#Stephen Broadberry

[dipnotski]

Kolektif – Modern Avrupa’nın Ekonomik Tarihi (2023)

Avrupa’ya kimlik kazandıran en başat unsur ekonomidir. Ekonominin seyri modern Avrupa’nın kökeninde yer bulmuş, demografiden sanata kadar sayısız alanı değiştirerek modernizmin inşaatındaki harç hâline gelmiştir. Stephen Broadberry ve Kevin H. O’Rourke editörlüğünde hazırlanan ‘Modern Avrupa’nın Ekonomik Tarihi (1700-1780)’ bu bilinçle derlenmiş göz alıcı bir çalışma. Sanayi Devrimi’nden başlayan…

[volumeofvalue]

The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World

BOOK REVIEWThe Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World, Volume 2: 1870 to the Present by Stephen Broadberry (Editor), Kyoji Fukao (Editor) 2021 About the EditorsStephen Broadberry is Professor of Economic History at theUniversity of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. He hasbeen Managing Editor of the Economic History Review and also theEuropean Review of Economic History, and…

[xhxhxhx]

Here’s something I wanted to add to that post but couldn’t find the space for:

The United States had destroyed workers’ control and the national labor movement, but Britain had not. American output and productivity grew rapidly, liberated from the shackles of labor, but Britain’s industrial economy was ultimately dragged under.

This is a particularly impressive chart for my railfan followers, from Stephen Broadberry’s Market Services and the Productivity Race, 1850--2000: British Performance in International Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006):

Martin Daunton explains in Wealth and Welfare: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1851--1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 88, 93:

The bargain struck by industrialists and labour in the mid- and late nineteenth century institutionalized the form of internal subcontract found in Birmingham, leaving a large amount of control on the shop floor. Consequently, British employers had much less ability to control the level of effort than their counterparts in America. Even if one employer or industrial sector wished to impose more control on the shop floor, they were constrained by the wider political system. At the very time that industrialists wished to adopt ‘American’ technology or systems of control over work in the later nineteenth century, the role of unions was sustained by the state. Unions were accepted in Britain and usually did not operate to raise productivity. Rather, they adopted an adversarial attitude, viewing the division between wages and profits as a zero-sum game in which a higher return for the capitalist was assumed to be at the expense of the workers. The issue was not only the contrast in levels of unionization (see Table 3.2). More significantly, the nature of bargaining and the form of production institutions on the shop floor had wide implications; it affected the ability of employers in all sectors to control the level of effort and secure high rates of work.

On the whole, British workers did not see themselves as co-operating with employers to raise effort and productivity; rather, they assumed employers sought higher profits at their expense. The attitude reflected a deeply ingrained cultural system. Each class created its own institutions. They created social cohesion within each group, but did not overlap and integrate. Unions were accepted and resented encroachment in their control of the workplace. As one commentator noted, the attitude of British workers was defeatist: they wished to stay within their class, and to defend their position from change. Labour relations rested on adversarial bargaining: unions were accepted, but workers defined their interests against the employers. 

In Britain, craft control inhibited effort-saving technology, and employers were reluctant or unable to break the system and move to managerial control. In the United States, control was removed from the shop floor by investing in management structures and technology. The process entailed more than merely a destruction of unions and the imposition of tight labour discipline through ‘scientific management’; it also involved the promise of stable employment and a share in productivity gains. In Britain, industrialists did not face serious constraints in the supply of craft labour; the state’s attitude towards trade unions made the task of employers much more difficult; and the structure of the market made high throughput production systems less appealing. These factors were mutually reinforcing. Such arguments subvert Marshall’s analysis: craft control in proprietary firms becomes a source of weakness.

The combination of workers’ control over the conditions of production, an adversarial relationship between workers and employers, and state accommodation to trade unions inhibited productivity growth and hampered technological change.

The basic problem was the absence of managerial control, which ultimately prevented Britain from adopting new production methods and new industries, which led to Britain’s humiliating inefficiency in automotive production -- the Americans were seven times better at it -- which made the automobile the privilege of a small elite, rather than the people. In 1924, there was one automobile for every seven Americans and every seventy-eight Britons.

“It was not surprising that the United States and Germany were outstripping England in the struggle for industrial supremacy,” Élie Halévy wrote in 1926. “Neither Carnegie nor Krupp had to deal with trade unions.”

