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Explain the Tiffin dilemma, its origins, its relationship to the Bretton Woods Agreement, Fort Knox redemption rates from end of WW2-Nixon Shock. And finally explain what the consensus view of the Tiffin dilemma among today’s serious modern economists? And why do they think that?
Explain Soviet Banking’s dual currency system? Why did the Soviet banking system adopt two currencies? Why not just do one? Are there other evolutionary pathways in the history of central banking design that are now dead but once walked the earth?
Why is the digital payments landscape is so much more fragmented in Japan than it is in the United States? What is the comparative payments history that can explain this?
Prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the United States had regional exchange rates for dollars. Can you explain why it wasn’t so that “a dollar is a dollar is a dollar” across the United States? Roughly how much could exchange rates differ? What measures had to be baked into commercial contracts to accommodate for these differences in rate? How long was it until these exchange rates vanished?
How much data has been gathered about the spending and investment preferences of people as they come out of poverty across cultures? Do people invest in the same order of things as the means become available, regardless of culture? For example, do people buy a clotheswasher as soon as they can afford it, regardless of culture? If there are differences, what accounts for those differences? How robust is the data that observes this phenomenon?
In America, the mafia is outlawed as organized crime. Yet the Japanese equivalent, Yakuza, are formally recognized by the government and need to register with government agencies. Why is it that the Yakuza in Japan have such a more formal recognition than organized crime in the United States? Are there any other such countries where the state formally recognizes organized criminal groups?
When and where did animals first get legal rights? What was the story of advocacy leading up to those rights being secured?
More broadly, is there any correlation between per capita income and the strength of animal rights? Do animal rights grow in a basket alongside other rights frameworks whose growth tends to correlate with economic development? What are the relationships between animal rights and human fertility rates? Do countries with lower fertility rates tend to have more robust animal rights regimes?
How robustly documented is it that the amount of regulation scales roughly with populations? Is this observed at just the city level or does it happen at the national level as well? Is the relationship more with populations or population density? Does the relationship hold across cultures?
Legal scholars split the civil law tradition into subtraditions: Napoleonic Law, Germanic Law, Nordic Law, Chilean Law. How do Nordic Law, Germanic Law, Chilean Law diverge from Napoleonic? Why are these sub-strains all considered within the same family of "civil law"? Do these justice systems share a common ancestor?
When did journalists emerge as a vocation with a self-recognizing industrial identity? When did the journalist code of conduct emerge? How did journalism look before this?
Compare the composition, bureaucratic culture, and budgets of the CIA and MI6? When did each form? How did their founders' personalities differ? How did the circumstances of their foundings differ? And how did those differences influence the divergent cultural paths that each one took? What are home country public attitudes for each?
When did the horse collar arrive in Western Europe? Explain in detail its significance, where it came from, its impact on the animal labor composition of the standard European farm, and ultimately what it did to the trajectory of farm productivity, and Europe in general.
When was the combine harvester invented? and how long did it take from first invention to diffusing across the US agriculture industry? what did the process of diffusion look like? what were the bottlenecks? what infra was missing? how long did it take to build? how did farms need to be retooled and re-workflowed to be redesigned around the tractor?
Outline the process of diffusion of the printing press from Gutenberg out to the rest of Europe. How long did it take? What journey did it chart? What impact did the diffusion of the press have on literacy levels? How long after Gutenberg was it that European hubs of culture began to see vibrant publishing industries and regular periodical newspapers?
What are some of the most interesting finds produced by zooarcheology?
How did birds arrive in Hawaii and other far-off, isolated Pacific Islands? If it was via migration, how far can these birds fly without landing? How long would it take them to travel from the nearest land to, say, Hawaii?
What regions of the world domesticated the most animals? Were there any examples of "parallel domestication" whereby multiple different cultures domesticated the same animals? If so, are these domestication lineages distinct from one another to this day? Has there been any interbreeding?
It is commonly cited that many people of East Asian heritage cannot digest dairy. Yet people in steppe cultures, such as the Mongols, can. Is there any evidence in the genetic or archeological record that suggests how long it took for either dairy intolerance to develop among East Asian populations, or for the ability to digest dairy to develop among more pastoralist Asian populations?
How strong is the evidence that indigenous Tasmanians lost or did not have the ability to man-make fire for thousands of years before European arrival? How do modern scholars treat this historical claim?
Do we have a clear account of how the Polynesians peopled the many islands of the Pacific? What techniques did they use for navigation between islands? How far could Polynesians navigate accurately? To help ground their sense of progress, can you explain how far and how accurately Western Europeans could navigate during the era(s) of Polynesian people-ing the Pacific? What tools did each group use?
The Maluku Islands in Indonesia were known from the 16th century onward as "The Spice Islands", because they were the world's sole source of nutmeg, mace, and cloves. How exactly was it that the Western world discovered the existence of the Spice Islands? How did nutmeg, mace, and cloves make it to the West? What were the prices of each? Approximately how much of median European's wages did one have to pay for these spices in Europe?
What is the story of how China developed sericulture? How did they manage to maintain a such a monopoly on the process to produce silk for so long?
Explain the ideology of the Taiping movement in 19th Century China. From where did they receive their ideas? At their height, how much ground, how many cities, and how many residents had the Taiping captured? After the Taiping fell, did any of their ideas live on? How are the Taipings remembered in modern China’s collective memory today?
What Aztec texts survived the Spainairds? What have we been able to glean about Aztec culture and history from them?
What did Indian food look like before the arrival of the tomato? Are there any pre-Columbian recipes that have survived of particularly beloved delicacies in Indian cuisines?
What is the Altaic language theory? What does it purport? How long has the Altaic School of linguistics been around? How robust is the evidence that supports it? What do modern sociolinguists think of the Altaic theory?
Explain the unification of the Jurchen tribes into the Manchu race. Are there any other examples in recorded history of the formation of a race from a patchwork of distinct clans, tribes in such a rapid period of time?
Has anyone attempted to explain how, exactly, Vienna became such a hotbed of ideas and trouble from 1905-1920? Klimt, Schiele, Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Popper, and more (including, grimly, Hitler) were all there - in a population of 2 million, about the size of Phoenix, Arizona.
How is it that Russian fiction writers, seemingly out of nowhere, became so good for a generation? Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov were all contemporaries. Talent density has never been as high as it was then. What happened then?