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Economic History
A Category Archive (137 entries)
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November 20, 2009
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Will Wilkinson writes, Ygesias says, "I believe that absent the [TARP] bailout, we'd be looking at even higher unemployment today." I think this is a plausible claim. But I don't know of a satisfactory way to evaluate it. It's plausible... MORE
November 12, 2009
Finance: stocks, options, etc.
Arnold Kling
Piergiorgio Alessandri and Andrew G. Haldane write, Historically, the link between the state and the banking system has been umbilical. Starting with the first Italian banking houses in the 13th century, banks were financiers of the sovereign. Sovereign need was... MORE
November 11, 2009
Economic History
Arnold Kling
John Quiggin writes, The names of Asquith, Bethmann-Hollweg, Berchtold and Poincare are barely remembered, yet on any reasonable accounting they belong among the great criminals of history. Not only did they create the conditions for war, and rush (eagerly in... MORE
November 9, 2009
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I've been thinking all day about what to write for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here goes.The conventional interpretation of the Wall: Socialism, a movement that began with wide-eyed idealism, was gradually corrupted. The first... MORE
November 6, 2009
Economic History
Arnold Kling
George Selgin writes, Economists generally take for granted, if only tacitly, a teleological view of money's historical development, according to which it first takes the "primitive" form of mundane commodities such as cowrie shells and cacao seeds, and then advances... MORE
October 30, 2009
Economic History
Arnold Kling
The financial crisis creates significant opportunity for long-term pessimists. Again, I recommend the podcast featuring Ken Rogoff and Niall Ferguson. Rogoff has been a gloomy person (in a fun way) for as long as I have known him, which is... MORE
October 29, 2009
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Arnold Kling
I've talked before about the new book by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, titled This Time is Different, which is about how financial crises have been around a long time and have a lot in common with one another. (You... MORE
October 23, 2009
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe is - and will probably remain - the most glorious political event of my life. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I missed the 20th anniversaries of the end of Communist rule... MORE
October 22, 2009
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Arnold Kling
Empire of Liberty, by Gordon Wood. Part of the Oxford series on American history, it focuses on the period 1789-1815. So far, I find myself thinking about it in the context of the Cowen-Hanson theory of political behavior and also... MORE
October 13, 2009
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I wish Julian Simon were around to read this passage from "The Low-Fertility Trap Hypothesis: Forces that May Lead to Further Postponement and Fewer Births in Europe":In the past decades, population projections were based on the expectation that after the... MORE
September 15, 2009
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Lee Ohanian's paper on "What - or Who - Started the Great Depression?" didn't get a lot of love in the comments. I'm not going to reply to all the criticisms, but there are a few I'd like to... MORE
September 11, 2009
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Like almost everyone else, libertarians typically argue that Herbert Hoover's policies exacerbated the Great Depression. But there's a key difference: Normal people blame Hoover's commitment to laissez-faire, but libertarians blame Hoover's proto-New Deal policies. Libertarian economists are particularly likely to... MORE
September 7, 2009
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Doug Rushkoff says that our capitalist society is neither spontaneous nor an order. He thinks it came about because of some decisions made by monarchs in the 13th century. The first innovation was to centralize currency. What better way for... MORE
August 31, 2009
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Profit from bank bailouts--so far. The profits come from banks that have paid back the government, and recall that some banks were forced to take bailout funds in the first place. We will see what happens to the full sample.... MORE
June 26, 2009
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
In his latest one-two punch, Scott Sumner...1. ...explains why Woodrow Wilson was the worst president in U.S. history:...Wilson's economic policies were perhaps the worst in American history. He presided over the creation of the Fed and the income tax, which... MORE
May 21, 2009
Economic History
Arnold Kling
David Frum writes, [Peter] Heather takes a less benign view of Rome. Here, he says, is a society of savage aggressiveness, that grew not through productivity improvement but by waging war on its neighbors to enslave their populations. Pointer from... MORE
May 16, 2009
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
According to official numbers, unemployment stayed extremely high through the New Deal. But some of Roosevelt's defenders say the numbers are misleading. Bob Murphy, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, explains their... MORE
April 6, 2009
Finance: stocks, options, etc.
