Miscellaneous Links
1 June 2011 at 9:18 am Peter G. Klein 1 comment
| Peter Klein |
- A public service from our good-twin site: What makes a good review?
- History matters? “[T]he descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture, today have lower rates of female participation in the workplace, in politics, and in entrepreneurial activities, as well as a greater prevalence of attitudes favoring gender inequality.”
- Another review of The Invention of Enterprise, by frequent O&M commenter Michael Marotta.
- Regression to the mean? A McKinsey report (via Russ) illustrates the difficulty of long-run supra-normal growth: “a startling 44 percent of all companies that grew at rates faster than 15 percent from 1994 to 1997 were growing at rates lower than 5 percent ten years later.”
- Another attempt to model the evolution of cooperation — this time by Acemoglu and Jackson.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Business/Economic History, Entrepreneurship, Management Theory, Strategic Management.
Organizations and Markets 
1.
gabrielrossman | 1 June 2011 at 2:50 pm
I’ve only skimmed it, but the plow thing strikes me as bullshit.
Theoretically, the issue with agriculture vs horticulture is that unlike horticulture, agriculture is incompatible with child-rearing and therefore is “man’s work,” which implies a very early gender division of labor. Of course the same could also be said of animal husbandry and so really all of central Asia and some of the arid parts of Africa should be coded as “masculine agriculture” (ie, plow or cattle). Of course that wouldn’t fit as well, but that is a telling problem if you’re trying to make an argument about early gender roles.
Furthermore, why are some Westernized countries outside of geographical Europe coded as plow cultures (eg, USA and Canada) but others seem to be coded on the basis of the relatively small cultural/demographic/institutional impact of their pre-colonization indigenous populations (eg, Australia and Argentina)?
There’s also the thing that it doesn’t make sense for within region comparisons — certainly I think of Egypt and North Africa (i.e., the major grain-exporting provinces of the Roman empire) as more egalitarian than Saudi Arabia.