Danny Quah of the London School of Economics (LSE) recently wrote a paper describing the dynamics of the global economy’s centre of gravity. By economic centre of gravity he refers to the average location of the planet’s economic activity measured by GDP generated across nearly 700 identifiable locations on the Earth’s surface.
For more info, click here.
A really interesting paper was presented by Professor Geoffrey Hosking (UCL) at last weekend’s Economic History Society Conference in Cambridge. It stood out in a stellar cast of academic performers. His paper was part of a plenary session on “The Struggle for Economic Security and Trustworthy Economics: how to get history into policy making”. His fellow panelists were: Professor Simon Szreter (University of Cambridge) and Professor Jim Tomlinson (University of Dundee).
In my humble opinion, Hosking’s paper was of really first-rate importance, although this may just reflect my own research concerns, which increasingly centre on issues of trust and culture. Hosking’s paper isn’t yet online on the EHS website, but you can read a modified version of it here. Perhaps the most interesting part of the paper is where Hosking speaks about the malaise of modern economics, a discipline whose members (with a few honourable exceptions such as Nouriel Robini), totally failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis.
Let me quote from the abstract:
There is a widespread feeling that the science of economics has lost its way. Its current orthodoxy is a belated child of nineteenth century Utilitarianism. It is trapped in a narrow and misleading view of human nature which regards human beings as individuals motivated by material self-interest and making rational choices with a wide range of good information normally available to them. Most economists seem to believe the aim of economic policy should be to promote growth through the medium of markets – which by nature are self-correcting, tend towards equilibrium, assess risk better than any government agency, and ensure the most efficient allocation of resources.
The current economic crisis has cast fundamental doubt on all of this. It has shown that markets do not assess risk well, do not allocate resources efficiently and, when unrestrained, tend towards the unstable disequilibrium of boom and bust. But where are we to look for more reliable guidelines? George Akerlof and Robert Shiller have accused economists of ignoring the vital input of ‘animal spirits’, a term they borrow from John Maynard Keynes. Similarly, according to the Financial Times, at a recent gathering of leading economists in Cambridge to discuss the failures of economics, ‘One of the central conclusions was that economists and market traders alike need to devote far more time to human psychology, rather than just the raw economic numbers beloved of many policy wonks.’
A really interesting thing about Hosking is his career background. Hosking isn’t an economist or even an economic historian. Hosking came to economic history rather late in his distinguished scholarly career. His autobiog on the UCL website says
I have always worked on the borders of political and cultural history. My first book (1973) was on the pre-revolutionary State Duma, and my second (1980) on Russian prose fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, in which I argued that samizdat and officially published fiction differed less than one might expect.
Increasingly my interests turned to the strange and paradoxical situation of the Russians as the dominant people first in the Russian Empire and then in the Soviet Union. Contrary to what one might expect, they did not always benefit from their situation; indeed, one might argue (as did Solzhenitsyn, for example) that they actually suffered from being the main bearers of empire. I examined their fate in what I consider my two most important books: Russia: People and Empire (Harper Collins, 1997) and Rulers and Victims: the Russians in the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2006).
In recent years my attention has turned increasingly to the question of trust as a social phenomenon. This change of direction was prompted partly by the fate of Russian society and the economy after the end of the Soviet Union. It seemed to me then that western politicians and economists were assuming that one could simply graft western economic institutions on to Russia and they would automatically function. But economic institutions – banks, insurance companies, stock exchanges and so on – depend on social trust which cannot be created overnight.
What Hosking is saying isn’t entirely original, as readers of Francis Fukuyama’s book on trust will know. In fact, one could argue that at points he is attacking a straw man, a doctrine that few still believe. Nevertheless his paper is important. His critique of economics should be read alongside this piece by Raghuram G. Rajan.
P.S. I just bought a book on a related subject:
I was asked to post the following statement by Stanley J. Shapiro, Prof-Emeritus of Marketing, Simon Fraser University
sshapiro at sfu.ca. Stanley recently co-edited a special “Canadian” issue for the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing. What he is proposing here sounds like a really great initiative.
After co-editing a special “Canadian” issue for the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, I have come to recognize the need for a Canadian Centre that would focus on the History of Advertising, Retailing, Marketing, Distribution and, Cultures of Consumption. I have no particular university in mind for this. In fact you might consider my task one of fashioning a proposal to be “sold” to a potentially interested Canadian University. I don’t even know what the home department might be though some sort of linkage between Business and Economic history seems in order.
