Mostly Economics

Junaid Jahangir provides a teaching plain to teach economics of populism and hate in the latest edition of Real World Economics Review:

The objective in this paper is to list the salient ideas in the economics of populism to provide a lesson plan at the introductory and elective levels in economics. This is achieved through a literature review and book reviews in the economics of populism, the economics of hate, the political economy of both populism and hate, and popular books by noted academics, Jason Stanley and Yuval Noah Harari. A list of salient ideas is highlighted and complemented with video clips including ‘The Mob Song’ from Disney. Activities based on parsing song lyrics, contrasting viewpoints, and sample questions are outlined for the purpose of teaching the economics of populism.

Samuel Bazzi of University of California, San Diego in this NBER paper discusses Indonesian experience of building a diverse nation:

Johan Norberg has written a new book: Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages.

He shares the key learnings in this IMF article:

Ninth century Baghdad, seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, was designed as a perfect circle to honor the Greek geometer Euclid. The empire, enriched by trade in goods and ideas, sponsored an ambitious translation movement to collect the accumulated knowledge of the many cultures it interacted with.

This open mindset is one of the keys to the success of seven great civilizations spanning two and a half millennia. The practical lessons of these cultures could not be more important today as countries choose once again to wall themselves off—physically, economically, digitally, and from new ideas.

Leaders promise safety, greatness, and a return to an imagined golden age through protection and control. It is a familiar and tempting story when the future feels uncertain. Yet history tells a different tale.

The most secure and prosperous societies did not hide from the world. They were confident enough to remain open to trade and ideas, allowing the new to challenge the known. Progress emerges when people experiment, borrow, and combine ideas in ways no planner could ever foresee; decline happens when fear overcomes curiosity.

These are among the central lessons of history’s real golden ages that I explore in my new book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages.

Gaurav Khanna in this NBER paper discusses  the impact of migration from Asia to US over three decades:

This paper examines the rise of high-skill migration from Asia to the United States over the past three decades and its consequences for both sending and receiving economies. Between 1990 and 2019, migrants from five Asian countries—India, China, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines—accounted for over one-third of the growth in US software developers and a quarter of the increase in scientists, engineers, and physicians.

Drawing on census microdata, visa records, and administrative sources, I show how US demand for talent in information technology, higher education, and healthcare interacted with Asia’s demographic and educational transformations to generate this migration boom. Policy reforms (notably the H-1B, F-1, and J-1 visa programs) and sectoral shifts—such as the internet revolution, declining public support for universities, and aging-related healthcare demand—created persistent needs for foreign students and workers.

Asian economies were uniquely positioned to meet this demand through rapid tertiary expansion, strong STEM institutions, English proficiency, and diaspora networks.

These inflows boosted US innovation, entrepreneurship, and service-sector productivity while fostering “brain gain” and “brain circulation” in Asia. Together, these trends reveal how talent flows from Asia have become central to the structure and growth of the modern US economy.

Marina Dimova and Arianne Wunder discuss scholar networks before the industrial revolution:

Since the Middle Ages and throughout the early modern period, European universities and academies established dense webs of interpersonal connections among scholars. Using historical data on European scholars and their academic affiliations, this column argues that such networks were a key channel for the spread of knowledge across time and space. Especially without the dense networks offered by academies, where scholars could simultaneously hold multiple affiliations, ideas would spread only locally and fade. It was not the ideas themselves but the long-lasting institutions around them (or lack thereof) that made the difference.

Vincent Geloso and Alex Tabarrok argue democracy and capitalism go hand in hand:

Many people argue that democracy is incompatible with capitalism but they differ on whether democracy will subvert capitalism or whether capitalism will subvert democracy.

The first argue that the logic of democracy leads to socialism with James Madison and Joseph Schumpeter decrying the road to serfdom while others like Karl Marx delighting in this historical inevitability.

The second argue, based in part on fears of rising inequality, that capitalist oligarchs will come to control the democratic process cementing their dominance. Democratic forms may remain but true democracy will be ended.

A third argument consistent with the views of Hayek, Mises, Friedman and others is that capitalism and democracy are compatible and even mutually reinforcing.

We  provide evidence for the third view by showing that most democracies are capitalist and most capitalist countries are democracies. Empirically there is no obvious and inevitable trend either towards or away from capitalism or democracy, although both rise and fall with events. We argue that there are significant complementarities in theory and practice between capitalism and democracy and, as a result, capitalist democracies are relatively stable.