Peter Temin News Today

America as a third world country Asia News Network (ANN) is the leading regional alliance of news titles striving to bring the region closer, through an active sharing of editorial content on happenings in the region.

This class is now seen as a thriving and dynamic catalyst for economic growth on a worldwide scale

New desperate ideas to fix chronic US trade imbalances, like capital controls, are getting a hearing.

Presidential contenders ignore root causes threatening Social Security. Is it due to their reliance on wealthy donors?

After Google's Bard A.I. chatbot invented fake books in a demonstration with 60 Minutes, Sundar Pichai admitted: "You can’t quite tell why it said this."

You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation. This edition went out to over 15,600 subscribers. To support my work, you can upgrade your subscription here: One of the weird things about Britain, despite its being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is that its financial infrastructure was for a long time remarkably backward. Its “Financial Revolution”, by which both people and the state began to bor...

There is a strong ethical case to be made for reparations to descendants of American slaves. MIT economic historian Peter Temin’s recent book “Never Together” (2022, Cambridge University Press) and William Darity and A. Kirsten Mullin’s “From Here to...

Welcome to the Rise of Steel part II. We previously looked at the early stages of industrialization of iron and steelmaking, between roughly 1200 and 1850. To briefly recap, making steel was an involved, multistep process. Iron would first be smelted from iron ore in a blast furnace, resulting in high-carbon pig iron. This pig iron was then placed in a special furnace (initially a finery furnace, later a puddling furnace) to remove the carbon and other impurities, resulting in wrought iron. Wrou...

One of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the ubiquity of steel. Nearly every product of industrial civilization relies on steel, either as a component or as part of the equipment used to produce it. Without it, Vaclav Smil notes in “Still the Iron Age”, modern life would largely be impossible:

CAMBRIDGE  —  At the heart of development economics lies the idea of “productive dualism”. The economists who founded the field of development economics, such as the Nobel laureate Caribbean economist W. Arthur Lewis, noted that poor countries’ economies are split between a narrow “modern” sector that uses advanced technologies and a much larger “traditional” sector