Arnold Kling
Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith on the housing bubble. How can one crash that wipes out $10 trillion in assets cause no damage to the financial system and another that causes $3 trillion in losses devastate the financial system? The... MORE
March 24, 2009
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Tonight I'm going to see Mikhail Gorbachev, last dictator of the Soviet Union. I've heard he's really boring. I plan to leave early. Even so, I'm happy to pay $20 to see the most influential man of the second half... MORE
March 11, 2009
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Matt Yglesias joins the attack squad on Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man, a history of the Great Depression and the New Deal. For me, the main take-aways from the book are: 1. Franklin Roosevelt had no coherent economic... MORE
February 28, 2009
Growth: Causal Factors
Arnold Kling
Jeff Cornwall summarizes the panel on the outlook for the economy and entrepreneurs at the Kauffman Foundation forum this past weekend in Kansas City. In a later post, I will discuss the interesting ideas that were brought up at that... MORE
February 27, 2009
Central Planning vs. Local Knowledge
David Henderson
Lew Rockwell has an interesting article today on Adolf Hitler's economic policies. His bottom line: Adolf Hitler was a Keynesian. Two highlights: What were those economic policies? He suspended the gold standard, embarked on huge public works programs like Autobahns,... MORE
February 21, 2009
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Christopher I. Beckwith writes, Viewed from the perspective of Eurasian history over the last four millennia, there does not seem to me to be any significant difference between the default underlying human socio-political structure during this time period--that is, down... MORE
February 18, 2009
Economic History
David Henderson
I saw a masterful performance yesterday at San Jose State University: a talk by historian Burton Folsom on his new book, New Deal, Raw Deal. Folsom has a lot of energy and humor. The way he told the story of... MORE
February 13, 2009
Economic History
David Henderson
Yesterday, blogger Megan McArdle had an interesting post on Canada. She wrote: Canada is now being held up as a regulatory example to us, but Canada has always been an odd duck--it was also the only major economy in the... MORE
February 12, 2009
Economic History
David Henderson
My occasional co-author, Jeff Hummel, has scored a real coup: getting a balanced assessment of Abraham Lincoln published in Illinois. And not just in Illinois but also in the most important Illinois newsaper, the Chicago Tribune. And not just in... MORE
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I enthusiastically recommend Brink Lindsey's "Nostalgianomics." It's just plain interesting, well-written, and edifying. In a just world, it would have appeared in The New Yorker. The springboard of the piece is Krugman's recent love letters to the 1950s. Brink grants... MORE
Economic History
Arnold Kling
The Washington Post reports on how economists are still debating the 1930's. We are, but I bet I could get a pretty broad swath of economists, left and right, to agree to the following: 1. The steps that Roosevelt took... MORE
February 11, 2009
Fiscal Policy
David Henderson
During President Obama's press conference on Monday, the first question was: Can you talk about what you know or what you're hearing that would lead you to say that our recession might be permanent when others in our history have... MORE
February 8, 2009
Economic History
David Henderson
Yes, you read that correctly. Frank Rich, the partisan New York Times columnist, has a good column today. In it, he delves into what he calls "[T]he tsunami of populist rage coursing through America." Here's one of the best sections:... MORE
January 23, 2009
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Razib Khan writes, up until the year 1900 the world's cities were massive genetic blackholes. Cities only kept their population up through migration, which explains how Rome shrunk to 30,000 inhabitants by the 7th century. Today,. we think of cities... MORE
December 31, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
If your holiday season was anything like mine, you've heard some elderly relatives denounce the "kids these days." "They don't read the newspaper!" "They don't know when World War II ended!" "How can democracy survive with this level of ignorance?!"... MORE
December 26, 2008
Economic History
David Henderson
In his column in today's New York Times, Paul Krugman claims that Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was "clean" and avoided corruption. So clean was FDR's Works Progress Administration, writes Krugman, that "when a Congressional subcommittee investigated the W.P.A., it... MORE
December 16, 2008
Economic History
David Henderson
I heartily second Bryan Caplan's endorsement of the Canadian TV show on the New Deal. Bryan focused on the economic content and I want to add my own thoughts to that, but beyond that is the amazing tone of the... MORE
