Thinking About Teaching Economic History to the First-Y…

We economists know preferences, market structures, supply, demand, equilibrium, and surplus. Half at least of economic history is using what we economists know to understand history in the very important ways that non-economic historians most lamentably do not. But that half is not terribly useful to economics graduate students very few of whom are going to become economic historians. We should teach them the other half of economic history. But what is that other half, and how is it best taught?

I get to try to teach incoming economics graduate students how to gain a much deeper and richer understanding of preferences, market structures, supply, demand, equilibrium, and surplus by looking behind them at the processes of historical development—how these things came to be, and how they might well have been otherwise (and become otherwise in some future. But what is the best way to do this? Especially since I find myself psychologically incapable of cutting my topic and reading list below eighteen!…

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Barry Eichengreen has a very nice way of what we are trying to do that I have never been able to improve on:

Economics 210a… is designed to introduce a selection of themes from the contemporary economic history literature. Emphasis is on the
insights that history can provide to the practicing economist. The focus is on the approaches and tools of historical analysis, and how those approaches can be useful to economists in a wide range of fields. Topics and readings are chosen with the goal of illustrating various approaches, techniques, and issues; the course does not provide a comprehensive introduction to all of economic history. Substantively, the emphasis is on long-run growth, the development and functioning of markets, and macroeconomic fluctuations…

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In the first six weeks of the course (before the baton gets handed off to Barry to cover first American exceptionalism, and then the development of labor and capital markets) Chenzi Xu is taking the first week to cover (a) multiple equilbria and (b) equilibrium selection via path dependence and then hadning the baton to me to then cover, more or less in order:

1. Historical analysis: our “treasure for all time” for putting supply and demand in proper context (Solow, Robert M. 1985. “Economic History and Economics.” American Economic Review 75 (May): 328-331. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/pdf/1805620.pdf>).

2. Malthus: the more than 5000 year agrarian-age near-stagnation in human productivity (Clark, Gregory. 2005. “The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004.” Journal of Political Economy 112 (December): 1307-1340. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/10.1086/498123>)

3. Malthus: biophysical indicators of Malthusian-era poverty (Steckel, Richard. 2008. “Biological Measures of the Standard of Living” Journal of Economic Perspectives 22 (Winter): 129-152. <http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.22.1.129>).

4. Malthus: consequences of poverty and near-stagnation for the character of agrarian-age societies (Diamond, Jared. 1999. “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Discover Magazine (May). <http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race>).

5. Malthus: how much of our rapid technological advance after the agrarian age is simply “two heads are better than one” (Kremer, Michael. 1993. “Population Growth & Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990.” Quarterly Journal of Economics <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2118405>)?

6. Malthus: domination, culture, & slow pre-modern technological improvement (Finley, Moses. 1965. “Technical Innovation & Economic Progress in the Ancient World.” Economic History Review: 29-45. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/2591872>).

7. Dispelling the ensorcellment: resources vs. the division of labor in civilizational advance (Henderson, J. Vernon, Adam Storeygard, & David N. Weil. 2018. “The Global Distribution of Economic Activity: Nature, History, & the Role of Trade”. Quarterly Journal of Economics 133,1 (February): 357-406. https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/26495164> & Henderson, J. Vernon, Adam Storeygard, & David N. Weil. 2012. “Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space.” American Economic Review 102 (April): 994-1028. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/23245442>).

8. Economies of domination: Patriarchy (Alesina, Alberto, Paola Giuliano, & Nathan Nunn. 2013. “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women & the Plough.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128 (May): 469–530. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/26372505>).

9. Economies of domination: guesses at societal inequality since bronze & writing (Milanovic, Branko, Peter H. Lindert, & Jeffrey G. Williamson. 2011. “Pre-Industrial Inequality.” Economic Journal 121 (March): 255-272. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/41057775>).

10. Economies of domination: societal mistrust, poverty, & the shadow of the past (Nunn, Nathan. 2008. “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 123 (May): 139-176. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/25098896>).

