Marie Duggan

It was very exciting to be along for the ride.  For those who know me, it will be no surprise that I fnd compelling the paper on the sustainability of the US current account deficit (Colin Volz) or credit card interest rates as usury (Gino Frisella).  The surprise is how interesting I’m finding the papers about skiing (Laura Demanche), baseball (Jimmy Barone), golf ( Marc Silano) and hunting (Cody Larrimore)–all subjects about which I know zip!  I am fascinated to see my students writing about subjcts that really motivate them.  Now Jimmy has got me staying up late to read Moneyball about the underfunded Oakland A’s using econometrics to find the underpriced top players to win. 

I’m just back from presenting a paper at UMass Amherst which wound up being etitled, “Through a Mahalanobis Lens: Growth and Transformation in Colonial California.”  (Download from UMass, economics, courses, 802 with different title). Scott Carter was a true friend and really went over the paper in a way that nobody could have expected.  I was also so fortunate to have Mohan Rao in the audience, with his deep knowledge of India and development economics.  I’m teaching development next semester after several years, and this was also a chance to get my head back into that theoretical lit.  My hypothesis that the Franciscans put 2/3 of investment into religion rather than production proved correct.  However, I was shocked to find how very little increase in productivity they got for their investment.  People think they were interested in extracting money from Indians. Prior to 1810, it was so much the opposite.  They would really have had to suppress economic growth in order to make the religious aspects of their project grow.  Carol Heim had an interesting comment about how the religious and the economic motive have a similar impetus for making the system grow–so true, but this exercise also showed the very distinct types of growth each generates.  Jerry Friedman, Laurie Nisonof, and Keene’s own Dan Alosso (now PhD student at UMass in history) also contributed nuggets of gold in the discussion that followed. 

Laurie also hosted me in her lovely apartment, and we created an impromptu subcommittee meeting of the URPE steering committee by having dinner with our national office person Pat Duffy and labor organizer Frances Boyes.  From there all four of us attended the fundraiser for Dollars and Sense at Bob Pollin’s house.  Laurie and Carol and Jerry were all there, and gave me introductions to many profs in the five college area, which was so kind of them.  Bob Pollin is sort of a light for us New School econ grads, and it was nice to get to know him a bit better.

Everybody encouraged me to attend the economic history/development workshop at UMass–after 10 years here in Keene, I finally think that this is something I may do quite often.  There is so much about Keene that keeps me attached to this place and this college, but I had missed the intellectual debate with economic historians and development types, so this is like the last piece of the puzzle falling into place. You’d think maybe this is something I could have done long ago–but I really couldn’t, there was such a steep learning curve when I started teaching, and then the two babies.  The one hour drive back and forth was actually out of the question.  But now those babies are not babies!

By the way, Dollars and Sense is a very important magazine for political economists.  Economic turbulence feels like a natural disaster to the populace, many of us got involved in this stuff so that we could empower people to understand what was happening to them, and there are really very few outlets for getting the information from  academia to actual people.  D&S is in pretty dire straights at the moment, because people no longer buy textbooks for teaching courses, so they have to recreate their funding model.  I, always utterly broke, actually coughed up a donation, perhaps others would like to also–or get a subscription.  Gift subscriptions are only $15 per year.  Guess what everybody I know is getting for the holidays!!  Readers may know I published a paper in Dollars and Sense Jan/Feb 2009 (see links).

My pet project these days is to explore Keynes’ proposal for an international currency union.  So many papers on this topic are dry.  To teach it to my students, I apply his model to modern China/US imbalances, so see when penalties would have kicked in if we had adopted Keynes’ ideas.  I presented the first half (on US foreign debt buildup) in March 2009 at the Eastern’s, I’ll present the second half on China’s imbalances in March 2010 at the Eastern’s in Philly. 

Off getting reviewed is a paper submitted to JHET on Spanish economists Campomanes and Jovellanos.  If you are the reviewer, yes, I know, I failed to put in a lit review!  I’m remedying that by reading Spanish commentary on 18th century economics after the kids are in bed; it certainly takes my mind far away from normal preoccupations.  Interlibrary loan is bringing me books from Puerto Rico and Texas, Linda Madden is my lifeline to the intellectual world.   The research involved exploring why Spanish economic thought sees the church as the enemy of the private sector, and the government as the private sector’s ally.  I wound up also sorting out my own ideas about the free market utopian dream, and I came away with respect for the intellectual honesty and personal integrity of Jovellanos in particular. Campomanes, on the other hand, was tough; he managed to get ideas out there and survive politically, sometimes cutting deals Jovellanos couldn’t stand. 

Every now and then I teach US Economic History, in which I work with students to explore the industrial revolution here in Cheshire County, NH in 1850 and 1870, using data from the manufacturing census at the Historical Society of Cheshire County.  We are hoping to move into studying the deindustrialization of Keene in the 1970s in the next iteration of that course–and ultimately to its rebirth as a highly competitive base of export manufacturing for certain sectors.

From my California research I’ve published an article on the way Scholastic economic ideas motivated Franciscan decisions in California (HOPE 2005), and a monograph for the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation about the Chumash and the Presidio.  There are so many other papers half-birthed on my computer.  These are the ideas I’d still like to get to:

1) Exploring Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation in the context of early California.  I gave a lecture to my ISECON 360 students this past spring in which I showed how missions both crushed the previous economic basis (native hunting and gathering aka seasonal migration) and kept Indian communities in existence within the Spanish agricultural economy.  Mexican ranches in California then worked to destroy missions, and hence to further erode Indian community–and yet looking back, they were at least small scale, leaving room for personal one-on-one negotitiations.  Large scale agriculture overrode the Mexican ranchos, replacing on-site labor force communities with massive seasonal importations of first Japanese, later Mexican, farmworkers with no rights.  Over time, larger capitals eat smaller. The missions seem less onerous when seeing what came next. 

2) A sort of cultural paper (can economists do that?) which might explore the arguments that Franciscans destroyed Indian civilization at the missions.  Over time, I’ve come to believe this reflects the desire of Americans to believe that Indian civilization was entirely destroyed before any English-speakers arrived.  It’s understandable that our own society would like to believe that, but it leads to a one-dimensional view of missions that does not serve to increase human understanding of California’s multi-cultural past.  I can’t seem to get anything published until I figure out how to lay out this larger view.  California “experts” keep blocking publication of my work in major journals because they think I’m a “dupe of the Franciscans,” but actually I think I’m the vanguard of multicultural history.  Somebody is deluded, hope it’s not me!

3) A paper connecting the demographic data on Indians in California with the investment patterns of Franciscans at the missions.  Is there a connection? This is very exploratory, but it would be quite intellectually satisfying to connect these two quantitative strands of California history–the way Physicists wish they could find a grand unifying theory.