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An American Political Economy: Industry, Trade, and Finance in the Antebellum Mind

This chapter argues that the crisis in the Baltic countries can be properly understood only in the context of the dramatic de-industrialization and structural change that took place in these countries, and other Eastern European economies, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is argued that with the Eastern enlargement, climaxing in 2004 with formally admitting Eastern European economies into the Union, the European Union gradu-ally abandoned its previous strategy of symmetrical integration . based on principles surviving from the Post World War II era, inspired by Fried-rich List . integrating the regioni?½s economies into a structurally asym-metrical relationship that has common elements with colonialism. Once the real-estate bubbles collapsed, this underlying structural weakness became evident, causing wage collapse and outward migration. We show that the Eastern enlargement . along with financial architecture of the euro zone . also undermined the success of previous waves of enlarge-ments, particularly that of Spain. In the Baltic countries the effect of the crisis was, as could be expected, a massive redistribution of income: wages as a percentage of GDP (the share of i?½the 99 per centi?½) plum-meted by some 6 percentage points while profits and rents (the share of i?½the one per centi?½) rose correspondingly. We also discuss whether the Estonian case actually deserves to be called an .internal devaluationi?½, and indicate that what apparently dampened the crisis were not local policy initiatives but forces external to the region. The chapter also presents two different scenarios from the crisis in the 1930s . the US and the German ones . and asks if this crisis is likely to follow the US or the German pat-tern of income distribution. It is argued that the pattern likely to be fol-lowed is the German rather than the US one, which in the present context is likely to produce a long crisis and at worst make EU wage reductions permanent.

Failed and Asymmetrical Integration: Eastern Europe and the Non-financial Origins of the European Crisis

In most arts and sciences – from astronomy to zoology – the Renaissance represents a qualitative watershed in human history, and historians are generally united in considering it a period of unprecedented intellectual ferment. Echoes of da Vinci, Galileo, and Machiavelli still resound in the way we approach art, science, and human coexistence, and it is noticeable how these developments came ‘out of Italy’ (Braudel, 1991). As a precondition for this, the Renaissance was also a period when the productive powers of small European city states allowed a large part of the population to live free from poverty. Where feudalism had provided wealth for the very few and misery for most, the city states of the Renaissance for the first time witnessed a situation where artisans, merchants and public employees filled the ranks of a new middle class

Mercantilism and Economic Development: Schumpeterian Dynamics, Institution Building, and International Benchmarking

The field of early American political economy has quietly grown in the last decade, as historians have used a flexible framework to analyze how a wide variety of economic practices and ideas related to formal and informal political formations. Using capacious definitions of “political economy,” historians have followed in the footsteps of their sources, early American political economists, who, unsure of the range of the mechanisms and forces they were trying to describe, were wary of too narrowly delimiting their field of investigation. In contrast to other methodological approaches to early American economic practice, historians investigating political economy have largely been keen to “keep early America weird,” recognizing the unfamiliar and the dissonant in the past while generating important new perspectives on topics of perennial interest, such as the links between slavery and economic growth, and opening new inquiries into state-formation, market-creation, and the import of the early republic’s global connections. This essay highlights some of the common themes and questions driving recent work, delineates how histories of political economy both fit within and diverge from new histories of capitalism, and offers suggestions for further study.

What Counts?: Political Economy, or Ways to Make Early America Add Up

A key common element in persistent world poverty and in the financial and (real) economic crisis is the .terrible simplificationy . a theoretical overshooting into irrelevant abstractions . that has taken place in economic theory after World War II. As unlikely as it may initially sound, I shall endeavour to explain in this paper how . in spite of its apparent sophistication . equilibrium economics became .mathematized demagogueryy based on an extremely simplistic worldview. One element explaining the financial crisis is what Hyman Minsky called .destabilizing stabilityy: long periods of stability lead to increasing vulnerability. This paper argues that similar mechanisms are at work inside economics: long periods of economic progress in the core countries lead to increasingly abstract and irrelevant economic theories (.terrible simplificationsy). This leads to turning points towards more relevant economic theories, referred to as .1848 momentsy. The paper further outlines the key variables that need to be reintroduced into economic theory in order to furnish poor countries with the type of productive structures that makes it possible to eliminate poverty.

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Financial Crises, Persistent Poverty, and the Terrible Simplifiers in Economics: A Turning Point Towards a New '1848 Moment'

Essays on political economy : or the most certain means of promoting the wealth, power, resources and happiness of states applied particularly to the United States

Mathew Carey

Papers

Essays on political economy : or the most certain means of promoting the wealth, power, resources and happiness of states applied particularly to the United States