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Branko Milanovic

19 Mar, 9 tweets, 2 min read

(long thread)
These days I receive many letters, some very detailed, criticizing or agreeing w/ diff parts of my writings. I try at least to acknowledge most of them & to reply to some. But I feel guilty for not being better at it b/c I know how it is to be on the other side.

My 1st unanswered long letter was the one to Samir Amir in Dakar after reading "Accumulation on the world scale". Took me several days to compose it in an excellent French. Never heard from him. Since I believe he was a nice person I (still) try to convince myself he never got it

I wrote to Pedro Ramet who published a nice book on Yugoslav federalism (early 1980). In my letter, I made politely a very good point about something he missed in his book & which might not have fully fit into his scheme. Never heard from him.

A little later I wrote to Samuel Huntington after reading "The Third Wave". I recall not thinking highly of the book, but I wrote to correct a factual error re. pre-War Yugoslavia, and also (I think) something about Portugal's "Carnation Revolution". Never heard from him.

On the positive side.
I wrote in early 1970s to Evsey Domar re. one of his articles in the EJ. There was a small error there. Domar replied very quickly, agreed with it, and said I should send it to the Journal. I did not. I was just happy that he found my point correct.

I wrote in the late 1970s to James Meade who had an influential article on the labor-managed firm. I spent literally several *weeks* working on dynamic equilibrium properties of his findings & sent him (I know it was crazy!) a 20-page letter full of equations.

Meade, very graciously, wrote back a several-page long hand-written letter saying he has gone through the first 9 pages (I remember that) of my derivations, agreed w/ some and hoped to check it all.

I could possibly come up with a few other cases but these are the ones that I recalled on my walk today--- as I thought too of the opening lines of a book on Robespierre that I loved as a kid.

R. is delegated by his teachers to read a letter of welcome to Louis XVI who was visiting Arras. But after hearing a few sentences, bored Louis orders his driver to move on & the coach splashes mud all over the the young Robespierre, outfitted in his best clothes.
The rest...

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More from @BrankoMilan

Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

12 Mar

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.

Read 4 tweets

Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

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

@BrankoMilan

7 Mar

@realDrcabbie

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

@BrankoMilan

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

@BrankoMilan

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

@BrankoMilan

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

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