More on Sir Thomas Gresham (from my email)
…Double-entry book-keeping – John and I believe, with some evidence, that he may well have been the person to bring double-entry book-keeping to the UK from the Low Countries. In turn an Italian invention of the 13th century…
Business exchanges rather than markets – Gresham certainly brought the idea of an exchange or bourse from Antwerp (in turn from Ghent) to England. It really was a radical idea. No phone directory, no advertising, no internet – we used to block of Cornhill with chains so merchants could meet at regular times in the mud and rain to establish ventures, principally voyages, and fund them. The Exchange became more and more populated as the Low Countries fought with Spain. People don’t bring money to a war zone (or a cybersecurity hazard). Thus, it was the vessel into which poured the extensive wealth of the Low Countries and turned London from an outback sheep town of 30,000 at the beginning of the 1500’s to a city of over 200,000 by 1600. Markets for cattle, sheep, produce, chickens, all existed – but a market for intangible things?
1st English Shopping Mall? – Gresham also brought the idea of a shopping mall to England. We have many examples of similar complexes and galleria from ancient times, but not in England. At the time it was the upper floor of his Exchange. The concept of shops not adhering to a physical locality – Bread Street, Milk Street, Boot street, etc. – was more radical than it sounds to modern ears. Amusing then to have England referred to in later centuries as “a nation of shop keepers”.
From Michael Mainelli, here is my original post on Gresham.
That was then, this is now
Around Hormuz, however, the Portuguese always had to be on guard. Many naturally protected sandy coves (khors in Arabic) practically invited “pirates.” The Nakhilu, or Banu Hula, were Sunni arabic speakers on the Gulf coast of Persia whose descendants still inhabit the Gulf coast of Iran. For decades they set up upocket ports in the many hidden bandars and byways of the mountainous shore and created an underground economy that rivaled Hormuz’s. These “pirates” were a major drain on Portuguese revenue, regularly attacking ships that paid the feed for the cartaz, and docked at Hormuz.
That is from Allen James Fromherz, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present. From this same book I learned that Milton refers to the Straits in Paradise Lost, but under the name of Ormus:
High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind[ia],
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d
To that bad eminence
Growth is getting harder to find, not ideas
Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that ideas are getting harder to find. We build a new 45-year panel tracking the universe of US firms’ patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. We find that average patents per R&D input are increasing, the elasticity of patents to R&D inputs is flat or rising, and there is no systematic evidence of a secular decline in patenting after controlling for research inputs. We then document a positive, significant, and fairly steady relationship between firms’ growth in ideas (patents) and labor productivity. Average firm growth after controlling for idea growth, however, declines. Together, these results suggest that innovative efforts play a key role in sustaining growth that has not diminished over the last four decades.
Here is the paper by Teresa C. Fort, Nathan Goldschlag, Jack Liang, Peter K. Schott, and Nikolas Zolas.
Friday assorted links
1. Luis Garicano on the task is not the job. And jobs and the Jevons paradox.
2. The lived experience of aphantasia.
3. Shruti on delimitation in India.
5. Leibniz on symbolic computation, from the unpublished papers.
6. A History of Christian Political Economy, by Ballor and Matson.
7. Michael Tilson Thomas, RIP (NYT).
Which workers are using AI the most and best?
An FT poll of 4,000 workers in the US and UK shows adoption is heavily skewed towards the best-paid workers: more than 60 per cent use AI daily, compared with just 16 per cent of the lower earners.
Link here. Note also that the youngest workers are not those who use AI the most, rather it is workers in their 30s. Men in the workplace are using AI more than women are. A very good piece by Madhumita Murgia and John Burn-Murdoch.
What should I ask Luke Burgis?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Excerpted (and edited) from a bio:
He is on the business faculty at Catholic University and has a background on both Wall Street and in the startup world, where he founded several companies. His first book, Wanting (2021), has been translated into 20+ languages and is selling more than copies than ever five years in. He is an expert on Rene Girard. His new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, is out from St. Martin’s June 16 — a theory of how identity gets formed or deformed under conditions of technological social contagion. He has a third book with a major publisher (on “technology as soulcraft”) in the pipeline with a major publisher. He also lived in Italy and for a while was studying to be a priest. He remains a true Catholic, and is the founder and director of the Cluny Institute.
