Economic History Blog

Excellent!
(Memo to myself: update blogroll. Stop procrastinating)

Why do I learn French?

The reason is not the music, food or tourism. Some time ago, I grabbed a copy of Leroy-Beaulieu's De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (1874) . It seems that he created the concept of "colonies of settlement" and "colonies of exploitation" (Roscher may have said something similar. I bought his book, but I gave up learning German 20 years ago). Every schoolboy in Brazil learns the diference between exploitation and settlement colonies thanks to Caio Prado Jr, a marxist historian. One day, I may write about the intelectual evolution of these concepts. A possible title of the paper: "From Roscher to Acemoglu"...Would anyone like to participate in this project?

(There was another reason to learn Frech: reading Thisse et al. textbook on Regional Economics, but I've just found out that it has been published in English as well. )

Inequality and Innovation in the US

From Our Own Correspondent is the best radio show since the day that Marconi had a great working day. BBC journalists analyse current affairs around the world based on their personal experiences. In a recent edition, Justin Webb starts with the sad fact that his child had just been diagnosed with diabetes to write about inequality, profit, and innovation in America.
(While you are there, check out this one on Fortaleza, Brazil)

The 3rd World Conference of the Spatial Econometrics - Deadline extension

Here.

Gmail offline!

Here.

The Consolation of Economic History

Brad Delong, the wise, writes:

...
The current recession may turn into a small depression, and may push global living standards down by five percent for one or two or (we hope not) five years, but that does not erase the gulf between those of us in the globe's middle and upper classes and all human existence prior to the Industrial Revolution.
...
The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.
...
I'm convinced that everyone I know can easily imagine how to spend up to three times their current income usefully and productively. (It is only beyond three times your current spending that people judge others' spending as absurd and wasteful.) And everybody I know finds it very difficult to imagine how people can survive on less than one-third of what they spend—never mind that all of our pre-industrial ancestors did so all the time.

Markets in Everything, the cartoon

Via Mahalanobis. More, obviously.

Eat the Poor

A debate on Swift's A Modest Propostal.

Dysrationalia

"Stanovich coined his own term — dysrationalia — for 'the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence.' That 'disorder,' he suggests, might afflict some of the smartest people you know."

Acemoglu's "Introducion to Modern Economic Growth"

The winner of the John Bates Clark medal finally launches his book on Growth. Something tells me that very soon every graduate student of Economics in the world will be carrying it around. It is a bargain: US$61 for 1000 pages!
The impressive Table of Contents and sample chapters are available here.

Did Railroads Induce or Follow Economic Growth? Urbanization and Population Growth in the American Midwest, 1850-60

Jeremy Atack, Fred Bateman, Michael Haines, Robert A. Margo say:

For generations of scholars and observers, the "transportation revolution," especially the railroad, has loomed large as a dominant factor in the settlement and development of the United States in the nineteenth century. There has, however, been considerable debate as to whether transportation improvements led economic development or simply followed. Using a newly developed GIS transportation database we examine this issue in the context of the American Midwest, focusing on two indicators of broader economic change, population density and the fraction of population living in urban areas. Our difference in differences estimates (supported by IV robustness checks) strongly suggest that the coming of the railroad had little or no impact upon population densities just as Albert Fishlow concluded some 40 years ago. BUT, our results also imply that the railroad was the "cause" of midwestern urbanization, accounting for more than half of the increase in the fraction of population living in urban areas during the 1850s.

That is exactly the kind of paper in economic history that I love. Lots of historical data + GIS database + econometrics= an answer to an interesting question.

Who survived the Titanic?

Frey, Savage and Torgler have shown that the social rule "women and children first" was respected while the boat sunk. Another interesting result (despite being quite expected): the dummy "English" reduced the chances of survival, while "American" increased. Politeness has its costs. More on the subject.

New York Times on R

R !

HT Na Prática.

Breaking the Grouxo Marx Principle

There was only one club that I would like to join and would (hopefully) accept me: The Flat Earth Society. But I've just discovered another association that I support without reserves.

Institutions matter?

Sometimes they don't.

Best economics paper of 1959

Following the tradition of this blog, here goes my choice of paper that celebrates its 50th year. There is Herbert Simon's paper, but my very personal choice goes to a work from Douglass North that does not rank among his most popular ones:

North, Douglass. "Agriculture in Regional Economic Growth. Journal of Farm Economics, v. 51, 943-51

He extends his 1955 paper, and shows the role of the distribution of wealth and the production function on long run regional growth. A must read for regional economists and economic historians.

Urbanization data for Brazil

A very nice piece on Zipf's Law in Brazil and in the US. Unfortunately there is a problem: the quality of the data on urbanization in Brazil. José Eli da Veiga has stressed how unreliable and insane are the 1938 official criteria on definition of urban areas in Brazil. Official data on urban population in Brazil is hugely overestimated and weirdly related to the number of municipalities created. Therefore, historical trends on urbanization in Brazil are unreliable and international comparisons should be avoided.
Recently, Embrapa used satellite images to identify urban areas and this is the best data that you can get. (The main limitation, obviously, is that there is no historical data)

Greg Clark responds to his critics

Here. More posts on Farewell to Alms.
Addendum: Greg Clark did something really rude in his reply that I'll not mention here.

