Possible Weekly Online Discussion Thread Questions for þe Spring 2021 Instantiation of "Þe History of Economic Growth" :: Econ 135
I need to cut these 40 down to 15, one per week. Suggestions?
Thinking: Why would one want to think (or not think) “like an economist”? What benefits (and what costs) would doing so bring?
Course Organization: What do you think is likely to go wrong with this course structure, as we have outlined it so far?
Malthusian Economies: What are the key requirements for a society to get stuck in a Malthusian configuration?
Malthusian Economies II: How reliable is our inference that the typical human back before 1900 was desperately poor—had a standard of living that we would see as about $2.50/day?
“Efflorescences”: Do you think the typical person was better off living in an “efflorescent” society like the Roman Empire under the Antonine Dynasty or in classical Athens, or in some non-efflorescent time?
The Slow Agrarian-Age Pace of Invention: Which proposed explanations of the very slow pace of invention and innovation back before 1500 did you find most convincing, and why?
Inventive Ancients: Is there a good way to reconcile the belief that slavery meant that work and ingenuity were scorned with the artisanal creativity and care shown in, for example the Anti-Kythera device? (cf.: Jo Marchand, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Mogi Vicentini, & Michael Wright: The Anti-Kythera Device <https://www.icloud.com/pages/0oi9x6SqEHmpYIfDjc_bBsNkw> <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/antikythera.pdf>
Modes of Domination: What were the typical patterns of social organization back before 1870 by which upper classes extracted enough wealth to become leisured and well-nourished, and then how did upper classes maintain those patterns?
Aristotle: Was it worthwhile to assign the first scroll of Aristotle’s Politics? Does he have anything useful to say to us?
Growth Theory: What underpins the theoretical conclusion reached this week that ideas and invention are much more important than thrift and capital accumulation in driving economic growth? To what extent is this theoretical conclusion solid and reliable? Do you think it is correct?
William Baumol & Michael Polanyi: What struck you as important things in the Michael Polanyi <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/michael-polanyi-republic-growth.pdf> or in the William Baumol <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-baumol-entrepreneurship.pdf> readings that were not mentioned by Professor DeLong in the lectures?
Breaking Through: Greg Clark wants to draw big & bold conclusions from the numbers he has collected on English construction worker wages. How solid are those big & bold conclusions? How could we investigate whether they are correct or not?
Strait Is the Gate: How near run a thing does your leading of Allen lead you to think that the industrial revolution was? If we could rewind history, what do you think the chances are that human civilization today, in 2021, would be industrial, rather than in some near-stagnation agrarian-age or commercial-imperial gunpowder empire configuration?
The Slow Spread of Industrialization: Which of the reasons that Robert Allen adduces for the slow and partial spread of industrialization do you find most convincing? Which do you find least?
Why Not China First, Anyway?: Which of the reasons that David Landes adduces as an important reason why the industrial revolution took place in Northwest Europe rather than Southern China do you find most persuasive? Which do you find least?
The “Rise of the West”: Starting in 1770, the economies of the "Global North" began to pull substantially ahead of the world average. Starting in 1870, the speed of this pulling-ahead grew substantially. How can we understand the coexistence of (a) a world in which humans communicate, and in which ideas are the most important pieces of economic growth, and (b) the substantial growth of global inequality after 1870?
Globalization and Divergence: Starting around 1870, the world became fully globalized. Instead of taking months to communicate, it took hours. Goods could be shipped all around the globe for pennies. One would have thought this would make the transfer of useful technologies and effective institutions easier. So why do you think Pritchett found the facts of economic divergence that he did?
Hopes for Convergence?: Are there any good reasons to hope that 2020-2100 will see more in the way of “convergence” than 1870-2020 has?
Net Impact of Globalization and Colonialism: To what extent do you see the global south today ahead or behind of where it would otherwise have wound up now as a result of colonialism and globalization? How would you go about assessing whether your interpretation is in fact the right one?
W. Arthur Lewis: Evolution of the International Economic Order <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-lewis-evolution-selections.pdf>: How would we go about finding out whether Arthur Lewis is right in his belief that over 1870-1914 the world was divided into rich and poor countries by the workings of the global market and by migration, rather than by the more direct consequences of imperialist rule?
