Utopia, you are standing in it!

Today’s post is by Judith from the Visitor Team at Manchester Museum. We are each sharing our passion and  interest in the museum and its objects.

For more about the Money Gallery at Manchester Museum, have a look at the Curator’s blog, Ancient Worlds.

From Paper to Plastic – The History of the Five Pound Note

The Bank of England has cooked them in ovens, drowned them in red wine, stuck them in the microwave and run them through a 90°C washing machine cycle with a well-known brand of washing powder! It reckons that the new £5 plastic notes – which go into circulation on 13th September 2016 – are fairly indestructible!  They’re expected to be more environmentally friendly, last longer, stay cleaner and be more difficult to counterfeit than the notes we use now.  Just don’t iron them – but more of that later …

The new polymer £5 note being put…

2018 is an important year for the commemoration of the struggle for women’s suffrage. A number of anniversaries of key events in the history of votes for women are celebrated over the course of this year.

6 February 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, 1918 which extended the vote to some women over the age of 30 for the first time.

2 July 2018 is the 90th anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act, 1928 which gave the vote to women aged 21 and over.

21 November 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, 1918 which allowed women to stand for election to the House of Commons.

14 December 2018 is the 100th anniversary of some women voting for the first time in the election of December 1918.

Tomorrow, the 6th of February, is the 100th anniversary of the parliamentary…

This is the second in our blog series, women and parliament in this, the centenary year of the Representation of the People Act 1918. Here at the History of Parliament we are closely involved in celebrations, commemorations and projects relating to this anniversary. So today, on the actual anniversary that this Act became law it seemed pertinent to honour its passage. to that end, our assistant director, Dr Emma Peplow explains not only what this Act meant for women, but for men and the whole electoral system…

One hundred years ago today George V gave his assent to the Representation of the People Act. Throughout the country we are celebrating this centenary, particularly because it gave the parliamentary vote to some women for the first time as well as to millions of previously excluded working men. The number of registered voters franchise rose dramatically, from 7.9 million to 21.4…

Joint with Aurélien Goutsmedt

In a few weeks, the famous presidential address in which Milton Friedman is remembered to have introduced the notion of an equilibrium rate of unemployment and opposed the use of the Phillips curve in macroeconomic policy will turn 50. It has earned more that 8,000 citations, more than Arrow, Debreu and McKenzie’s proofs of the existence of a general equilibrium combined, more than Lucas’s 1976 critique. In one of the papers to be presented at the AEA anniversary session in January, Greg Mankiw and Ricardo Reis ask “what explains the huge influence of his work,” one they interpret as “a starting point for Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Models.” Neither their paper nor Olivier Blanchard’s contribution, however, unpack how Friedman’s address captured macroeconomists’ minds. This is a task historians of economics – who are altogether absent from the anniversary session – are better equipped to…

This is the first in a series of posts about Anglo-Russian relations in the 1910s and 1920s, exploring themes and stories connected to my book, The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, the Russians and the Jazz Age (published by Granta, September 2017).

Nicholas II, pictured in 1895, still young and perhaps hopeful early in his reign.

A century ago this week, Russia found herself in a state of turmoil with all her society, everyone from princes to peasants, frantically struggling to work out what the Tsar’s sensational abdication meant for them. Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias, had clung doggedly to his throne for more than twenty-two years, offering only a minimum of concessions to those of his subjects who wanted a fairer society while punishing many who dared to campaign for basic freedoms and a less autocratic regime. Revolution had long been prophesied but, when it came, it was nonetheless a great shock. Hundreds of years of unbroken one-person rule suddenly ended and the future was riven with insecurity.

This sense of uncertainty…

The New York Times (NYT) recently published a column by Gehad el-Haddad — the [previous] spokesman for the global Islamist group The Muslim Brotherhood — penned from the confines of his Egyptian jail cell, in Tora prison. Haddad wrote about his movement’s “peaceful reformist approach,” and he concluded his letter by a shy admission that his group’s political maneuvering created distance between the Brotherhood and the Egyptian people. Haddad, however, failed to address the problematic approach of the ideology of political Islam that was the core problem that forced many Egyptians, including millions of Muslims to turn against the Muslim Brotherhood.

In a column in the Daily Beast, British activist and columnist Maajid Nawaz wrote an open letter to Gehad Haddad, addressing the points Haddad in his NYT’s column and how Haddad only presented half the story, and how it is “disingenuous to argue that your Islamist ideology does not…

What is the “crisis in economic expertise” about?

Trump’s decision to demote whoever might be nominated chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from his cabinet has been interpreted as a final blow to a though year – in which economists’ advice has been systematically ignored by voters- within a though post-financial crisis decade. Economists are under the impression that since 2008, their expertise has been increasingly challenged, and theyhaveofferedseveral analyses and remedies: more micro, more data, more attention to distribution and less to efficiency, more humility, more awareness to the moral and political element in economic expertise, more diversity and more interdisciplinarity –economic education included- Few of these however rely on the whopping literature on the history and sociology of scientific expertise.

