American Economic History Midterm This Friday!
Here are my slides for the pre-midterm review class... These are the things I want to have handy today, both to talk about the format and the types of questions that will be on the exam and also to...
Here are my slides for the pre-midterm review class... These are the things I want to have handy today, both to talk about the format and the types of questions that will be on the exam and also to answer substantive questions about the course that come up during the course of the class…
(yes, there is an error in the answer chosen for question #5)
(Parenthetically, the illustration to the “Why Do Economics” slide: I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a picture of John Maynard Keynes talking to Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, W. Arthur Lewis, and Claudia Goldin. It pretty much failed—but it failed most extremely in that Arthur Lewis definitely looks Afro-Caribbean and Claudia Goldin is a person of XX-ness. I wonder if programmers have been frantically unwoking ChatGPT? For it seems to me very odd that the internet-footprint association of “male, elderly, overdressed” with the word “economist” is so outweighing explicit references to W. Arthur and Claudia D. Claudia D., by now, must surely have a very impressive internet word-association footprint with which to tickle ChatGPT’s simulated neural network, no?)
We start with the title slide, followed by slides on exam format, sample questions, and exam philosophy—this is for the most part a “police the reading” exam, in that the questions on it should be easy if you have done the reading, but not so easy if you have not. Then come two slides reminding students of what kind of course this is—an economic history course—and why such a combination might be better than either “pure” history or “pure” economics.
That brings us all the way to the end of the slides that I expect to put up. Later slides in the deck are to use to answer questions asked about the substance of the course, week-by-week.
The way the course is going, it is not a standard chronological history with a Grand Narrative. It is, rather, episodes. In each week, readings are background, Monday lecture sets the stage with interesting economics and economics-related issues, Wednesday does calculations bringing economic models and methods to bear on those issues, and Friday I am reserving what would otherwise be lecture-prep and lecture time to quiz each of the 150 students one-on-one so I can figure out what they are thinking.
So far we have done:
WEEK 1: Introduction: “American Exceptionalism”: Is America exceptional and thus worth studying for reasons other than that we happen to be here—or, rather, in what ways has America been and is now exceptional, and how does that matter?
WEEK 2: American Economic Growth in Long-Run Global Perspective: What is the shape, historical and global, of human economic growth—and how does America fit into that bigger picture?
WEEK 3: The Conquest-Settlement Resource-Grab Economy: What is overly politely called “the frontier” and its role in American history—How much did it matter for what America had become by 1880 that it believed for both utilitarian and sacred reasons that it has a “Manifest Destiny” to conquer a resource-rich continent? 60%…
WEEK 4: Slavery, Civil War, & After: Who really benefitted most from the “peculiar institution” of Southern plantation slavery?—and how much?
Still to come, after this WEEK 5: Review & Midterm, are:
WEEK 6: American Exceptionalism, 1789-2025: Comparative Advantage & Industrial Policy—What was the balance of economic forces and factors that diverted America from the standard resource-heavy economic configuration of “economies of northwest European settlement”?
WEEK 7: The 2nd Industrial Revolution, 1850-1910: Technological Change—What factors transformed America from an 0.4%/year technology-growth economy before 1870 to a 2.5%/year technology-growth economy after 1870?
WEEK 8: Immigration: Labor Economics—What would America be like today if it had not been an immigrant welcoming and assimilating society?
WEEK 9: Feminism, 1776 to Present: Feminist Economics—it ought to be 1/3 of economics, and it ain’t, so what role did economic factors play in the decline of High Patriarchy we have seen over the past century and a half?
WEEK 10: The Mass Production Economy, 1908 to 1980: Increasing Returns & Industrial Organization—where did Big Business as we have known it come from, and what difference did its emergence make for how the American economy has worked and works today?
WEEK 11: The Social-Democratic New Deal Order: Political Economy—How did America become and for a good long while remain a social-democratic society of Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government, and what differences did that make vis-à-vis a continuation of something like the Belle Époque Pseudo-Classical Semi-Liberal Gilded Age Order?
WEEK 12: The Rise of Silicon Valley, 1950 to 2025: Invention, Innovation, & Finance—from the Mass-Production through the Globalized Value-Chain to the Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy.
WEEK 13: Inequality & Economic Mobility, 1945 to 2025: Human Capital—How much difference did it make that we shifted from the New Deal Order of the Mass-Production Economy to the Second Gilded-Age Neoliberal Order of the Globalized Value-Chain Economy?
WEEK 14: The Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy & The Future, 2000 to ?: What comes next?—& how does what has come before illuminate it?
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On racialization, wasn't travel technology a huge factor, too? The ability to move quickly to new places with very large aggregations of internally similar yet comparatively weird-looking humans? Didn't that experience fairly invite the "obvious" naive conclusion that is "race"?