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I enthusiastically recommend this panel discussion on the New Deal, featuring Russ Roberts, Lee Ohanian, David Kennedy, Eric Lascelles, and Joe Martin. Random observations:1. Kennedy and Lascelles, the most pro-Roosevelt guys on the panel, strangely torpedo their own cases by... MORE
December 5, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Stiglitz is bragging about his amazing foresight:Rereading some of my papers in preparing for the publication of the second volume of my Selected Works (to be published by Oxford University Press), I came across a paper, written almost two decades... MORE
November 22, 2008
Economic History
David Henderson
I work as little as possible on my birthday (November 21), which is why I didn't post yesterday. Tyler Cowen's column in yesterday's New York Times is excellent and I want to note some highlights, with my additional thoughts, and... MORE
November 21, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
In contrast to my militaristic account, we have Nick Szabo: Local but extremely valuable trade was, this essay argues, made possible among many cultures by the advent of collectibles, by the time of the Upper Paleolithic. Collectibles substituted for otherwise... MORE
November 12, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
You've heard what Hoover said in his own defense on November 5, 1932. What did he say about his opponents? His lead-in:I would again call your attention to the fact that with the Democratic victory in congressional elections of 1930,... MORE
November 11, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Murray Rothbard opened my eyes to the real story about Herbert Hoover, but his quotation splicing makes me wince. In my next two posts, I'm going to dissect one of Hoover's last major speeches before the 1932 election - his... MORE
November 5, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
These days a lot of economists blame the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act for worsening the Great Depression. Herbert Hoover considered this hypothesis back in 1932 - and angrily rejected it.Note: When Hoover says "our opponents set up the Hawley-Smoot tariff bill,"... MORE
November 3, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I recently relayed one of Murray Rothbard's great Herbert Hoover quotes. When I was tracking the quote down, though, I noticed something weird in Rothbard's work. The online 5th edition of Rothbard's America's Great Depression (p.187) states: "To portray the... MORE
October 26, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
No joke - The Onion really did run this story for Bush's first inauguration:Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address... MORE
October 23, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of... MORE
September 23, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Many of us are grasping at historical analogies to the current financial crisis, and the 1930's keep coming up. One of the lessons of the 1930's is that in times of crisis people want strong leadership. In the 1930's, that... MORE
September 14, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Gavin Kennedy and Mark Koyama are still beating me to a pulp. Koyama writes, Polanyi and the historians and sociologists who have been inspired by Polanyi mainly claim that markets didn't exist before 1800 or 1750 because they don't know... MORE
September 11, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Putin's backing new textbooks for social studies and modern Russian history, and they sound awful. The Times says that the social studies book:...presents as fact Mr Putin’s view that the Soviet collapse was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th... MORE
September 8, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Wolfgang Kasper weaves them together in an interesting essay. Anyone who has spent only a few days working in different cultures will realise how influential and pervasive these differing attitudes are. During three days’ work, say, in Shanghai, you will... MORE
August 20, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
At Gene Expression, the bloggers closely follow what might be called the Pomerantz controversy, after the writer of The Great Divergence, where it is argued that Asia and the West were at similar points of development just prior to the... MORE
August 3, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's passing reminds me of my favorite passage from his writings:But let us be generous. We will not shoot them. We will not pour salt water into them, nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle them up into a... MORE
July 2, 2008
Growth: Causal Factors
Arnold Kling
Maarten Bosker, Eltjo Buringh, and Jan Luiten van Zanden write, The sociologist Max Weber introduced a distinction between ‘consumer cities’ and ‘producer cities’... The classical consumer city is a centre of government and military protection or occupation, which supplies services... MORE
July 1, 2008
Income Distribution
Arnold Kling
Brad DeLong writes, The true history of the U.S. since 1980, IMHO at least, is not Sean Wilentz's "Age of Reagan" but is instead composed of a half dozen or so deeper and broader tides, like: 1. The end of... MORE
June 20, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
