This brings to mind the extremely relevant TED talk by the prominent Norwegian Labor Party politician Hadia Tajik: “Why women are more profitable than oil” https://youtu.be/4D9ubPTr8rY?si=Cjf0JgcIa0tGgKsD
It is clear that he will not at any point acknowledge that what he is talking about is limited to a small part of the population. White men as the prototype human is strong here, and completely unacknowledged.
Sociologists would be infuriated by this book, he keeps on saying stuff like “who knows why that is, it could be so many things, we’ll just never know”
I can hear sociologists screaming: WE KNOW
And then in a much calmer voice: We might not know EVERYTHING, but there is SO MUCH we do know, about why that is.
Oh joy, we’re gonna take a “brief detour through literature” as we start chapter 3: “The metamorphosis of capital”
This might be a French thing 🤷🏻♀️
To recap chapter 2: we have reduced “growth” to a single number for any particular country. Don’t worry if it’s small, small is good because compound interest.
All complexity has been dismissed under “who knows really” or completely ignored.
We have now spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at how there was little inflation for a long time by studying amounts used in various novels in France and Great Britain… shout out to Jane Austen, I guess.
Ok, lol, he is inadvertently dissing MAGA by saying than in historical economic context 1950-1970 were an outlier and not at all “normal”. “Inadvertently” because this book came out in French in 2013.
I think he is now talking about how having colonies was great for Britain. But France wasn’t doing that well on their occupation of other peoples lands.
But his language is so sanitized it’s weird.
“On assets that French citizens owned in the country’s foreign possessions.”
I think he’s wrong about the “human capital” thing and I think any early investor in a tech company would agree with me on that. Not sure it matters. I haven’t gotten that far in my head. But it seems silly to discount. Also on a national level that suddenly might make education something the economists might care about.
So far he’s just going on about what is capital and I just realized something, in the part before the slavery quote earlier he talked about how he didn’t like how some economists have started to talk about “human capital”. Basically he seems to think that capital is things you can buy and sell. You can’t own humans, so no humans can be capital. He seemed a bit disappointed about that, but that might be my interpretation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital
Mathematical concepts covered up to now: Addition Subtraction Multiplication Division Average Compound interest (so powers/exponents though not explicitly mentioned) I think one should get by without high school math so far.
Unfortunately, this seems to confirm all my suspicions. Complex systems made the math hard so let’s make an average human or an average company and pretend that has not stripped away any essential information.
Also I am really struggling with how they never test their theories. Or have any experiments. I’m getting cigar club vibes, where men sit around other men and say “profound” things they just make up and everyone nods sagely.
It went nowhere really. Our two colonial powers got into debt because of wars, France used inflation to reduce its debt, Britain issued bonds bought by the rich. (From memory, I wasn’t super interested). Nationalization happened and was undone. Really. I don’t feel anything here was analyzed. Maybe the chapter was just really boring and I zoned out. Let me know if I should go back.
Anyway, let’s recap of chapter 3… there is nothing interesting in here. It was about France and Britain. Main takeaways: Have colonies Don’t lose them Don’t go to war And we don’t know how public debt works actually but it’s weird. Sometimes maybe you should nationalize, who knows, it’s unclear. Sometimes you should privatize, no analysis, but he seems to like it.
This was a useless chapter and if anything proves that his whole jam of extrapolating from his “very diverse set” of countries is weak. But whatever.