Can You Get Leather Bracelets At Disneyland

227) Douglas North about open societies

A review of an important book:

Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, Barry R. Weingast:
Violence and Social Orders - A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History
(Cambridge University Press, 2009)

elites, domination and change
Ricardo Abramovay
Economic Value , 28/08 / 2009

The great advantage of open access societies is adaptive efficiency, which combines power and participation.

is the way they face the problem of violence that societies shape the interaction human and define the forms of their political and economic organization. Over the past ten thousand years, mankind has known mainly two ways to stop the violence. The longest lasting of the order is limited or natural state, typical of much of Mesopotamia to Britain under the Tudors or the Aztec empire. Indeed, it is in societies with limited access to live, even today, 85% of humanity in 175 countries. The central feature of these natural states is that stability comes from a coalition of forces whose members have privileges (in some cases, even rights) special. Military power is dispersed among several groups who renounce their use by establishing agreements to gain in economic activities. But those deals are closed and strictly personal. It is only in the last 150 years that a few companies formed states of open access, in which the processes of social domination are depersonalized and competition in terms of politics and economics paves the way for innovations that result in dramatic improvements in living standards. Ensuing two central questions: which allowed the order formed by natural states emerge societies marked by open access and why this transition was limited to a restricted number of such countries?

At 88 years old and holder of the Nobel Prize Economics 1993, - a reference book that will certainly be in the social sciences of the XXI century.

His starting point is that violence can only be controlled by the elites' interest in forms of economic exploitation that bring them more income than that provided by the use of weapons. It is only in societies open access there is a real monopoly on violence by the state. In the restricted access, violence is scattered and the challenge is to find ways to allow dominant groups to explore opportunities to gain that lead them to forgo their use. The primary means to do so is the restriction of the possibility of forming organizations to a small number of individuals. Hence the deep dependence and promiscuity among private and public organizations, characteristic of societies in closed access.

Until the early nineteenth century, create businesses or form a political organization, for example, was a privilege, the grant came from the state. It was since then, and initially only in three countries (Britain, France and United States), that the elites have undergone universal laws. At the same time, generalization is the ability to create independent organizations and the state is consolidated political control over military power. The monopoly of violence is a consequence and not a precondition for the formation of modern democracies.

The central question the book is: if the elites stabilize their power based on special privileges in customized forms of domination and restrictions on building organizations, how can the states of closed access to the premises to produce a social order supported in an impersonal and opening opportunities for increasingly large segments? The answer is that in societies of closed access, to ensure the prerogatives of the elite organizations whose expansion is needed just requiring the definition not only privileges but also rights of those elites. At the same time, it creates conditions that may broaden the opportunities for gain for larger segments of their own ruling elites, based on competitive processes, which requires a new institutional arrangement, in which depersonalized forms of domination are to be paramount. Democracy and development are neither renunciation of the dominant groups to their interests or they make concessions to the pressures of the masses. Are new forms of domination, where elites are employing organizations and methods of control and impersonal in which exponentially expands the possibility of forming organizations not only to elites, but the whole population.

The book aspires to nothing less than propose a new research agenda for the social sciences, the center of which are the ways in different societies deal with violence. Three important conclusions stand out. Firstly, the development is not just about adding "more capital or a transplant to correct society institutions such as democracy, property rights, markets or laws." Without giving rise to conditions that will, within the groups ruling, interest in opening opportunities for organizations to encourage the prescription of formal democracy (elections, markets, laws, etc..) can backfire. Development involves understanding the culture and history of countries and not formulas. The second conclusion is that open access societies are characterized by strong states, with a prominent intervention in economic life and, above all, the ability to offer bases in impersonal, public goods that contribute to reduce inequality and widen access to opportunities to generate income. Finally, and most importantly, natural states have proved extremely resilient, with its thousands of years, and we can not guarantee that societies open access will continue. But its great advantage is that they have greater adaptive efficiency than any other form of social organization known previously. This is not an uncritical defense of the market economy but a powerful historical analysis of the reasons why the elites extend the legal and organizational bases of their rule to, around, open extraordinarily rich possibilities of participation and social change .

