The Habsburg Empire and the long half-life of economic institutions | Hacker News Reader

The Habsburg Empire and the long half-life of economic institutions

voxeu.org

33 pointsMaysonL25 comments

In 100 years I'll bet that there would still be significant social and cultural differences between hong kong and mainland China. These cultural legacies live for a long time when they are popular and widely accepted as norms.

Very interesting, especially considered how many societal changes these countries have gone through post-WWI. I wonder if similar results could be drawn about the Roman Empire, for instance?

Of course it can. The (western) roman empire roughly corresponds to the christian part of the world.

You could even go further and say that the Western Empire corresponds roughly to Catholic/protestant Christendom while the Eastern is Orthodox where Christianity has remained.

There is that, true. And I guess some legal principles also derive from Roman times. But I meant more the trust/mistrust in government that they were measuring in the article.

Yeah. I went into hand-waving-territiry, because didn't have any concrete references at hand. In medieval history, there is a distinction to be made between roman and germanic law. The concept of roman law is that things are written down and a crime is interpreted in relation to the formal, written text. In germanic law, things are much more contextual. There weren't a lot of formal laws, instead you'll have collection of respected eldars pass judgement. So basically, roman law is pretty much what we have today.

Now, I still haven't directly answered your question of course, but the fact that the whole concept of law can be traced back to the romans is at least fairly close.

Some of that Roman vs. Germanic distinction still remains, right? The European continental system relies much more on the written laws, and the Anglo-Saxon system more on precedent.

Should also be noted that I wasn't really expecting an answer. A proper answer would probably require another study like the one referenced in this post :-)

Thought provoking. Whilst I understand acqq's cautions about specifics, I think that the long-term view of these things is insufficiently discussed. We have a limited understanding of how e.g. language and phraseology, which are passed from generation to generation, affect our judgements - but it would be surprising if they did not.

As someone from that area, who had met people both from the inside and from the outside of the former border, I would like to tell you that the conclusions of this study are 100% correct.

As someone from the former empire, I stopped reading after this:

> it shows that firms and people living in what used to be the empire have higher trust in courts and police.

People in eastern and southeastern Europle have a low trust of police, courts and government.

And? Those two statements don't contradict each other.

Indeed. The economists were presumably speaking relatively.

How don't they contradict each other? They said one thing, the reality is another thing.

Earning $1 per day is a very low income yet it is still higher than earning $0.5 per day.

It is so low that any additional lower rating would be complete anarchy.

Why are people on HN who are critical of articles so quick to tell everyone precisely the sentence at which they stopped reading an article? If anything, criticism from someone who stopped reading mid-stream should be taken less seriously than criticism from someone who managed to read the whole thing. Lots of worthwhile articles have foolish sentences in them.

This is beyond foolish and even with the worthwhile points in the article (I read it, "stopped reading was only a figure of speech) it renders it amateur and not serious.

The "maximal extent" limits in Balkan states happened only during the wars. Moreover, the population structure in some areas changed significantly after the same wars. I'd be vary of a "discussion paper" that doesn't consider these nuances when sampling. Then how much of the discussion paper uses scientific method properly and how much of it just matches the agenda? I don't know, the discussion paper is behind the paywall.

The paper is here: http://ftp.iza.org/dp5584.pdf

Some quotes relevant to the questions you asked:

To ensure that the “control group” to which the Habsburg “treatment group” is compared does not include locations that had actually also been exposed to the Habsburg treatment at some time, throughout the definition of the Habsburg variable H is an indicator of whether a location has ever been part of the Habsburg Empire. By contrast, defining the Habsburg variable by Habsburg affiliation at any particular point in time would mean that part of the “control group” had also received a “Habsburg treatment” at some point in history. For example, defining the Habsburg treatment by its borders just before its demise in 1918 would mean that several regions that had been part of Habsburg until 1908 would constitute a substantial part of the control group in the border sample. However, as one robustness analysis below, we show that results are robust in a specification that restricts the analysis to locations that were part of the Habsburg Empire in 1900 (and their control locations) while dropping all locations from the analysis that had been part of the Habsburg Empire at some time but were no longer in 1900.

The specification of our basic model assumes that the Habsburg treatment effect is independent of the duration of treatment. To test for the validity of this assumption, we will also estimate models that allow the Habsburg effect to differ by length of a community’s affiliation with the Habsburg Empire: […]

— Empirical Model, p. 13

Third, and most importantly, in contrast to the basic assumption of a regression discontinuity design, there are a number of reasons to expect some sort of diffusion to and interdependence between neighboring towns across the former Habsburg border. Such reasons include migration and marriage between neighboring towns; local spillovers whereby inhabitants of an Ottoman town just across the border observe that well-functioning public services may have positive consequences, so that they may imitate them to some extent; “frontier” effects in that authorities may behave differently if located close to the enemy, such as when a Habsburg local authority may behave more authoritarian if the Ottomans are next door; and political competition across neighboring locations. All of these effects would mean that the Habsburg status of one town may affect outcomes in towns that are located directly on the other side of the border. Note that any of such diffusion or interaction effects work against our identification strategy finding a significant difference between Habsburg and non-Habsburg locations in the border sample.

— Empirical Model, p. 15

(There is also some relevant discussion with regard to your questions in the Results section.)

Note that all of the things you mentioned would have made it less likely to find an effect.

This looks like solid work. Like always (especially when social sciences are involved), there are problematic aspects to it. Social science is damn hard to get right.

Thank you for the link to the paper. I wasn't able to find in the paper any basic data, only derived coefficients. The map is the same, including the "maximal extent" which happened only at the few years the territories were occupied during WWI. The big movements of big amount of people over the territories during the turbulent history are also somehow not addressed. There's a unique history behind each settlement, not taking that in the consideration or not showing what you actually did I believe any conclusion can be generated. I still question some premises and the execution of the paper.

That may be true for the southern border in the map, but in the North the left half of the "maximal extent" seems to be from before the Austro-Prussian war of 1867, and I'm not sure when they had the right half, but that territory was occupied by Germany in WWI rather than Austria-Hungary.

These "leading economists" have understood nothing about the Habsburg Empire. Nor the economic power of thereof (see China). Habsburgs were ruling by force, but it would have been a perpetual war without prosperity (see Iraq, Afghanistan) if they wouldn't have observed the following.

The premise was, that it has three foundation pillars, supporting each other:

- members of the empire had a common monetary policy, to have a common economy

- which supported a common military power to ensure the "freedom" to

- have a common foreign policy.

If you follow the above, you understand that it is a recurring theme, and it is still the premise as of today.

In fact, the American Empire [1] has drawn from it heavily (USD, .mil, and the current situation). Furthermore, this is the underlying thesis of the European Union: common market, common currency (€), a very discretely nascent military power which is heavily opposed by the USA (but all is in the guise of NATO), in order to have a common foreign policy (most people's interest of this globe do not coincide with the interest of those who shape USA foreign policy [not so] behind the scenes). Even so, aspirations of the Latin American Union and the Arab Union are also taking a page from this book -- though sidelined by western propaganda as much as possible, for obvious reasons. China with the cantons and the Yuan has a very coherent execution.

Regarding the half-life of the empires, the Habsburgs were well educated enough to know their lessons from history. They know the opening chapters of Bainville's bestsellers. They knew what to avoid but alas, nothing can last forever...

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1020_ageofempire/

I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with. The paper doesn’t seem to be incompatible with your views.

Here is what this column is all about (second sentence of the introduction): “This column shows that these empires can leave behind a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms.”

The column doesn’t want to shed light on how empires work. It’s like you are talking about completely different things.

I'll just say, that this blog/paper is pseudoscience, with all the bells and whistles of the formalities [1].

[1] i.e. /“control group” to which the Habsburg “treatment group”/

Why is that? Justification for such an accusation is very much in order.

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