In light of the genetic evidence about very long-run jati endogamy, what is the best case for the arguments put forth by Bayly and Dirks? I consider Bayly superior, but they both assume, as a matter of course, that caste identities had always been fluid in the pre-modern period without elaboration

Many people are sceptical of Mokyr's idealist take on the Industrial Revolution, but even if you are suspicious, The Enlightened Economy is still a tremendous book. I think this review in JEL gives the correct flavour. It says the comprehensiveness is a curse, but the 'curse' teaches you a lot !!!

I am by nature a hate-poster. When I hate, I post far more extensively, far more volubly, than when I like, let alone when I love (🪢). Last year I disliked. This year I approve highly. So I won't be clogging up your feeds this year as I did last year ;-)

Aghion (et al) have a paper on China, they recognised long ago & before many that the Chinese model departs from the East Asia model in having a Darwinian struggle-to-the-death competition of firms behind a wall of protection. It pairs Schumpeterian growth theory w the economics of industrial policy

The single biggest challenge to previous work on the 'why Europe?' question & which inspired a mountain of new work, came from Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, published by Princeton University Press. One of their bestsellers. That was published in a series of which Mokyr has been editor in chief.

I anticipate some sneers thrown Mokyr's way so my preemptive comment... What ever else he might have done, what ever faults he might have, Mokyr has performed a tremendous service simply by stressing the great importance of the Scientific Revolution to the birth of the modern economy.

Mokyr's work could not have been done today in most economics departments, but the irony is that his work would not fit in history departments today, either. Methodologically he seems more 'history' than 'economics' to economists, but the content and reasoning are too 'economics' for most historians

Four items by Mokyr: the first is a topic already recognised by the Nobel, but the other three are less well known areas of Mokyr: his study of the Irish famine, his explanation of why the Dutch Republic was not the first, and his artisan theory of the Industrial Revolution.

David Wootton, historian of science & author of The Invention of Science, which (in part) argues (contra the HoS orthodoxy) that science played an important part in the history of technology, credits Mokyr for resurrecting that argument. Footnote 11 takes you to 4 major works by Mokyr

I love the Aghion graduate growth theory textbook. There are many reasons, but one small one is that in Acemoglu's (left), developing countries merely import frontier tech & catch up, but in AGH (right) seemingly recognises actual history & suggests indigenous innovation is important à la East Asia

I personally think Robert Allen, another economic historian of the British Industrial Revolution with a theory of innovation as well known as Mokyr's, and are complementary to Mokyr's, should have been included in the Nobel. But I recognise that they don't do fours ;-)

Aghion (et al) have a paper on China, they recognised long ago & before many that the Chinese model departs from the East Asia model in having a Darwinian struggle-to-the-death competition of firms behind a wall of protection. It pairs Schumpeterian growth theory w the economics of industrial policy

Many misunderstood my meaning so here is a clarification. I was NOT saying the social science lit arguing that war => state formation/capacity is wrong. There is a subtle distinction between that question and the narrower historical question of the little divergence within western Europe.

Wars were mostly bad for European economic development. Might be obvious to ordinary people, but it's not considered obvious in economic history. But I think it's obvious ;-) Below from @sheilaghogilvie.bsky.social

Happy to see @victoriagierok.bsky.social argue ‘ “The state made war and war made the state” does not describe very aptly what happened during pre-industrial Europe’s largest wars’ in a recent paper on wealth destruction in urban Germany during the Thirty Years' War. ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid...

From a new paper by @mjdcurtis.bsky.social, David de la Croix, et al. The Little Divergence in 'academic human capital' (kind of publications index) btw northern & southern Europe started ca 1500. Northern Germany diverged from central & southern German areas after the Thirty Years' War.

I feel duty-bound to read the new book McCloskey is working on now, but if below is any guide, it does NOT look promising. As long-time followers know, I'm sympathetic to her point about enclosures but I have 2 objections, stylistic & substantive. Stylistic: her batshit crazy gratuitous rhetoric.

Incredible contribution to our knowledge of global working hours. 1/ Women supply 35% of total hours worked globally 2/ Hours worked do not substantially with income across countries. BUT this stability is produced by reductions in male hours which are offset by rises in female hours

If modest pensions can measurably reduce the practice of old kinship systems (e.g., adult children residing with their parents), perhaps the impact of economic development on cultural change is severely underrated, and the reverse (impact of culture on economic development) highly overrated...

Acemoglu once said (dismissively), "It's all Jack Goody" regarding the (now) popular claim that the Catholic Church created the European Marriage Pattern. When you read Henrich it does seem synthesised from a variety of sources. But in fact their thesis is 95% Goody. He had said it all >40 years ago

episode should have been called 'The Green Revolution in Insulin' (harvesting insulin from genetically modified bacteria)

Formal manufacturing firms in India have very low exit rates. Yet India’s most dynamic sector, software, has lower exit rates than firms in Morocco or Chile. As far as I can tell, India’s most dynamic states, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, also have lower exit rates than firms in those countries as well.

Interesting thing about the end of the Atlantic slave trade is, which had the bigger impact, the British suppression of the trade (supply) or the end of demand at the source? Demand is overwhelmingly more important (as the authors also argue). Yet the British naval campaign gets far more attention!

ZERO growth, possibly even negative growth, in productivity across 55,000 smallholder farms across 6 African countries (Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Tanzani) in 2008-2019, despite substantial investments.

A three-month-long Kreutzer earworm can actually induce mental fatigue.

