The Cambridge History of Capitalism

30 09 2014
For many around the world, we are richer today than we ever thought possible. Can the level of economic growth that we have seen since the mid-19th Century be sustained in the 21st century? And with that, capitalism itself?

We certainly think that the level of economic well-being enjoyed by the world’s population will continue to rise, provided political forces allow capitalism to continue making innovations in the way goods are produced and delivered to markets. But it is unlikely to maintain its current rate of growth. Miraculous growth in the Third World will certainly diminish, as these late-comers catch up with the leaders by exploiting their technologies, institutions, and governance. Population growth is also declining everywhere, and the aging associated with it will drag down growth. In addition, rising inequality in the leaders and even followers – like China and India – may reinforce anti-capitalist, anti-market, and populist feelings.

– That’s from an interview in which Jeff Williamson and Larry Neal discuss the new Cambridge History of Capitalism.


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Call for Papers: Association of Business Historians

30 09 2014

Call for Papers
Association of Business Historians
23rd Annual Conference, 3-4 July 2015,
University of Exeter Business School
Business and the Periphery
The Association of Business Historians 23rd Annual Conference will be held on 3-4  July 2015 at the University of Exeter Business School on the beautiful Streatham  campus.

The conference theme will be ‘Business and the Periphery’. The conference will  explore the boundaries of business history and the conference committee will interpret  this theme broadly to welcome paper and session proposals which address historical  themes relating, but not limited, to business operating on economic, financial,  geographical, social, political, religious, technological, legal, regulatory and other  peripheries.

The conference will feature a roundtable on ‘Business History after the Research  Excellence Framework (REF)’. The Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop will precede  the conference on 2-3 July 2015 and will be subject to a separate call, as will the
Coleman Prize for the best PhD thesis on business history completed on a British subject or at a British university.

The conference committee welcomes proposals for individual papers or complete research tracks of 90 minutes in length. Each individual paper proposal should include a short abstract, a list of 3 to 5 key words, and a brief CV of the presenter.
Proposals for research tracks should include a cover letter containing a session title and the rationale for the research track. The organisers also welcome research papers on any topic related to business history which are outside of the conference theme. If you have any questions, please contact the local organiser Mark Billings at: abh2015@exeter.ac.uk.

The deadline for submissions is 27 February 2015. Notification of acceptance will be made by 20 April 2015. Please send proposals by email to: abh2015@exeter.ac.ukor by post to:

Mark Billings
University of Exeter Business School
Streatham Court
Rennes Drive
Exeter
EX4 4PU
United Kingdom


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Peter Klein, Carmen Segarra, and Hard Evidence of Regulatory Capture

29 09 2014

New York Fed

Back in August, I published a blog post in which I discussed a new paper by Peter Klein on the microeconomics of central banking. (This paper appeared as a chapter in a new book edited by David Howden and Joseph Salerno, The Fed at One Hundred: A Critical View on the Federal Reserve System (New York: Springer, 2014). The title is “Information, Incentives, and Organization: The Microeconomics of Central Banking.” You can read a version of the paper here). In the paper, Klein rightly says that we need to take a hard look at the incentives of the individuals who run monetary policy, as many conflicts of interest may exist here.

I said that I really liked Peter Klein’s paper.  I pointed out that while a great deal has been said about way bankers’ compensation is structured, there is very little popular or scholarly discussion of how central bankers (e.g., Bank of England Governor Mark Carney) are compensated and how that compensation structure might influence their decisions about monetary policy! However, while I praised Klein’s paper, my instincts as a document-focused historian caused me to urge caution at the same time. Historians are like investigative journalists, we want to see a paper trail before making definitive conclusions. I wrote that

Klein makes a very strong a priori case for the thesis that the Fed’s actions are influenced by the private interests of the individuals who control it. However, I think that he has run up against a brick wall related to the availability of primary sources. The Fed and other central banks are reluctant to release information about the employment contracts, compensation packages, and so forth of their current and past employees. All they publish are the headline salaries. If we want to examine how the incentive structure for central bankers has evolved over the last 100 years, we would need access to the appropriate archival materials, which would involve looking at both the personal papers of the central bankers, the papers of their family firms, as well as the archives of the central banks. For a start, we would need to compare the terms of the employment contracts given to successive central bankers.  Speaking as a business historian, I think it may be difficult to get access to all of these materials.