Abramovay Ricardo, is a professor in the Department of Economics, FEA / USP, the coordinator of its Center for Environmental Economics (Nesa), a researcher from CNPq and FAPESP. www.econ.fea.usp.br / Abramovay

Memorial Plaque Sample Words

226) International Economic Integration

Dennis MP McCarthy
International Economic Integration in Historical Perspective
New York: Routledge, 2006. xii + 254 pp. $160 (hardcover),
ISBN: 978-0-415-77027-9.

Reviewed for EH.NET by John R. Hanson II, Department of Economics, Texas A&M University.

This is a vague title because there are many historical perspectives one could take on globalization today. The proliferation in recent times of econometric work based on the principle of the economic integration of world commodity markets in the past is one such. This is a leading approach today, as a perusal of recent issues of the leading economic history journals indicates. Another approach, allied to the first, is statistically descriptive. What actually were the magnitudes of international flows of capital, goods, and labor in the past? This is also a common approach today, although less so than the other. Both are in the tradition of what used to be called the New Economic History.

The volume under review, however, is pure Old Economic History. It is largely non-statistical, non-theoretical and proffers conclusions based on the expertise of the author gleaned from qualitative sources. Though empirically based, it does not truck with modern studies, especially not the abundance of econometric ones published by Jeffrey Williamson and his associates in obvious outlets. It has, on the contrary, the air of wisdom gained from a lifetime of study of certain historical events and episodes in international economic integration. The question is whether such a treatment of various unconnected topics falling under the general rubric of international integration adds much to our understanding of today or of the past. Another question is whether this work belongs to the “lessons from history” genre of historical writing or the “historical roots of the present world” genre. The author seems to want membership in both. Either way, I learned something, but not much which sheds light on the present, either as guide to policy or roots of the current situation.

After an introduction which tries to define or give coherence to the body of the work, the author presents a series of chapters about internationalization in the past. These include chapters on colonial empires, merchant associations, religious empires, criminal empires, free trade areas, customs unions, and common markets, all in 194 pages of text. Obviously the discussions of each are cursory, but on those subjects with which I am familiar I found the author’s discussion and opinions well-grounded and to the point. So as an informative introduction for undergraduates to some interesting and sometimes neglected international history I was not disappointed. But what does it all mean?

For example, the author portrays most of this as the back story to the modern world, which is generally true. Modern globalization does not arise from a vacuum. The institutions described represent or are implied to represent the connection-building which let modern globalization flourish. Leaving aside the glaring omission of multinational enterprise, which the author apologizes for, it is not made clear what precisely the contribution of any of these things was to the present. Criminal empires? What does modern globalization have to do with the Mafia? What we get is a discussion of how the Mafia operates, period. There is no discussion of it as a model for the international drug trade, which is only briefly referenced, or anything else. This lack of close linkage of historical topics to present conditions is disguised by the author’s frequent use of the word “panorama” to describe what I would call his arbitrary (but not uninteresting) collection of episodes about international economic contact in the past.

As for lessons learned from study of these episodes, there is little of interest. The summary at the end continues the effort begun in the introduction to unify the disparate topics, but it can hardly be considered a guide to modern policy. Again, the “lessons learned” seem unique to the event which produced the “lessons.” The author needs to show in more detail what the moral of his tales is -- the takeaway (as my students like to say). My takeaway is the impression of a failed effort to bring modern pertinence to some very interesting historical material.


John R. Hanson II is Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University and Stipendiary Fellow of the Glasscock Center for the Humanities at Texas A&M. Among his publications are "Proxies in the New Political Economy: Caveat Emptor" _Economic Inquiry_, October, 2003. He is at work on denominational issues in the colonial American money supply.

