Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Sheilagh discuss the economic impacts of historical pandemics, the “happy story” of the Black Death and why it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, the history of variolation and how entrepreneurs created vaccination franchises in 18th-century England, why local communities typically managed epidemics better than central authorities, the dastardly nature of medieval guilds, the European marriage pattern and its disputed contribution to economic growth, when sustained economic growth truly began in England, why the Dutch Republic stagnated despite its early success, whether she agrees with Greg Clark’s social mobility hypothesis, her experience and conducting “anthropological fieldwork” on English social customs, the communitarian norms she encountered while living in Germany, her upcoming research project on European serfdom, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
OGILVIE: …If you were a teenager in an English village in the 18th century and you were deciding, “I’m going to move to London and get a job,” you and your friendship group from the village would all go into the nearest town and pay a commercial variolator. You’d all get smallpox together. You’d go back to your village. You’d suffer through this mild case of smallpox, and then you would be immunized for life, assuming that you hadn’t died. You would go off to London and seek your fortune. It was very much a normal teenage thing to do.
There was this incredible franchising set up in England. It was like a McDonald’s, but to get variolated. There were these entrepreneurs who advertised themselves as having lower-risk ways of getting immunized and cheaper ways of getting immunized. There was this famous family of the Suttons that started a franchise in 18th-century England in the 1750s. Then they spread into the continent of Europe and actually into North America.
COWEN: You would have done it back then?
OGILVIE: Oh, definitely.
COWEN: With enthusiasm.
And this:
COWEN: You’ve now lived in England for well over 30 years. What’s been your biggest surprise about the place, if anything has stuck?
OGILVIE: It keeps on surprising me. I’ve actually lived here for more than 46 years. I moved here as an undergraduate. I came here when I was 16, and I feel as if I’m still doing anthropological fieldwork on the behavioral patterns of these strange local tribes. There are these systematic things — they’re charming, but they’re very strange.
For instance, just to give one example, English people are very reserved. I get on with that because Canadians are fairly reserved as well. It’s okay to talk to people in your neighborhood if they have a dog with them. That’s a conversation mediator. Or if you are gardening in your front garden, but if you’re in your back garden, you’re not supposed to talk to people. It’s taken me a few decades to observe this as an empirical regularity.
Nobody ever tells you that this is how you’re supposed to behave, but if you keep your field notebooks going as an anthropologist, you begin to notice the tribal patterns of the English. I must like them, since here I still am after more than four decades.
xxx
The post My Conversation with the excellent Sheilagh Ogilvie appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