All the hype about the Romanian movie 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is true. It's an amazing period piece about the last years of its Communist dictatorship. It's a vivid illustration of the effects of prohibition on quality. And... MORE
June 18, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
A hard-working volunteer has translated my long-standing Holocausts of Communism Test into Spanish. While the Spanish-speaking world was not the worst victim of Communism, it was a victim: Not just Cuba, but also Spain (during its Civil War), Nicaragua, El... MORE
April 30, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Admittedly I'm a sucker for a period piece, but World War I dogfight drama Flyboys has the most exciting aerial combat scenes I have ever seen. See it - it's way better that you'd expect. P.S. Get ready for the... MORE
April 14, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
West Virginia's got the lowest level of economic freedom in the U.S. What's the reason? Newly-minted WVU Ph.D. Claudia Williamson traces it to West Virginians' serious historical misconceptions in her chapter in Russ Sobel's edited volume, Unleashing Capitalism: Why Prosperity... MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Arnold Kling
Second Nature, by Haim Ofek. It was written in 2001. It tries to address some puzzles in evolution and in ancient economic history. For example, why is the human brain overdeveloped, in the sense that it is larger than necessary... MORE
April 6, 2008
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Remember last year's blogosphere debate on whether FDR was an "American Mugabe"? I just came across a 1997 piece by Robert Higgs that I should have been quoting in my defense. But late is better than never. His thesis:In retrospect... MORE
April 2, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Troy Camplin writes, In the "Acharnians," Dicaeopolis is in Athens and complaining about the war and how he is "longing hopelessly for peace, loathing town and homesick for my village . . . where you don't hear cried of "Buy... MORE
April 1, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Tyler Cowen writes, the absence of a developed economics until the mid-18th century remains a startling anomaly in the history of ideas. Why was that? I would note that the theory of probability also was developed surprisingly late. I think... MORE
March 26, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
From Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, p. 221: The expansion and maintenance of the trading routes did not derive from an ideological commitment of the Mongols to commerce and communication in general. Rather, it... MORE
February 21, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
George Grantham writes it appears likely that at its peak the classical economy was almost as large as that of Western Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution...in the more fertile districts of southern Britain and northern Gaul rural... MORE
February 20, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Mark Koyama has two more follow-ups, here and here. In the first, he writes Roman transport links were as good as any that existed in Europe until the late 18th or even the 19th centuries. This may address a point... MORE
February 19, 2008
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Arnold Kling
A representative sentence from John Darwin's history of the world since 1400, After Tamerlane (p. 305). The steamship and railway were the battering rams with which European traders could break the monopolies that African coastal elites and their inland allies... MORE
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Mark Koyama writes, in the great agrarian empires such as Rome, there was a large volume of trade in ordinary goods. Grain, wine, olive oil, ceramics, were traded on a tremenous scale. They were not plundered and then redistributed as... MORE
February 6, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
James McCormick reviews Bryan Ward-Perkins on the fall of the Roman Empire. the era between Pompeii’s suppression of the pirates in the mid-first century BCE and the fall of Carthage to the Vandals in 439CE is the longest period of... MORE
January 9, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Paul Walker writes, Arnold Kling isn't buying into this. He writes,"I just don't believe that over a thousand years ago human beings had the trustworthiness, discipline, numeracy, and institutional base to engage in what we would today recognize as free... MORE
January 8, 2008
Economic History
Arnold Kling
The New York Times reports, The findings, archaeologists say, are some of the first strong evidence that the ancient Maya civilization, at least in places and at certain times, had a market economy similar in some respects to societies today.... MORE
December 29, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Power and Plenty is the name of a new book by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke. Chapter 6, "Trade and the Industrial Revolution," is worth reading.... MORE
