');
The Unz Review •�An Alternative Media Selection$
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
RSS
Show by ⇅�
Email This Page to Someone

�Remember My Information



=>
Sources Filter? ❌
akarlin.com da-russophile sublime-oblivion
Nothing found
�
BlogAnatoly Karlin Archive
/
Economic History
�BlogAnatoly Karlin Archive
/
Economic History

◄►Bookmark◄❌►▲ ▼Toggle AllToC▲▼Add to LibraryRemove from Library •�B
Show CommentNext New CommentNext New ReplyRead More
ReplyAgree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
AgreeDisagreeThanksLOLTroll
These buttons register your public Agreement, Disagreement, Thanks, LOL, or Troll with the selected comment. They are ONLY available to recent, frequent commenters who have saved their Name+Email using the 'Remember My Information' checkbox, and may also ONLY be used three times during any eight hour period.
Ignore Commenter Follow Commenter
Russian Manufacturing Productivity on Par with France'S. (In 1908).
•�March 7, 2021
•�1,000 Words •�85 Comments
Lychakov, N. I., Saprykin, D. L., & Vanteeva, N. (2020). Not Backward: Comparative Labour Productivity In British And Russian Manufacturing, Circa 1908 (WP BRP 199/HUM/2020). National Research University Higher School of Economics. (h/t @devarbol) This recent paper says that the Russian Empire, far from being in a general sense of "economic backwardness", was better viewed... Read More
Maddison Project 2020: New Historical GDP Estimates
•�December 11, 2020
•�400 Words •�53 Comments
Forgot to blog about it at the time, but latest version of the Maddison Project was released a month ago. In my last post (on the MDP 2018), I noted that many of the results for Russia were very strange: The new figures make a lot more sense, to be frank. USSR/RSFSR-RF GDPcc as %... Read More
Polish Perspective on Polish Reforms
•�February 23, 2019
•�1,400 Words •�110 Comments
I find the comments on extractive elites to be very plausible and they would form an interesting complement to viewing them in terms of Mancur Olson's roving vs. stationary bandits theory, which is the main prism through which I view the differential development of institutions in the post-Soviet space. Ages ago, I read Jeff Sach's... Read More
Human Capital in Early Modern Poland and Russia
•�February 22, 2019
•�1,500 Words •�33 Comments
There have been some recent debates on this blog's comments threads about human capital in Poland, Russia, and the West Russian lands while they were under Polish rule. While there is a consensus that Poland was more intellectually advanced than Russia, at least during the 17th century, the relative position of the Ukraine and Belorussia... Read More
Thorfinnsson on Taiwan vs. South Korea
•�February 21, 2019
•�1,000 Words •�17 Comments
This all rings true enough. I have always been skeptical about taking the mania for S&M business development too far - there are limits to the scope of the projects that they can take on, and on the extent that they can technologically upgrade entire sectors of the economy. Interestingly, this is also the position... Read More
Intellectual Production in the Byzantine Empire
•�February 20, 2019
•�1,200 Words •�39 Comments
One question people sometimes ask is how the intellectual/cultural/scientific output of the Byzantine Empire compared to Western Europe and/or Italy, its most advanced major region for most of the medieval period. How do we answer this? Quantify! Quantify! Quantify! In this post, I will attempt to provide a short "cliometrics"-based answer. Buringh, Eltjo, and Jan... Read More
Shadows of the Past in Venezuela
•�January 24, 2019
•�1,800 Words •�108 Comments
Caracas, Venezuela. One curious thing about Venezuela that few people seem to have remarked upon is that Chavez and Maduro are not really all that hardcore about their class war. The latter assumed the powers of Congress in 2017, but didn't send armed men to round up the querulous parliamentarians. They continued to yack and... Read More
Who Fed Who in the USSR?
•�September 8, 2018
•�300 Words •�91 Comments
Some data on this topic. 1. Via Egor Kholmogorov's eponymous article for Komsomolskaya Pravda, source given as "Sovetskaya Rossiya 1992", according to which the RSFSR and Belarus were the only net donors. 2. Orlowski, Lucjan T. - 1995 - Direct transfers between the former Soviet Union central budget and the republics: Past evidence and current... Read More
Cognitive Cliodynamics
•�July 3, 2018
•�1,900 Words •�334 Comments
The FLynn Effect has not acted uniformly across the various domains of intelligence. To put it very roughly, in the past century, the developed world has seen a two S.D. improvement on Raven's Progressive Matrices, hardly any improvement in verbal or Backward Digit Span tests, and a one S.D. improvement in various picture arrangement and... Read More
Latest Release of Maddison Project: Was Russia Richer Than Previously Thought?
•�February 26, 2018
•�800 Words •�35 Comments
The Maddison Project is probably the world's most comprehensive source of economic history statistics. Begun by British economist Angus Maddison, it was continued after his death in 2010 by an institution at the University of Groningen. Recently, an update for 2018 has been released. Background paper: It was accompanied by a major introductory article at... Read More
