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John Nye

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65
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2018-11-21
most recent
2018-11-21
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1
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  1. “British tax revenues rose four hundred and fifty percent from the seventeen hundreds through to the end of the 18th century, which is remarkable since everybody else was trying to raise their revenues and were unsuccessful at doing so.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “No, I don't think it's luck, but I think there's a number of things to consider. To begin with, the fact that Britain is, you need to cross the water to get to Britain is an advantage in their favor. I think in much the same way, Britain had some advantages Japan had in Asia, where that the Chinese were never able to overwhelm Japan for similar reasons. I mean, having to cross the channel, it was non-trivial given older technologies. And it was not an easy thing to conquer Britain in the same way that it wasn't easy for Britain to hang on to Normandy or England to hang on to Normandy. I mean, I think the geography matters. But secondly, England did have a more centralized state earlier, but that was made possible by fiscal reforms, which is another thing I discuss in my book, Warwine and Taxes, talks about the fact that it's ironic that in the period that we think of as liberal Britain, Britain had the fastest growing tax revenues. Throughout the eighteenth century, if any country in Western Europe,”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think or not having the war turn out worse. I mean, Britain was at war. For fifty percent of the eighteenth century. And up through, and that's up to the early 1800s. And I think in many ways, one of the things we underestimate is the extent to which the wars in Europe did not lead to greater destruction. If something had led to a sort of a more cataclysmic kind of event, if Napoleon had won the war, but then there had been a fight back, you might have had a far greater, I don't know, upheaval. I mean, it sounds fancifully science fiction today, but I really think that Europe has benefited from an extreme degree of political and economic competition, but extreme political and economic competition is beneficial if you don't destroy the underlying order that makes competition and innovation possible in the first place.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think the evidence is strong there again this is not my area, but the evidence is that that is one case in which United States had institutions that were good enough to take advantage of the resource bounty.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, I think there it's, I think the agglomeration of mass urbanization, industrialization, innovation across the board in multiple manufacturing. Everything is not just fossil fuels, railroads, steam, technology, production, greater trade, all these things are coming together. And now you're sort of seeing what we think of in these big waves of changes and things of that sort.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “England. Fast in comparison to what had happened in previous centuries, but slow into what happens today and even slower for the working classes. And you only see this acceleration that we think of as modern economic growth in the Western states, in particular Britain, France, the US and Germany, starting in the eighteen fifties and sixties or so.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, I think American growth was quite impressive. I mean, 2.5% averaged over like a century or century and a half is quite a lot of growth, in fact, especially if you take into account the standard biases and the way in which GDP does things. And moreover, I think there was slow growth in the sense that you were integrating a large, very poor population, both domestically and through immigration. And all these things contributed to what looks like slow growth. But it's not really slow growth by historical standards. And I don't see that a surprise at all. Moreover, we tend to overvalue the ways in which the first industrial revolution transformed things. Most of the big growth boost comes in the second half of the 19th century.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I'm not an expert in this area, so I'm just going to recite the consensus. And I believe the consensus is that purely economic factors weren't going to drive it out, at least in the short to the medium run. Perhaps over another century it would have. But the evidence, as at least it was presented to me in economic history classes, which I haven't always kept up with, suggests that the political factors were very important in getting rid of it, including the war”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think the problem with that is the following. I agree with you that it really upsets people. And for that reason, we don't see meritocracy in most venues, even in academia. But I think the real problem as you get in the United States is given the ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States, is then what you get is you get tribalism along lines that recreates many of the things that I think the liberal republic was designed to get rid of. And so you basically recreate factionalism.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, that's getting into too many things, but if we just stick to things I personally care very deeply about, I would like to see a return to a more an earlier period of pure meritocracy. I would like to see that much more both at the level of university at companies and so forth and so on. I would like to sort of see objective tests and standards used to judge quality whenever possible. And I think that the rise of an anti-merucratic notion or the idea that meritocracy should be adjusted for social needs has made it very hard to have, I think, state-of-the-art production in many areas.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think it certainly hasn't been tried, for example, I'm just throwing this from out of nowhere. If the US were to negotiate a genuinely strong bilateral agreement with the UK, and perhaps one Asian partner, I wouldn't be surprised if that would essentially create huge incentives for most of the EU and large chunks of Asia to join in.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Even though it's called Anglo-French Treaty, and suddenly pretty much every power in Europe joins in within a decade, virtually all the major powers in Europe are locked into a free trade agreement with Britain and France because they're afraid of being left out because the two major powers on the continent have negotiated this treaty. In fact, the only Western power who sees their tariffs rise is the United States, thanks to the Civil War.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, I think in the nineteenth century, in fact, one of the things I do know about the 19th century is that there's no evidence that either unilateral free trade or multilateral did very much. Almost all the free trade in Europe in the 19th century was a product of initially the bilateral trade agreement between Britain and France, sometimes known as the Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce of 1860, in which they each agreed to a much more liberalized trade on a most favored nation basis. Once they accepted this, then what happened is anyone who signed on to either Britain or France on the most favored nation basis then bought into in some sense this system. And what's interesting is that after the Corn Laws Britain is telling everybody to unilaterally lower the tariffs because free trade's so good and the French and the Spanish are screaming, well about your wine tariffs, but then in 1860 they negotiate this secret treaty between England and France or Britain and France again, I have to keep repeating.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “like beer, but also gin, whiskey, etc. And they became so dependent on the revenues from those alcoholic products that in fact one of the things that happened is even when the consensus was growing for liberating trade in alcohol, there was still concern about tariffs. And so the rise of the income tax and other forms of taxation gave them increased leeway to make these changes.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think part of the reason for that is that the long 19th century has a period in which the industrialists are becoming much more important. And you have two aspects about this. The bilateral agreement in 1860 between Britain and France allows Britain to get access now to French markets in terms of their manufacturers by having the French remove their prohibitions and lowered their tariffs. But it also is a world in which increasingly those who were benefiting from some of these restrictions wanted to have them removed. As free of trade was being more and more favorable to Great Britain. Finally, I think the other thing that occurred is that people forget that initially the wine tariffs which go back to the late 1600s and early 1700s were primarily protections. They were an attack on France. But because of the high tariffs, the British were able to impose very high taxes on domestic alcohol, in particular things.”

    2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source