The problem is that this image is a fiction. In no way does the evidence from the field of economic history support it. Maybe it is politically useful to use it, but it is not historically nor economically accurate.
Vincent Geloso
Senior Fellow
Vincent Geloso, senior fellow at AIER, is an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University. He obtained a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics.
Follow him on Twitter @VincentGeloso
Articles
The problem is that, from a research perspective, there are important reasons to keep off the state capacity bandwagon, even if doing so would be ideologically congenial.
The field of economic history is a hard one to dabble in. It requires the assembly of rich and complex data from the past. Unlike modern statistical series, there are no “user guides” for economists and historians who deal with past data. One must simply absorb large quantities of detail to make things as simple […]
A recurrent complaint leveled at economists is that income per capita is not a good measure of welfare. In its most refined forms, the complaint is that gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is a poor indicator of well-being. This is why there have been frequent calls to shift to other measures of well-being where […]
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is clear: there is a loss of biodiversity globally. The losses are expected to increase as a result of climate change. As a result, there are some researchers who advance the idea that we may be in the Sixth Great Extinction. However, it must be pointed out that […]
Dictatorships or authoritarian regimes (which also tend to be economically unfree) often put a lot of pressure on their bureaucrats to develop the economy and increase output. Thus are their data positively biased.
In the last weeks, the topic of Venice’s floods has been heavily discussed in the media. This is part because it has been argued by some that it represents a vivid illustration of the problem posed by climate change. As such, the occasion has been used to renew calls to actions to mitigate climate change. […]
The process of economic change is about how economic actors invest to alleviate the constraints they face by reducing transaction costs in order to grow richer.
Some of the 262 million individuals that suffered from democide could have escaped their fates. More importantly, rulers faced with the possibility of exit would have been more reluctant to engage in democides in the first place.
In the debates over wealth inequality that have followed the publication of The Triumph of Injustice (authored by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman), there have been intense discussions of the methodological choices made in the book. There have been few considerations regarding the underlying assumptions regarding the sources of inequality. All inequalities are bundled as […]
