Why do we associate Indian cuisine so much more with long simmers, whereas Chinese cuisine — of course, it is a little bit of everything, as Fuchsia knows so well, but it is often a little bit more associated with quick fries. What is the factor endowment here of these two very big countries, very big civilizations having somewhat divergent paths, as we imagine, with culinary traditions?

DUNLOP: That’s a really interesting question. It’s hard to answer because I don’t really know anything about Indian food. I did have a really interesting conversation with an Indian who came on my tour to Yunnan earlier this year because I was speculating that one of the reasons that Chinese food is so diverse is that the Chinese are really open-minded, with very few taboos. Apart from Muslims eating halal food and some Buddhists not eating meat, there’s a great adventurous open-mindedness to eating.

Whereas in India, you have lots of taboos and religious and ritual restrictions. That’s one reason that you would think it would be a constraint on the creativity of Indian food. But this Indian I was talking to, who’s a food specialist — he reckoned that the restrictions actually forced people to be more creative. He was arguing that Indian food had all the conditions for diversity that Chinese does.

In terms of cooking methods, it’s hard to say. Again, I don’t know about Indian food, but the thing about China is that there’s been this intense thoughtfulness about food, really, for a very long time. You see it in descriptions of food from 2,000 years ago and more.

In the Song Dynasty, this incredible restaurant industry in places like Hangzhou, and innovation and creativity. I suppose that when you are thoroughly interested in food like the Chinese and thinking about it creatively all the time, you end up having a whole plethora of different cooking methods. That’s one of the striking things about Chinese cuisine, that you have slow-cooked stews and simmered things and steamed things and also stir-frying. That might explain why several different methods have achieved prominence.

COWEN: Before I comment on that, Lydia, on the new dish, please tell us.

The dishes are explained as they were consumed, the meal was excellent, of course the company too.  A very good episode, highly rated for all lovers of Chinese food.  And here is Fuchsia’s new book, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, self-recommending.  And here are previous MR mentions of Fuchsia, including links to my two earlier CWTs with her.