November 27, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I think it's obvious that the Soviet Union was a vastly greater threat to the U.S. than Islamic terrorism will ever be. But some readers don't agree; in their view, the practice of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) meant that, in... MORE
October 30, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Michael H. Hart's book, Understanding Human History, probably first came to my attention via Tyler Cowen. In his conclusion, Hart writes (p. 416), The central hypothesis of this book is that genetic differences between human groups (in particular, differences in... MORE
October 16, 2007
Institutional Economics
Arnold Kling
Gregory Clark goes medieval on Avner Greif. In chapter 2, Greif lays out a formal definition of an institution. This is, “An institution is a system of rules, beliefs, norms and organizations that together generate a regularity of (social) behavior”... MORE
October 7, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
The Malthusian model is not as crazy as Greg Clark's interpretation of it in A Farewell to Alms (here's Clark's reply; here's my rebuttal, with a second reply from Clark in the comments). But even correctly interpreted, the Malthusian model... MORE
September 30, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Kennedy writes, In the extreme, I have suggested that economic history of the last 10,000 years (and for long enough before that) the history of the poor is not the decisive factor in economic development: it is the history of... MORE
September 28, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
When I teach undergraduate labor, I lecture on "Why the Standard Story of Labor Is Wrong." Here's the standard story, according to me:1. In the days before the minimum wage, unions, etc., life was terrible for workers because employers paid... MORE
September 26, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Clark and I are moving toward agreement on the implications of the Malthusian model, but I'm still not satisfied. He writes:Caplan replaces my figure 2.1 with one where disease and harvest failures cause the technology schedule to move down but... MORE
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Gregory Clark emailed me the following reply to my criticism and asked me to post it to the blog. I'm happy to oblige. Everything that follows is Clark, not me. Clark right on Malthus! Bryan Caplan raises some interesting points... MORE
September 25, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I think Arnold is mis-stating not only Malthus, but even Clark. Maybe it's just semantic, but I don't think so. Here's Arnold:A bad year for grass (the bad harvest scenario) starves a lot of the herd, which is bad. But... MORE
September 24, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
In the Malthusian economy before 1800 economic policy was turned on its head: vice now was virtue then, and virtue vice. Those scourges of failed modern states - war, violence, disorder, harvest failures, collapsed public infrastructures, bad sanitation - were... MORE
September 22, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I've finally finished Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms. Like everyone else, I agree that it's well-written and addresses important topics. And I think lunch with Clark would be fun. But frankly, I can't find much else good to say... MORE
September 12, 2007
Economic Methods
Arnold Kling
In summing up his reaction to Gregory Clark's book, Tyler Cowen writes, Greg wants an explanation with a Malthusian or a Ricardian rigor and logic. I believe our explanations will be more like those of history than of economics. That... MORE
August 30, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
I cannot figure out the status of Brad DeLong's The Economic History of the Twentieth Century: Slouching Towards Utopia?. When I go here, it looks like an abandoned project. But just yesterday, Brad wrote, In some ways the world economy... MORE
August 29, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
He says The book challenges the modern orthodoxy of economics - that people are essentially the same everywhere, and with the right set of institutions, growth is inevitable - in three ways. First by showing that there were societies like... MORE
August 21, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Tyler Cowen writes, Why should we aggregate income comparisons by country (or the whole world) rather than by city? World history looks very different if we do the latter. Aren't most countries relatively recent inventions anyway? More generally, I would... MORE
August 7, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade writes, Historians used to accept changes in people’s behavior as an explanation for economic events, like Max Weber’s thesis linking the rise of capitalism with Protestantism. But most have now swung to the... MORE
July 7, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Here's a puzzling reaction to my doubts about the wonders of American independence:The chief goal of libertarianism is not low taxes or any specific public policy outcome but rather liberty.Actually, the libertarian view is that liberty consists in specific public... MORE