A systematic review would take a book, so let’s jump to how it helps elucidate what the problem with economic…

This week has delivered one more interesting batch of economics soul-searching posts. On Monday,  the Bloomberg View editorial board has outlined its plans to make economics more of a science (by “tossing out” models that are “refuted by the observable world” and relying “on experiments, data and replication to test theories and understand how people and companies really behave.” You know, things  economists have probably never tried…). John Lanchester then reflected on recent macro smackdown by Bank of England’s Andy Haldane and World Bank’s Paul Romer. And INET has launched a timely “Experts on Trial” series. In the first of these essays, Sheila Dows outlined how economists could forecast better (by emulating physics less and relying on a greater variety of approaches) and why economists should make peace with the  inescapable moral dimension of their discipline. In the second piece, Alessandro Roncaglia argued that considering economists as princes or…

AGGRO! In the long, hot summer of 1976, ACTION comic’s blood-crazed sharks, spy thugs and football yobs warped young minds across Britain. Creator Pat Mills tells JOHN NAUGHTON about the comic The Sun called the Sevenpenny Nightmare.

In the recent trend for publishing books based around specific years, no-one has yet laid claim to 1976. Like visitors strolling past a boss-eyed mongrel at Battersea Dogs’ Home, prospective authors have failed to see the appeal of a year that began with 15 people murdered in Northern Ireland before the Christmas decorations came down and continued in grindingly grim fashion with front pages dominated by endless tales of industrial aggro or Cod and Cold War stand-offs. Civil war raged in Angola and bombs exploded throughout London. Is this the MPLA, is this the IRA? Yes, on both counts, Johnny.

Action’s most infamous cover, as seen in High-Rise.

Listen closely and you can hear the tectonic plates…

Written by Gianluca Sgueo, Francesco Tropea and Marie-Laure Augere-Granier,

© Andreas P / Fotolia

With 52% of the European Union (EU) territory classified as predominantly rural, more than 170 million hectares of agricultural land, and 113 million people (nearly one quarter of the EU population) living in rural areas, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) represents one of the largest shares of expenditure from the EU budget. The CAP pools European Union resources spent on agriculture to protect the viable production of food, the sustainable management of natural resources, and to support rural vitality.

The CAP consists of two ‘pillars’, the first includes direct payments (i.e. annual payments to farmers to help stabilise farm revenues in the face of volatile market prices and weather conditions) and market measures (to tackle specific market situations and to support trade promotion). The second pillar concerns rural development policy and it is aimed at achieving balanced territorial development…

On Monday, if I can navigate through strikes, river floods, and tear gaz, I’ll be taking a course on the Great Gatsby curve in Rennes. And as I scroll through articles on the topic, I’m struck by an air of déjà-vu. Thought similar curves had been circulated by Miles Corak since 2006, the name was introduced by Alan Krueger, then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in a January 2012 address on inequality. Statistics, Krueger argued, show a negative relationship between inequality in the mid-1980s and intergenerational mobility across countries, one he called the “Great Gatsby Curve.”

Corak’s Great Gatsby Curve

Both the empirical existence and the theoretical foundations of the Gatsby curve have since been hotly debated within academia. It has been argued that no correlation, even less causation, existed across countries, nor across US local labor markets, that the relation disappears when other measures…

On Hardware, there’s a great illustrated history of computers here (and timeline). For econometrics software, I relied on Charles Renfro’s massive history. I have tried to classify the various ways in which computerization affected the development of economics here and I list further research questions here. Comments welcome. 

1930s

Leontief tries to solve 44 simultaneous equations on a mechanical computer developed by John Wilbur at MIT and fails. The computing capacities at that time, Dorfman recalls, enabled econs to solve 9 simultaneous equations in 3/4 hours.

Late 1940s

The ENIAC

While the first general-purpose computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) becomes operational in 1946, economists’ fascination with machine is then still related to the utilization of physics metaphors and tools to build economic models. In 1949, for instance, engineers Walter Newlyn and Bill Phillips (of the Phillips curve) built an hydromechanical analogue computer to simulate monetary and…

“The rise of applied economics from the 1970s onward is a consequence of computerization and better data.” This increasingly canonical narrative has the allure of truthiness, and it is therefore surprising that the computerization of economics has never been historicized. Gathering a few important occurrences of economists’ engagement with computers has made me aware of the unclear interplay of hardware, software, econometric theory, modeling, coding, data gathering and policy making. My tentative chronology hints at the many ways in which the development of computers have affected economics, from speeding up econometrics calculations to challenging entrenched conceptions of economic “proof,” from providing new objects of studies to forging new relationship between theory and empirical work, even eliminating the distinction between the two spheres. More specifically, here are the 9 tentative layers of influence I read in it (comments much  welcome)

1) Improving calculations: as they were brought by academic and research institutions…

How do academics work? How do they communicate? How do they analyse data? Does it differ between Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS)  avs Science, Technology and MedMath (STEM) . Lets see