Observando a Colombia: Albert O. Hirschman y la Economía del Desarrollo

Los años que Albert O. Hirschman vivió en Colombia le sirvieron para moldear el contenido de su principal publicación: La estrategia del desarrollo económico. La experiencia adquirida durante su estadía en Colombia, donde participó en misiones del gobierno que recorrieron todo el país, le permitió diseñar un método de investigación basado en las prácticas observadas de lo que la gente hacía, contrario a las visiones ortodoxas que planteaban normas a partir de lo que la gente debería hacer. Su crítica a la economía planificadora del desarrollo, basada en el crecimiento balanceado, planteaba la estrategia hacía el desarrollo económico no como una necesidad de superar la escasez de factores sino como una necesidad de mejorar la habilidad de los agentes para tomar decisiones. Sus observaciones de la cotidianidad colombiana le brindaron la evidencia necesaria para entender que los problemas se resolvían en la práctica y le permitieron generar estrategias para facilitar la solución de los problemas a partir del agente económico.Desarrollo económico, Albert O. Hirschman, estrategia

Hirschman’s Choice: Exiles and Obligations of an anti-Fascist

This essay uses the life history of Albert O. Hirschman, especially the years of his active political engagements that preceded his intellectual career, to explore the “micro-history” of choices about whether to stay and fight or back and flee. It also considers some of Hirschman’s own thinking about action—and the choices between exercising voice, loyalty, or defection, the bases of his influential book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Finally, it explores the ever-complicated connections between personal experience and theoretical reflection.Basé sur des éléments biographiques de la vie d’Albert O. Hirschman, en particulier les années de son engagement politique précédant sa carrière intellectuelle, cet essai explore la « micro-histoire » des choix qu’il fit : rester et combattre ou se retirer et fuir. L’essai étudie aussi la pensée de Hirschman sur l’action, c’est-à-dire le choix entre exercer le droit à la parole, la loyauté, ou se taire, alternatives explorées dans son ouvrage influent Exit, Voice and Loyalty. L’étude analyse enfin les relations infiniment compliquées entre expérience personnelle et réflexion théorique

Empires, merchants, and the origins of politics in the Iberian Atlantic

This essay connects several fields of historical research about the age of revolutions in Latin America: the crisis of the Iberian Atlantic, the transformation of merchant capital, and the rise of new sources of political legitimacy.  It points to the importance of the slave trade in the South Atlantic, and how the crisis of empires had a fundamental effect on slave economies.  Warfare produced, therefore, a fiscal crisis of the empires and a social crisis of a regime of accumulation. The outcomes of the conjuncture were new social actors and new models of politics.  In the debate about whether the age of revolutions was one of continuity or discontinuity in Latin America, this essay makes the case for discontinuity.  It draws attention to the centrality of slavery to the nature of the regimes.  It also calls for attention to social and economic forces in the making of new political institutions and ideas.This essay connects several fields of historical research about the age of revolutions in Latin America: the crisis of the Iberian Atlantic, the transformation of merchant capital, and the rise of new sources of political legitimacy.  It points to the importance of the slave trade in the South Atlantic, and how the crisis of empires had a fundamental effect on slave economies.  Warfare produced, therefore, a fiscal crisis of the empires and a social crisis of a regime of accumulation. The outcomes of the conjuncture were new social actors and new models of politics.  In the debate about whether the age of revolutions was one of continuity or discontinuity in Latin America, this essay makes the case for discontinuity.  It draws attention to the centrality of slavery to the nature of the regimes.  It also calls for attention to social and economic forces in the making of new political institutions and ideas

The Rites of Statehood: Violence and Sovereignty in Spanish America, 1789-1821

This essay explores the varieties of expressions of political violence during the revolutionary conjuncture, 1789 to 1821, across Spanish America from New Spain to Buenos Aires. It challenges some of the familiar ways in which historians have pointed to violence as an inevitable effect of the end of empire, and instead argues that violence became a means to engage in the political process that brought down empire. At the same time, it argues that the role of violence in bringing down the old regime and creating new institutions and habits of rule and protest was at least as important as the role of the public sphere and elections, which historians have recently accented. Indeed, the essay suggests ways in which historians of the public sphere might consider the rituals and languages of violence as part of public conduct, while it was the opening of the public sphere that created a means, or space, to push vindictive patterns of violence into more vindictive directions. Violence was not of a piece, a constant display of carnage. The essay accordingly seeks to illustrate the varieties of uses of political violence and its changes over time, from the first crises of the 1790s to the widespread savagery of the 1810s

The Void Phenomenon Explained

We use high-resolution N-body simulations, combined with a halo occupation model of galaxy bias, to investigate voids in the galaxy distribution. Our goal is to address the 'void phenomenon' of Peebles (2001), which presents the observed dearth of faint galaxies in voids as a challenge to the current cosmology. In our model, galaxy luminosity is determined only as a function of dark matter halo mass. With this simple assumption, we demonstrate that large, empty voids of ~15 Mpc/h in diameter are expected even for galaxies seven magnitudes fainter than L*. The predictions of our model are in excellent agreement with several statistical measures; (i) the luminosity function of galaxies in underdense regions, (ii) nearest neighbor statistics of dwarf galaxies, (iii) the void probability function of faint galaxies. In the transition between filaments and voids in the dark matter, the halo mass function changes abruptly, causing the maximum galaxy luminosity to decrease by ~5 magnitudes over a range of ~1 Mpc/h. Thus the boundary between filaments and voids in the galaxy distribution is nearly as sharp for dwarfs as for ~L* objects. These results support a picture in which galaxy formation is driven predominantly by the mass of the host dark matter halo, and is nearly independent of the larger-scale halo environment. Further, they demonstrate that LCDM, combined with a straightforward bias model, naturally explains the existence of the void phenomenon.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, submitted to ApJ. citations update

Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clustering and the Mass-to-Number Ratio of Galaxy Clusters

We place constraints on the average density (Omega_m) and clustering amplitude (sigma_8) of matter using a combination of two measurements from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: the galaxy two-point correlation function, w_p, and the mass-to-galaxy-number ratio within galaxy clusters, M/N, analogous to cluster M/L ratios. Our w_p measurements are obtained from DR7 while the sample of clusters is the maxBCG sample, with cluster masses derived from weak gravitational lensing. We construct non-linear galaxy bias models using the Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) to fit both w_p and M/N for different cosmological parameters. HOD models that match the same two-point clustering predict different numbers of galaxies in massive halos when Omega_m or sigma_8 is varied, thereby breaking the degeneracy between cosmology and bias. We demonstrate that this technique yields constraints that are consistent and competitive with current results from cluster abundance studies, even though this technique does not use abundance information. Using w_p and M/N alone, we find Omega_m^0.5*sigma_8=0.465+/-0.026, with individual constraints of Omega_m=0.29+/-0.03 and sigma_8=0.85+/-0.06. Combined with current CMB data, these constraints are Omega_m=0.290+/-0.016 and sigma_8=0.826+/-0.020. All errors are 1-sigma. The systematic uncertainties that the M/N technique are most sensitive to are the amplitude of the bias function of dark matter halos and the possibility of redshift evolution between the SDSS Main sample and the maxBCG sample. Our derived constraints are insensitive to the current level of uncertainties in the halo mass function and in the mass-richness relation of clusters and its scatter, making the M/N technique complementary to cluster abundances as a method for constraining cosmology with future galaxy surveys.Comment: 23 pages, submitted to Ap