Anne Emerson- Photographer,Twin, and Author

Annie's Model in Brief
Annie says her main policy recommendation - increase the required reserve ratio at banks, either all or some, with transparency - will bring prices down.
It will also bring wages down, but a woman I met in the grocery store had no problem with that - it's what your paycheck will buy, not what its monetary value is! And this is what the Fed and other policymakers need to debate - how will declining prices and wages affect the system? Annie says that this policy will even up inequities around the world.
Brief summary: "Easy money" policy skews local, national, and global economic systems in favor of knowledge industries at the expense of personal service industries. Debate over free markets versus government or autocratic control ignores this situation and thereby allows it to get worse.
In particular, one size does not fit all. We need a different approach from the pursuit of "efficiency" in situations that DO NOT benefit from doing things more rapidly and less expensively. Annie calls the two sectors in her model money-magnet industries, and resource-losing industries. [That's industries, not countries, not businesses.] Each sector benefits more, or less, from global economic policies, because each responds differently to global financial environments. We might wish to treat them differently - different market-based policies might be appropriate for each - just as different human beings, facing different environments, benefit differently from them.
Annie says that global economic policies have benefited money-magnet industries at the expense of resource-losing industries, all over the world, and the challenge has reached crisis point. It is very hard to believe that this occurred deliberately, because it may be found all over the world. Annie thinks Governments have been at loggerheads because they don't know what to do, not because they intend to be unkind. We need to talk over how it happened (is Annie correct?) and what to do about it, going forward.
Annie is in good company - Swedish Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal said something similar! But we are wiser now and it's time to revisit what was cutting edge many years ago. Paul Romer received a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in modeling technological change. Paul Krugman pioneered "The New Economic Geography" and won a Nobel too. W. Arthur Lewis of the University of Manchester made a much earlier argument along similar lines. He won a Nobel too.
Annie's model contains elements of all of these ideas. However, Annie's model also updates all of these ideas and conventions, based on her own research findings which imply that the rate of migration is motivated by the rate at which jobs open, rather than by the wage to labor, although of course the two are related.

While the figure above is part of Annie's scholarly work on Migration in Algeria, Annie has also traveled to North Africa (Egypt, Tunisia, and the Sudan). What she experienced in those countries has influenced her worldview. For a more poetic take on these matters, please see the "Poems" page. Link below. For an immigrant's journey out of grief, please see "Happiness" page. Link below.
The map above represents migration streams within Algeria between 1966 and 1977. Re-printed with permission, from Annie's doctoral dissertation (degree awarded in1992).
If anyone thinks urbanization results mostly from rural-urban migration, they might want to think again, as they look at the figure. Clearly, there were many migration streams to and from large coastal cities.
This also confounds the idea that inter-regional wage-differentials account for city growth. (Are city-wages higher in Alger, or in Oran?) And why are many people moving between Alger and oil and gas fields in the Sahara Desert (regions 7 and 30), but not so many from other regions?
Systemic Bias - an
Economist's Perspective
Professor doubts "closed world economy" - see button below. Annie never did give up on this "bad idea"! She always intended to model it someday. See her reply, beneath the button. New in Summer 2026 - For busy economists, Annie's most important out-of-the-mainstream references; an explanation of what closed systems are in the natural sciences; four books about economic history; a response to the "cheaper and better" argument; reasons why the new economics must be global. Please see buttons with red text below and at right.
Annie replies - the model of a developing country favored by the World Bank in the 1980s was set up as an open economy, not a closed economy, and as such it ignored the closed-economy solution that explains rural-urban migration. That solution is known as Engel's law in agricultural economics and its impact is not in doubt. NOT IN DOUBT among agricultural economists.
Kelley and Williamson said that their open-economy model did not predict rural-urban migration. People "should" (or, would be expected to) stay in the countryside, as economic growth proceeded. It seems reasonable that economies open to trade ought to give you the open-economy solution. If you were looking at migration instead of agriculture, you would see that this has been a mistake.
I have explained WHY the open-economy model doesn't work in this particular case (of migration); I have suggested a policy to correct this ongoing bias, hidden under the radar of the best economic models because they assume it's all about price, while quantity adjusts on its own. To the groupthink: thanks for doubting me for so long. I am now sure that I am right; about this one particular analytical mistake, of course. But it's a biggie.


A "best and final" summary of Annie's analysis, for busy people, may be found under the heading "Annie's Model in Brief" at left, or on the Essays - Money and Inequality page on this website.
The two working papers (links in boxes with blue and yellow headings) immediately below are based on Annie's research findings dating back to the 1980s. Back then, her conclusions were controversial. Today, she thinks the truth is clear. The first paper lays out the theoretical underpinning for the second one, and it should be read FIRST. These are technical articles, for professional economists, not for the general public. "Peer Review" and discussion with colleagues would be expected to catch remaining errors.
Economics for less-technical people is at the links below. Economics for general readers is on the Essays page of this website. Essays concerning international economics are at the series of links on a multi-colored background, below. They may be somewhat irreverent - with general readers in mind - but they make serious points.
Annie believes that we can reverse much of what has happened in government and finance, by reducing prices and wages across a whole economic system, up to and including the whole world.
If governments cannot do it, large or small commercial banks may be able to do it on their own. It would work best, if the banks are transparent about their financial policies and investment portfolios. The general public can then decide in which banks they choose to invest.
Repeal of the Corn Laws - Opening England's Grain Markets to International Trade

The diagram at left is Wheat prices in England, 1264 to 1996, measured in constant 1996 pounds per tonne. That is, it follows the price of wheat in England for several centuries, adjusted for inflation. It is from the book "Forecasting Methods and Applications" (Third Edition) by Makridakis, Wheelwright, and Hyndman, copyright 1998 by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. It is Figure 9-6, on page 459. On the y axis is Price: pounds per tonne. On the x axis is the date, from 1264 C.E. to 1996 C.E. The trend line starts downward right around the Industrial Revolution. And, as mentioned, this is in England, and we can be more precise than that. The "repeal of the corn laws" occurred in England in 1842. "Corn" means "wheat" in England.
I found a copy of this diagram on "Our World in Data" (open source material), a few years ago, but even if I hadn't, the book states that diagrams in it are freely available. I was not able to find the diagram on "Our World in Data" when I looked again more recently.
The diagram below represents worldwide urbanization since the Industrial Revolution. Annie suggests that both the advent of factories and the opening of grain markets to international trade precipitated worldwide urban growth. The matter merits discussion, in view of its implications for global inequality and the marginalization of peoples working the land.

Challenging the Conventional Wisdom
Numerical Examples demonstrate how Annie's model explores the path of growth and change. Background information for the examples is on the Essays page, link HERE

Annie's "Process" for Understanding Worker Migration

These scans of pages 67 to 72 of Annie's doctoral dissertation (degree awarded in 1992) at the University of Maryland, College Park, describe Annie's "process." A professor at the University suggested that the Process needed to be modeled in order for it to be taken seriously. Annie ran into a few distractions along the way (family, home, work, illness, life) and she humbly apologizes that the system is not set up so that a mother with children can get the kind of job that would have produced "Annie's Model" sooner.



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Dr. Anne Emerson
PO Box 701,
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