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Phil Magness Profile picture
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11 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Nikole Hannah-Jones's explanation for how the 2008 financial crisis happened is...well...something.
The above is from her @Masterclass "lecture" - if you can even call it that - on the economics of slavery.
@MasterClass Trust me when I say that this isn't even the craziest part of the video.
@MasterClass Here's the link if you want to verify yourself, although an subscription is required.

masterclass.com/classes/black-…

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Phil Magness Profile picture
12 Jan
A primary economic function of a price system is the signal conveyed in the price.

When you replace free labor with coercion, you obviate the price signal. We should therefore expect accounting under unfree labor (slavery) to be *more* complex than under free-labor capitalism.
The reason? In addition to the brutality of coerced labor, its lack of a functional price signal means the plantation overseer needs to turn to other empirics to figure out how to produce goods. So they invent non-priced measures of labor inputs and outputs, all coerced.
This is why some of the most complex accounting systems known to human history came from attempts at centrally planning an entire economy, such as in the Soviet Union. They ended disastrously, but necessarily relied on other input/output measures after destroying price signals.
Read 4 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
12 Jan
There's a segment of the twittersphere that seems to believe that it's okay to crib the published work of another writer as long as you include a citation.

Not so! If you copy their words, sentence structure etc. with only superficial cosmetic changes, it's still plagiarism.
This is how the American Historical Association defines plagiarism. As they clearly note, a citation alone is not enough. Indeed, their example of plagiarism includes a citation...then copies the text with small cosmetic changes. historians.org/teaching-and-l…
Several high-profile plagiarism cases in recent years involve texts where the author properly cited the plagiarized work, but then lifted wording and sentence structure. Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose both had extensive citations in their plagiarized passages.
Read 5 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
10 Jan
Last week I approached @jakesilverstein about correcting the 1619 Project's misuse of Ed Baptist's "calibrated torture" thesis to explain cotton output.

He replied by denying that they used Baptist's thesis.

So why is @nhannahjones repeating Baptist in her @masterclass lecture?
@jakesilverstein @nhannahjones @MasterClass Baptist's "calibrated torture" thesis is provocative, but it's also empirically false. This was shown by Alan Olmstead & Paul Rhode in their analysis of cotton seed improvements before the Civil War.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
@jakesilverstein @nhannahjones @MasterClass Note that nobody is denying the brutality of slavery here - only Baptist's claim (now repeated by Hannah-Jones in her Masterclass lecture) that torture was meticulously tracked in accounting books, and that this was the *cause* of increased cotton production yield.
Read 4 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
10 Jan
It appears that the "Science Based Medicine" editor David Gorski got @GeneticLiteracy to de-publish a year old editorial because it criticized his conspiratorial ravings against the Great Barrington Declaration.

It used to be here, but no more:

geneticliteracyproject.org/2020/11/16/vie… Image
@GeneticLiteracy Since the internet never forgets, an archived copy may still be found here.

web.archive.org/web/2020112817…
@GeneticLiteracy When he discovered the piece some six months after its publication, @gorskon was furious and tweeted up a storm about how he was going to be "brutal" in his response, and how he was going to go after the GLP. ImageImage
Read 8 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
7 Jan
In my latest piece on the 1619 Project, I tackle the claim that double-entry accounting books on the plantations somehow make slavery a "capitalist" enterprise.

nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/…
Contrary to the 1619 Project's line of argument (and related NHC literature), accounting books are not unique to capitalism. Even the Soviet Union used accounting books - heavily.
No sane person would argue that the Gulags are capitalism because they tracked forced labor outputs as part of a massively complex centrally planned economy. So why is that claim made about the plantations?
Read 6 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
4 Jan
The bibliography from @nhannahjones' @masterclass lecture consists of (a) quack ideological economic history exclusively from the New History of Capitalism echo chamber, and (b) a few "classics" by Alfred Chandler and Eric Williams that NHJ almost certainly never read.
@nhannahjones @MasterClass Listening to her lecture now. It is painfully incompetent - basically a badly garbled cliff notes version of Ed Baptist, as delivered by someone who has even less familiarity with economics than Baptist himself.
@nhannahjones @MasterClass In addition to embracing King Cotton theory, she claims that the use of accounting book on plantations is proof that they are "capitalist." She then claims accounting practices today descend from the plantations.
Read 10 tweets

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