The bit about how in the “16th and 17th century in England, the political culture changed from ‘divine right of kings’ to ‘popular sovereignty’” got me to thinking about how if I had to do it over again, I would reverse a lot of the order of the books I read concerning English and European history generally. This may be because before I got into reading history a lot, I remember being impressed with Why Nations Fail. When I first read it what seems like so long ago, I was impressed with its breadth and insight. Reopening it now, maybe not so much anymore.
With that in mind, I am going to suggest to younger readers with limited budgets that before going out and dropping money on anything out of the AJR oeuvre, that they might consider undertaking some free reading that I at least wish that I had had at a much earlier age.
As a starting point to understanding the English civil wars, the birth of liberalism, and the historiography of English economics, I wish I had first read Town life in the fifteenth century, by Mrs. J. R Green (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50392 ). This provides a highly readable account of the “fist fight” between institutions involving the king, church, and townspeople in England over taxes, property rights, and the duties of social order. I think it provides a useful context for considering the English civil wars, whose historical importance are difficult to understate, as well as providing me a with a real example of how in reading history it is easy to overlook the importance of isolated and local struggles and events.
To connect the 15th century to today, the second free book I would recommend is Leonard Hobhouse’s Liberalism (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28278 ). It traces the intellectual currents at play in the rise and fall of the free cities through the civil wars through the classical liberal thinkers and beyond all the way up through Gladstone and the new liberals, which in a way provides a liberal pedigree for the social democracy which Acemoglu seems to see as a pinnacle of human achievement if perhaps not the end of history. Classical liberalism is maybe better understood in the context of the numerous schisms with which liberalism was beset historically.
To understand institutional limits and failures, and how out of control fist fights can get despite all the rationalism in the world, as well as to provide a broader historical context for the historical origins of modern institutions, Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/tocqueville-the-old-regime-and-the-revolution-1856 ) is a good, short and engrossing book with which to consider that epochal event.
If you really want to drop some coin reading about the history of institutions, though, I’m guessing your money would be just as well spent on Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition or Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. However, I haven’t read any of the recent AJR books and they may be really wonderful as well, but at least from my experience, I would have been a much more critical reader of theirs if I had originally had the free books above under my belt.
Evan’s delightful and apt description of culture as a “fist fight” might suggest that even economists need to embrace the cautious and contextualized approach of historicism and reject universal and fundamental laws of explanation. Maybe focused historical, anthropological, and sociological approaches and case studies are not so bad after all? Perhaps many of us might benefit from paying as much attention to the Royal Historical Society, Wolfson, and Pollard prizes as we do the econ Nobel?
And perhaps because Mommsen’s History of Rome is one of my favorite of such histories, and because it is institutionally focused as well, maybe noting that the Nobel prizes have tended to recognize history writing with the literature prize, we might consider that much of what AJR are getting at has been addressed by literature Nobelists. AJR are big on colonialism as the big explanation for everything and the literature prize in 2021 went to Abdulrazak Gurnah for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism,” so one is tempted to think that current anti-colonial fervor has much to do with these prize awards. But there is a longer history and some very interesting and worthwhile older Nobel-recognized work to consider.
Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People starts out with the Roman conquest of the British isles. But in opposition to his imperialism, we also have Nobelist Rabindranath Tagore’s interesting take on institutions, culture, and change:
“Civilisation must be judged and prized, not by the amount of power it has developed, but by how much it has evolved and given expression to, by its laws and institutions, the love of humanity. The first question and the last which it has to answer is, Whether and how far it recognises man more as a spirit than a machine? Whenever some ancient civilisation fell into decay and died, it was owing to causes which produced callousness of heart and led to the cheapening of man's worth; when either the state or some powerful group of men began to look upon the people as a mere instrument of their power; when, by compelling weaker races to slavery and trying to keep them down by every means, man struck at the foundation of his greatness, his own love of freedom and fair-play. Civilization can never sustain itself upon cannibalism of any form. For that by which alone man is true can only be nourished by love and justice.”
Tagore thus seems imminently linkable to the AJR vision.
But the literature Nobels also provide us with interesting competing explanations. My favorite in this department Nobelist Henryk in whose work themes of the Polish positivists were developed and communicated. Polish positivists sought to gain independence for partioned Poland through a rational course of development by mass education and building physical infrastructure to allow their societ to function as an integrated "social organism." Such notions of indigenous cultural agency seem incompatible with AJR’s colonialism-centric approach.
Other great works of Nobel-recognized historical literature that might be profitably examined in relation to AJR include Mario Vargas Llosa (I’d recommend The War of the End of the World and Conversation in the Cathedral as starters), Ivo Andric (“There are no buildings that have been built by chance…”), Johannes Jensen’s The Fall of the King, and Waladyslaw Remont’s The Peasants.
Perhaps there is ambiguity at the heart of all great literature and that is why the Nobel literature prizes would seem to a offer a different sort of value that is not possible through the type of historical literature recognized by the economics Nobel prize?
McCloskey has actively studied the interplay between culture and institutions ( for 20 years, if I am not mistaken). It's very unfortunate that the extensive research -- such as summarized in The Bourgeois Virtues, the ethics for an age of commerce, and other books of the series -- gets much less attention it deserves.
I’m puzzled by her association of Trump with statism.
Or rather, how can she lean left if she doesn’t approve how thoroughly the left places government in the seat once occupied by other authorities, from the simplest to the most sublime?
I guess liberty is so paramount for McCloskey that the difference between the modern right and the modern left in America is negligible. Both are indistinguishably statist.
I’ll venture a guess that the government’s paternalism down to putting the thoughts in your head (and associated necessary coercion re people’s pocketbooks) could expand like the sun but if people could cut hair without a license, or go boating without putting safety jackets on, that would satisfy her supposed anti-statist itch.
Although she has a pleasingly if slightly affected bitchy tone, so reading her secret econ diaries would probably be fun.
I have been going back and forth trying to decide whether you are being intentionally ironic in saying that McCloskey has 'a pleasingly if slightly affected bitchy tone,' and whose 'secret econ diaries would probably be fun' to read, or alternatively, you are blithely unaware of the irony. I'm leaning towards the former. Either way, it is highly amusing.
I didn’t mean it in a salacious way; rather, someone who uses that voice in public writing, is bound to be even more candid and unfiltered, in private, about the matters of the day. I’d be disappointed if not.
The obviously rejoinder to their body of work is the simple question, "where does culture come from?" In other words, why not simply acknowledge that it is people that drive wealth creation and some people are smarter than others which is why we see the 'global south' lagging Asia and Europe (and the Anglo world) in wealth. That said, institutions obviously matter in extreme cases -- see the Korean peninsula for a striking example.
The demand is for explanations that are compatible with The Narrative and The Agenda. The Narrative is that all peoples are the same and all nations could develop equally well if only they could implement the secret sauce recipe of the right set of institutional arrangements and cultural habits. That some nations got richer than others was just a combination of luck, timing, and, essentially, theft. The Agenda is to insist not just on the legitimacy of the state's role in intervening to ensure all institutions are """inclusive""" (a euphemism for you-know-what), but to go further and claim that such perpetual state supervision and intervention is indispensable for prosperity.
Except that Venezuela was once one of the richest countries and for most of history China has been rather poor. It mostly still is. And then there's Russia. Just a guess but I bet you'd find some countries in Africa above average.
I'm not saying your premise is wholly wrong but given all locales have a substantial minority well above the top of the bell and into the right tail, I'm doubtful it is primary.
The prize choice seems reflective of the period we’re in. I’m an outsider with no Economics credentials, commenting when I probably shouldn’t, but this makes me roll my eyes. Hope they use the money well.
I have long called the culture of the West “Christian capitalism”. Treating all humans as Images of God, with free will, and markets that allow win-win transactions between people.
Secularism has always filled the God shaped hole in people’s hearts, with worse-for-society alternate values. So has anti-capitalism.
Neither is perfect, but they’re the best humans can do.
When Evans spoke of religious piety being institutionalized by politicians I couldn't help but think of woke politics as a secular version of that.. Of course proponents would see it from the oppressed-oppressor viewpoint. They are exerting pressure for reform to hold the Leviathan in check, as she also notes.
This Evans’ post is one of the best econ posts I’ve read on Substack. So many quotable paragraphs and interesting topics to explore. I’m putting Alice Evans above Dan Williams in my ranking of all-star FIT players. Thanks Arnold.
The main conclusion of their new paper is that their framework enriches the study of the codetermination of political, institutional and cultural outcomes. A few days ago in replying to "What's one underrated big idea?", the first of five questions for Politico (10/11/24), Rohit Krishnan claimed:
"We end up stuck with Berkson’s paradox, where the more we try to find something at the very top of a distribution by measuring ever so finely, the very attributes you’re measuring it with become anticorrelated rather than correlated."
Question: How relevant do you think Bergson's paradox is to assess a statistical analysis of the codetermination of the outcomes mentioned by Acemoglu and Robinson?
Arnold - I see a half dozen good looking books in Evans’ post. If you’ve read any of them, do you recommend any of them, and where in the hierarchy would you put them relative to Albion’s Seed?
A book was recommended on AK's substack three or four weeks ago. I think by him. I've been meaning to go back and hunt for it but that title sounds familiar. Is it the one? Do you know which post mentioned it?
The bit about how in the “16th and 17th century in England, the political culture changed from ‘divine right of kings’ to ‘popular sovereignty’” got me to thinking about how if I had to do it over again, I would reverse a lot of the order of the books I read concerning English and European history generally. This may be because before I got into reading history a lot, I remember being impressed with Why Nations Fail. When I first read it what seems like so long ago, I was impressed with its breadth and insight. Reopening it now, maybe not so much anymore.
With that in mind, I am going to suggest to younger readers with limited budgets that before going out and dropping money on anything out of the AJR oeuvre, that they might consider undertaking some free reading that I at least wish that I had had at a much earlier age.
As a starting point to understanding the English civil wars, the birth of liberalism, and the historiography of English economics, I wish I had first read Town life in the fifteenth century, by Mrs. J. R Green (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50392 ). This provides a highly readable account of the “fist fight” between institutions involving the king, church, and townspeople in England over taxes, property rights, and the duties of social order. I think it provides a useful context for considering the English civil wars, whose historical importance are difficult to understate, as well as providing me a with a real example of how in reading history it is easy to overlook the importance of isolated and local struggles and events.
To connect the 15th century to today, the second free book I would recommend is Leonard Hobhouse’s Liberalism (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28278 ). It traces the intellectual currents at play in the rise and fall of the free cities through the civil wars through the classical liberal thinkers and beyond all the way up through Gladstone and the new liberals, which in a way provides a liberal pedigree for the social democracy which Acemoglu seems to see as a pinnacle of human achievement if perhaps not the end of history. Classical liberalism is maybe better understood in the context of the numerous schisms with which liberalism was beset historically.
To understand institutional limits and failures, and how out of control fist fights can get despite all the rationalism in the world, as well as to provide a broader historical context for the historical origins of modern institutions, Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/tocqueville-the-old-regime-and-the-revolution-1856 ) is a good, short and engrossing book with which to consider that epochal event.
And to tie it all up from a political context that fully explores the aforementioned switch from divine right of kings to popular sovereignty, Guizot’s The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/guizot-the-history-of-the-origins-of-representative-government-in-europe ) is a worthy read.
If you really want to drop some coin reading about the history of institutions, though, I’m guessing your money would be just as well spent on Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition or Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. However, I haven’t read any of the recent AJR books and they may be really wonderful as well, but at least from my experience, I would have been a much more critical reader of theirs if I had originally had the free books above under my belt.
Evan’s delightful and apt description of culture as a “fist fight” might suggest that even economists need to embrace the cautious and contextualized approach of historicism and reject universal and fundamental laws of explanation. Maybe focused historical, anthropological, and sociological approaches and case studies are not so bad after all? Perhaps many of us might benefit from paying as much attention to the Royal Historical Society, Wolfson, and Pollard prizes as we do the econ Nobel?