Paranoia is fun

My New Year's resolution is to do the same thing:

xkcd is terrific. Really.

Happy 2010!

Gerschenkron

I've just read
The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World, the biography of Alexander Gerschenkron written by his grandson. It is an excellent book. Even the cover is great: a portrait of the economic historian drawn by Leontief.
During this week I will post a few stories and quotes from the book. Just a taste of it: Gerschenkron played chess (and lost superbly) to Marcel Duchamp and Vladimir Nabokov named a character after him (for very mean reasons) .

Heights and Human Welfare: Recent Developments and New Directions

Richard Steckel, one of the founding fathers of Anthoropometric History, has written a new survey.

Brad Delong: American Economic History Podcast

Here. I've listened to previous Prof Delong podcasts and I can assure you: they are great! Erudite, witty, and insightful.
The best things in life are free...

Merry Xmas!

Let's celebrate! (Are you sure?...)

Off-line

I am going to be off-line until Dec 29. Happy Holidays!
(I left a few scheduled posts)

Science, Financial Crisis, and Paul Romer

Paul Romer:

"...after Citibank made some bets that turned out badly in the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, its CEO John Reed helped mid-wife the Economics Program at the Santa Fe Institute. He wanted the new theoretical insights about financial crises that the new complexity scientists promised. Ever since, the complexity scientists have been telling us that markets are self-organizing systems. For the life of me, I can't see how this puts us way ahead. Didn't seem to help Citibank either, which I've noticed is back in the headlines.
(...)
I agree with the closing suggestion, that air transport is a good place to look for lessons about avoiding crashes. No matter what we do, we will still have financial crises, just as we still have plane crashes. But judging from our success in making air travel safer, it seems reasonable to bet on an institutionalized commitment to systematic data collection as a way to reduce their frequency and severity. As a traveler and an investor, I feel much safer in the hands of experts with good data than tourists from other scientific disciplines bearing new models.

Here.

Talkin' about science, there is a bonus.

Ideapad S10 e Ubuntu Netbook Remix

One month ago I bought a Lenovo Ideapad S10. Beautiful, light, small, and fast. I am a very happy owner. The obvious limitations are the size of the screen and keyboard. They are perfect for smurfs, but normal human beings suffer a lot after 3 hours of use.
It came with Windows XP so I was not in a hurry to run Ubuntu. Yesterday, I took a break and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix, ie, Ubuntu for tiny notebooks. It is perfect and almost solves the screen issue.

You know that you have reached k* when

... this happens:

Via boingboing.

Every flight on Earth

24 hours in 72 seconds. (Imagine the size of the W matrix!)
Suggestion: plot Eltis' data on trans-Atlantic slave write. I'll write to Prof Rege right now!

Bayesian econometrics

O Introduction to Modern Bayesian Econometrics by Tony Lancaster is a great book . It provides the first steps on the subject, and it comes with the S-Plus (or R) and BUGS code to follow the book. HT to Márcio Laurini, the über-econometrician.

Long-run spatial inequality in France: Evolution and determinants

Guess what? The regional inegalité is inverted-U shaped. Readhere.

Industrialization in Latin America

Or..."Was It Prices, Productivity or Policy? The Timing and Pace of Latin American Industrialization after 1870" by Jeffrey Williamson and Aurora Gómez Galvarriato.

Brazil, Mexico and a few other Latin American republics enjoyed faster industrialization after 1870 than did the rest of Latin America and even faster than the rest of the poor periphery (except East Asia). How much of this economic performance was due to more accommodating institutions and greater political stability, changes that would have facilitated greater technology transfer and accumulation? That is, how much to changing fundamentals? How much instead to a cessation in the secular rise in the net barter terms of trade which reversed de-industrialization forces, thus favoring manufacturing? How much instead to cheaper foodstuffs coming from more open commercial policies ('grain invasions'), and from railroad-induced integration of domestic grain markets, serving to keep urban grain prices and thus nominal wages in industry low, helping to maintain competitiveness? How much instead to more pro-industrial real exchange rate and tariff policy? Which of these forces contributed most to industrialization among the Latin American leaders, long before their mid 20th century adoption of ISI policies? Changing fundamentals, changing market conditions, or changing policies?

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13990

More or Less

Tim Harford, my favorite writer of "economics for the masses" books, presents a new series on statistics and math on BBC radio 4.

Mary Poppins and the financial crisis

Nothing new under the sun...

