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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

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

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

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 !!!

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

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.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

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

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

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

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

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

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

very long-term, like on a multi-thousand year scale, different story. I'm a fan of this book

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

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

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

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...

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

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.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

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.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

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...

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

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

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

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.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

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!

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

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.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

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/...

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

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

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

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...

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

You would really only compare with Muslim-majority countries, and South Asia (where it has fallen a lot).

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

( By implication there is a poverty trap: slow growth => families remain more agricultural, less mobile geographically, less educated & higher fertility & more cousin marriages; which in turn contribute to underdevelopment in a vicious cycle. )

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

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%.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

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).

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

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...

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

And surely this is the first time *ever* that Thomas Aquinas's 2nd proof of the existence of God -- the famous one, the proof by remotion, the one borrowed from Aristotle -- has ever made an appearance in an economics or economic history paper?!?!

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

My favourite -- Mapping the influence of mediaeval Scholasticism through Lombardus’s Sentences, tracing its influence on the Protestant Reformation via Luther’s negative reaction to it, with scholastic natural religion (religious knowledge through reason) being held as contrary to Sola Scriptura.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

They trace the ‘movement’ of the ideas of Regiomontaus in mathematical astronomy within the network, from scholar to scholar, from institution to institution, from city to city; and correlate this with the building of astronomical observatories!

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

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

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Paper's narrative for how East African states did not handle the 'food price policy dilemma' very well is complex and there are MANY policy mistakes, compounded by colonial policy choices. Here's their own brilliant summary:

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

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.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Brilliant summary but some sense of this should go into the abstract, I think, or perhaps into the intro of section 4. the narrative in section 4 is complex & it would help the reader if you gave a better sense of the big picture in the intro to section 4.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

*** 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 --

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

An analysis confined to 1950-2019 shows that the global relationship between GDPpc and TFR shifts down over time, suggesting the same thing as above: over time, low fertility is achieved at lower income thresholds than had been the case for the richest countries.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Why has the Demographic Transition become faster over time? First, there has been more economic development. Second, the DT spreads by cultural contagion. The more neighbours a country has which have started the DT, the more likely that country itself will embark on the DT

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Information in the first post from this paper.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

For those who might not know ( CDR = crude death rate ) ( CBR = crude birth rate ) ( the Demographic Transition is the evolution from a high-mortality, high-fertility regime to a low-mortality, low-fertility regime. Nicely illustrated in this OWID graphic )

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

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

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

The Fergana Valley, in the south, is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the MUCH less agricultural northern and western Central Asia. The southern half contains the rich settled farming region & is the site of most of the famous silk road cities

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

My favourite off-the-cuff example of that is the Turkestan Famine. I remember being (dumb)struck by this passage back in 2016 or whatever. (That now seems like ancient history!) Here's the passage from EOC, which is incredibly misleading, to say the least !!!

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

e.g., that he makes some basic errors in furtherance of that overestimation, etc. For example, see below. Pretty important factual and conceptual errors.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

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.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

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

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

Pretty sensational, this chart. (Going up is 'bad' on the graph). China's entry into the WTO reduced export product complexity for Bangladesh but increased it for Thailand.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

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]

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

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)

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

at X so many Americans are currently complaining about eating food by hand but (1) the Americans seem to eat with their hands extremely often & (2) when they do resort to knife & fork, the modal American wields them thus. You might as well grab that steak & shove it into your mouth directly

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

It should be noted, however, that Joe Francis has argued Williamson *understated* his own case.

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Piketty ignores the work of Jeffrey Williamson: the periphery's terms of trade *improved* in the 19th century -- something which would have been relevant to discuss in his paper (unlike Furtado or Amin or Wallerstein). Below from Williamson 2008

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Pseudoerasmus @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

This is better than Latin American structuralism or dependency theory or unequal exchange theory. But I'm not going to post this at the other place because I would be inundated with replies fans of those things, whereas the advantage here is I barely get engagement ;-)

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