And perhaps because Mommsen’s History of Rome is one of my favorite of such histories, and because it is institutionally focused as well, maybe noting that the Nobel prizes have tended to recognize history writing with the literature prize, we might consider that much of what AJR are getting at has been addressed by literature Nobelists. AJR are big on colonialism as the big explanation for everything and the literature prize in 2021 went to Abdulrazak Gurnah for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism,” so one is tempted to think that current anti-colonial fervor has much to do with these prize awards. But there is a longer history and some very interesting and worthwhile older Nobel-recognized work to consider.
Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People starts out with the Roman conquest of the British isles. But in opposition to his imperialism, we also have Nobelist Rabindranath Tagore’s interesting take on institutions, culture, and change:
“Civilisation must be judged and prized, not by the amount of power it has developed, but by how much it has evolved and given expression to, by its laws and institutions, the love of humanity. The first question and the last which it has to answer is, Whether and how far it recognises man more as a spirit than a machine? Whenever some ancient civilisation fell into decay and died, it was owing to causes which produced callousness of heart and led to the cheapening of man's worth; when either the state or some powerful group of men began to look upon the people as a mere instrument of their power; when, by compelling weaker races to slavery and trying to keep them down by every means, man struck at the foundation of his greatness, his own love of freedom and fair-play. Civilization can never sustain itself upon cannibalism of any form. For that by which alone man is true can only be nourished by love and justice.”
Tagore thus seems imminently linkable to the AJR vision.
But the literature Nobels also provide us with interesting competing explanations. My favorite in this department Nobelist Henryk in whose work themes of the Polish positivists were developed and communicated. Polish positivists sought to gain independence for partioned Poland through a rational course of development by mass education and building physical infrastructure to allow their societ to function as an integrated "social organism." Such notions of indigenous cultural agency seem incompatible with AJR’s colonialism-centric approach.
Other great works of Nobel-recognized historical literature that might be profitably examined in relation to AJR include Mario Vargas Llosa (I’d recommend The War of the End of the World and Conversation in the Cathedral as starters), Ivo Andric (“There are no buildings that have been built by chance…”), Johannes Jensen’s The Fall of the King, and Waladyslaw Remont’s The Peasants.
Perhaps there is ambiguity at the heart of all great literature and that is why the Nobel literature prizes would seem to a offer a different sort of value that is not possible through the type of historical literature recognized by the economics Nobel prize?
McCloskey has actively studied the interplay between culture and institutions ( for 20 years, if I am not mistaken). It's very unfortunate that the extensive research -- such as summarized in The Bourgeois Virtues, the ethics for an age of commerce, and other books of the series -- gets much less attention it deserves.
McCloskey's take on AR: https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/pdf/McCloskey_AcemogluRobinson2021.pdf - before their 2021 working paper.
Oh, and this one - out yesterday - https://mccloskey.substack.com/p/a-statist-nobel
Juicy, as usual.
I’m puzzled by her association of Trump with statism.
Or rather, how can she lean left if she doesn’t approve how thoroughly the left places government in the seat once occupied by other authorities, from the simplest to the most sublime?
I guess liberty is so paramount for McCloskey that the difference between the modern right and the modern left in America is negligible. Both are indistinguishably statist.
I’ll venture a guess that the government’s paternalism down to putting the thoughts in your head (and associated necessary coercion re people’s pocketbooks) could expand like the sun but if people could cut hair without a license, or go boating without putting safety jackets on, that would satisfy her supposed anti-statist itch.
Although she has a pleasingly if slightly affected bitchy tone, so reading her secret econ diaries would probably be fun.
I have been going back and forth trying to decide whether you are being intentionally ironic in saying that McCloskey has 'a pleasingly if slightly affected bitchy tone,' and whose 'secret econ diaries would probably be fun' to read, or alternatively, you are blithely unaware of the irony. I'm leaning towards the former. Either way, it is highly amusing.
