Professor Luciano Segreto lectured in Michigan this week on the subject of a comparison between US and European capitalisms. Segreto is professor of International Economic History, Financial History, and the History of Regional Economic Development at the University of Florence. His lecture was fascinating in many ways, but of special interest here is whether there …
Woodward Avenue
How does a rust belt city relaunch itself? How can the stakeholders of Detroit, Cleveland, or Milwaukee begin to reinvent their cities and get on a track that leads to greater prosperity, health, and educational attainment that can eventually result in opportunity and quality of life for the urban majority? The factors that led to …
Michigan’s recovery?
The Mackinac Policy Conference brings forward something new this year -- optimism. The state of Michigan has been hammered in the past eight years by the upheaval of the auto industry and the national trauma of the global financial meltdown. Unemployment has been substantially higher than the national average, the city of Detroit has hemmorhaged …
Rawls and classical political economy
John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is highly relevant to the ways we think about our economic system. If we just read the citations, Rawls seems to be primarily influenced by "modern" economics -- Samuelson, equilibrium theory, game theory, and marginalist theory. And so we might suppose that his moral worldview reflects a neoclassical vision of …
David Graeber’s reflections on money, debt, and violence
David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years has hit a chord with a lot of people who are concerned about rising inequalities in the United States and elsewhere. Graeber is an economic anthropologist, a discipline that pays close attention to the ways that material arrangements worked in detail in pre-state societies. One of the great works …
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Beyond divergence
As I've noted in previous posts, there has been a major debate in economic history in the past 20 years about what to make of the contrasts between economic development trajectories in Western Europe and East Asia since 1600. There had been a received view, tracing to Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, that European "breakthrough" was …
Historical GDP estimates for early modern China
Li Bozhong is one of China's most influential economic historians, and he is undoubtedly the most internationally connected. Much of his work in the past several decades has been devoted to constructing a detailed economic history of the lower Yangzi Delta (for example, Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620-1850). His findings have been crucial empirical contributions to …
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The standard of living across time and space
A very basic question for historians is how to measure and compare the standard of living experienced by people in different historical settings. Is it possible to arrive at credible estimates of the standard of living in the Roman Empire, medieval Burgundy, nineteenth-century Britain, and twentieth-century Illinois? Can we say with any confidence that Romans …
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Marx on a global wage
What is the longterm tendency in the wage for relatively unskilled labor? In the United States we've been thinking about this problem in the past three decades in the context of "outsourcing" and the flight of manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries. Moderate- and high-wage industrial jobs have left the country in large numbers. In the …
Urban and metropolitan problem solving
The issues that almost all large American metropolitan regions and cities are facing are important and messy. Here is a short list: racial segregation, concentration of poverty, poor health and nutrition, poor schools, crime and violence, and disaffection of young people. These problems are important because they hold back the personal lives of millions of …
Understanding Society 