Copyright (c) 2009 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (June 2009). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.
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Cheats Lifetime Awards

225) Basic Education in Brazil: important book

The importance of education
Fabio Giambiagi
Valor Econômico, 08/24/2009

We just published the book Basic Education in Brazil (Campus / Elsevier), with 12 chapters, including a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2000, Professor James Heckman, who honored us with the co-author of an article written with great teachers Araujo Cunha and Moura. As I was only one of four organizers and the merits of the book fit to authors who have written excellent chapters, feel free to compliment the content. I think that those interested can read the pages in a diagnosis and a screenplay about the challenges faced by the Brazilian education. The major contribution of the book is to show what is being done in new and beginning to reveal the first results in this area in Brazil and worldwide. Chapters such as Fernandes, Gremaud, highlighting the role of evaluation and improvement of indicators; de Menezes-Filho and Ribeiro on the determinants of improved academic performance; M. Neri about how education is perceived by the population, and C . Ferraz about the experiences of SP and EP, with the adoption of performance incentives in the remuneration of teachers, without prejudice to other chapters that do not no space to summarize, point to promising avenues for future occurrence of new advances in the field. As in many other areas in Brazil, there were improvements, but there is an arduous task ahead.

The importance of education can be measured by data from one of the chapters, written by C. Moura Castro. In it, shows that in Brazil, individuals with primary education earn around 2 times what he earns an individual with no schooling, those who have completed high school receive a third (third) more than those who only have fundamental, and graduates with higher education have incomes equal to more than 3.5 times that of those with only high school. Study is therefore important for the country and for individuals, therefore, in general, the higher education are associated with higher levels of income and welfare.

Brazil is delayed, historically, relative to other countries or had already done its homework in this area long ago - like the U.S. - or is intensely devoted to education in recent decades - especially in some Asian countries. F. Barbosa Filho and S. People showed that at the beginning of the current decade, the average number of schooling of the economically active population of English-speaking countries, especially the U.S., was twice that Brazil.

The table, drawn in the first chapter of the book, authored by Professor F Veloso, supplements this information by decomposing the given percentage of the population aged 25 and older with high school. Despite advances in recent years, Brazil ranks poorly in the photo. In the whole population, the indicator is already compelling: while only 30% of the adult population has completed high school in Brazil, the percentage reaches levels of 80% to 90% in Germany or the USA. Yet it is in progress over time most noticeable on our delay, when comparing the percentage of those who completed high school between groups specific population. One measure is to compare this indicator for two age groups: the 25-34 years and 55-64 years. That indicates the degree of education of youth, while the latter shows a photograph of the young group that was three decades before. It's a way to measure the progress of a country and between generations. Look at what happened with Spain: the group of 55 to 64 years, only 27% have completed high school, but among the younger, the percentage reaches 64%. No wonder that Spain is only a pale reminder of the country 70 years. In Chile - which has experienced great progress in the last 30 years - these percentages are 32% and 64% respectively. And what is most striking: not only the elderly in South Korea have similar levels of education to young people in Brazil today, but - astonishingly - the percentage of youngsters who have completed high school in Korea reached incredible 97%.

Fabiana de Felicio presents other data to compose the picture: the completion rate for primary education to 16 years old in Brazil was 61% in 2007, which is little. On the other hand, was only 34% in 1997. At the same time, average schooling for persons aged 15 and over was 7 years in 2007, which also is unusual, that this information, however, comes with two good news: The first is that there was a significant improvement since the number of years of study of this group was 5 in 1987 and the second is that the range of 15 to 30 years had reached nine years of study in 2007.

The framework generally portrayed in the various chapters - that we can not expose in detail, but it may be better understood by reading the book - progress is slow but gradual, accentuated in the last 15 years. If the effort devoted to the theme - administrations of merit shared by Paulo Renato de Souza Cardoso under and Fernando Haddad in Lula's government - is maintained, Brazil in a few decades could be better than the country in which we played live. We can only hope that there continuing this progress and, preferably, they will accelerate in the next decade.

