supply and command

What the Common People Think About our Research

(taken by FJM on 12 December 2011)

Note: the above picture is an historic photograph. Meanwhile, this frank expression of the popular voice has been removed.

Homocidal Maniac Doing Fieldwork

The weirdest story I have ever read: Murder Most Academic.

Obama = Keynesian!?

Property Rights in Italy

Help yourself with bathroom accessories!

Merchant Networks Panel at EBHC

The 14th ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE EUROPEAN BUSINESS HISTORY ASSOCIATION 2010 is coming up soon. This time the meeting will be held in lovely Glasgow, Scotland.

Andrea Caracausi has organised a panel on business and merchant networks to which I will be contributing a paper. The aim of the meeting is to explore methodological overlaps between economic  network theory and the historical study of networks. Here's the panel abstract:

"BUSINESS AND MERCHANT NETWORKS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: TOWARDS A FORMAL APPROACH

During the last decades, the concept of “network” has fascinated historians. Using approaches drawn from other social sciences, business historians, as well as scholars in economic and social history, have tried to explain in terms of network analysis the rise and fall of businesses, families and also institutions such as the State or financial markets. However, the same concept of “network” remains too vague, and the dialogue between scholars of different backgrounds is very poor.

The aim of this session is to fill this gap in economic and business history. Our idea is to start a confrontation of the formal models in use to study and compare networks in history, trying to extend the usual approach to graph statistics (centrality etc.) using a measure of complementarities (drawn from organisational studies) and inserting (or adding) a consideration for conflict and power (asymmetries, inclusion/exclusion) via vectors and similar tools. We propose four exemplary case-studies on different periods (from the pre-modern to the contemporary period) and topics (merchant networks and social networks in the pre-modern period; business networks in 19th and 20th centuries) in order to discuss how a common formal approach could be useful both in the study of business networks and in the dialogue between history and the social sciences."

A New Economic History?

I have been thinking a lot recently about what I want to achieve in my doctoral studies from a methodological point of view. My PhD thesis is a project in medieval economic history, yet it presents a methodological challenge to the typical modus operandi in medieval studies. This stems mainly from the inclusion of social-scientific concepts and methods that are not commonly used in descriptive historical research. It is my hope that, by highlighting the mutual dependence of historical narrative and theory, their inclusion may contribute towards the solution of an ongoing Methodenstreit in economic history. This post provides a short recap on this debate before outlining my own stance (in still rather rudimentary form).

New Social Sciences Journal

My Alma Mater University College London, Department of European Social and Political Studies, has launched a new online journal: European Social and Political Research. The first issue can be found here.

Among the contributions is an article I wrote back in 2007, which is based on my BA thesis. The economic dimension of the public sphere: Jacques Necker's public agenda in 'Compte rendu au roi' is available for download here. 

Acemoglu on Freedom

MIT economist Daren Acemoglu says (not surprisingly) that institutions are the key to wealth. And he makes a few sensible proposals on how to steer institutional development in the right direction:

"If we know why nations are poor, the resulting question is what can we do to help them. Our ability to impose institutions from the outside is limited, as the recent U. S. experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate. But we are not helpless, and in many instances, there is a lot to be done. Even the most repressed citizens of the world will stand up to tyrants when given the opportunity. We saw this recently in Iran and a few years ago in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution.

The U. S. must not take a passive role in encouraging these types of movements. Our foreign policy should encourage them by punishing repressive regimes through trade embargoes and diplomacy. The days of supporting dictators because they bolster America's short-term foreign-policy goals, like our implicit support of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan starting in the 1970s, and our illicit deals with Mobutu's kleptocratic regime in the Congo from 1965 to 1997, must end. Because the long-term consequences — entire nations of impoverished citizens, malnourished and hungry children, restive, discontented youngsters ripe to be drawn toward terrorism — are too costly. Today that means pushing countries such as Pakistan, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and countless others in Africa toward greater transparency, more openness, and greater democracy, regardless of whether they are our short-term allies in the war on terror."

The problem, however, is that embargoes often times are just as unlikely to work as military interventions (as we have seen in the cases of Iraq and North Korea, where the real victims have been and are ordinary citizens). It seems to me that foreign policy makers should devote more attention to the possibility of strategic-nonviolent conflict. For empowering the locals is the key to political change, and a whole lot less costly.

New Lecture Cycle at Heidelberg

A new series of lectures kicks off at Heidelberg University today. First speaker is Professor David Jacoby (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) with a talk on Merchants in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea: Cross-Cultural Communication and Interaction in the 12th-15th Centuries.

The full programme can be found here.

Economics is not for Ideologues

International Economics points me to the most boneheaded opinion piece to have been spotted in the international media in 2009. Just look at it:

"As much of mainstream economics became obsessed with navel-gazing esoteric models or theories designed to justify market liberalism, the public became relatively more alienated from the activities of economists. [...] Monetarist and free market approaches have been disproportionately rewarded, often at crucial times. For example, the 1974 award to Friedrich von Hayek led to a resurgence of interest in the Austrian school and made his book The Road to Serfdom a bestseller. Two years later the prize went to Milton Friedman, making his extreme form of monetarism academically respectable and even leading to a conservative policy revolution. Economic history in the turgid and restricting form of retrospective econometrics was promoted by the 1993 award to Robert Fogel and Douglass North, while rational expectations theory was given a big boost by honouring Robert Lucas in 1995.
The geographical distribution of the award both creates and reflects power hierarchies in the discipline. The economics prize has been awarded 40 times to 62 recipients, 42 of whom have been from the US, while more than 50 were working in the US at the time of the award. The University of Chicago has 11 laureates, leading to the joke about "the Stockholm-Chicago Express". This does not reflect the actual state of economic knowledge so much as the biases and blindness of the jury. Only two people from developing countries have received it (Arthur Lewis and Amartya Sen) and both worked in the US and Britain. Only three with an interest in the economics of developing countries – which is the economic reality for around three quarters of the world's population – have received the award.
In recent years the prize has been focused on financial market behaviour. In 1997, the award went to two economists – Robert Merton and Myron Scholes – who were supposed to have discovered a method of valuing derivatives that could reduce or eliminate risk in financial investment. When the hedge fund they ran (Long Term Capital Management) went bust within the year and had to be rescued by the US federal reserve, there was some embarrassment. Perhaps to right this wrong, a few years later the prize was given to economists George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz, who had pointed to the imperfect functioning of financial markets. The award last year to Paul Krugman may also have indicated some bowing to changing times.
So far, no woman has received the economics Nobel. Apart from obvious exclusions such as Joan Robinson, this also reflects power hierarchies within the subject, because women economists even in the US and UK tend to be concentrated in the lower reaches of the academics profession, as researchers and lecturers rather than professors."

This could be taken as harmless comedy were it not so prevalent in public discourse nowadays. I keep being amazed by the ideological hollering that many media commentators have subscribed to in response to the so-called economic crisis. But following the widespread banker-bashing that often received applause even from mainstream politicians, it should come as no surprise that academic economists are also on the blacklist. On the plus side, defenders of rational debate now have an even easier job debunking ill-informed blahblah such as the above article. So let's take it step by step: