Tell me how to give myself the equivalent of the education a history undergrad gets somewhere like the School of Oriental and African Studies

osamabindrinkin · 2012-05-24T19:45:49.856380+00:00

Naturally I agree, but I don't think historical research (defined as producing new knowledge about history) is necessary to developing those skills. A lot of the same learnings come just from knowing a bit about history, developing hypotheses based on what you already know, and reading more (whether it's primary or secondary material) to confirm or disprove those hypotheses.

When one says research in the context of history, I think of trying to add to the body of existing knowledge, which though in of itself highly educational, isn't fully necessary to get the main benefits of a historian's education. Building the mental muscle to think critically can be done just by "researching" in the body of existing knowledge, because so much of existing historical knowledge is not widely known.

In other words, I think musschrott's points #1 and #2 are an extension of my point #1, and his point #3 is an extension of my point #2. IMO the benefits of a historical education aren't so much that you're forced to write papers (writing a paper in of itself is beneficial, but it's a sufficient, not a necessary condition IMO), but that you're forced to engage with other scholars of the same materials you've been studying; this engagement need not be through conventional academic papers.

uplift17 · 2012-05-24T18:37:25.955069+00:00

This question is extremely broad so I don't know how good an answer you'll be able to get for this. In the first place how does one define the term "democratisation"? Do you just mean that parliamentary polities tend to be more observably democratic in the liberal democratic sense compared to presidential polities?

Even assuming the correlation holds true (my prima facie impression would be yes, parliamentary systems seem to be more historically democratic than presidential systems), it would be very, very difficult to answer the next bit -- why. You could write several books offering several different explanations and still not come close to exhausting the possible range of answers.

But anyway, probably the tl;dr answer to your question is in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_system

Some scholars like Juan Linz, Fred Riggs, Bruce Ackerman, and Robert Dahl claim that parliamentarianism is less prone to authoritarian collapse. These scholars point out that since World War II, two-thirds of Third World countries establishing parliamentary governments successfully made the transition to democracy. By contrast, no Third World presidential system successfully made the transition to democracy without experiencing coups and other constitutional breakdowns.[citation needed]

Note these scholars tend to be political scientists or sociologists so you should also try to find some answers in those fields.

schueaj · 2012-05-24T18:01:18.775697+00:00

The argument tends to hinge on some idea of East Asian cultures being more entrepreneurial (or alternatively, collectivist) or otherwise having traits that make them more amenable to modern development (e.g. a long history of state-centred bureaucracy in China, etc.). Southeast Asian cultures on the other hand have been mostly agricultural, although there were certainly some mercantile empires or states that are often forgotten about when these arguments are made.

I don't know how much currency these arguments have in modern historical scholarship -- little, I would suspect -- but the East Asian exceptionalism argument often finds its way into the press and other pop journalistic outlets, both in the West and in Asia. In Malaysia, PM Mahathir in the 1980s quite openly exhorted Malaysians to model economic society and culture on that of the Japanese.

Aurevir · 2012-05-24T16:22:09.537229+00:00

I found the Copperhead (Northern Democrat) slogan, "To maintain the Constitution as it is, and to restore the Union as it was", which is pretty damn similar. Maybe this is a derivative?

Possibly. I've heard this phrase ("...the Union as it was, and the slaves where they were") before but can't remember where. Possibly stems from Republican/Unionist rhetoric lambasting the Copperheads.

johnleemk · 2012-05-24T16:09:07.913458+00:00

So the policy response is to lower interest and do QE to increase liquidity. But banks aren't lending more, consumers continue to deleverage. Either consumers don't want those good/services that are idle or banks can't find credit worthy people to loan to, right?

You're confusing money and credit. Easy money does not require more lending. Money has quite clearly been too tight in any event.

So how does the fed you create easy money? and how does easy money translate into real growth once easy money is taken away?

The money illusion leads to sticky wages which artificially force people out of work and drive down AD. The role of keeping the price level growing is to ensure real wages can adjust appropriately to any shocks; when wages do not adjust properly, you get weak AD.

The only reason really easy money is needed now is to correct for the Fed's failure in keeping money too tight, and catch nominal income back up to where it would have been if the Fed had kept nominal income at trend through the crisis. Once the failure has been corrected, the Fed can easily cut back to an appropriate inflation rate.

johnleemk · 2012-05-24T15:18:35.355776+00:00

do you have a reference for further reading on the statement that 70's stagflation was supply side phenomenon?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation

I guess my argument comes down to I am very suspicious that the economy recovers (real growth that is independent of easy credit) first and then the inflation kicks in. If it doesn't happen in that order, then the Fed has no exit strategy.

