Neoclassical economics presents a pretty simple theory of the equilibrium price of a manufactured good. This theory also extends to a theory of the wage for skilled and unskilled labor. We postulate production and demand curves, and the equilibrium price is the point where supply equals demand. The supply curve is influenced by factors governing …
Proto-industrialization
The concept of proto-industrialization became an influential one in economic history in the 1970s and 1980s. The term refers to a system of rural manufacture that was intermediate between autarchic feudal production and modern urban factory production. Variously described as rural manufacturing, domestic manufacture, cottage industry, and a "putting-out" system, it was a dispersed system …
Development economics in historical context
Hollis Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan published the Handbook of Development Economics in 1988. It was state-of-the-art in the late 1980s. It is interesting to look back at the Handbook twenty-two years later to see how it stands up today. First, the contributors. The volume is a dream-team of development thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s: Amartya …
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More on jobs and people in Michigan
Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Katz did an important empirical study of regional adjustment to employment shock in 1992 (link). Here is their central conclusion: "We have shown that most of the adjustment of states to shocks is through movements of labor, rather than through job creation or job migration." (54) In other words, they find …
Prosperity based on commodities
An earlier post looked at economic prosperity and standard of living from the point of view of a grain-based agricultural economy. There I singled out intensive, extensive, and technology-based growth, and the effects these scenarios had on the standard of living for a farming population. This is a particularly simple case, since it equates standard …
Varieties of economic progress
The study of economic history reveals a number of different patterns when it comes to agricultural production and the standard of living of a given population in a region. Let's think about the issue in very simple terms. Imagine that the standard of living for a population in a region is determined by the amount …
Marx on Russia
In 1881 Marx wrote a letter to Vera Zasulich, an important Russian follower, that addresses the question of theory and prediction when it comes to thinking about the future course of history. In particular, he denies that his theories have determinate predictive implications for the development of capitalism or socialism in Russia. Here is a link to the …
Public health estimates in Marx’s Capital
Long stretches of Marx's Capital take the form of an effort at developing and defending an economic model of capitalism, based on the theories of value and surplus value. But there are also recurring efforts at providing a descriptive sociology of capitalism: the forms of day-to-day life that British economic relations imposed upon the working class. …
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Works councils and US labor relations
image: Diego Rivera, Rouge Plant mural, Detroit Institute of Arts The United States has one of the lowest rates of union representation of all developed countries. The 1994 level of unionized workers in the US had fallen to about 12 percent of private sector employment, and the trend is downward. And the sole institutional form …
The Brenner debate revisited
One of the defining controversies in the field of economic history in the past 35 years is the Brenner debate. Robert Brenner published "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe" in Past and Present in 1976 (link) and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" in 1982. In between these publications (and following) there …
Understanding Society 