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
>>
>>
>