I didn’t mean it in a salacious way; rather, someone who uses that voice in public writing, is bound to be even more candid and unfiltered, in private, about the matters of the day. I’d be disappointed if not.
Not always bitchy: https://deirdremccloskey.org/articles/index.php
"The cult of statistical significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives" is my favorite.
No, I know, a famous economist.
Dang Arnold. How are you so good at finding the best links?
"...be wary of journalistic attempts to summarize their contribution." Exactly. And same could be said for most journalistic summaries.
What I came here to write.
The obviously rejoinder to their body of work is the simple question, "where does culture come from?" In other words, why not simply acknowledge that it is people that drive wealth creation and some people are smarter than others which is why we see the 'global south' lagging Asia and Europe (and the Anglo world) in wealth. That said, institutions obviously matter in extreme cases -- see the Korean peninsula for a striking example.
The demand is for explanations that are compatible with The Narrative and The Agenda. The Narrative is that all peoples are the same and all nations could develop equally well if only they could implement the secret sauce recipe of the right set of institutional arrangements and cultural habits. That some nations got richer than others was just a combination of luck, timing, and, essentially, theft. The Agenda is to insist not just on the legitimacy of the state's role in intervening to ensure all institutions are """inclusive""" (a euphemism for you-know-what), but to go further and claim that such perpetual state supervision and intervention is indispensable for prosperity.
That's why Chetty will win one soon too.
Except that Venezuela was once one of the richest countries and for most of history China has been rather poor. It mostly still is. And then there's Russia. Just a guess but I bet you'd find some countries in Africa above average.
I'm not saying your premise is wholly wrong but given all locales have a substantial minority well above the top of the bell and into the right tail, I'm doubtful it is primary.
The prize choice seems reflective of the period we’re in. I’m an outsider with no Economics credentials, commenting when I probably shouldn’t, but this makes me roll my eyes. Hope they use the money well.
I have long called the culture of the West “Christian capitalism”. Treating all humans as Images of God, with free will, and markets that allow win-win transactions between people.
Secularism has always filled the God shaped hole in people’s hearts, with worse-for-society alternate values. So has anti-capitalism.
Neither is perfect, but they’re the best humans can do.
That’s why they need to be conserved.
When Evans spoke of religious piety being institutionalized by politicians I couldn't help but think of woke politics as a secular version of that.. Of course proponents would see it from the oppressed-oppressor viewpoint. They are exerting pressure for reform to hold the Leviathan in check, as she also notes.
“Frankly, I have found North more readable than AJR. My knowledge of AJR is second hand.“
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2015/Klingtwoforms.html
This Evans’ post is one of the best econ posts I’ve read on Substack. So many quotable paragraphs and interesting topics to explore. I’m putting Alice Evans above Dan Williams in my ranking of all-star FIT players. Thanks Arnold.
The main conclusion of their new paper is that their framework enriches the study of the codetermination of political, institutional and cultural outcomes. A few days ago in replying to "What's one underrated big idea?", the first of five questions for Politico (10/11/24), Rohit Krishnan claimed:
"We end up stuck with Berkson’s paradox, where the more we try to find something at the very top of a distribution by measuring ever so finely, the very attributes you’re measuring it with become anticorrelated rather than correlated."
Question: How relevant do you think Bergson's paradox is to assess a statistical analysis of the codetermination of the outcomes mentioned by Acemoglu and Robinson?
Arnold - I see a half dozen good looking books in Evans’ post. If you’ve read any of them, do you recommend any of them, and where in the hierarchy would you put them relative to Albion’s Seed?
A book was recommended on AK's substack three or four weeks ago. I think by him. I've been meaning to go back and hunt for it but that title sounds familiar. Is it the one? Do you know which post mentioned it?
Albion's Seed is the one he most prominently and recently recommended.
https://substack.com/@arnoldkling/p-149533425
https://substack.com/@arnoldkling/p-149017314
I can't find the one where he said "put Albion's Seed near the top of your list." Is that the post you're looking for?
This isn't the post I was thinking of but it is probably the one that made Albion's Seed a fuzzy memory. Thanks much.