I found that Klein’s paper provided lots of soft evidence of conflicts of interest but not so much hard evidence of the sort we historians (along with investigate journalists) crave. In the last few days, however, an astonishing new source of data about the incentives and socialization of key officials at the Fed has become available.  That’s because Carmen Segarra, a former employee of the New York Federal Reserve, has released 41 hours of secret recordings of her conversations with her colleagues that appear to demonstrate that Regulatory Capture was indeed at work. See here and here.  The associated episode of This American Life is well worth listening to, especially if you are the type of person who is skeptical of the ability of regulation by the state to protect the public interest.


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What’s My Kardashian Index?

28 09 2014

Kim Kardashian West, Parramatta Westfield Sydney Australia – 15218956411CC BY-SA 2.0 Photo by Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer

From a recent post by Peter Klein, I’ve learned of the existence of something called the Kardashian Index.

Biologist Neil Hall made a bit of a splash a few months back by introducing the Kardashian Index, basically the ratio of an academic researcher’s Twitter followers to citations in peer-reviewed journals. (For a rough approximation, just divide Twitter followers by Google Scholar cites.) Someone with a very high K-index, the story goes, has a large popular following, but hasn’t made any important scientific contributions — in other words, like Kim, famous for being famous.

I’m afraid that my Kardashian Index may be a bit higher than it should be. I’m fairly prominent in the academic blogosphere, but my Google Scholar citation count suggests that my research hasn’t made a massive impact yet.


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From Hierarchy to Market: the Changing Industrial Organization of Epistemic Communities During Hong Kong’s Transition to a Cashless Society (1965-2005)

26 09 2014

AS: I’ve written a paper on Hong Kong’s transition to cashlessness with Bernardo Batiz-Lazo of Bangor Business School. Bernardo will be presenting the paper next month at the University of Gothenburg. The paper is based on extensive archival and other primary source research. On a theoretical level, it draws on the work of Richard Langlois and Lars Håkanson. Here are the details of our talk.

Guest seminar with Professor Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, University of Bangor, UK

Organized jointly with Center of Finance and Department of Economy and Society, Unit of Economic History

Date: October 14 at 2 pm,

Place: D32 (in Main Building)

From Hierarchy to Market: the Changing Industrial Organization of Epistemic Communities During Hong Kong’s Transition to a Cashless Society (1965-2005)

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo (Bangor Business School) and Andrew Smith (Liverpool School of Management)

Abstract

This paper documents how computer technology modified retail financial markets in Hong Kong in the period from the 1960s to the early 2000s. The forty years after the deployment of the first computer in 1965, saw a dramatic change in retail banking technology as Hong Kong moved towards being a cashless society. Prior to that pivotal year, none of the colony’s banks used computers whilst retail customers accessed their liquid balances via cash and cheques and only during banking hours. Over time, the ways in which people spent money became more diverse and transformed with the advent of technologies such as the ATM, point of purchase debit card terminals, the Octopus chip, and mobile phone payments. One could construct a straightforward narrative arc that links the acquisition of HSBC’s first computer in 1967 to the proliferation of electronic payment systems in the twenty-first century. Such a narrative, however, would obscure an important discontinuity in the history of retail payment technology. In the early stages of Hong Kong’s transition to the cashless society, the relevant technologies were installed and managed within the boundaries of large financial intuitions such as HSBC.  The second episode discussed in this paper is the successful launch of a micro-payments solution called “Octopus”. Initially designed as a transport payments card, cash balances stored within a smart chip grew outside financial institutions to become the leading payment solution in small value transactions. Over the course of the period covered by this article, the industrial organization of the relevant technologies transformed as the provision of much of the technology for retail payments had been outsourced to non-bank, non-financial institutions. In other words, the industrial organization of the relevant technologies had been transformed. This paper seeks to account for this shift in the organization of payments technology by drawing on literature around the boundaries of the firm as well as the theory of the firm as an epistemic community. It will be suggested that this process of vertical disintegration (i.e., a shift from hierarchy to markets) took place because of changes in the underlying conditions in Hong Kong’s economy.

Information about Porfessor Batiz-Lazo

Professor Batiz-Lazo is Professor of Business History and Bank Management at Bangor University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He read economics (at ITAM, Mexico and Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain), history (Oxford) and received a doctorate in business administration (Manchester Business School). He has been studying financial markets and institutions since 1988. He joined Bangor after appointments at Leicester, Open University and Queen´s Belfast.

