History Readings

“The Case for Reparations,” Coates’ 16,000-word cover story for The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent. Published online in May, it was a close look at housing discrimination, such as redlining, that was really about the need for America to take a brutally honest look in the mirror and acknowledge its deep racial divisions.

The story broke a single-day traffic record for a magazine story on The Atlantic’s website, and in its wake, Politico named him to its list of 50 thinkers changing American politics

Coates believes that if there is an answer to contemporary racism, it lies in confronting the pas

economic historians reckon the question of whether the benefits of globalisation outweigh the downsides is more complicated than this. For them, the answer depends on when you say the process of globalisation started.

it is impossible to say how much of a “good thing” a process is in history without first defining for how long it has been going on.

Although Adam Smith himself never used the word, globalisation is a key theme in the Wealth of Nations. His description of economic development has as its underlying principle the integration of markets over time. As the division of labour enables output to expand, the search for specialisation expands trade, and gradually, brings communities from disparate parts of the world together

one theme does emerge unscathed throughout his work: a search for macroeconomic stability. According to Mr Skidelsky at Warwick University, much of Keynes’s work was motivated by a desire to return to the stability and growth of the pre-1914 period

All these works share one underlying feature—the idea that the internal stability of an economy (of prices and unemployment) should be prioritised above abstract principles that were directed at maintaining external stability (of exchange rates or the free movement of capital, for instance) at all costs.

He did not consider himself tied down to any particular economic creed. For instance, he pointed out that the most effective and appropriate economic theory for a particular period changes, because the structure of the world economy mutates and evolves over time far more quickly than, say, the natural world and its systems:

The falling price of oil has at least brought some relief to drivers. Indeed, it is widely assumed that tumbling oil prices will put a dent in the sales of electric cars

Electric vehicles are unlikely to fall too far out of favour in the short term, partly because they are hardly in favour. Of the 1 billion vehicles on the world’s roads fewer than 1m are powered by electricity alone.

Electric cars attract some buyers not because they are cheap but because they are expensive. They serve as a badge for committed greens to demonstrate to the world that they care about the environment, no matter what the cost.

to the degree the finance sector attracts the best and brightest young people, it is funneling people away from making goods and services people use, and toward serving what is essentially a back office function for the entire economy. A very important back office function, to be sure, and one that requires very smart people to do well. But a back office function nonetheless, not unlike the legal industry or human resources department

the economists Stephen G. Cecchetti of Brandeis University and Enisse Kharroubi of the Bank for International Settlements have found clear evidence that an unusually large financial sector actually reduces the growth rate of an economy, rather than enhances it.

what about us "experts?" What have we learned? Are there really any significant new insights? Do we know much more today than we did a generation ago?

France uplifted the downtrodden people of Algeria and Indo-China

My generation was deeply influenced half a century ago by economists and mathematicians. We scholars all wanted to be - and particularly to show -- that we had mastered all the techniques of our professions as social scientists, that we could build models, make graphs, juxtapose trends, etc. After all, we were writing our learned books and essays for our academic colleagues and our paymasters, not for those we were describing. So, at least those who were paid by our government and its proxy think tanks often became, as the English say, "too clever by half." They and their counterparts in universities, after all, had to prove their "smarts" in order to get funded, promoted or kept on

“American exceptionalism,” as Americans began talking about it in the 1950s, rested on a series of claims about American history.

It was claimed that because America had never known a feudal aristocracy, the United States had evolved as a uniquely classless society, at least for its white citizens. Because America was classless, the United States was uniquely immune to socialism and communism. This achievement came at a price however: a society uniquely indifferent to high culture, uniquely characterized by mass production and mass marketing.

These claims don’t seem very robust today. The United States is more, not less, class-bound than other developed countries. Socialism and communism are dead ideas everywhere in the developed world. Nor does American culture look so different from that of other rich countries as it did when Henry James lamented of the United States: “no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class.”