D'Maris Coffman: Bringing History to Economics
Economy | Information | History | Online | Facts | World | Global | Money
This episode features grantee D'Maris Coffman of the Centre for Financial History talking about her organization's commitment to a New Financial History and what the fruits of their approach can tell us about modern debt crises and sustainable debt levels. She also discusses her research, funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, which explores fundamental questions about how Britain averted a Malthusian trap in the early nineteenth century and why the answers matter for global food security today. Historians can contribute to economic thinking in three ways. First, much of development studies depend on historical parallels, especially to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, which is taken as the cardinal case for industrialization. Through these parallels, historians can refine, modify, and even discover fallacies that have become dangerously entrenched in some development economics. Second, historians can offer histories of economic thinking, including histories of economic analysis, which explore the internal intellectual trajectories of economic ideas, and histories of economic thought, which put these ideas in context. Both of these fields of study disrupt economics' path of dependence on certain ideologies And third, economists principally deal in "explanation," especially in the econometric sense of establishing causation. Yet "narrative causation," what historians call interpretation, can be even more powerful, as the psychoanalyst and Institute grantee David Tuckett and others have shown. These "interpretations," or "stories" that people tell themselves about phenomena, often influence behavior much more readily than the models would predict. To understand the first point, consider the exchange between Adair Lord Turner and Professor Niall Ferguson after the latter's plenary lecture. Ferguson follows North and Weingast (1989) in seeing in the Glorious Revolution a triumph of "good institutions" over bad ones, and especially follows them in identifying parliamentary supremacy as responsible for securing property rights. This has caused him to espouse a particular version of the Washington Consensus. Yet Turner and Bill Janeway both argued that eighteenth-century institutions were often very poor indeed. To this end, our research into the "Credible Commitment" thesis has yielded three key findings. One that political risk is the most important single determinate of sovereign risk. Two, that the willingness of one party to honor the other party's commitments is essential, and thus 1710 (when the Tories honored Whig commitments) was more of a turning-point than 1688-89. And three, that rather than crowding out the private sector, public sector spending and a coercive and authoritarian fiscal system paid for public borrowing during the Napoleonic wars. These findings show that that gridlock in Washington is the "worst sort of politics possible." Indeed, it is my firmly held belief that our research will overturn the relatively glib heuristics proposed by Carmen Reinert and Kenneth Rogoff. The key thing to remember is that it's not necessarily about "better institutions." Yes, institutions matter at some levels of development, particularly poor institutions that can retard growth. But we need to develop a concept of "good-enough institutions." At some point, institutional quality probably is deadweight: the direction of causality changes. Successful economies and societies are not successful because they have superb institutions, but rather they have superb institutions because they can afford them. The trick is to find that sweet spot. D'Maris Coffman is a Leverhulme/Newton Trust Early Career Fellow in the history faculty and an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge. She also is a grantee of the Institute for New Economic Thinking for her work on the history of U.K. agriculture markets. Her book Questioning Credible Commitment: Perspectives on the Rise of Financial Capitalism, co-authored with Adrian Leonard and Larry Neal, was published in September 2013 by Cambridge University Press.
Comments
-
interesting
-
What a wonderful conversation and great example of integral thinking. Thank you!
-
Peter Boetke sounds so different than I remember
-
Economic Porn! What a great video.
-
Thank you for raising these issues. Peak Oil - and energy policy as a whole - is a key issue today. No doubt about that, though I am a bit more sanguine than many people about the possibilities afforded by nuclear energies. Safety is the issue. As to C18/C19, there's a lot of very good new research, pioneered by Tony Wrigley at the Cambridge Population Group, on carbon energy and the Industrial Revolution. For those who are interested, look for recent books by Craig Muldrew and Paul Warde.
-
Hi Dr Coffman. The discovery in the 18th and 19th Century that concentrated energy from cheap fossil fuels (first coal then oil) could massively increase labour productivity and allow the physical realisation of advanced scientific and technical concepts, seems to me to be behind England's (and then the USA's) ability to grow out of debt and build empire. Today, depletion of the easiest cheapest fossil fuels means that no such pathway is available to our global civilisation.
-
Rather Marshall and I were discussing what 'history can offer economics'. I gave what I see as the three most important things. But I also think it is worth remembering that much of the foundations of economics as a discipline can be found in contemporaries' attempts to understand the 17/18th & 19th-century British & French experiences, in the first instance, and, in the second, the course of economic modernisation in Germany, Italy, America and Russia post-1860. I should have made that clear.
-
Good luck with it! Personally I don't believe that the human impulse to 'emplot' trends lends itself to modelling beyond classic momentum and mean-reverting strategies, which still involve 'figural-causal' explanations, i.e. metaphors. But my interview was not about 'bringing history to trading markets'. Nor will I speculate here on how far historical time series data improve trading simulations; that's a technical and empirical question which I am happy to leave to those with skin in the game.
-
Yes controlling your emotions is most difficult. That is quite clever to think about traders being subject to some intrinsic level of bias which they may not be aware of. I've been trying to see for precisely that reason if there is a way to sidestep this trap. My findings so far suggest that, although systematic strategies do have advantages over discretionary, no systematic system can protect you fully and the best result could involve some discretionary judgement being made on the boundary.
-
As to your other question, I suspect we are talking at cross-purposes. I had a look at your website and I think I understand what GMST does. One of the primary justifications for systematic (over discretionary) strategies is that computers do not believe their own press releases. I am sorry if you thought I was attacking alg-shops. What I said is that I agree with Tuckett et al who argue that many individual investors, and not a few asset managers, trade their own stories without realising it.
-
I am very sorry if I my speech was so quick at the end that it was difficult to follow the argument about 'good enough institutions.' I didn't say Britain avoided a Malthusian trap by having appalling institutions; I said that, in some sense, British economic growth was not because of, but in spite of, institutions that we might today consider 'appalling.' They were evidently 'good enough' but they were not 'great' - either by our standards or those of many contemporaries.
-
Exactly what questions about the market haven't been settled from 20 years ago? She seems to be saying that narrative and interpretation are more useful than economic models. If there is indeed something missing in terms of explanatory power please state clearly how this is possible in the context of efficient markets and the rapid development over the past two centuries. Her statement that 19th century Britain escaped the Malthusian trap because of appalling institutions is quite interesting.
13m 48sLenght
29Rating