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Branko Milanovic Profile picture
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12 Mar, 4 tweets, 1 min read
One of most challenging papers for me to write was this one on income distribution in pre-revolutionary France (according to Quesnay). I was just re-reading it today.
stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/research/the-l…
Quesnay exercises this dark fascination on anyone who reads him. It is like the transformation problem in Marx or the Pareto slope. The idea is intuitively clear but the technicalities are complicated, the issue is complex, the terminology is not precise enough...
or is differently used, there are errors in the original sources, and thus depending on one's view on where the errors are different interpretations are possible. This fuels for centuries an enormous literature.
Being too clear & too precise is not necessarily good.
One should always leave some ambiguity.

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More from @BrankoMilan

Branko Milanovic Profile picture
7 Mar
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.
Read 10 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
7 Mar
I read Samir Amin's article on China suggested by @realDrcabbie.
monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/chi…
I highly respect Amin and especially his early work ("the Young Amin") which was very empirical. His later work is less so.
My quick impressions on this one:
1 The review of international pol economy of E Asia's rise (present in other Amin's works & Arrighi) is excellent.
2 Accent on inability to alienate land exaggerates its importance (30y rent is not v diff from selling the land) and the USSR/China comparison there is not v useful.
Read 6 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
5 Mar
The problem w/ people who complain about IPR "stealing" is manifold.
At country level, all countries that have developed have used the "stealing" of technology, incl. the US that refused to accept most European patents in the 19thC (see Chiang's The Bad Samaritans).
"Reverse engineering" was key in Japan's and Korea's success.
The accent on IPR today is just a reflection of power relations in the world, and with globalization, greater ability of rich countries to impose the rules that are of benefit for them and enforce them.
It's the same as the ability of the rich within countries to write tax and other rules that are good for them.
Not different at all.
Read 6 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
2 Mar
A final point on politics of surveys.
In the past, the usual dissemination was to publish detailed tables with many permutations. Some countries used to publish thick booklets, e.g. British Blue Books, or French Enquetes de menages...
...or similar detailed data from Yugoslavia (APD, all republics), Poland (Badanie...), Hungary, Czechoslovakia.
Some countries (Japan, Taiwan) still publish several hundred pages-long books w/ tables for each survey.
US does it too.
However, such publications are dying out.
People are moving to electronic data.
But this is not all good.
In some cases, yes, the access to micro data (see LIS) has expanded tremendously.
Read 5 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
2 Mar
What are the countries about whose income distributions we know the least, i.e. those that either do not conduct income surveys, or do not release them, or do not participate in harmonized data bases by the World Bank, Luxembourg Income Survey, Economic Research Forum etc?
The *worst* (not surprisingly) are Saudi Arabia and North Korea. No surveys ever, no data.

Somalia & Somaliland probably never had a survey either. Eritrea might have had, but nothing is available.
Almost equally bad are Qatar and Oman; and UAE (they at least had 1 survey).
Then, there are difficult cases:
W Sahara is probably included in Moroccan surveys.
Abkhazia, South Ossetia do not have surveys. The same (as far as I know) is true for Macao (but not for Hong Kong which had surveys for 40y), Nauru.
N Cyprus is not included in Cypriot data.
Read 10 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
27 Feb
If I had my own way, I would never pay much attention (today) to people who would tell me they want to study inequality & populism, and inequality & discrimination. These are popular topics, everybody is now ready to study them & I would take it as a sign of lack of originality.
But, leaving aside global inequality and links between factoral and personal inequality, which are indeed my favorite topics, I would love on see studies on (here are some examples):
Why the end of apartheid did not bring income inequality down (but increased it) in South Africa?

Will climate change (under current projections) increase inter-country inequality or not?
Read 9 tweets

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