This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
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13 May 1998 13:21:00 -0500 (CDT)
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 13:21:35 -0500
From: "Joshua L. Rosenbloom" <jrosenbloom@ukans.edu>
Subject: Re: Frank/Landes
To: mlevine@lcsc.edu, jeff sommers <jsommers@lynx.dac.neu.edu>,
Chris Chase-Dunn <CHRISCD@jhu.edu>,
"Marilyn A. Levine, Lewis-Clark State College" <mlevine@lcsc.edu>
I'm copying several comments related to AGF's comments that have appeared on
Eh.Res. I will continue to post traffic on EH.Research as it comes in to
me. But will also pass these messages along unless you don't want them.
And I would appreciate your doing the same. Then we can let AGF respond as
he wishes.
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 15:03:11 -0500
From: "Alan M. Taylor" <amt@nwu.edu>
Subject: EH.R: Frank versus Landes
Sender: owner-eh.res@eh.net
To: eh.res@eh.net
Reply-to: eh.res@eh.net
================= EH.RES POSTING =================
I am confused. It seems to me that Gunder Frank is between a rock and a
hard place. The key hypothesis (an empirical claim) is that the East was
about level with Europe ca. 1750. That seems like a testable hypothesis,
and the work of many scholars, like Ken Pomeranz (whose work was the
subject of a FORUM on This List), is putting it to the test. But what of
its implications? Does it matter? And how does it matter?
Suppose the hypothesis is false. The East was behind, as the Eurocentrics
believe. Then we are back to having the old stroy about the "superiority"
of European institutions for what--500, 750, 1,000 years? And Frank's case
would be lost.
Suppose the hypothesis is true. Then, following a ruthlessly nihilistic
line, we may dismiss everything before the Industrial Revolution, at least
in comparative terms, as of little interest. Everybody was on the same
page, no great divergence, etc. But then, EVERYTHING, hinges on the last
250 or so years, and the "great bifurcation" (as Joel Mokr termed it in the
online internet video seminar last week). And the issue there is why did
Asia (read: non-European or non-European New World) fall so far behind? We
know from Bairoch/Maddison et al. that this divergence was huge. Is this
scenario any better for Frank? If the New Economic History, New
Institutional History, and the New Growth Theory and Empirics, say
anything, it is that, going beyond simple neoclassical models, policies and
institutions did make a difference in growth outcomes. So hey, we have
whittled down 1,000 years of "superior" European institutions to just 250
years... great! But that just happens to be the 250 years in which the gap
between rich and poor nations has gone through thr roof. And so it really
matters, and it still begs the question as to what made the difference for
Europe, and why Asia (and others) didn't have the right conditions. So
Frank now has to move to post-1750, not pre-1750, and tell us why that
happened, and where we are going. And here there are two problems--one
theoretical, one empirical. First, if it is not the Institutions/NEH/Growth
story, then what is it--surely not a rehash of the discredited
structuralist/dependency theories of the 1960s? Second, who said Asia is
getting ready to once again catch and surpass Europe; a handful (literally)
of countries have reached middle income per capita levels, namely the NICs,
meaning they have reached the same level as the richest Latin American
countries, and are close to the poorest "Western" nations. But the rest of
Asia is far behind. China and India dominate the population weighted
picture. Their institutional and policy environment is/was not very
conducive for growth, or else why would their per capita incomes be so low?
Even on the most optimistic forecasts, parity of the East (as a whole) and
West might be decades or centuries away.
I think (and I think David Landes, Joel Mokyr, and many others think) that
the Industrial Revolution is so important because it is the beginning of
that great bifurcation. (And that bifurcation is great even if we allow
Europe to still have a lead in 1750; the lead just gets and order of
magnitude bigger after that). Explaining that post-1750 bifurcation is
probably THE greatest challenge of global economic history. Landes deserves
credit: he has tried to meet that challenge, and he gave us a story. What's
yours?
Respectfully submitted,
Alan M. Taylor
Hoover Institution and Northwestern University
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Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 11:57:24 -0500
From: Gregory Clark <gclark@ucdavis.edu>
Subject: EH.R: Frank versus Landes
Sender: owner-eh.res@eh.net
To: eh.res@eh.net
Reply-to: eh.res@eh.net
================= EH.RES POSTING =================
In the debate between Frank and Landes, and in the assessment of the
meaning of Ken Pomeranz's work on China versus Europe it seems to me that
we should keep in mind two things:
1. All economies of the world before 1800 were "Malthusian" in the sense
that living standards did NOT depend directly on the production technology.
Instead living standards depended on the factors determining the birth
rate (fertility control, marriage etc) and on the factors determining the
death rates (the disease environment, war, the operation of grain markets
etc). Thus Pomeranz's interesting findings that living standards in the
Yangzi delta circa 1800 were as high as those in Europe says nothing
directly about the relative development of European and Chinese technology.
For all we know living standards in sub-Saharan Africa may have been
higher than in either of these places (because of the disease environment).
Indeed one interpretation of Pomeranz's results are that they reinforce the
work of Chinese demographers who have been emphasizing that Europe was not
the only part of the world where there was limitation of fertility in the
years before 1800. Though marriage was early and nearly universal for
Chinese women, fertility was limited within marriage by means known and
unknown.
The high Chinese living standards thus may indicate only facts about
Chinese family and social structure (and disease environment), and nothing
about technology. Unless you have a theory of the IR which emphasizes high
living standards this finding about China will not in itself change any
views about what caused the IR.
2. By 1900 there was a huge gap in living standards between even the
advanced areas of China like Shanghai and Britain and the USA. In nominal
terms at least wages in China were one fifth those in Britain in cotton
textiles. Recent work on Britain in the IR and later has emphasized slower
and slower growth rates of output and of real wages (see Feinstein's recent
work). Was this gap then the result of a collapse in Chinese living
standards 1800-1900? Did China just stagnate from 1800 to 1900, or did it
actually regress in living standards? And if it did regress, why did that
happen within the Malthusian economic framework that still operated in China.
Yours hurriedly!
Greg Clark
_________________________________________________________________
Gregory Clark
Department of Economics PHONE 530-752-9242
University of California FAX 530-752-9382
Davis, CA 95616
_________________________________________________________________
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Joshua L. Rosenbloom e-mail: JRosenbloom@ukans.edu
Department of Economics phone: 785-864-2839
Summerfield Hall
Lawrence, KS 66045
University of Kansas
http://www.bschool.ukans.edu/home/jrosenbloom/jlr.html
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