[tenaciouspersonbouquetus-blog]

Essays in economic history of australia Essays in Economic & Business History

Daniel Giedeman, Grand Valley State University. Essays in Economic & Business History. Essays in Economic & Business History. Gerben Bakker, London School of Economics. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, Bangor University. Dan Bogart, University of California, Irvine. Stephen Broadberry, University of Oxford. Ann Carlos, University of Colorado-Boulder. Youssef Cassis, European University Institute. John A. Dove, Troy University. Jeffrey Fear, University of Glasgow. Price Fishback, University of Arizona. Robert K. Fleck, Clemson University. Juan Flores, University of Geneva. Vincent Geloso, Texas Tech University. Sheryllynne Haggerty, University of Nottingham. Mary Eschelbach Hansen, American University. Leslie Hannah, London School of Economics.... View more ...

[melindarowens]

Weekend Reads: Classic Papers for Lasting Learning

A few weeks ago, Morgan Housel scared Twitter by asking, “How much of what you read today will you care about a year from now?”

Speaking personally, much less than I’d like.

Fortunately, Google Scholar created Classic Papers, a “collection of highly cited papers in their area of research that have stood the test of time.” Enjoyably, it “excludes review articles, introductory articles, editorials, guidelines, and commentaries,” and allows for high-signal interdisciplinary browsing.

I took the news of this week to the exercise, which began with reports that the US military had downed a Syrian jet. On Thursday Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North Korean government, reportedly warned South Korea against following “psychopath Trump.”

You wonder about these sorts of things. How are investors reacting? In a discussion at the Annual Ben Graham Value Conference IV, hosted by CFA Society New York on Tuesday, investor John Levin observed that in general, “domestic earnings are undervalued and international earnings are overvalued” as a result of these and other tensions.

While wondering about this and flipping through the aforementioned classic papers, I came across Niall Ferguson’s “.” Its final section asserts that World War I came as a “bolt from the blue” for investors, despite plenty of early discounting.

Ferguson’s paper is relevant to the present but is easy to misinterpret. Whenever one refers to World War I in a geopolitical discussion, it’s hard to avoid the notion that the war was inevitable. Such predestined wars — when established powers clash with rising ones — are sometimes called “Thucydides Traps.” However, Arthur Waldron, reviewing Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap by Graham Allison, writes that there is little evidence that they really exist.

Unexamined assumptions are a silent killer of thoughtful analysis, and one of the most common of these is that “developed” and “emerging” markets have important uniform characteristics. In their paper, “The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices, and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800,” economists Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta look under the hood of economic development during that time. The connection they draw between high productivity and eventual prosperity is worth noting in the context of contemporary worries about productivity growth. The discussion continues, as Ryan Avent recently summed up.

I thought Stefaan Walgrave and Peter Van Aelst’s article on the contingencies that enable the media to set a political agenda to be particularly interesting. The discussion of the methods used to create truth in this arena is fascinating.

We often feature posts on the role of women in investment management, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t close this section by mentioning Patricia Yancey Martin’s “Practising Gender at Work: Further Thoughts on Reflexivity.” It is an invitation to view gender performance through the same prism that George Soros suggests we view markets: reflexivity.

Further Reading

Is it 2057 or 2035 when computers take over the world? Over at AI Impacts, Katja Grace usefully distills and applies the results from a survey of machine learning specialists about the likely path of machine learning technology. For the record, the last time Enterprising Investor asked about this, 35% of respondents thought artificial intelligence (AI) was impossible. (AI Impacts, Enterprising Investor)

Harry Markopolos, CFA, claims to have uncovered a new fraud, this time in the public sector: The pension of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) is $500 million smaller than previously thought. The cause? A mix of “bad investments, fraudulent accounting, and unrealistic actuarial assumptions,” according to Markopolos. (Advisor Perspectives)

Just print this out and refer to it once every six months: “Can China Really Rein in Credit?” Opinions abound — and have long abounded — suggesting it is necessary. But political will and economic self-interest rarely match up. (Bloomberg View)

JP Koning’s discussion of what happened in 1947 to 1949 when policymakers were forking the Indian rupee into Pakistani and Indian flavors is a reminder of what occurs when theoretical experiments in currency are made real. Recent op-eds on the effect of demonetization for farmers make me wonder if digital money is worth all of the physical unease it creates. (Moneyness, The Indian Express)

India and Pakistan have both joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which Xinhua dubbed the “world’s most populous regional cooperative organization and the largest by area.” What is it, exactly? Read the background from the Council on Foreign Relations. (Xinhua, Council on Foreign Relations)

Fun Reads

If you liked this post, don’t forget to subscribe to the Enterprising Investor.

