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S4 E2: Taylor Jaworski, ”American Economic History”
13 Plays2 years ago
Taylor Jaworski, Associate Professor of Economics and my successor as Associate Faculty Director of the Benson Center. Taylor has been a Faculty Fellow at the Benson Center, and he has written widely on the economic history of the United States. We discuss the development of the American economy during the periods of the Founding and the Second World War, the history of America's transportation system, and the ways in which various notions of progress emerge from the study of economic history.
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Transcript
Introduction to Free Mind Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we discuss philosophic and political ideas with adventurous disregard for intellectual trends. I'm Shiloh Brooks from the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I'm joined today by Taylor Jaworski, Associate Professor of Economics and my successor as Associate Faculty Director at the Benson Center. Taylor has been a faculty fellow at the center and he's written widely on the economic history of the United States.
Exploring Economic History
00:00:33
Speaker
Our conversation today explores the discipline of economic history. We discuss the development of the American economy during the periods of the founding and the Second World War, the history of America's transportation system, and the ways in which various notions of progress emerge from the study of economic history.
00:00:55
Speaker
Taylor Jaworski, welcome to the Free Mind podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I've wanted to have you on for a while. You're a faculty member in economics at CU, you study the history of economics, a discipline in which I'm interested, but about which I know very little other than having once taught a course in it on a whim and in an emergency.
00:01:15
Speaker
So you get to teach me today about economic history. Let me start out by asking you just broadly about the discipline of economics. Talk to us about, and this may seem like a dumb question, but I suspect dumb questions have profound answers. What is economics? Yeah, again, thanks for having me. And yeah, so I think that the kind of answer that you would get in a introductory to economics course, like
00:01:40
Speaker
you roll into Econ 101 and kind of don't know what you're getting into. And the first thing you might come across in chapter one of some textbook would be, you know, economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. So that's kind of the most fundamental or the easiest answer to give to what economics is.
00:01:59
Speaker
I think that another way to think about economics and one that is connected to the biggest thinkers in economics or many of the biggest thinkers in economics is to think about instead the patterns of institutions, of culture, of society that sustain specialization and exchange. I mean, that goes all the way back to Adam Smith and runs through David Ricardo and many of the other economic
00:02:24
Speaker
thinkers or theorists of commercial society that have come about since Adam Smith a little bit before and then very much after. And so I think about that as being the fundamental thing that people should understand about what economics is. It's about how we build institutions and then how society works to sustain specialization and exchange, right? So when I'm good at some stuff and you're good at some stuff, we should figure out how to have
Economic History vs. History of Economic Thought
00:02:51
Speaker
one person do one and one person do the other.
00:02:54
Speaker
And then we can both benefit from the fact that we have particular comparative advantages. Right. So this is helpful and it gives us a broad definition on the basis of which we can have the rest of the conversation. So now that you have this broader definition of economics, we need to talk about your discipline in particular because you're not what a lot of folks think about when they think about economics. You know, they go to the economics department and people are writing these.
00:03:18
Speaker
fancy econometric papers. We're using a lot of mathematics and equations and these sorts of things. You're an historian. And so I want to talk to you about history and its relationship to economics. It's in a way a two-part question. We can take part one first, but I want to ask the whole question. I want to talk about what history brings to the study of economics. What does history in particular bring to economics?
00:03:38
Speaker
And why, and this is the second part, although related to the first, why does economics need a history in the first place? Why don't we just have people who are, you know, I don't know, whiling away at their econometric papers based in equation and these sorts of things. Why a history of economics?
00:03:53
Speaker
Yeah, so the first thing, kind of another definition that I think it's useful or a pair of definitions to sort of clear some things up. So one way that you hear about economic history is that it can be confused with the history of economics, which is a specific field that has to do with studying what people have thought about the economy over time. So in a course like that, you might start with Adam Smith, or you might start with the precursors to Adam Smith, and then you would work your way through Ricardo,
00:04:20
Speaker
John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, and then on into the 20th century. And that's the history of what people have thought and how people have thought about the economy over time. A good book, for example, on this topic would be Robert Heilbronner's The Worldly Philosophers, which is
00:04:36
Speaker
a book about philosophy, but it ends up being ultimately a book about what economists or what people would recognize as economics today, what they have thought about the world over time, so the worldly philosophers. So that's the history of economics. Economic history is a little bit different, or economic history as practiced in economics departments, for example, is a little bit different. Economic history is the boring definition.
00:05:03
Speaker
the application of the tools of economics, either theoretical tools or statistical tools, to the two historical questions. So that's a kind of boring way to understand what economic history is. I mean, it's useful, but it's kind of the easiest and simplest and
00:05:19
Speaker
You know, if that's all we were doing, we might be a little bit bored. The way that I like to think about economic history is that it's the humanities of the social science. Or one way to think about that I like to think about it is that it's the humanities of the social sciences. It's a field. It's not the only one necessarily, but it's a field that brings together social science concerns with the causes of things and humanitarian or humanities concerns with a kind of story that we tell ourselves about
00:05:49
Speaker
in this case, our past and our development as a society, as an economy over time. And so that's, I think, fundamentally what economic history is, is how we sort of use the tools of economics and the tools of history to tell ourselves a story about what has happened over time in the world, in the United States, you know, at different points in
Applying Economic History to Broader Contexts
00:06:11
Speaker
time.
