Podcast appearances and mentions of mark koyama

What more can be learned about a topic like the origins of economic growth that has been covered so extensively? When pulling back and looking at all the connected threads, is there an order in which things must happen to spark the change?Mark Koyama is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Research Associate at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), and Mercatus Center, Senior Scholar. He is also the co-author of two books, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth and Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom.Greg and Mark discuss the recurring interest in the origins of economic growth and the Industrial Revolution. Mark lays out the various theories and factors that have shaped economic development across different regions and historical periods, such as geography, demography, culture, institutions, and political conditions. Greg asks why some regions like Europe succeeded in industrialization while others did not, and the role of colonialism in shaping global economic dynamics. Mark also offers insights into the ongoing relevance of economic history in understanding contemporary growth and innovation.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Show Links:Recommended Resources:Walt RostowDaron AcemogluDemographyMalthusianismReformed ChristianityDouglass NorthMughal EmpirePaul A. DavidGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at George Mason UniversityMercatus Center ProfileSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageHow the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic GrowthPersecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious FreedomNewsletter | MarkKoyama.comGoogle Scholar PageEpisode Quotes:The overlooked challenge of sustaining economic growth04:45: Once you think about growth, it's hard to think about anything else. It's a question, I think, both for rich countries, which are stagnating. So, I mean, for the US in my view, but if you think about Germany or the UK, these are pretty stagnant economies right now. And so I think these are, you know, it's not just a "Oh, we've had this revolution. Now we can sit on this, wealth gradient.." No, this is an ongoing problem, and I think policymakers in most countries have totally neglected issues of growth. They've focused on all these other issues, which we think are important, and we might say we care about growth, but we really don't act like it. And, similarly, there's a need in developing countries, obviously, to sustain growth. Both the poorest countries in the world, but also middle-income countries, which can stagnate and fall into what's called a middle-income trap.Geography's impact on economic hubs13:55: Geography still has this massive role, basically, even today, in the where, like the location, which locations are going to be economic hubs. But obviously, you can't explain the why, so it's going to be insufficient on its own, but it could be interacting with other factors.On markets and creative destruction42:06: You need markets, which are flexible and adaptable, so they can be disrupted by new technologies and entrepreneurs. Other people will have a more statist perspective. They'll think that you need, maybe, the state to do more on basic science, right? Maybe more even on actual innovation to support this. But I tend to think that you need these market institutions, basically, and they need to be sufficiently vibrant.

The economy has hit a hinge moment. For the past few years, inflation has been the big economic story — the fixation of economic policymakers, journalists and almost everyone who goes to the grocery store. But economists now largely see inflation as tamed. It's still a major political issue; the country continues to reel from years of rising prices, and there is a real affordability crisis. But that isn't all the next administration will have to deal with. So what does it mean to fight the next economic war rather than the last one?Jason Furman is an economics professor at Harvard and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Barack Obama. Furman has closely tracked the inflation crisis over the past few years, and he's deeply knowledgeable about how economic policy is made.In this conversation, we discuss why the inflation crisis upended the expectations of so many economists and what we've learned for the next time inflation strikes, what he expects to see with mortgage rates and the housing market, the upcoming fight over Donald Trump's expiring tax cuts, the good and the bad in Kamala Harris's housing policy and why there seems to be so little concern from either party about the ever-growing U.S. debt.Mentioned:“The Economic Theory Behind JD Vance's Populism” with Oren Cass on The Ezra Klein Show“Trump's Most Misunderstood Policy Proposal” by Oren Cass“In Defense of the Dismal Science” by Jason FurmanBook Recommendations:How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared RubinThe Goodness Paradox by Richard WranghamThe Ladies' Paradise by Émile ZolaThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Tyler Cowen, Veronique de Rugy, Desmond Lachman, Lindsay Owens, Nathan Tankus, Isabella Weber and Sonia Herrero. Soon, you'll need a subscription to maintain access to this show's back catalog, and the back catalogs of other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don't miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

Alex speaks with Mark Koyama about the historical context and economic implications of the Manila Galleon trade, focusing on how monopolistic practices increased the risk of shipwrecks and the broader lessons for contemporary economics about the unintended consequences of monopoly power. References "Shipwrecked by Rents: The Manila Galleon Trade" by Mark Koyama, Desiderio Desideri, and Fernando Arteaga Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304387823001967  "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Wealth-Nations-Adam-Smith/dp/1505577128 "Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance" by Douglass C. North Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Institutions-Institutional-Change-Economic-Performance/dp/0521397340 "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Inquiry-Nature-Causes-Wealth-Nations/dp/1494465227 "The East India Company: A History" by Philip Lawson Link: https://www.amazon.ca/East-India-Company-Philip-Lawson/dp/0582490522 "Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World" by Niall Ferguson Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Empire-How-Britain-Made-Modern/dp/0141007540 "The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire" by William Maltby Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Fall-Spanish-Empire-Maltby/dp/1405844874

On this episode, we'll hear a book panel discussion on Timur Kuran's book, Freedoms Delayed: Political Legacies of Islamic Law in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In his comments, Timur provides an overview of his book, highlighting the Middle East's struggle with repressiveness, the challenges of fostering a liberal civil society, and the historical role of Islamic legal institutions. The panel is moderated by Peter J. Boettke, and they are joined on the panel by:Mark Koyama,* Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center, and co-author of How the World Became Rich (2022) and Persecution and Toleration (2019).James Robinson, Professor of Political Science at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies, Institute Director at the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, and he has numerous books including The Narrow Corridor (2019) and Why Nations Fail (2013).Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Founding Director of the Center for Governance and Market and Professor at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and co-author of Land, the State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan (2021).Timur Kuran is a Turkish-American economist and political scientist. He is a Professor of Economics and Political Science and the Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. He has published multiple books including The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (2011) and Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (1997).*Mark Koyama's comments were recorded separatelyIf you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season two, now releasing!Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgramLearn more about Academic & Student ProgramsFollow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatusCC Music: Twisterium

  This podcast is sponsored by Supernormal (Supernormal - AI That Writes Your Meeting Notes/https://supernormal.com/).   Mark Koyama is Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Mercatus Center. Mark earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford. He focuses on how historical institutions functioned and on the relationship between culture and economic performance. He is the author of several books, most recently ‘How the World Became Rich' with Jared Rubin. This podcast covers: how to measure prosperity today and in the past, whether geography makes some nations richer than others, landlocked countries, Islamic empire, Mongol invasion, and much more.    Follow us here for more amazing insights: https://macrohive.com/home-prime/ https://twitter.com/Macro_Hive https://www.linkedin.com/company/macro-hive

How did the world become rich? Join Daniel Freeman, Deputy Editor at the Institute of Economic Affairs, in a insightful discussion with Mark Koyama, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as they explore the intriguing insights from Koyama's book, "How the World Became Rich: The History and Origins of Economic Growth." In this interview, Prof Koyama delves into the historical factors that have fuelled economic growth over the centuries, examining the roles of institutions, culture, geography, demographics, and myths surrounding colonialism's impact on economic growth. Gain valuable insights into the complex dynamics that have shaped the prosperity of nations and discover how these factors continue to influence global economic trends.

Mark Koyama is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and is a senior fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center. Mark is also a returning guest to the podcast, and he rejoins Macro Musings to talk about his recent book that he co-authored with Jared Rubin titled, *How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth.* Specifically, David and Mark discuss the key drivers of long-run economic growth throughout history and what we might be able to expect in the future.   Transcript for this week's episode.   Mark's Twitter: @MarkKoyama Mark's GMU profile Mark's Mercatus profile   David Beckworth's Twitter: @DavidBeckworth Follow us on Twitter: @Macro_Musings   Join the Macro Musings mailing list! Check out our new Macro Musings merch!   Related Links:   *How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth* by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin

Welcome to Ideas Untrapped. My guest today is Vincent Geloso who is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He studies economic history, political economy, and the measurement of living standards. In today's episode, we discuss the differences between democracies and dictatorships, and their relative performance in socioeconomic development. The allure of authoritarian governance has grown tremendously due to the economic success of countries like China, Korea, and Singapore - which managed to escape crippling national poverty traps. The contestable nature of democracies and the difficulty many democratic countries have to continue on a path of growth seems to many people as evidence that a benevolent dictatorship is what many countries need. Vincent challenges this notion and explains many seemingly high-performing dictatorships are so because their control of state resources allows them direct investments towards singular objectives - (such as winning Olympic medals or reducing infant mortality) but at the same time, come with a flip side of unseen costs due to their lack of rights and economic freedom. He argues that the benefits of dictatorships are not as great as they may seem and that liberal democracies are better able to decentralize decision-making and handle complex multi-variate problems. He concludes that while democracies may not always be successful in achieving certain objectives, the constraints they place on political power and rulers mean that people are better off in terms of economic freedom, rights, and other measures of welfare.TRANSCRIPTTobi;You made the point that dictatorships usually optimise, not your words, but they optimise for univariate factors as opposed to multiple factors, which you get in democracy. So, a dictatorship can be extremely high performing on some metric because they can use the top-down power to allocate resources for that particular goal. Can you shed a bit more light on that? How does that mechanism work in reality?Vincent;Yeah, I think a great image people are used to is the USSR, and they're thinking about two things the USSR did quite well: putting people in space before the United States and winning medals at Olympics. Now, the regime really wanted to do those two things. [That is], win a considerable number of medals in [the] Olympics and win the space race. Both of them were meant to showcase the regime's tremendous ability. It was a propaganda ploy, but since it was a single objective and they had immense means at their disposal, i. e. the means that coercion allows them, they could reach those targets really well. And it's easy to see the Russians putting Sputnik first in space, the Russians putting Laika first in space. We can see them winning medals. It's easy to see. The part that is harder to see, the unseen, is the fact that Russians were not enjoying rapidly rising living standards, they were not enjoying improvements in medical care that was commensurate with their level of income, they were not enjoying high-quality education. You can pile all the unseens of the ability of the USSR as a dictatorship to allocate so much resources to two issues, [which] meant that it came with a flip side, which is that these resources were not available for people to allocate them in ways that they thought was more valuable. So, the virtue of a liberal democracy, unlike a dictatorship, is that a liberal democracy has multiple sets of preferences to deal with. And in a liberal democracy, it's not just the fact that we vote, but also that people have certain rights that are enshrined and which are not the object of political conversation. I cannot seize your property, and it's not okay for people to vote with me to seize your property. And in these societies, the idea is that under a liberal democracy, you are better able to decentralize decision-making, and people can find ways to deal with the multiple trade-offs much better. Whereas a dictatorship can just decide, I care about this. I am king, I am president, I am first secretary of the party, I decide this and we'll do this regardless of how much you value other things that I value less than you do.Tobi;Two things that I want you to shed more light on. Depending on who you talk to or what they are criticizing, people usually selectively pick their dictatorships. If someone is criticizing, say, for example, capitalism, they always point to the Cuban health care system in contrast to the American health care system. How the American system is so terrible, and how capitalism makes everything worse because of the profit motive. And how we can do better by being more like Cuba.  On the other end of that particular spectrum, if you're talking about economic development, critics of democracy like to point to China. China is not a democracy. And look at all the economic growth they've had in the last 40 years, one of the largest reductions in human poverty we've ever seen in history. I mean, from these two examples, what are the shortcomings of these arguments?Vincent; Let's do Cuba first, then we can do China. So, the Cuban example is really good for the case I'm making. Because the case I'm making is essentially that the good comes with the bad and you can't remove them. So, people will generally say with Cuba, “yes, we know they don't have political rights, they don't have economic freedom, but they do have high-quality health care.” And by this they don't mean actually health care, they mean low infant mortality or high life expectancy at birth. My reply is, it's because they don't have all these other rights and all these other options [that] they can have infant mortality that is so low. That's because the regime involves a gigantic amount of resources to the production of healthcare. Cuba spends more than 10% of its GDP on health care. Only countries that are seven or ten times richer than Cuba spend as much as a proportion of GDP on health care. 1% of their population are doctors. In the United States, it is a third of that, 0.3% of the population are doctors. So, it's a gigantic proportion. But then when you scratch a bit behind, doctors are, for example, members of the army. They are part of the military force. The regime employs them as the first line of supervision. So, the doctors are also meant to report back what the population says on the ground. So, they're basically listening posts for the dictatorship. And in the process, yeah, they provide some health care, but they're providing some health care as a byproduct of providing surveillance.The other part is that they're using health care here to promote the regime abroad. And that has one really important effect. One of those is that doctors have targets they must meet, otherwise they're penalized. And when I mean targets, I mean targets for infant mortality. [If] they don't meet those targets, the result is they get punished. And so what do you think doctors do? They will alter their behaviour to avoid punishment. So in some situations, they will reclassify what we call early neonatal death. So, babies who die immediately after exiting the womb to seven days after birth, they will reclassify many of those as late fetal deaths. And late fetal deaths are in-utero deaths or delivery of a dead baby so that the baby exits the womb dead. Now, if a mortality rate starts with early neonatal death [and] not late fetal ones, so if you can reclassify one into the other, you're going to deflate the number total. And the reason why we can detect this is that the sources of both types of mortality are the same,[they] are very similar, so that when you compare them across countries, you generally find the same ratio of one to the other. Generally, it hovers between four to one and six to one. Cuba has a ratio of twelve to 17 to one, which is a clear sign of data manipulation. And it's not because the regime does it out of, like, direct intent. They're not trying to do it directly. It'd be too easy to detect. But by changing people's incentives, doctors' incentives, in that case, that's what they end up with.There are also other things that doctors are allowed to do in Cuba. One of them is that patients do not have the right to refuse treatment. Neither do they have the right to privacy, which means that doctors can use heavy-handed methods to make sure that they meet their targets. So in Cuba, you have stuff like casa de mata nidad, where mothers who have at-risk pregnancies or at-risk behaviour during pregnancy will be forcibly incarcerated during their pregnancy. There are multiple cases of documented, pressured abortions or literally coerced abortions. So not just pressured, but coerced. Like, the level is that the person wants to keep the infant, the doctor forces an abortion to be made. Sometimes, it is made without the mother's knowledge until it is too late to anything being done. So you end up with basically the infant mortality rate, yes, being low, but yes, being low because of data manipulation and changes in behaviour so that the number doesn't mean the same thing as it does in rich countries. And now the part that's really important in all I'm saying is [that] what people call the benefits for Cuba is relatively small. My point is that, yeah, maybe they could be able to do it. But the problem is that the measures that allow this to happen, to have a low infant mortality rate are also the measures that make Cubans immensely poor. The fact that the regime can deploy such force, use doctors in such a way, employ such extreme measures, it's the reason why Cubans also don't have property rights, don't have strong economic freedom, don't have the liberty to trade with others. Which means that on other dimensions, their lives are worse off. That means that, for example, their incomes are lower than they could be. They have higher maternal mortality. So, mothers die to [a] greater proportion in labour than in other countries or post-labour. There are lower rates of access to clean water than in equally poor countries in Latin America. There are lower levels of geographic mobility within the country, there are lower levels of nutrition because, for example, there are still ration services. So that means that, yes, they have certain amount of calories, but they don't have that much diversity in terms of what they're allowed or are able to eat without resorting to the black market. Pile these on. These are all dimensions of life that Cubans get to not enjoy because the regime has so much power to do that one thing relatively well. Let's assume it's relatively well, but the answer is, well, would you want to make that trade-off? And most people would probably, if given the choice, would not make the choice of having this. So, those who are saying, “look at how great it is,” are being fooled by the nature of what dictatorships are. Dictatorships can solve simple problems really well, but complex multivariate problems, they are not able to do it in any meaningful way.The other part that is going to be of also importance is when you look at Cuba, before we move on to China, the other part about Cuba that's worth pointing out is, I was assuming in my previous answer that the regime was actually doing relatively well. Even without considering all the criticism, it still looks like it has a low infant mortality rate. But when you actually look at the history of Cuba, Cuba was exceptional in terms of low infant mortality. Before the Castros took over, Cuba already had a very low level of infant mortality even for a poor country. And so with a friend of mine, a coauthor, Jamie Bologna Pavlik, we used an econometric method to see if Cuba has an infant mortality rate that is as low as it would have been had it not been for the revolution. So, ergo, we're trying to find what is the effect of the revolution on infant mortality and we're trying to use other Latin American countries to predict Cuba's health performance. And what we find is that in the first year of the regime's, infant mortality actually went up, so it increased relative to other Latin American countries, but it gradually reverted back to what would be the long-run trend. So that Cuba is no more exceptional today in terms of infant mortality than it was in 1959. That is actually a very depressing statement because it's saying that the regime wasn't even able to make the country more exceptional. So even if it's able to achieve that mission quite well, it's not clear how well they've done it. At the very least, they haven't made things worse in the very long run, they only made things worse in the short run. So when you're doing, like, kind of, a ledger of goods and bads of the regime, all the bad trade-offs I mentioned: lower incomes, higher mortality rates for mothers and maternity, lower rates of access to clean water, lower rates of access to diverse food sources, lower rates of geographic mobility - pile these on, keep piling them on, that's the cost. What I'm saying is what they call the benefits, they're not even as big as it's disclaimed. The benefits are relatively small.And now with regards to China…Tobi;Yeah.Vincent;The Chinese case is even worse for people because they have a similar story with GDP. So, in China, a regional bureaucrats have to meet certain targets of economic growth. Now, these same bureaucrats are in charge of producing the data that says whether or not there is economic growth. You can see why there is a who guards the guardian's problem here? The person who guards the guardian is apparently one of the guardians. So you could expect some kind of bad behaviour. And there is an economist, Luis Martinez, out of the University of Chicago. What he did is he say, well, we have one measure that we know is a good reflector of economic growth and it is artificial light intensity at night. Largely because the richer a country is, the more light there will be at night time. And so if you have like 1% growth in income, in real numbers, you should have some form of commensurate increase in light intensity during night time. If the two deviates, it's a sign that the GDP numbers are false, that they're misleading. Because if they deviate, the true number, the always true number will be the light intensity at nighttime. So, when Martinez used the nighttime light to compare GDP in Chinese regions overall and the actual GDP, he found that you can cut the growth rate of China by, maybe, two-fifths, so it is 40% slower than it actually is. So, China is not even as impressive as it is. And the thing is now think about the pandemic, think about how extreme the measures that China deployed to restrain this has been, no liberal democracy would have been able to do that, no free society would have tolerated forcibly walling people into their houses. And there are massive downsides to the communist regime in China. Like, yes, the regime is free to do whatever it wants, but it also means that it can put Uyghur Muslims into concentration camps. It also means that it can wall people into their houses when they do not comply with public health order. It also means that people are under the social credit system where they are being largely surveilled on a daily basis. It also means that the government can allocate massive resources to the act of conquering Taiwan or flexing muscles towards Japan. All things that when you think about it, is that really an improvement in welfare? Obviously, you can say that, oh yeah, they're doing X or Y things really well but here are all the bad things that come with this. And those bad things are on net much worse than the good things.Tobi;Now, you keep emphasizing liberal democracy and I want to get at the nuance here because I've seen several results. Either it is from Chile and other countries that say unequivocally that democracies are better for growth than dictatorships, even in the case of Chile, despite all the reforms of Pinochet regime. But what I want to get at is, what exactly about democracies make them better? Because, for example, we can think of Nigeria and Nigeria as a democracy. We've had uninterrupted election cycles for over two decades now, but there's still very weak rule of law. Successive governments still rely on extracting oil rents, basically. And, the degree to which people enjoy rights vary depending on who is in power or their mood on any particular day. And, of course, Nigeria is a democracy. So is it liberal democracy? Is that the key factor?Vincent;So, think about it this way.Tobi;Yeah.Vincent;Think about it this way. Inside the big box of liberal democracy, there is for sure democracy. But the part that makes the box liberal democracy is not only the smaller babushkadal inside that box which is a democracy one, it is the other constraints that we put on the exercise of political power. The true definition of a liberal democracy, at least in my opinion, is that not only are people allowed to vote, but they are restraints on what we can vote on. So, for example, if it's not legitimate for me to steal from you, it is no more legitimate for me to vote with two other people to steal from you. The act of democracy should warrant some acts that are outside the realm of political decision-making. There are also constraints that exist on rulers, so it's not just that there are some rights that are not subject to conversation. There could be also incentives that prevent rulers from abusing the powers they have. That would mean, for example, checks and balances, where there are different chambers that will compete with each other, different regional powers of government that will compete with each other for jurisdiction, and so they will keep each other in balance. It could also be some form of external constraint, because a liberal democracy can also rely on external constraints upon political actors. It could be the fact that people can leave the country, the fact that taxpayers can migrate to another country, puts pressure on politicians to not abuse them. People can move their capital out of the country, [this] creates a pressure on politicians to not try to steal from them, because people will just remove all the productive capital and the ruler will be left with very little to exploit as a result, regardless of whether or not the ruler is elected or not. So the way to think about this is liberal democracy is, you want to have a system where there are rules, incentives, constraints that make it so that we are not betting on a man or a woman, for that matter, being the correct man and woman for the moment. We care about a set of incentives, constraints, and rules that will make sure that even the worst human being possible will feel compelled or compulsed [sic] to do the right thing. So, that's like the old Milton Friedman thing, it's like “I don't want the right man. I want to have a system that makes sure that even the most horrible person on earth is forced to do the right thing.” That's what a liberal democracy is.Now, it is a broad definition that I've provided. It is not narrow in any way. It is not specific, largely because I don't think it can be what works. It's not everywhere the same. The general family to which this belongs is universal. But the way it can work is not the same everywhere. A homogeneous, small, Sweden probably doesn't need as much level of, say, breakdown of provincial versus federal powers. Whereas, from what I understand, Nigeria is a somewhat multinational country, multiethnic country with multiple groups east and west from what I understand the divide is in Nigeria. There, it might be good to have a division inside the country where things that are most homogeneous, you leave to the federal government, to the highest level of power. Then the things that you can delegate to the local level, [it is] better to do it that way. Countries that are incredibly heterogeneous maybe need even more federalism. What is optimal for one place won't work elsewhere. So I couldn't take Belgian institutions and then just dump them in Nigeria. Same as I couldn't just say, well, let's take Swedish institutions and dump them into Canada. But what makes generally Sweden work better in terms of institutions than Nigeria, for example, is the fact that Sweden does fit in that general box of liberal democracy. There are clear constraints, there are restrictions, there are constitutions that are well respected, there's a strong rule of law, and politicians are compelled to not fall prey to their own baser instincts.Tobi;  A couple of months ago, I had Mark Koyama on the show.Vincent; Great guy. He's a colleague of mine.Tobi;Yeah. So, we were talking about state capacity. We're talking about his book with Noel Johnson. So I did bring up your paper on state capacity, [in] which, basically, one description that stuck with me is that you never really find a poor, but highly capable state in history…Vincent;You mean backwards. A rich society with an incapable state?  Tobi; Yes, a rich society with an incapable state. Thanks for that. So, I've been trying to disentangle this state capacity thing, I know Bryan Caplan basically dismissed it as a sleight of hand. Right. So, like, how does it work and how is it a necessary ingredient for economic development, so to speak?Vincent; I am actually quite respectful of the state capacity literature in one way. So let me do like kind of a quick thing. State capacity says that you want the state to be able to do certain missions. Right, so we're not making judgments as to whether the mission is good. State capacity is about the abilities of the state. The reason why that literature has emerged since the 2000… here's a story of economic thought really briefly: in the 1950s, Samuelson and others show, ‘oh, well, there are market failures' and then a few years later there are the public choice rebuttals, where the public choice economists say, ‘well, you're kind of wrong. There are also government failures.' And the state capacity crowd tries to come in between these two and say, ‘yeah, there are market failures and there are government failures. How do we get a state to solve the market failures but not fall into government failures?' Okay, straightforward, good argument. The part that I'm sceptical of is that the argument of the state capacity crowd is that you will have a lot of rich societies that will have strong states, you will have much fewer societies that have strong states but are very poor (the USSR would be a good example of that), [and] you will have a lot of societies that are poor and have weak state. The thing is that they can't seem to explain why it is under their theory that there are no societies that are relatively weak state but rich. Even though in history we do have many examples of these and they collapse all the time.The argument that I make with my colleague, Alexander Salter, is that societies that have weak states will fall prey to predation because their neighbours with stronger state will try to capture their wealth by conquest. If they are conquered, they grow immensely poor, they are made poor. Basically, it's a terrible event for them. Or they resist, and if they resist ably, the result from resistance is that they have to build a strong state themselves to resist predation by other rulers. And so in the argument me and Alex build, it boils down to: the state is not necessary for development, but it is inevitable as an outcome. So, the task of political science, of political economy, is understanding if we are going to be stuck with one of them, how do we make it that we get the least terrible one? If it's not necessary, but it is inevitable, then how do we get to one that will maybe do some benefit, or at least, we can get the best kind possible? Well, that's where the liberal democratic answer gets into. [It] is [that] we need to find sets of constraints, rules, incentives that force the politicians to make it too costly for them to engage in predatory behaviour, in redistributive behaviour, and that they concentrate on what you could call productive behaviour. That would be like solving externalities. Like dealing with pollution or producing public goods stuff that markets have a harder time to produce. Getting into that category is the task of what liberal democracies are trying to do. That is a much harder proposition. Daron Acemoglu in his somewhat awful book, The Narrow Corridor, calls it a narrow corridor. (I don't like that book that much. I think it's a horrible piece of literature. He should have kept it at Why Nations Fail, we had everything we needed with Buchanan, and it was much better in the other version. He was a much worse version of that.) So, Parenthesis over on Daron Acemoglu, but his point is still relatively okay. There is a narrow corridor on which we evolve. That is a very narrow equilibrium that we want to stay on to, to avoid veering either into more territorial forms of government or into different types of authoritarian[ism], in a certain way. So the corridor for a liberal democracy is very, very, very, very narrow.Tobi; I like that description. The state is not necessary but inevitable. Whereas with the traditional state capacity crowd, the state is often assumed and never justified.Vincent;Actually, that's a bit unfair to them. The state capacity crowd, a lot of them are interested in state capacity as a story of the origins of states. That, I think, is a much-valued contribution. However, the issue of whether or not state capacity is linked to growth, I think this is where there's overstretching. My point is “no, there's very little reason to believe that state capacity is related to growth.” State capacity is more the direct or indirect result of growth in the past. So, either you are getting state capacity because you get conquered and you get imposed it by somebody else, or you get state capacity because you want to protect your wealth from other predators.Tobi; For the record, I'm not talking about your colleagues. There's this industrial policy school in development economics who are also big on state capacity, who think the state has to do this heavy lifting. They sort of assume the state and not justify it. But I won't let you go without asking you this final question. You recently published a paper - talking about the work of Thomas Piketty, the French economist - with Phillip Magness, I should say. What is your critique of his work? Because so far as I can tell, yes, I read the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, [but] everybody else is sort of pretending that a critique of Piketty does not exist. And the political coalition around their research, along with [Emmanuel] Saez and [Gabriel] Zucman is moving rapidly apace, whether it is in taxation or other forms of agenda. So, what is your critique? I know there have been others in the past Matthew Rognlie, I'm not sure how to pronounce his last name.Vincent;Yeah. Our argument is actually very simple. And to be honest, I don't really care about the political conversation where, [for] the political people who are using Piketty's work, I ignore them. There may be a motivation for doing this work because it tells you the importance of his work, but the person I'm trying to talk to is Piketty himself. And the point we make in the paper is that he [not only] massively overestimates inequality in terms of levels, but he also misses times a lot of changes. In the article that me, Phil, another Phil, and John Moore published together in the Economic Journal, we find that there is a very different timeline of inequality in the United States. The most important part is that unlike Piketty and Saez, who can assign most of, and later Zucman… who can assign most of the changes in inequality to tax policy, we find that actually half the decline in inequality that happens between, say, 1917 and 1960, half of it is because of the Great Depression. And just as good economists, we should not be happy that, okay, the rich are growing poor faster than the poor, but the poor are also growing poor. That is not a decent outcome. So we're minimizing the role of fiscal policy and tax policy in doing inequality, but also the other changes that we find give a very different story of what matters in changing policy rather than being taxes, it has more to do with labour mobility within the United States. With capital mobility within the United States. So poor workers from the south, mostly black Americans, move to richer northern cities where wages are higher. Capital moves from the rich north to the poor south where workers are made more productive. So, the levelling has to do with a very standard force in economics - it's a Solow growth model - capital goes to where the returns are greatest, labour goes where the wages are greatest. Most of the convergence is explained by this, not by tax policy changes. So that's the critique we make of them. And there's a lot of other people who are joining in, Gerald Holtham, David Splinter, a lot of people are actually finding that their numbers don't make much sense and they're actually in violation of a lot of other facts of economic history, even though they're correct in the general idea that inequality fell; fell to 1960 and rose since the 1980. The problem is that all they got right is the shape, but they got wrong the timing, the levels, the extent of the changes. They got most of it wrong. They just got the general shape right. And that's no great feat.Tobi;Thank you so much for joining me.Vincent;It was a pleasure. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

Hub Dialogues (part of The Hub, Canada's daily information source for public policy – https://www.thehub.ca) are in-depth conversations about big ideas from the worlds of business, economics, geopolitics, public policy, and technology.The Hub Dialogues feature The Hub's editor-at-large, Sean Speer, in conversation with leading entrepreneurs, policymakers, scholars, and thinkers on the issues and challenges that will shape Canada's future at home and abroad. The episodes are generously supported by The Ira Gluskin And Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.This episode features Sean Speer in conversation with Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin, who are economics professors at George Mason University and Chapman University, respectively, about their fascinating, new book, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth.If you like what you are hearing on Hub Dialogues consider subscribing to The Hub's free weekly email newsletter featuring our insights and analysis on public policy issues. Sign up here: https://thehub.ca/free-member-sign-up/.The Hub is Canada's leading information source for public policy. Stridently non-partisan, The Hub is committed to delivering to Canadians the latest analysis and cutting-edge perspectives into the debates that are shaping our collective future.Visit The Hub now at https://www.thehub.ca. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, we listen to a book panel discussion of Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin's book, How the World Became Rich, in which they dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They tackle recently advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism as they show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. Peter Boettke moderates as they are joined on the panel by commentators:Lisa Blaydes, Professor of Political Science at Stanford UniversityNathan Nunn, Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard UniversityJoel Mokyr, Robert H. Strotz Professor at Northwestern UniversityIf you like the show, please leave a 5-star review for us on Apple Podcasts and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever else you get your podcasts.The Hayek Program Podcast now has merchandise available! Visit our merch store and use promo code "hayek" to take 10% off your order.Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgramLearn more about Academic & Student ProgramsFollow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatusCC Music: Twisterium