Fabio Giambiagi is an economist, writes monthly on Monday.

Inviting Friends For Marriage

224) Engels: the angel of Marx gauche

The biography of Friedrich Engels
A very special business angel
The self-effacing friend who enabled "Das Kapital" to be written

Tristram Hunt:
Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $ 32

Published in Britain the
The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
Allen Lane, £ 25

WHEN the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.

The two men became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s, and remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Both were Rhinelanders (our picture shows Engels standing behind Marx in the press room of Rheinische Zeitung which they edited jointly) but came from very different backgrounds: Marx’s father was a Jewish lawyer turned Christian; Engels’s a prosperous Protestant cotton-mill owner. Marx studied law, then philosophy; Engels, the black sheep of his family, was sent to work in the family business at 17. While doing his military service in 1841 in Berlin, he was exposed to the ferment of ideas swirling around the Prussian capital.

Next, he went to work for the Manchester branch of the family business, Ermen & Engels. Manchester’s “cottonopolis” in the mid-19th century was a manufacturer’s heaven and a working man’s hell, and it provided an invaluable lesson for Engels: that economic factors were the basic cause of the clash between different classes of society. By 1845, when he was just 24, he had not only learnt how to be a successful capitalist; he had also written a coruscatingly anti-capitalist work, “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, which charted the inhumanity of modern methods of production in minute detail.

Engels left Manchester to work with Marx on the “Communist Manifesto” and the two of them spent the late 1840s criss-crossing Europe to chase the continental revolutions of the time, ending up in England. Marx had started work on “Das Kapital”, but there was a problem. He had by then acquired an aristocratic German wife, a clutch of small children and aspirations for a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, but no means of support.

Engels (whose name resembles the word for “angel” in German) offered an astoundingly big-hearted solution: he would go back to Manchester to resume life in the detested family cotton business and provide Marx with the money he needed to write his world-changing treatise. For the next 20 years Engels worked grumpily away, handing over half his generous income to an ever more demanding Marx. He also collaborated intensively on the great work, contributing many ideas, practical examples from business and much-needed editorial attention. When at last volume I of “Das Kapital” was finished, he extricated himself from the business and moved to London to be near the Marx family, enjoying life as an Economist-reading rentier and intellectual.

Engels was an enigma. Gifted, energetic and fascinated by political ideas, he was nevertheless ready to play second fiddle to Marx. “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented,” he declared after his friend’s death. Mr Hunt does a brilliant job of setting the two men’s endeavours in the context of the political, social and philosophical currents at the time. It makes for a complex story that can be hard to follow but is well worth persevering with.

Tall and handsome, Engels had a taste not just for ideas but for the good life—wine, women, riding with the Cheshire hunt—and seems to have felt little sense of irony that all these things were paid for by the proletariat’s back-breaking labour. His domestic life was much more unconventional than Marx’s. He lived, on and off, with a semi-literate Irish working-class girl, Mary Burns; then, when she died, with her sister, Lizzy, whom he married only on her deathbed. He had no children, though he chivalrously took responsibility for a boy whom Marx had fathered with a housekeeper.

Engels’s sacrifices continued after Marx’s death. He not only carried on funding the Marx family and their various hangers-on, but also spent years pulling together the chaotic notes Marx left behind for volumes II and III of “Das Kapital”. Inevitably there were lots of loose ends which Engels tied up as he saw fit, and sometimes the results were more revolutionary than the author may have intended. In volume III, where Marx discussed the tendency of companies’ profitability to fall and noted that this might lead to the “shaking” of capitalist production, Engels substituted the word “collapse”, opening up the text to much more radical interpretations by 20th-century Marxists.

When Engels died in 1895, he eschewed London’s Highgate cemetery where his friend was laid to rest. Self-effacing to the last, he had his ashes scattered off England’s coast at Eastbourne—the scene of happy holidays with the Marxes.

Dolly Parton's Bare Boobs

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Another session with a lovely child. Ivan

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