00:06:11
Speaker
So that's, I think, an answer to your first question about what economics brings to history. And then I think that economics, or what history brings to economics, going the other direction, I think that it's useful. I mean, sort of my version of economic history, sort of cleometrics, sort of this
00:06:30
Speaker
economics department-based way of thinking about history really started in the post-World War II period in the 1950s and 60s and 70s, really got going then. And the concern at the time, or one of the interests at the time, was trying to sort of bring the discipline that economics can provide
00:06:50
Speaker
not that only economics can provide, but the discipline that economics can provide to the kinds of stories that we tell ourselves. And so the way I like to think about it, or the easiest way for listeners to understand this is, you know, when you tell yourself a story about what happened in history, we should wonder what's going on if that story doesn't obey the law of demand, right? That demand curve slope downward, or some other kind of fundamental thing that we think shapes how people interact in the economy.
00:07:17
Speaker
If you want to tell yourself a story about, you know, American or European economic development, there's going to be some notions of economics that are relevant that can help discipline and say, you know, something like that is not that likely to happen. Even if you can tell a story about it, that story is not going to apply to a broad set of people. It's not going to characterize how that society worked in general.
00:07:39
Speaker
So applying economics to history is a way of saying, what is the story that we can pull out of this environment that is somewhat general, right? Not that it applies to all societies in all time periods, but the story that says, here is something that we believe about the economics or the economy of this time period. And the story that we're going to tell obeys approximately those laws.
00:08:02
Speaker
I see. I just want to go back to something you said at the beginning. There's a difference between what I would call the history of economic thought. That is Smith, Montesquieu, Marx, all the way back to Aristotle. We could name many other names. There's a history of economic thought, which is itself a philosophic discipline, the history of economic thought.
00:08:26
Speaker
In a way, you're reading these philosophers in a certain sense. And that's different from economic history, which is the actual practice you used just a moment ago, the term story, storytelling, storytelling about the development of the economy itself. You're interested in both of these things, in a way. You write mostly on the history of economics, not the history of economic thought. Is that right?
00:08:50
Speaker
Yes, I think most of what I spend my time doing, I have a little bit of my past self that has spent time thinking about how to use
00:09:01
Speaker
the famous texts in economics, the wealth of nations, the theory of moral sentiments to teach economics as a way of trying to garner interest among students when math, statistics is not what would bring them to be interested in economics. And so there's a part of my past self and current self that's interested, that was interested in doing that. But what I spend my days doing for the most part is trying to think about how we can use the tools of economics
00:09:28
Speaker
to understand the American past in my case. So let's talk about that. I want to get some examples of the kind of research that you're doing and thus the ways in which economic history can enrich the study of economics and not just that, but can enrich the study of history. So
00:09:48
Speaker
Give us some examples of ways that we can understand history better using economics. Whether you want to start in Europe, you want to start in the United States, or I know your specific research might involve transportation, second world war, etc.
Origins of Economic Growth and the Industrial Revolution
00:09:59
Speaker
But just a few examples of how the study of economics can enrich our understanding of American history more broadly.
00:10:06
Speaker
I like to be pluralistic, so I'll start with things that are a bit outside of my wheelhouse in terms of my research, but things that might interest listeners. Some of the biggest questions in social science you can reframe or you can think of as economic history questions or as questions related to economic history.
00:10:27
Speaker
We can go all the way back to the Roman Empire and ask, did the Roman Empire work as a market economy? There's an economist at MIT who has a book on that. Can we understand the Roman economy as fundamentally or as essentially a market economy?
00:10:45
Speaker
You know, maybe not the biggest question in the whole world, but it's going back a long period of time to understand a point in history that we think is pretty important and trying to ask what kinds of systems govern the way that the Roman economy works.
00:10:59
Speaker
Something that is a bit closer to us in time and that really are fundamentally big questions is, where did economic growth come from? And then when we kind of zoom in and we notice that it seems to be places in Northwest Europe around 1700, 1750, 1800 that were the first to experience modern economic growth, we can then ask,
00:11:20
Speaker
Why did the Industrial Revolution, this period of modern economic growth, why did it happen in Britain first or in Britain in the Netherlands first in the different ways that it happened? Why did it spread the way that it did to France and Germany? Why was there this divergence sort of in Europe broadly or between Europe broadly and parts of East Asia or parts of the Middle East, places that had been quite prosperous up to the point of the 1617 hundreds?
