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pseudoerasmus.bsky.social
I bleat about the history of global economic development https://pseudoerasmus.substack.com/ https://pseudoerasmus.com https://medium.com/@pseudoerasmus
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Three topics that I despise which are always and forever, obstinately, unrelentingly, inexorably, and ineradicably cropping up in my feed at X are fertility, AI, and urbanism. No matter what or how much I mute or block or incinerate, they keep creeping in and oozing over on the screen.

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

Basically papers by Pickle, & the recent one by Piketty, & several earlier unequal exchange theories, & commodity cartel / agreement schemes inspired by the New International Economic Order thing, are all premised on the idea that all developing countries could be ‘petrostates’

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

X is still useful sometimes. Yesterday I learnt a 2003 Arrighi paper anticipated Rodrik's 'unconditional convergence in manufacturing' (w/o overall income convergence) to which Amsden replied (besides calling Arrighi a dependencista hack) by anticipating my own hobbyhorse (tertiary sector problems)

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

The fact that China doesn’t seem to feel the least urgency in concluding a trade ‘deal’ with the USA could conceivably suggest the USA was never the ‘world’s consumer of last resort’ & that was rather a nationalistic self-congratulatory fantasy about the world’s dependence?

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Piketty ignores the work of Jeffrey Williamson: the periphery's terms of trade *improved* in the 19th century -- something which would have been relevant to discuss in his paper (unlike Furtado or Amin or Wallerstein). Below from Williamson 2008

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

Final note on Piketty: Latin Americans have noted the non-citation of Latin American authors even though Piketty’s co-author is an Argentine; whilst Indians, who are usually so keen to find prominent mentions of India, have missed that Piketty draws heavily from the Indian colonial drain literature…

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Zubok wrote a history of the Cold War nearly 15 years ago -- but from the Soviet point of view. (It was pretty conventional, IIRC -- Stalin started it with his ambitions in Poland, Turkey & Iran.) But what's his new book on the Cold War? A normal history of the Cold War from both sides?

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Reading a description of Beckert's new book it reads just like The Empire of Cotton, but with non-cotton things thrown in. Alternatively it sounds like a condensed one-volume version of the five volumes of The Modern World System.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

This is better than Latin American structuralism or dependency theory or unequal exchange theory. But I'm not going to post this at the other place because I would be inundated with replies fans of those things, whereas the advantage here is I barely get engagement ;-)

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

Piketty's claims about growth & convergence are extremely flimsy but this is the most interesting claim that emerges from his various simulations: impact of modestly higher commodity prices is orders of magnitude bigger than impact of colonial extraction by unilateral transfer

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Reactions to Piketty: Centre-right: another communist paper from Piketty Actual communists: Lol we already knew this, loser. Latin Americans: He stole from Structuralists but didn't mention us! Heterodox: We denounce the methodological mainstreaming of dependency theory

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

I do think the new Piketty paper is mostly nonsensical but as usual I pedantically disapprove of criticisms of the paper which are not my own, so I am also defending the paper against accusations that it’s old wine in a new bottle merely rehashing Samir Amin or Raul Prebisch 😂

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

( Most disputes over replication in economics papers with historical or development themes seem like a waste of time because so much of the time, even if the results are robust they are trivial or make little difference to the big picture )

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Don’t get me wrong: Nievas & Piketty do do many interesting calculations, such as below. But the impact of these flows on X-country inequality depends critically on domestic politics but they just assume that every peripheral country would have pulled off the Meiji Restoration!

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Very amusing! The Piketty unequal exchange paper does not cite any unequal exchange theorist, nor Raul Prebisch & Hans Singer, nor Jeffrey Williamson — but it does cite Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik… But gratifyingly no mention of Rhymes with Pickle

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Does Piketty not know that the periphery did experience a long-term terms of trade boom in the 19th century and that this drove the so-called deindustrialisation of the periphery and the empowerment of agrarian comprador elites?

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

I had heard Piketty’s parents were Trotskyites but perhaps little did they know their son would resurrect a neoclassical neo-Trotskyism via a neoclassical unequal exchange theory….

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

The Nievas-Piketty unequal exchange paper is certainly better than Hickel's, but their counterfactual assertion of convergence between countries in 1800-2025 is based on these entirely political-economy-free assumptions

submitted 8 days ago • 4 comments

It would be VERY amusing if the US supreme court held that all discretionary presidential authority over tariffs was unconstitutional & the congress had no right to delegate any such authority; in parallel with the ruling about independent agencies violating the separation of powers

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

LOL the ghost of the gold standard & Bretton Woods! A law which empowered the US president to call it an emergency when there was a balance of payments deficit (because gold would be flowing out) & temporarily impose tariffs as a solution — that apparently still matters today….

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

Economists talking about the welfare consequences of tariffs may very well be missing the point. But the totality of current US policies doesn't make any sense as geopolitical rivalry with China, either. The only thing that does make sense is xenophobic import substitution, of both goods & people

submitted 19 days ago • 2 comments

A lot of US discourse laments, and presupposes, that the rise of China was enabled by US policy, i.e., by promoting China's accession to the WTO. (Even PRC shills like Branko think this.) But why couldn't China have done most of what it has done since ~1980 under GATT rules?

submitted 21 days ago • 4 comments