User:Carlanthonymosk/sandbox

Carl Mosk Carl Mosk is an economic historian, demographer, and expert on Asian economies. The hallmarks of his research are comparative history; placing analysis of historical development in a contemporary perspective; a concern with the interaction of ideology with economic behavior; and a focus on Japan. Born in California in 1944 - the son of an economic historian, Latin American expert, and member of the Economics Department at the University of California at Berkeley, Sanford Mosk – Carl Mosk spent a year in Mexico at age one, his father doing research in Mexico City. Speaking Spanish before English, he developed an interest in foreign societies and foreign languages well before he entered pre-school in Berkeley. Graduating from Berkeley High School in 1962, Mosk enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley where he majored in Mathematics. He continued his Mathematics studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Master of Science degree in 1967. Switching to Economics, he graduated from Harvard University in 1976, writing a dissertation on the demographic transition in Japan. In Japan he was fortunate enough to carry out his research at Hitotsubashi University and at the Research Office on Population Problems (Jinko Mondai Kenkyujo) at the Ministry of Health and Welfare. In later research trips to Japan Mosk benefitted from positions at the Institute for International Economics at Nagoya University and at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. Mosk commenced his teaching career in 1967, teaching Mathematics at Spellman College in Atlanta Georgia for one academic year, 1967-1968. He continued his academic teaching career as a graduate student at Harvard University; as an Assistant Professor at the University of California (Berkeley); as an Associate Professor at Santa Clara University; and as a Full Professor at the University of Victoria. Beginning in 2002 he began teaching in the Summer School at the University of California at Davis. As well Mosk taught in Japan, lecturing in both English and Japanese at Doshisha University in Kyoto. Mosk’s research falls into two sub-groups. One sub-group deals with Japanese economic and demographic history: the demographic transitions in fertility and mortality; height and weight of children and young adults, the so-called biological standard of living; urbanization; and immigration and emigration. He has published five books dealing with Japan: Patriarchy and Fertility: Japan and Sweden, 1880-1960 (Academic Press, 1983); Competition and Cooperation in Japanese Labour Markets (Macmillan Press Ltd., 1995); Making Health Work: Human Growth in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 1996); Japanese Industrial History: Technology, Urbanization and Economic Growth (M.E.Sharpe, 2001); and Japanese Economic Development: Markets, Norms, Structures (Routledge, 2007). With the exception of the book comparing the Japanese demographic transition in fertility with the Swedish case, none of these works are explicitly comparative. In writing about Japan Mosk has emphasized the crucial importance of economic logic: opportunity cost; the importance of aggregate demand, and the decomposition of supply side aggregate per capita income growth into augmented factors of production and total factor productivity growth. At the same time he has embedded ideology into his analysis. For instance in explaining why the Japanese fertility transition occurred he emphasized the importance of social norms in shaping the way Japan’s version of a stem family system operated, noting it was shot throughout by patriarchal beliefs prevailing among the samurai elite during the Tokugawa Era. In discussing contemporary labor markets and trends in height and weight in Japan he wove into his analysis an appreciation for corporate paternalism, demonstrating how it echoed the internalization of labor markets prevailing in Tokugawa merchant houses. An important corollary concerns the way economic rationality operates. It is not universal. Ideology peculiar to particular societies informs it. For instance in Japanese Economic Development Mosk shows how the Meiji ideological framework – revolving around how fukoku kyohei (wealthy country/strong military) beliefs were fought over by opposing political groups, national agendas swinging back and forth between imperialist militarism and international cooperation oriented non-militarism – shaped Japan’s economic advance between the 1880s and the onset of the Pacific War in 1941. The other sub-group in Mosk’s publishing record deals explicitly with comparisons between countries. As often as not this comparative research overlaps with analysis of interactions between countries. One study compares Japan to China - Traps Embraced or Escaped: Elites in the Economic Development of Modern Japan and China (Singapore: World Scientific, 2011) – emphasizing the military interaction between these two economic giants. Indeed the book argues that the military-oriented samurai played an unusually important role in shaping Japan’s Meiji Era economic development, a feudal elite emerging as a key driving force in Japanese capitalist evolution. Not surprisingly the fact that China’s Confucian elite failed to play a similar role in China slowed China’s economic advance compared to Japan’s, leading to Japan’s bid to become a military overlord over China and the hegemonic power of East Asia. A second study Trade and Migration in the Modern World (Routledge, 2005) analyzes the breakdown in international migration and trade between World War I and World War II, showing how the ideology of Eugenics shaped immigration policy in the United States, demonstrating how it adversely impacted Asia, especially Japan, fueling resentments on the part of the Japanese polity that helped set the stage for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The importance of warfare as a resultant of, and catalyst for, ideologies realized in terms of economic policies not only informed Mosk’s treatment in his study comparing Japan’s economic development with China’s and his study of international immigration policy. As well it pervaded his analysis of the spread of the nation-state system in the modern world Nationalism and Economic Development in Modern Eurasia (Routledge, 2013). In this study Mosk develops a military power equation with which he explains why nationalism succeeded in some countries – Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States – while failing in countries like the former Yugoslavia. A crucial point made here is the importance of international geopolitics in shaping nationalism within particular nation-states. Treating religion and capitalism as ideologies – religion defined as purification buttressed by faith and capitalism as capital mobility buttressed by credit creation – in his book Capitalism and Religion in World History: Purification and Progress (Routledge, 1918) - Mosk explains why the evolution of capitalism was hampered in the Ancient world; why it took off in the form of Merchant Capitalism with the emergence of Islam; why Merchant Capitalism took off in Western Europe beginning with the Crusades; why a second form of capitalism Technological Capitalism emerged and prospered in Europe; and why barriers to the diffusion of Technological Capitalism exist in the contemporary world due to the establishment of religious nationalism in some regions of the globe. Again as in other studies Mosk has carried out the interaction of countries through warfare and imperialism lie at the heart of his approach to economic history.