I have found one possible prototype to copy as far as programming is concerned, CHORD in the United Kingdom, but there must be others out there. I am assuming, in addition to sponsoring research, the Centre would serve as a first point of electronic interest to those interested in the subject. I also envisage the university’s library physically both amassing a core collection of the most relevant books in the area and providing archival support. Beyond that, I do not know. However, I am fairly certain that there are other Centres out there that might provide prototypes for what I have in mind. Consequently, I would appreciate any one who could help contacting me
As I have told Stanley, I think that the best place for this centre would be Western. Western already has the Canadian Tire archive in its special collections and its history department is the strongest in business history in Canada. Another option would the Rotman School of Business in Toronto.
Historian Stephen Thompson has published an interesting paper that manages to connect two apparently unrelated developments in recent UK politics. One is the current debate over electoral reform (a referendum on moving from First Past the Post to AV is planned for May. Thompson suggests how the two issues are linked by placing them in their long-term historical context. The second is the anti-census rhetoric that has been heard from some members of the governing coalition in the UK. The anti-census rhetoric has been heard both from right-wing Tories (who object to the costs of the census) and from Liberal Democrats, whose objection to the intrusive census is a reflection of a broader concern about civil liberties, the rights of terrorist suspects, opposition to national ID cards, etc.
I thought that this might interest Canadian readers in light of the recent controversy over the long-form census in Canada. One of the ministers most opposed to the long-form census was Tony Clement, who is an immigrant from the UK and who still follows British politics closely.
This is from the executive summary of Thompson’s paper.
The 2011 Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act is only superficially similar to the 1832 Reform Act. The present government’s commitment to equal-sized constituencies would, in fact, have been an anathema to Whigs and Tories alike in 1832. Today’s anti-state surveillance sentiments and, most particularly, the Coalition’s anti-census rhetoric implies a fundamental misunderstanding of how early nineteenth-century reformers achieved their aims.
Read more here.
Stephen Thompson is a Fellow of St John’s College, and a Visiting Research Associate at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge. This paper is a revised version of comments made at the launch of the British Library’s ‘Census and society: why everyone counts’ exhibition on 14 March 2011. A fuller discussion of the 1832 Reform Act may be found in his article in a new collection of essays, Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800-2000, edited by Tom Crook and Glen O’Hara (London: Routledge, 2011).
What does rise of the Tea Party movement mean for U.S. foreign policy?
Mead
Walter Russell Mead, who is one of the leading experts on US foreign policy and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, shares some thoughts on this issue in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. In my opinion, this essay should be read by every historian of the US. Mead shows that the Tea Party’s ideas about Foreign Policy did not emerge out of nothing and are part of a long tradition in American foreign policy that extends back to the earliest days of the republic. Mead argues that American views on foreign policy can be grouped into four basic camps: Jacksonian, Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, and Wilsonian-Internationalist. Proponents of these four different views of the world can be found in most periods of American history, according to Mead.
The Tea Party people definitely aren’t Wilsonian internationalists. They aren’t really Hamiltonian mercantilists. It remains to be seen whether they are Jeffersonian war-avoiders or Jacksonian hyper-nationalists or a mixture of the two.
Reactions to Read’s article can be found here, here, and here.
March 21, 2011 A Harrier jet aircraft assigned to the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (26th MEU) returns to the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) for fuel and ammunition resupply while conducting air strikes against Libya and in enforcement of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1973. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Michael S. Lockett
Mead’s piece, which was written at least a month ago, is very interesting in light of the division of the Tea Party movement over the American intervention in Libya. Some Tea Party people assert a militarist and aggressive nationalism that involves lots of flag waving and sabre-rattling and saluting the troops. These people were 100% supportive of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their big problem with Obama is that is he isn’t militarist enough.
There are, however, Tea Partiers such as Rand Paul who are opposed to overseas military missions and want to dramatically shrink the size of the US military, along with other branches of the US government. (You can see this much about Rand Paul– he is consistent). This branch of the Tea Party has condemned Obama’s intervention in Libya as unconstitutional and war-mongering. See here, here, here, and here.