Here is Luke on Twitter. Here is Luke’s home page. So what should I ask him?
What I’ve been reading
1. Mason Currey, Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life. The best overall book I know on the different methods top artists have used to keep themselves going financially. It is perhaps more anecdotal and less theoretical than I would prefer, still a nice work.
2. Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Dissent in Qajar Iran. A very good, clear, and useful book on different dissident religiouis developments in Iran, leading up to the Bahai faith. Recommended, one of the best books I have found for grappling with the history of current Iran.
3. Lena Dunham, Famesick: A Memoir. Not exactly my thing, so I did not finish it. But it is pretty good, so if you are tempted give it a try.
4. Iain Pears, Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent. A delightful story/indirect memoir, telling the tale of the lives and marriage of Francis Haskell, the British art historian, and Larissa Salmina Haskell, a Russian woman who survived the siege of Leningrad as a girl. Pears had the full cooperation of Larissa, at an age where she doesn’t give a damn any more. This story truly comes to life, and that is helped by Pears’s background as a writer of very good fiction.
5. Lázár, by Nelio Biedermann. An excellent novel of ideas, in the style of earlier Continental literature, by a 23-year-old Swiss phenom. It is very good in German, I have not sampled the translation.
Thomas Gresham is underrated
While northern professions in 1600 did not require lengthy training in mathematics or science, there was popular interest in these topics. England’s first chair in mathematics was endowed by Thomas Gresham,61 who had founded London’s Royal Exchange and pledged the rents from that institution to fund seven professorships, who would not train student but would rather give two public lectures (in Latin and English) each week. As Gresham also gave chairs in astronomy and “physik,” this produced a cluster of scientifically minded individuals, who would later play an outsized role in the founding of the Royal Society. Robert Hooke was the Gresham Professor of Geometry, William Petty the Gresham Professor of Music, and Christopher Wren the Gresham Professor of Astronomy.
Perhaps because of Gresham’s public lectures, interest in mathematics grew. More professorships followed, including the mid-17th century Lucasian Chair in Mathematics (after William Lucas, member of parliament for Cambridge), for which Isaac Newton would be the second occupant (Clark, 1904). The popular interest in science also meant that teachers at urban universities could fill public lecture halls by teaching about chemistry, and even performing public chemistry experiments.
That is from a new NBER working paper by David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser, “How Have Universities Survived for Nearly a Millennium?” Has any single individual funded three equally prestigious chairs or anything close to that?
Thursday assorted links
1. The rise of Chinese micro-dramas.
2. Niklas Luhmann.
3. Why Rome never industrialized (YouTube video).
4. One account of the genocidal impulse.
5. Organs on demand? We will see.
6. U.S. at the Venice Biennial (NYT).
7. “Argentina’s economy shrank 2.6 per cent in February compared to January, the largest monthly contraction since President Javier Milei took office in late 2023, as his inflation-busting economic programme weighed on major industries.” FT link here.
From the UAE
Under the directives of the President of the UAE, we launch a new government model.
Within two years, 50% of government sectors, services, and operations will run on Agentic AI, making the UAE the first government globally to operate at this scale through autonomous systems.
AI is no longer a tool. It analyses, decides, executes, and improves in real time. It will become our executive partner to enhance services, accelerate decisions, and raise efficiency.
This transformation has a clear timeline. Two years. Performance across government will be measured by speed of adoption, quality of implementation, and mastery of AI in redesigning government work.
We are investing in our people. Every federal employee will be trained to master AI, building one of the world’s strongest capabilities in AI-driven government.
Implementation will be overseen by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, with a dedicated taskforce chaired by Mohammad Al Gergawi driving execution.
The world is changing. Technology is accelerating. Our principle remains constant. People come first. Our goal is a government that is faster, more responsive, and more impactful.
Here is the link. While there is typically a certain amount of PR in such pronouncements, I do not think this one is only PR.
Is each American generation doing better?
