Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads: Economic History
Kevin Drum: What Made Marxism So Deadly?: "[Noah] Smith has the causation backward here...
Paul Rincon: Hun migrations 'linked to deadly Justinian Plague': "Eske Willerslev, Peter de Barros Damgaard and others... sequenced genomes... recovered DNA from a strain of plague related to the one responsible for the Justinian Plague...
Noah Smith: Remember Karl Marx for the many things he got wrong: "Marx didn’t make it to 200, but the ideas he injected into the global conversation and the ideologies that bear his name far outlasted the German economist and philosopher...
History, biography, and fiction are the queens of the humanities because we think via narrative: David Robson: Culture-Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories: "The perfect summer blockbuster. A handsome king... superhuman strength... insufferable arroganc... wreak[s] havoc...
The well-worth reading Ryan Cooper trolls me: Ryan Cooper: It's time to normalize Karl Marx: "For elite American economists, Marx has long been viewed as absolutely anathema, if not some kind of demon...
Craig Palsson: Small Farms, Large Transaction Costs: Incomplete Property Rights and Structural Change in Haiti
Peter Baehr (2001): The "Iron Cage" and the "Shell as Hard as Steel": Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: "In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehäuse that modern capitalism has created...
J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, Tim L. Squires, and David N. Weil: The Global Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity: Nature, History, and the Role of Trade: "We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers...
Jane Humphries (2013): The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution: "The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective...
Susan Pfeiffer et al.: Discernment of mortality risk associated with childbirth in archaeologically derived forager skeletons: "An obstetric dilemma may have been a persistent characteristic of human evolution...
Andrew Carnegie (1889): Wealth: "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth...
John Stuart Mill (1848, 1871): Principles of Political Economy: "Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being...
Prateek Raj: How merchant guilds became obsolete: "For much of human history, markets were embedded in relationships.... Merchant guilds... associations of wholesale traders were networked, and were considered reliable...
Òscar Jordà, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, Alan Taylor: The rate of return on everything: "Returns of major asset classes in the advanced economies over the last 150 years...
