Avner Offer

Property and politics, 1870-1914 : landownership, law, ideology and urban development in England

List of figures and illustrations List of tables Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Part I. Law as Property - Solicitors, the Land Market and Legal Reform: 1. Solicitors: profile of a profession 2. A Benthamite project: land-law reform 1826-1870 3. Lawyers and Liberals 1870-1895 4. Solicitors and the property cycle 1895-1925 5. Benthamism blunted 1895-1925 Part II. Dimensions of Tenure: 6. Clergy, corporations and junior property professions 7. Landowners and entrepreneurs: Domesday revisited 8. Mortgagees 9. The ramparts of property Part III. Tenure and Taxation 1850-1900 10. Banners or spoils? The doctrines of taxation 11. The country versus the city in Parliament 1850-1885 12. Henry George and local taxation 1885-1895 13. Mr Goschens finance 1887-1892 14. Doles for squire and parson 1895-1902 Part IV. Municipal Enterprise and Private Capital: 15. towns against the Tories 1890-1902 Forging a weapon - the taxation of land values 1901-1906 17. The property cycle in London 1892-1912 18. Property values, local taxation and local politics Part V. Edwardian Climax 1906-1914 19. Towards the Peoples Budget 1906-1909 20. Romantic residues 21. Back to the land 22. Peoples Budget and rural land campaign 1909-1914 23. The urban question again 1910-1914 Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Time series citation data: the Nobel Prize in economics

Citation time series are not easy to compile from the most popular databases. The Data for Research service of the JSTOR journal database is a large and high-quality sample of citations, weighted towards humanities and social sciences. It provides time series citation data over many decades, back to the origins of the constituent journals. The citation trajectories of Nobel Prize winners in economics are analyzed here from 1930 to 2005. They are described mathematically by means of the Bass model of the diffusion of innovations. A bell-shaped curve provides a good fit with most prize winner citation trajectories, and suggests that economic knowledge follows the typical innovation cycle of adoption, peak, and decline within scholarly careers and shortly afterwards. Several variant trajectories are described.

Hayek in Citations and the Nobel Memorial Prize

Citations are a currency of academic standing. Among scholars, priority of discovery is acknowledged in footnotes and references, and the number of citations is a measure of the impact of conceptual innovations. Citation counts were first assembled in the 1920s. The Science Citation index was launched in 1960, and a companion Social Science Citation index was added in 1975.1 Both are now part of the Thomson-Reuters ISI database, which is the most prominent citation database in use today. All citation counts have biases.2 ISI is proprietary and is not easy to work with; its coverage dwindles the further back you go, it has a restricted range of journals, only counts first authors, and only takes account of books if they appear in journal citations. Elsevier’s more recent Scopus database covers many more journals, but has a poor coverage of the distant past. An online source of citations, Google Scholar, is easy to use, and it counts books as well as publications in languages other than English. That is not a decisive argument against it, since most important journals are available online, but the findings are weighted towards the present and the scores are always in flux. It is also difficult to extract citation on a yearly basis.

The Challenge of Affluence: Interview with Avner Offer

Why do rising incomes not make people happier? Some argue that it is because we quickly become accustomed to our new acquisitions. Others would say that it is because relative status is the goal, not the material acquisitions themselves. But Avner Offer opines it is because we have a difficult time postponing gratification. This is an intriguing notion, one of many in his new book.

The Market Turn: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism

Social democracy and market liberalism provide different solutions to the same problem: how to provide for life‐cycle dependency. Social democracy makes lateral transfers from producers to dependents by means of progressive taxation. Market liberalism uses financial markets to transfer financial entitlement over time. Social democracy came up against the upper limits of public expenditure in the 1970s. The ‘market turn’ from social democracy to market liberalism was enabled by liberalized credit in the 1980s. Much of this was absorbed into homeownership, which attracted majorities of households (and voters) in the developed world. Early movers did well, but eventually easy credit drove house prices beyond the reach of younger cohorts. Debt service diminished effective demand, which instigated financial instability. Both social democracy and market liberalism are currently in crisis.

Charles Hilliard Feinstein (1932–2004)

Charles Feinstein extended Richard Stone’s System of National Accounts of the UK back to the middle of the nineteenth century, with some elements extended into the eighteenth century. Together with Stone and Simon Kuznets, he advocated a bookkeeping model of general equilibrium that did not rely on assumptions of market clearing or optimality. He was a leader of economic history in Britain, and held important academic posts at Cambridge, York, and Oxford. He was born in South Africa, left it as a proscribed radical, and returned to work there after the end of apartheid.

Facing Future Adversity: A Challenge to Markets

Among the challenges to the working of free markets is our inability to deal rationally with the future. Instead of calculating the future risks and rewards, and what they mean to us today, we fall back on social conventions, norms, and institutions. But when it comes to potential climate change, are these enough? This is a vital and fresh analysis of how we must deal with the future.

The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation.

This is a completely new interpretation of the First World War. Dr Offer weaves together the economic and social history of the English-speaking world, the Pacific Basin, and Germany, with the development of food production and consumption. He argues that the roots of Germanys defeat went back to the late-Victorian decline of British agriculture and the development of Canada, Australia, and the United States as agrarian exporters, while the agrarian interests of America and Australia were crucial in shaping the peace. The book examines the relation between economic and military power, and legal and moral questions of selecting civilians as a strategic target. Suggested Citation