Paul Seabright | Tag Archive

Economistes et historiens: un dialogue de sourds?

I have an essay (in French) in this volume edited by Alain Trannoy and Arundhati Virmani and published by Odile Jacob.

J’ai un chapitre en français dans ce livre sorti en janvier 2025.

Un petit extrait de mon chapitre:

“Une vision assez courante des sciences sociales les représente comme étant en lutte éternelle contre les séductions du récit. Le récit, c’est l’éloge de l’histoire individuelle, anecdotique, suffisamment atypique pour être remarquée – alors que les sciences sociales s’intéressent aux statistiques, à l’expérience générale d’une population, aux réalités agrégées où l’individu se fond dans la masse. On entend même parfois que notre attachement au récit relève d’une « addiction » : c’est la thèse, par exemple, d’un livre du philosophe Alex Rosenberg publié en 2018 par la MIT Press et intitulé How History Gets Things Wrong : The Neuroscience of our Addiction to Stories.^[1] Rosenberg va très loin dans sa dénonciation : « Narrative history is always, always wrong. It’s not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy ». Mais même des chercheurs qui sont moins hostiles par principe aux récits ont tendance à penser que l’amélioration des sciences sociales vient de l’utilisation des méthodes statistiques pour surmonter les biais inhérents aux récits que chaque discipline a hérité de son passé. Ceci est le point de vue du livre publié en 2021 par le politologue Matt Grossman et intitulé : How Social Science Got Better : Overcoming Bias with More Evidence, Diversity and Self-Reflection.^[2]

Il est indéniable que la place des statistiques est devenue bien plus centrale aux sciences sociales depuis quelques années. Doit-on en conclure que la valeur du récit est devenue moindre, ou encore que le récit soit destiné à disparaître d’une conception des sciences sociales vraiment scientifique, dans le meilleur sens du terme ?Cet essai proposera une réponse négative à la question. Le récit non seulement ne disparaîtra pas. Il sera encore plus ancré dans la pratique des sciences sociales, même les sciences sociales les plus quantitatives….”

^[1] Rosenberg (2018).

^[2] Grossman (2021). Morgan (2021) montre que l’utilisation du récit dans le travail des historiens économiques a parfois servi à combler des lacunes dans leurs données disponibles. Un point de vue français sur ces biais dans les travaux des historiens se trouve dans Hartog (2003, 2021), et notamment dans son analyse du « présentisme ». “

PUBLISHED IN MAY 2024: The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People

Forthcoming book events:

AALIMS conference in Princeton, 11th April 2025.

The book was published by Princeton University Press on 14th May 2024. It was long listed for the FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2024, and was a finalist in the 2025 PROSE awards of the Association of American Publishers.

Here is a contribution to PUP’s Ideas page to mark the release: “A sermon from a mountebank? Religious messaging in the age of AI“.

Here is an extract in Foreign Policy: “The Divine Marketplace is Pretty Crowded”.

Launch events were held at the University of Glasgow on 28th May and at the London School of Economics on 29th May. The lecture at the LSE was recorded, and is available on YouTube here.

I discussed the book on 11th June during the launch event for the Starling 2024 Compendium, with Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson.

I gave a talk in a panel at the Society for Scientific Study of Religion, Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, 18th October 2024, with the excellent David Hollinger.

I gave the Score Strand III Lecture at the University of Cambridge on 17th November 2024, and have given book talks at the University of California at Berkeley, Chapman University and the University of Texas at Austin.

I published a piece on 30th August in IAI News entitled “How Religion Wrote the Playbook for Big Tech: Studying Religion from the Outside In“.

Reviews, podcasts and interviews are available here.

The announcement page is here, and you can order it there are well.

You can also order it on Amazon here.

The data files for the Statistical Appendix are available here.

“Soviet Power Plus Electrification: what is the long-run legacy of communism?”

“Soviet Power Plus Electrification: what is the long-run legacy of communism?” (with Wendy Carlin and Mark Schaffer), available here, published in Explorations in Economic History 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2012.07.003

Abstract

Two decades after the end of central planning, we investigate the extent to which the advantages bequeathed by planning in terms of high investment in physical infrastructure and human capital compensated for the costs in allocative inefficiency and weak incentives for innovation. We assemble and analyse three separate types of evidence. First, we find that countries that were initially relatively poor prior to planning benefited more, as measured by long-run GDP per capita levels, from infrastructure and human capital than they suffered from weak market incentives. For initially relatively rich countries the opposite is true. Second, using various measures of physical stocks of infrastructure and human capital we show that at the end of planning, formerly planned countries had substantially different endowments from their contemporaneous market economy counterparts. However, these differences were much more important for poor than for rich countries. Finally, we use firm-level data to measure the cost of a wide range of constraints on firm performance, and we show that after more than a decade of transition in 2002-05, poor ex-planned economies differ much more from their market counterparts, in respect to both good and bad aspects of the planning legacy, than do relatively rich ones. However, the persistent beneficial legacy effects disappeared under the pressure of strong growth in the formerly planned economies in the run-up to the global financial crisis.

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. By Laurent Dubois. Published in January 2012 by Metropolitan Books.

A remarkable history of Haiti since the revolution and independence. Excellently written, largely structured as narrative but with valuable discussions of many aspects of Haitian culture, economics and society; an eye-opener in its accounts of the many ways outsiders have used and imagined the country for their own purposes. A biography fully worthy of its subject, a troubled but remarkable country. Buy here.

The Better Angels of our Nature

The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker. Published October 2011 by Viking Penguin. Here is what I wrote about this book in BBC Focus Magazine:

The world has never been more violent place than it is today, right? Wrong! In this excellent and very readable book the psychologist Steven Pinker assembles massive amounts of evidence to show that for the average citizen the world is less violent now than it has ever been. More people died violently in the twentieth century than ever before, but thatâ€™s because the worldâ€™s population was so much greater. By any other standard â€“ the risk we each face of being murdered, raped, tortured â€“ we are safer now than ever. In fact, for the first time in the history of the world, an average person is more likely to die at their own hand than at someone elseâ€™s, unless that person is driving a car. Itâ€™s a remarkable achievement of modern society, even if it doesnâ€™t fit the fashionable nostalgia for a kinder, gentler past. But Pinkerâ€™s book is not triumphalist, and far from naÃ¯ve about the inner demons of our nature. Youâ€™ll learn things here about violence in history you might prefer not to know. Pinker wants to understand why violence has declined so that we can do our collective best to stop us ever going back. Understanding why Western Europe seems unlikely to repeat the carnage of the Thirty Years War may also help bring peace to those parts of the world â€“ Iraq, the Congo, Detroit â€“ where violence is still unacceptably high. It may even help to curb domestic violence and, if you believe Pinker, our cruelty to animals.Â Itâ€™s an ambitious agenda, but so is Pinkerâ€™s range (across criminology, psychology, history, economics and neuroscience). He emphasizes that the explanation lies not just in institutions like the law but also in subtle values and habits of thought. You may not agree with all of his account â€“ I donâ€™t â€“ but the questions are vital, the prose clear, the challenge exhilarating.Â The arguments are ones every awake citizen should reflect upon.Â Buy here.

Leningrad

Leningrad, by Anna Reid. Published August 2011 by Walker and Co.

An account from letters and journals of what it was like, for both attackers and defenders, to live through the two-and-a-half year siege of Leningrad that began in 1941, and in which around three-quarters of a million inhabitants of the city died of starvation.

Tags: History, War.

Buy here.