Category: History

The influence of Malthus in India?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Public servants frequently fail to implement government policy as intended by principals. I investigate how exposure to economic ideas can alter implementation by government agents, focusing on the influence of Malthusian ideas on British bureaucrats in colonial India. In the Malthusian view, economic distress reduces population growth, raising incomes and ultimately resolving distress without any need for government intervention. Leveraging the death of Malthus in 1834 as a natural experiment, I find that colonial officials who studied under Malthus at a bureaucratic training college implemented less generous fiscal policies in response to rainfall shortages, a proxy for local distress. Across every common relief measure, Malthus-trained officials provided between 0.10 and 0.25 SD less relief than peers trained by Richard Jones, a critic of Malthus. The results offer new evidence concerning how economic ideas shape government policy through their influence on bureaucrats.

That is an abstract from Eric Robertson, who is on the economics job market from University of Virginia.

Technological Change and the Market for Books, 1450-1550

by  Tyler Cowen in

Abstract: This paper considers how movable-type printing’s economic features shaped the early modern book market using product-level data. Building on a lively medieval tradition of manuscript production, Gutenberg’s innovation did not simply reduce costs; it introduced new incentives and constraints that altered both the product’s nature and the market’s structure. First, printing’s business model encouraged the production of shorter and simpler books targeting a poorer and less literate audience. Second, its cost structure led to product differentiation and prolific trade rather than direct competition and localized production, making available a greater variety of products offering diverse information and perspectives. Rather than simply making medieval books cheaper and more abundant, these changes may represent printing technology’s true contribution to European economic development. 

That is from the job market paper of Qiyi Charlotte Zhao, who is on the market this year from Stanford.  Excellent topic.

The microfoundations of the baby boom?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Between 1936 and 1957, fertility rates in the U.S. increased 62 percent and the maternal mortality rate declined by 93 percent. We explore the effects of changes in maternal mortality rates on white and nonwhite fertility rates during this period, exploiting contemporaneous or lagged changes in maternal mortality at the state-by-year level. We estimate that declines in maternal mortality explain 47-73 percent of the increase in fertility between 1939 and 1957 among white women and 64-88 percent of the increase in fertility among nonwhite women during our sample period.

Here is the full article by Christopher Handy and Katharine Shester, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  Overall, I take this as a negative for the prospect of another, future baby boom?  We just cannot make maternity all that much safer, starting from current margins.

My Conversation with the excellent Jonny Steinberg

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg’s particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee’s journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist’s emotional insight.

Tyler and Jonny discuss why South African police only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls, how to fix policing, the ghettoization of crime, how prison gangs regulate behavior through century-old rituals, how apartheid led to mass incarceration and how it manifested in prisons,  why Nelson Mandela never really knew his wife Winnie and the many masks they each wore, what went wrong with the ANC, why the judiciary maintained its independence but not its quality, whether Tyler should buy land in Durban, the art scene in Johannesburg, how COVID gave statism a new lease on life, why the best South African novels may still be ahead, his forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes, why English families weren’t foolish to move to Rhodesia in the 1920s, where to take an ideal two-week trip around South Africa, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: My favorite book of yours again is Winnie and Nelson, which has won a number of awards. A few questions about that. So, they’re this very charismatic couple. Obviously, they become world-historical famous. For how long were they even together as a pair?

STEINBERG: Very, very briefly. They met in early 1957. They married in ’58. By 1960, Mandela was no longer living at home. He was underground. He was on the run. By 1962, he was in prison. So, they were really only living together under the same roof for two years.

COWEN: And how well do you feel they knew each other?

STEINBERG: Well, that’s an interesting question because Nelson Mandela was very, very in love with his wife, very besotted with his wife. He was 38, she was 20 when they met. She was beautiful. He was a notorious philanderer. He was married with three children when they met. He really was besotted with her. I don’t think that he ever truly came to know her. And when he was in prison, you can see it in his letters. It’s quite remarkable to watch. She more and more becomes the center of meaning in his life, his sense of foundation, his sense of self as everything else is falling away.

And he begins to love her more and more, and even to coronate her more and more so that she doesn’t forget him. His letters grow more romantic, more intense, more emotional. But the person he’s so deeply in love with is really a fiction. She’s living a life on the outside. And you see this very troubling line between fantasy and reality. A man becoming deeply, deeply involved with a woman who is more and more a figment of his imagination.

COWEN: Do you think you learned anything about marriage more generally from writing this book?