Fidelity Fiduciary Bank
Mr. Dawes Sr, Mr. Banks and Bankers:
If you invest your tuppence
Wisely in the bank
Safe and sound
Soon that tuppence,
Safely invested in the bank,
Will compound
And you'll achieve that sense of conquest
As your affluence expands
In the hands of the directors
Who invest as propriety demands
You see, Michael, you'll be part of
Railways through Africa
Dams across the Nile
Fleets of ocean greyhounds
Majestic, self-amortizing canals
Plantations of ripening tea
All from tuppence, prudently
Fruitfully, frugally invested
In the, to be specific,
In the Dawes, Tomes
Mousely, Grubbs
Fidelity Fiduciary Bank!
Now, Michael,
When you deposit tuppence in a bank account
Soon you'll see
That it blooms into credit of a generous amount
Semiannually
And you'll achieve that sense of stature
As your influence expands
To the high financial strata
That established credit now commands
You can purchase first and second trust deeds
Think of the foreclosures!
Bonds! Chattels! Dividends! Shares!
Bankruptcies! Debtor sales!
Opportunities!
All manner of private enterprise!
Shipyards! The mercantile!
Collieries! Tanneries!
Incorporations! Amalgamations! Banks!
You see, Michael
Tuppence, patiently, cautiously trustingly invested
In the, to be specific,
In the Dawes, Tomes
Mousely, Grubbs
Fidelity Fiduciary Bank!

The bank run scene is here (around 1:25).
HT to Niall Fergunson. BTW, his new book (The Ascent of Money: a Financial History of the World) seems pretty interesting.

Obama

Tomorrow I will go back to my normal personality: cynical and pessimist. But today I just can't...

"Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly."

Jay-Z

Wealth of the Nations in the Long-run

Before 1500...
Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 B.C.?
Diego Comin, William Easterly, Erick Gong

We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 B.C., 0 A.D., and 1500 A.D. for the predecessors to today’s nation states. We find that this very old history of technology adoption is surprisingly significant for today’s national development outcomes. Our strong and robust results are for 1500 A.D.determining per capita income today. We find technological persistence across long epochs: from 1000 BC to 0 AD, from 0 AD to 1500 AD, and from 1500 AD to the present. Although the data allow only some suggestive tests of rival hypotheses to explain long‐run technological persistence, we find the evidence to be most consistent with a model of endogenous technology adoption where the cost of adopting new technologies declines sufficiently with the current level of adoption. The evidence is less consistent with a dominant role for
population as predicted by the semi‐endogenous growth models or for countrylevel
factors like culture, genes or institutions.

(dica do Shikida).

After 1500...
Post-1500 Population Flows and the Long Run Determinants of Economic Growth and Inequality
Louis Putterman, David N. Weil

We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500. Using this matrix, we analyze how post-1500 migration has influenced the level of GDP per capita and within-country income inequality in the world today. Indicators of early development such as early state history and the timing of transition to agriculture have much better predictive power for current GDP when one looks at the ancestors of the people who currently live in a country than when one considers the history on that country's territory, without adjusting for migration. Measures of the ethnic or linguistic heterogeneity of a country's current population do not predict income inequality as well as measures of the ethnic or linguistic heterogeneity of the current population's ancestors. An even better predictor of current inequality in a country is the variance of early development history of the country's inhabitants, with ethnic groups originating in regions having longer histories of agriculture and organized states tending to be at the upper end of a country's income distribution. However, high within-country variance of early development also predicts higher income per capita, holding constant the average level of early development.

I can not say that the papers deal with the veeery long-run because the brilliant Michael Kremer set a new standard.

8th Spatial Econometrics and Statistics workshop

Dear colleagues,

We are very pleased to invite you to Besançon, France, to participate to
the 8th edition of the Spatial Econometrics and Statistics Workshop,
which will be held on June 1-2, 2009. This workshop aims at reinforcing
and stimulating the interactions between well established and young
researchers involved in spatial statistics and econometrics.
Both theoretical and empirical contributions are welcome.

You are invited to submit your paper or long abstract (6 pages)
electronically to the following email address:
spatial2009@univ-fcomte.fr. The deadline for submission of
abstracts/papers is February 15th, 2009. Notification of acceptance will
be sent by March 20, 2009. The call for papers is enclosed.

More information concerning the workshop is available at :
http://sew2009.univ-fcomte.fr/index.htm or
http://sew2009.univ-fcomte.fr/english/home.htm

We are looking forward to meeting you in Besançon.

Best regards,
Julie Le Gallo

(for the scientific and organizing committees)

Landes versus Crafts

They have a long history of arguments. The tone is quite rude sometimes, but I was not expecting this.
Landes on Crafts:

I am struck by the fact that I have no place in his bibliography. (I know he reads me, if only to disagree.)

Here.

Money on the Brain by Tim Harford

Tim Harford on Neuroeconomics at BBC Radio 4. You have only 2 days to listen to it! (Or you can download (ou então baixe the podcast)

Beta software that I recommend

A few suggestions:
QGis- GIS software that opens shape files. Almost an ArcView replacement;
PSPP- SPSS for the poor. Still very far from the real-thing, but it works;
Ubiquity- fantastic firefox extension.
All are cross-platform and free. BTW, why don't you install Ubuntu? This Thursday a new version (8.10) is going to be released.

