What were the great revolutions I witnessed in my life?
The first & really big was the Iranian revolution. I had many Iranian friends. They were all anti-Pahlavi. But quickly they split into two or three camps. The revolution had global resonance: I remember that my father disagreed with my mother over it. In Belgrade! They had no dog in the fight. But it was big. Reagan's revolution was also big. He upended things. Pushed back against the USSR that foolishly invaded Afghanistan the year before & not only went into a war it could not win, but challenged the basis of the Cold War order. Reagan was a Cold Warrior who wished for peace.

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. Then extremely low skill premium of 3-5% vs 18-70% for West European countries (and even more in the US).

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.

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.

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…

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.

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% 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%

When in my recent talk in Edinburgh I claimed that Adam Smith could be seen as "a man of the left" (these terms btw are not used in the Visions of Inequality) this was based on the following: Smith's extraordinary strong critique of how the rich have acquired their wealth (plunder, corruption, collusion, trade companies, monopoly, colonialism). That critique is often stronger than Marx's critique of "primitive accumulation".

My new paper "The three eras of global income inequality 1820-2020, with the focus on the past 30 years" is just out in World Development. Access is free for 50 days.
Here is the link:
sciencedirect.com/science/articl… It is an important paper. Not only because it gives calculations of global inequality over 200 years (following Bourguignon & Morrisson seminal work) but because it looks at the political implications of the three eras: the rise of the West, the Three Worlds & the rise of Asia.

Much has been written about China's train system. But not enough. I think that it will be seen, with the system of canals and the Great Wall, as one of the most important contributions of China. One can see it as a proof that China excels in network industries. The speed, punctuality and cleanliness of the system are absolutely remarkable. But even more striking to a visitor is how apparently simple and well-organized is everything so much that one cannot but wonder why other countries have not done the same thing.

Somebody asked me for book recommendations re. the classics, capitalism etc. (I am not exactly sure what b/c it is hard to judge what people are interested in from just a couple of sentences). Nevertheless, I sent a list of books. First, those published in the past 3-4 years... Darrin McMahon, Equality
David Lay Williams, "The greatest of all plagues"
Glori Liu, Adam Smith's America
Marcelo Musta, The last years of Karl Marx
Krishnan Nayar, Liberal capitalist democracy
Fritz Bartels, The triumph of broken promises

Some of my slides for tonight's discussion:
Smith Ricardo

Long thread. One or two sentences, or direct quotes of economists studied, from each of the 7 chapters of Visions of Inequality." We start with Quesnay.

The Balkans, and Serbia in particular are, for obvious reasons, often mentioned in connection w/ WW1. But there is another important, if less discussed, connection w/ the outcome of WW2. The Operation Barbarossa was supposed to begin in the Spring of 41. Hitler was unpleasantly surprised by Italian invasion of Greece and even more unpleasantly by their inability to win there. Hence his full-court pressure on Yugoslav Royal Govt to join the Axis and allow German military to transit in order to help the Italians.

Soloviov's itinerary seems to conform to the following (common) pattern:
upper middle class family w/ good connection and ability to afford elite Soviet education,
readiness to join the Soviet elite, interest and love for the US,
[Gorbachev comes to power]

https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1706080760908619785

change of direction: unbounded love of democracy.
ideolization of the United States,
participation in the plunder of Russia w/ attendant contempt for the people (who are stupid and thus incapable to steal),
purchase of many properties in the West,

A few thoughts on Beria.
I was for a long time puzzled by why US historians of the Cold War (and Gaddis in particular) have such a soft spot for Beria. I thought he was the worst criminal of all.
And indeed he was. But he was the Soviet McNamara: efficiency (body count?) above all. Devoid of moral scruples. This is why Stalin put him in charge of delivering nuclear weapon; and Beria did it. On time. Nobody dared to touch the best scientists. He did not care what their political views were.

An excellent article which shows how hopeless is the migration situation and how (as my global inequality work indicates) it will get even worse.
elmundo.es/internacional/… EU does not want more migrants & it is closing itself off (Nordics were the first to do it). It pays Maghreb countries to stock migrants there. But Maghreb does not want Africans either. So the solution is: growth in Africa, But then EU goes against Chinese Belt and Road

1/6 Since @MaxCRoser and I are both using mostly World Bank and @lisdata we get similar results. There are however some differences depending e.g. on what Indian data to use, what PPPs to apply for China, India and Indonesia (to have rural and urban PPPs or not),

https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1661647776629899264

2/6 what years are chosen (data for all countries are not available annually), and what to do (if anything) with countries from which we do not have the data at all. There is also a problem of whether to adjust (increase) income at the of distributions in many countries.

"The tyranny of merit" by Michael Sandel (a recent bestseller) is an excellent book that, for people working on income distribution, shows how thin are philosophical bases of what they/we study and measure. Sandel does not even discuss utilitarianism which is (unfortunately) still used a lot in economics. He discusses, in order of economic/philosophical sophistication,(a) primitive neoclassical theories of marginal productivity a la Mankiw, (b) Hayek's "divorce" of value from merit,

Fairly biased article on corruption in China.
eurasiareview.com/18032023-six-m… Corruption is indeed systemic to political capitalism (as indeed I argued in "C,A") but the critique of extending the reach to capturing corrupt officials abroad is unfair b/c it is due to USA & Canada ignoring Chinese warrants.

Schumpeter on Roman imperialism:
“Here [Rome] is the classic example of that kind of insincerity in both foreign and domestic affairs which permeates not only avowed motives but also probably the conscious motives of the actors themselves—of that policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman.