Open House Event For Prospective Students, January 16th, 2014

February 7, 2014 Jin Chung

Why were the Balkans underdeveloped? A geographical hypothesis
The Balkans are an odd man in Europe. Its income level is much lower than the average income level of Western and Central Europe. This is a well-known fact but is worth of another look. The median GDP per capita in Western Europe is around $40,000 (expressed in constant 2005 international dollars used by the […]
The influence of Karl Marx—a counterfactual
The two hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth is giving rise to many conferences dedicated to numerous (and God knows there were many) aspects of Marx’s work and life. (I am going to one such conference in Haifa.) Add to it an even greater number of reviews of his work and influence (Peter Singer just […]
When autarky becomes the only solution
The latest, and by far the most serious, round of US sanctions against Russia has shown two things very clearly—neither of which has received much publicity in the comments so far. The first is the extraordinary power of the modern state. The second is that when powerful states impose sanctions that limit one’s access to […]
Chinese income distribution in 2002-3 and 2013
Chinese official micro-level data on income distribution are difficult to get and of questionable reliability. The best source are urban and rural nation-wide household surveys (HS) that have been running since at least 1982 (”at least” is a qualifier because the surveys have been fielded from 1954, but, were discontinued during the Cultural Revolution and, […]
India at the time of the Globalization Raj. A review of Rana Dasgupta, “Capital: The explosion of Delhi”
It is the story of Delhi, the city of imperial courts, colonialist city-planners and above all of administrators that in the past three decades has become the heart of Indian, and perhaps worldwide, political capitalism. The story of Delhi is a metaphor for the story of global capitalism and the energies that it unleashed, both […]
Will bourgeoisie ever rule the Chinese state?
[I am publishing early and somewhat modified versions of self-contained sections from my forthcoming book “Capitalism, alone”, Harvard UP, hopefully 2019. They may be a bit longer than my usual posts. This is the first such piece. All comments are welcome]China is not the West. But what exactly is the difference, in the long-term context, […]
How is the world ruled?
It is Saturday evening and snowing in New York. I have nowhere to go, I do have things to do (my book!) but my memories take over.Like for example, the simple question of how is the world ruled. I think that lots of misunderstanding among people in the world comes from inability to visualize how […]
“Fake news”: reaction to the end of the monopoly on the narrative
Very few people can make sense of the current “fake news” hysteria and almost nobody is willing to look at it in a historical context and to understand why the problem arose now.The reason why the hysteria has spread, and especially so in the United States, is because this is (to some extend understandable) reaction […]
“I won’t go to Moscow until the revolution triumphs”, a review of Wang fan-hsi’s 'Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary'
These are the words that Mao said to a comrade in 1927 when the Chinese Communist movement was in complete chaos. They are mentioned at the end of the book by the Chinese Trotskyist Wang fan-his. The book is written in 1957 and covers one of the most tumultuous periods of Chinese history from 1919 […]
The bitterness of Adam Smith
Under the influence of Amartya Sen, we have been “nudged” towards a reassessment of the relative merits of “The theory of moral sentiments “ (TMS) and “The Wealth of Nations” (WN). Sen has done a lot to bring Smith’s early work out of relative obscurity where it was consigned by two centuries of success of […]

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Graduate Center Economics Student Blog

Monthly Archives: February 2014

Open House Event For Prospective Students, January 16th, 2014

A blog for Econ students, by Econ students.