As an economic historian, I’ve always had a hard time with the idea of secular stagnation. After all, one decade of slow growth is merely a blip on the twelve millenniums of economic history (I am not that interested with the pre-Neolithic history, but there is some great work to be found in archaeology journals). … Continue reading Women and secular stagnation
The short answer is “yes.” In the ‘comments’ section of Dr Delacroix’s recent article on the myth of American economic stagnation, Dr Amburgey, who works at the University of Toronto’s business school, dropped three arguments at my feet. I gave him three responses and he chose to address Issue #2 first. I will await his … Continue reading From the Comments: Is US Economic Stagnation A Myth?
For the last couple of weeks, I have been reading and re-reading Gerard Klickstein’s book The Musician’s Way: A Guide to Practice, Performance, and Wellness. Klickstein is a musician and professor who has spent much of his teaching career helping other musicians recover from physical injury or overcome psychological issues, such as performance anxiety. Klickstein … Continue reading Foundering in academia
There’s a whole set of simple but profound lessons that, if I were being lazy, I might call “the economic way of thinking.” We move through a hand-me-down world, solving some problems and creating new problems, adjusting and adapting, and shaping the world that we pass on to the next generation. I just stumbled on … Continue reading Evolution in Everything: Handwriting
A friend recently gifted me a vintage copy of some of Umberto Eco’s essays translated to English. One of the essays, titled “How to eat ice cream,” opened with an anecdote Eco said was based on his childhood. In the story, there was an ice cream vendor who sold regular cones for two cents and … Continue reading Eco’s ‘How to eat ice cream’
François Furet, in the preliminary essay that serves as an introduction to The Past of an Illusion, entitled “The Equalitarian Passion,” highlights that in the Ancient Regime inequality was legally consecrated, while after the French Revolution, inequality persists surreptitiously, of contraband, thus cementing a feeling of vindication in the face of illegitimate inequality. Something similar … Continue reading Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders (Part 8): Inequality before the law, de facto
There is a thin line between the abstract model of “natural selection of institutions,” its instantiation in an imaginary example that interprets it and the application of that theory to interpret historical experience. The latter does not test the model, but is the result of the organization of the record of events around this interpretive … Continue reading Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders (Part 5): Logical models
Economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo studied the root causes of flawed decision making in their book Poor Economics. While much of the book is an applied economics redux of Ludwig von Mises’ more cerebral Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, there were several points that are particularly applicable in an examination on the difference between the … Continue reading Bourgeois IV: The Economics of difference
The affirmation that one should not judge the historical past with current values forms a topic as widespread as the disobedience to it. However, a conscious exercise of the evaluative critique of the past allows us to identify continuities and disruptions in institutional patterns, i.e., in systems of incentives that are considered legitimate, whether by … Continue reading Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders (Part 3): Evolutionary drift
I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls. ― Michel Foucault Martin Luther, a German Augustinian monk, is credited with triggering a profound spiritual movement in the minds of early modern Europeans. Luther, who was an extremely pious Catholic, eventually became a reluctant rebel by channeling the frustrations of the … Continue reading “Foucault’s Pendulum”: Social Scholarship, Ideology, and Libertarian Temptations
Countries can change their course, they can turn from stagnation towards growth, as it is the case of South Korea in the last fifty years. They can also decline after a boom period. Together with other examples of successes and failures, these are indications that economic performance does not depend on geography, culture, or the … Continue reading Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders (Part 1): Introduction
Federico Sosa Valle fgmsosavalle@googlemail.com Introduction Countries can change their course, they can turn from stagnation towards growth, as it is the case of South Korea in the last fifty years. They can also decline after a boom period. Together with other examples of successes and failures, these are indications that economic performance does not depend … Continue reading Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders
This role of entrepreneurs also depends on an abstract characteristic of technological knowledge: it works in a manner contrary to that of most goods, since it is more productive to the extent that it is more widespread in the population. This characteristic of the abstract nature of technological knowledge is related to the phenomenon of … Continue reading Three Lessons on Institutions and Incentives (Part 7): Breaking the mold
Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson acknowledge that the weakest point of their theory consists of recommendations to “break the mold.” How to change the historical matrix that leaves the nations stagnant in extractive political and economic institutions, or that move them back from having inclusive economic institutions with extractive political institutions to being trapped in … Continue reading Three Lessons on Institutions and Incentives (Part 6): Breaking the mold
When Friedrich A. Hayek referred to the coordination problems among rational agents as a consequence of the dispersion of information in the economic system -and that made him worthy of the Nobel Prize in Economics- he did not refer to an information problem that could be solved with better statistical tools. This is also a … Continue reading Three Lessons on Institutions and Incentives (Part 5): “Spontaneous” institutions