The causes of the Great Depression

Mankiw summarizes the research on the causes of the Great Depression. Eichengreen, Romer and Temim among others have shown that there is a lot to do in the field. As Bernanke said: “To understand the Great Depression is the Holy Grail of macroeconomics”. I must add: ",especially in interesting times".

Resource curse and the current crisis

Recent international experience supports the resource curse hyphotesis : resource rich countries, mainly when the resources are extracted from a narrow geographic or economic base, tend to have bad institutions and slow growth in the long run. Dube & Vargas have shown the relationship between coffee and oil prices and civil conflict in Colombia (HT Dani Rodrik).
Commodity prices are tumbling, so what will happen? Now there will be no money for useless stuff and the economic reasons for a coup have weakened. I am afraid however that there is a ratchet effect: dictators will stay in power, playing the nationalist card.

Why Krugman got the Nobel?

Dixit dixit.

Always look on the bright side of life

An inconvenient recession

In fact the only upside of all this is that the massive slow-down in economic growth will rapidly cut the growth rates of CO2 emissions. Pollution is tightly linked to the level of economic activity, so that a few years of negative growth would lead to reductions in pollution levels not seen since the 1970s. It seems ironic that the greed of Wall Street may have inadvertently achieved what millions of well intentioned scientists, activists and politicians have failed to achieve – a slowdown in global warming.

Culture and Development

Another critical review of Farewell to Alms:

One of my favourite history books is a collection of contemporary letters and reports written during the first half of the nineteenth century about industrial work in German lands. Observers decried how unreliable, slovenly, and undisciplined workers were. Germans had no hope of ever becoming developed!

by Wolfgang Kasper. Read it here.

Google Chrome!

Your next browser.
(Dammit! No release date for a linux version)

Columbus' business plan

Here.

(In fact this is the first laptop powerpoint presentation)

PS. This reminds me of the funniest economics paper ever published.

The worst mistake

Jared Diamond says that our problems started when we adopted agriculture:

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.(...)

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. ... Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies... led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.

Via Brad Delong.

Brave new world

In fact, not so brave and not so new.

Via boingboing.

Made in China?

About 50%.

Hal Varian

A podcast with Google's smartest employee.

North Korea

In 1962 an American soldier deserted to North Korea. Crossing the Line , an amazing BBC documentary tells this story. Nicholas Bonner, the producer, manages - I do not how - to shoot movies there. I would love to use his travel services.
I guess it is illegal, but you may download the movie here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/23337898/BBC4_-_North_Korea_-_Crossing_The_Line.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/23337951/BBC4_-_North_Korea_-_Crossing_The_Line.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/23338030/BBC4_-_North_Korea_-_Crossing_The_Line.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/23338089/BBC4_-_North_Korea_-_Crossing_The_Line.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/23338137/BBC4_-_North_Korea_-_Crossing_The_Line.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/23338195/BBC4_-_North_Korea_-_Crossing_The_Line.part6.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/23338284/BBC4_-_North_Korea_-_Crossing_The_Line.part7.rar

Brazilian Historical Statistics - IPEA

A team from IPEA- lead by Eustáquio Reis- has uploaded a new historical dataset on XIX century prices in Brazil. The same team has been scanning tons of official historical statistics documents and uploading them to Memória Estatística do Brasil/Nemesis website. (Most of the files are in Portuguese, but there are some in French).

How to write a scientific paper

Here:

"The purpose of science is to get paid for doing fun stuff"

Seriously, I strongly recommend McCloskey's book on scientific writing.

Bastille Day!!!

"Want faster European growth? Learn to love creative destruction"

Says Nick Crafts. E mais:

If only ministers could bring themselves to think (better still occasionally to say) “these job losses are good news”

Robert Mugabe, Msc in Economics

"Intelligence in the service of evil is worst than dumbness." Hélio Pellegrino, Brazilian writer.

"All accounts describe him in the same words," writes Blair, "diligent, quiet, studious, introverted." Mugabe shunned smoking and drinking alcohol and "excelled academically" at every institution he attended, including South Africa's University of Fort Hare, the hotbed of African nationalism from which Nelson Mandela had been expelled earlier. During Mugabe's 11 years of imprisonment, from 1963 to 1974, under Zimbabwe's white-ruled predecessor state of Rhodesia, the future president enrolled in University of London correspondence courses and earned four degrees — a master's degree in economics, a bachelor's degree in administration, and two law degrees — to go with the three bachelor's degrees he already possessed, in economics, education, and history and literature.

Montesquieu against Jared Diamond

Guns, germs and steel? No. Ideas were the key of western domination of the Americas:

"Can it be said that this destruction, the greatest history has ever known, was only a simple effect of the ignorance of a principle of philosophy? It can, and I am going to prove it."

Montesquieu in The Motives That Ought to Encourage Us to the Sciences

(I recommend the whole paper.)

via aldaily.