Since 1998 he edits a weekly report on new working papers in business, economic and financial history (NEP-HIS). See http://lists.repec.org/mailman/listinfo/nep-his.

For the NEP-HIS blog, which reviews the highlights of these papers, see http://www.nephis.org/.

For more information contact Susanna Fellman


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The WINIR Greenwich Conference

24 09 2014

Richard Langlois’s most recent blog post has motivated me to join the new World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR),

Dick Langlois's avatarOrganizations and Markets

| Dick Langlois |

I write on the flight back from the inaugural conference of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR), which met on the Prime Meridian these last few days. The conference was a great success, not only for its wonderful location in the Old Royal Naval College astride the Cutty Sark but also for the overall quality of the organization and the presentations.

As I have mentioned before, WINIR was created to encourage institutional research from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines. The annual conference institutionalizes this (you might say) by having keynote speakers from five different disciplines. The political scientist was Kathleen Thelen from MIT, one of my fellow editors on the Journal of Institutional Economics; the legal scholar was Katharina Pistor from Columbia; and the sociologist was Geoffrey Ingham from Cambridge, who made some interesting observations about Chinese institutions in the…

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This Week’s EconTalk Episode: Piketty

22 09 2014

Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century talks to Econtalk hostRuss Roberts about the book. The conversation covers some of the key empirical findings of the book along with a discussion of their significance.

Listen to the podcast here.


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The Historic Turn in Core Econ?

22 09 2014

Over the last few years, there has been growing evidence of a historic turn in management school teaching and research. Works that are historical in subject matter and, crucially, methodology are now starting to appear in top management journals. It is now widely recognized that there needs to be more history in business school research and teaching. Marcelo Bucheli and Dan Wadhwani have argued that the historic turn should involve more than research about the past (i.e., trips to the archive to gather data points for the testing of various social-scientific theories).They argue that the historic turn should involve the adoption of historical methods by management academics.

 

 

It appears as if a similar historic turn may be taking place in the undergraduate economics curriculum. Given the importance of economics in the present-day hierarchy of social sciences, these changes should interest all social scientists and management scholars. Core Econ is a movement to reform the undergraduate econ curriculum by incorporating newish research that shows that human beings are both less rational and less selfish than traditional economics textbooks would suggest. The Core Econ movement, which is associated with the Institute_for_New_Economic_Thinking, has achieved traction in part because of demand from students who want a more empirical,  policy-oriented curriculum.

 

How is CORE different?

CORE ECONOMICS CONVENTIONAL TEXTS AND COURSES
Question motivated
Students learn tools to analyse growth, distribution, environment, policy.		 Tool motivated
Students learn tools that are then illustrated by applications.
Empirically motivated and illustrated
Students learn economics to understand their economy and compare it to others.		 Axiomatic
Student learning is largely independent of empirical reference points.
New results are integral
We examine behavioural experiments, incomplete contracts, finance and bubbles.		 New results are often just “add-ons” 
New thinking sits alone at the end of the course or text.
Dynamic
History, innovation and instability is essential to economic analysis.		 Static
History doesn’t matter – often because equilibria are assumed to be unique.
Central role of institutions
Property rights, bargaining power, varieties of price and wage setting central in both allocation (mutual gain) and distribution (conflicts).		 Little attention to institutions 
Attention on markets through budget constraints and competition. Attention centred on mutual gain, distribution determined by fallbacks.

 

I’ve taken a look at the chapter summaries of newly-published Core Econ textbook and I’ve found that it includes a fair bit of economic history. In fact, the first chapter is all history.  That’s encouraging to me as I’m certain this textbook,  which is available for free online,  will go into widespread use for free.


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The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

20 09 2014

Earlier this month,The Economist published a short review of Professor Edward Baptist’s forthcoming book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.The unsigned review was unsympathetic to Professor Baptist’s account of antebellum slavery, which was written from the perspective a left-of-centre critic of capitalism.


The review generated intense criticism from academic historians, journalists, and others. The Exchange, the BHC’s blog, has helpfully compiled links to some of the blog posts and articles published in response to the review.

