Tony Wrigley has posted a short introduction to his work on the role of energy during the Industrial Revolution, here.
Category: Economic history
This post is well worth a read, if necessary using google translate. It essentially takes the well-known point that moderate inflation can be beneficial in that it helps downward real wage adjustment, in circumstances when this is necessary; and extends this to the context of real exchange rate adjustments in a diverse currency union. It also cites some supportive evidence from the history of the classical gold standard, courtesy of Flandreau, Le Chacheux and Zumer.
One of the things that has always marked out economic history as a subfield within economics is its focus on the economics of technological change. The Habbakuk thesis held that the high wage environment of the United States helps explain the nature of that country’s technological progress in the 19th century, and Bob Allen has recently argued that high wages and cheap energy are key to understanding the British Industrial Revolution.
I was pleased to see John Bruton referring to this in his recent LSE speech.
Since this is the weekend, here is another example of directed technological change (or at least, such is Roger Cohen’s interpretation), this time from Denmark.
This is an addendum to John McHale’s last post and a response to JTO’s plea for more real data on this site. Below is a consistent series (based on CSO data) for the net migration rate from 1961 to 2010. The net flow has been expressed as a rate per 1,000 average population. The years are to end-April.
We await with great interest the results of the 2011 Census, which will give us a fix on the migration trend for the year ending April 2011 and allow the estimate for 2002 to 2010 to be updated.
Preliminary Census results should become available by the end of the summer.
