Tuesday, July 24, 2012

More from David Warsh

"As it happened, when the Libor story began to break two weeks ago, I was reading Joel Mokyr on the institutional underpinnings of the Industrial Revolution. Mokyr, of Northwestern and Tel Aviv universities, is the foremost living historian of that momentous transformation, the author of The Enlightened Economy:  A History of Britain 1700-1850 (as well as the earlier The Lever of Riches:  Technological Creativity and Economic Progress; and The Gifts of Athena:  Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy).
In the essay I was reading, a contribution to Institutions and Economic Performance, a conference volume, Mokyr zeroed in on a question underlying the current controversy in which one of the world’s most important interest rates was manipulated in some small degree during the crisis of 2008, both for the preservation of civilization (by regulators) and for private profit (by traders) – How did London get to be the way it is?"

I have always thought one of Mokyr's books would be great for ASET bookclub.

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