Gus is joined by Mark Koyama, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Together they examine many of the topics addressed in Mark's recently released book, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth, including the role of legal institutions in economic growth, how culture and diversity impact economic growth, and much more.Follow Mark Koyama on Twitter @MarkKoyamaFollow Gus Hurwitz on Twitter @GusHurwitzFollow NGTC on Twitter @UNL_NGTCLinksHow the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic GrowthNebraska Governance and Technology Center

Mark Koyama is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason. Mark researches comparative national state economic development and the rise of religious tolerance. He is interested in how historical institutions functioned and in the relationship between culture and economic performance. Transcript: www.thendobetter.com/investing/2022/10/9/mark-koyama-how-the-world-became-rich-economic-history-intangibles-culture-progress-podcast I ask why it has taken economists and historians so long to form central views on how we have become rich? Mark discusses what historic progress might tells us about economic development today. I ask about the interaction between the main factors behind economic progress such as: institutions, culture, infrastructure, geography, energy. I question the role of common law and ask about living constitutions. Mark discusses his reading of the literature and how the UK is relatively unique in its living constitutions. I query the role of intangibles and the patent system and briefly lay out the case (after Brad De Long) for importance of industrial labs and the corporate form. Mark discusses these factors and their importance from the 1870s but also what was important pre-1870. We chat about culture (using Joe Henrich's terms) as a set of heuristics. Mark discusses the literature on the importance and role of slavery (probably not the most major facotr in the UK's industrialization, but still heavily argued), and the role and roots of social progress such as women's rights. We cover impacts of war and also the black death from an economic history view and we discuss the challenge on climate. We play over/underrated on : GDP, carbon tax, representative democracy governance mechanisms, universal basic income. Mark ends with current projects and advice. "….So podcasts; everything is online basically. The young person who's ambitious and interested can actually get to speed quickly. So you can teach yourself econometrics by watching tons of YouTube videos. Most people won't because there's other stuff to watch on YouTube, there's other stuff to do. I could be teaching myself foreign languages on YouTube and I'm not doing it because my opportunity costs I guess is maybe high. But if you're young and wanted to study this stuff, you can get a huge head start just by use of the internet cleverly. Tyler Cowen's advice is find the right mentors. Find some people and learn from them. But you get a huge amount early on to give yourself a head start before you go to university because to be honest, the university experience isn't necessarily going to be all that…"

Sunday, September 11, 2022Rev. Mark Koyama

In this episode, Shruti speaks with Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin about their new book, “How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth.” They discuss the link between technological innovation and growth, the importance of global market competition, positive and negative effects of colonialism, the methodology of economic history and much more. Koyama is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He is interested in how historical institutions functioned and in the relationship between culture and economic performance. Rubin is a professor of economics at Chapman University. His research focuses on historical relationships between political and religious institutions and their role in economic development. Recorded July 27th, 2022 Read a full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links. Follow us on Twitter Follow Shruti on Twitter Follow Mark on Twitter Follow Jared on Twitter Click here for the latest Ideas of India episodes sent straight to your inbox.

Mark Koyama explains the historical origins of sustained economic growth.

Dr. Mark Koyama is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center. Holding a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Oxford, his latest book is titled How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth. 

What if the Roman Empire had experienced an Industrial Revolution? That's the compelling hook of Helen Dale's two-part novel, Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules and Order. Drawing on economics and legal history, Helen's story follows the arrest and trial of charismatic holy man Yeshua Ben Yusuf in the first century — but one with television, flying machines, cars, and genetic modification.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I dive into the fascinating world-building of Kingdom of the Wicked with Helen. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: Your Kingdom of the Wicked books raise such an interesting question: What would have happened if Jesus had emerged in a Roman Empire that had gone through an industrial revolution? What led you to ask this question and to pursue that answer through these books?Helen Dale: There is an essay in the back of book one, which is basically a set of notes about what I brought to the book when I was thinking. And that has been published elsewhere by the Cato Institute. I go into these questions. But the main one, the one that really occurred to me, was that I thought, what would happen if Jesus emerged in a modern society now, rather than the historic society he emerged in? I didn't think it would turn into something hippy-dippy like Jesus of Montreal. I thought it would turn into Waco or to the Peoples Temple.And that wasn't necessarily a function of the leader of the group being a bad person. Clearly Jim Jones was a very bad person, but the Waco story is actually much more complex and much messier and involves a militarized police force and tanks attacking the buildings and all of this kind of thing. But whatever happened with it, it was going to go badly and it was going to end in violence and there would be a showdown and a confrontation. And it would also take on, I thought — I didn't say this in the essay, but I thought at the time — it would take on a very American cast, because that is the way new religious movements tend to blow up or collapse in the United States.And so I was thinking this idea, through my head, “I would like to do a retelling of the Jesus story, but how do I do it? So it doesn't become naff and doesn't work?” And so what I decided to do was rather than bring Jesus forward and put him now, I would put us back to the time of Jesus — but take our technology and our knowledge, but always mediated by the fact that Roman civilization was different from modern civilization. Not in the sense of, you know, human beings have changed, all that kind of thing. We're all still the same primates that we have been for a couple of hundred thousand years or even longer. But in the sense that their underlying moral values and beliefs about the way the world should work were different, which I thought would have technological effects. The big technological effect in Kingdom of the Wicked is they're much better at the biosciences and the animal sciences. They're much weaker at communications. Our society has put all its effort into [communication]. Their society is much more likely to put it into medicine.To give you an idea: the use of opioids to relieve the pain of childbirth is Roman. And it was rediscovered by James Young Simpson at The University of Edinburgh. And he very famously used the formula of one of the Roman medical writers. So I made a very deliberate decision: This is a society that has not pursued technological advancement in the same way as us. It's also why their motor vehicles look like the Soviet-era ones with rotary engines. It's why their big aircraft are kind of like Antonovs, the big Ukrainian aircraft that we've all been reading about since the war has started in Ukraine. So, in some respects, there are bits of their culture that look more Soviet, or at least Britain in the 1950s. You know, sort of Clement Attlee's quite centralized, postwar settlement: health service, public good, kind of Soviet-style. Soft Soviet; it's not the nasty Stalinist sort, but like late-Soviet, so kind of Brezhnev and the last part of Khrushchev. A few people did say that. They were like, “Your military parades, they look like the Soviet Union.” Yes. That was deliberate. The effort has gone to medicine.It's an amazing bit of world-building. I was sort of astonished by the depth and the scale of it. Is this a genre that you had an interest in previously? Are there other works that you took inspiration from?There's a particular writer of speculative fiction I admire greatly. His name is S.M. Stirling, and he wrote a series of books. I haven't read every book he wrote, but he wrote a series of books called the Draka series. And it's speculative fiction. Once again, based on a point of departure where the colonists who finished up in South Africa finished up using the resources of South Africa, but for a range of reasons he sets out very carefully in his books, they avoid the resource curse, the classic economist's resource curse. And so certainly in terms of a popular writer, he was the one that I read and thought, “If I can do this as well as him, I will be very pleased.”I probably didn't read as much science fiction as most people would in high school, unless it was a literary author like Margaret Atwood or George Orwell. I just find bad writing rebarbative, and a lot of science fiction struggles with bad writing. So this is the problem, of course, that Douglas Adams famously identified. And one of the reasons why he wrote the Hitchhiker's books was to show that you could combine science fiction with good writing.In all good works of speculative fiction of the alt-history variant, there's an interesting jumping-off point. I would imagine you had a real “Eureka!” moment when you figured out what your jumping-off point would be to make this all plausible. Tell me about that.Well, yes. I did. Once I realized that points of departure hugely mattered, I then went and read people like Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle. The point of departure for him is the assassination of Roosevelt. I went and read SS-GB [by] Len Deighton, a great British spycraft writer but also a writer of speculative fiction. And in that case, Britain loses the Battle of Britain and Operation Sea Lion, the putative land invasion of the UK, is successful. And I really started to think about this and I'm going, "Okay, how are you going to do this point of departure? And how are you going to deal with certain economic issues?"I'm not an economist, but I used to practice in corporate finance so I've got the sort of numerical appreciation for economics. I can read an economics paper that's very math heavy because that's my skill based on working in corporate finance. And I knew, from corporate finance and from corporate law, that there are certain things that you just can't do, you can't achieve in terms of economic progress, unless you abolish slavery, basically. Very, very basic stuff like human labor power never loses its comparative advantage if you have just a market flooded with slaves. So you can have lots of good science technology, and an excellent legal system like the Romans did. And they reached that point economists talk about of takeoff, and it just never happens. Just, they miss. It doesn't quite happen.And in a number of civilizations, this has happened. It's happened with the Song dynasty in China. Steve Davies has written a lot about the Song dynasty, and they went through the same thing. They just get to that takeoff point and then just … fizzled out. And in China, it was to do with serfdom, basically. These are things that are very destructive to economic progress. So you have to come up with a society that decides that slavery is really shitty. And the only way to do that is for them to get hooked on the idea of using a substitute for human labor power. And that means I have to push technological innovation back to the middle republic.So what I've done for my point of departure is at the Siege of Syracuse [in 213-212 B.C.]. I have Archimedes surviving instead of being killed. He was actually doing mathematical doodles outside his classroom, according to the various records of Roman writers, and he was killed by some rampaging Roman soldier. And basically Marcellus, the general, had been told to capture Archimedes and all his students and all their kids. So you can see Operation Paperclip in the Roman mind. You can see the thinking: “Oh no, we want this fellow to be our DARPA guy.” That's just a brilliant leap. I love that.And that is the beginning of the point of departure. So you have the Romans hauling all these clever Greek scientists and their families off and taking them to Rome and basically doing a Roman version of DARPA. You know, Operation Paperclip, DARPA. You know, “Do all the science, and have complete freedom to do all the…” — because the Romans would've let them do it. I mean, this is the thing. The Romans are your classic “cashed up bogans,” as Australians call it. They had lots of money. They were willing to throw money at things like this and then really run with it.You really needed both. As you write at one point, you needed to create a kind of a “machine culture.” You sort of needed the science and innovation, but also the getting rid of slavery part of it. They really both work hand in hand.Yes. These two have to go together. I got commissioned to write a few articles in the British press, where I didn't get to mention the name of Kingdom of the Wicked or any of my novels or research for this, but where people were trying to argue that the British Empire made an enormous amount of money out of slavery. And then, as a subsidiary argument, trying to argue that that led to industrialization in the UK. … [So] I wrote a number of articles in the press just like going through why this was actually impossible. And I didn't use any fancy economic terminology or anything like that. There's just no point in it. But just explaining that, “No, no, no. This doesn't work like that. You might get individually wealthy people, like Crassus, who made a lot of his money from slavery.” (Although he also made a lot from insurance because he set up private fire brigades. That was one of the things that Crassus did: insurance premiums, because that's a Roman law invention, the concept of insurance.) And you get one of the Islamic leaders in Mali, King Musa. Same thing, slaves. And people try to argue that the entirety of their country's wealth depended on slavery. But what you get is you get individually very wealthy people, but you don't get any propagation of the wealth through the wider society, which is what industrialization produced in Britain and the Netherlands and then in Germany and then in America and elsewhere.So, yes, I had to work in the machine culture with the abolition of slavery. And the machines had to come first. If I did the abolition of slavery first, there was nothing there to feed it. One of the things that helped Britain was Somerset's case (and in Scotland, Knight and Wedderburn) saying, “The air of the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe.” You know, that kind of thinking. But that was what I realized: It was the slavery issue. I couldn't solve the slavery issue unless I took the technological development back earlier than the period when the Roman Republic was flooded with slaves.The George Mason University economist Mark Koyama said if you had taken Adam Smith and brought him back to Rome, a lot of it would've seemed very recognizable, like a commercial, trading society. So I would assume that element was also pretty important in that world-building. You had something to work with there.Yes. I'd read some Stoic stuff because I did a classics degree, so of course that means you have to be able to read in Latin. But I'd never really taken that much of an interest in it. My interest tended to be in the literature: Virgil and Apuleius and the people who wrote novels. And then the interest in law, I always had an advantage, particularly as a Scots lawyer because Scotland is a mixed system, that I could read all the Roman sources that they were drawing on in the original. It made me a better practitioner. But my first introduction to thinking seriously about stoicism and how it relates to commerce and thinking that commerce can actually be a good and honorable thing to do is actually in Adam Smith. Not in The Wealth of Nations, but in Moral Sentiments, where Adam Smith actually goes through and quotes a lot of the Roman Stoic writers — Musonius Rufus and Epictetus and people like that — where they talk about how it's possible to have something that's quite base, which is being greedy and wanting to have a lot of money, but realizing that in order to get your lot of money or to do really well for yourself, you actually have to be quite a decent person and not a s**t.And there were certain things that the Romans had applied this thinking to, like the samian with that beautiful red ceramic that you see, and it's uniform all through the Roman Empire because they were manufacturing it on a factory basis. And when you come across the factories, they look like these long, narrow buildings with high, well-lit windows. And you're just sort of sitting there going, “My goodness, somebody dumped Manchester in Italy.” This kind of thing. And so my introduction to that kind of Stoic thinking was actually via Adam Smith. And then I went back and read the material in the original and realized where Adam Smith was getting those arguments from. And that's when I thought, “Ah, right. Okay, now I've got my abolitionists.”This is, in large part, a book about law. So you had to create a believable legal system that did not exist, unlike, perhaps, the commercial nature of Rome. So how did you begin to work this from the ground up?All the substantive law used in the book is Roman, written by actual Roman jurists. But to be fair, this is not hard to do. This is a proper legal system. There are only two great law-giving civilizations in human history. The Romans were one of them; the English were the other. And so what I had to do was take substantive Roman law, use my knowledge of practicing in a mixed system that did resemble the ancient Roman system — so I used Scotland, where I'd lived and worked — and then [put] elements back into it that existed in antiquity that still exists in, say, France but are very foreign, particularly to common lawyers.I had lawyer friends who read both novels because obviously it appeals. “You have a courtroom drama?” A courtroom drama appeals to lawyers. These are the kind of books, particularly if it's written by another lawyer. So you do things like get the laws of evidence right and stuff like that. I know there are lawyers who cannot watch The Wire, for example, because it gets the laws of evidence (in the US, in this case) wrong. And they just finish up throwing shoes at the television because they get really annoyed about getting it wrong.What I did was I took great care to get the laws of evidence right, and to make sure that I didn't use common law rules of evidence. For example, the Romans didn't have a rule against hearsay. So you'll notice that there's all this hearsay in the trial. But you'll also notice a mechanism. Pilate's very good at sorting out what's just gossip and what is likely to have substantive truth to it. So that's a classic borrowing from Roman law, because they didn't have the rule against hearsay. That's a common law rule. I also use corroboration a lot. Corroboration is very important in Roman law, and it's also very important in Scots law. And it's basically a two-witness rule.And I did things, once again, to show the sort of cultural differences between the two great legal systems. Cornelius, the Roman equivalent of the principal crown prosecutor. Cornelius is that character, and he's obsessed with getting a confession. Obsessed. And that is deeply Roman. The Roman lawyers going back to antiquity called a confession the “Queen of Proofs.” And of course, if confessions are just the most wonderful thing, then it's just so tempting to beat the snot out of the accused and get your bloody confession. Job done. The topic of the Industrial Revolution has been a frequent one in my writings and podcasts. And one big difference between our Industrial Revolution and the one you posit in the book is that there was a lot of competition in Europe. You had a lot of countries, and there was an incentive to permit disruptive innovation — where in the past, the proponents of the status quo had the advantage. But at some point countries realized, “Oh, both for commerce and military reasons, we need to become more technologically advanced. So we're going to allow inventors and entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas, even if it does alter that status quo.” But that's not the case with Rome. It was a powerful empire that I don't think really had any competitors, both in the real world and in your book.That and the chattel slavery is probably why it didn't finish up having an industrial revolution. And it's one of the reasons why I had to locate the innovation, it had to be in the military first, because the military was so intensely respected in Roman society. If you'd have got the Roman military leadership coming up with, say, gunpowder or explosives or that kind of thing, the response from everybody else would've been, “Good. We win. This is a good thing.” It had to come from the military, which is why you get that slightly Soviet look to it. There is a reason for that. The society is more prosperous because it's a free-market society. The Romans were a free-market society. All their laws were all sort of trade oriented, like English law. So that's one of those things where the two societies were just really similar. But in terms of technological innovation, I had to locate it in the army. It had to be the armed forces first.In your world, are there entrepreneurs? What does the business world look like?Well, I do try to show you people who are very commercially minded and very economically oriented. You've got the character of Pilate, the real historical figure, who is a traditional Tory lawyer, who has come up through all the traditional Toryism and his family's on the land and so on and so forth. So he's a Tory. But Linnaeus, who he went to law school with, who is the defense counsel for the Jesus character, Yeshua Ben Yusuf, is a Whig. And his mother was a freed slave, and his family are in business in commerce. They haven't bought the land.A lot of these books finished up on the cutting room floor, the world-building. And there is a piece that was published in a book called Shapers of Worlds: Volume II, which is a science-fiction anthology edited by a Canadian science-fiction author called Ed Willett. And one of the pieces that finished up on the cutting room floor and went into Shapers of Worlds is a description of Linnaeus's family background, which unfortunately was removed. You get Pilate's, but you don't get Linnaeus's. And Linnaeus's family background, his dad's the factory owner. The factory making cloth. I was annoyed with my publisher when they said, “This piece has to go,” and I did one of those snotty, foot-stamping, awful things. And so I was delighted when this Canadian publisher came to me and said, “Oh, can we have a piece of your writing for a science-fiction anthology?” And I thought, “Oh good. I get to publish the Linnaeus's dad story in Shapers of Worlds.”And I actually based Linnaeus's dad — the angel as he's referred to, Angelus, in the Kingdom of the Wicked books, and his personality is brought out very strongly — I actually based him on John Rylands. Manchester's John Rylands, the man who gave his name to the Rylands Library in Manchester. He was meant to be the portrait of the entrepreneurial, Manchester industrialist. And to this day, authors always have regrets, you don't always get to win the argument with your publisher or your editor, I am sorry that that background, that world-building was taken out of Kingdom of the Wicked and finished up having to be published elsewhere in an anthology. Because it provided that entrepreneurial story that you're talking about: the factory owner who is the self-made man, who endows libraries and technical schools, and trains apprentices, and has that sort of innovative quality that is described so beautifully in Matt Ridley's book, How Innovation Works, which is full of people like that. And this book as well, I've just bought: I've just bought Arts and Minds, which is about the Royal Society of Arts. So this is one of those authorial regrets: that the entrepreneur character wasn't properly fleshed out in the two published books, Kingdom of the Wicked book one and book two. And you have to get Shapers of Worlds if you want to find out about Linnaeus's industrialist dad.Is this a world you'd want to live in?Not for me, no. I mean, I'm a classically trained lawyer. So classics first, then law. And I made it a society that works. You know, I don't write dystopias. I have a great deal of admiration for Margaret Atwood and George Orwell, who are the two greatest writers of dystopias, in my view, in contemporary, and not just contemporary fiction, probably going back over a couple of hundred years. Those two have really got it, when it comes to this vision of horror. You know, the boot stamping on the human face forever. I greatly admire their skill, but those are not the books I write. So the society I wrote about in Kingdom of the Wicked is a society that works.But one of the things I deliberately did with the Yeshua Ben Yusuf character and what were his early Christian followers, and the reason I've taken so much time to flesh them out as real characters and believable people [is] because the values that Christianity has given to the West were often absent in the Roman world. They just didn't think that way. They thought about things differently. Now some of those Christian values were pretty horrible. It's fairly clear that the Romans were right about homosexuality and abortion, and the Christians were wrong. That kind of thing. That's where they were more liberal. But, you will have noticed, I don't turn the book into Gattaca. I try to keep this in the background because obviously someone else has written Gattaca. It's an excellent film. It's very thought provoking. I didn't want to do that again. It's kept in the background, but it is obvious — you don't even really need to read between the lines — that this is a society that engages in eugenics. You notice that all the Roman families have three children or two children, and there's always a mix of sexes. You never have all boys or all girls. You know what they're doing. They're doing sex-selective abortions, like upper-class Indians and Chinese people do now. You've now dealt with the problem of not enough girls among those posh people, but they still want a mixture of the two. You notice that the Romans have got irritatingly perfect teeth and their health is all very good. And people mock Cyler, one of the characters, because his teeth haven't been fixed. He's got what in Britain get called NHS teeth. He hasn't got straightened teeth, because he genuinely comes from a really, really poor background. I have put that in there deliberately to foil those values off each other, to try to show what a world would look like where there are certain values that will just never come to the fore.And as you mentioned, industry: how those values also might influence which areas technology might focus on, which I think is a great point.I did that quite deliberately. There is a scene in the first book in Kingdom of the Wicked where Linnaeus — who's the Whig, the nice Whig, the lovely Whig who believes in civil rights and justice and starts sounding awfully Martin Luther King-ish at various points, and that kind of thing; he's the most likable form of progressive, Stoic Roman ideas — and when he encounters a child that the parents have kept alive, a disabled child, which in his society would just be put down at birth like Peter Singer, they have Peter Singer laws, he's horrified. And he doesn't even know if it's human.I actually wrote a piece about this couple of years ago for Law & Liberty, for Liberty Fund. I did find that people wanted to live in this sort of society. And I just sort of thought, “Hmm, there are a lot more people out there who clearly agree with things like eugenics, Peter Singer laws, a society that has absolutely no welfare state. None.” There are people who clearly find that kind of society attractive. And also the authoritarianism, the Soviet-style veneration of the military. A lot of people clearly quite like that. And clearly like that it's a very orderly society where there are lots of rules and everybody knows where they stand. But even when the state is really, really very powerful.I deliberately put a scene in there, for example, where Pilate's expectorating about compulsory vaccinations — because he's a Roman and he thinks compulsory vaccinations save lives and he doesn't give a s**t about your bodily integrity. I did try to leave lots of Easter eggs, to use a gaming expression, in there to make it clear that this is a society that's a bit Gattaca-ish. I did that for a reason.I don't know if there's a sequel in mind, but do you think that this world eventually sort of Christianizes? And if this is what the world looks like 2000 years ago, what would that world look like today?I haven't thought of the answer to the first one. I must admit. I don't really know the answer to that. But in the second one, I did discuss this in quite a bit of detail with my then partner. And she said, “I honestly think that with that sort of aggressiveness and militarism, they will finish up conquering the planet. And then it'll start looking like a not-nice version of Star Trek. It won't be the Federation. It will be much more likely to be Khan and the Klingons and they'll start looking really, really Klingon basically.” That was her comment at the time.Like a more militaristic version of Star Trek.Yeah. But sort of very militarized and not the Prime Directive or any of that. Obviously Star Trek is very much an American conception of Americans in space. My Romans in space would look much more like the Centauri out of Babylon 5 or the Klingons in Star Trek. They would be much more aggressive and they'd be a lot more ambiguous…I don't know how much of a Star Trek fan you are, but of course there's the mirror universe, which kind of looks like that. We have the evil Kirk and the evil Spock. There's still advance, but there's like a Praetorian Guard for the captain and…All of that. Yes. I hadn't really thought about the first question, but the second question I thought, “Yeah, if this persists into the future, imagining a hypothetical future, then I think you are going to be dealing with people who are really, really quite scary.”Apparently you're not working on a sequel to this book, but what are you working on? Another book?Yes. I'm actually being pursued at the moment by a British publisher, who I won't drop into it because otherwise, if I say the name, then I will never, never be forgiven. And then they will insist on me writing a book. I'm never going to be the world's most super productive novelist. I think that I may finish up in my life writing maybe another two. I look at Stephen King. That man writes a door stopper of a book every time he sits down to have a hot meal. Incredible. How does he do it? I'm not that person.Helen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.Thank you very much for having me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Poverty was the norm for most of human history. Then, starting in Britain in the 18th century, economic growth took off. So what happened? Economists have theories about the origins of the Industrial Revolution, from geography to culture to institutions. In a new book, Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin assemble the literature to give readers a big-picture […]