We construct a posttax, posttransfer income measure from 1963 to 2023 based on the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement that allows us to consistently compare the economic well-being of five generations of Americans at ages 36–40. We find that Millennials had a real median household income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slowdown from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%). The slowdown for younger generations largely resulted from stalled growth in work hours among women. Progress for Millennials younger than 30 has also remained robust, though largely due to greater reliance on their parents. Additionally, lifetime income gains for younger generations far outweigh their higher educational costs.
That is from Kevin Corrinth and Jeff Larrimore in Demography. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Those old factory sector jobs
As AI sweeps into white-collar workplaces, old-timey hands-on jobs are getting a new look—and some of those professions even have shortages.
Consider tailors. Sewing is a vanishing skill, much like lacemaking and watchmaking, putting tailors in short supply when big retailers like Nordstrom and Men’s Wearhouse, as well as fashion designers and local dry cleaners, say they need more of them.
The job, which can take years to master, can be a tough sell to younger generations more accustomed to instant gratification. But apprenticeships that offer pay to learn on the job and new training programs are helping entice more people…
For the first semester of its program, which concluded in December, FIT received more than 190 applications for 15 spots. The nine-week course requires prior sewing experience. Nordstrom hired seven students from the inaugural class.
“It’s increasingly becoming more challenging to find people to fill these alterations jobs,” said Marco Esquivel, the director of alterations and aftercare services at Nordstrom, which employs about 1,500 tailors. Similar to other high-end retailers, Nordstrom offers free basic tailoring for garments purchased at the department-store chain and charges a fee for those bought elsewhere.
Tailored Brands, which employs about 1,300 tailors at its Men’s Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank and other chains, is updating its apprenticeship program to include more self-guided videos with the goal of moving people through the training faster.
Here is more from Suzanne Kapner at the WSJ. Via LJ Fenkell.
The exposed counties (from my email)
Professor Cowen,
Built a county-level AI displacement model across all 3,204 US counties. Top 5 most exposed counties are all in the DC metro, not the Rust Belt.
https://jakeprokopets.substack.com/p/why-the-most-ai-exposed-counties
18, built it in three days.
Jake Prokopets
Wednesday assorted links
1. On health care price transparency.
2. Interview with Sindarov’s trainer.
3. Tariff increases are contractionary.
5. U.S. manufacturing capacity has been growing for sixteen consecutive quarters.
6. Dean Ball book on AI is coming.
7. DEI statement requirements in academic hiring have more than halved within a year.
Ending the Occupational Licensing Racket
VinNews: The Rockland County Legislature approved amendments to the Home Improvement Law, dissolving the existing Home Improvement Licensing Board and shifting primary licensing authority to the Legislature itself…Under the new rules, the former licensing board will be reduced to an advisory role, losing its power to issue or revoke licenses. Licensing responsibilities will now fall under the Rockland County Legislature…
This is an interesting change and worth studying. In the Licensing Racket, which I reviewed for the WSJ, Rebecca Haw Allensworth emphasizes that occupational licensing boards put the fox in charge of the chickens:
Governments enact occupational-licensing laws but rarely handle regulation directly—there’s no Bureau of Hair Braiding. Instead, interpretation and enforcement are delegated to licensing boards, typically dominated by members of the profession. Occupational licensing is self-regulation. The outcome is predictable: Driven by self-interest, professional identity and culture, these boards consistently favor their own members over consumers.
Ms. Allensworth conducted exhaustive research for “The Licensing Racket,” spending hundreds of hours attending board meetings—often as the only nonboard member present. At the Tennessee board of alarm-system contractors, most of the complaints come from consumers who report the sort of issues that licensing is meant to prevent: poor installation, code violations, high-pressure sales tactics and exploitation of the elderly. But the board dismisses most of these complaints against its own members, and is far more aggressive in disciplining unlicensed handymen who occasionally install alarm systems. As Ms. Allensworth notes, “the board was ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety.”
Moving regulation out of the hands of the regulated could be an improvement but there are also advantages to self-regulation. See my review for other reform possibilities.
Hat tip: Heshy.
