Name: The national system of political economy
ISBN: 9780342215645

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Ligma123Sep 2022

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

Republic - Plato

Laws - Cicero

National System of Political Economy - Friedrich List

Man and Technics - Oswald Spengler

The Bible

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kapitzaNov 2016

Some of the confidence of this article (which one could describe as a remarkably, um, self-confident explanation of basic accounting identities in international trade) seems a little misplaced 20 years later. Especially if you've spent much time in the burned-out areas of America.

As an economic doctrine, running a country as if it were a company (in economic terms) has a name. It's called "mercantilism." Adam Smith coined this term to describe, essentially, normal economic policy before Adam Smith.

You don't need a time machine to investigate the effects of mercantilist economics, since the entire modern Far East is run on basically mercantilist principles. Just visit Harvard, ride the Amtrak to DC (looking out the windows), then fly to Shanghai. Cost, about $2K. This should give you a good gut feeling for whose econ professors are on the money.

On the other hand, Adam Smith sure could turn out a sentence. And so can this guy. Not clear that this is the best way to judge economics professors, however. For a classic text in mercantilist economics, try Friedrich List, _National System of Political Economy_ (1844):

https://books.google.com/books?id=4uuc7tdk0Z8C

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SSJPythonMay 2025

There's an excellent book by economist Michael Hudson called "America's Protectionist Takeoff" that discusses how the US used tariffs to promote certain industries in order to compete on the world stage. It was part of Alexander Hamilton's American System. Friedrich List, the German economist that wrote "The National System of Political Economy", used the American System to advocate for the same policies in Germany. Germany eventually adopted these policies and became an economic powerhouse themselves. Likewise, Meiji Japan went so far as to adopt the ideas of Friedrich List's economic policies, which resulted in them becoming a great power in a generation.

Tariffs can work, but only if they are targeted towards certain industries/sectors. They can't just be slapped across the board and be expected to work properly. Furthermore, they must be attached to certain KPIs such as exports (i.e., the ability to effectively compete on the international market). Joe Studwell's "How Asia Works" argues that Japan, Korea, and Taiwan all used tariffs and subsidies to promote their own "national champions". In turn, they forced those companies export their products rather than just sell domestically in order to compete. If they didn't meet those export targets, those companies were cut off from state support. Ha Joon Chang, a Korean developmental economist, likens this to raising a child: you spend their initial formative years supporting them until they are able to support themselves without your help.

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dredmorbiusAug 2016

You might enjoy this: a 19th century encyclopaedia edit war over free trade policies between a British publisher and its American partners.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...

Source: https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n1...

I've sketched in some related information at Ello which I need to incorporate. This is strongly related to Friedrich List's National System of political economy.

The 18th and 19th centuries were interesting times.

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dredmorbiusAug 2016

The idea of nurturing a nascent industrial base has been active for much of the past 200 years. It also breaks down on highly predictable lines:

Economically dominant nations are in favour of free trade. England / the UK in the 19th century. The United States since the 1950s.

Economically less-developed or backwards nations tend to oppose it, or at least, unrestricted free trade. The United States through much of the 19th century. The UK from about 1919 through the 1970s.

Ha-Joon Chang has been one of the louder voices for this recently, but his own scholarship points to many earlier instances. Friedrich List (mentioned in your article) wrote a book on the topic (The National System of Political Economy), available at the Internet Archive.

Among List's American publishers was J.B. Lippencott, who among other works also printed the authorised version of Chamber's Encyclopaedia. As I've just noted in another comment, there's a particularly illuminating bit of editorial umbrage expressed by the British publishers (Chambers) of some apparently unauthorised rewriting of select articles within the American edition:

https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n1...

In the interests of literature, and in defence of their rights as authors, Messrs Chambers have to make the following Satement regarding an American edition of their Encyclopaedia:

After a time, the American publishers began to make extensive alterations to the articles, a thing which had not been contemplated in the agreement. ...[I]t is a serious matter when, in a re-issue of a work, statements and opinions are introduced which are repudiated and hateful to the original proprietors...

The first "hateful" example was the article on free trade.

British: "This term, when used so late as twenty years ago, expressed a diputed proposition, and was the badge of a political party; it now expresses the most important and fundamental truth in political economy..."

American: "a dogma of modern growth, industriously taught by British manufacturers and their commercial agents...."

Also covered, "Protection -- Protection Duty" (tariffs), rather predictably "Slavery", and containing "a slanderous imputation concerning His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, which we should be ashamed to copy" among other offenses, an article on Elizabeth I.

I find this interesting on multiple grounds, both in the debates over economics, and in light of claims that Wikipedia's highly visible edit wars are somehow anomolous. I've long maintained they're not by virtue of existence but rather visibility, and feel rather vindicated by this evidence.

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