Made in America? The New World, the Old, and the Industrial Revolution

On the same subject of yesterday's post:
Made in America? The New World, the Old, and the Industrial Revolution
by Gregory Clark, Kevin H. O'Rourke, Alan M. Taylor - #14077 (DAE IFM ITI)

Abstract:

For two decades, the consensus explanation of the British Industrial
Revolution has placed technological change and the supply side at
center stage, affording little or no role for demand or overseas
trade. Recently, alternative explanations have placed an emphasis on
the importance of trade with New World colonies, and the expanded
supply of raw cotton it provided. We test both hypotheses using
calibrated general equilibrium models of the British economy and the
rest of the world for 1760 and 1850. Neither claim is supported.
Trade was vital for the progress of the industrial revolution; but it
was trade with the rest of the world, not the American colonies, that
allowed Britain to export its rapidly expanding textile output and
achieve growth through extreme specialization in response to shifting
comparative advantage.

Power and Plenty:Trade, War, and the World Economy in the II Millennium- O'Rourke and Findlay

The book is not for everyone. It presumes that the reader has a quite comprehensive knowledge about the last 1,000 years of world economic history and some training in Economics. Nevertheless, it is a must if you are a serious researcher of any of these issues.
The book has changed my mind on several issues, mainly about the Industrial Revolution. I used to take the New-Economic-History side: it was slow and foreign markets were not important. Now I am not so sure at all. The bottom line: Power and Plenty is a great book!

III Research Workshop on Institutions and Organizations - Call for papers

Ramon Fernandez emailed me:

"Call for papers

The III Research Workshop on Institutions and Organizations will be held at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV-SP) from October 13th to 14th 2008. The III RWIO is sponsored by three Brazilian Academic Institutions (Fundação Getúlio Vargas São Paulo, IBMEC São Paulo and University of São Paulo).

Seminar participants will discuss recent developments in the analysis of institutions and organizations through the lenses of Economics, Management, Sociology, Law and other social sciences. Instead of focusing on the contributions of specific disciplines dealing with institutions and organizations, workshop participants will emphasize differences and commonalities among different approaches, leading to potential advances and refinements in the field.

We encourage the participation of researchers of Brazilian and international institutions. The following program is based on both invited and selected papers.

The organizational committee invites the submission of papers to the following the topics:

CHAIRS

Panel I: Organizations, law and corruption

Panel II: Institutions and Development

Panel III: Institutions and environment

Panel IV: Psychological issues and organization strategies

Panel V: Industrial and competition policy

*More details about the panels will be announced soon.

DEADLINES

-Deadline for submission of an extended abstract: July 15th 2008

-Acceptance of proposal: July 25th 2008

-Deadline for submission of final papers: August 30th 2008

-Acceptance of final papers: September 15th 2008


Proposal must be sent in English as PDF attachment to workshop_io@yahoo.com.br and should include an extended abstract (maximum of 1.000 words). A confirmation message will be sent."

Greg Clark reviews a book that I am not going to read

Adam Smith in Beijing by Giovanni Arrighi.

Why study economic history?

Brad DeLong explains.

Brazilian 1872 and 1890 Censuses

They are now available on-line. Many thanks to Prof Puntoni and to the CEBRAP's team.
(HT Eustáquio Reis)

Two links

The Brazilian Journal História e Economia has just released a new number. (Some papers are available in English).

IPEADATA - the main economic data repository in Brazil- has new looks and datasets. Many thanks to Eustáquio Reis and his team.

Best economics paper of 1958

Which paper/book should we celebrate its 50th year? Obviously, my vote goes to the paper that started the cliometric revolution:
The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South
Alfred H. Conrad, John R. Meyer
The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Apr., 1958), pp. 95-130
Is there any other contestant?

Happy December 25th!

There is a good reason to celebrate.

News...

- I would like to apologize to my three and a half readers for not posting. It is almost the end of the term and things are really busy. So the blog will be on hold for a while.
-Ubuntu is doing fine. Compiz is running full throttle and I am able to do 99% of the things that I used to, but much faster. I think that I will never go back to Windows.
- Today I am going to the 1er Congreso Latinoamericano de Historia Económica in Montevideo. My expectations are quite high. Many dear friends will be there giving papers. Moreover, I will be the first time that I will meet researchers like Roberto Cortés Conde, James Robinson and others.
- Otávio Damé, my former undergrad student and research assistant at UFPel, has won the Controladoria Geral da União monographs prize. Congratulations to him and his advisor, André Carraro!
- See you soon!

My Ubuntu experience- day 1

A few problems:
Hardware: I could not manage to solve an issue with the graphics card. Therefore the extended screen (or "extended desktop" for windows user) is not working.
Software:I lost 1 hour trying to figure out how to run R. How stupid I am... It is so easy.
The reaplayer plug-in is not working. Ok. I guess I can stand one more day without listening to the BBC.

