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 …
Revitalizing our cities
It is hard to think of an American city that is doing really well these days. Dense urban poverty in the core, super-high rates of unemployment, failing schools for many urban children, high rates of crime, chronic and overwhelming fiscal crises resulting from too little public revenue for needed public services, and health outcome discrepancies …
Detroit: Taking charge of our story
New Detroit (link) and Wayne State University are putting on a major and significant conference on how the story of Detroit is being told today. Detroit is getting a lot of press these days --and it's mostly about crisis, decline, and despair. It is hard for a city to move forward in the context of …
Democracy and agency in development ethics
Development ethics is an area of applied ethics that attempts to explore the moral issues involved in global social and economic transformation. Key to the urgency of the field is the fact of massive global poverty, hunger, and inequality. The current situation of the world's poor -- in Egypt, India, Mexico, Sudan, or Brazil, for …
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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 …
Measuring recession’s impact: Michigan
Michigan has been in a rolling crisis since 2002 or so: the state has experienced the loss of manufacturing jobs, mortgage foreclosures, and plummeting state and municipal revenues at a pace that has left the region badly shaken. What have been some of the macro-level effects? How have population, income, employment, and housing changed since …
Alleviating rural poverty
What theories and values ought to underlie our best thinking about global economic development? Along with Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom), I believe that the best answer to the ethical question involves giving top priority to the goal of increasing the realization of human capabilities across the whole of society (The Paradox of Wealth and …
Messy regional problems and collaborative leaders
Regions are highly complex social formations: millions of people, thousands of businesses, hundreds of non-profit organizations, and lots of problems. Some problems are relatively simple to deal with. If the local river is being polluted by sanitary system overflows during heavy storms, the solution is costly but straightforward: the region needs to invest in a …
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Rebuilding employment
The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago hosted a two-day conference in Detroit this week on the subject of work force adjustment (link). It was convened by the Federal Reserve Bank, the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, and the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. This is one of the many efforts underway to attempt …
Understanding Society 