7 Comments

Ah! To be an undergraduate again knowing what I know now. I'd learn so much more!

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Hey Brad,

As someone who is trying to move away from excel, why are you using python instead of RStudio? There's a movement in my industry, real estate appraisal, to switch to RStudio but very few are using python.

Thanks

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I would be very interested to see what you would recommend to students interested in the institutional framework of the 1870's take-off. You touch on this is STU -- the corporation and the research lab -- but there is no deep dive. As Paul Seabright says in his review of STU: "After nodding to the threefold blessings of "full" globalization, the modern corporation and the industrial research laboratory, he tells us a little about globalization, but nothing, for example, about how many industrial laboratories there were, or how they functioned, or about how or when the "modern corporation" came into existence, or what difference it made."

Obviously, STU couldn't cover everything in depth, and a course in world economic history even less so. Still, I would be interested to see what you would recommend for readings if you did a week or so of classes on this. I suspect the problem may be the the good texts are rather too unwieldy for ugrad classes. Chandlers' The Visible Hand for example.

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This is such a very good question. I wish I had an equivalent answer. Yes, Chandler. And Thomas Hughes, "American Genesis". And Vaclav Smil...

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Many thanks for the tips. Will follow up on Hughes and Smil. Part of my interest is Schumpeter's claim that modern corporation has rationalized and routinized innovation and made the entrepreneur obsolescent. From what I can tell he has the same late 19th century period in mind. Though he does not give a lot of detail or analysis for such an important claim.

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Sir,

One thing to always keep in mind: we all are just trying to make sense of the world based on our own experience. It has always been thus, and many of our errors stem from not understanding the implications of this.

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"Unfortunately, that rate of progress and transition was much too fast for any process of gradient-descent societal institutional evolution to cope well."

Of maybe we just made some bad decisions. [Bismarck and Tojo might NOT have gone for empire when trade was lower cost way of economic integration. ] But this is the part that would need to be fleshed out.

I think this is just one place where the "Council of Economic Advisors" view in each era would be useful. ("Just let the Goths settle and tax them, Valens!)

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