Ian McKay, professor of history at Queen’s University, recently delivered an engaging and provocative talk titled “The Empire Strikes Back: Militarism, Imperial Nostalgia, and the Right-Wing Reconceptualization of Canada”. McKay’s talk was the keynote address of the 15th annual New Frontiers Graduate History Conference at York University.
The talk is available here for audio download.
McKay argues that there has been in an attempt in the last few years by right-wing historians in English-speaking Canada develop a new narrative of Canadian history to counter the previously hegemonic left-liberal interpretation of Canadian history. The left-liberal narrative celebrates such things as the growth of Canadian independence from Britain, the development of multiculturalism in Canada, the advent of socialized medicine, Canada’s efforts to remain separate from the United States, accommodation between French- and English-speakers, and Pearsonian peacekeeping.
The new conservative narrative discussed by McKay pines for the old days of the British Empire, is tinctured by monarchism, and has a celebratory attitude towards Canadian participation in imperial conflicts such as the First World War. Some of its proponents are hostile to multiculturalism, although others argue (in my view correctly) that multiculturalism is part of Canada’s legacy from the British Empire.
I share McKay’s dislike of the neo-conservative narrative of Canadian history. However, I’m not certain that it has a lot of traction with ordinary Canadians, certainly not with the younger generation. I find that many Canadian undergraduates find the most visible institutions left over from the old British Empire, (e.g., the Governor-General) to be funny rather than either awe-inspiring or offensive. Many immigrants think it is hilarious that Canada requires them to swear allegiance to the head of state of another country as a condition of citizenship. This aspect of the citizenship ceremony makes it hard for immigrants to take Canada seriously as “real country”.
I suspect that the neo-conservative interpretation discussed by McKay will remain an unpopular paradigm for the simple reason that it is fixated on symbols that many Canadians regard as risible. I really don’t think that there is much of an appetite for people to re-fight the 1964 flag debate.
An 8-nation agreement has produced a produced a new opportunity for scholars interested in digital humanities and social sciences called Digging Into Data. The deadline for submissions for Round 2 is June 16. I have an idea for a project that would be eligible for Digging Into Data funding, but I wouldn’t want to take the lead in writing a grant proposal. So I am going to just outline the idea here (see below) and then ask scholars who would be interested in developing the idea still further to contact me.
From the press release:
Today, eight international research funders are jointly announcing their participation in round two of the Digging into Data Challenge, a grant competition designed to spur cutting edge research in the humanities and social sciences. The Digging into Data Challenge asks researchers these provocative questions: How can we use advanced computation to change the nature of our research methods? That is, now that the objects of study for researchers in the humanities and social sciences, including books, survey data, economic data, newspapers, music, and other scholarly and scientific resources are being digitized at a huge scale, how does this change the very nature of our research? How might advanced computation and data analysis techniques help researchers use these materials to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world?
The first round of the Digging into Data Challenge sparked enormous interest from the international research community and led to eight cutting-edge projects being funded. There has also been increased media attention to the question of so-called “big data” techniques being used for humanities and social sciences research, including a recent cover article in the journal Science.
The eight sponsoring funding bodies for Round Two of Digging into Data are:
Individual submissions are not allowed here. Teams of scholars have to submit proposals. The teams have to be interdisciplinary and include academics in more than one of the participating countries.
Final applications will be due June 16, 2011. Further information about the competition and the application process can be found at http://www.diggingintodata.org.
Ok, so here is my idea. We have pretty good records for the daily prices of government bonds traded on the London and Amsterdam exchanges for the 18th and 19th century. From the late 19th century, we have good data for the prices of corporate bonds and equities (e.g., shares of US railroads). Digitizing all of this data so that people can do really robust quantitative analysis would take lots of work, but with a big budget to hire RAs, you could do it and then put the results online. The thing I am really interested in is how information flows influenced the price of bonds: before undersea telegraphs, it took a long time for news of, say, a military reversal overseas to reach bondmarkets. There has been some great research done analysing historical bond yields and news of political and military events, but with a big dataset we could do lots more. In fact, there are probably uses of this data that haven’t even occurred to me.
Anyone interested in applying to Digging Into Data to do something along these lines is welcome to contact me. Given my other commitments, I probably couldn’t be part of the team submitting a bid, but I would love it if someone could take up this idea, since I would final the final result (the database) to be really useful. The team creating this project would likely include historians, economists with really strong stats background, and computer scientists and digital humanities experts.