Poverty was the norm for most of human history. Then, starting in Britain in the 18th century, economic growth took off. So what happened? Economists have theories about the origins of the Industrial Revolution, from geography to culture to institutions. In a new book, Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin assemble the literature to give readers a big-picture view of how the world went from poverty to widespread prosperity. Mark is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and Jared is a Professor of Economics at Chapman University. They are the authors of https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Became-Rich-Historical/dp/1509540237 (How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth).

Mark Koyama is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, Senior Scholar. Professor Koyama got his PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford. Here he discusses the ideas presented in his latest book, where he talks about how demographics, institutions, culture and more have had influences on the economic development of a country.

Dylan Matthews sits down with economic historians Jared Rubin and Mark Koyama to discuss their new book, How the World Became Rich. It tries to answer one of the hardest questions in history: Why, roughly 200 years ago, did parts of the world start experiencing sustained economic growth?  References: How the World Became Rich by Jared Rubin and Mark Koyama Dylan also wrote about the book Hosts: Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt), senior correspondent, Vox Credits: Sofi LaLonde, producer and engineer Libby Nelson, editorial adviser Amber Hall, deputy editorial director of talk podcasts Sign up for The Weeds newsletter each Friday: vox.com/weedsletter  Want to support The Weeds? Please consider making a donation to Vox: bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dr. Jared Rubin is the co-author of How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth, which he wrote with Mark Koyama, a previous guest on the podcast. We are so happy to welcome Jared to the show today to discuss the thesis of his book, and what he and Mark aimed to add to the literature on the subject of economic growth in the contemporary context. This is a fascinating and thoughtful conversation, packed with insight and nuance on important arguments of the past, what is needed to broaden and enhance our understanding of economic growth, and how far these projects might go towards enabling us to see a better future. Dr. Rubin answers some questions about geographic, legal, and technological explanations for growth, and stresses the importance of synergy and interplay between these theories for a more illuminating picture. So to hear all this and a whole lot more, including many reasons to pick up his latest book, tune in today!   Key Points From This Episode:   •   Introducing the role of culture in economic growth, and tracing the roots of this inquiry. •   Positioning How the World Became Rich in the lineage of literature on the subject of growth.  •   Looking at England and the emergence of modern growth; arguments over the most important factors. •   Why Dr. Rubin tried to bring different theories into conversation through writing this book. •   Unpacking the argument for the role of liberal speech norms in the history of development, proposed by McCloskey. •   Technological progress and geographic endowments; why this relationship is worth exploration. •   Dr. Rubin's perspective on the role of law and legal systems in the growth trajectory of a country. •   Discussing the relative slowing of growth in the Western world and what this may mean. •   Dr. Rubin briefly comments on an argument for total factor productivity growth being linear. •   Thoughts on big picture topics through a micro lens. •   The lessons we can take from history for the most impactful policies for growth in the future.     Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:   https://www.jaredcrubin.com/ (Dr. Jared Rubin) https://www.chapman.edu/ (Chapman University) https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Became-Rich-Historical/dp/1509540237 (How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth) https://twitter.com/jaredcrubin?lang=en (Dr. Jared Rubin on Twitter) https://economics.gmu.edu/people/mkoyama2 (Mark Koyama) https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/podcast/charter-cities-podcast-episode-16-state-capacity-religious-toleration-and-political-competition-with-mark-koyama/ (Charter Cities Podcast Episode 16 with Mark Koyama) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1995/lucas/biographical/ (Robert Lucas) https://economics.northwestern.edu/people/directory/joel-mokyr.html (Joel Mokyr) https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Growth-Origins-Schumpeter-Lectures/dp/0691168881 (Culture of Growth) https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/ (Joe Henrich) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist (Max Weber) https://www.amazon.com/Protestant-Ethic-Spirit-Capitalism/dp/1603866043 (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1992/becker/facts/ (Gary Becker) https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5970597.html (Culture and the Evolutionary Process) https://press.princeton.edu/our-authors/o-grada-cormac (Cormac Ó Gráda) https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/ (Deidre McCloskey) https://growthecon.com/ (Deitrich Vollrath) https://www.amazon.com/Fully-Grown-Stagnant-Economy-Success/dp/0226820041 (Fully Grown) https://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/thomas-philippon (Thomas Philippon) https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/...

Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass?  In How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity, 2022), Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently-advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the USA, Canada, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up? Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society's past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may—or may not—develop. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass?  In How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity, 2022), Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently-advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the USA, Canada, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up? Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society's past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may—or may not—develop. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

You’re reading Economic Forces, a free weekly newsletter on economics, especially price theory, without the politics. You can support our newsletter by signing up here:Welcome to Episode 10 of the Economic Forces Podcast! We interview Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin about their new book, "How the World Became Rich." We talk about why England grew more than the Dutch, what role institutions and culture play, the modern approaches to economic history, and the need for more price theory in economic history. Buy their book here.You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app. If you don’t see Economic Forces on your podcast app, try adding the following RSS feed directly: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/86578.rss.Below you’ll find a teaser clip and the full interview. Enjoy! Get full access to Economic Forces at pricetheory.substack.com/subscribe

Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass?  In How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity, 2022), Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently-advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the USA, Canada, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up? Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society's past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may—or may not—develop. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass?  In How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity, 2022), Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently-advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the USA, Canada, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up? Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society's past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may—or may not—develop. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass?  In How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity, 2022), Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently-advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the USA, Canada, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up? Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society's past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may—or may not—develop. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass?  In How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity, 2022), Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently-advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the USA, Canada, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up? Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society's past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may—or may not—develop. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass?  In How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity, 2022), Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently-advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the USA, Canada, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up? Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society's past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may—or may not—develop. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

