Economics and history Twitter are all abuzz about a HPE paper! That’s good, right? Even if there is occasionally discord between economic historians and historians? Oh, wait ... the comments are something. Fortunately, one of the paper’s authors, Martin Fiszbein, has a response to many of the comments. There have also been a few threads on it. I … Continue reading On the Frontier Thesis
In my last post I discussed the role that culture plays in historical political economy. We can view culture as the lens through which one (or a society) views the world. This means that cultural forces can be a particularly potent means of locking a society into a “bad equilibrium.” It is not just that … Continue reading From Trust to Kin: The Long Shadow of Culture
I decided to use my first post to talk about culture. Culture is one of those things that social scientists have long known affects all types of actions, interactions, and outcomes. Yet, until very recently we shied away from analyzing culture. There is good reason for this. In the first half of the 20th century, … Continue reading Culture in Historical Political Economy