In reply to John Barkley, I  never doubted the great advances in science and 
mathematics and related subjects that took place in the Islamic countries 
until around 1000. I bow to superior knowledge of the details surrounding 
these events but I understood that these advances took place to a great 
extent in spite of the religious authorities rather than with their active 
support. After all, for some time after the death of the Prophet the Islamic 
religious authorities were largely unaware of Greek learning as it had not 
yet been translated into Arabic.  Initially ".it was not necessary to 
translate from Greek to Syriac into Arabic, since most of those who carried 
on the tradition [of learning] were still Christians, Jews or Zoroastrians, 
and even those who had been converted would still have retained their 
knowledge of [Syriac and/or Greek], the languages of thought.." (Hourani 
1991: 75-6). In the West, the attitudes of the religious authorities were 
ambivalent early on, but once the revival of learning began around the 
10th-11th centuries, the church fathers became wedded to the view that Greek 
science was compatible with Christian religious views.

My purpose in the posting under question was to suggest that there is much 
more to understanding long term economic growth than Acemoglu and Robinson 
suggest in their book. The Asian example was meant to illustrate that 
authoritarian governments have sometimes had major favorable impacts on 
growth and the Islamic-Christian comparison was meant to illustrate that 
historical accidents can be critical in affecting long term growth.

Richard Lipsey


--------------------------------------------------
From: "Rosser, John Barkley - rosserjb" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 2:49 PM
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [SHOE] risk and Far East philosophy/economics

