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Leaving Paris

On a warm summer day in late August 2019, we moved into a third-floor apartment in Paris’s residential 15th arrondissement. Standing on our balcony and looking to the left, we could see the district’s mairie—its town hall—and behind it the Eiffel Tower. Directly across the small park in front of us was a row of apartment buildings and a...

Serendipity

My paper with Paul Dower, Evgeny Finkel, and Steve Nafziger on “Collective Action and Representation in Autocracies” is out in the most recent issue of the APSR. It’s the latest installment in a project on reform and rebellion in Imperial Russia that, for me, never would have happened had I not ventured into the library stacks during my first...

(Not) Correcting Acemoglu and Robinson

When is an error not really an error? Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson recently posted a correction to the key proposition in “Why Did the West Extend the Franchise? Democracy, Inequality, and Growth in Historical Perspective,” the seminal paper in what has proven to be an enormously influential research enterprise. That proposition characterizes equilibrium in terms of the parameter q,...

A Bit More about Theory in Historical Political Economy

Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a blog devoted to historical political economy. As Volha mentioned in her post on Monday, she, Eugene Finkel, and I are working on something—a review of the field of historical political economy for an audience of political scientists. As part of that process, I have been thinking about the role of theory in HPE. Sean Gailmard’s recent...

Drawing the Wrong Lessons from Socialism

I have just forced myself to read the CEA report on "The Opportunity Costs of Socialism." Personally, I rather prefer Francis Spufford's Red Plenty for a palatable introduction to actually existing socialism. But a couple of observations. Somewhat surprisingly for an economic analysis, the CEA report confuses the costs of transition to socialism (e.g., collectivization-induced famine) with the efficiency losses...

Political Agency (Second Edition)

One of the pleasures of revising my textbook on Formal Models of Domestic Politics has been discovering work that speaks to our current politics. I began a series of posts on forthcoming changes to the text with a discussion of Wiola Dziuda and Antoine Loeper’s model of dynamic veto bargaining, which helps to explain Republican resistance to economic aid...

A Good Workshop

Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a blog devoted to historical political economy. A few years ago, in reflecting on the annual meeting of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, I wrote: What makes for a good conference? The opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. Quality panels with work that challenges and crosses intellectual...

Life and Death During the Transition Depression

Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a new blog devoted to historical political economy. The New York Times published an interesting pair of reports on Tuesday. The first related a recent study in Health Affairs that documents a staggering, and unexpected, decline in hospital admissions since the arrival of COVID in the United States earlier this year. With the important exception of those...

What Did Stalinist Industrialization Accomplish?

Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a blog devoted to historical political economy. The spring quarter at Chicago starts in a week. I will be teaching a course on the political economy of communism and the postcommunist transition. I love this class, which I taught at Wisconsin for many years, and not just because it is an opportunity to subject a captive audience...

Is Trump Tipping? An Update

In what seems like eons ago, but in fact was early March, I posed the question: Is the Trump presidency at a tipping point? My conclusion then was that it was easy—perhaps too easy—to tell stories in which actors have incentives that lead to tipping points. Let's not get carried away, I argued: one could just as easily tell...