![]() For example, China gets a lot of credit for its free-market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, but these reforms just took China from "literally Mao" to "kind of an average level of market freedom for developing countries". In other cases, the book just isn't sure these helped that much. ![]() The strong governments pursued strong industrial policies, the high taxes paid for infrastructure, and the poor property rights let governments use eminent domain to build canals, railroads, et cetera. While it admits that they matter to some degree, it also points out that some of the most successfully-developing economies, including Britain in the 1700s and Japan in the Meiji period, had unusually strong governments, high taxes, and poor property rights. GEH:VSI is also nervous talking too much about institutions, especially along the lines of strong property rights or other libertarian-adjacent ideas. Overall I think of these exclusions more as a commitment to a paradigm: what would it look like to pursue a project of understanding global economic history without invoking either of these tempting but curiosity-stopping explanations? The reluctance to invoke colonialism too heavily is even less well-explained, but I think it relies on differences between never-colonized countries - for example, Russia and the Ottomans lagged behind the West in much the same way as Asia and Latin America, and even Austria lagged Britain (GEH:VSI does talk about particular problems with colonial policies when they come up, as part of its general policy survey). ![]() It's skeptical of the Protestant work ethic because, however much it matched experience in 18-whatever, today "Catholic Italy Protestant Britain" (is this true? Britain has higher GDP today, but Italy was higher when this book was written) It's skeptical of ideas that some countries are "traditionalist" and resistant to change because of - for example African farmers now mostly grow more productive New World crops (but couldn't countries be willing to change in some ways but traditionalist in others?). Given its brevity, it can only gesture at justifications for this choice. It explicitly disavows explanations that lean too heavily on some populations being better (smarter, harder working, etc) than others, or on narratives of colonial exploitation - sorry if you were looking for anything too juicy. Why is the West richer than the rest of the world? Why have some non-Western countries (Japan, China) come from behind and mostly caught up? Why have others failed to replicate the West's trajectory and stayed underdeveloped despite seemingly having enough time to catch up? GEH:VSI tries to answer these questions. ![]() Three ounces is exactly the amount of global economic history that my brain can absorb before turning to mush, so I was glad to find it. This book is subtitled "A Very Short Introduction" and is one of the smallest books I've ever seen, about three ounces. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |