Category Archives: Economic History

Over the past ten years or so the concept of “white privilege” has become much more prominent in elite “chattering class” culture. From my own perspective as a brown-skinned person who grew up in an America that was white by default, with a black minority, it is a peculiar phenomenon. The prominence of white privilege […]

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The World’s 10 Largest Economies by GDP (1960-Today) via @VisualCappic.twitter.com/29KiDBuPnO — Carl Zha (@CarlZha) November 8, 2018 The depiction of the change in the top 10 economies over the last 60 years in the above graph is pretty mesmerizing. It tells you so much without the recourse to narrative description. Below is a Google chart […]

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Most projections usually predict that China will be the largest economy by the year 2030. This got me thinking: when exactly did the USA surpass other nations? I knew it was in the 19th century, but I wasn’t sure exactly when. As I’m sure you know, GDP estimates are always somewhat dicey, and they were even […]

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After reading the section on Rome in War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, I realized I had changed my mind over the past 10 years on the issue of differences in wealth in the past. Following the treatment in A Farewell to Alms: A Brief […]

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I come not to praise or bury Max Weber. Rather, I come to commend where warranted, and dismiss where necessary. The problem as I see it is that though a meticulous scholar, Max Weber is the father of erudite sophistry which passes as punditry. Though he was arguably a fox, his genealogy has given rise […]

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Medieval England Twice as Well Off as Today’s Poorest Nations:
The figure of $400 annually (as expressed in 1990 international dollars) is commonly is used as a measure of “bare bones subsistence” and was previously believed to be the average income in England in the middle ages.
However the University of Warwick led researchers found that English […]

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I am about two-thirds of the way through Why the West Rules-for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, and I have to agree with Tyler Cowen’s assessment so far. The author is an archaeologist, and though a little less shy in regards to general theory than most in his […]

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OECD’s Gurría mourns death of economist Angus Maddison. I highly recommend his books such as Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD. I would concede that the data would sometimes be sketchy or fragmentary, but when it comes to historical models there’s a lot more jabber than legwork. It is notable how much the jabberers […]

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Well, just the way I asked it, our gut feelings about the economically powerful are obviously not a product of hunter-gatherer life, given that such societies have minimal hierarchy, and so minimal disparities in power, material wealth, privileges of a…

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In the comments below I was outlining a simple model which really is easiest to communicate with a chart. I removed the labels on the Y and X axes because the details don’t matter, the X axis is simply “time,” and the Y axis simply reflects the magnitu…

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This is more a question for readers who know this stuff, what do you think about Patricia Crone & company in their revision of the early history of Islam? I’m more of a Hugh Kennedy guy because I don’t know much about this field and would prefer to…

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11/11
Razib Khan