Why not? If loose money isn't creating real growth, the Fed isn't obligated to continue trying loose money. The problem with the status quo is that loose money hasn't even been properly tried. In spite of the Fed's actions, 2009 saw the lowest inflation rates, hitting deflationary territory, in recent US history. Current inflation rates are still on the low to low-medium end by historical standards, and nowhere near hyperinflationary territory.

And all this boils down to "real growth is impaired due to lack of easy credit / AD problems" which I am very skeptical of. I don't think the issues impairing growth are that simple and neat.

It's not lack of easy credit, it's lack of easy money. And the simple fact that money has been too tight means AD has been artificially impaired by monetary policy; even if you believe there are AS problems, that hardly precludes AD problems as well.

schueaj · 2012-05-24T15:12:58.852550+00:00

How absolute was the Philippines independence though? Did the people really want the US there or was it American money buying Philippines' leaders consent?

I'm half-Filipino and although Filipinos take pride in their independence (Aguinaldo remains a national hero and the officially recognised first president of the Philippines, because of his struggle against American conquest), there's genuine affection for the US. (Some Filipinos even wish they'd become a US state instead.) I'm not aware of any significant anti-American sentiment in the Philippines, even though the US propped up Marcos's hated regime.

My understanding of the historical consensus on the subject is that although Filipino leaders were subservient to US policy prior to official independence in the late 1940s -- the self-government of 1934 being something of a sham -- there's no good reason to think it was a puppet state from then onwards. It was certainly just as independent as the Diem regime was in South Vietnam (which contrary to the apparently common belief, was not much of a puppet state either).

johnleemk · 2012-05-24T15:01:04.639029+00:00

Once the economy has recovered and inflation is running away, there is no need to worry about hiking rates/destroying money.

Comparisons to stagflation as far as recovery goes are inappropriate because stagflation was primarily a supply-side phenomenon while the current crisis is mostly demand-side.

schueaj · 2012-05-24T14:42:50.463939+00:00

It's a loose grouping, don't take these labels for anything rigid, but here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asia

Malaysia has a significant Chinese minority so some might attribute its relative success to that. Others might argue that the maintenance of British common law institutions (even though they've become corrupted somewhat since independence) is the main factor. Both the institutional and ethno-cultural explanations are also consistent with Singapore's outperforming Malaysia economically.

johnleemk · 2012-05-24T14:36:45.552670+00:00

If one is judging monetary policy by the inflation rate, it's emphatically clear that it is not too loose, and that it was in fact far too tight during the worst of the crisis: http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/currentinflation.asp

If one judges monetary policy by nominal income, a similar picture emerges: http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:USA&ifdim=region&tstart=959140800000&tend=1274673600000&hl=en&dl=en&ind=false&q=nominal+gdp+in+the+us

Likewise, the GDP deflator has been below trend since 2008: http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=ne_dab_defl_zs&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:USA&ifdim=region&tstart=959140800000&tend=1274673600000&hl=en&dl=en&ind=false&q=nominal+gdp+in+the+us

People squawking about hyperinflation don't seem to realise that even by the CPI, the current US inflation rate is over 3x, even 4x lower than the worst of the stagflationary era, which one cannot describe as hyperinflation by any stretch of the imagination. US money is certainly not extraordinarily loose.

schueaj · 2012-05-24T14:36:05.657903+00:00

Well it's not like all was hunky dory in Korea pre-WWII either. Korea was a colony of Japan for a similar amount of time as the Philippines was a colony of the US.

johnleemk · 2012-05-24T14:32:44.846043+00:00

Uh, how do you think the Fed raises interest rates?

schueaj · 2012-05-24T13:45:53.295766+00:00

This is actually a fairly tough question to answer but I think the tl;dr can be summed up as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Marcos

In general, Filipino institutions have never been very good, so there's a lot of corruption at the local level. Nationally, Marcos literally looted the country and also put it in immense debt while he was at it. His dictatorial regime discouraged foreign investment at precisely the wrong time (the 1980s) by killing his opponents like Benigno Aquino, so while other Asian countries managed to attract tonnes of investment, the Philippines was busy trying to put its own political house in order. The institutional explanation is one which I think makes the most sense although I don't know whether it explains 20% or 100% of why the Philippines is so poor.