Modern Economic Growth: DeLong has a theory for why the last watershed-boundary crossing—the acceleration of ideas growth around 1870—took place. Suppose that DeLong is wrong. What is your guess as to what other historical factors and causes would have been most likely to cause that watershed-crossing?
“All established orders and institutions are steamed away”: What do you think were the most important consequences for the world, outside of the narrowly economic ones, of the fact that the world average ideas-growth rate after 1870 was not 0.035%/year or 0.15% or even 0.44%, but instead 2.06%/year?
International Economic (and Political) Hegemony: To start off the discussion of "hegemony", what lessons should the U.S. learn to guide its conduct today from Britain's experience of the superpower succession of itself by the U.S. a century and more ago? And what lessons should China's government learn to guide its conduct today from America's experience of rising to superpower status a century and more ago?
American Exceptionalism: Brainstorm some ideas about why even the most technologically competent other economies had great difficulty in matching America’s productivity performance in the 1870-1916 era of American hegemony. Speculate on how you might test and evaluate some of your ideas.
Thirty Glorious Years: Lots of hypotheses have been thrown out for why the Post-WWII "glorious years" in the global north were so peaceful, harmonious, and prosperous. What pieces of evidence should we go look for to try to judge between these hypotheses?
Conflict Between Systems: Back in 1990 or so, at the end of the Cold War, Frank Fukuyama wrote <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-fukuyama-1989-end-of-history.pdf>: “In the past century, there have been two major challenges to liberalism, those of fascism and of communism.... Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea as well. What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal moral revulsion against it, since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but its lack of success. After the war, it seemed to most people that German fascism as well as its other European and Asian variants were bound to self-destruct. There was no material reason why new fascist movements could not have sprung up again after the war in other locales, but for the fact that expansionist ultranationalism, with its promise of unending conflict leading to disastrous military defeat, had completely lost its appeal. The ruins of the Reich chancellery as well as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed this ideology on the level of consciousness as well as materially, and all of the pro-fascist movements spawned by the German and Japanese examples like the Peronist movement in Argentina or Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army withered after the war…” How does this position need to be revised in light of all the history that has flowed under the bridge since 1990?
Moral Burdens for Economic Development: What responsibility does the history of the development of underdevelopment impose upon the rich of the global north with respect to attempting to eliminate dire poverty and accelerate uneven and halting development in the global south?
Decline of Hierarchy: For much of human history, putting up barriers that keep opportunity and status in the hands of a small group has been much more the rule than the exception. Why is it that in the 20th century there has been a broad movement for "inclusion"? What is different about the long 20th century that drives this very different sociological current than we ever saw before in the human past? Or are the sociological currents different—is hierarchy based on ethnicity, class, gender, etc. truly on the decline?
Inequality: To what extent should we view inequality of the rough amount we have today as an evil to be dealt with, and to what extent should we just view it as a tax on ourselves that is inescapable given all the problems of motivating humans to cooperate and contribute to society?
Plutocracy: Brainstorm some ideas about why it is that the more complex human societies become, the more it becomes a possibility that there will be superrich who will exercise an enormous share of power over society. Speculate as to whether and why such superrich are an asset or a liability for society
Behind the Iron Curtain: Really existing socialism: So you build an economy that is not governed by the market, it is rather one big bureaucracy. That then leads to six questions: (a) How does that work, exactly? (b) And how well does that work? (c) Specifically, why was the Soviet Union unable to adjust its economy in the 1980s to deliver higher agricultural output levels to its population? (d) Is the Soviet Union best viewed as "colonized", as part of the global south—as much of Asia and Africa were colonized by European masters, as much of Latin America was colonized by its own internal landlord notionally conquistadores-descended elite—and so its relative economic performance ought to be judged by a global south rather than a global north yardstick? (e) Why, again, did Lenin not think that the market system could be used by the party? Why did it have to be eliminated? (f) In the absence of Stalin's heavy industrialization and other programs, what do you think would have been likely to happen during World War II?
Hyperglobalization: In what ways, if any, was the hyperglobalized world that emerged after 1995 qualitatively different from the globalized world that had emerged after 1950, or the earlier first wave globalized world that had emerged after 1870?
