Marie Duggan

Casey McBrien in Senior Research Project, Fall 2009

Patrick Rodden, Senior Research Project, FAll 2009

Eight courageous and talented students are coming with me to present their work at the Eastern Economic Association Feb. 26-28, in Philadelphia.  We are putting Keene State Economics on the map!  Thank you to the Student Conference Fund for the opportunity, and good luck to Laura Demanche, Xia Kyrousis, Justin de Montigny, Sam Rosendahl, Jimmy Barone, Gino Frisella, John Garvey and Casey McBrien.  My Tulsa colleague Scott Carter has organized fourteen URPE sessions, and I’m also presenting on two of them.  Now I’m trying to convince Alex and my students they want to go to a Jazz bar on Friday night, and Alex and my URPE buddies to head for Latin restaurant El Vez on Saturday night, hey my weekend out of town with no kids will be set!  Well, there is that business of finishing the two papers I’m supposed to present, and reading those two papers I’m supposed to discuss, and guiding the students in their presentations.  It will all fall into place.  If you miss my students in Philly, you can catch them at the Academic Excellence Conference here in Keene on the last weekend in March.

My papers: one is on Keynes’ ICU proposed at Bretton Woods.  This time, I’m comparing his proposal with that of HD White a bit more, and looking at how the gold standard and its failure influenced what he put together.  Keynes just assumes away speculative flows of capital, which does make it a lot easier to make sure that countries can use domestic expansionary policies to stabilize employment.  White has this more complex proposal, and more realistic one, where the World Bank could pursue open market operations inside nations to stabilize interest rates (I thought it was the IMF, but now I see Gardner, p. 75 he gave this to the World Bank).  This is fascinating because it is a second method of protecting the ability of nations’ to use monetary policy that does not require banning free capital mobility.   Jane D’Arista pointed this out in a 2009 paper in CJE.  One suspects that HD White’s ideas deserve more attention than they get.   Imagine if we had had a World Bank that simply stepped into Asian nations during the financial crises of 1997-98 and puchased the bonds of local governments in such quantities that capital flight could not destabilize interest rates, GDP.

The second paper is a rewrite of the Mahalanobis model I applied to early California last fall.  I want to build on Carol Heim’s suggestion that the paper really gets at the distinctions between the religious motive and the profit motive for growth–while at the same time bringing out that the religious impulse is also a growth-generating force, not stasis.

These papers both go along with my courses.  Econ Development is a 300 level one with a term paper.  How am I going to reign myself in from asking those students to delve in too much?  This is only a 300 level course, Duggan, calm down.  I hope we get to the Chenery two-gap model, that’s the plan.  Maybe I can prod some students into looking into development in India, China, Brazil in the classic years 1950-1980. I am so curious about those early hopeful attempts.   I suspect free market change in India and China is going to be more appealing for them. The second course is Histoy of Economic Thought, 1200 to the present.  We were reading Adam Smith’s parable of the ambitious poor man’s son this morning.  Smith says the ambitious man is suspicious of all his friends, one student noted.  That Smith, so insightful–even if in the end, conscience, love of one’s rep, and sympathy do not seem to have the strength to check the evil side-effects of the ambition he wants to unleash.

Back burner: Jovellanos and Campomanes paper is sitting on some reviewer’s desk.  Please, it’s been almost two years, I can revise it.  I know it needs advice from an Iberian scholar, and would welcome such advice.

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.