If one prefers ethno-cultural explanations, one can argue that the Philippines is Southeast Asian and South Korea is East Asian, and all else being equal, one would still expect the East Asian society to outperform the Southeast Asian one. (In Southeast Asia the only first world country is Singapore, whose population is mostly Chinese. Most Southeast Asians are just as poor as the Filipinos are.) I don't place a lot of stock in such cultural explanations, but they're one popular folk theory in some circles.

shalkal · 2012-05-24T13:34:28.175937+00:00

This is a common conspiracy theory in Malaysia (although Malaysia's divisions are on ethno-religious lines which don't correspond well to geographical boundaries), but I don't know of any evidence to support it. Outside Malaysia, I don't know of any evidence to support it as general policy in other colonies either, although I wouldn't be surprised if one can find the odd example here or there.

This question's come up before in this sub, I believe, and someone else pointed out that colonial powers did not think at all about decolonisation when drawing boundaries on maps, because they believed they would be there for the indefinite future.

In short, I'm not aware of any evidence for this as a general, intentional pattern of colonial policy, although I wouldn't be surprised to find exceptions.

osamabindrinkin · 2012-05-24T13:26:37.913938+00:00

Absolutely, if you're planning on being a professional historian. For the history-curious layperson, however, I think these are less essential skills to have.

johnleemk · 2012-05-23T23:42:58.197840+00:00

I don't know, it might be hard for the Eurozone not to implode upon itself once countries start leaving in droves. One proposal I've heard has been to split it into two, with an austere north and looser south, maintaining two different currency zones.

Krugman also foresaw these difficulties around the same time as Friedman: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/euronote.html

Pretty clearly, Europe is not about to tear itself apart because it cannot agree about monetary policy. In fact, everyone but the central bankers now does agree about monetary policy. The clear and present danger is, instead, that Europe will turn Japanese: that it will slip inexorably into deflation, that by the time the central bankers finally decide to loosen up it will be too late.

osamabindrinkin · 2012-05-23T23:35:10.385002+00:00

IMO the two main things a uni course do for you are:

Expose you to a multitude of different texts
Engage you in discussion with other students (loosely defined, here, as someone engaged in study, i.e. including the course teacher) of those same texts

Both of these can be replicated with a good library and access to a group of people interested in the subject you're studying. For part #2, you can take uni classes, or you can find a club of some sort devoted to whatever it is you're interested in (perhaps even /r/askhistorians, although I don't know if we have many Asia experts here).

Asian history is a huge field. What time period(s) and region(s) are you interested in? What type of history are you interested in? Political, military, social, cultural? If our interests coincide in some way there may be books I can recommend.

(Also, rather OT, but when I read your question my first thought was "Read a lot of Marx and Engels" -- the only other place in the world besides the SOAS campus where I've seen so many communist/leftist posters has been Kolkata in India, which is literally ruled by a Communist Party. SOAS has a reputation for being one of the most left-wing colleges in the University of London. It has a fantastic library, BTW, and if you live near London, I think you can probably find a way to get access to it.)

Smallpaul · 1 day

The banks that failed were allowed to fail because their failure did not create systemic risk.

Uh, no. Bear Stearns was bailed out, and the chaos created by Lehman's bankruptcy was used to justify the bailouts that took place afterwards.

When it was the merged banks that were at risk of failing (Goldman, etc.), the bailout was needed because there was systemic risk.

Goldman Sachs is also a pure investment bank.

But Goldman's systemic risk did not derive from Lehman's failure. The seeds for that were planted years earlier during the sub-prime boom. The banks which failed did not create the recession and in fact were irrelevant to it.

The securitisation of debt predates GLB by almost 3 decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization

"Regulations which allow companies to fail with little impact on the economy, are good because creative destruction is a good thing."

So how does this justify requiring investment and retail banking to be separate?

Nobody is arguing that regulation should require investment banks and retail banks to be joined. The argument is about whether there should be regulation requiring them to be separate.

Smallpaul · 1 day

You're changing the topic. You asked for arguments against enforcing a separation between investment banking and retail banking. One of those arguments is that such banks which in fact were separated are the precise ones which failed during the crisis and created such systemic risks that they had to be bailed out.

Essentially the argument you seem to be making is "Regulations which make more companies fail, and fail in such terrible ways that they risk bringing down the whole economy, are good because creative destruction is a good thing."

But the whole point of regulation is to make the economy more healthy and ensure good businesses prosper and bad businesses fail -- not to make failures happen for the sake of it. The prima facie evidence suggests that the bad businesses which failed, and which caused dramatic damage to the economy, are precisely the investment banks which were kept separate from retail banks.

Fjosnisse · 1 day

A company ruled an entire subcontinent for a century, for pete's sake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_rule_in_India

As musschrott says, the concept of companies as legal entities is relatively new, but wealth and power have been intertwined forever. The earliest companies were founded to speculate/invest in things like the exploration and colonisation of new territories. So if anything, one can easily argue that modern companies are more politically benign than early companies were.

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