00:11:50
Speaker
So that's kind of the first, I think, sort of fundamental question of economic history is, why does economic growth happen? And then in history, why did it happen? Why did it seem to happen first in the places that it did in and around Northwest Europe?
00:12:06
Speaker
If we move to U.S. economic history, sort of a bit closer to my areas of interest, so when I teach classes in economic history, I would talk about something like, why did the American Revolution happen, right? So one way to understand the American Revolution would be from the perspective of political or cultural history.
00:12:25
Speaker
And economic history doesn't say those things aren't relevant, but it might say, let's emphasize particular aspects of mercantilist policy in Great Britain at the time, policies that sought to enrich the core of the British Empire, London and its surroundings, relative to the colonies. So not just the American colonies, but other places around the British Empire.
00:12:50
Speaker
And so one way to understand the American Revolution is as like a fundamental revolt to mercantilist policies that made the American colonies less well off than they would have been otherwise.
00:13:02
Speaker
My own research has to do with the 20th century, so fast forward 150 years, and tries to ask questions about World War II, how the World War II economy worked, how the World War II economy, and its predecessor, the 1930s New Deal economy, how this represents an important transition
00:13:22
Speaker
in the modern American economy and how politics interacts with the economy. And then more recently, my work has really focused on the role that transportation plays in facilitating economic and regional development.
Transportation's Role in Economic Development
00:13:35
Speaker
So when we build highways,
00:13:38
Speaker
How does that shape what happens to the US economy overall? And how are the gains from, say, economic growth that happens because of the cheaper costs of trading within the US, how are those gains distributed across US regions? Does the Northeast, does the South, does the West, does the Midwest benefit more or less from different kinds of changes in the transportation system?
00:14:02
Speaker
Well, why don't we drill down into one of these? I mean, the question you raised about the New Deal economy and the World War II economy, that's fascinating to me. The Free Mind podcast is not about hot takes, but I'm going to ask you for a late person summary. You've done a lot of research on the World War II economy and this sort of thing. Give us a viewpoint from which to understand better how the economics of the Second World War and the New Deal have shaped the growth of the American economy into the present. Talk to us about some of that research.
00:14:33
Speaker
Yeah, so the first order thing that I would want people to take away from a better understanding has come through research and economic history about the New Deal in World War II, is that the New Deal especially represents this kind of fundamental break in how the government, the role that the government plays in the American economy, and we can apply a kind of political or partisan valence
00:14:57
Speaker
to, or we can interpret this phenomenon through certain kinds of partisan lenses. But I mean, it just is true that fundamentally in the period leading up to the New Deal, what you have is really a dominance of first state governments. State governments are really, say in the 19th century,
00:15:15
Speaker
where you see a lot of the action happening in terms of who is building infrastructure, who is helping to charter new corporations that help to facilitate the growth of the American economy in the 19th century. It's really state governments.
00:15:28
Speaker
And then at the end of the 19th century and into the middle and into the early part of the 20th century, what you get is the role of, you get an increased role for local governments having to do with where the sources of revenue, tax revenue are and what kinds of projects are being built. So in this period, you see the building up of municipal utility services that are financed by local tax revenue. You know, this could be sewer, this could be electricity, this could be gas works.
00:15:56
Speaker
And then the New Deal comes along and the New Deal represents this first period in American history in which the federal government really has the capacity in terms of administration and the source of revenue in terms of taxes to raise and spend a lot of money.
00:16:14
Speaker
And this is what is going on in a little bit in the run-up to the New Deal. Sort of at the end of, say, the 1920s, you see sort of projects being brought online or projects very much being thought about as big public works or infrastructure projects or big government programs that will eventually come into being. And then the New Deal just really brings all this stuff
00:16:36
Speaker
puts it on the table. You get social security. You get programs targeted to specific aspects of the Great Depression, work relief, and loan programs for homeowners and farmers. And so that's really the most important thing to understand about the New Deal is, aside from, again, a particular kind of partisan angle that you might take on this, it just empirically is true that
00:17:01
Speaker
the New Deal represents this fundamental break in American political economy. And then World War II is just a continuation of this. I mean, in some ways, World War II kind of puts what happens during the New Deal into hyperdrive and focuses all of that sort of energy in one particular sector or in a set of sectors very much related to mobilization for World War II.
00:17:24
Speaker
I see. So this would be an example of your research at work. Let me ask you this. I mean, you mentioned the American Revolution and these sorts of things. I know you've done some work with the Benson Center on Hamilton. Can you talk a little bit about, I hate to put you on the spot, but can you talk a little bit about political economy?
00:17:40
Speaker
at the American founding and how this shapes the founding. And you can talk about Hamilton. I know you've studied the report on manufacturers and these sorts of things, but I'm just curious now that you've given us this major moment. I imagine there are several major moments, New Deal, World War II being one, but perhaps we should have done this one first. But can you talk about the economic history of the American founding? Yeah. I mean, I think again, like, I mean, sort of if I was to emphasize sort of this change in political economy that happens in the 1930s and 1940s for the New Deal and World War II,
00:18:09
Speaker
I think you can again go back and sort of think about the American Revolution in the period after the revolution or after the revolution concludes through the Articles of Confederation.