All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

Image credit: iStockphoto.com/JLGutierrez

Will Ortel

Will Ortel is a researcher and content manager at CFA Institute. He’s worked in investment management since 2006 and joined CFA Institute in 2010.

Source link

source http://capitalisthq.com/weekend-reads-classic-papers-for-lasting-learning/ from CapitalistHQ http://capitalisthq.blogspot.com/2017/06/weekend-reads-classic-papers-for.html

[everettwilkinson]

Weekend Reads: Classic Papers for Lasting Learning

A few weeks ago, Morgan Housel scared Twitter by asking, “How much of what you read today will you care about a year from now?”

Speaking personally, much less than I’d like.

Fortunately, Google Scholar created Classic Papers, a “collection of highly cited papers in their area of research that have stood the test of time.” Enjoyably, it “excludes review articles, introductory articles, editorials, guidelines, and commentaries,” and allows for high-signal interdisciplinary browsing.

I took the news of this week to the exercise, which began with reports that the US military had downed a Syrian jet. On Thursday Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North Korean government, reportedly warned South Korea against following “psychopath Trump.”

You wonder about these sorts of things. How are investors reacting? In a discussion at the Annual Ben Graham Value Conference IV, hosted by CFA Society New York on Tuesday, investor John Levin observed that in general, “domestic earnings are undervalued and international earnings are overvalued” as a result of these and other tensions.

While wondering about this and flipping through the aforementioned classic papers, I came across Niall Ferguson’s “.” Its final section asserts that World War I came as a “bolt from the blue” for investors, despite plenty of early discounting.

Ferguson’s paper is relevant to the present but is easy to misinterpret. Whenever one refers to World War I in a geopolitical discussion, it’s hard to avoid the notion that the war was inevitable. Such predestined wars — when established powers clash with rising ones — are sometimes called “Thucydides Traps.” However, Arthur Waldron, reviewing Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap by Graham Allison, writes that there is little evidence that they really exist.

Unexamined assumptions are a silent killer of thoughtful analysis, and one of the most common of these is that “developed” and “emerging” markets have important uniform characteristics. In their paper, “The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices, and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800,” economists Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta look under the hood of economic development during that time. The connection they draw between high productivity and eventual prosperity is worth noting in the context of contemporary worries about productivity growth. The discussion continues, as Ryan Avent recently summed up.

I thought Stefaan Walgrave and Peter Van Aelst’s article on the contingencies that enable the media to set a political agenda to be particularly interesting. The discussion of the methods used to create truth in this arena is fascinating.

We often feature posts on the role of women in investment management, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t close this section by mentioning Patricia Yancey Martin’s “Practising Gender at Work: Further Thoughts on Reflexivity.” It is an invitation to view gender performance through the same prism that George Soros suggests we view markets: reflexivity.

Further Reading

Is it 2057 or 2035 when computers take over the world? Over at AI Impacts, Katja Grace usefully distills and applies the results from a survey of machine learning specialists about the likely path of machine learning technology. For the record, the last time Enterprising Investor asked about this, 35% of respondents thought artificial intelligence (AI) was impossible. (AI Impacts, Enterprising Investor)

Harry Markopolos, CFA, claims to have uncovered a new fraud, this time in the public sector: The pension of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) is $500 million smaller than previously thought. The cause? A mix of “bad investments, fraudulent accounting, and unrealistic actuarial assumptions,” according to Markopolos. (Advisor Perspectives)

Just print this out and refer to it once every six months: “Can China Really Rein in Credit?” Opinions abound — and have long abounded — suggesting it is necessary. But political will and economic self-interest rarely match up. (Bloomberg View)

JP Koning’s discussion of what happened in 1947 to 1949 when policymakers were forking the Indian rupee into Pakistani and Indian flavors is a reminder of what occurs when theoretical experiments in currency are made real. Recent op-eds on the effect of demonetization for farmers make me wonder if digital money is worth all of the physical unease it creates. (Moneyness, The Indian Express)

India and Pakistan have both joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which Xinhua dubbed the “world’s most populous regional cooperative organization and the largest by area.” What is it, exactly? Read the background from the Council on Foreign Relations. (Xinhua, Council on Foreign Relations)

Fun Reads

If you liked this post, don’t forget to subscribe to the Enterprising Investor.

All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

Image credit: iStockphoto.com/JLGutierrez

Will Ortel

Will Ortel is a researcher and content manager at CFA Institute. He’s worked in investment management since 2006 and joined CFA Institute in 2010.

Source link

from CapitalistHQ.com http://capitalisthq.com/weekend-reads-classic-papers-for-lasting-learning/

[principleofplenitude]

A new study by Stephen Broadberry of Oxford University, Hanhui Guan of Peking University and David Daokui Li of Tsinghua University in Beijing argues that China has indeed lagged behind Europe for centuries. It compares levels of GDP per person in China, England, Holland, Italy and Japan since around the year 1000. It finds the only period when China was richer than the others was during the 11th century. By that time China had invented gunpowder, the compass, movable type, paper money and the blast furnace. But according to Mr Broadberry and his co-authors, Italy had caught up with China before 1300, and Holland and England by 1400. Around 1800 Japan overtook China as the richest Asian country. Chinese GDP per person fell relentlessly during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). In 1620, it was roughly the same as it had been in 980. By 1840, it had fallen by almost a third (see chart). These findings challenge a hitherto common belief that China and Europe had similar living standards for centuries until the West’s industrial revolution began in the late 18th century: a point often referred to by historians as the “great divergence”. This view, promoted by Kenneth Pomeranz of the University of Chicago, lends more support to the party’s understanding. Researchers used not to be able to work out GDP from 1,000 years ago. Angus Maddison, an economic historian, was among the first to try. But the research by Mr Broadberry and his colleagues, which scales up local and private records to generate national accounts, offers greater detail. The first study of Britain’s historical GDP using this technique appeared in 2008. It was followed quickly by other ones focusing on Holland, Italy and now on China.

“China has been poorer than Europe longer than the party thinks” from The Economist

[omcik-blog]

New Post has been published on OmCik

New Post has been published on http://omcik.com/the-history-of-growth-should-be-all-about-recessions/

The history of growth should be all about recessions

“THROUGHOUT history, poverty is the normal condition of man,” wrote Robert Heinlein, a science-fiction writer. Until the 18th century, global GDP per person was stuck between $725 and $1,100, around the same income level as the World Bank’s current poverty line of $1.90 a day. But global income levels per person have since accelerated, from around $1,100 in 1800 to $3,600 in 1950, and over $10,000 today.

Economists have long tried to explain this sudden surge in output. Most theories have focused on the factors driving long-term economic growth such as the quantity and productivity of labour and capital. But a new paper* takes a different tack: faster growth is not due to bigger booms, but to less shrinking in recessions. Stephen Broadberry of Oxford University and John Wallis of the University of Maryland have taken data for 18 countries in Europe and the New World, some from as far back as the 13th century. To their surprise, they found that growth during years of economic expansion has fallen in the recent era—from 3.88% between 1820 and 1870 to 3.06% since 1950—even though average growth across all years in those two periods increased from 1.4% to…Continue reading

[belindawoodward]

The history of growth should be all about recessions

“THROUGHOUT history, poverty is the normal condition of man,” wrote Robert Heinlein, a science-fiction writer. Until the 18th century, global GDP per person was stuck between $725 and $1,100, around the same income level as the World Bank’s current poverty line of $1.90 a day. But global income levels per person have since accelerated, from around $1,100 in 1800 to $3,600 in 1950, and over $10,000 today.

Economists have long tried to explain this sudden surge in output. Most theories have focused on the factors driving long-term economic growth such as the quantity and productivity of labour and capital. But a new paper* takes a different tack: faster growth is not due to bigger booms, but to less shrinking in recessions. Stephen Broadberry of Oxford University and John Wallis of the University of Maryland have taken data for 18 countries in Europe and the New World, some from as far back as the 13th century. To their surprise, they found that growth during years of economic expansion has fallen in the recent era—from 3.88% between 1820 and 1870 to 3.06% since 1950—even though average growth across all years in those two periods increased from 1.4% to 2.55%.