I’m kinda thinking aloud here, so I apologize for this inconclusive post.
References:
Weidenmier, Marc. 2000. “The Market for Confederate Cotton Bonds”. Explorations in Economic History. 37 (1)
Frey, Bruno S., and Daniel Waldenström. 2007. Using financial markets to analyze history: the case of the Second World War. Zurich: Inst. for Empirical Research in Economics.
The New York Times has been “live blogging plus 150 years” the events of the American Civil War. I have been impressed by the sheer quality of many of the posts to the Disunion blog. Some really distinguished academics have contributed to it.
I loved yesterday’s blog post because it set the Civil War in its international context. It was about the Republic of San Marino’s reaction to Lincoln’s inauguration. It is a great post because it connects and compares the story of Italian unification in the 1860s with the Civil War. The author of the post is Don H. Doyle, who teaches history at the University of South Carolina and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He is the author of “Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question” and is writing about a book about the international context of dimensions of the American Civil War.
Check out this lecture by Doyle.
Someone with an Ontario IP address just sent me the following message. It is clear from context that they wanted their query to be placed on my blog so that they could get as many responses as possible. So here it is:
I have just published a trail guide for Battle of Queenston Heights – October 13th 1812. Entitled “12 Hours That Saved A Country”, by Cameron Porteous, this 60-page soft cover book details Cameron’s walk around Queenston documenting the hour by hour action with his own words and the production of 15 evocative paintings. I would like to see this easy-to-read book as an I-Pad APP and linked with the navigational system for Niagara. Any suggestions as to how to do?
Please post your answer in the comments section below.
The 2011 meeting of the BHC will take place in St. Louis, Missouri 31 March–2 April 2011. The theme of this year’s conference is “Knowledge”.
The BHC is one of my annual conferences, but I was unable to present this year because I started a new job in January! I really regret that I won’t be going to the BHC,as there are some interesting-sounding presentations on the program.
My early research was on the 1860s. I was, therefore, really interested to see this paper:
Sean Patrick Adams, University of Florida “Unanticipated Casualties: The Institutional Rebirth of Coal and Oil during the American Civil War” [Abstract]
I should also point out that the panel that I helped to organize is going ahead.
A.2 Banking in Nineteenth-Century North American Regions
Chair: Edwin J. Perkins, University of Southern California
Discussant: Richard Sylla, New York University
Sharon Ann Murphy, Providence College, “Banking on the Public’s Trust: The Image of Commercial Banks in Kentucky, 1816-1820” [Abstract]
Robert E. Wright, Augustana College and New York University “Not All Banks Are Bad: The Merchants Bank of New Bedford and Community Banking in America” [Abstract] [Paper]
Mark Stickle, The Ohio State University, “New Gowns, Morocco Shoes, and Little Monsters: Eastern Capital and Mortgage Credit in Ohio, 1835-1850” [Abstract]
There are also some promising-looking papers on Canadian topics planned. They include:
Matthew J. Bellamy, Carleton University, “The Guardians of True Temperance”: The Brewers’ Campaign to End Prohibition in Canada, 1916-1930″ [Abstract]
M. Stephen Salmon, Library and Archives Canada “Transacting a Successful Business”: Knowledge, Informal Empire, and Canadian Life Insurance Companies in China, 1892-1941″
The methodology/theory session looks really interesting as well.
E.1 Method or Madness: Does Business History Have a Methodology?
Co-Chairs: R. Daniel Wadhwani, University of the Pacific and Marcelo Bucheli, University of Illinois Discussant: The Audience
David Kirsch, University of Maryland, “Between the Humanities and Management Science: The Epistemology of Business History”
JoAnne Yates, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Historical and Qualitative Methods for Studying Organizations”
[Abstract]
Matthias Kipping, York University, and R. Daniel Wadhwani, University of the Pacific “The “Holy Trinity” of the Historical Method: Source Critique, Triangulation, and the Hermeneutic Circle”
Roy Suddaby, University of Alberta “The Use of Historical Methods in Organizational and Institutional Theory”
The full program is available here. The members of the program committee for the 2011 meeting were Mark R. Wilson (chair), Teresa da Silva Lopes, Matthias Kipping, Jocelyn Wills, and Richard R. John (BHC President).
The Past Speaks 
