Why did people revive the calculation debate instead of this, to me much more interesting, socialization debate between Schumpeter and Bauer?
jstor.org/stable/23722217 This debate seems much richer. Not just contention over the technical basis of administered prices (important! no doubt) but also the domestic and int'l politics of the "necessary social upheaval." Bauer's seeming acceptance of ethnic nationalism's necessity very telling here.

Suddenly obsessed with imagining a “currency financed” Erie Canal. 1. NY issues notes to pay construction costs, focusing on most paying sections as before. 2. Call them “toll vouchers” to get around Constitution’s proscription on state money. 3. Modify bank charters to create... incentive to support the notes, say by allowing toll vouchers to count partly toward capital. Or issue new bank charters. 4. Make notes receivable for all public debts, including property taxes. 5. Perhaps allow a limited a number of notes, on first come first served basis...

THREAD on the economic limits of antebellum slavery. A ton of important scholarship, recent and older, has shown that enslavement could be very profitable to enslavers. Yet there’s no doubt the South as a region developed more slowly & stayed poorer than other US regions. Why? 1/ Here I want to gather some thoughts and put them out for critical engagement. Probably everything here has been said before but either not together or not in a long time. 2/

ANIMAL ENERGY, a THREAD on the surprising history of industrial capitalism's core and periphery:

You'd think animals are a primitive power source quickly discarded once fossil fuels entered the picture. But you'd be wrong. Animal power concentrated in the 19c industrial core. As Clay McShane showed long ago, urban growth in the US Northeast was fundamentally dependent on horses. Look at these incredible population figures. Even as rural migrants and int'l immigrants streamed into Boston, it's horse population grew even faster. jstor.org/stable/3185479

People might be underestimating the Lincoln Project thing because of misunderstanding how messaging campaigns build over time. Ppl thought Occupy Wall Street was a failure b/c it didn't immediately change things, but it was an important moment in a trajectory 1/ OWS left a legacy of activists and a politically effective language for keeping inequality in the public mind (the 99% vs the 1%). Lincoln Project is different but it has some dedicated and well funded people working on messaging that might ultimately find an audience 2/

Thread: 1/For folks interested in 19c US history of capitalism and pol econ, I cannot recommend enough @yuenyuenang's How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. It offers fresh thinking for reflecting on the US case. This thread raises one implication I took from the book @pseudoerasmus 2/The final chapter makes its own comparison to the 19c US, drawing on Wallis's work on public finance w/the "open access" framework he developed with North and Weingast and recently elaborates in an ed. volume with Lamoreaux. This is fine, but there's much more one could do