My Ubuntu experience- day 0

Ubuntu is running like a breeze. In fact, I've spent 4 hours backing up Vista and my stuff, but the Ubuntu installation took me less than one hour.
Sure there are many things that do not work and I haven't noticed yet. But I have a whole week-end to sort it out... I will keep you informed.

Going Ubuntu

I can not stand Vista anymore. I am a proud owner of a Thinkpad T61, but after 3 months I noticed that things are just getting worse. Vista has lots of bugs, crashes a lot and it is painfully slow.
This week, Vinícius, a geek student of mine, convinced me to try Ubuntu. I downloaded the iso file, burned a CD-ROM and ran it. Everything went surprisingly smooth. In minutes, without any configuration, the notebook was wireless connected and running Firefox faster than ever. I tried OpenOffice and it opened a huge doc file with track changes without any problem.
So, this week-end I am going Ubuntu. In order to prepare for this historical moment, I have printed the instructions and I've downloaded the episodes of Going Linux podcast. This show is co-hosted by Serge Rey, the über economic geographer. (Update: I've just noticed that Serge has his own podcast on Linux installation!)
Any suggestion or advice?

Institutions matter. Really?

What are the causes of the Industrial Revolution? It is amazing that THE most important event in human history remains a mystery. Gregory Clark and James "Reversal of Fortune" Robinson take opposite sides on the issue. Greg has a point when he says that institutions are not everything, but I think he takes his point too far. Robinson is much more convincing.
(Daniel Brook criticizes the weakest point in Farewell to Alms: the biological factors behind the Industrial Revolution)

Rio de Janeiro, 1936

The city looks like a tropical Paris. But the movie is quite misleading. In 1936 Brazil:
- Income per capita was a fifth of the today's
-Life expectancy at birth was 36 years (Arriaga);
- 57% of the population was illiterate;
- Infant mortality was 150 per thousand. Today:28/1000.
I do not miss Brazil in the thirties.

Free trade & the size of government

Kevin O'Rourke is among the top economic historians. His papers with Jeffrey Williamson on the history of globalisation and the role of tariffs are a must.
Now he has turned his attention to the determinants of individual attitudes toward free trade. In a new paper, he and his coauthors show that "government expenditure can boost support for free trade."

Via Vox EU.

US Dollar lows and Gisele Bündchen

Here.

Day of the Dead and the Dismal Science

"Finados", a national holiday in Brazil, is not as entertaining as the Dia de los Muertos in Mexico. So, the post today will be quite morbid.
What is the monetary value of a death of a loved one? That is, what is the monetary value that would take you back to the same indifferent curve? Instead of asking people, this study used happiness studies to calculate it. The results are surprising:

Your partner has the highest value and it worths more than the sum of the your mother and father! Policy recommendation: take care of your partner. He/She is much more important for your happiness than you think.

World Bank & IMF

One new data source and one new report.
Via Gustibus.

From Our Own Correspondent

I listen to the radio about 8 hours a day and FOOC is my favorite radio show. Twice a week ,BBC journalists all over the world tell their personal experiences. Last week, Alan Johnston told his 114 day ordeal in Gaza. Podcast it and take a look at the website that celebrates 50th year of the show.

World Congress of RSAI - Reminder

Deadline approaching for the 2008 World Congress of RSAI in Brazil

Submit your paper at www.aber.fea.usp.br/rsai2008

The 8th World Congress of RSAI will be organized by the Brazilian Regional Science Association (ABER – Associação Brasileira de Estudos Regionais) and will be hosted by the Faculty of Economics, Administration and Accounting of the University of São Paulo, Brazil (www.fea.usp.br), on March 17-19, 2008.

It will have the same format as the regular RSA meetings, with regular sessions, R-sessions, panels, etc.

Papers from all fields in regional science are welcome.

Submit your paper at www.aber.fea.usp.br/rsai2008.

RSAI World Congress 2008 Local Organizing Committee

This is so sad

The Nigerian Space Program.

Via wired.

Bad Geography and Development in Africa

In a QJE forthcoming paper, Nathan Nunn has shown the legacy of slave trade in the current development of Africa. Now he goes one step further. With Diego Puga, the brilliant New Economic Geographer, he has written a paper that argues that the rugged terrain "afforded protection to those being raided during the slave trades. Since the slave trades retarded subsequent economic development, in Africa ruggedness also has had a historical indirect positive effect on income". The title of the paper is: "Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa".

Why do we like beer?

Because the guys that couldn't stand alcohol died of dysentery a long ago. This is just one of the things that I've learned in "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World". The logic goes like this: polluted water is a major threat to human beings, so...

"In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to "pure" fluid" was alcohol. Whatever the risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol's antibacterial properties. Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties... To digest large quantities of (alcohol), you need to be able to boost production of enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases, a trait regulated by a set of genes on chromosome four in human DNA. Many early agrarians lacked that trait, and thus were genetically incapable of "holding their liquor". Consequently, many of them died childless at an early age, either from alcohol abuse or from waterborne diseases... Most of the world's population is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance to alcohol."