How Religion shapes and influences the trajectory of a country's development path is a subject I have long been curious about - and I found persuasive answers in the work of Economic Historian Jared Rubin. Jared's book is a tour de force on how rulers and elites use religious legitimacy to propagate their rule - and the developmental implications of such equilibrium. The first part of our conversation is to get him to explain some of the fundamental concepts of his book and analysis. It is impossible to capture his work in a single conversation, so curious listeners can check out his book - and his excellent blog posts here, here, and here. He also has a new book out with previous podcast guest, Mark Koyama (episode here).You can also get the podcast on all the popular platforms like Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, and the rest. The transcript of the conversation is available below. Thank you for listening and for your support.TRANSCRIPTTobi; Welcome to Ideas Untrapped podcast my guest today is Jared Rubin. Jared is an economics professor at Chapman University in California. He's an economic historian, and he has written a wonderful book titled Rulers, Religion and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not. Welcome to the show, Jared.Jared; Thank you. It's great to be here. It really is.Tobi; Kind of like [an] obvious first question is why religion, really? I mean, so religion has always been this largely accepted but not really systematically defined or studied aspect of the society, especially when it comes to its influence on institutions and economic development. So what motivated you along this line of research?Jared; Yeah, so this goes back a long way. Religion is something I've always been interested in. Not necessarily, for me, a personal conviction and I'll be fine if it were, but it's been something mainly because I've had a hard time understanding its impact. It's something that very obviously influences decision making. So from my undergraduate days, I was interested in economics, which I view as, kind of, how and why people make decisions. And I was also interested in religion for actually similar reasons because it clearly influenced the way that people made decisions. So I took a lot of courses on various religious topics in undergraduate, but it was something that when I went to get my PhD in economics I never really thought I would pursue. I didn't think that it was something that economists studied. And then in my second year of graduate school, I took a class from who would eventually become my advisor, [...] Wright, who has done work on religion in the past, particularly the role that Islamic and Christian cultural attributes fed into economic development in the medieval period and my mind was blown that you could do this, that some economists took religion seriously. So I went to him, this was probably 2003 and I told him that I wanted to do a dissertation on religion and economic development over time. And at the time, precisely the setup to your question, he told me - that's fine if that's what you want to do, and that's what you're interested in, but know that you're going to have a hard time getting a job?Because there were very few economists at the time that were interested in religion. I mean, you could probably count them on two hands, the economists seriously thought about religion... which in retrospect, is kind of mind-blowing.For me, especially, thinking about medieval Europe, say... I don't understand how you can think about European economic development in the medieval period without thinking of the role of the church. If you think about almost any aspect of Middle Eastern economic history since the spread of Islam, very hard to think through the mechanisms through which growth either happens or doesn't without thinking about the role of Islam, and particularly religious authorities. So I decided to go down this path anyway. I knew that it was something I wanted to do with my career. That's the type of thing that got me really excited about working. And my view on things in general is, you only live once. So if you're fortunate enough to be in a position where you can do what you want, do it! I did eventually find a job, which was fortunate. And as I dug more and more into the history, you know, history was also something that I didn't necessarily think I was going to do... I've always read a lot and it always interested me... start to realize that, you know, something I kind of knew anyway, especially Islam-Christianity comparison, there are way more similarities than there are differences between the religion and religious tenets. Now, clearly, there are differences. But when it comes to the things that impinge on economic development, there's a lot of similarities, especially in history. Now, the question is, has religion played a role at all in economic development and that's what I was trying to think through. And when you start really reading the history, I think one of the things you must immediately latch on to, whether it be medieval European history or medieval Middle Eastern history, is the role that religion played in politics really mattered. And when you start getting a [...] that well, maybe even if these religions are pretty similar, actually, (they're not nearly as different as I think a lot of people think they are) the role they played in politics has diverged a lot over time, and the divergence to some degree coincides with the divergence in economic fortunes in the region. So that was the observation that inspired me to write this book. And to really then think through not just the role that religion has played in politics, but why it might differ across societies, and then how it might evolve over time based on the somewhat initial differences, and then what that might mean for economic development. So I ended up writing a few papers on this. But I decided that the time had come to write a book because I had enough, at least, I saw how the connections were made in my mind and between my papers, and that's where that came from. It's kind of a brief background.Tobi; Yeah, just for the audience, your work on religion is not just limited to the book, you've written numerous papers, and publicly available essays, which I'm going to be putting up links to some of it in the show notes. So I'll start my exploration with the evolution of big gods in society, because religion has been with humanity for as long as we know. But tell me, how did big Gods, monotheistic religion become the most popular flavour of human religious practice? I know you've written about this.Jared; Yeah. So this is something that it's certainly more in the field of anthropology. So there's been some really good anthropological work recently done on this, and actually some work by some economists as well. And this is something that's also, you know, as I was just mentioning, it's intimately related with politics. So small gods, this is not a term that is meant to describe them or anything like that in any way, shape, or form. But it's just meant to say [that] we call small gods, like, gods that have a specific purpose. It might be a god that brings water to a population or heals sickness, things like that. That's a small god, you know, it's a god that has a specific purpose.Big gods are gods that has broader powers. So certainly, when we think about monotheistic gods, those are very big gods, it's the God in a sense, but polytheistic gods can be big gods as well. But what big gods can do is what this literature cites as a purpose of big gods is that it can be a way to legitimate rule. It can be a way that if a ruler has the support of a big god, whatever that means, right? And that can be based on some tenet of the society that whoever's ruling is God-ordained, there might be some clerical class in a society that ordains a ruler as God-ordained. But the idea is that big gods, especially centralized gods (and this is where you kind of get towards a more monotheistic faith) are much better at legitimating rule, at keeping rulers in power, and this is where we get autocracy from too. So a lot of these early societies that had big gods, these were the ones that ended up being a little less fair, that kind of really centralized power in a small group of people because gods like that could be used in that way. You know, when you have a variety of gods you can appeal to, when you have these ''smaller gods'', each group can have their own god. And in that way, it's really hard for any one political group to monopolize divine power. So the recent research on this has mainly connected the origin of these types of gods with political power. And this is something I haven't done my own original research on. But I've written a few things, especially online, we have a blog that I worked for that kind of summarizes this works. I think it's really interesting and not just interesting, but it's a really important precursor to my own work to think about where these gods come from in the first place. Because where my own work comes from is well into monotheism. We're talking about the origins of Christianity and Islam that's well past the point where big gods have formed originally. The real idea is big gods start coming about when humans settle down in society. So, around the Neolithic revolution 8,000-10,000 years ago, so...One other thing that really popped immediately in your book is the role of elites in society. And this is something that has been a bit elusive, at least, in my own experience to define. Tobi; I have a friend [and], I mean, when we talk about Nigeria, and how elites are not really doing enough or talking about the right things or doing the right things, the usual retort is, oh, yeah, well, who are the elites? And I find that it's a surprisingly harder question to answer than it sounds. Jared; Yeah. Tobi; So you describe elites as anyone who can influence how people whom they do not know, act. Can you explain that a bit? Who exactly are the elites in society? How do they emerge?Jared; Yeah, I think this is a really important question. And it's a question that I don't think there's one answer to in the sense, like, I wanted to define elites in a certain way, because I wanted to be able to kind of think through what I described as elites, and this was the commonality. But certainly, if you read other works, they'll define elites in a slightly different way. There are certain people we all know are elite, right, like presidents, or people on the highest courts, things like that. But then there are other people that might not be so obvious whether they're a leader or not, like a local priest or imam or something. Is that person an elite? You know, maybe some people would say yes, some people would say no. So yes, for my book and my work more generally, I use this definition, because it has practical value. So it's this idea that to be an elite, you need to be able to influence the actions of other people, particularly people you don't know. Now, you ask two questions, both of which are really good. One is, how do you become an elite? This is something I've been thinking about a lot for work I'm still doing now is, what is the source of power? Because elites have power, almost by the definition of what I described, if you really want to think about why this matters, it's [that] there's some sorts of power that they have.Now, this differs by the type of elite, some of the ones I'm concerned with in the book of religious elites. Now, the idea here tends to be that religious elites (have) either through their study or through their position or something have access to something people care about. Which is, you know, either the Word of God or some places and times actually begin to connect to the supernatural, something like this. And because they have privileged access to ''we'll just call it the supernatural''... something people really care about, that gives them power to do other things to influence the way people act. And it might be in a way that's consistent with religious tenets and might not. There's been plenty of instances where not. In other cases, there's access to coercive power that can make one elite. This is something where you can say warlords could be considered elite in the sense that at the top level, they have access to coercive power, that because people fear the use of coercive power, it allows them to make people act in a way that they don't want to act.You know, more generally, military elites. And there's a lot of grey area here, you know, so in the military, for instance, who's elite who's not? The lowest rank military person probably isn't, you know, they might be able to be on the street with a gun or something, trying to direct people to do something, but it's not really their actions that is causing this, it's the people above them.Then the very top people are elite. Somewhere in the middle, you just have to kind of make a decision if you're thinking about the social scientific definition. And then this other [group] who I describe as economic elite, who with their access to resources, gives them power. Whether through a formal political process or not, you know, oftentimes, especially in the modern world, it's often through formal political processes. But there's a lot of non-formal processes as well through which this happens, certainly through markets, for instance. You know, market power can be really [a] domineering force. So by this definition, my definition is much more broad than many definitions, especially, in the politicacience literature, because by my definition, there's a lot of elites in many societies. And a reason I think that it's important to consider this idea of there being many elites is that there's many people in general and in societies that can influence the political process. Now, to be clear, it doesn't mean that just because you're elite, you'll influence a political process. The way I've described it in my own work is I do use game theory, or at least is the idea of thinking about the interactions between these various people in societies. And when you go through a Game in Game Theory, you think about how they interact with each other, and what are their motivations? What are the outcomes of their interactions, that's really ultimately what you want to get at. And so I think about the game as being between elites. Now, certainly there are people in the background, right, that aren't elites. The non elites are the people that give elites power in a sense because it's those very non elite states that the elites can influence. And that's the very source of their power. So there is a bit of a tautology here, in a sense that elites power because they can influence people, and then non elites follow elites because they can be influenced. But it's also one of these things. We see it across societies. And I do think that there are many reasons why one can become an elite. And those also differ across societies as well.Tobi; In your book, you also describe a class of people who are still elites, as propagating agents of a ruler. But, one thing became very clear your argument that a ruler seeks to propagate their rule. That's what they desire, you know, isn't this a bit of a public choice assumption, some would question that to say that, Oh, well, just ruling for its sake is not the only desire of a ruler. Some rulers want to do good, some want to, you know, like there are diverse motivations and desires for a ruler. But your mechanism sort of relies on this propagation of rule. What is your argument for choosing to go in that direction?Jared; That's a good question, because this is something that, you know, books have been written on, you know, why do religion? What are the motivations? I mean, you're right, certainly, some have much more altruistic motives, i don't deny that. Some have the exact opposite. Essentially wanting to seek as many rents as possible. And then there are others in the middle. They might be altruistic towards their own ethnic group, and very much the opposite towards others. And this is more of a theoretical concept. Because when we need to think about the interactions between various people or groups in society, we do need to think about what they need, what they want. And what I was trying to do in this book was to think about the most general way of capturing this. And I actually agreed that you can think about it in other ways, and I don't think this captures 100% of motivations, but all of the stuff we've been talking about here, whether it be pure altruism, or you know, something like that, or really wanting to improve society. Or again, on the other hand, wanting to capture as many rents for you or your small group of people. In order to do that, you have to stay in power. And so at its base, I want to minimize the assumptions we make. Because once you make an assumption about, say, wanting to maximize tax revenue, or state revenue or something like that, you know, because certain types of rulers that would really benefit, well then you're you're no longer capturing the type of society where, you know, as you mentioned, maybe the ruler just wants to do best for their society. So what I was trying to do, I was trying to think through a way that we might discuss leadership, rulership in a way that is going to be true of all types of societies. So even in democracies, you have rulers at many levels wanting to be reelected. So they're constrained in ways to do that.Clearly in very autocratic governments, no matter what the autocrat wants to do, they can't do it if they don't stay in power. But yeah, I certainly agree that if you wanted to study, especially, a certain type of rulers or a type of ruler of certain motivation, you could think about this a little different, for sure. Good point.Tobi; Going with your mechanism now, so for a ruler to propagate it's rule, you identify two types of agents. One is legitimizing agents and the other coercive agents. But you see cases, and that transverses many societies... you see cases where there is a sort of overlap between the two where the faction of a ruler has some legitimacy, but also uses force to entrench that legitimacy. So disentangle both types of agents for me slightly.Jared; Yeah, so this is good. Maybe for the sake of listeners, that's a word I use that is not really too common in the literature - this term, propagating agents. To your previous question, I find propagating rulers as staying in power. So a propagating agent is somebody in society that can help you stay in power.If it's a religious agent, they might have access to the Word of God or something like that. A military agent, as you mentioned, is a type of coercive agent - one that has power. And to your question, you're absolutely right and I think nearly every society in human history has had some combination of legitimacy and coercive power. In fact, you know, you really can't have rulership without some degree of coercive power. If a ruler has zero access to coercive power, they will be overthrown quite easily. You can, in theory, have a society that has zero legitimacy, and you know, it's run completely by coercive power. We would say that there have been a few societies that have, at least, come close to that. But again, that ruler is very tenuous in their rule, because there's gonna be a lot of people in society that don't think that they're the rightful ruler. I should also just note quickly that legitimacy is a very complex concept, but we can think about it in a simplistic way, as just that one has political legitimacy when people view that person's having the right to rule. And that can come from a lot of sources. It can come from, certainly, religious elites. It can come from economic elites. It can even come from military elites, depending on, you know, the cultural attributes of the society. So I think, say, certainly, Genghis Khan had this type of legitimacy. And then this was true, at least, in my reading of Mongol societies, that those who could fight have political legitimacy as well as the right to rule. One of the ideas put in my book, to get directly to your question here, is that you can think about it as not necessarily disentangling the two, but what weight do you put on the two. Does the ruler use 95% coercive power, 5% legitimacy or the reverse? Now, one thing that I argue is that there are many types of legitimacy that are relatively inexpensive, from the rulers perspective, you know. So, of course, coercive power is often pretty expensive, for two reasons. One, it's just often expensive in terms of resources, you know, either be outfitting a military or police forces or things like this. And the other thing is that it's expensive in the sense of giving too much coercive power to groups in society is also a threat to your own rule. Because those are the people that are most likely to overthrow you.Now, legitimacy... to gain legitimacy, I think of it as kind of interaction between rulers - I should say, rulers here doesn't necessarily have to be a person, maybe a small group of people [or] something like that... just the ruling elite - and those in society that can provide legitimacy. Again, whether they be religious elites, economic elites, something like that.And we can think about this as a trade-off. There's going to be some types of maybe policies, sometimes it's just pure payments. Like it's certainly in both Christian and Muslim societies that much of their history, religious authorities will say tax-exempt, things like that, you know, as a part of the payoff. They also might want some types of policies. Oftentimes, the religious elite maybe wants suppression of rival religions, things like that. In the grand scheme of things that tends to be relatively inexpensive, relative to other forms of legitimacy. So then it's attractive. And that's one of the outcomes or the way that I'm thinking about it in the interactions between different groups. You know, some kind of basic economic comparison. There's going to be benefits from using different forms of legitimacy or coercion, there are also costs. So we think about what's the cost-benefit trade-offs, and rulers are going to use some types and not others. And that's going to differ by society, it's also going to differ over time. One thing my book tries to do is look at the evolution of these trade-offs over time and why they diverge between the regions.Tobi; You also explained and described something called the rules of the game, as institutions - be it culture, norms and the practices of the society which sort of set the boundaries of what a ruler and the elites can sort of do in a society. So, I mean, describe that to me a bit. How is that a limiting factor? Because a lot of people kind of assume that once you achieve some legitimacy, maybe through religious legitimacy by, say, converting to the most popular religion of population, you can do what you want. But you made it clear that there are some limiting factors in different societies to what rulers and their agents can do. Describe this process.Jared; Yeah, so that term ''the rules of the game'' is a very famous one used by the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Douglass North. And that's, again, even for him, you know... that's like a very simplistic way to think about institutions. And North goes well beyond this. And then they [other economists] have gone even further beyond this. But the way that these work do not mean that actors, or even rulers, can act unilaterally and do whatever they want. They're constrained by various things. And one of the real things that I focus on here is this degree to which religious elites can really legitimate rule and how effective they are at doing this.So in some societies, religious elites are extremely effective at doing this; and this is not just to do with their effort or something like that, it's based on history. It's something that historically, in some societies, religious elites have been very good, so they continue to be very good, at least for the short run. What I do in the book, of course, is you know, look at certain parts of the Middle East. Religious elites can be extremely effective at either propping up rule or the opposite, or challenging rule. Look at the 1979 Iranian Revolution - that's exactly what happened there. On the other hand, religious elites may no longer be powerful where they once were powerful. I mean, Western Europe is like that today. Religious elites tend to not have much power in Western Europe today, in large part because society is not very religious, whereas they used to. So again, that's kind of a constraint that's faced by a ruler at any one given point in time. So maybe a medieval European ruler would have desired to have religious legitimacy because in the medieval period religions are still very effective at legitimating rule. In the modern-day, certainly Prime Ministers, Presidents are going to look elsewhere as they tend to. So when we talk about, you know, the rules of the game, we can think about this as a rule. It kind of sets the stage for how this game as I described it between those who rule and those who can keep them in power, how they interact with each other.So let's get right into the meat of your argument proper, which is how Christianity and Islam emerged when they did, and how the relationship between both religions and their societies and the institutions they propagated, sort of lead to economic divergence, so to speak. Tobi; And so I'm going to ask you two questions. I'm trying not to assume too much knowledge for the audience here. So I'm going to ask you two related questions. So describe for us briefly how the emergence of Islam [happened] when it did, and the emergence of Christianity when and where it did [and] how that came to influence the divergence that was to come later in the society where they sort of propagated these influences. And my second question, just to note, is that you made very clear - which also I should state for the sake of the audience - that you're not arguing that there is something inherently wrong with any religion. Though, some might argue that, well, you kind of have to say that, right? So...Jared; Yeah, no, I think the second question follows from the first question, though, too, because this is actually really important to clarify if the audience hasn't picked up on that yet is, this book doesn't really look at the tenets of religion. In fact, Islam and Christianity are much closer on most fronts than they are apart. So to the extent that religion might have played a role in what ended up becoming a larger economic divergence, it's hard to look at the tenets of religion as the core cause. And moreover, something the book also notes is that a good explanation of any type of divergence...you know, economic divergence in the long run, but especially between Europe and the Middle East has to also account for the fact that the Middle East was far ahead of Europe for a long time. Minimum, 400 years, probably 700 years.[It] doesn't really matter exactly how long in a sense that, you know, it was a while and eventually Europe pulled ahead. But that fact in and of itself suggests that a simplistic argument about there being something about Islam that holds economies back is a foolhardy one. I mean, how do you explain that the Middle East for the first, say, 600 years after the spread of Islam was so far ahead of Western Europe, on every front - economically, scientifically, culturally, technologically, everything? So specifically, your first question, though the book looks at and draws out the implications of one very important difference between not so much the theology or the tenets of the religion but a historical difference between the two that did get involved institutionally into the two regions.This stems from the way that the religions were born and it has to do with their role in legitimating role. And the book argues that, for historical reasons, Islam is more effective at legitimating rule. And it cites numerous passages not just in the Quran, but also the Hadith, which are the kind of the second most important set of religious sayings that's associated with teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. And the reason that the book argues... and I'm not the first person by any means to note this... that Islam is better, or is more effective at legitimating rule is the conditions under which these religions were born. So Christianity was born in the Roman Empire. And for its first 300 years, it was a minority religion, which was essentially trying to survive in the Roman Empire. And for this reason, we see the writings in early Christianity when the real doctrine in the corpus of Christian doctrine is really being formed are not about legitimating rule. In fact, it's quite the opposite. You know, there's the famous quote attributed, at least, to Jesus, you know, ''render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God, what is God's''. The idea of being these two separate spheres, and the religious sphere is not part of that of the Caesar, the secular ruler. And then there are plenty of others who at the time, you know, Augustine and numerous Popes that had similar ideas. On the other hand, Islam formed at the same time, what was at the time the world's largest ever empire was formed. Muhammad himself was a political figure, as well as a religious figure.Then, in the first 30 years, the first caliphate, then under the Umayyad Caliphate, within a 100 years of the spread of Islam you have it going from the Atlantic Ocean, you know, in terms of the Iberian Peninsula, all the way to South Asia.This is the largest empire the world has ever seen. And as this empire is expanding, this is the same time that the corpus of Islamic thought is being formed. It's being formed differently in different contexts. But because it's forming alongside a growing empire, there is need for Islamic justification for political rule. So from a very early period, you get Islamic doctrine and this being kind of ingrained institutionally that a rightful ruler is one who follows islam, however that is defined. And again, what this ends up doing is, eventually, after the Islamic clerical classes eventually come about in the ninth and 10th century, this ends up giving them a lot of power because they're the ones who can define whether a ruler is acting like a good Muslim or not. And because of the principles, you know, the kind of what we might call a cultural principle of what makes legitimate rule, it gives religious authorities a lot of power on the one hand, because they can be the ones that describe it. But then, when a ruler has this legitimacy, it gives the ruler a lot of power to act however they like because they're viewed as legitimate and they might not necessarily need as much coercive powers as they otherwise would.Tobi; You sort of answered my second question. I agree with you, by the way. But what I've noticed with people who get defensive about this kind of argument is to insist on the tenets argument and say, Oh, no, one of these two religions, Islam, in particular, is quite politically prescriptive. And because of that you cannot just separate the tenets of each religion from its institutional or social or political influence, right. But you are saying that, because there was a divergence in the rules of the game, so to speak, when these two religions started growing, influenced the text, the tenants, the practices, and how much legitimacy each can command, you know? So I guess my next question would be, at what point... because like you said, the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire was a pretty successful Empire for hundreds of years. Jared; Yes. Tobi; When did it change? When did religious legitimacy and the way it worked in the Middle East become a sort of economic albatross?Jared; So this is the great question. And I think this is the important question to answer because I would actually argue, and I do argue in the book, that initially, this was something that actually was economically beneficial relative to what, say, post-Roman Europe was going through at the time; and even relative to what, you know, societies, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, but even throughout the Middle East North Africa look like, you know, there were empires at the time. But one thing early Islam did was it helped unite these various regions under one rule, which meant fairly consistent rule of law, even though you know, we don't think of these as pure rule of law societies, but there was consistent rule, they use the same currencies, they could expect similar protections. One thing that religion does do, you know, this isn't unique to Islam, but because Islam at least, was mainly initially spread amongst merchants, so this was something that [for] the broader populations of these regions, it took a while for them to more broadly Islamise, but merchants were among the first to convert. And this is something that, at least, brought them into similar social circles, it improved their networks. And I think this helps explain - it's not the only thing, but it helps explain the economic growth of what we might think of as a broader Islamic world for its first 400 years.This is known in the historical literature as the golden age of Islam from the mid-seventh century till about 1000 or so. And I think you can make the case that the fact that these rulers were in fact strong, for the most part, was a reason for this. And certainly, at least up until like the late 9th century, when the Abbasid Empire which was the large empire, beginning the mid 8th century was kind of at its peak. This is a reason I think that Islam plays its role. And again, I mentioned a few minutes ago that I think an explanation that focuses on religion also does need to explain why Islam was associated for so long with a relatively economic successful region. Whereas, you know, this is the same period - that period mid-seventh century to 1000 or so where Europe is not nearly as successful, you know, it's still kind of in its post-Roman doldrums. Even when you get some type of unification like under Charlemagne, the Carolingian Empire, there's no real capacity to rule in most of those places. And I think, in part at least, that's due to differences in the way that these rulers - to use my term of propagating rule. Now to get at your big question, what we really need to explain then is actually a reversal. So the year 800, ironically enough, is often a year that's pinpointed, because on the one hand, in Western Europe, it's kind of a famous year because it's the year that the Pope crowned Charlemagne. But it's also right at the height of the Abbasid Empire in terms of its economic power, in particular. And this is a year that, you know, around this time, early ninth century, that economic divergence between the two regions was probably at its greatest. So we then say, well, what was the source of reversal? Now, I want to make it clear that I'm pinpointing one source, this is by no means the only source. There are many different reasons, I mean, nothing as big as 1000 years of economic history is going to be mono-causal. But one thing I look at is, we can start with the Middle East and North Africa and say, because religion was so effective at propagating rule, there was very little incentive for political authorities to change this. They stayed in power, by ceding relatively little to religious authorities, they certainly had to have access to coercive powers, which they did. There's been a lot of good work that has looked at what access to coercive powers meant for the stability of Muslim empires as well as their economic strength. But it meant that religious authorities remained powerful and, importantly, what I then got to argue is that it meant that economic elites were kept out of the ruling coalition. Before I go too deeply into this, I want to also make it clear that, you know, having a society run by economic elites is generally not a good thing. You know, purely economic elites. Because economic elites, you know, people that are engaged in commerce, maybe merchants, things like that, we should be thinking about them just like we think about all actors as being somewhat selfish.They have their own desires that they want satisfied. And in this case, it may benefit them at the expense of society. One thing I note, though, is that the big things that economic elites want from the political bargain are things that tend to benefit society more broadly.And the two big ones I point out in the book because these come up again and again in our history are some types of protections often for their property. But you know, more broadly for especially commercial interactions, you know, so you have some type of means to appeal when you're being cheated, or certainly when your rights are being infringed in any way. And there's a very large literature in economics that suggests these types of rights are really important for economic development. And the other thing is investment in large scale public goods. Things like transport networks, roads, bridges, canals, things like that. And a whole host of other public goods, eventually education becomes something, even though that's actually quite a bit later. There's a long, long history of economics that suggests that those things are typically most efficiently provided by government. Again, the economic elites want these types of things, because they benefit themselves. They do benefit themselves, but they also happen to benefit society more broadly. So on this front, you could say, Well, if the economic elite really don't have a seat at the bargaining table, in this case they don't have a seat because rulers don't need them. They have plenty of legitimacy, say, through religion and giving up stuff like property rights is among the most expensive things that can be asked for. So rulers really don't want to give that up if they don't have to. On the other hand, in Europe, what ends up happening around the year 1000 or so... it starts in northern Italy, in the low countries, is you start to get some seeds of commercial development. Trade, actually, a lot of the trade at least begins with the Byzantine Empire and the Muslims. And with this, as trade starts to expand, some of the things that the religious authorities might impinge upon, while we look at say like moneyed interest or stuff like that. But that's actually I think less important in the broader scheme of things.What's probably more important is that economic elites gain more power. And, you know, to go back to the broader narrative in the book, because Christian religious authorities actually have less legitimating power, they're less effective at legitimating rule. [And] once there are these other sources of power that come up in a society that can provide rulers with things like tax revenue, rulers seek them out. So this is precisely the period where Europe goes through a major kind of overhaul in its Church-State relations. So the most famous episode and this is called the investiture crisis, where it essentially pits the papacy versus various secular rulers. And this is a period, a medieval period where religious legitimacy remains important, but it loses some of its value and where it loses its power, it's economic elites that gain. I fast forward a little bit to the Reformation, which where it takes place kind of permanently undermines the role of, certainly, the Catholic Church, but just more generally, [the role of] religion in legitimating rule. And in those places, that's where you really start to see economic elites, mainly in the form of Parliaments becoming much more powerful. And there again, that's where you start to see these economic elites bargaining for various things that improve the economic development in the region. Again, they're doing it for their own personal reasons. it's not to say that economic elites are altruistic, kind-hearted people that want what's best for society. Oftentimes, it's quite the opposite, they just want things that benefit themselves. But some of the things they want are the types of things that we think of that portend broader economic success. So in a nutshell, that's kind of the very broad scope of the argument. Certainly, there's historical detail that the book goes into. But yeah...Tobi; Some of the implications of your work are so deep, that I'm not quite sure I can do it enough justice. But one thing I want to now get at is the issue of persistence. I mean, the period you called in the book, and also your research, they are pretty long enough, some will say, for us to see maybe some convergence. I mean, there has been the Industrial Revolution, the first one, the second one, and I mean, now we live in an age of globalization. And some of this divergence can still be observed. So specifically, speaking of religious legitimacy and how growth retarding it can be in certain conditions, how persistent is that effect? And secondly, how does legitimacy wither?Jared; I think that this is kind of a key question in terms of thinking about these long-run processes. And I think one answer to this is that, in part, at least, it comes down to incentives.It comes down to incentives of the ruling elite to continue to use religious legitimacy. And to kind of go back to what we're talking about initially, we can think about this in terms of cost benefits. And what we might think about as the costs here are what economists think about costs as - it includes opportunity cost, the foregone cost of using something, a different form of legitimacy in this case.As long as the costs are relatively low, which we might think of that as broadly being the case with religious legitimacy, then it's likely to persist. This doesn't necessarily entail anything deterministic about... you know, just because a religion is good at legitimating rule, it's definitely going to persist, there might be other things in societies that come about. In fact, you know, we have seen this here and there, you know, so say, after World War One, Turkey became a fairly secular society, at least in terms of its politics. So there's nothing absolute at all here in terms of it persisting, but what we can say, and I think this is where if you do economics correctly enough is strong. But if you use economics in a good way, you never want to say something's definitely going to happen. But you can say things are more likely to happen because people are incentivized to do something in a certain way. And that's what I think I would describe here in terms of persistence. And I think this same logic also helps us understand why in this case, things don't persist. Why the use of religious legitimacy doesn't persist. And these might be things outside of what we might think of as the ruling elite or the religious elite's control. When, you know, what I was just describing... when you have a reemergence of commerce in Europe, for instance, in what is known in the historical literature as the commercial revolution, happening approximately between 1000 - 1300, that changes the cost-benefit calculation. And because the benefits of religious legitimacy were lower, and now the costs are higher, because you're essentially keeping this increasingly powerful economically outside the political circle if you continue to rely on religious legitimacy, that changes the calculation. And maybe you do want to start offering these economic elites political rights, but it would come at the expense of political power for the religious elite. But that's precisely what ends up happening in the medieval period in Europe, is that these economic elites increasingly get rights throughout central Europe and actually in other parts of Europe as well.They start forming communes, which are like the city-states, which are mainly made for merchants by merchants to trade with each other, but they gain a lot of rights and these rights come at the expense of the religious elite. The religious elites have relatively little power in these areas, and these areas become the economic workhorses of medieval Europe. And they benefit the rulers, in some cases, immensely and this becomes one of the primary sources of tax revenue and a whole host of things. So again, you know, I think if we think about it in terms of this cost-benefit framework, we have to know the history, certainly, to know why these costs and benefits might change. But I think it does give us a framework for thinking about why things persist as well.Tobi; Thinking about incentives the way you just described it, especially of the elites, and this is not just about religion, you see some societies that may be too reliant on rent from resource revenue and their struggles to diversify also struggle with this incentive problem. So I guess my point would be, is it fair or, should I say, reasonable to conclude that a lot of modernization projects that we are seeing whether in terms of foreign aid or interventions or setting up democracies in, perhaps, states that have no history of that form of governance, are they all efforts that are doomed to fail if the incentives of local elites remain the same?Jared; Oftentimes, yes. And this is where I think that this question is extraordinarily deep in that this gets at so many different things in human history. And I think, you know, we can broadly say that transporting something that worked, whether it be institutional design, whether it be just funding for certain types of things that worked in one society, it doesn't necessarily work in another society if, in this case, the institutions... and you could even say that there are cultural incentives too that, you know, when people are imbued with a certain view of the world, then they're not just going to be able to adopt new things in a whole host of ways. So yes, I would argue pretty strongly that certainly elites that govern the political process, when incentives don't change, you're unlikely to get a change in political behaviour. So if you really want to think about what might be a driver of societal change, at some point, the incentives of the elites have to change. So this can come from a variety of ways. This can come from certainly international, either pressure or incentives, or, you know, it can be financial incentives. It can come from the ground up. What I just described in Europe was more of a ground up thing, in that the incentive of political elites only changed after commerce really started to reemerge. And on the other hand, talking about commerce reemerging in Europe, it still wasn't flowing, as far as we can tell, nearly as much as it was in the Middle East at the time. So what that indicates is that... at least to me, is that the incentives for Middle Eastern rulers or North African rulers at the time to employ religious legitimacy was just so much stronger that it was going to take a lot more to undermine those incentives. So again, that's where I think to your question, really understanding the incentives that authorities face, [that] the various parts of the ruling coalition face is really important to even begin to understand what is possible in terms of change.Tobi; My final question to you, which is also a bit of a tradition on the show, is what's the one big idea that you would like to see spread everywhere? It may be something you're working on new [or] old, it may be something that you find interesting. So what is it?Jared; By spread everywhere, you mean [the] broader population? Tobi; Yes.Jared; I think it's [the] implications of my work. It's not my work in particular, but it's the type of stuff that got me interested in this in the first place. It is that if you really want to take a grand, grand, grand view, I think with both myself and I think a large fraction of people who go into economics, why we get in the field is to understand both wealth and poverty. Because for me understanding poverty, you have to understand wealth as well, you have to understand how it's created. Because I think what most of us, I would hope one, at least one of the main reasons we're interested in this is because understanding the way economies work as a source to help people.You know, the people that need it the most. And, you know, something I've long been interested in is the role that religion has played in this because I think it's one of many factors. And again, I want to be very clear, I have a book coming out early next year with Mark Koyama. He's been a guest on your show in the past about how the world became rich, and we look at a lot of different reasons in that book. So this is one of the reasons but I do think that there are massive misconceptions in the role that religion has played and can play in the future. And I think that if we want to say think about the broader Muslim world, for instance... you know, what worked to raise the economic profile and improve the economic development of, say Western Europe initially, my argument was that it was in part getting religion out of politics. I don't think that's going to work, though, in large parts of the Muslim world for reasons we just discussed. So an implication of both my work but also something that is long interested me is this idea that tenets of religion themselves are not things that have a massively damaging impact on economic development. And I think that oftentimes, that's something that is easy to pinpoint, especially for people who want to blame religion for something. But when we think about the role that religion plays in politics, and this is not unique to religion, it can be the role that the military plays in politics, can be the role that actually, frankly, certain types of economic elites play in politics. And if we really want to improve the lot of... there's still a billion or so people in the world that live on $3 a day or less...the role of local politics plays a role in depressing the capacity for those people to just get to a point where thinking about what they're going to eat is not dominating their lives.And it differs by society. But I do think that attempts to improve the lots of those people that aren't as concerned with the political are not going to get far. And that's a lot of, you know, especially Western NGO types. And this is not to say, I mean, many of them do extremely good and important work. But if we really want to get at the source of lifting, you know, at least the most dire of poverty out of the world, I think it's the political that we really need to address. And we need to address it in different ways in different societies. This is not by any means to say that all we need to do is impose democracy. It's exactly the opposite in many cases because democracy when it's imposed, and does not arise organically often does not work that well. So it's thinking about local context, it's thinking about how rulers stay in power, it's all of these things, and including religion. This is in part to say, there's no panacea. There's no silver bullet that's going to affect the politics in various places in the same way. But I do think that if we can pull on generality out which, much more importantly, can help alleviate the most dire of poverty, it's to really try to affect the political. That's the thing that I'm frankly hoping to continue to work on for the next 40 or so years to thinking about the historical determinants of this and what that can teach us for the present.Tobi; Thank you so much. My guest today has been Jared Rubin, economic historian and professor of economics at Chapman University. Thank you very much, Jared, for joining me.Jared; Thank you so much. This has been really fun. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