11. Economies of domination: the market as a mask for unfreedom & inequality (Marx, Karl, & Friedrich Engels. 1848. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/>).

12. Agricultural revolution: how could early-modern England support a commercial economy (Allen, Robert C. “Tracking the Agricultural Revolution in England”. Economic History Review (1999) 52: pp. 209–235. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2599937>)?

13. Commercial revolution: the final pre-modern “efflorescence” (De Vries, Jan. 1994. “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution.” The Journal of Economic History 54 (2): 249-270. <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/industrial-revolution-and-the-industrious-revolution/CF3AE82F17442FEE4C3045507A5FF606>).

14. Commercial revolution: the coming of the industrial society (Clark, Gregory. 2001. “The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution.” Unpublished manuscript. <http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/secret2001.pdf>).

15. Malthus: the early-industrial economy as the last Malthusian one (Nicholas, Stephen, & Richard H. Steckel. 1991. “Heights and Living Standards of English Workers during the Early Years of Industrialization, 1770–1815.” Journal of Economic History 51 (December): 937–957. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2123399.pdf>).

16. Transition to modern economic growth: empire, commerce, coal, & science: one chance only to thread the eye of the needle (Allen, Robert C. 2011. “Why the Industrial Revolution Was British: Commerce, Induced Invention & the Scientific Revolution.” Economic History Review 64 (May): 357-384. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/41262428)?

17. Transition to modern economic growth: industrial-age processes of knowledge diffusion (Rosenberger, Lukas, Walker Hanlon, & Carl Hallmann. 2024. “Innovation Networks in the Industrial Revolution.” NBER Working Paper no.32875. <https://www.nber.org/papers/w32875>).

18. Modern economic growth: its character (Kuznets, Simon. 1971. “Modern Economic Growth: Findings and Reflections.” Nobel Prize Lecture. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/lecture/> & Jones, Chad. 2015. “The Facts of Economic Growth”, Chapter 1. <https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/facts.pdf>).

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And I have only 30 minutes for each of these…

I am figuring on:

• 5 minutes (hopefully a week or so earlier) laying out what the subject area is.

• 5 minutes (hopefully a week earlier) on what the paper’s conclusions tell us about the important questions and uncertainties.

• 15 minutes of the class discussing whether the paper is right, and what we should do next to find out if the paper is right.

• 5 minutes of me raising (but probably not answering) important questions I think that the discussion has missed.ֿ

1. How can a look at historical development and situation help a contemporary economist make a better analysis of preferences, market structures, supply, demand, equilibrium, and surplus?

2. Is it credible that English real wages were more-or-less stagnant from 1200 to 1850, and that England is a good model for other times and places from the year -3000 or so to, well, 1950 or so?

3. Just what does biophysical evidence tell us about how poor humanity was in the agrarian age—and since?

4. What were societies in semi-stagnant Malthusian poverty really like to live in?

5. Is the scale of human activity the key link in technological development?

6. Why the disjunction between the astonishing élite accomplishments of human society in other dimension and the lack of accomplishment in the technology-advance dimension?

7. Does “civilization” come more from the division of labor or from control of resources.

8. High patriarchy: WTF!?!?

9. What patterns do we see in changing within-society inequality since the invention of bronze and writing?

10. Could a slave trade that ended two centuries ago really be the reason for the bulk of the poverty in sub-Saharan Africa today?

11. Should we see market economic exchanges as innately and presumptively “fair”?

12. How different was imperial-commercial age England from your “standard” agrarian-age economy?

13. Were imperial-commercial age economies substantially different from agrarian-age ones?

14. How was an industrial revolution in textiles different from previous ones in industries like printing or sea transport?

15. Who benefitted from the early stages of industrialization?

16. Could the industrial revolution have happened anywhere and anywhen but Britain in the 1700s?

17. What more is required to boost the pace of technological progress than a large market-economic sector with healthy institutional underpinnings?

18. How are modern economic growth economies different from the “normal” human economic baseline?

Is there a better way to do this?

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