Re: Re: Superior culture

[Brad DeLong <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > In response to Michael K.'s mention of Huntington, Brad's journal
> > recently published a counter example.  It noted that the sugar colonies
> > in the Americas had the highest per capita income regardless of whether
> > the British, French or Spanish ruled them.  It suggests that the factor
> > endowments determined the institutions.
>
> I'm sorry, but that example is pretty bogus. Given the nature of the
> crop (with inelastic demand and the spread of sugar to new lands and
> the development of new forms of sugar harvesting, e.g., beet sugar)
> the high per capita incomes were bound to fall. That is, the high
> incomes were mostly the result of the _high price of sugar_ at the
> time.
>
> I suspect that the issue of "whether the British, French or Spanish
> ruled them" is more important to the issue of the distribution of
> income within the total of each colony.

Ken Sokoloff says not--that the distribution of income was enormously
ferocious in *all* the sugar islands.

Back when my brother was in college he wrote a senior thesis about
how the exact same self-government and liberty arguments deployed by
the American revolutionaries were deployed by sugar-island planters
to defend their property. An insight that had been previously
expressed by Samuel Johnson, who had said apropos of the American
Revolution: "Tell me, why do we hear the loudest yips for liberty
from the drivers of negros?"


Brad DeLong