00:18:19
Speaker
and up to and then after the Constitution as another important period in American political economy in which, you know, there's a couple of things going on. I mean, one thing is we are figuring out as a country how to structure political relationships in a way that hopefully ends up being a departure from the way that political relationships are structured in Europe.
00:18:42
Speaker
And then in particular, that eventually provides foundations, you know, maybe not always intentionally, maybe somewhat accidentally, provides foundations for a break from Europe in the sense that what, I mean, one way that you might characterize kind of the political economy of pre-modern or kind of pre-American Revolution times is a political economy that uses economic rents, that uses sort of access to different parts of the economy as a way to build political coalitions.
00:19:12
Speaker
Right? And so the reason you get royally chartered, like joint stock companies say, is those joint stock companies provide, and through their royal charter provide a monopoly to go engage in some activity around the world, you know, the East India Company, Dutch or English.
00:19:28
Speaker
And that monopoly, it's a monopoly, right? It only goes to one set of people, one group of people who get to do that. And the American Revolution is an attempt, in some ways, or the institutions that end up coming out of the American Revolution, again, not always intentionally, are a set of institutions that say, let's open up space for people to enter the economy who are not necessarily politically connected, right?
00:19:51
Speaker
That's not really the period. That's not really the history of the very early republic. The very early republic is banks being created that are federalist banks, banks being created that are republican banks, right? And then kind of the use of those economic activities to try to structure economic or political relationships.
00:20:09
Speaker
But then after, with the period, say, of the Jeffersonian Revolution and afterward, what you get is a break again in which it's not about national politics and it's not about empowering people at the national level to set up political coalitions.
00:20:26
Speaker
what's going on in the States, right? So this is the period in which you get the building of the Erie Canal, you get the building of other canals, you get other kinds of infrastructure that come into being. And really, you can't look at the Constitution and see this is exactly the clause that has exactly this causal effect on the flourishing that happens later. There's a lot of change that goes on between, say, 1789 and
00:20:51
Speaker
the period of states being brought into the Union and them reforming their constitutions. But I think of the American Revolutionary period as a period of one, of trying to break down how things are done in Europe and trying to do those things differently on the American continent, some for better, some for worse.
00:21:09
Speaker
And then the period after that is really kind of throwing that mission to the states. I mean, again, not always so intentionally, but throwing that mission to the states to see what can happen at the state level to facilitate political and economic development. Yeah, so this is great. This is a snapshot. I mean, we've now, you know, New Deal, World War II, the funding, some of these pivotal moments in American history and the ways in which economic history can
00:21:33
Speaker
enrich our understanding of them. I know that you also study and I want to get this in there because I know nothing about it. It's a fascinating topic. You mentioned earlier transportation and how you can look at the way transportation is developed and bring that development into dialogue with the development of the American economy.
Analyzing Infrastructure's Economic Impact
00:21:49
Speaker
Can you talk just a little bit about transportation and its effect on the American economy?
00:21:54
Speaker
Yeah, so this is a great example, I think, of economic history and sort of what sets economic history maybe apart from history specifically or only economics, right? So I've done work where part of that work is just kind of the boring job of putting together new data that we can use, that I can use, that others can use to explore a set of questions. And so for me, one thing that I have done or one thing that I've contributed to over the last couple of years is
00:22:22
Speaker
Going back in time to try to understand exactly where American highways were, we can always look it up in an atlas, but you got to go find the atlas and then you got to say, okay, so that's a line, is that line at scale and kind of have to pay attention to all these details. And then what I've done with a co-author is put together maps, digitized maps,
00:22:43
Speaker
of the U.S. highway system every 10 years going back to 1920, so that in principle, if you give me two locations in 1920, I can use GIS software together with these data that I've created to tell you how long it would travel, how long it would take to travel between any two points in the U.S. going back to 1920.
00:23:02
Speaker
So that's kind of like a boring thing. It's like a Google Maps Lite for 1920, right? I can do that. But then we can sort of step outside of sort of idiosyncratic or esoteric task and say, now let's use this data to understand how improvements in the highway system have affected economic development. And so in some of my work, I've kind of taken this and said,
00:23:25
Speaker
Let's look at a place where we know that highways were built in a relatively short period of time. And then what impact that had on a particular region. And so I have a paper with a co-author where we look at the region of Appalachia, so in and around West Virginia, so the state of West Virginia and around that state.
00:23:42
Speaker
where we just ask a question, how important is better market integration? How important is lowered costs of trading with the rest of the country for a region's economic development? The Appalachian region of the United States is one of the poorest regions in the United States. That's been true today. It's been true in the country's history. Economists might come up with a bunch of different explanations for why that's the case. It could have to do with the interaction between
00:24:08
Speaker
investments in human capital and migration, a kind of brain drain effect. It could have to do with resource dependence and the way in which dependence on one particular resource. So in the case of Appalachia, it might be coal or something related to energy resources. That means that you don't sort of develop a broad, diversified economy.