East Asian Miracles: To what extent should we be surprised by China's successful economic growth trajectory since the overthrow by Deng Xiaoping Maoist policies and practices? To what extent should we not be surprised, and say that we would've expected China to do this given common institutional and cultural patterns along the Asian Pacific rim? Is it your sense of the institutions that China adopted and used after Deng Xiaoping's overthrow of Maoist policies and practices were superior to or inferior to those adopted for successful growth in other East Asian economies?
Catching-Up and Overtaking: East Asian institutions and practices that were very successful in catchup and convergence do not appear to have been successful in “overtaking”. The United States is still preeminent in productivity in most of manufacturing. Aside from vehicles (Japan and Germany), precision equipment (Germany and Switzerland), and semiconductor foundries (South Korea—Samsung—and Taiwan—TSMC) U.S. firms do not export because U.S. wages are so high, not because U.S. workers are unproductive. Speculate on why institutions that are so very good as long as there is somebody more productive to copy and emulate do not work so well when one’s economy is already at the world’s technological frontier.
Implementing State-Led Development: Why have other regions of the world been so notably unsuccessful in executing the policies for successful economic development and convergence that Peter Evans outlines in the chapter from his book Embedded Autonomy that we read?
The Southern Cone: Arthur Lewis and many others had theories that strongly suggest that the growth experience of the southern cone of South America since 1870—Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil—should have been like that of other temperate resource-rich economies like Australia and Canada. Why do you think such theories do not work?
The Color Line in the Global North: Suppose we were to consider the northern & western United States, the southeastern United States, and the Union of South Africa. Where would you look to try to understand their comparative economic growth experiences?
Post-WWII Sub-Saharan African Retardation: What are the mechanisms through which Nathan Nunn argues that the Atlantic slave trade of 1500-1850 has left Sub-Saharan Africa impoverished today? What are the mechanisms through which Robert Bates argues that the way that decolonization was conducted has left Sub-Saharan Africa impoverished today? Do you see good reasons to expect Africa's relative economic performance to be better in the future than it has been since WWII?
The Great Recession: How was it that a mere $500 billion of bad mortgage debt in the United States was able, in 2007 and 2008, to cause a $20 trillion loss of value on global financial markets? Why did not global north governments do the obvious thing in 2008-2012—print money and buy things to get back to full employment?
The Anæmic Recovery: In your view, is the balance of the evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the productivity-growth slowdown in the global north arriving with the Great Recession—in 2007—is predominantly a transitory, cyclical phenomenon? Or is the balance of the evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the slowdown is predominantly a permanent, structural phenomenon?
Gain up to 6 points per thread by either (a) being one of the first five to give a substantive answer to (one of) the question(s) with which I launch the thread, and then giving a substantive and relevant comment on one of your peers’ comments; or (b) making three substantive and relevant comments on one or more of your peers’ comments. Your discussion-thread points are capped at 30 for the semester. (In short: you need to contribute to five threads to max out your discussion-thread points.)
This course is adapted—taken—from one taught at Harvard as Econ 1342. I have filed off some but not all of the serial numbers. Smart things here should be attributed to Melissa Dell, who is innocent of all responsibility for dumb things here.
I do like these questions. You need to cut them down, so I would start with:
#1 (and 2)This is too meta, and students probably won't take it seriously. Likewise #2 Dive right in with a Malthusian question.
#11 has the "that was not mentioned by Prof DeLong" clause that will probably be a big dampener on discussion. Maybe if you mentioned 3 of them and had them pick?
#20 attempts to get students to think empirically about a question that is most often addressed ideologically. This is great. You know your students better than me, can they do this? #19 I think does this better.
#26 is a great thing to think about, but it's kind of long-winded. I'd ditch it. An ideal discussion question, to my mind, is easy to state and hard to answer.
#31 as a practical matter has too many moving parts. It's hard to focus on as a discussion question.
That's the stuff that jumps out. Again, I think all the questions are good, but I think some work better as online discussion prompters than others. That's just my own intuition speaking.
Wow, these are great questions! Your lucky students are much cleverer than I remember us being when I was a student. Or perhaps it is only that Melissa Dell is much cleverer than our professors were.
The questions about course organization and content give currently existing students an opportunity to vent about how much they dislike Aristotle but mainly seem valuable to future generations of students. I wonder whether your current students are happy to give up 2/15 of their questions to the future. But maybe they are as selfless as they are clever.
Also, LMAO at question #1 ... which you seem to need to think like an economist to answer?