Adam Tooze Interview

This link is to the Penguin website and an interview with Adam Tooze, the author of pathbreaking economic history of Nazi Germany. Some interesting points about Tooze's background and motivations for writing this book come up, there is little on what I regard as the most interesting aspect of Tooze's research: Nazi perceptions of the causes of American prosperity. Tooze argues that the Nazi drive to acquire a vast Lebensraum in the Slavic east was inspired by America's frontier. The Nazi reasoning was that if the Americans could push Indians out of the way in order to get land and other resources, Germany could jolly well do the same. (the Nazis were clearly ignorant of the important role America's relative tolerance towards immigrants played in creating American prosperity).

Leaving aside the obvious moral dimensions of the issue, whether Hitler's plan for the east ever could have worked in the sense of creating prosperity is a question economic historians need to consider. Simply having lots of territory doesn't necessarily translate into prosperity. In fact, it can turn into a curse. This is something American economic historians (as well as Canadian and Australian) need to think about.

One counterfactual that has always intrigued me: suppose Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase never took place and the American people had been confined to the Eastern seaboard. How would their economy of have developed? Could they have reached OECD-country type living standards without tapping the natural resources of the interior? Would the US have developed electric instead of internal combustion cars?

An even more interesting counterfactual is Europeans never colonizing other continents at all. Would Europe have been able to escape the Malthusian trap with Australia and North America as a vent for surplus population?

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780713995664,00.html?sym=QUE



Brad De Long has some thoughts on Tooze's book. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/08/the_wages_of_de.html