00:24:27
Speaker
And then another explanation could just be that you can do things there, that you can't do other places, but the cost of trading with other places is so high that you end up being autarkic or isolated from the rest of the country. And so some policymakers in the 1960s, a little bit before, but in the 1960s had this idea that that could be one of the reasons why Appalachia was relatively poor in the context of the US of the time. And so highways,
00:24:54
Speaker
could be a way to sort of try to bring Appalachia up to the income level of the rest of the country. And so with my co-author, we went about sort of documenting where highways were in Appalachia, when they came into being over time, and then trying to do a set of statistical and economic exercises to ask, well, what would have happened in the absence of the highway? So if we hadn't built the highways, how much lower would population growth or how much lower would income per capita have been
00:25:22
Speaker
And how would this have affected both the region narrowly and the country as a whole? And what we found is that really in this case, this is kind of an instance in which you kind of have to pay attention to the historical context because it might not be true in all cases. But in this case, it doesn't seem to be that costs of trading are really the reason that Appalachia is poor.
00:25:44
Speaker
It seems to be or is likely more related to questions having to do with human capital or resource dependence and not costs of trading. But sort of moving on to some other work, you can take a zoom out and ask, well, if not for one region, but for the whole country or for different regions within the country.
00:26:03
Speaker
What is the overall effect of highways? So we built the interstate highway system starting in the 1950s. And we might want to know, like, how valuable is the system? Right. Like, this is a pretty big piece of infrastructure. It's kind of world historical and it's in its scope. How valuable is it? Right. And so then I have some other work where what we try to do is exactly answer that question about the system as a whole.
00:26:24
Speaker
So if we were to remove the system today, what would be the impact of removing that system on income for Americans? And then sort of not for the country as a whole, but for individual regions, what would be the effect? And here, I mean, the story is kind of the flip of what we find for Appalachia. I mean, the interstate highway system is hugely valuable.
00:26:44
Speaker
Lower-end estimates that are available in the literature suggest something on the order of $200 billion in GDP. Our estimates are somewhere between two and three times higher than that, depending on exactly the details of what you decide to include or not include.
00:26:59
Speaker
This is just really gigantic in scale. And sort of our take on this is that this is really important, that, you know, we really want to think carefully about, you know, maybe not like improving this particular piece of infrastructure, but like this infrastructure and infrastructure like it is really fundamental to the way the U.S. economy works. I mean, the U.S. economy works in part because it's gigantic geographically and in the number of people. And those people are basically not isolated from each other.
00:27:27
Speaker
because of the kinds of infrastructure that we build. And this is just it's fundamental to American prosperity. The last thing I would say is that, you know, those linkages kind of extend beyond our domestic borders. I mean, this highway infrastructure, for example, obviously facilitates connections to the rest of the world.
00:27:44
Speaker
whether that's Canada or Mexico in the simplest cases, or a farmer in Iowa wanting to trade with China or Latin America or Europe. Part of what they're going to do in moving their goods to market is going to take place on the American highway system or some other aspect of American transportation. These kinds of investments are just fundamental and a combination of economics and economic history can help to highlight where and how they are fundamental to what this country does.
00:28:15
Speaker
Yeah, this is fascinating. And it shows precisely how what you're doing can illuminate aspects of American history that I think traditional American historians don't illuminate. I'm interested though, we've been talking a lot about your research and I'm curious about the following. So I am not an economic historian, but I did once as I mentioned teach a history of economic thought course. And I was struck by the way the students, we would read
00:28:40
Speaker
passages from the New Testament in which the love of gain is discouraged or platonic dialogues in which the love of gain is discouraged and found to be vulgar and these sorts of things. And then we progress forward into authors like Locke and Montesquieu who have put it mildly a more tolerant opinion of commerce and a more optimistic view of what it can do and
00:29:02
Speaker
look at Tocqueville and Marx as a critic of those views, not Tocqueville as a critic, but Marx as a critic. And I was struck by the students being turned inside out in their viewpoints. In other words, these authors, they would come in with, the students always come in with a very broad
00:29:17
Speaker
capitalism is good or it's bad, and that's what they do. And they have this very black and white basic position. And then we use these authors to challenge those viewpoints and get students to think in a more complex and nuanced way about the philosophy that sort of underpins economic theory. And I'm curious, with respect to your courses, in economic history in particular, what are some of the ways in which, like when you're talking about transportation, you're talking about the New Deal, World War II, the American founding
00:29:45
Speaker
Do these facts that you present and these narratives that you present the students with challenge and how do they challenge their ways of seeing economics, whether they have a moral view of the way, say, American economics works or technical ways, but how does economic history get students kind of out of their comfort zone and turn them inside out?