Instead, shorter and shallower slumps led to rising long-term growth. Output fell in a third of years between 1820 and 1870 but in only 12% of those since 1950. The rate of decline...Continue reading from Business and finance http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21720311-faster-growth-not-due-bigger-booms-less-shrinking-history?fsrc=rss

[adventuresinsocialpolicy]

Aren’t economic historians great? They’ve gone back through centuries of accounts, government records, institutional records and so on to estimate GDP and population sizes right back to the middle ages.

This article argues that we can see the ‘great divergence’ between European and Asian countries from the late middle ages (although the continents aren’t homogeneous- there were ‘little divergences’ as well).

The Black Death of the 1300s and the opening of trade routes in the 1500s are the cause in this story. Countries with different economic structures/resources etc. responded to these shocks differently, and set off on the different paths we see today.

[ericfruits]

China has been poorer than Europe longer than the party thinks

XI JINPING, China’s president, likes to talk of his “Chinese dream”. He says it involves “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. To him this means that under the Communist Party, China will again be the world’s richest, most powerful country as it was before the “hundred years of humiliation”—the economic disasters and territorial grabs by foreigners during the century after the first opium war of 1839-42. By extension the party’s legitimacy will rest on this rejuvenation. But what if China was not the world’s richest country before 1839? What if it has lagged behind Europe not for 175 years but for 675? Would Mr Xi’s Chinese dream be so compelling?

A new study by Stephen Broadberry of Oxford University, Hanhui Guan of Peking University and David Daokui Li of Tsinghua University in Beijing argues that China has indeed lagged behind Europe for centuries. It compares levels of GDP per person in China, England, Holland, Italy and Japan since around the year 1000. It finds the only period when China was richer than the others was during the 11th century. By that time China had invented gunpowder, the compass, movable type, paper money and the blast furnace.

But according to Mr Broadberry and his co-authors, Italy had caught up with China before 1300, and Holland and England by 1400. Around 1800 Japan overtook China as the richest Asian country. Chinese GDP per person fell relentlessly during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). In 1620, it was roughly the same as it had been in 980. By 1840, it had fallen by almost a third (see chart).

These findings challenge a hitherto common belief that China and Europe had similar living standards for centuries until the West’s industrial revolution began in the late 18th century: a point often referred to by historians as the “great divergence”. This view, promoted by Kenneth Pomeranz of the University of Chicago, lends more support to the party’s understanding.

Researchers used not to be able to work out GDP from 1,000 years ago. Angus Maddison, an economic historian, was among the first to try. But the research by Mr Broadberry and his colleagues, which scales up local and private records to generate national accounts, offers greater detail. The first study of Britain’s historical GDP using this technique appeared in 2008. It was followed quickly by other ones focusing on Holland, Italy and now on China.

Doubts remain about the quality of the Chinese data. A recent study by Kent Deng and Patrick O’Brien of the London School of Economics argues they are too fragmentary. It is hard enough comparing the living standards of different countries today, let alone doing so in the distant past with far less precise statistics. Mr Broadberry responds that China’s historical sources are no worse than those available for medieval England. He also notes that imperial China and early-modern Europe both used silver as a unit of value, facilitating comparison.

But there remains a vital difference of scale. Italy and the Holland were the richest parts of Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. It might be better to compare them not with China as a whole but with its richest part, the Yangzi delta, around modern-day Shanghai. If you do that, England and Holland were still richer than the Yangzi area in 1800 but the point at which they overtook the delta turns out to be around 1700. This is not so different from Mr Pomeranz’s view that the great divergence happened in the 18th century. But it still means the process had begun before the industrial revolution, which in turn implies that European wealth and Chinese poverty cannot be explained by industrialisation: they must reflect institutional differences.

Mr Xi would do better to consider a different source of legitimacy from history: poverty reduction. If Mr Broadberry and his co-authors are right, Chinese peasants saw almost 1,000 years of decline and misery after 1000. But Mr Xi’s party has massively reduced rural poverty and hopes to eradicate it by 2020. That is an achievable dream.

 This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "A not-so-golden age"

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