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pseudoerasmus
Personal blog · pseudoerasmus.comeconomicshistory
pseudoerasmus is a personal blog at pseudoerasmus.com about economics and history. Since 2014, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
29mentions?
11HN people?
2014–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog as a source on economic and industrial history, with posts cited on Germany's Hartz reforms, world income distribution, and Empire of Cotton. One commenter recommends it with its book lists.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Blog about economic history & comparative development
Most-linked posts?
- /2017/10/02/ijd/3 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2018-06-17
- /2016/06/16/eoc/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-06
What Hacker News says?
> FWIW I'm far left myself, so it's not like I'm complaining. So perhaps it's just sycophancy after all? > I'm sorely tempted to say that it's because the reality has a liberal bias, but I'll let other people repeating the experiment to make the inference on their own. What political left and political right mean differs between countries and between decades even in the same country. For example, at the moment free…
Comment linking /2017/09/27/bmww1/
on “Sycophancy in GPT-4o”Submitted A very brief history of Greek diglossia as a story · 3 points
HN discussionCompare and contrast https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board”Submitted Where do pro-social institutions come from? (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI don't think it's right to say that enforcing copyrights is an aspect of free trade. In practice many countries don't want free trade unless their copyrights get enforced and so copyright ends up getting rolled into free trade agreements but you could say the same with health and safety standards in products. I also think of government support for industry as orthogonal to free trade. Yes, countries have certainly…
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion? (2010)”I believe you, but could you flesh that critique out some more? My understanding of Greek's fundamentals start here: http://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/02/23/greece-orthodoxy-peronis... (this was linked from the Interfluidity thing everyone was talking about before) and continues through here: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2015/cr15165.pdf (which I read when someone claimed Greece had a 2014 primary surplus, wh…
Comment linking /2015/02/23/greece-orthodoxy-peronism/
on “Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.””Hartz IV was successful. Germany decreased bureaucracy and employment protection/regulation to the extent that their unemployment rate went down massively. From 1994-2012 Competition Weighted Relative Unit Labour Costs in Germany declined by 30% and unemployment dropped from 12% to 5.5% from 2005 to 2012. https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/08/01/anthropology-of-financi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept > Th…
Comment linking /2014/08/01/anthropology-of-financial-crises/
on “New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It”1: We have very limited ability to change educational outcomes in this country and the differences between schools have little to do with external inputs (systematic differences in per pupil funding, teacher quality, etc). https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r... 2: Years of schools have essentially no explanatory power at an international level (even in lesser developed countries that should…
Comment linking /2015/06/15/education-econ-growth/
on “Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong”Letting people in less fortunate countries work for foreign multinationals would give them more alternatives. Compare also https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “Google employees who work from home could lose money”Compare and contrast https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “Google sends anti-regulation propaganda to small businesses using Google Maps”> We know from history and other countries that broadly speaking, if you weaken unions with right-to-work laws, workers as a whole end up worse off. > If you look at peer countries with stronger, more present unions, you find that workers are usually considerably better off there. Compare and contrast https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/ Also compare European countries. The more neoliberal ones tend to be riche…
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “New York Times tech workers vote to certify union”All of the books on Hickel’s reading list are historians and none of them are economic historians because it’s impossible to make the case he wants to make if you use data gathered by economic historians. Hickel references Beckert’s Empire of Cotton , which, whatever its many virtues does not accord with economic history at all. The other books he referenced are similarly useless for answering what is a question of…
Comment linking /2016/06/16/eoc/
on “A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty”> In principle from a capital stand point, it is always better to have one unemployed person and one over worked person who is terrified of becoming unemployed than two employed people. It’s preferable to have more production, which could be one person working 60 hours or two working 30 hours. Sometimes due to lower switching and communication costs and returns to specialisation/learning by doing 60 hours will be mo…
Comment linking /2014/08/01/anthropology-of-financial-crises/
on “Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)”Distrust is sometimes ok for productivity too. https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “You can legally get and run WordPerfect for free”And that's why competition is so important. That way that company across the ocean that manages to get these productivity enhancers in, can eat the lazy bums' lunch. Compare https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “You can legally get and run WordPerfect for free”These numbers aren't even close to accurate. The actual position of the US underclass (bottom quintile) is more like the 60-85th percentile of global income. After adjusting for CPI it's clear that poverty in the United States is very real. https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/09/29/world-income-distributi... The US underclass also suffer the social and psychological effects of being the underclass, i.e. weaker social sup…
Comment linking /2014/09/29/world-income-distribution/
on “Dollar General Hits a Gold Mine in Rural America”Compare https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/ for the historical impact of unions in other sectors of the economy around the world.
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “Epic Systems workers are organizing”Obviously this is a huge subject. I'm not sure it's so clear that British rule slowed Indian industrialisation... I guess answering that requires a counterfactual, and as you say post-1850s Japan is the best-case one. But do note that this was not a kind and gentle democracy... even if its rulers spoke the same language. (And, of course, the fact that there was a same-language to speak indicates that it was long a u…
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “New research on the cost of colonization to India”Compare and contrast https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT”Compare (and contrast) https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “Facebook moderator: ‘Every day was a nightmare’”Many books! (Although sadly too many are just modern political battles dressed up in earlier period costumes.) For now let me recommend https://pseudoerasmus.com/ (and his book lists) as an honest guide to all this, for those with enough time! Postwar UK is indeed a different story. My reading of the demise of Leyland - Rover etc. leans towards it being a parable about communism never working, rather than about mark…
Comment linking /
on “Packard Merlin: How Detroit Mass-Produced Britain’s Hand-Built Powerhouse (2015)”> You seems to believe unions appeared out of nowhere. No, why? The British monarchy also didn't spring out of nowhere, but that doesn't mean Britain couldn't turn into a republic, if they wanted to change their laws. Here in Singapore we barely have any unions, or rather in practice unions barely have any influence. Compare also https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “New York claims a small victory in 'forever war on rats'”Just in case anyone is wondering, the linked pseudoerasmus post is: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/
Comment linking /2016/06/16/eoc/
on “The End of the Past”The author links to pseudoerasmus's blog post about Empire of Cotton as if it were a refutation of Empire of Cotton's thesis. But that blog post is a summary, not a critique--the author says this explicitly in its comments. The closest the author comes to a critique is an aside in this post: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/04/26/mccloskey-cotton-ir/ with similar points made earlier in: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/…
Comment linking /2014/11/10/slavery_and_industrialism/
on “The End of the Past”Well, basically the 'market' is just people trading. People react to incentives and have preferences. Luckily, people are hypocrites, so they will say that we should 'buy American', but then happily engage in free trade. Or they say that we should segregate races, but then greed dictates that it's more profitable not to discriminate like that. Yes, if people are bought and sold, that also happens on a market. Alas.…
Comment linking /2014/09/05/antebellum_ussouth_cotton/
on “Fusion News Ignites Optimism”Leisure and comforts like the eight hour workday are what economists call a 'normal good'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_good > In economics, a normal good is a type of a good which experiences an increase in demand due to an increase in income, unlike inferior goods, for which the opposite is observed. When there is an increase in a person's income, for example due to a wage rise, a good for which the demand…
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “Bezos-Backed Startup Convoy Closes Operations with No Buyer”Compare and contrast https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
Comment linking /2017/10/02/ijd/
on “AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI”