STEINBERG: [laughs] One of the sets of documents that I came across in writing the book were the transcripts of their meetings in the last 10 years of his imprisonment. The authorities bugged all of his meetings. They knew they were being bugged, but nonetheless, they were very, very candid with each other. And you very unusually see a marriage in real time and what people are saying to each other. And when I read those lines, 10 different marriages that I know passed through my head: the bickering, the lying, the nasty things that people do to one another, the cruelties. It all seemed very familiar.

COWEN: How is it you think she managed his career from a distance, so to speak?

STEINBERG: Well, she was a really interesting woman. She arrived in Johannesburg, 20 years old in the 1950s, where there was no reason to expect a woman to want a place in public life, particularly not in the prime of public life. And she was absolutely convinced that there was no position she should not occupy because she was a woman. She wanted a place in politics; she wanted to exercise power. But she understood intuitively that in that time and place, the way to do that was through a man. And she went after the most powerful rising political activists available.

I don’t think it was quite as cynical as that. She loved him, but she absolutely wanted to exercise power, and that was a way to do it. Once she became Mrs. Mandela, I think she had an enormously aristocratic sense of politics and of entitlement and legitimacy. She understood herself to be South Africa’s leader by virtue of being married to him, and understood his and her reputations as her projects to endeavor to keep going. And she did so brilliantly. She was unbelievably savvy. She understood the power of image like nobody else did, and at times saved them both from oblivion.

COWEN: This is maybe a delicate question, but from a number of things I read, including your book, I get the impression that Winnie’s just flat out a bad person…

Interesting throughout, this is one of my favorite CWT episodes, noting it does have a South Africa focus.

Why did the colonists hate taxes so much?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The evidence becomes overwhelming that Americans opposed seemingly light taxes, not because they were paranoid, but because the taxes were charged in silver bullion, a money few colonists used on a regular basis and most never had.  Thomas Paine had outlined the logic of resistance in June 1780.  “There are two distinct things which make the payment of taxes difficult; the one is the large and real value of the sum to be paid, and the other is the scarcity of the thing in which the payment is to be made.”…Adam Gordon, an MR for Aberdeenshire who was traveling in Virginia in 1765, wrote that he was “at a loss to find how they,” some of the wealthiest colonists in the New World, Virginia’s slave-driving tobacco planters, “will find Specie, to pay the Duties last imnosed on them by the Parliament.”

That is from the new and excellent Money and the Making of the American Revolution, by Andrew David Edwards.

What should I ask Andrew Ross Sorkin?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  From Wikipedia:

Andrew Ross Sorkin (born February 19, 1977) is an American journalist and author. He is a financial columnist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box. He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news service published by The New York Times. He wrote the bestselling book Too Big to Fail and co-produced a movie adaptation of the book for HBO Films. He is also a co-creator of the Showtime series Billions.

In October 2025, Sorkin published 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation, a new history of the Crash based on hundreds of documents, many unpublished.

Most of all I am interested in his new book, but not only.  So what should I ask him?

How the pandemic has changed the world

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Patrick Collison on Twitter:

Maybe a very prosaic observation, but I’ve been reflecting on just how much the pandemic changed the world in ways that are completely unrelated to the pandemic itself. I think I’ve underestimated it ’till now.

In a recent interview, I was struck by the comment that so many of the shops that we associate with the best of France—the poissonneries and the fromageries—closed during the pandemic, to be replaced by take-out pizza shops and the like.

College professors almost uniformly describe big changes in student behavior: lecture attendance and willingness of students to complete reading assignments are both way down.

A UK government official recently told me that British economic statistics have become much less reliable since the pandemic: data on trade, employment, and population is suspect. (The true GDP per capita figures are probably worse than what is indicated by the published data, since the 2021 census is believed to be an undercount.)

In the West, there are far fewer bustling workplaces than there used to be. In recent conversation with a well-traveled friend, he bemoaned how so many cities—places like Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Bali—have lost so much of their erstwhile vibrant nightlife.

Immigration accelerated enormously across many countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.

In China, I hear descriptions of how fear, caution, and conservatism have persisted since the COVID lockdowns. (And Western travel to China remains massively depressed.)

Lots of the changes are neutral, or even good. Retail participation in the US stock market almost doubled overnight, say, and has persisted at that elevated rate. Firm creation in the US increased by around 50%, which is probably a very good thing.

Overall, the number of time series (either literal or figurative) that jumped discontinuously during COVID and then didn’t return to baseline is just very striking.

Which are the best historical analogs? Are there any apart from major wars?

I want to read this book!

*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.