Is It Good If Your Work Becomes More Valuable?
When Something Is Valuable:
- You can either:
- Work hard to make stuff and trade stuff
- Steal it—by fraud, or force, or threat of force
- When property rights are "endogenous", who endogenizes them, and how?
- As with so much else, these historical arguments start with the 14th Century Bubonic Plague
- The Brenner thesis, and the Brenner debate
- Is “freedom” really free? Naidu and Yuchtman
- What did the slave trade do to Africa in the very long run? Nunn
- What did maintaining a slavery/debt peonage system do to Latin America (and the U.S. South) in the very long run? Engerman and Sokoloff
First Huge Fact: Growth since 1870 (1800?) (1500?)
- Measured:
- Bottom third like our pre-industrial ancestors: $1000/year incomes “subsistence”
- Middle third: 15x
- Top third: 75x
- “True”:
- Bottom third: “subsistence”
- Middle third?
- Top third: 75 x 32 = 2000x subsistence
Second Huge Fact: Divergence since 1870 (1800?) (1500?)
- Countries in a 10-1 range (3-1 for 90%+ of world population) in 1800
- Countries in a 100-1 range (40-1 for 90%+ of world population) today
- As I have said before, this simply should not be in a globalized world—this should not be at all…
- Does unfree labor have a role to play?
- Gellner: “In a domination-prone world, economic ‘rationality’ is not rational: those who work hard see themselves deprived of the fruits of their labor only by those in power…”
Readings: Slavery and Serfdom:
- Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff (1994), "Factor Endowments, Institutions and Differential Paths of Development among New World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States," NBER Working Paper no. 10066 <http://papers.nber.org/papers/h0066>
- Robert Brenner (1976), "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe", Past & Present 70 (Feb.), pp. 30-75 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/650345>
- Suresh Naidu and Noam Yuchtman. 2013. “Coercive Contract Enforcement: Law and the Labor Market in Nineteenth Century Industrial Britain,” American Economic Review 103 (February): 107–144. <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.103.1.107>
- Nathan Nunn (2008) “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 123 (February): 139–176. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25098896.pdf>
