Branko Milanovic Profile picture
Mar 7, 2021 10 tweets 2 min read Read on X
On March 9, 1776 was published The Wealth of Nations.
Here are 9 not that well-known quotes from it.
Marriage is encouraged in China not by the profitableness of children but by the liberty of destroying them.
All merchants & master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price & ...lessening the sale of their goods...They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent w regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains.
The exorbitant rewards of players, opera singers, opera dancers, etc. are founded upon these two principles;
the rarity and beauty of the talents, and the discredit of employing them in this manner.
How much lower ranks of people in the country are really superior to those of the town, is well known to every man whom either business or curiosity has led to converse much with both.
All the ancient arts of Mexico and Peru have never furnished one single manufacture to Europe.
The late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their negro slaves, may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great.
To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it.
The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.
The church of Rome may be considered the most formidable combination that ever was formed against the authority and security of civil governments, as well as against the liberty, reason and happiness of mankind.

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More from @BrankoMilan

Nov 21, 2024
Consider income composition in socialism and developed capitalism. They are fairly similar. The differences are in the lack of income from K, greater family-related transfers, and quasi-absence of direct taxes (other than proportional flat wage taxes) in socialism. Image
Then extremely low skill premium of 3-5% vs 18-70% for West European countries (and even more in the US). Image
Then, much less redistributive social transfers. While UK/Ireland had very pro-poor transfers, socialist countries had flat transfers. Thransfers depended on family composition and were about the same regardless of underlying income. Image
Read 4 tweets
Nov 21, 2024
This is the second year that in my teaching I spend two hours discussing income inequality under socialism, the way it was, not normative stuff. The most important thing is to tell students that socialism is not capitalism with less inequality. The logic of the system was entirely different.
The salient points.
Nationalization of capital & end of incomes from K reduces inequality directly.
Wage compression: very low skill premium. Explained both by free schooling and ideological preference for less skilled workers.
Relatively large (but not larger than in modern capitalism) social transfers directed toward families and old-age persons.
Large but almost totally flat direct taxes, mostly in the for of a wage tax.
Read 5 tweets
Oct 19, 2024
After reading @pseudoerasmus excellent thread on the evolution of devt thinking and the role of institutions and @ingridharvold, Kesar, Dutt paper on the same topic (both published within the past 48 hours) I asked myself the following Q: Why did I like AJR early work so much & then lost interest?
I liked both their "Origins.." and "Reversal..". The reason is that I found in these papers the themes with which I was already familiar from reading neo-Marxist literature, including S Amin and G Arrighi. But I always felt dissatisfaction with that literature's "sporadic" use of empirical evidence.
What AJR provided was the same story with much more data and modern methodology. So it was a big step forward.
The problems started afterwards: their inability to explain communism (political inequality but economic equality), and the turn away from understanding of capitalism
Read 8 tweets
Aug 21, 2024
15 reviews of books on neoliberalism:
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation

Clinton Fernandes, Subimperial Power
branko2f7.substack.com/p/living-throu…
branko2f7.substack.com/p/powerful-but…
Krishnan Nayar, Liberal Capitalist Democracy

Peter Turchin, The End Times
branko2f7.substack.com/p/capitalism-u…
branko2f7.substack.com/p/the-chronicl…
Fritz Bartels, The Triumph of Broken Promises

Jamie Martin, The Meddlers
branko2f7.substack.com/p/western-mone…
foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review…
Read 9 tweets
May 7, 2024
We shall never know if the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was intentionally targeted or not.
Here are some arguments why I find accidental bombing highly unlikely.
-This was the only building targeting mistake in 78 days of very precise bombing.
-The ostensible target was a financial institution (bank giving loans, for, among other things, old SRFY's sales of armament). But that bank no longer worked; Serbia was bankrupt; it was not giving loans to anyone.

-It is the only fin institution having been ostensibly targeted.
-The Chinese emb & the Bank 2 very different buildings. Not only when you face them. Even if you have a 2-dimensional map, emb was facing, at an angle, towards the river, a solitary building w/a fence. The bank is 150m away across a 6-lane highway, adjoining another building.
Read 8 tweets
Apr 14, 2024
In 1974, it made sense to speak of the Three Worlds, as among themselves, and treating China that never belonged to the Third World apart, they accounted for 98% of world GDP (in PPP terms).
Capitalist core 62%
Socialist countries 13%
Third World 24%
China 2% Image
But now we have a different situation. The capitalist core has shrunk despite its geographical extension to E Europe. The socialist world has disappeared. The 3rd world is more important thanks to the rise of Asia.
Core 44%
China 22%
Politically heterogen. periphery 31%
RUS 3%
In political sense, we have a unified West with 44%, China with ½ of that amount, politically heterogeneous periphery with almost 1/3 of global GDP (but its political power is low because of that heterogeneity) and Russia that is obviously trying to punch above its weight.
Read 5 tweets

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