This book falls from the sky into your fantasy world

Thanks user, that sounds interesting. I'll check it out

>make a great case for
>not definitively proving one way or the other
History is bullshit.

t. STEMfag

Let me give you the pdfs

>geographic determinism.
Define, please?

...

Fuck off /pol/ faggot

Much appreciated

Its the basic essence of Germs, Guns, and Steel, which states that the reason places like Asia and Europe took off, but Africa didn't, is due to differences in environment. Specifically, access to certain crops, domestic animals, and ease of transfer of ideas. Its been repeatedly debunked as pop history trash.
>I want to develop universal laws to describe the workings of a group of free agents and semi-random events -You

STEMfags please go.

The argument is that culture, government, institutional forms, legal orders, rule of law or anything like that doesn't matter. The only thing that determines which countries are rich and which are poor today is that some had access to certain vital resources that other did not and that those regions that lacked those resources also had bad things like malaria and bad soil. Never mind that places like Hong Kong, which is just a useless rock, manage to become phenomenally rich because they create a useful and convenient place for people to do business.

The thing to understand about economics is that we have no equations of motion, so we can do comparative statics, but unless you believe that money literally flow like water you're shit out of luck. Consequently we have a very good understanding of which equilibria are good or bad, respectively, but very little understanding of how to move between them.

no problem, I teach this stuff at university level, so I have a bunch of books and papers lying around.

The trifecta with those two books is this paper by Greif, who brings in the role of culture as a means of bridging the gap between personal and impersonal exchange.

Also, to the STEMfag who is skeptical of institutions, check out Dietz Vollrath's "Skeptics Guide to Institutions." It's probably the best case made *against* the importance of institutions, although I do think that he makes some logical mistakes.

It's in four parts, here's the link to part 1:
growthecon.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/the-skeptics-guide-to-institutions-part-1/

>Its been repeatedly debunked as pop history trash.
It sounds pretty significant to me.

>The argument is that culture, government, institutional forms, legal orders, rule of law or anything like that doesn't matter. The only thing that determines which countries are rich and which are poor today is that some had access to certain vital resources that other did not and that those regions that lacked those resources also had bad things like malaria and bad soil.
That sounds pretty untenable in a lot of ways. I got the impression it was more "Hey, those are important, but you can't rule out the effects of X" rather than "X is the new hotness, nothing else matters."

>Its the basic essence of Germs, Guns, and Steel, which states that the reason places like Asia and Europe took off, but Africa didn't, is due to differences in environment. Specifically, access to certain crops, domestic animals, and ease of transfer of ideas. Its been repeatedly debunked as pop history trash.

But... the differences between continents are due to geography. Even if you wanted to take it down to race, that's still ultimately caused by geography.
It's either that or it's random.

The book might be utter horseshit for all I know, but the premise seems basically self-evident.

Congratulations.
You now own a book of antiquity.

Should you not wish to keep it youself the current market value for antique books in such good condition normally starts at 1000 TiN.
Additionally the Library of Marianne Columbia will pay 81% of market value and offer lifetime membership for any and all rare and antique books.

Further more, should this book be of a seditious nature, you are required to be approved by a criminal psychological exam before you may read said material.
For a list of Censored, Banned and Seditious works, please see the link provided.

Thank you and have a beautiful day.

>It sounds pretty significant to me.

There's more to world history than the nutrition values of your local plants.

>X is the new hotness, nothing else matters.
The argument, which I will do a poor job defending because it's shit, is that everything else is endogenous to the initial conditions, and since the initial conditions cannot be changed nothing you do now will matter much. There is no way to make the Congo a nice place to live because the initial conditions created the kind of environment where economic growth cannot thrive. It's a shit argument, but go read Guns Germs and Steel if you want to know more about it.

The alternative take on the same thing is the one by Jeffrey Sachs who is concerned about Malaria. He thinks that with enough foreign aid we can buy them the tools that they need to overcome the persistent effects of disease (according to the thoroughly discredited Harrod-Domar model of investment gaps). Problem with this theory is that you can buy nice things for the Africans all you want, but if they don't have the economy to support say, maintenance materials and maintenance providers and training, then just capital investment is worthless.

These people by the way are the types of people in charge of the world bank.

I think the main problem with guns germs and steel is the fact that it tried to lay down a hard and fast THIS is what makes or breaks EVERYTHING when he had a sample size of exactly one.

