Some years ago in my search for causes of the West’s prosperity I came across Deepak Lal’s 1999 book Unintended Consequences. The book planted the seed of an idea that has recently borne some exotic fruit.[1]
According to Lal, in 597 AD Catholic missionaries were trying to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons in England. Augustine, a monk who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to Pope Gregory I asking him whether several of the converts’ marriage habits were allowed.
In his reply, the pope was strict. He did the following: 1) he rejected marriage to close relatives or to close in-laws (called affines by anthropologists), 2) he banned the adoption of children, and 3) he prohibited concubines. (Divorce was already prohibited, based on scripture). Why? Continue reading “The Medieval Church and Its Consequences”
The Economist has just published an article decrying the decline of history as an academic discipline.[1] Dwight R. Lee, a respected econonomist who is also known as a witty popularizer, offers a comment.
First, the excerpt from the Economist ‘s July 20, 2019, “Bagehot” column:
“Even as history itself has become more dramatic, the study of history has shrivelled. The number reading it at university has declined by about a tenth in the past decade.
“At the same time, the historical profession has turned in on itself. Historians spend their lives learning more and more about less and less, producing narrow PhDs and turning them into monographs and academic articles, in the hamster-wheel pursuit of tenure and promotion. . . .
“And historians increasingly devote themselves to subjects other than great matters of state: the history of the marginal rather than the powerful, the poor rather than the rich, everyday life rather than Parliament. . . . These fashions were a valuable corrective to an old-school history that focused almost exclusively on the deeds of white men, particularly politicians. But they have gone too far. Indeed, some historians almost seem to be engaged in a race to discover the most marginalised subject imaginable.”
Dwight Lee responds:
I don’t know much about what most academic historians do, but I suspect the Economist has described them pretty accurately, and I doubt there is much difference between the British and American variety. Furthermore, I don’t think I am all that biased in my view because my criticism applies in general, if not in particular cases, to academic economists.
I used to say that if someone asked me what they should do to acquire some broad information about economics I would tell them the last thing they should do is take a college economics class, with exceptions of course. What I would suggest is to read some books by journalists who are not overly ideological and who have the ability to write well. For example, The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley; Knowledge and theWealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery by David Warsh; and Keynes and Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott. And let’s not forget Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt and “The Petition” and other works by Frédéric Bastiat. All these authors are journalists who learned some economics. (Also there is Common Sense Economics,[2] to which a journalist I know made a huge contribution.)
[1] “Bagehot: The End of History,” Economist 432, no. 9152. (July 20, 2019), 24. (Behind a paywall.)
[2] Authors are James D. Gwartney, Richard L. Stroup, Dwight R. Lee, Tawni Ferrarini, and Joseph P. Calhoun.
Years ago, as a young economics professor, my husband served on a history student’s advisory committee. At the student’s dissertation defense, the historians asked detailed questions about the paper. My husband asked, “What is the theory behind your findings?” The student stammered an answer and my husband concluded that historians don’t think much of theories.
I won’t address whether historians have theories right now, but, rather, discuss economists’ theories about how people make decisions. Some are simple: Incentives matter, so when something becomes more costly (in money, effort, or pain), people usually want less of it. Another is opportunity cost: something may have value, such as sitting on the lawn on a nice day, but its opportunity cost is high if it means missing an interview for a good job.
Economists apply their theories to all kinds of human behavior. In my historical research on primogeniture in the Middle Ages, I came across a bold and bracing paper, “An Economic Analysis of the Protestant Reformation.“[1] The economist authors tried to figure out why some regions in Europe became Protestant and why others stayed Catholic. They hypothesized that some European countries were more open to Protestantism than others: “societies characterized by the decline of feudalism and relatively unstable distribution of wealth” would welcome Protestantism, while “more homogeneous, rent-seeking societies that were mostly dissipating rather than creating wealth” would reject it. Continue reading “Historians Have Facts, Economists Have Theories?”
I was fortunate to spend a semester studying the work of Frédéric Bastiat, the great nineteenth-century French economic pamphleteer. Beloved by libertarians, he is unequalled in his ability to defend freedom and personal responsibility.
Even Frédéric Bastiat, an insightful libertarian thinker, could not imagine communism of the twentieth-century kind.
Much can be said about Bastiat, but here I’d like to mention his discussion of communism, for two reasons. First, it illustrates the fluidity of the terms socialism and communism in the mid-nineteenth century—something historians should not forget. For another, it illustrates how brilliant people can be both unusually perceptive about what is around them, but still blind about the future.
Warning: Like most writers about Bastiat, I find it hard not to quote him at length. He says things much better than most of us can.