GrowthChat is a podcast on the social and cultural journey of humankind, hosted by Marco Lecci and Sascha O. Becker. In this episode we chat with Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin about their book "How the World Became Rich: the historical origins of economic growth". Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass? How did the world become rich? Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the US, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up? Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society's past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may – or may not – develop

The Pacific Ocean trade routes have fascinated many for a long time including economic historians Mark Koyama & Fernando Arteaga. Together with their colleague Desiree Desierto they have written an extensive paper on trade across the Pacific Ocean in the centuries after the arrival of Columbus and Europeans in the Americas. In this episode of I've Been Thinking Peter asks in particular why so many ships were lost during the crossings, what role greed and personal profit played in decision-making, and how these influenced the downfall of the Spanish Empire. To read the Desiree, Mark and Fernando's work and to find out more about the 3 authors head here - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3693463 If you have a topic you would like to hear on the podcast then Peter can be reached on Twitter - @peterfrankopan Produced, edited and mixed by @producerneil

Jared Rubin is a professor of economics at Chapman University. He works at the intersection of religion and economics. This is not an entirely obscure field, as evident in 2010's Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion. Nevertheless, Rubin talks about how he was somewhat of an odd duck in the field of economic history due to his interest in religion. His advisor indicated that it would be difficult to find a job. Luckily, that prediction did not come true. Most of the discussion is given over to Rubin's 2017 book, Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not. He argues that the ideological content of Western Christianity matters in terms of the development of capitalism and liberal institutions. Though in the details the model is quite different from the sort of thesis promoted by Max Webber, Rubin does believe that ideas have consequences. In particular, we talk extensively about what a “legitimating ideology” is, and why Islam managed to check the rise of the capitalist class despite the fact that the Prophet Muhammad was himself a merchant. Rubin's argument dovetails in many ways with Joe Henrich's in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Finally, we close out the conversation talking about the book which will be out next year, coauthored with Mark Koyama, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth. You can't say that they don't have ambition. You can find the transcript of the conversation here.  

I learned a lot having this conversation with economic historian Mark Koyama. State Capacity has become an important concept to be understood - especially with the current economic and security problems Nigeria is currently dealing with. A lot of us are also reeling from the consequences of the decisions our governments made in responding to the global pandemic. My conversation with Mark was a bit “wonkish”, so listeners unfamiliar with some of the things we discussed can read the links provided below.Epidemic disease and the state - Mark KoyamaHow to build a state - Anton HowesSome Thoughts on State Capacity - Mark Koyama“State Capacity” is Sleight of Hand - Bryan CaplanIdentity Rules, Group Rights and the Promise of Liberalism - Mark KoyamaYou can listen on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts by simply searching for “Ideas Untrapped”. Kindly give us a rating on these platforms, as it helps others discover the podcast. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

When the galleon San José sank in a typhoon in 1694, it was carrying a cargo worth 2% of the GDP of the entire Spanish empire. Fernando Arteaga, Desiree Desierto and Mark Koyama tell Tim Phillips about how bribes sank Spanish treasure ships. Read the Vox column (https://voxeu.org/article/shipwrecked-rents) about Spanish shipwrecks.

Today's guest is Mark Koyama, Economic Historian at George Mason University. Mark recently co-authored Persecution & Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom with Noel Johnson, and in this episode, we talk to Mark about some of its big themes – state capacity, religious toleration, and political competition. We begin by hearing Mark's ideas about a key argument in his book, the connection between religious freedom and the development of liberal societies. From there, we unpack the meaning of the idea of state capacity which springboards a discussion on the relationship between strong states and the treatment of religious minorities. To flesh out some of the nuances of this idea, our discussion hones in on the treatment of Jews during the Black Death during the Holy Roman Empire. On the topic of state-building, we look at some examples of small city-states versus medium states in Europe, hearing Mark's ideas on why the latter had more lasting power. We also speak about the role of weaponry in state-building. Our conversation moves to focus on the idea of shocks to a local labor pool and how these forces affect wages and markets in different ways. Following this, Mark talks about the persecution of Christian ‘heretics' during the Reformation and the role of the printing press as well as the Ottoman Empire. We speak about the influence of the ideas of Locke and Spinoza on religious toleration and then move on to critically examine the ‘everything exists is efficient' argument as it pertains to state-building. Wrapping up, we talk to Mark about how deep roots literature accounts for state-building in Europe, the role of counterfactual thinking in economic history, and the role of data and analytic narratives in understanding history. We round off the episode with an exchange about how an understanding of economic history will make Libertarian arguments against the state less convincing. Tune in today! Key Points From This Episode: •   Mark's new book looking at how we get modern, liberal societies through the lens of religious freedom. •   Other indicators or drivers for Liberalism and why Mark sees religious freedom as a major one. •   Examples of so-called liberal states suppressing religion. •   Liberal states defined as states which place value in having religious freedom. •   Mark's definition of state capacity, another major theme in his book. •   Tracing the evolution of state capacity as a phenomenon and a term. •   The relationship between strong states and the treatment of religious minorities. •   Jewish tolerance and pogroms during the Black Death in the Holy Roman Empire. •   The role of the size of political units on the development of state capacity in Europe. •   How (the cost of) weaponry influences state-building and state capacity. •   How different types of labor shock affect wages and markets. •   Why some Christian sects were persecuted around the time of the Reformation and the printing press. •   Whether the political decentralization of the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Turks are related to the Reformation. •   The ‘deep roots' argument and how it fits in with the development of modern Europe. •   Mark's book section dealing with the ideas of Locke and Spinoza concerning religious toleration. •   Why the argument that ‘everything which exists is efficient' is not helpful for understanding state policies. •   How counterfactuals can be applied to history and which approaches are useful. •   The role of data and analytic narratives in understanding history. •   The relationship between one's understanding of economics and one's politics. •   The importance of economic history... Support this podcast

Seven hundred years ago the worst pandemic in history killed almost half the population of Europe and the Middle East. Mark Koyama tells Tim Phillips about the centuries-long economic impact of the Black Death.

Apa itu birokrasi? Mengapa birokrasi mesti direformasi? Apa kaitannya dengan kapasitas pemerintah? Bagaimana Reformasi Birokrasi dilakukan? Sejauh apa dampak Reformasi Birokrasi bagi kinerja pemerintah dan kepentingan warga-negara? #NALAR mencoba mendalami gagasan mendasar di balik perlunya Reformasi Birokrasi dalam membangun negara modern. REFERENSI: 1. Sydney Lady Morgan (1818). Florence Macarthy. Henry Colburn. p. 35. 2. John Stuart Mill (1861). "VI – Of the Infirmities and Dangers to which Representative Government is Liable". Considerations on Representative Government. 3. Woodrow Wilson (1887), "The Study of Administration", Political Science Quarterly, July 1887 4. Ludwig von Mises (1944). Bureaucracy. 5. Robert K. Merton (1957). Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, Free Press. pp. 195–206. 6. Karl Marx (1970). Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843). Cambridge University 7. Jaques Elliott (1976). A general theory of bureaucracy. London: Heinemann. 8. "In Praise of Hierarchy". Harvard Business Review. 1 January 1990. 9. Charles Tilly (1985). "War making and state making as organized crime," in Bringing the State Back In, eds P.B. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, & T. Skocpol. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10. Jeffrey Herbst (1990). "War and the State in Africa." International Security, (1990): 117-139 11. David Beetham (1996). Bureaucracy. 12. Franz Wirl (1998). "Socio-economic typologies of bureaucratic corruption and implications". J. Evolutionary Economics, 8(2):199–220. 13. Christopher Hood (2000), The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management. Oxford University Press. p. 76. 14. Liesbet Hooghe (2001). The European Commission and the integration of Europe: images of governance. Cambridge University Press. pp. 40–. 15. Marshall Sashkin, Molly G. Sashkin (2003). Leadership that matters: the critical factors for making a difference in people's lives and organizations' success. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. p. 52. 16. V Fritz, A.R. Menocal (2007). "Developmental states in the new millennium: Concepts and challenges for a new aid agenda". Development Policy Review, 25(5):531–552. 17. Charles T Call (2008). "The Fallacy of the 'Failed State'". Third World Quarterly, 29(8):1498. 18. George Ritzer (2009). Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics. McGraw-Hill. pp. 38–42. 19. Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters (2015) "Bureaucracy" from Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification. Palgrave MacMillan. 20. Noel D. Johnson, Mark Koyama(2017). "States and economic growth: Capacity and constraints". Explorations in Economic History, 64(April):1–20. 21. Elissa Berwick, Christia Fotini (2018). "State Capacity Redux: Integrating Classical and Experimental Contributions to an Enduring Debate". Annual Review of Political Science, 21(May):71–91. 22. Agnes Cornell, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Jan Teorell (2020). "Bureaucracy and Growth". Comparative Political Studies, 53(14):2246–2282.

Apa itu birokrasi? Mengapa birokrasi mesti direformasi? Apa kaitannya dengan kapasitas pemerintah? Bagaimana Reformasi Birokrasi dilakukan? Sejauh apa dampak Reformasi Birokrasi bagi kinerja pemerintah dan kepentingan warga-negara? #NALAR mencoba mendalami gagasan mendasar di balik perlunya Reformasi Birokrasi dalam membangun negara modern. REFERENSI: 1. Sydney Lady Morgan (1818). Florence Macarthy. Henry Colburn. p. 35. 2. John Stuart Mill (1861). "VI – Of the Infirmities and Dangers to which Representative Government is Liable". Considerations on Representative Government. 3. Woodrow Wilson (1887), "The Study of Administration", Political Science Quarterly, July 1887 4. Ludwig von Mises (1944). Bureaucracy. 5. Robert K. Merton (1957). Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, Free Press. pp. 195–206. 6. Karl Marx (1970). Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843). Cambridge University 7. Jaques Elliott (1976). A general theory of bureaucracy. London: Heinemann. 8. "In Praise of Hierarchy". Harvard Business Review. 1 January 1990. 9. Charles Tilly (1985). "War making and state making as organized crime," in Bringing the State Back In, eds P.B. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, & T. Skocpol. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10. Jeffrey Herbst (1990). "War and the State in Africa." International Security, (1990): 117-139 11. David Beetham (1996). Bureaucracy. 12. Franz Wirl (1998). "Socio-economic typologies of bureaucratic corruption and implications". J. Evolutionary Economics, 8(2):199–220. 13. Christopher Hood (2000), The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management. Oxford University Press. p. 76. 14. Liesbet Hooghe (2001). The European Commission and the integration of Europe: images of governance. Cambridge University Press. pp. 40–. 15. Marshall Sashkin, Molly G. Sashkin (2003). Leadership that matters: the critical factors for making a difference in people's lives and organizations' success. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. p. 52. 16. V Fritz, A.R. Menocal (2007). "Developmental states in the new millennium: Concepts and challenges for a new aid agenda". Development Policy Review, 25(5):531–552. 17. Charles T Call (2008). "The Fallacy of the 'Failed State'". Third World Quarterly, 29(8):1498. 18. George Ritzer (2009). Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics. McGraw-Hill. pp. 38–42. 19. Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters (2015) "Bureaucracy" from Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification. Palgrave MacMillan. 20. Noel D. Johnson, Mark Koyama(2017). "States and economic growth: Capacity and constraints". Explorations in Economic History, 64(April):1–20. 21. Elissa Berwick, Christia Fotini (2018). "State Capacity Redux: Integrating Classical and Experimental Contributions to an Enduring Debate". Annual Review of Political Science, 21(May):71–91. 22. Agnes Cornell, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Jan Teorell (2020). "Bureaucracy and Growth". Comparative Political Studies, 53(14):2246–2282.