BTW, I strongly recommend the book. It provides an amazing account of the role of scientific preconceptions, and it tells the story of the map that started Spatial Analysis. Spoiler: it is a myth that John Snow discovered the source of cholera after drawing his famous map. In fact, he draw it to convince the others that water, and not, miasma was responsible for the spreading of the disease.

I am not sure, but I think this is Art

Solow Growth Model on-line

Brad DeLong has uploaded to google docs his famousspreadsheet that represents the Solow model.

Predictably irrational

It seems that the 2008 blockbuster book will be Predictably Irrational. After all 4 Economics Nobel prize winners - and the mother of the author - strongly recommend the book.

Doing Business 2008

Brazil occupies a grim 122th place. But the map is really cool!

New Input Output Table for Rio Grande do Sul

Great news for those interested in the economy of Rio Grande do Sul. Alexandre Porsse has released the 2003 input-output table (in Portuguese).

Historical Statistics

Mostly Swedish data, but there are international statistics as well.

A conceptual framework for interpreting human history

The forthcoming book by Douglass North, John Wallis and Barry Weingast is available on-line.
In one week the primitive accumulation of pdf files has added 1700 pages to my pile of must read pages.

Via Na Prática.

Acemoglu and the Hawking's Value

If you have read any economic blog this week, you know that Daron Acemoglu's book is available on-line. I am sure that its 1,169 pages are excellent and that it will become the standard graduate textbook on economic growth.
However, I can't help thinking about its Hawking's Value (as I've decided to called it). HV goes like this:

HV=number of copies sold or downloaded*(a/b)

a=number of pages of the book;
b=average number of pages actually read and understood.

For instance, Hawking's Brief History of Time sold 10 million copies of 200 pages each, but the number of pages actually read were, say, around 1 (one). Therefore it has a HV= 2,000,000,000, the highest in history . Back to Acemoglu's book: how many pdf files will rest unopened/unread in our hard disks?

R 101

If you want to learn R, take a look at this R video tutorial.

Via Andrew Gelman and friends.

Income per capita by country 1-2003

GDP per capita when Jesus was walking around? Check out the new version of the Maddison's database: World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2003 AD.

Duílio meets Deirdre

I met Professor Duílio Berni about 10 years ago and he quickly became my intellectual lighthouse. We do not share research interests and I have the feeling that I understand only half of his main points. But every talk with him gives me food for thought for at least one year and the books that he suggests are mind blowing. (Having him as my neighbour in London was one of fondest memories of my sabbatical year).
I've never met Deirdre Mcloskey, but she taught me how to write and research. Her Economic History papers are even better than the methodology ones that made her famous.
Reading Deirdre's blog I had the surprise of finding a question posed by Duílio. He wants to know the reference of the following Deirdre's quote:

"Replete of prices and profits, acres and hand, economic science is the most measurable of all social sciences”.

What a amazing quote! Deirdre did not provide the answer and told Duílio to look for it in her on-line papers.I suspect that there is a non-zero probability that, in fact, Duílio wrote it, but it would be great if somebody could help him find it.

Update: Deirdre's blog is not working today (2nd October). Not my fault, hopefully.

Reports of my dissapearance have been greatly exaggerated...

I'm back. I've underestimated the time and energy necessary to get my life back on track in Brazil. From now on, I will try update the blog daily.
So, let's start with an upbeat post. Scott "Dilbert" Addams, the genius, wrote a sort of eulogy for economists:

"I studied economics in college. One thing I’ve noticed is that other people who have studied economics tend to think a similar way. Some of the similarity is probably because it takes a certain kind of person to be interested in economics in the first place. But I’m convinced that the study of economics changes brains in a way I can identify after about five minutes of conversation. In particular, I think the study of economics makes you relatively immune to cognitive dissonance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

The primary skill of an economist is identifying all of the explanations for various phenomena. Cognitive dissonance is, at its core, the inability to recognize and accept other explanations. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point. The more your brain is trained for economics, the less it is susceptible to cognitive dissonance, or so it seems.

The joke about economists is that they are always using the phrase “On the other hand.” Economists are trained to recognize all sides of an argument. That seems like an easy and obvious skill, but in my experience, the general population lacks that skill. Once people take a side, they interpret any argument on the other side as absurd. In other words, they are relatively susceptible to cognitive dissonance."

Brad Delong at EHA

Delong's talk is available here.
(My blogging activity has been low. Sorry for that.)

Pure Bliss

Yesterday, Joel Mokyr, Richard Easterlin, Jeffrey Williamson and Brad Delong debated the role of economic history on economic policy. Amazing. One of the best sentences:

"Theory is distilled history."
Brad Delong

Coase Workshop 2008

I strongly recommend applying to the event (and to the fellowship). I have very fond memories of the workshop that happened in Rio many years ago:

The Ronald Coase Institute
First Asia Workshop on Institutional Analysis
January 5-10, 2008 Singapore

Co-sponsored by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy/
Asia Competitiveness Institute, National University of Singapore
Apply by September 30, 2007

Attend this inaugural workshop in Asia to
• Learn more about institutional analysis
• Present your current research and receive comments from established scholars
• Become part of a worldwide network of institutional scholars.

