“West” or “Dover Circle-Plus”? A student asked me why, in my lectures earlier this week, I kept on referring to the “North Atlantic” rather than the “Western” economies. Why did I use the first rat...
I think the ideas of "cores" is far too reductive and obfuscates more than it illuminates, and is ridiculously Anglocentric. It completely misses major civilizations like the Islamic empires, the Indus valley, the American Mayans and Aztecs, and the African empires. The circles in 1800 and 1900 are also far too small, as they exclude Italy and Germany - Germany was the most scientifically advanced country in the world in 1900 and Italy produced Galileo, Volta, Avogadro and LaGrange among many others. So I'm not sure how useful the idea of "cores" are, and they're too subjective and ill-defined to build an argument on.
[if you must stop betting when your bankroll runs out]
You do not need to consider debt, or even the possibility of bankruptcy, to make Constantin's math work. Think of a geometric Brownian motion with mu < sigma^2 / 2, sigma > 0. The game will never end, you'll just spend eternity with wealth arbitrarily close to zero.
I wouldn't dismiss cultural continuity out of hand. It's hard not to trace western European civilization back to Rome, especially with the Roman Catholic Church dominant for over a thousand years. It's hard not to trace Rome back to the Mediterranean colonizers of an earlier era, the Greeks and Phoenicians. It's hard not to trace their origins back to ancient Egypt and the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent. There is linguistic continuity, material continuity and cultural continuity. If you accept the past has having any explanatory power, you have to account for this.
I agree that this culture has extended far and wide, sometimes by colonization, sometimes driven by cultural and material exchange. Italy didn't develop its silk industry from the whole cloth. China doesn't design integrated circuits based on Taoist mysticism. Those growing and shifting blobs are still useful. Perhaps the shifting patterns could be better illustrated with arrows to indicate flow. (You could probably derive a tree of influence from a comparative study of material and culture much as Greenberg and his successors built those linguistic family trees more recently validated by genetic evidence.)
If you look at our modern industrial civilization, it is hard not to see its influence in material culture, and the exigencies of global trade have enforced a homogeneity of business culture that has flowed into everyday life. You can even track its expansion in terms of declining fertility rates suggesting its pervasiveness.
What do you want to call it? Dover Circle-Plus emphasizes its origin in the wake of the wool trade axis. I'd go for something with "industrial" in it since people have heard of the industrial revolution and are generally familiar with its region of origin.
I think the ideas of "cores" is far too reductive and obfuscates more than it illuminates, and is ridiculously Anglocentric. It completely misses major civilizations like the Islamic empires, the Indus valley, the American Mayans and Aztecs, and the African empires. The circles in 1800 and 1900 are also far too small, as they exclude Italy and Germany - Germany was the most scientifically advanced country in the world in 1900 and Italy produced Galileo, Volta, Avogadro and LaGrange among many others. So I'm not sure how useful the idea of "cores" are, and they're too subjective and ill-defined to build an argument on.
[if you must stop betting when your bankroll runs out]
You do not need to consider debt, or even the possibility of bankruptcy, to make Constantin's math work. Think of a geometric Brownian motion with mu < sigma^2 / 2, sigma > 0. The game will never end, you'll just spend eternity with wealth arbitrarily close to zero.
I wouldn't dismiss cultural continuity out of hand. It's hard not to trace western European civilization back to Rome, especially with the Roman Catholic Church dominant for over a thousand years. It's hard not to trace Rome back to the Mediterranean colonizers of an earlier era, the Greeks and Phoenicians. It's hard not to trace their origins back to ancient Egypt and the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent. There is linguistic continuity, material continuity and cultural continuity. If you accept the past has having any explanatory power, you have to account for this.
I agree that this culture has extended far and wide, sometimes by colonization, sometimes driven by cultural and material exchange. Italy didn't develop its silk industry from the whole cloth. China doesn't design integrated circuits based on Taoist mysticism. Those growing and shifting blobs are still useful. Perhaps the shifting patterns could be better illustrated with arrows to indicate flow. (You could probably derive a tree of influence from a comparative study of material and culture much as Greenberg and his successors built those linguistic family trees more recently validated by genetic evidence.)
If you look at our modern industrial civilization, it is hard not to see its influence in material culture, and the exigencies of global trade have enforced a homogeneity of business culture that has flowed into everyday life. You can even track its expansion in terms of declining fertility rates suggesting its pervasiveness.
What do you want to call it? Dover Circle-Plus emphasizes its origin in the wake of the wool trade axis. I'd go for something with "industrial" in it since people have heard of the industrial revolution and are generally familiar with its region of origin.