This paper analyzes the human capital training strategies adopted between the 1850s and 1930s by railroad companies in Mexico and Chile. These two countries enable one to contrast the different routes taken by the same type of firm, technology and labor force. A propos of this, we suggest that...

‘Eurasia’ seems to be a relatively clear concept in terms of physical geography, but much less so for social sciences. While the word ‘Eurasia’ is constantly used in various contexts (more today than twenty years ago), the specific notion of what it actually means is unclear. According...

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scienti�c theories are auxiliary constructs re-describing people's behav- ioural dispositions. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, no less existent than the unobservable entities and...

I argue that a form of consciousness may be found in American economic history, one which is both mathematically demonstrable and important. In this book I present a model of economic and political growth based upon systematic addition. We begin with a philosophic model of trade (pp. 34-46);...

‘Constitutions and Commitments” has inspired the economic literature on the importance of “Legal origins” (LaPorta et al., 1998, 2008), which vindicates the notion that post-Glorious Revolution English institutions were particularly conducive to economic growth. More recently economists...

As one of the world’s most unequal societies, Brazil is often referred to as a land of contrasts: the causes of its high levels of income inequality continuously debated. When solutions are discussed, one of the more frequently recited policy prescriptions is to expand the supply of education...

This paper was presented to the May 2013 conference of the PostGLobalization Initiative (http://pglobal.org/) in response to a request from the organizers to present suggestions for the policies required to get out of the economic crisis which opened in 2007, and their implications for the...

The Great Famine of Ireland from 1845-51 ranks as one of the most lethal of all time, claiming approximately one eighth of the country’s population. Utilizing Famine Relief Commission reports to develop a micro-level dataset of blight severity, I find that in the short run, districts more...

This paper extends our previous work on grain market integration across Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Dobado, García-Hiernaux and Guerrero, 2012). By using the same econometric methodology, we now present: 1) a search for statistical evidence in the East of...

In sum, in these essays I explore the self-similarity between levels, the fractal structure of reality, through an investigation of an inherent and unavoidable uncertainty which is unique to each level. These essays will demonstrate that as each level struggles to resolve its own inherent...