**NEW WORKING PAPER**

Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis

w/ Ali Almelhem, Murat Iyigun & Austin Kennedy

Available at:

Short 🧵 below…
1/7 docs.iza.org/dp16674.pdf






We provide an empirical test of Mokyr’s “Culture of Growth” thesis - which asserts that a *progress-oriented* view of science, promoted by the great Enlightenment thinkers, helped facilitate Britain’s “Industrial Enlightenment” and ultimately its Industrial Revolution
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The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy (co-edited with @jaj7d) will be published in September 2023!

Chapters available as they are formatted at: academic.oup.com/edited-volume/…

The contributors did an amazing job. A thread on each chapter in the volume… (1/47) We tried to give wide coverage to HPE topics in economics and political science. We organized the volume into five sections:

1) Historical Political Economy: An Overview
2) How States are Organized
3) Components of the State
4) Long-Run Legacies
5) The State and Society

Now forthcoming at European Economic Review

"A Theory of Cultural Revivals"
w/ Murat Iyigun & @SerorAvner

In short: we present a theory of how culture can be molded by elites to prevent more efficient modes of production (that harm the elites) from becoming dominant
1/ Much of the political economy literature on this topic tends to focus on vested interests preventing change. This explanation works in many settings

But elites often do not have the political power to prevent more efficient modes of production from becoming dominant
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Excited we finally have a draft of this paper, which attempts to provide a 'unifying theory' of the long economic divergence between the Middle East & Western Europe

As we see it, there are 3 recent theories that hit on important aspects of the divergence...

1/

https://twitter.com/cepr_org/status/1361057839582691332

One set of theories focus on the legitimating power of Islam (Rubin, @prof_ahmetkuru, Platteau). This gave religious clerics greater power, which pulled political resources away form those encouraging economic development

But these theories leave some questions unanswered...
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***Religion in Economic History: A Survey***

with @essobecker and Ludger Woessmann

An extensive survey covering the emerging field of “religion in economic history”

Available here: cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_…

1/ Prepared for The Handbook of Historical Economics (elsevier.com/books/the-hand…), edited by @albertobisin & Giovanni Federico

Surveys the recent literature asking “How has religion affected economic history?” “How did historical circumstances shape religious beliefs/activities?”

2/

My one and only COVID-19 take:

This crisis has revealed to me that most economists need to take a class in economic history 1\ It is not because economists should be well-versed in the history of pandemics. Indeed, most economic historians are not even well-versed in this

It is because of the way economic historians deal with really ***tricky data*** 2\

Economics fields as @dril tweets 👇 Macro

https://twitter.com/dril/status/1098463076980903936?s=21

Now that my book, Rulers, Religion & Riches, has been out over a year, I thought I would share its figures and tables. To the extent possible in 280 characters, I will place each of them in the context of the broader arguments made in the book.

amazon.com/gp/product/B01…

(THREAD} Table 1.1 is a motivating table, meant to show that the contemporary Middle East is poorer, has worse governance, and is more subject to conflict than the "West".

The question is, given the Middle East's vast head start (by, say, 1000), how did we get to this point?

I just remembered that 2018 is a big year for U.S. copyright law so I’m going to indulge with a thread.

Why is it a big year for copyright law? It is the first year *in twenty freaking years* that works will enter the public domain.

THREAD... How does this affect you?

Have you ever tried to read a book on Google Books only to be cut off after reading a few pages? That’s because the book *might* be under copyright. This is true for *any* book published since 1923.