July 6, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Gregory Clark writes, Millenia of living in stable societies, under tight Malthusian pressures that rewarded effort, accumulation, and fertility limitation, encouraged the development of cultural forms--in terms of work inputs, time preference, and family formation--which facilitated modern economic growth. This... MORE
July 5, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
In response to yesterday's doubts about the benefits of American independence, many commenters emphasized the importance of taxes - and pointed me to the Declaration of Independence. But this doesn't really answer my question: Did the Revolution actually lead to... MORE
July 4, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Can anyone tell me why American independence was worth fighting for? Most libertarians interpret the Revolutionary War as a libertarian crusade. But when you ask about specific libertarian policy changes that came about because of the Revolution, it's hard to... MORE
June 21, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
One of my pet ideas is the Jock/Nerd Theory of History. If you're reading this, you probably got a taste of it during your K-12 education, when your high grades and book smarts somehow failed to put you at the... MORE
June 11, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
The Victims of Communism Memorial will be dedicated tomorrow in Washington, D.C. This is a great chance to set the record straight, and remember the greatest totalitarian disaster of human history. I wish they had worthier headline speakers than a... MORE
June 5, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
My latest essay says, most of the ignorance that plagued policymakers during the 1930's was conceptual. They did not understand the difference between lost resources and under-utilized resources. They did not understand the relationship between financial markets and markets for... MORE
June 4, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Russ Roberts interviews Amity Shlaes. From the notes: NRA even ruled out a consumer's picking out best chickens from a batch—just had to take first ones that came to hand. But consumer and business choice are very important. Concept was... MORE
June 3, 2007
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Arnold Kling
Randall E. Parker's The Economics of the Great Depression costs $125. The contents of the book are outstanding--more on that further on in this post. But the price stands out even more. I believe that one can construct an economic... MORE
June 1, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
From my latest essay. I would have thought that 1929 should have looked pretty good to people living in the depths of the Depression. But one of the many interesting lessons of Amity Shlaes' new history of the Great Depression... MORE
May 3, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I rarely care about symbolic issues, but for the Estonian statue controversy, I'll make an exception: Young Russians staged raucous protests in Moscow on Wednesday to denounce neighboring Estonia for removing a Soviet war memorial from its capital, and the... MORE
May 1, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Once again, the folks at Catallarchy (now The Distributed Republic) offer an eloquent May Day Tribute to the victims of Communism, past and present. Check it out.... MORE
April 10, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Amity Shlaes spoke last evening at the American Enterprise Institute. Her topic, which is also the topic of her forthcoming book, was Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In her talk, the New Deal comes across less as an economic revolution and... MORE
March 15, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
While watching 300 for the second time today, I kept remembering David Stannard's description of America's Founding Fathers as "slaveholding philosophers of freedom." There's a lot of high-minded talk in 300 about free Greeks standing against Persian tyranny (not to... MORE
March 13, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
An enthusiast on the Pulp Hero discussion board provides some authentic flavor of the Prohibition Era: An official Medicinal Liquor prescription form. It's funny to think that alcohol was once treated like medical marijuana.... MORE
February 6, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I'm frankly puzzled by Arnold's latest take on the New Deal. (That quote is from him, not DeLong as I initially guessed!) I think the New Deal was moderately fascist (i.e., Mussolini light, not Hitler light), but let's leave that... MORE
Economic History
Arnold Kling
The online Wall Street Journal arranged a celebrity death match between Brad DeLong and yours truly on the topic of the New Deal. What would have happened in the U.S. without the New Deal? My father answers with one word:... MORE
January 18, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Historians have a standard story about the partition of Poland in the 18th century: Poland was unable to defend itself effectively because it had a crazy unanimity rule that gave every nobleman a veto over everything. Seems plausible. But yesterday... MORE
January 14, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Daniel Gross says Roosevelt was better than Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. I agree. This does raise the interesting point that given world conditions for investors, the U.S. should have been able to do really well without really trying. Instead it... MORE
January 11, 2007
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Brad thinks it's a little crazy for me to compare Roosevelt to Mugabe: To get to somebody willing to argue that the entire New Deal taken as a whole made things worse, you have to go to somebody like Arnold's... MORE
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Brad DeLong's of course right that I'm not normal. At the same time, he's backed off enough that I wonder if he'd put himself in the same boat as two normal guys with negative things to say about the New... MORE
January 10, 2007
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Reading Brad DeLong's latest word on the subject, I find that we seem to agree on the economics, but perhaps not on the history. We both like Roosevelt's policies of going off the gold standard and providing deposit insurance. Where... MORE
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Hamilton and Arnold are making a lot of sense. On the negatives of the New Deal, though, it's also worth pointing out how scary Roosevelt's policies and populist rhetoric were to business. If I were a potential investor in 1933,... MORE
Economic History
Arnold Kling
James Hamilton writes, The notion that if we can just create more monopoly power for every single sector of the economy, encouraging every sector to produce less so they can raise their wages and prices, that we will then somehow... MORE
December 13, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I was curious to read more about Jefferson's position on the Indians. Here's a nice set of quotations. It's full of high-minded rhetoric, like: Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians, to cultivate an affectionate attachment... MORE
December 12, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
The most straightforward - if not the best - way to interpret the end of Apocalypto is that Christian Europeans finally arrived in the New World to put an end to monstrous pagan barbarism. Whether or not that was Gibson's... MORE
October 22, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
A leading criticism of Ayn Rand's novels is that her villains are unbelievable. No one runs around proclaiming their devotion to the opposite of what John Galt believes. People who say this should read more about the '30's and '40's.... MORE
October 9, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
By the time Christopher Columbus appeared in Lisbon in 1477 an Old World slave trade was thriving in the eastern Atlantic between West Africa, the Atlantic islands, and Europe. In his famous letter on his first voyage he informed Ferdinand... MORE
October 2, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
My online Museum of Communism has a new exhibit: The memoirs of Romuald Lipinsky. Lipinsky was deported from Poland to Siberia by the Soviets when he was 15 years old. Last year, he told me his tale of woe and... MORE
August 30, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Not long after Abbie Hoffman praised "revolution for the hell of it," David Friedman memorably retorted "revolution is the hell of it." While reading literary historian Gleb Struve's edifying Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, I came across an eloquent... MORE
July 19, 2006
Economic History
Eric Crampton
While I was at GMU, Gordon Tullock was working on a book he intended to call "Open Secrets" -- things that most people don't know but ought to. Levy and Peart's re-discovery of the origins of the term Dismal Science... MORE
July 12, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Toward the end of the fifth century c.e., another religious reform movement was launched by Mazdak. It came in 497... Mazdak asked King Kobad (488-531) the question, "How do you judge a man who has the antidote but does not... MORE
July 4, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Time has put Teddy Roosevelt on the cover of its 5th Annual Special Issue, and the coverage stretches the limits of sycophancy. It reminds me of my high school history textbook, which praised any President who backed new regulations or... MORE
May 7, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I just found out that Milton Friedman's great-grandson Tovar Miles Friedman was born pre-maturely last year, but is now doing well. His story brought me from pity to joy in minutes. Now that you know that things work out, you... MORE
May 1, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
This May Day, the able bloggers of Catallarchy have once again assembled a great line-up of short essays on the dark history of Communism. Highlights include a moving vignette by Polish deportee Romuald Lipinsky on his time in Siberia; Clara... MORE
March 28, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Vladimir Putin's supposed to be an economist. Kind of embarassing. But it turns out that he plagiarized his dissertation, so we can justly banish him from the club: According to the Kremlin’s official biography, Putin, 53, obtained a PhD in... MORE
