Republicans: Worse than You Can Imagine (Bobby Jindal Edition)
The Emerging Democratic Majority

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...


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