A happy day...

is when you receive a book titled Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium by Ron Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke and you start reading it even though you are late on several papers...

Ron Findlay is one of the most erudite economists I know, and as perfect a gentleman as you will ever find in academia. I've always thought of him as an anomaly at an institution like Columbia, where egos don't come in small sizes.  Now I know why he has been so quiet of late: the book is more than 600 pages long and it does cover 1,000 years of economic history.       

And what a book it is.  Disarmingly, Findlay and O'Rourke let us know that "As is the case with many books, this one has been written for the primary benefit of the authors."  Comparing international trade in history with the version one encounters in textbooks, they write:

the greatest expansions of world trade have tended to come not from the bloodless tatonnement of some fictional Walrasian auctioneer but from the barrel of a Maxim gun, the edge of a scimitar, or the ferocity of nomadic horsemen.  When trade required more workers, parental choices regarding quality/quantity trade-offs could often safely be ignored, since workers could always be enslaved. When trade required more profits, these could be earned via plunder or violently imposed monopolies. For much of our period the pattern of trade can only be understood as being the outcome of some military or political equilibrium between contending powers.

Sort of humbling when you have to go to class and motivate Heckscher-Ohlin.

And I am only on page xix.  Please, someone take the book away--I have work to do...

Comments

[Henri Tournyol du Clos, Paris]

"For much of our period the pattern of XXXXX can only be understood as being the outcome of some military or political equilibrium between contending powers."

The problem with this sentence is that you can actually fill the XXXXX space with quite a few words. "Trade" is just one of them. "Religion" would fit well, too, for a start, as would "slavery", "peace", "diplomacy", etc.

Frankly,I am relieved that the authors, poring over the last millenium of history, manage to find it kind of brutal. If they had not, I would have been downright worried about what kind of bloodthirsty creatures US Academia can breed nowadays...

[chris]

I have not yet read this book, but the quote above seems rather pessimistic. Surely this is not the characteristic of trade expansion that characterized the Imndustrial Revolution? That largest expansion of wealth and prosperity occurred because of emerging liberal ideals took hold for a short period of time (eventually to be replaced by Progressivism). To be sure, mercantilism has been the norm for the past 1000 years, and it is often violent, but that simply makes it all the more important for the economists to teach that greater returns are possible via peaceful, voluntary exchange and the enforcement of property rights.

[Jeremy Duckworth]

I haven't as of yet read Findlay's and O'Rourke's book, but it is interesting and to me—and revealing—that you should find it such a riveting read. I'm intrigued because a well known failure of neoclassical theory is that it ignores history and indeed sociology, politics, and psychology. So, I have a suggestion: why not take Heckscher-Ohlin off the syllabus next year and instead study this text? I bet students would get much more out of Findlay's and O'Rourke's book than memorising yet another model that they'll never use.

[Manfred]

I'm relieved to hear that also economics professors sometimes do not work as strictly as they should, but instead enjoy reading something else!
That's good news for a self-critical, but eager student of economics like I am :)

[dale]

"Surely this is not the characteristic of trade expansion that characterized the Imndustrial Revolution?"
I've got an old roll up wall map of Africa from the early 1900's- just before WWI. Virtually every section of Africa is listed as a colony of a European nation. And that's not counting India and Asia, or the US sphere of influence in Latin America. Or Oceania.

So no Chris. I don't think these authors are being overly pessimestic.

[Dominic]

Ha. Well I took most of this day off work to read YOUR book, Danni.

What goes around comes around ;)

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Frankly,I am relieved that the authors, poring over the last millenium of history, manage to find it kind of brutal. If they had not, I would have been downright worried about what kind of bloodthirsty creatures US Academia can breed nowadays...

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