The great economic historian of 20th century China, Thomas Rawksi, weighs in on the Great Divergence debate! Quite critical of Broadberry et al.'s claims about the precipitous decline of the Qing economy after 1700... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I was going to tweet this last year but somehow I was impeded… “When [economic] growth does, and does not, reduce poverty” www.bii.co.uk/en/news-insi... — A great literature review by a team including @paddycarter.bsky.social and @paulsegal.bsky.social

Trade liberalisation in 1960-2019 had a positive effect on growth for countries already exporting manufactured goods (>50% share in exports), but negative for countries which were exporting commodities at the time of liberalisation. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

An underrated reason for the persistence of cousin marriages: high fertility maintains a large supply of cousins. Could (help) explain why Pakistan’s first-cousin marriage rate is 50%!!! versus India and Bangladesh <10%.

Paper on labour supply response to the kinship tax i.e. when you are expected to share income with kin/community. Inspired by work on peasants (Scott, moral economy; Fafchamps, solidarity networks in preindustrial societies; Lewis 'traditional sector', where income-sharing arrangements prevail).

Last year nobody noticed Pickle's lunatic claim that extreme poverty in China rose from 5.6% in 1981 to 68% in 1995! You would think under-5 child mortality would skyrocket under such circumstances. No sign of it (but there was a slowdown in the rate of reduction in the 1980s relative to 1970s).

When the economists start getting on board with critical green revolution takes🥹

Beyond the claim that the Peasants' War (1524–1525) turned the German Reformation distinctly conservative, there's a potential paper below along the lines of 'Peasants, knights, & princes: the Dissolution of the German Monasteries and the rise of state capacity' or some such thing...

the persecution of the federal reserve governor Lisa Cook reminds me that when she was appointed, *some* pathetic centrists tried to equate her with a Trump appointee because her specialism wasn’t monetary economics and they needed to practise fake even-handedness.

There are several recent papers which could fall under the heading ‘Economic History of the Scientific Revolution’ but this network analysis tracing how scientific ideas diffused amongst scholars in the period 1084-1793 is a real milestone, an ‘epidemiological’ model of how ideas spread like disease

I had no idea Instagram had so many classical music, both pro & amateur. And I had thought it was primarily semi-naked people strutting in front of the mirror. There’s also a lot of cooking but it seems to be people either covering chicken in 1kg of butter, or cooking dry pasta directly in the sauce

I'm super picky about the podcasts I listen to because I rarely get value added over reading stuff they're discussing. But Kotkin's podcast w. Dwarkesh opens w. a 45-min discussion re dilemmas of authoritarian modernisation that's better than a 100 theoretical historical political economy seminars!

On Old Twitter there was a big, long exchange on why African wages (facing export manufacturers) were so high (compared with e.g. Bangladesh). One answer: African staple food prices were so high. Brilliant paper addressing that issue historically, using maize prices in East Africa in the 20th c.:

When Mamdani wins in the NYC mayoral election some of his rich opponents could finance a right-wing remake of his mother's film but this time the Roshan Seth character would be a former grain merchant in Uganda & when he revisits the old country he takes unseemly satisfaction in high maize prices.

New working paper from me & some colleagues on East Africa's maize markets from c. 1900 to today, based on a major data collection effort to fill in the long-run history of food prices in one of the world's poorest regions: www.aehnetwork.org/working-pape...

*** Everything Now Happens at "Earlier Stages of Development" Part 7932 *** Whether it's life expectancy convergence, deindustrialisation, (sub)replacement fertility, democratisation, everything has been happening at "earlier stages of development". Urbanisation --

Likely underappreciated stylised fact: In the past 300 years, countries have started the Demographic Transition at apprx similar income levels, but over time, transitions have been getting FASTER & SHORTER, so that later transitions end at lower income levels than earlier transitions

Now that Beckert's new, even bigger, non-cotton book on the global history of capitalism is appearing soon, a 🧵 on “not outright errors but highly misleading statements” from The Empire of Cotton. I will be adding examples intermittently as I remember them, but 1st example is about Russia/Turkestan.

It’s too bad it would not be understood by most Anglophones but HÉLAS! HÉLAS! HÉLAS! declaimed with great solemnity and artificiality would make a great reaction GIF to crap replies. In fact I’m surprised I can’t find any already made by someone

Automation & unemployment: Child Labour Edition, mid-Victorian England Technological change did not displace child labour, let alone make it redundant. Rather it reallocated children to less mechanised tasks. Of course this narrative had existed earlier, but there are new data.

Positive China Shock in Ethiopia: Chinese imports post 2001 caused manufacturing employment (across all industries) to rise by ~5% because cheaper imported inputs (machines, chemicals, metal products, etc.) with no domestic substitutes increased firm productivity & capacity utilisation

Beethoven’s own arrangement for the string quintet of the Kreutzer Sonata. Not a fan of this adaptation!! youtu.be/gk8c1niCSFc

Catching up on my backlog and I notice... OH MY GOD they took the first stab at a 'Chinese deindustrialisation of the Global South' paper & no one told me! Pretty sensational. [analogous with the 19th century deindustrialisation of the Global South via trade integration with industrialising Europe]

Thanks to ecclesiastical estates & monks' account management, there is more quantitative information about farms in the high middle ages than any time until a modern census is taken. (below England, from Broadberry et al)

The worst aspect of constructing long-run GDPpc data is not (as I used to believe) people like comparing GDPpc 1992 in country X with GDPpc 1492 in country Y -- but, rather, that people like saying stuff like "this phenomenon is happening at earlier/later stages of development than it used to"