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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

20 Apr

The great success of unfettered capitalism is how many people have totally accepted as obvious the argument that whoever has the money has the right to decide on the rules and do whatever he likes.
Moreover, it is made without people fully realizing what they are saying.

1) When Twitter decided to ban people it did not like, many said, "it is a private company, it can do whatever it wants: if you do not like it go elsewhere".

2) When Bezos bought the Washington Post, many said, "he can buy whatever he likes and decide what they write. If you do not like it, read something else."

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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

5 Apr

@jasonhickel

The difficulty of discussion w/ @jasonhickel comes also from the fact that he just does not *know* things about which he writes. He is right that today's GDP does not include non-marketed activities. But this is less obvious for the past. He seems to imagine that in 1820 England

Zambia and Peru had statistical offices that calculated GDP according to today's rules and excluded then quite sizeable non-market activities. But this is of course not true. There are no statistical offices and GDP methodology until late 1940s and early 1950s or even 1960s.

Historical GDPs are calculated based on assessments of arable land, yields, some info on people's consumption patterns, and data on production on a few manufactured goods. Such an approach which, in agriculture, does not depend on marketization but on physical production can...

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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

5 Apr

@jasonhickel

It is obvious that @jasonhickel does not know how different PLs have been derived. He believes that they are all arbitrary. He should check with (or better read) @MartinRavallion how the PLs, from 1990s onwards have bee defined. The PPP$1 line (which is now $1.90) is indeed low.

This us why it is called "absolute poverty line". It certainly does a good job as an absolute poverty line in historical data. My PL for Byzantium 1000 is very close to it. Maddison has used it. Allen has derived a similar level line using linear programming & regionally-based

consumption baskets & heating requirements. The original line was defined in 1990 based on the *actually* existing PLs in several poor countries. Hickel should also know that the Indian actual PL was *lower* than $1.90 and so was the Chinese rural PL until very recently.

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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

3 Apr

When I criticized recent publishing (in both Yang's book on Cultural Revolution & D Markovits' book on meritocracy) I had in mind the following.
In a book of such historical importance like Yang, you cannot put all footnotes 700 or more pages behind, in illegible endnotes.

(In Markovits' book, it was even worse.)
The names of most important (and frequently cited) people should have (when mentioned first) be written also in Chinese characters between brackets & even in Wade-Giles transliteration b/c that's how their names were written in the 1970s.

The editor should have used footnotes to give super short (one- or two-sentence) explanation for some events that are either badly explained or assumed known by Yang. Also for biographical details (DOB and death, most important political position).

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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

19 Mar

(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.

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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.

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