EconTech

Who Shall We Honor?
In the US, today is Memorial Day, when we are to honor warriors who died in our side of wars. In addition we are to honor all our warriors on Veterans’ Day, and our first warriors and politicians on Independence Day. We also have days to honor wartime politicians, one [...]

I’m sorry that I missed this yesterday:
Inventing illegal immigration.

May 6, 2008 in this day by eric
On this day in 1882, the US adopted a law including these provisions:
Whereas, in the opinion ofthe Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory [...]

I am a fan of reading occasional economic histories. They are amazingly fascinating (really, just fascinating, but even I would expect them to be boring, yet they are not, thus the amazing). However, not a whole lot has been produced as of late. Nevertheless, there is talk that there will be a resurgence in economic [...]

From VoxEU by Jane Humphries:

Child labour: lessons from the Industrial Revolution
Societies have long sought to eliminate child labour. Yet two hundred years after the first Factories Act and despite a level of prosperity that our forefathers would have deemed unimaginable, there are an estimated 186 million child labourers worldwide –5.7 million in forced labour, 1.8 [...]

From the nerdy(-ier?) Freakonomicist (otherwise I probably would’ve never written about this, and sorry for the length):
Think Twice Before You Wear Your “Free Mumia” T-shirt

By Steven D. Levitt

I was sitting in the student union at the University of Chicago last week when a student came by putting “Free Mumia” leaflets on the tables.
I have never [...]

It is amazing how much historians get “wrong.” The evolution of husbandry is something that economic historians have and some others have been investigating for the past 30 years or so and have come up with a number of fascinating results, completely blowing away everything you thought you knew about old-school farming and family. Brad [...]

Ok, I have come across some nutty libertarians. However, the numerous attempts at rewriting history to try to legitimize crazed anti-government views is getting old. If Tyler is right, that there exist libertarians who would blame the coercive nature of the state for creating Jim Crow, rather than the pre-existing social norms, then it takes [...]

I’ve said it before, there are forms of knowledge production other than science:
Eternal Medicine

Most fans of modern medicine do not realize how similar in appearance was ancient medicine:
While the Greeks left a vast legacy of medical texts in a familiar language, we know of only 12 from the time of the pharaohs - written [...]

Geoff Stone gets shrill on religious America. The problem with some of the elders blogging habits is that they haven’t gotten in the habit of hyperlinking their non-obvious claims (becker-posner, I’m looking at you too). At least a bibliography with some footnotes. My point is that, if I wanted to conduct research into this question, [...]

The words we use influence people and often reveal our biases and may be even engender a previously non-existing bias into our brain. Hence, the reason I use the term undocumented migrant as opposed to illegal immigrant. It is because we are debating the line in the law, so referring to the legal status of [...]

In many parts of France, dog-power was vital to the early industrial revolution. In the Ardennes, where nail-making was a major domestic industry, a passer-by who peered into one of the nail-makers’ low stone cottages would see a small dog…
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Today is September 26th, Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 26th, 1983. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, take a minute to not destroy the world. The story begins on September 1st, 1983,…
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Here is the abstract from the new Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt paper:The Ku Klux Klan reached its heyday in the mid-1920s, claiming millions of members. In this paper, we analyze the 1920s Klan, those who joined it, and the…
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A new study in the September issue of the Journal of Modern History reviews historical evidence, including documents and gravesites, suggesting that homosexual civil unions may have existed six centuries ago in France.
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