00:30:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is great. I mean, I think like the way that I teach economic history and, you know, to some extent, although the kind of controversy is not front and center in research always, but certainly in how I teach U.S. economic or European economic history, it's not to present sort of topics as definitive, as exactly canonical of some, you know, moral dilemma, right?
00:30:30
Speaker
But economic history does contain lots of instances in which we want to balance kind of an economist concern for some maybe broad, but often pretty narrow kind of efficiency with other considerations. It might be
00:30:47
Speaker
easier to understand considerations like inequality, right? So periods of growth might be related to or might correspond with periods of growing inequality, right? We might want to present to students a way of thinking about that, not like that there is one way to think about that trade-off, but that when thinking about aspects of economic history, it's important to think about kind of a trade-off
00:31:09
Speaker
you know, this is the simplest between growth and inequality. But then, you know, issues of slavery, I mean, for example, you know, you can kind of apply that sort of dynamic or that sort of contrast of growth versus inequality to that. But I think, you know, an issue like slavery, inequality is putting it way too mildly to kind of, you know, to frame sort of what the issue of slavery is as an issue about inequality. It's not on the right scale, right? It's not that it's not of the right magnitude. And so then
00:31:38
Speaker
You really have to, you know, get students to think about, you know, this is where I would do something like talk about the way that the slave system worked. Right. So how did the slave system work? How did the slave system contribute to or not contribute to productivity on different kinds of farms?
00:31:54
Speaker
But then you also, and I do, bring in people like Frederick Douglass, who are not writing about exactly the economics of slavery, but Douglass' writings, or the writings of people like him, are giving you a window into the operation of an economic system that is, at least in part, what slavery was. It wasn't only that. It's a political system. It was a social system.
00:32:17
Speaker
And I don't know what the answer is to a particular question or, you know, you'd have to pose the question before I could think about what the answer is. But I think that, like, economic history is an opportunity for students to be confronted with those kinds of sort of a set of facts about the way that the world is. And then a set of issues, a set of social issues, you know, whether it's kind of the most important one in American history, the issue of slavery.
00:32:42
Speaker
or, you know, kind of lesser issues of sort of moral significance, you know, where we have to think about immigration. Right. So that's a hot button issue today. And we can think about immigration today versus immigration in the past. And we can compare and contrast those systems, how they worked, what the economics of them were, what the political economy of those systems were. And that's, I think, really important for students to understand. Right. The world, as seen through a kind of standard economics class, is not just
00:33:11
Speaker
a policymaker gets to decide how to divide up the gains from trade, the gains from globalization. A policymaker doesn't get to make that choice. In some kind of messy collective way, we make that choice together as a society, and choice is really even wrong. It is the outcome of a bunch of different interactions that don't exactly intend the outcome that we get.
Economic History in Education
00:33:35
Speaker
And it's important for students to understand that not only in the kind of narrow context of an economic model, but in the messy application of a set of imperfect economic models to the world, right? And that's really what economic history is for undergraduates and possibly for graduate students, but definitely for undergraduates.
00:33:54
Speaker
You know, these models work as far as they work, and then they stop working. And you got to fill the space with something else, right? You got to fill it with what you think, constrained by reason and morality and, you know, facts. And you got to fill it with what other people think and how you sort of come to some view about, you know, a question like, why is the United States rich, right? Is it because of a confluence of a set of institutions and natural resources?
00:34:21
Speaker
Or is it maybe at least for the 19th century fundamentally tied up with something like slavery, right? Like those are real questions that undergraduates should know the answers to by the end of my course, or at least have thought 20% more about it at the end of my course. Yeah, this is good. So for people who don't have access to you, which is, you know, it's not all of us, us older people.
00:34:44
Speaker
To wind down, I want to transition to a new topic, but to wind down this discussion of economic history and its examples and its definition. Can you recommend a couple books, two or three books that are accessible, that are in your view examples of economic history well done for average folks who just kind of want to see this discipline in action and see the innovative ways that it approaches?
00:35:09
Speaker
History needs you know you can talk to me i don't know if there's a great book on the classical world and you want america whatever you want whatever you want to talk about but i'm just curious where where one would start with this stuff. Yes i'll give you a couple of recommendations here.
00:35:22
Speaker
for Shiloh and for the listeners. So I think that one of the books that really just changed, and I don't know if it's absolutely the best book on economic history, but it's pretty short and it's pretty accessible. And that really got me interested in economic history was Douglas North, who is one of the Nobel Prize winners in economics for his work in economic history, is his book, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, which is a really great sort of high level view of
00:35:49
Speaker
how economic change, so not necessarily progress in the sense of moving forward in some GDP sense, but just how change happens, how individuals and what they want interact with the larger society around them to facilitate big changes in the economic structure of society over time, whether that's Europe, he has examples about that, or the United States or other parts of the globe.
