The battle of the piggy banks with the money doses

I didn’t know this piece by Pieter Bruegel. That’s the only interesting thing I got from Niall Ferguson’s  BBC series the Ascent of Money. The show’s dismal and often out right inaccurate. Worse, instead of the promise financial history of the world, we get a third rate finance class with, admittedly, historical examples. It’s completely different, in particular there is an idea of evolution through try and error that is absolutely absent from the series. I’d like to see what a real historian like Oscar Gelderblom would have done with it.

The XVth World Economic History Congress is over!

Oooof, it’s over!

The 15th World Economic History Conference’s over, over 1300 participants from every continents, sort of the Olympics for hitory buffs and math geeks put together. On the very positive side: no organizational problems, everything seems to have moved smoothly and if it wasn’t for the quality of Dutch food in general the whole thing would have been perfect on a logistics point of view (thank you Jessica and Paula).

Why economic history? (part II)

This week the Economist has a review of Alan Beattie’s False Economy. A surprising economic history of the world. It is an excellent and highly entertaining book presenting  (mostly recent) economic history to the general public. I will be using the examples he gives to answer to my drop-out dad when he asks me for the nth time: “but what is it exactly that you do”. Lets put it that way: it is an truly great and thorow introduction and I can only wish I had the opportunity to read it when I started, it would have saved me a lot of uncertainty and unecessary readings.