Obviously geography matters in that it has an effect, the point of Guns Germs and Steel is that it is the only effect that matters. Englishmen were destined to be Englishmen, to have a parliamentary government, found colonies that would have inclusive voting patterns (relatively compared to Spain), would invest heavily in the bureaucracy of tax collection so they didn't have to tax farm like the continentals did, and so on. These governmental and institutional factors matter, and the point Jared Diamond is making is that they are all completely deterministically determined by the initial physical conditions of our ancestors, which is stupid.

The best evidence against it is that nations so rise and fall, nations that are ahead don't stay ahead, because if they did then the Chinese would have always been the richest in the world, except that they aren't and haven't been for a very long time. The very fact that the ordinal ranking of nations by GPD per capita is subject to change is itself evidence against a purely endogenous growth model based solely on initial conditions.

>deterministically determined
I'm retarded, but I think my point is still clear.

You know, you seem to think it's shit, and your accounting does make it sound like shit. Hard to tell how unbiased your relation is though.

I mean, hell, independent of the book, >Specifically, access to certain crops, domestic animals, and ease of transfer of ideas.

Those all sound pretty important to me. Fuck the book, can we at least agree that all of those are fairly significant, though not more significant than everything else?

I'm giving it a bad wrap, but I think that the thing that niggles economists the most about it is that it falls for the problem of suggesting that since people didn't have something they can't get it, and nothing can be fixed. Like, yes, Africa doesn't have cows, but that doesn't mean that if you did actually manage to get a non-awful dictator and allow people private possession and allow markets to work their globalist magic that they couldn't import the cows.

Jared Diamonds point isn't that these things matter, it's that they matter so much that there is nothing that anyone can do to make it better.

>
>Let me give you the pdfs
Nice, actual knowledge and history. Thanks for making this thread worth something.

The universe we live in is deterministic (at least on the macro level). So that seems basically right.

Now, I could buy the argument that the amount of complexity between the initial geographical conditions and the outcome is enough that with a few minor changes the world could be radically different. But even then, the countries with the right climate, resources and a reason to remain competitive are going to be the victors. There might be an alternate universe where the US speaks Portuguese, but there probably isn't one where it speaks Tagalog.

Well, everything you're saying sounds quite reasonable.

Honestly, that's not what I remember from the book; the impression of the usual hate I got for it was people, say, you know, /pol/acks, hating it because it suggested that the reason Europeans did so well (and many other places did so poorly) was just dumb luck rather than being ubermenschen or something.

Either way, it sounds like we agree on the important stuff, and if he really was working the angle you're saying he did, we agree on the rest too. I really don't remember that kind of defeatist "it's fucked, nobody can fix it" tone, but I did read it like a decade ago or something.

So, q for unifag in re to Acemoglu's "institutions are key". China had some shit institutions but managed some amazing development. Same with the Soviet Union c. 1950s. How do they square that circle?

The book itself is a fantasy world. Its widely debunked as incorrect and fallacious.

I assume it's the classic "There isn't one easy solves-all answer to everything, the real answer is a lot of a couple different schools of thought and a little of a lot more."

if it's an answer someone can succinctly relay to you on a Mandalay ironmongery board, it's probably got several holes that can be poked in it.

>you know, /pol/acks, hating it because it suggested that the reason Europeans did so well (and many other places did so poorly) was just dumb luck rather than being ubermenschen or something.

/pol/ hate has more to do with it being spammed CONSTANTLY with "/pol/ BTFO, western civ doesnt matter, culture doesnt matter, therefore diversity is good" stupidity.

It was downright ridiculous how much time a single autist spent flooding the board with the same GGS thread over and over and over

>There might be an alternate universe where the US speaks Portuguese, but there probably isn't one where it speaks Tagalog.
Sure, but that's just saying that there are boundaries on the potential set of outcomes, which I think is pretty obvious. The idea that there is some alternative outcome where we speak Portuguese does matter. Things like shared language and legal forms do really matter.

See this paper by La Porta et al. on how the civil versus common law countries have different impacts on the styles of incorporation and property protection across nations.

The point of institutional analysis is to take a step back from the macro-investment models where everyone is the same and the only thing that matters is capital labor ratios (since they take all capital goods and laborers to be homogenous). It's by no means a complete solution, but it's definitely, in my opinion, a better one.

So I happen to *really* prefer the explanations provide by North Wallis and Weingast on this, because unfortunately Acemoglu and Robinson really only go so far as to say that bad institutions are bad and good ones are good so switch to the good ones already, which isn't really a helpful thought.

NWW talk about how natural states use exclusion form economic activity to create rents. These rents, cause by intentional economic inefficiencies, can be redistributed so as to sue peace, so to speak. Basically, the "bad" institutions that we associate with China and the Soviet Union were under the circumstances the best institutions that the elites could allow while providing stability. Stability itself goes a long way towards promoting more complex organizational forms, which are necessary for advanced levels of production. Check the first three chapters of Violence and Social order pdf I posted earlier for a more in depth explanation.

Oh. Well, my mistake. Plenty of ignorance of my own.

Thank you for informing me. I hadn't any idea.

>crops
Africa was a breadbasket that exported food throughout the world during apartheid. After blacks took over, it fell to shit and famine swept the continent

>herd animals
Holy shit, how fucking moronic. Africa has hundreds of herd species

>BUBUBU But they're not domestic
Anyone who says this is too stupid to live. Animals don't evolve in the wild as domestic. They are domesticated over centuries as tamed animals are bred by humans. Africans never domesticated any animal in their entire history, because they would simply eat them. Even apes have been known to tame animals.

>Spread of ideas
Even with the internet, africans don't have any ideas worth spreading.

>. They are domesticated over centuries as tamed animals are bred by humans.
yeah, and despite literal millennia we've managed to domesticate, what, 12 species if we count shit like silkworms?

I dont think you grasp how bad the jared diamond spam got. I was temp out of work on an injury at its height, and wasting a lot of time on various boards.

The 1st half dozen or so threads actually had some decent discusion going on, both for and against, with a lot of PDFs and links being posted. But it quickly descended into a torrent of shitposting spam, which is when the jared diamond hate really escalated.

I didn't even want this, but thanks.

As a continuation of my last post, since I can only have one pdf at a time here is Williamson's nobel lecture.

Institutional analysis, as used by economists, is really just saying "we take transactions costs in the world to not equal zero."

See when Ronald Coase showed that if transactions costs were zero that the property rights allotments wouldn't matter because people who just trade to the efficient outcome what he really ended up proving was that they *do* matter because in the real world transactions costs aren't zero.

Institutions, as generally defined by Doug North are "the rules of the game" that are both de facto and de jure that constrain the potential set of human actions. Thus institutions can either increase or decrease transactions costs and thereby affect potential economic outcomes.

It might be weird that institutionalists seem to whine so much about transactions costs, but it's only because neo-classical eocnomics just assumes that they are zero, which is fine for some high order shit where you're looking for theoretical optimums, but it's not going to usefully describe anything in the real world.

What about "they're not domestic" in the sense of domestic vs import, rather than domestic vs wild?

It's hard to tame horses when there are no horses on your continent, that kind of thing.

I didn't know it got spammed at all, so you're absolutely right.

I think its closer to 40 or so. There were some pretty neat experiments on domestication in the soviet union, taking foxes from completely wild to almost doglike very quickly. Worth a read on a lazy afternoon

Which nation does it fall into, because that will really, really inform the consequences.

>Dark
This only proves that we have a golden opportunity for conquest - we mustn't squander it!

>Light
This only proves that we have happenstance advantages - we must share them with others!

>Fire
What is a "gun" and how do we mass produce them?

>Water
What is a "germ" and how can we make use of them?

>Air
Why should we care?

>Earth
Who gives a shit, build that wall!

Still, that's 40 species, many of which aren't all that useful except as pets (Wikipedia lists things like hamsters and small fish as a significant portion of the list) out of tens of thousands of species. Not exactly an amazing track record there.

...

not him, but Diamonds point is that the places that had domesticated agricultural animals got a head start and that these head starts are essentially permanent leads that can't be "fixed," which is pretty silly when you think of all the places in the world that did better than Europe all the way up until around the proto-industrialization period.

Certainly Britain was not nearly as wealthy or prosperous as the countries on the continent, but it somehow was able to have a complete industrial revolution despite not being the discoverer of any of the major scientific breakthroughs that allowed the technological improvements of the revolution to be invented.

>to create rents
What does "rent" mean in this context, real quick?

I wasn't arguing Diamond at all, I was arguing with another, in retrospect almost certainly /pol/ poster who basically said all animals can be domesticated and them darkies wuz just too dam stoopid to do it.

IIRC Angus Madison, another historian-economist, showed that wealth levels on a per capita basis were in fact higher in NW Europe than anywhere else on the planet since the early medieval period. China had the highest aggregate wealth/GDP until about 1895, periods of rebellion aside, but never on an individual level.

Okay, last book post I swear, but for those interested in the general history of economic growth this is *the* go to book unless you're looking for something highly technical. The stylized facts are presented well and the data is easy to understand.

A note about the author, Clark is not a big believer that institutions matter so much as genetics for the industrial revolution. He is very heterodox in his belief that genetics play a much more crucial role in modern economic development than most economists give it credit for, although he would never go so far as to say that in the book, because that would be thought-crime.

Thanks again PDFanon

>but it somehow was able to have a complete industrial revolution despite not being the discoverer of any of the major scientific breakthroughs that allowed the technological improvements of the revolution to be invented.
I thought we knew all the factors behind the Industrial Revolution, like high costs of labor and advanced metallurgy.

>Muh Manifest Destiny
>Muh Cultural Darwinism
Alt-right shitters triggered easier than any brain dead SJW

Is he an Objectivist? I mean, I won't hold that against it, it's just jarring sometimes to run across it halfway through a work.

>"Africa has shitty weather, animals, and mosquitos out the ass."
>"No fucking shit."

So basically a "rent" is a surplus created by an economic bottleneck, such as a monopoly. In perfect competition each firm drive each other one down to zero net profit. To be clear, wages paid to employees are not zero since that is spent on the input of labor, it's just after all factors have been paid for there is zero left over because everyone is operating at absolute maximum efficiency.

Basically, think of a government sanctioned monopoly, or a union industry controlling the supply of labor, or an industry with licensing restrictions. Each of these things shifts the supply and demand away from the equilibrium value thus meaning that someone in that market gets to collect the monopoly profits.

So, for example, this is what lobbyist try to get the government to do when they want certain legislation passed. By making things easier on themselves and harder on their opposition and customers they get to collect extra $. It's a way of the government paying them without having to directly give them money.

see also, see the pdf in this post
Basically there are a lot of different takes on this because it's very difficult to compare wages and outputs for different places when those outputs bought different bundles of goods. Lots of people have very smart things to say about it if you do a little searching on google scholar, but certainly the best places to start are with the who pdfs I just posted.

How did you even avoid getting purged in a modern university environment where non-Marxist thinking like this is a thought-crime?

>after blacks took over
>Africa

you're welcome

no, he's pretty "normal" in his beliefs outside the genetics things, which is just his weird eccentricity.

Oh boy do we not, time to post some more stuff. Basically we can say stuff like "this was probably important for Britain," but then you have to ask whether or not it mattered just because Britain was the first or whether it is necessary for all nations who want to industrialize. We are ultimately interested in who lists of factors, the list of sufficient factors and the list of necessary factors.

There are going to be a few pdfs of journal articles on the IR in my next few posts so hang tight

By not inhabiting some persecution fantasy you managed to construct from second-hand anecdotal information.

we're economists. In case you didn't know we
1. dont' give a fuck
2. are mostly conservatives
3. are suuuper autistic and can't into social signalling

sociologist are our arch-nemeses

more pdfs

continued

The article in the pdf by NWW is generally considered to wrong, but it is important to set up the next one.

Probably by being in a reasonable school that doesn't listen to any of the shit that falls out of a sociologists upper asshole.

So Pincus and Robinson have a different take on the governmental changes that happened during the Glorious Revolution (1688) that precipitated the legal environment that allowed Britain to have an innovative set of industries during the Industrial Revolution.

Also, check out the blog by Pseudoerasmus for general economic history stuff:

pseudoerasmus.com/

He posts a lot about the Industrial Revolution, but no one in econ history knows who the fuck he is. Bets I think are going that he's Eric Chaney from Harvard, but we're not sure. He's clearly a prof. at some university though because he knows everyone too well.

>2. are mostly conservatives
After thinking about this for a minute I think I should clarify. Most economists are classical liberals who are commonly associated with certain wings of the conservative party in the United States. We are very rarely actual conservatives in the truest sense of the word.

Sometimes I forget that people here aren't just from the US.

Finally for anyone who doesn't want to drudge through dense journal articles here is a complete summary of where the literature stands on our understanding of the Industrial Revolution.

> This book falls from the sky into your fantasy world.

> It is soon followed by other such tomes and strangely adorned mystics who proceed to surround you and alternate between jabbing at the pages of the other books and pointing at the first book while yelling about how and why it's shit.

>It is soon followed by other such tomes and strangely adorned mystics who proceed to surround you and alternate between jabbing at the pages of the other books and pointing at the first book while yelling about how and why it's shit.

Sounds about right. The New Institutional Economics conference that happens every year (ISNIE) has 5 minutes of talk and an 55 minutes of questions per presentation, it's fucking brutal to give a paper there.

The European colonies revolutionized the continent, and it all fell apart when they gained self-determination. But you can't say that nowadays, you'll be told to go back to /pol/.

>Not written in Common
>Only translatable through magic
>Speaks about another world
It would probably inspire a conspiracy about how there are people in another world have language and enough knowledge to produce books on politics, meaning there are probably magicians there.
It would probably lead to a whole lot of fuss that leads nowhere because there would be no real way for them to get to us and there's no way of tracing the book. Overall, it would probably be filed under freak coincidence to the point where it would spawn a minor following, other people calling the book a matter of urban legend or conspiracy.

I think it's unreasonable to jump the gun and say that they are that way because of the genetics of the people who took over, though it is a possibility. Being a colony of a larger power provided them with political infrastructure and market access that they lost after independence. When people lose market access and economic outcomes take a downturn there is likely going to be unrest. The new governments did not have the military capacity of the imperializing nations and so had to resort to more restrictive organizational forms in order to stabilizer their rule.

Certainly it's possible that genetics plays a larger role in what's going on, but it's so difficult to overcome the endogeneity between culture and genetics in tribalistic regions that we can't be sure what's what.

If anything it definitely goes to show that the geographic determinism is not the only thing holding back those nations.

Also, for what it's worth you can say this stuff as an economist without too many sideways glances, you just can't print it in your books/journals, which I do agree is a real problem.

they think its satire when you deal with orcs race denialism loses some of its appeal

Nonsense, everyone knows of the Orbis Tertius, which lies behind the Orbis Mundani and the Orbis Limbi.

>enter yet another stupid "wat do" thread
>leave with a bunch of human science books
You're wierd, Veeky Forums. Not that it's a bad thing.

Isn't it just great? Its what keeps me coming back to you comfy faggots

>What does "rent" mean in this context, real quick?
It generally means "income you didn't work for".

A monk reads it, laughs like an idiot, and writes a refutarion in a lazy weekend.

>Even with the internet, africans don't have any ideas worth spreading.

They're doing pretty good on the scamming front, for one.

Nobody can read it because common is not modern English.

And thank fuck. The problems with Guns, Germs, and Steel are myriad, but the biggest ones are as follows:

>Jared Diamond doesn't just argue for the importance of environmental factors; he (while asserting that he is not doing so) essentially reduces environmental factors to the only relevant ones.
>I have been told by biologists that he also has facts about flora and fauna (such as zebras being somehow impossible to domesticate) that are just factually incorrect, to bolster his arguments.
>This is all done because Jared Diamond is pushing a unilineal evolution model of societal change, which says that all societies are pushing toward a singular goal, and often that goal most resembles modern "Western" societies like the US or most of Western and Northern Europe.
>This in turn, combined with his claims about other places not having the natural resources to "improve" their lives by building a modern nation state, leads Diamond to suggest, less explicitly in this book but more explicitly in other places, that outside governments need to bring them into the fold by any means necessary.

Here's an example of people about whom he wrote, demanding an apology for his outright lies:
survivalinternational.org/news/8958

Finally, he's not even trained in any of the fields he tries to do, nor does he engage the related literature. His field of study is birds.

It's just like Sam Harris trying to do international relations or ethics when all his graduate level education is in a totally unrelated discipline.

It would be cute if it weren't so harmful.

...

That was a short, simple answer to a situation for which the answer is flat out wrong.

I am imagining now a sci fi setting in which the two main factions are only opposed by the divide in common law and civil law.

>Fuckin' Magnets
Mother fuckin' miracles 'n' shit everywhere!

>genetics do not determine intelligence

>Western whites are genetically dumber