00:36:13
Speaker
So that's, I think, a really great and a pretty accessible, short, high-level introduction to an aspect of economic history. I think my favorite book on U.S. economic history, and it's in some ways you can think about it as about something a little bit boring because it's about agriculture, sort of about the development of American agriculture, but it's really just
00:36:34
Speaker
absolutely a tour de force of how you should do economic history and what economic history can teach us is this book Creating Abundance by Paul Rodi and Alan Olmsted, which is about overturning one of the most important ideas in American agriculture about where the sources of gains in American agriculture came from.
00:36:55
Speaker
A simple story that people might tell is a story of, well, we just applied more capital investment to the problem. We just said, let's do more of that stuff, but using better machines. This book really shows that at every stage of the development of American agriculture, biological innovation, and often institutional innovations to facilitate that biological innovation were absolutely essential to the development of American agriculture.
00:37:21
Speaker
So those are the kind of two books that maybe are a little bit older, I mean, somewhere between 10 and 15 years old at this point. Then the one other book that I would point people to is it's a great book on kind of an issue of the day, which is the role of education and inequality. So this is a book, The Race Between Education and Technology by Claudia Golden and Larry Katz. And it's just a great overview of, again,
00:37:46
Speaker
institutions and how the institutions of American from primary to higher education have worked over time, and then what kinds of labor market outcomes and overall economic growth outcomes they have generated for the United States since the late 19th century.
00:38:02
Speaker
And so those are three great introductions to economic history in general as a field and then my space in economic history, U.S. economic history, one for the 19th century agriculture and then another for the 20th century education.
00:38:17
Speaker
I see. Okay. That's very helpful. Let's transition. I know we only have, you know, our time is growing short, but I wanted to ask you about this. We have an episode that will come out at some point with Deirdre McCloskey. And, you know, we talked, she gave a talk at the Benson Center. We talked a lot with her about, about progress.
00:38:35
Speaker
and the notion of progress in history and the ways in which a study of economic history can illuminate our understanding of human progress.
Economic History and Progress
00:38:44
Speaker
So I'm wondering, it seems to me a lot of economic historians are talking about this. You've recommended some reading to me by folks who have done some work on this. Can you talk about ideas of progress, the relationship of these ideas to progress to economic history, and how
00:38:59
Speaker
these ideas of progress and the sort of scholarship that's arisen around notions of progress has yoked to the discipline of economic history. Yeah, I mean, I think it always depends on exactly what people mean by progress. I mean, I think people bring their own. I mean, certainly like if you were to ask an effective altruist or something like that, they would have a particular set of meanings they bring to what progress is. But
00:39:22
Speaker
A kind of generalized notion, a nonspecific notion of progress is definitely integral to economic history. I mean, economic history at the end of the day, and maybe economics in general at the end of the day, is just fundamentally a discipline about what makes countries rich and what makes countries poor, right? It's the question.
00:39:42
Speaker
that Adam Smith asked in his book. And then economists, you know, sometimes in very narrow ways, but often in very broad ways, have then taken up that question and just tried to understand, you know, whether it's related to healthcare markets or sort of something more fundamental about institutions and geography and culture and religion.
00:40:02
Speaker
have just said, what are the things that contribute to economic growth? And so then economic growth is often used as a synonym for progress. And so I think it's useful to try to be a little bit more detailed or provide a little bit more meat on the bones of what we mean by growth and progress. And so a kind of simplistic way to understand this is through a kind of measure like GDP.
00:40:25
Speaker
where we just say, let's try to throw together the value of all the goods and services that an economy produces and equate that with progress. So just how much value, in some pretty narrow sense, I would say, does an economy produce?
00:40:41
Speaker
And economists do that. Maybe we divide by the number of people. Maybe we divide by the number of hours worked. But fundamentally, we're saying we're trying to value the goods and services that an economy produces. And then economists can get caricatured as only caring about GDP or something like that. And certainly, I have talked to philosophers or any number of other people who caricature economists that way. But I think, actually, that when you go and look at the economics literature,
00:41:08
Speaker
Economists are interested in all kinds of weird things. They're interested in health outcomes. They're interested in mental health outcomes. They're interested in measuring happiness if we thought it was possible to do that. There really is a pluralism of outcomes. Again, maybe being a little bit narrow in that, but in which economists really try to bring on board a lot of different dimensions to understanding
00:41:36
Speaker
how do people sort of make progress, you know, as an economy, as a region, as an individual in their own lives, right? And that can be in any number of ways. And I think, I mean, it's absolutely fundamental to economic history. I mean, economic history is just, it's about like how a society goes from being relatively poor to being relatively well off, right? As many countries have done and seem to continue to do across the globe since 1800.
00:42:03
Speaker
Yeah. And this is an interesting topic to me. I mean, let me ask you this question, something I want to ask you for a while. Does economic history as a discipline, you're talking about how it's sort of intimately bound up with notions of progress because its purpose is to show in broad terms how poor countries became rich countries. And then if you want to talk about it on the globe, how, you know, global growth has occurred in the preceding centuries and thus there's a kind of notion broadly speaking of human progress.
