A series from FKN that I did, based on Professor DeLong’s Econ 115 lecture notes and audio files at Berkeley.
One of my favorite professors at Berkeley has made his class notes for a course in economic history of the 20th century public, because the network they use at Berkeley sucks and they wiped out everything on their servers to make space because of budget cuts. But that’s good for us because I’ll post summaries of his notes here, along with some essays that he’s assigning as thought-provoking exercises.
He also had a nice inspirational speech reminding his students that they attend the University of California, Berkeley, the finest public university in the world, the most prestigious research institution in the world, and maker of the future rich. The class is designed to cram as much information and creativity in thought as humanly possible, because this crisis has reminded us if nothing else that talent is always in short supply and the sheep are always one step from being slaughtered.
The course makes five big points:
-economic history is the important history. The 20th century saw changes that rocked everything that people ever knew about the world to its very roots.
-there was a very recent explosion of global wealth
-this has also caused a very recent explosion of global inequality, which the world has been increasingly and acutely aware of
-most of this is rooted in tyranny. Oddly enough, not based on religion, military, or political strength, but roots in philosophy about how to distribute goods in society.
-governments face the enormous task of walking the balance wheel to success. Needless to say, it often failed.
To whet your beak and get you thinking:
Most economics departments in the United States (including Berkeley) make a big deal about capitalism and how global competition has increased standards of living drastically. We take it as largely an assumption that free trade, democracy, and liberal rights (i.e. education, health care, housing, etc.) make a country prosperous.
But consider the example of India, which has been closely integrated with the British for the last 150 years. They’ve had all of those things and yet no prosperity. Things are slightly better now but they’ve struggled greatly next to China, which has a command economy, communism, and very few rights. China has had much less intimate contact with Europe, and 50 years ago had fewer roads, railroads, telephone lines, steel, schools, hospitals, factories, temples, doctors, engineers, lawyers, soldiers, and citizens than India. China was also devastated by World War II while India was untouched. So what happened?
As another example, North Korea had a comparable and even superior rate of economic growth compared to South Korea until the 1980s. Both the USSR and US dropped their economic aid programs to Korea around 1988, yet Seoul thrived in the global economy while Pyongyang withered. What explains these differences?