Who is eligible?
• Postdoctoral social scientists - early in their careers
• Advanced graduate students - in economics, political science, and other social sciences
• Scholars from developing/transitional countries in Asia are particularly invited to apply.
Participants will be selected on the basis of their research abstracts. Admission is strictly limited,
and the pace is intense. Participants must attend all sessions and give as well as receive feedback.

As a participant, you will
Hear established scholars discuss their strategies to formulate research questions, design
projects, and draw important and practical conclusions.
Make two presentations of your own research
(1) in a small group, receiving faculty guidance
(2) after revisions, to the entire workshop, with discussion following.
Network through close, informal contacts with faculty and workshop alumni from
50 countries who have an enduring interest in institutional analysis.

How to apply (deadline September 30, 2007)
E-mail an abstract - 350 words maximum - of a current research project of yours, plus
a one-page curriculum vitae, to workshop2008sg@coase.org. Work already published
is not eligible.

At the top of your abstract, list the title, your name, and the number of words in the abstract.
Any co-authors must be listed here.

On your one-page CV, list your current professional status and the academic degrees you have
received, with university, year, and field of study. Also include your citizenship, date of birth,
and country of residence. Give as references the names, e-mail addresses, and telephone numbers
of two scholars familiar with you and your work.

As e-mail subject line, use Application for 2008 Singapore Workshop. Please attach your
abstract and CV as Microsoft Word files, using filenames yyy abstract.doc and yyy cv.doc
where yyy is your surname.

Abstracts will be judged on the clarity and importance of the research question, and on their institutional focus. Please do not submit any longer documents, as they will not be read.

Costs
The cost of the workshop - tuition and meals - is $2395 USD. This does not include hotel accommodations or travel expenses.

Some fellowships will be awarded competitively to scholars from developing and transitional countries, for tuition, meals, and hotel accommodations. If you wish to be considered for a fellowship, you must state that in your application. Tuition and meal costs for participants who are Singaporeans, Singapore permanent residents, or faculty members of Singapore universities will be covered through the sponsors.

At the close of the workshop, participants may submit papers based on their workshop projects
to the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, to be considered for publication in a special volume
produced by the School.

For more information about the Ronald Coase Institute and its previous workshops, see
www.coase.org

Economic History Association Meeting

I am alive, but really busy. Now I am on the way to Austin to presentthis paper. Comments are welcome!

Epainos Award 2007

The Epainos Award goes to the best paper presented by a young researcher at ERSA. Yesterday Roberto Picchizzolu, a PhD candidate at LSE, shared the prize with Piyapong Jiwattanakulpaisarn. Roberto's paper is superb and the discussion, leaded by Philip McCann, was amazing. I was lucky enough to be there and I guess that it was the best paper/session of the whole conference.
The abstract goes like this:

Entrepreneurial Risk and the Geographical Concentration of Industries: Evidence from the UK Manufacturing Sector.This paper provides an analysis of the effects that conditions of imperfect information and irreversibility of investment exert on location decisions, and subsequently produce some empirical evidence in support of those theoretical results, by looking into the concentration of manufacturing industries in the UK. We analyse the location decision of a firm that has to undertake a non-recoverable investment in order to enter a new market. Localities are characterised by their level of efficiency. The potential entrant faces two types of uncertainty: 1) industry profits are aleatory and 2) the characteristics of the single localities are unknown. Due to the existence of sunk costs and uncertainty over future profits the potential entrant faces the risk of producing losses from the venture (entrepreneurial risk). Our main hypothesis is that agents will use the location of existing plants in the industry to infer information on the characteristics of the single localities: the existence of an industry in a locality signals “good” local endowments. As a consequence, the expected level of profits conditional on the locality being “active” will be higher than the unconditional. This difference is bigger the higher the variability of industry profits. Our main prediction is that high-risk industries will be more concentrated geographically, ceteris paribus. We test this hypothesis on the geographical distribution of manufacturing activity in the UK. We do so by running a series of linear regressions of NACE Rev.1 4-digit industries’ Ellison and Glaeser’s gammas on a measure of entrepreneurial risk, after controlling for transport costs, natural resource intensity and Marshallian economies of agglomeration. Our results confirm a significant positive effect of entrepreneurial risk on geographical concentration. As additional contributions, a new proxy for vertical linkages is introduced, which performs consistently better than the alternatives used in previous empirical studies, and a discussion on how to proxy for transport costs in studies of the geographical concentration of industries are carried out.

History Of Work Information System

I am at ERSA. But I`ve been working on a historical paper that has to be ready by next week. There is a website that was really useful to this research: History Of Work Information System. The search is great: you type an historical occupation in any language and it shows you its meaning and classification.