The Long Road To Religious Freedom: Mark Koyama on Witchcraft, Heretics, and Industrialization by HistoryTwins

This show was recorded in October 2019. What In God’s Name has a conversation with Mark Koyama, Tina O’Neil, Sarah Ellis, and Mona Brooks of the United Church of Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Our conversation: their community’s religiously anchored response to the number of Americans killed by gun violence in 2019. In this second part of our conversation, visual artist Mona Brooks talks about the physical, tactile dimension of this project and how that physicality made the people who have died in mass shootings more real, more human. Sarah Ellis reminds us that no society will last long without courage and love. Part One of this conversation can be found in last week’s show, released on October 3rd. Our fall focus is increasing our listenership. We need your help: please consider sending an email with a link to one of your favorite WIGN shows, to someone you think is interested in a different way of understanding what’s going on in the world. Or post one of your favorite shows to your Facebook page. You can direct people to our website: whatingods.com/how-to-listen. What In God’s Name approaches current events and culture not from a partisan political angle, not from a money and economics angle, not from a technological and scientific angle, but from a theological and philosophical angle. Be in touch. Our email: whatingods@ribeye-media.com (mailto:whatingods@ribeye-media.com) . Learn more. Our website: http://www.whatingods.com Here are timecodes to help you navigate through today’s show: 01:10     Chris and Shayna recount how they met and what draws them to co-create What In God’s Name 03:00     Chris shows some love for the What In God’s Name audience. Our show asks people to think seriously about public questions.  04:10     Chris recounts this local New Hampshire church’s response to the mass shootings this summer in El Paso and Dayton. 05:57     Mona Brooks shares her participation in the project. How is the question Do I make a difference? one of the questions that gives rise to religion? 09:12     Mona shares an invitation she makes to anyone who walks into her gallery, and the reason for the invitation. Does her reading of our human need ring true to you? 10:26     Can the exercise of human creativity unwind the life-denying power of destruction? What kinds of teaching do elders need to engage in, to help young people understand the human capability for both creation and destruction? 16:54     Shayna talks about the physical dimension of making the crosses, and planting them in the ground. Why is the physicality of these acts important? 18:20     Sarah Ellis shares that she was motivated by words that conveyed hope and resolve. How important is it for us to encourage one another? 20:22     Sarah observes that the culture of fear might be new to those who have lived in relative privilege, but that for many people of color, living with fear is not new. 22:09     Sarah emphasizes the importance of making way in the world that is grounded in love. Is that possible? Even if it’s not possible, could it still be worth making the effort?

Religious freedom is a core value of the modern West, but how did it emerge, and why does it matter? Economic historian Mark Koyama, of George Mason University, joins me to discuss his recent book (co-authored with Noel Johnson), Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom.Check out the book here, and follow Professor Koyama on Twitter @MarkKoyama.Support this show by supporting our sponsors!Quip - Your new toothbrush starts at just $25, and at GetQuip.com/TIDES you can get your first refill pack free.Peloton - For a limited time, you can go to OnePeloton.com, and use the code TIDESPOD to get $100 off accessories with the purchase of a Tread.

What In God’s Name has a conversation with Mark Koyama, Tina O’Neil, Sarah Ellis, and Mona Brooks of the United Church of Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Our conversation: their community’s religiously anchored response to the number of Americans killed by gun violence in 2019. In this second part of our conversation, visual artist Mona Brooks talks about the physical, tactile dimension of this project and how that physicality made the people who have died in mass shootings more real, more human. Sarah Ellis reminds us that no civil society will last, or be remembered as anything special, without creativity, courage, and love. Part One of this conversation can be found in last week’s show, released on October 3rd. Our fall focus is increasing our listenership. We need your help: please consider sending an email with a link to one of your favorite WIGN shows, to someone you think is interested in a different way of understanding what’s going on in the world. Or post one of your favorite shows to your Facebook page. You can direct people to our website: whatingods.com/how-to-listen. What In God’s Name approaches current events and culture not from a partisan political angle, not from a money and economics angle, not from a technological and scientific angle, but from a theological and philosophical angle. Be in touch. Our email: whatingods@ribeye-media.com (mailto:whatingods@ribeye-media.com) . Learn more. Our website: http://www.whatingods.com Here are timecodes to help you navigate through today’s show: 01:10     Chris and Shayna recount how they met and what draws them to co-create What In God’s Name 03:00     Chris shows some love for the What In God’s Name audience. Our show asks people to think seriously about public questions.  04:10     Chris recounts this local New Hampshire church’s response to the mass shootings this summer in El Paso and Dayton. 05:57     Mona Brooks shares her participation in the project. How is the question Do I make a difference? one of the questions that gives rise to religion? 09:12     Mona shares an invitation she makes to anyone who walks into her gallery, and the reason for the invitation. Does her reading of our human need ring true to you? 10:26     Can the exercise of human creativity unwind the life-denying power of destruction? What kinds of teaching do elders need to engage in, to help young people understand the human capability for both creation and destruction? 16:54     Shayna talks about the physical dimension of making the crosses, and planting them in the ground. Why is the physicality of these acts important? 18:20     Sarah Ellis shares that she was motivated by words that conveyed hope and resolve. How important is it for us to encourage one another? 20:22     Sarah observes that the culture of fear might be new to those who have lived in relative privilege, but that for many people of color, living with fear is not new. 22:09     Sarah emphasizes the importance of making way in the world that is grounded in love. Is that possible? Even if it’s not possible, could it still be worth making the effort?

What In God’s Name has a conversation with Mark Koyama, Tina O’Neil, Sarah Ellis, and Mona Brooks of the United Church of Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Our conversation: their community’s religiously anchored response to the number of Americans killed by gun violence in 2019. Our fall focus is increasing our listenership. We need your help: please consider sending an email with a link to one of your favorite WIGN shows, to someone you think is interested in a different way of understanding what’s going on in the world. Or post one of your favorite shows to your Facebook page. You can direct people to our website: whatingods.com/how-to-listen. What In God’s Name approaches current events and culture not from a partisan political angle, not from a money and economics angle, not from a technological and scientific angle, but from a theological and philosophical angle. Be in touch. Our email: whatingods@ribeye-media.com (mailto:whatingods@ribeye-media.com) . Learn more. Our website: http://www.whatingods.com Here are timecodes to help you navigate through today’s show: 04:50     What are the differences and similarities between responses to gun violence that come from a worldview grounded in a commitment to living as though God has something to do with the world, and a worldview grounded in a commitment to living as though no god has anything to do with the world? 06:30     Rev. Mark Koyama explains the project, and how it responds to the frustration that many people feel about the numbers of people dying in gun-related violence in the United States.  10:10     The community decided to create the crosses themselves. What happens when we make things rather than buy them? 10:30     Where do we discern the presence of God in this project? 13:10     Shayna points out the contrast between the time that it took to put each cross in the ground, and the time it took for the Dayton gunman to kill and wound many people. 14:24     People who regularly pray and engage in liturgy at least are practiced at returning to what is of ultimate concern. Is that true? Does it make a difference in the world? 17:32     Tina O’Neil describes resonating with the idea that it was no longer good enough to think and pray, but that we need to think, pray, and act. How is this more religious than just thinking and praying? 18:44     What is this culture of fear doing to us, as a society? 20:45     What is the faithful response to the culture of fear? Tina tells her grandchildren “to make a stand.”  21:43     How would you complete this sentence, on the topic of gun violence and mass shootings: “I wonder………”

The ALP has recommitted to an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, what will this actually turn out to be, and why does this divisive policy never go away? (1:42-15:36) The Adani mine enters it sixth year since approval but still is in purgatory, why won't governments let it be built? (15:36-29:24) And the millionth early voter will cast their ballot today - does early voting help or hurt our democracy? (29:24-42:32) Dr Chris Berg and Scott Hargreaves are joined by Andrew Bushnell and Morgan Begg to discuss these issues and share what they've been reading and watching this week, including Persecution and Tolerance, Cracks in the Ivory Towers, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. SHOW NOTES Persecution and Tolerance by Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama: https://www.amazon.com/Persecution-Toleration-Religious-Cambridge-Economics/dp/1108441165  Cracks in the Ivory Tower, by Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness: https://www.amazon.com/Cracks-Ivory-Tower-Higher-Education-ebook/dp/B07NYT5P7C  The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff: https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1610395697 Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2481498/  

Most liberal, Western citizens don't have significant worries nowadays about religious persecution in their own countries, but it wasn't always this way. How then did we get to this point on the long road of religious freedom? On this episode, Hayek Program scholar Mark Koyama and Mercatus affiliated scholar Noel Johnson share a conversation on their new book, 'Persecution and Toleration,' (Cambridge University Press 2019) which seeks to answer this question. Johnson and Koyama discuss their inspiration for the book and how the project came together before expounding on some of their findings. In particular, they point to the role of the contrasting governance structures of identity rules vs. general rules in shaping the process, and examine the effects of key historical events such as the Reformation. Along the way, they share some surprises they encountered in their work and offer up possible areas for further exploration by interested scholars. CC Music: Twisterium, Cool Vibes (Kevin Macleod), On the Ground (Kevin Macleod)

How did religious freedom emerge — and why did it arrive so late? In their forthcoming book, fellow Mason economists Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama argue that while most focus on the role of liberal ideas in establishing religious freedom, it was instead institutional changes — and the growth of state capacity in particular — that played the decisive role. In their conversation with Tyler, Johnson and Koyama discuss the ‘long road to religious freedom’ and more, including the link between bad weather and Jewish persecution, why China evolved into such a large political unit, whether the Black Death proves Paul Romer wrong, scapegoating, usury prohibitions in history, and the economic impact of volcanic eruptions. Transcript and links Follow Noel on Twitter Follow Mark on Twitter Follow Tyler on Twitter More CWT goodness: Facebook Twitter Instagram Email

My guest for this episode is Noel Johnson of George Mason University, and if that name sounds familiar, it's because he was the coauthor on the paper I discussed with Mark Koyama last month. Noel recently released a working paper titled "The Effects of Land Redistribution: Evidence from the French Revolution." It is coauthored with Theresa Finley and Raphael Franck. The paper examines the consequences of the land auctions held by the Revolutionary government in France. The abstract reads as follows: This study exploits the confiscation and auctioning off of Church property that occurred during the French Revolution to assess the role played by transaction costs in delaying the reallocation of property rights in the aftermath of fundamental institutional reform. French districts with a greater proportion of land redistributed during the Revolution experienced higher levels of agricultural productivity in 1841 and 1852 as well as more investment in irrigation and more efficient land use. We trace these increases in productivity to an increase in land inequality associated with the Revolutionary auction process. We also show how the benefits associated with the head-start given to districts with more Church land initially, and thus greater land redistribution by auction during the Revolution, dissipated over the course of the nineteenth century as other districts gradually overcame the transaction costs associated with reallocating the property rights associated with the feudal system. What's so interesting about this particular instance of land redistribution is the fact that it was all sold to the highest bidder rather than being given to the poor. This breaks with the pattern of most attempts at land reform throughout history. People have been trying to take land away from the rich and give it to the poor since at least Tiberius Gracchus in the second century BCE. But the Revolutionary government needed money and they needed it fast. So they concocted a plan to seize and auction off all French lands owned by the Catholic Church, which comprised about 6.5 percent of the country. Land auctions take time though, and the government desperately needed funds in the short term, so they issued a monetary instrument known as the assignat that could be used in these land auctions. The land was eventually auctioned off and then traded in secondary markets, where much of it was consolidated into large estates that could employ capital-intensive agricultural practices on a large scale. The evidence suggests that these land auctions added to the productivity of the regions where they occurred. Noel argues that this occurred because the reduction in transaction costs allowed for a more efficient allocation of property rights. One could argue, however, that the Church might have simply owned more productive land to begin with, and the paper uses a series of identification strategies to show that this is not the main driver of their results. Related Links: McCloskey (1998) on the Coase theorem. Galor and Moav (2004) on the relationship between inequality and productivity in economies dependent on physical capital vs human capital. Gallica, the website where you can download a ton of digitized French archives. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005) on Atlantic trade. Rachel Laudan discusses the history of potatoes and other foods on EconTalk. Photo credit: Early French banknote issue during the French Revolution (Assignat) for 400 livres, (1792), from the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian Institution.  

My guest for this episode is Mark Koyama of George Mason University. Our topic is a recent paper titled, "States and Economic Growth: Capacity and Constraints," which Mark coauthored with Noel Johnson. Just recorded at great podcast with @GarrettPetersen on my work on state capacity (with @ndjohnson). — Mark Koyama (@MarkKoyama) May 24, 2017 As stated in the paper, "state capacity describes the ability of a state to collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide public goods." That said, state capacity does not mean big government. A state may have the power to impose rules across its territory, but it doesn't have to use that power in a tyrannical way. Another way of saying that is to say that having a high state capacity is compatible with Adam Smith's desire for "peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice." One metric that researchers use to measure state capacity is tax revenue per capita. But as Mark is careful to point out, a state with less state capacity can still sometimes achieve a relatively high income through tax farming. This is the practice in many pre-modern states of auctioning off the right to extract tax revenues to local elites in different regions. We discuss the rise of modern nation-states in various regions, and why some states developed more state capacity than others going into the twentieth century. In particular, we discuss Europe's transition away from a feudal system ruled in a decentralized way by monarchs who held power based on their personal relationships with local lords. England's Glorious Revolution of 1688 allowed it to develop its state capacity earlier than other European nations, with a centralized tax system controlled by parliament. By contrast, continental powers like the French Ancien Régime and the Hapsburg Empire were legally and fiscally fragmented, leading them to develop their state capacity much later than England. We also discuss the development of state capacity in Asia, and why Meiji Japan was able to develop its state capacity much faster than Qing Dynasty China.  

Mark Koyama is an Assistant Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. He joins the show to discuss his research on the economic history of ancient Rome from the rise of the Roman Republic to the transition to the Roman Empire to the Empire’s eventual fall. David’s blog: http://macromarketmusings.blogspot.com/ Mark’s Medium page: https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama Mark’s GMU profile: http://economics.gmu.edu/people/mkoyama2 David’s Twitter: @DavidBeckworth Mark’s Twitter: @MarkKoyama Related links: “The Roman Market Economy” by Peter Temin (2012, Princeton University Press) http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9896.html “Peter Temin and the Malthusian Hypothesis for the Limits of Roman Growth” by Mark Koyama https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/peter-temin-and-the-malthusian-hypothesis-for-the-limits-of-roman-growth-12489edce93a#.ijytapey2 “Why did the Roman Economy Decline?” by Mark Koyama https://medium.com/art-marketing/why-did-the-roman-economy-decline-225deada66ea#.xnwksin86