Bettering Humanomics by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey;

Author:Deirdre Nansen McCloskey; [McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS000000 Business & Economics / General, BUS023000 Business & Economics / Economic History, BUS069030 Business & Economics / Economics / Theory, BUS039000 Business & Economics / Economics / Macroeconomics
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

The judges often declined to support the restrictiveness that the guilds sought to impose. . . . As early as the start of seventeenth century, towns had been losing cases they took to court with the aim of compelling new arrivals to join their craft guilds. . . . A key case concerned Newbury and Ipswich in 1616. The ruling in this instance became a common law precedent, to the effect that “foreigners”, men from outside a borough, could not be compelled to enrol.18

Ringmar devotes 150 lucid and learned and literate pages to exploring the origins of European science, humanism, newspapers, universities, academies, theater, novels, corporations, property rights, insurance, Dutch finance, diversity, states, politeness, civil rights, political parties, and economics. But he is a true comparativist (he taught for some years in China)—this in sharp contrast to some of the other Northians, and especially the good, much missed Douglass North himself. So Ringmar does not suppose that the European facts speak for themselves. In the following one hundred even better pages he takes back much of the implicit claim that Europe was anciently special, whether “institutionalized” or not, by going through for China the same triad of reflection, entrepreneurship, and pluralism/toleration and finding them pretty good. “The Chinese were at least as intrepid [in the seas] as the Europeans”; “the [Chinese] imperial state constituted next to no threat to the property rights of merchants and investors”; “already by 400 BCE China produced as much cast iron as Europe would in 1750”; Confucianism was “a wonderfully flexible doctrine”; “China was far more thoroughly commercialized”; European “salons and coffee shops [were] . . . in some ways strikingly Chinese.”19 He knows, as the Northians appear not to, that China had banks and canals and large and specialized firms and private property many centuries before the Northian date for the acquisition of such modernities in England—the end of the seventeenth century.

The economist and historian Sheilagh Ogilvie criticizes the neoinstitutionalists and their claims that efficiency ruled, arguing on the contrary for a “conflictual” point of view in which power is taken seriously:

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