Egor Kholmogorov: Socialism Not Dead - Paradoxes of an Unsolved Problem
and •�October 11, 2017
•�4,000 Words •�284 Comments
The latest in our series of translations of Russian national-conservative thinker Egor Kholmogorov. Translated by: Fluctuarius Argenteus; slightly edited by AK. Original: *** It may seem strange that, at the turn of the 21st century, the word “Socialism” is back in the popular political idiom. The final decade of the preceding century seemed to have... Read More
AAT Explains the Great Stagnation
•�August 15, 2016
•�800 Words •�50 Comments
At his blog Greg Cochran raises the issue of the Great Stagnation. Basically, GDP per capita growth rates throughout the developed world have plummeted relative to the levels of 1950-1973 (the years of the miracle economy, Wirtschaftswunder, trentes glorieuses, etc). They are however more or less typical of growth rates earlier in the century, substantially... Read More
Communist Economics 101
•�August 26, 2015
•�400 Words •�95 Comments
In response to Razib's post. Economically, Communist regimes are far from monolithic. You had: State capitalist/"market socialist" countries like today's China and Belarus, the NEPist USSR, tradionally Communist-ruled Kerala for that matter. Note that even Western countries, e.g. dirigiste France, have flirted with this. Central planning as practiced from the late 1920s in the USSR,... Read More
Nazarbayev Greatest President In Region
•�April 30, 2015
•�1,800 Words •�19 Comments
In Western popular culture, and to be honest most of the rest of the world, Kazakhstan is most commonly associated with Borat and his putative homeland of slapstick provincial troglodytes. And following Nursultan Nazarbayev's 98% win in the recent elections, and his reaction to it... ... the casual observer might feel that it has some... Read More
The World Economy's Orbit
•�August 15, 2012
•�200 Words •�1 Comment
The map below shows the shifting location of the world's economic center of gravity. It was compiled by McKinsey and reproduced by The Economist. All is broadly as one might expect. In pre-industrial times, the world's economic center of gravity was always basically triangulated between India, China, and the Roman Empire (later North-West Europe). By... Read More
The Soviet Economy - Charting Failure
•�June 22, 2012
•�1,600 Words •�143 Comments
Many Communists, leftists, and even patriots (I'm sorry to say) have a pronounced tendency to make out the Soviet economy as not quite the resounding failure it really was - or even to paint it as a success story that was only brought down by perestroika and liberal reforms. The above chart - based on... Read More
The Power of Contingency: Why China Didn't Rule the World
•�July 30, 2011
•�3,400 Words •�71 Comments
Pomeranz, Kenneth – The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2001) Category: economy, history, world systems; Rating: 5*/5 Summary: Brad DeLong's review; The Bactra Review; Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? It's a rare book that not only vastly informs you on a particular issue, but in so doing... Read More
Another View of the US Economy: Observations on Exergy, GDP & Median Incomes
•�August 21, 2010
•�2,500 Words •�17 Comments
The standard view of the American economy is one of exponential growth: even if interrupted by a recession once a decade and a Depression once every two generations (the 1890's, the 1930's, the 2010's?), the engines of industry would always come back roaring again. Output per American could always be expected to increase as it... Read More
The Transition 20 Years On: the Reckoning
•�March 10, 2010
•�3,000 Words •�17 Comments
It is now nearly 20 years since market reformers began liberalizing the economies of Eastern Europe, or as some smart-ass put it, trying to revive the fish in the centrally planned fish stews. These stews, cooked to diverse recipes from goulash socialism to Soviet "structural militarization", were subjected to a wide spectrum of overlapping treatments... Read More
Review of “Kicking Away the Ladder” by Ha-Joon Chang
•�October 19, 2009
•�2,800 Words •�6 Comments
Chang, Ha-Joon – Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002) Category: economy; history; industrial policy; Rating: 5/5 Summary: Kicking Away the Ladder:How the Economic and Intellectual Histories of Capitalism Have Been Re-Written to Justify Neo-Liberal Capitalism (Ha-Joon Chang) Much has been said of the smug arrogance, cultural aloofness and end-of-history conceit characterizing... Read More
"Economic History" Items Across Entire Archive
Anatoly Karlin
About Anatoly Karlin

I am a blogger, thinker, and businessman in the SF Bay Area. I’m originally from Russia, spent many years in Britain, and studied at U.C. Berkeley.

One of my tenets is that ideologies tend to suck. As such, I hesitate about attaching labels to myself. That said, if it’s really necessary, I suppose “liberal-conservative neoreactionary” would be close enough.

Though I consider myself part of the Orthodox Church, my philosophy and spiritual views are more influenced by digital physics, Gnosticism, and Russian cosmism than anything specifically Judeo-Christian.