March 22, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Even many people with little sympathy for the Soviet Union admire its "heroic" role in World War II. What all too few people realize is that for the first twenty-two months of World War II, the Nazis and the Soviets... MORE
February 26, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Robert Higgs is famous for his analysis of the "ratchet effect." As Higgs explained in his Crisis and Leviathan, governments expand during crises, then conveniently fail to return to their initial size after the crisis ends. Of course, it's possible... MORE
February 24, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
You probably can, but mostly because Lenin is such a terrible writer: Goebbels: Bourgeois social theory is primarily concerned with the individual. It is thus essentially determined by pity, or compassion, or the Christian love of one's neighbor or similar... MORE
February 9, 2006
Economic History
Arnold Kling
From my latest essay, The death of the entrepreneur was greatly exaggerated. Over the past two decades, the strength of entrepreneurialism has been unmistakable. The economy has been much more dynamic than Galbraith would have predicted. Many of the industrial... MORE
January 19, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Due to mild fear of a strip search at the airport, I decided not to fly with Daniel Brown's A New Introduction to Islam. But it was worth the wait. In another fascinating section, Brown explains how the early holy... MORE
January 17, 2006
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
I am engrossed by Daniel Brown's A New Introduction to Islam. It's packed with juicy scholarship. A standard history will tell you that Islam swept the Middle East in the space of thirty years. What it won't tell you is... MORE
November 28, 2005
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Robert J. Gordon writes, The evolution of the economy after 2000 was, of course, entirely different than after 1929, and we have previously attributed this to the aggressive easing of monetary policy that sustained a major boom in residential construction... MORE
October 25, 2005
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Did central planners under socialism focus on economics or politics? Lazarev and Gregory present an interesting test in their article "The Wheels of a Command Economy." (Published in the 2002 Economic History Review, and popularized in Gregory and Harrison's piece... MORE
October 21, 2005
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Nick Bostrom and Milan Ćirković asked me to write a chapter for their edited volume on Global Catastrophic Risks. Most of the other contributors are natural scientists who consider the risks of things like asteroids, nanotech, and nuclear war. But... MORE
October 19, 2005
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Here are some surprisingly modern observations on the Great Depression from the year 1931: We live in a society organized in such a way that the activity of production depends on the individual business man hoping for a reasonable profit,... MORE
October 13, 2005
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Brad DeLong recently described Chiang Kaishek as a "twentieth-century Chinese nationalist, socialist, general, and dictator." By itself, this description is rather surprising. The legendary Chinese anti-Communist was actually a socialist? But not only is Brad right about this; you could... MORE
September 2, 2005
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Jeff Hummel, one of the most knowledgeable historians I personally know, has an interesting review online of Thomas Woods' Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. I haven't read the book, but the review is a fun read. I particularly liked... MORE
August 7, 2005
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
According to my paper on the idea trap, economic downturns reduce economic literacy. Just when people need their economic common sense the most, they open their hearts to the crackpots. Perhaps the best example is the Great Depression, when every... MORE
May 1, 2005
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
Jonathan Wilde at Catallarchy has orchestrated a moving and edifying May Day blog extravangaza on the dark history of communism. Catallarchy has gone the extra mile here, offering twelve fine short essays, and leading off with R.J. Rummel, Nicholas Weininger,... MORE
April 7, 2005
Economic History
Bryan Caplan
The term "blog" was coined in 1999, and it now gets 105,000,000 google hits. Compare that to "democracy," which only gets 43,800,000. Wikipedia provides a fascinating and thorough discussion.... MORE
December 3, 2004
Economic History
Arnold Kling
Brad DeLong posts the syllabus for his economic history course. Included is this paper by Peter Temin. He claims that in the Roman Empire, the prices represent extensive market exchanges typical of a market economy, not reciprocal exchanges typical of... MORE
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