Post by Deleted on Dec 28, 2015 10:24:31 GMT 7
If we can't lift our minds from earnest discussion of the economy and its discontents between Christmas and New Year's Day, when can we? So let's take a summer squiz at the work of the rapidly diminishing band of economic historians.
One of the most interesting things they do is try to piece together economic statistics covering the years before much official effort was devoted to measuring the economy. The United States didn't start publishing figures for gross domestic product until 1947; we didn't start until 1960.
The global doyen of economic historians was the Netherlands-based Scot, Professor Angus Maddison, who devoted his career to "backcasting" GDP to 1820 for all the major economies and regions of the world.
Despite all the unavoidable and debatable assumptions involved, Maddison's estimates are still widely used. They're a reminder that, before Europe's Industrial Revolution, the two biggest economies were China and India.
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Australia's most distinguished economic historians were Noel Butlin, of the Australian National University, and his older brother, Syd, of Sydney University (after whom its Butlin Avenue is named).
Noel backcast Australia's GDP to 1861, then began researching what the Australian economy must have been like before white settlement. He wrote up his findings in Economics and the Dreamtime: A Hypothetical History (which I wrote up in a column on April 5, 1995).
As part of this research Butlin devoted much effort to estimating the size of the Aboriginal population before 1788. The anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown wrote in the Commonwealth Yearbook of 1930 that it would have been more than 250,000, maybe even more than 300,000
Continues
www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/maybe-the-colonialists-didnt-outnumber-our-aboriginal-population-swiftly-20151224-gluntd.html
One of the most interesting things they do is try to piece together economic statistics covering the years before much official effort was devoted to measuring the economy. The United States didn't start publishing figures for gross domestic product until 1947; we didn't start until 1960.
The global doyen of economic historians was the Netherlands-based Scot, Professor Angus Maddison, who devoted his career to "backcasting" GDP to 1820 for all the major economies and regions of the world.
Despite all the unavoidable and debatable assumptions involved, Maddison's estimates are still widely used. They're a reminder that, before Europe's Industrial Revolution, the two biggest economies were China and India.
Advertisement
Australia's most distinguished economic historians were Noel Butlin, of the Australian National University, and his older brother, Syd, of Sydney University (after whom its Butlin Avenue is named).
Noel backcast Australia's GDP to 1861, then began researching what the Australian economy must have been like before white settlement. He wrote up his findings in Economics and the Dreamtime: A Hypothetical History (which I wrote up in a column on April 5, 1995).
As part of this research Butlin devoted much effort to estimating the size of the Aboriginal population before 1788. The anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown wrote in the Commonwealth Yearbook of 1930 that it would have been more than 250,000, maybe even more than 300,000
Continues
www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/maybe-the-colonialists-didnt-outnumber-our-aboriginal-population-swiftly-20151224-gluntd.html
