Chapter 3 establishes that the Dutch had economic incentives to continue holding slaves. Slavery in Dutch New York was not just a cultural choice, but was reinforced by economic considerations. From archival sources and published secondary sources, I have compiled a unique dataset of prices for over 3,350 slaves bought, sold, assessed for value, or advertised for sale in New York and New Jersey. This data has been coded by sex, age, county, price, and type of record, among other categories. It is as far as I know the only slave price database for slaves in the Northern states yet assembled. Regression analysis allows us to compute the average price of Northern slaves over time, the relative price difference between male and female slaves, the price trend relative to known prices in the American South, and other variables such as the price differential between New York City slaves and slaves in other counties in the state. Slave prices in New York and New Jersey appear relatively stable over time, but declined in the nineteenth century. The analysis shows that slaveholders in Dutch New York were motivated by profit, and they sought strength and youth in purchasing slaves.

This chapter provides a motivation for this book, outlining the interests of economists in artificial intelligence, describing who this book is aimed at, and laying out the structure of the book.

We discuss how three social science disciplines, economics, sociology, and political science approach history and we contrast them to history as practiced by historians. We find that the drive to identify broadly generalizable causal effects, driven by the desire to predict and shape the future (the “Delphi syndrome”), frequently prompts social scientists to use history in a way that neglects the historians’ valuable insights. At the same time, the recent methodological developments in econometric techniques that have spread through the three disciplines place enormous, often unrealistic, historical demands on social scientists. We illustrate these issues by discussing several examples and we conclude by arguing that a way ahead consists in approaching the relation between idiographic and nomothetic research principles as one that approximates a continuum rather than a dichotomy.

A key response to legitimacy concerns over investment arbitration has been to point to the contribution of investment treaties to significant increases in in-bound foreign investment. The authors return to this vexed question of whether treaties offer material benefits and the large literature on the topic. Through a mixed methods approach and heightened awareness of the synergies and tensions within and between methodological approaches, they: (1) analyse econometrically the impact of ISDS provisions on inbound FDI; (2) present new qualitative research on investor and host state practices and attitudes; and (3) argue that social psychological research on cultural risk cognition is useful for both framing and presenting research questions and findings. They conclude that whatever the results that emerge from empirical research findings, the form of presentation will determine whether they will be accepted by the public or fall victim to growing polarization in perceptions and positions.

Asian economies are attempting to (re)balance their interests in fostering burgeoning outbound investment and attracting inbound investment, while preserving appropriate regulatory autonomy, while maintaining an attractive environment for foreign investors. To understand the issues and the likely future trajectory for international investment law in the region, this chapter first introduces Poulsen’s comprehensive recent study focusing on the experiences of developing countries world-wide, but including analyses of several Asian states (as outlined in Part 2 below). Despite marshalling powerful arguments and evidence for manifestations of ‘bounded rationality’ in BIT negotiations and drafting, some limits to his theory are suggested by a closer analysis of several countries in the region (Part 3). Given such historical experiences, it seems premature to abandon altogether the current treaty protection regime. Nonetheless, a combination of new approaches is worth considering under existing treaties, including more principled use of proportionality testing and deference to host state decision-making (Part 4.1). Greater care is also needed when assessing the net benefits from entering into new treaties, including the latest research into whether investor-state dispute settlement provisions lead to significantly greater cross-border investment (Part 4.2).

Chapter 4 analyzes Tinbergen’s scientific coming of age under the mentorship of the physicist Paul Ehrenfest. Tinbergen started his studies in mathematics and physics in 1921 in Leiden where he encountered some of the leading physicists of the age, such as Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Ehrenfest. Especially the latter helped turned Leiden into a lively scientific hub with innovations in the curriculum, teaching methods, and his famous inquisitive seminars, which earned Ehrenfest the title the Socrates of Leiden. From 1923 onward Tinbergen was mentored by Ehrenfest, who guided his studies in both physics and economics. The chapter details the difficult choice that Tinbergen had to make between these two fields, as well as the shared vision that Tinbergen and Ehrenfest developed about the role of science and scientists in modern society. In 1929 Tinbergen completed his dissertation in physics, which already contained some analogies between physical and economic phenomena. In the following years Ehrenfest stimulated Tinbergen’s statistical research in economics, which soon became part of the new field of econometrics. The two would host the meetings of the Econometric Society in 1933, but just days before, Ehrenfest would take his own life.

Chapter 6 analyzes the trajectory from his early econometric studies to the macroeconomic model he completed in 1936. During this period, he worked at the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Netherlands Economics Institute, to develop new methods to study business cycles. That research was linked to a network of similar institutes across Europe in London, Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and beyond. The chapter demonstrates how the analysis of the dynamics of particular markets provided inspiration for a study of the dynamics of the overall economy. The goal shared by many theorists of the age was to arrive at a dynamic economic theory, as opposed to the static equilibrium models of classical economics. Tinbergen sought to identify the relevant mechanism that could explain the type of movements typically seen in the overall economy: business cycles of about eight years. But the chapter argues that there was also an iterative dynamic between the political and policy issues of the time and Tinbergen’s work, which was never purely scientific or disconnected from practical concerns. The chapter concludes with a sketch of the main characteristics of his econometric work: the dynamic nature, the combination between theory and empirics, the substantive institutional emphasis, and the way in which Tinbergen believed that quantitative econometric studies could help overcome theoretical and political differences.

In the framework of a critical illustration of the contemporary history of economics, this chapter considers applied economics, econometrics, input–output analysis, descriptive statistics and statistical indicators, the theory of market regulation, market creation and auctions, the variegated history of energy economics from the Hotelling theorem to trilateral oligopoly and the Malthusian Club of Rome thesis of resource scarcity, the different approaches to environmental economics.