The Institutional Revelation: A comment on Douglas W. Allen’s The Institutional Revolution

Mokyr, Joel; Espín-Sánchez, José Antonio

doi:10.1007/s11138-013-0235-7

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Allen bends the historical evidence when he says that people had to wait another 500 years, that is, up to the start of the 19th century, for mechanical clocks to become accurate, and that the real use of clocks only started once they were cheap enough to be privately owned. This is incorrect: the drive to quantify and measure, and the technical means to do so in a fairly accurate way, had their start in the Middle Ages (see also Mokyr and Espín-Sánchez, 2013: 378–379).…”

Section: The Pitfalls In Allen's the Institutional Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

History as a laboratory to better understand the formation of institutions

Bavel

2014

Journal of Institutional Economics

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A main instrument for better understanding the formation of institutions, and explaining the differences in their long-run development between periods and societies, would be to use history as a laboratory, allowing us to test the hypotheses developed in the social sciences. This paper discusses the study by Douglas Allen, The Institutional Revolution, in that context, in order to identify some of the pitfalls in the current attempts by economists to use historical analysis. Next, the paper places his English case into a comparative perspective, helped by the recent insights gained by economic and social history, to see how these pitfalls can be avoided. Based on this, I argue for comparisons at the regional, national and global levels, and for a multidimensional view which includes social contextualization, combined with an open eye for discontinuity in long-run patterns, in order to avoid one-dimensional and teleological approaches to institutional change. *

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Section: The Pitfalls In Allen's the Institutional Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%