The Arc of Economic History

Weekend Reading: Daniel P. Tompkins: What the Ancient Greeks Can Teach Us About Human Capital

Daniel P. Tompkins: What the Ancient Greeks Can Teach Us About Human Capital: “Unsupervised, cooperative Athenians developed an economy powerful enough to escape the…

Today’s Economic History: Matthew Yglesias: Surplus content: “Keynes on bubbles…

…I think Chapter 22 of the General Theory is enduringly relevant:

“It may, of course, be the case — indeed it is likely to be — that the illusions of the boom cause particular types of capital-assets to be produced in…

Étienne Mantoux: End of “The Calumniated Peace: The Economic Consequences of John Maynard Keynes”: Today’s Economic History

Étienne Mantoux says: Britain and America must allow France to impose a satisfactory peace upon Nazi Germany in 1945 …

Refereeing Mantoux-Keynes

Note to Self: Rereading Etienne Mantoux: La Paix Calomniée, ou les Conséquences Économiques de M. Keynes. “The Calumniated Peace” of Versailles. OK. So why is the title of the English translation The Carthaginian Peace? Who decided to replace “Caluminiated” with “Carthaginian”, and…

Today’s Economic History: John Maynard Keynes on the Necessity of a Generous Peace After World War I

Note to self:

Perhaps I imposed too much of my own preconceptions on Skidelsky. But I had always seen Skidelsky as arguing that…

Today’s Economic History: American Slavery Ideology One Generation After the Cotton Gin

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates: John C. Calhoun: Slavery a Positive Good: “I do not belong… to the school which holds that aggression is to be met by concession…

Today’s Economic History: John Maynard Keynes’s Obituary of Alfred Marshall

John Maynard Keynes (1924): Obituary for Alfred Marshall: “ALFRED MARSHALL was born at Clapham on July 26, 1842…

…the son of William Marshall, a cashier in the Bank of England…

Today’s Economic History: Alfred Marshall on Aggregation

Must-Read: Alfred Marshall (1887): Aggregating Is Not Adding Up: “[Economists] paid almost exclusive attention to the motives of individual action…

…but it must not be forgotten that economists, like all…

Today’s Economic History: Arthur Burns: Secret Diary, 1969

Arthur Burns (August 21, 1969): “The recently announced [Nixon administration] welfare reform [plan] was to do away with food stamps (in order to keep costs down)…

…but then it was discovered — the…