00:42:30
Speaker
Do those things imply that progress as such as a kind of dogma is bound up in economic history and that economic historians have to be dogmatic that there has been progress in the deepest senses on a wide variety of axes? Do you see what I'm saying? Is that a settled question for economic history on the basis of which the entire discipline can take flight? If so, that strikes me as dangerous. I mean, I think that economists
00:42:55
Speaker
you know, maybe a particular economist or kind of randomly chosen person, you can sort of look at a randomly chosen person and come to kind of pretty narrow conclusions about what it is that that person is doing, right? Like I look at transportation, right? There's a kind of material that goes into transportation and then transportation produces a kind of material in the world, right? You can apply that kind of a narrow critique to me or probably really any economist, but I would say like,
00:43:24
Speaker
as a group of people, I think there is a growing sense of trying to sort of be more pluralistic and sort of how we understand what it means to make progress, right? What it means to empower individuals to do the kinds of things that they want to do in life. And I think, you know, economists are not particularly good or we shouldn't expect that they would be particularly good and, you know, certainly telling people what it is that they should be trying to do or even like, you know, guiding or nudging them in those directions.
00:43:54
Speaker
But I think economists certainly bring to the table or certainly bring a set of biases to the table about what the inputs into a kind of life of flourishing, of individual flourishing might look like. And it's not only material stuff. Again, there's a lot about the environment. There's a lot about health outcomes. There's a lot about other aspects that are not exactly easy to monetize.
00:44:19
Speaker
of people's lives that economists are very much interested in. But maybe economists can always use some input from other people. But I think as a group, there is a kind of openness. There's not always openness with every person, maybe even with a subset of people. But I think for economists as a group, there's a pretty broad openness to what it means to empower people or to live a flourishing life, in a sense, basically, that they define.
00:44:48
Speaker
No, that's helpful. Well, look, I want to wind things down, but one of the things I want to do is folks who are listening, if they listen to the intro to this current season, they know that I'm departing the Benson Center as the Associate Faculty Director and you are going to be my successor as the Associate Faculty Director.
Vision for the Benson Center
00:45:07
Speaker
So I wanted to give you just a brief moment to say a word about your hopes for the Benson Center.
00:45:13
Speaker
People who don't know, Taylor's been affiliated with us for some years now as a faculty fellow. We're really excited to have him on board. He's got some exciting ideas for programming. As you can tell from his podcast, he's very energetic. And so Taylor, what is it, I'm just curious about the Benson Center that excites you in the future and why have you been part of it and eager and participant in its initiatives in the past?
00:45:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I think first I should thank Shiloh for both having me on the podcast and for the great job that he's done over the course of his involvement in the center. And yeah, so I'm going to be taking over and my goal for the Benson Center is to bring, you know, in addition to sort of fulfilling what the Benson Center already sees as its mission to sort of bring a kind of like ideological and viewpoint diversity to campus,
00:46:03
Speaker
in the context of themes around and related to Western civilization. The thing that I most want to do is provide a forum or a place where in particular undergraduates at CU can get more involved with the kinds of issues of the day that they find interesting that are related to, or not always, but often related to the biggest themes in Western civilization or in how Western civilization
00:46:32
Speaker
has interacted with other places and across time in the world. And so that's really like kind of the fundamental like my interest in the center is to try to find a way to bring undergraduates on board to say you want to talk about climate change, you want to talk about health in the developing world, you want to talk about the importance of the future and how we think about the morality of decisions that we make today, you want to talk about
00:47:02
Speaker
slavery and the role that it's played both in the American economy and around the world. These are fundamental questions. It's not always the case that a class that you would take would cover these in great detail. Some classes will cover them a little bit, some classes will cover them not at all.
00:47:18
Speaker
But i think they're fundamental and i see in the classroom that students are often engaged and often want to learn of the material even if they didn't start out being interested in it but they also want to talk about the things that they're interested in and i want to provide a forum on campus or place on campus where people can come in.
00:47:34
Speaker
Let it rip with what they're interested in and have some faculty, not guidance in the sense of telling anyone what to think, but some faculty help in coming up with topics, coming up with readings, structuring discussions, providing pizza, whatever the right set of inputs are.
00:47:52
Speaker
Yeah, I can't support that more strongly than I already do. That sounds terrific, you know, to rededicate the center, expand its undergraduate programming, dedicated to much of its programming to undergraduates. That's the purpose in a university, from top to bottom, in my opinion. Research is just a fortunate tangent and consequence of the wonderful things that are being done with universities, with undergraduates at universities.
00:48:16
Speaker
Let me say to you, Taylor, thank you so much for this podcast on economic history. It's been illuminating and we look forward very much to your tenure as the Associate Faculty Director of the Betzen Center. Thanks, Shiloh.
00:48:29
Speaker
The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado at Boulder. You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash vincent.