Notes After Econ 210a: February 25, 2009: The Economics of Thugs with Spears Who Take Your Stuff
Economics 210a: February 25, 2009: The Economics of Thugs with Spears Who Take Your Stuff...
Domar: In order to have a rich upper class of warriors/administrators/bureaucrats, you need to have:
- sufficient productivity to support an upper class...
- sufficient differential in military effectiveness to make becoming a lord or an unproductive specialist in coercive violence worth the risk...
- scarce land, or an effective "recapture technology" (Cossacks, language competence, black skin as a marker, etc.) to keep your slaves/serfs/debt peons from successfully running away...
Austen and Smith: Colonial-era Caribbean slavery requires:
- guns that European merchants can sell to African kings on the coast...
- prior slave-raiding that can be made more effective and larger scale by guns...
- caravels and equivalent to carry slaves to the Caribbean reliably...
- Europe rich enough to pay for sugar...
- Europe with a taste for sugar...
- Legal systems that will support colonial slavery...
Marx and Engels: Things are not that different:
- formal judicial equality is not substantive equality...
- over time, variance means that some of the rich get richer and others lose their wealth and fall into the proletariat--hence income gets more concentrated...
- Marx believes working-class wages are doomed to remain at "subsistence." It is not clear why. His arguments for rising inequality are, I think, coherent. His arguments for the absolute immiserization of the working class are, I think, not coherent at all...
Didn't get to Engerman and Sokoloff...
