I just finished reading “Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China,” 1000-2000 by Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini, and Joel Mokyr. The book, as suggested by the title, is a study of comparative economic history. My reading of economic history is limited to reading biographies of Marx and Keynes. My reading of […]

I first met my friend Gunter at a scientific meeting on the Greek Island of Crete in 1986. He was from East Germany. I knew his published work at the time, and when I shared my unpublished data, he agreed to send me some Drosophila stocks that would advance my research. At the meeting, he […]

I’m reading Homelands: A personal history of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash. The book is organized by decades, and the decade of 1980-89 was a historically significant one for Central Europe. By the end of the decade, the “communist” dictatorships in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia had collapsed. Real history resists simplification, but to […]