> I beg to differ partly with Prof. Lipsey.  He misrepresents what went on 
> in the Muslim world regarding the Greek tradition.  It was not relegated 
> immediately to any inferior position, and for several centuries from 
> roughly 700 to 1000 the Muslim world was competing with the Chinese for 
> world leadership in mathematics and science.  Algebra was invented during 
> this period in the Muslim world.  While "Arabic" numerals really came from 
> India, they were readily adopted in the Muslim world while the Church was 
> denouncing the idea of the zero or negative numbers as demonic.  It took 
> the usefulness of them in double entry accounting and Tuscan banking to 
> change the mind of the Church on this matter later.  Ideas of Greek 
> reasoning, logic, and philosophy entered into Islamic interpretations and 
> jurisprudence directly, along with the use of precedents.  It was only 
> after about 1000 that there was a movement to shut all this down and to 
> forbid interpretation in theology and jurisprudence that the Greek 
> writings were put into an inferior position, although it was from Arabic 
> translations that Aristotle and many others were translated into Latin 
> prior to the European Renaissance, mostly by Spanish Jews.  This ending of 
> the allowing of such interpretation is known in Islamic history as the 
> "Closing of the Gate of Ijtihad," after which Shari'a schools became 
> rigidified, and intellectual life suffered greatly.  After that time, 
> Prof. Lipsey's explanation begins to be relevant.  But there was 
> definitely a long period when the views in the Musllim world towards the 
> Greek tradition were much more favorable and open than they were in Europe 
> under the domination of the Church after the fall of the western Roman 
> Empire.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On 
> Behalf Of Richard Lipsey
> Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 5:22 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [SHOE] risk and Far East philosophy/economics
>
> Since no one else has taken up Anthony Waterman-s question about Acemoglu 
> and Robinsons' book I offer the following short comment.
>
> I believe Acemoglu and Robinsons' treatment is useful but one sided. I 
> agree with Jared Diamond in his review( New Your Review of Books) that 
> even on their own level of analysis they omit some important forces, such 
> as access to waterways, climate, and soil fertility. I also agree with 
> Jeffery Sachs'
> review in Foreign Affairs that their approach is overly simplistic. It 
> omits many factors that matter and those that they argue really do matter 
> sometimes do and sometimes do not in fact matter. For example, those 
> countries that became the four original Asian Tigers where under 
> authoritarian governments when smart policy makers rejected the 
> then-prevailing Prebish import substitution model of economic development 
> and adapted policies designed to assist their firms' in climbing the steep 
> learning curve to become successful exporters in the fierce world of 
> international competition.
>
> To give an example of important things not considered by A&R, note that 
> one absolutely necessary condition for having the levels of income that we 
> experience today, and hence the growth rates over much of the recent past, 
> is the existence of Western science. Without it there could have been no 
> Second Industrial Revolution, there would have been no dynamo, no chemical 
> industry, no green revolution, no computer-based ITC revolution, to say 
> nothing of the forthcoming revolutions of nanotechnology and 
> biotechnology.
> A&R's treatment tells us nothing about the sufficient conditions for the 
> science and the technologies on which they depend to be developed when and 
> where they were. For one way-out illustration of forces that are at a 
> quite different level than those studied by A&R and that help to explain 
> the "where" consider how the differences between the Islamic countries and 
> the Western ones were influenced by some critical historical accidents.
> Christianity had to persuade its way into favor in the sophisticated 
> society of the Roman Empire while the Islamic religion was spread through 
> conquest in the century that followed the death of the Prophet. As a 
> result the Christian church fathers had to become familiar with Greek 
> science and philosophy while the Islamic religious leaders remained 
> largely ignorant of it. In a second momentous historical accident, during 
> the revival of learning the Greek writings that had been translated into 
> Latin and hence were available in the West did not include those of 
> Aristotle. After some controversy, the Christian church fathers became 
> committed to the view that Christianity was fully compatible with Greek 
> science. Later, Aristotle's works with their several key doctrines that 
> seemed inconsistent with the Old Testament became available. By then it 
> was too late to turn back from the full acceptance of Greek science, 
> although a century of controversy ensued as its works were woven into 
> Christian theology. In contrast, when the Islamic leaders commissioned 
> transitions of Greek writings into Arabic, they encountered Aristotle at 
> the outset. As a not surprising result they relegated Greek science to a 
> secondary position behind, and subservient to, religious writings. As I 
> pointed out in my original response to Robin Neill "...a scientific 
> revolution could not have occurred in Western Europe in the seventeenth 
> century if the level of science and natural philosophy had remained what 
> it was in the first half of the twelfth century..." (Douglas
> Grant)
>
> Richard Lipsey
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "Anthony Waterman" <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Friday, October 12, 2012 8:19 AM
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [SHOE] risk and Far East philosophy/economics
>
>> I think Tye is quite wrong about 18th C. England. He should look at
>> Peter Mathias's history of the brewing industry. More generally -- and
>> more interestingly -- I wonder what he, Lipsey and other SHOE
>> participants think of Acemoglu and Robinson (2012)? They claim to have
>> generalised this entire debate, and to have replaced or subsumed all
>> previous explanations of why some nations 'succeed' and others 'fail'.
>>
>> Anthony Waterman
>>
>>
>> On 12/10/2012 4:57 AM, Rob Tye wrote:
>>> Prof Lipsey
>>>
>>> That European prosperity and technology rapidly outpaced China after
>>> about
>>> 1800 is surely correct.  But I am delighted to see you take a stand
>>> against
>>> 'Chinese mentality' type explanations of that matter.   As historians we
>>> will inevitably tend to reverse engineer our evidence, but to do so
>>> merely by invoking mentality seems to just too associated with
>>> intellectual slovenliness, and worse.
>>>
>>> If I understand your position correctly, then you associate factory
>>> production rather closely with modern Europe in general and Fordism
>>> in particular.  This I do not accept.  Wang Anshih did not get five
>>> billion coins a year made in kitchen ovens, nor were the 90 million
>>> bricks in the Jetavana stupa made in anyone's back yard.  Factory
>>> production within a Fordist economic environment however is perhaps
>>> more of a modern European phenomenon - but surely we must then ask
>>> what the roots of that Fordist economic environment were?  It is at
>>> this point I think we find an important influence that China had on
>>> Europe.
>>>
>>> Berkeley (The Querist) is surely correct to point to high Chinese
>>> productivity in 1737 - I do not think it excessively sarcastic to
>>> suggest that the only thing England was mass producing at that time
>>> was stately homes.  And the obvious key fundamental element in
>>> Berkeley's proto-Fordism, got from a Chinese model, is the
>>> realisation that you have to bite the bullet and actually pay your
>>> workers, rather than truck them.
>>>
>>> In 1682 William Petty thought 12 copper coins per household was an
>>> adequate money supply for the English working classes.  When Wang
>>> Anshih took power in China around 1060, there were already maybe six
>>> thousand copper coins per household in circulation, but he saw this a
>>> greatly inadequate and increased production by at least an extra 100
>>> coins per household per annum.
>>>
>>> One final point - coinage does not seem to be on your list of General
>>> Purpose Technologies.  Am curious to understand why it was excluded,
>>> if so.
>>>
>>> Regards
>>>
>>> Rob Tye, York UK
>>>
>>>
>>
>