Jim Downs, ” ‘Big Wheel Keep on Turnin’ ‘: Slavery, Capitalism, and The Economist,” The Huffington Post
“History, Hashtags, and the Truth about Slavery,” Chronicle of Higher Education
Matthew Yglesias’s extended commentary, on Vox
Jonathan Wilson, review, “Another Kind of Blood: Edward Baptist on America’s Slaver Capitalism,” The Junto (published before the Economist review)
Hector Tobar, review, LA Times
Ellora Derenoncourt, “The Slaver’s Objectivity,” The Jacobin
Greg Grandin, ” ‘The Economist’ Has a Slavery Problem,” The Nation
Fergus M. Bordewich, review, Wall Street Journal

Edward Baptist responded to the Economist review here:

“What the Economist Doesn’t Get about Slavery–and My Book,”Politico
Baptist, “The Economist Review,” Talking Points Memo
Baptist, “How slavery haunts today’s America,” CNN
Baptist, “The Economist’s review of my book reveals how white people still refuse to believe black people about being black,”The Guardian


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“Green Capitalism? At the Crossroads of Environmental and Business History.”

17 09 2014

AS: I’m posting the programme of the forthcoming Hagley conference on business/environmental history here.

Hagely Museum and Library Soda House, Oct. 30-31, 2014

SCHEDULE

Friday, 30 October

8:30-9:00 Coffee

9:00-9:30 Welcoming remarks

Erik Rau, Hagley Museum and Library

Hartmut Berghoff, German Historical Institute-D.C.

9:30-12:00 Session 1: Firms as Conservationists?

William D. Bryan, Emory University: Corporate Conservation and Conflict: Determining the Ideal Forms of Development for the American South

Julie Cohn, University of Houston: Utilities as Conservationists: The Conundrum of Electrification during the Progressive Era in North America

David B. Cohen, Brandeis University: Capitalism and the Wilderness Idea: The Case of the Great Northern Paper Company

Frank Uekötter, University of Birmingham: How Green was Chemurgy? A Movement in Search of Corporations

Comment: Ann Greene, University of Pennsylvania

12:00-1:00 lunch

1:00-3:00 Session 2: Consumers’ Demands

Ai Hisano, University of Delaware: Making Natural: Coloring Florida Oranges, 1930s-1950s

Brian C. Black, Penn State Altoona: Energy Hinge: Green Consumerism and the Energy Scene since 1973

Rachel Gross, University of Wisconsin, Madison: Greening Outdoor Recreation in the Age of Plastics

Comment: Adam Rome, University of Delaware

3:30-5:30 Session 3: Globalization

B. R. Cohen and Matthew Plishka, Lafayette College: Cottonseed, Oil, and the Environmental Entanglements of a Global Gilded Age Industry

Emily K. Brock, Max Planck Institute: Naming Commodities: Colonial Power, American Business and the Rebranding of a Tropical Forest Tree in the Philippines

Simone Müller-Pohl,University of Freiburg: Why American Cities go Wasting Abroad: Local Political Economy and International Trade in Hazardous Waste

Comment: Yda Schreuder, University of Delaware

5:30-6:30: Reception

6:30-8:30: Dinner

Friday 31 October

8:30-9:00 Coffee

9:00-11:30 Session 4: Firms Going Green

David Kinkela, State University of New York Fredonia: Hi-Cone Plastic Six-Pack Rings, Ocean Pollution, and the Challenge of a Global Environmental Problem

Bart Elmore, University of Alabama: Towards a History of Sustainable Business?: What the Coca-Cola Company Can Tell us about the Ecological Causes of Corporate Restructuring

Leif Fredrickson, University of Virginia: The Rise and Fall of an Ecostar: Environmental Technology Innovation and Marketing as Policy Obstruction

Ann-Kristin Bergquist. Umeå University: Dilemmas of Going Green: Company Strategies in the Swedish Mining Company Boliden 1960-2000

Comment: John McNeil, Georgetown University

12:30-2:00 Session 5: Governance

Roman Köster, Bundeswehr University Munich: Private Companies and the Recycling of Household Waste in West Germany, 1965-1990

Hugh Gorman, Michigan Technology University: The Role of Businesses in Constructing Systems of Environmental Governance

Comment: Brian Balogh, University of Virginia

2:00-3:00 Conference summary

Christine Meisner Rosen, Haas School of Business, University of California-Berkeley

Advance registration is free but required. Contact Carol Lockman, clockman@Hagley.org, for program and registration information.


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