Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…You’re right. I don’t know if this makes me more politically radical. You’re perfectly right that one big difference between the work I’ve been doing and the work people like Braudel or Labrousse were doing is that I had to deal a lot with the 20th century, whereas these people were working a lot on previous centuries — 18th century, 19th century, or even before in the case of Braudel. Working on 20th-century data and, in particular, the enormous reduction of income inequality during the 20th century led me to a different kind of perspective and a different kind of thinking and issue. To be very precise, the political dimension is so much more important and, in a way, unavoidable and impossible to escape when you study the 20th century. When you study the 18th century or 19th century, or maybe you can have this Marxist or economic perspective stressing the long-run evolution, these deterministic economic forces. When you study the 20th century, politics is everywhere: World War I and World War II, the Great Depression, the creation of social security systems, the development of progressive taxation, decolonization, end of apartheid. Politics is everywhere if you want to understand the evolution of inequality. I would say it’s also, to some extent, the same for the 19th century and the end of the 18th century. I talk about the French Revolution and the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue. I think the history of equality or inequality cannot just be an economic history. It has to be a political history because, if you want to account for what you see, if you want to explain what you see, it’s political processes — sometimes revolution, sometimes tax reform, sometimes political confrontation of all sorts — play a major role. I had to develop this perspective, and indeed, this is a big difference with the Annales school. You know, the Annales school, in a way, did not disappear before reaching the 20th century. They were not confronted with the same kind of issues that I was confronted with just because I write later than them with data covering the more recent period, so I had to develop a different perspective and a different kind of interpretation. Yes, tracing the role of politics and political institution, fiscal institution, social institution, and the like. As you know, there’s a competing longue durée tradition — if you look at the work of Greg Clark and Neil Cummins — on surnames. They take data from England, from Sweden. There’s one paper where they have almost eight centuries of data, I think, and social status is more heritable than height. A given status relationship has persistence for 15 or 20 generations. What do you think of that work? Do you think it’s a perspective that contrasts to yours and shows it’s really very hard to redistribute what really matters in society? Well, this is very interesting. Every time there is a lot of historical data collection, I am very interested, and so, this is very interesting work. Now, that being said, I find the perspective a bit too conservative in a way, maybe because it’s very long run. Again, if I look, my period of study is the period ranging from the end of the 18th century until today. This is 1780 to 2020, if you want. Over these two centuries and a half, what I see is a movement to have more equality, both in terms of political rights but also in terms of social and economic equality. What I argue is that this process is very much related to political development, political revolution, slave revolt, wars of independence, tax reform, changing balance of power between capital and labor, development of social security, development of a public school system, of public health system. And over this period, this has led to a very strong movement to have more equality in all these dimensions, and also toward more economic prosperity, and I stress this. Now, before this period, I’m aware that there are people like Greg Clark and others who stress the continuity across eight centuries of the perpetration of status inequality. There are also historians like Scheidel, going back to the Neolithic period or to ancient history, who stress a relatively pessimistic perspective in the sense that they say, “Okay, without major destruction or war, you’d never have a reduction of inequality.” All this work is very interesting, but the perspective I stress is a bit different. I think it’s more optimistic in a way. I think, if you look at this shorter period, but which is still very long — two centuries and a half, 1780–2020 — you see this political movement towards more equality. To be honest, I must admit, I must confess that I am always a bit skeptical about some of the data sources before the late 18th century, partly because I know them less well, so I’m less confident with them. Partly because, when I don’t have a census, when I don’t have a tax administration, when I don’t even know the population that is out there and how it is changing over time, I find it very, very difficult to say, okay, did the concentration of wealth increase in Europe between 1500 and 1750? Let alone the question of did it increase between the end of the Roman Empire and 1500? I don’t know the answer to these questions. I would suspect concentration of forced inequality was always pretty large in this pre-18th-century period. But from what I read — and I try to read carefully — most of what is written on this topic, I’m not sure we have the data sources to really answer these questions, unfortunately. This is why I try to focus on the more recent period, which is still very long.…

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