A link to the interview. She is posed a question about monopolies at 20:50, and financial crises at 23:50. https://youtu.be/1ooKsv_SX4Y

Her point seems to be that companies can only establish monopolies through the coercive powers of government with lobbying, subsidies, land grants, and so on. Her point about financial crises is less clear to me, but she holds that in a pure free system, neither of these things will happen.

I have always assumed that the exact opposite was true, that monopolies and financial crises stem from the free market, but I haven't studied economics so I wouldn't really know. What is the scholarly consensus on this subject?

I'm posting this question in both /r/AskHistorians and /r/AskEconomists to maximize the amount of answers, especially since this sub gets substantially more traffic and answers. Seeing that the question is about economic history, I'm hoping it complies with the sub's rules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Al_Quaraouiyine

If it is the oldest then why is not Plato's academy considered? I am 99% sure that there were centers of learning in the Sumerian culture, early Chinese, Indian etc.

Also from the link I provided there is the following quote

Some scholars, noting certain parallels between such madrasas and European medieval universities, have proposed that the latter may have been influenced by the madrasas of Islamic Spain and the Emirate of Sicily.[17][unreliable source?] Other scholars have questioned this, citing the lack of evidence for an actual transmission from the Islamic world to Christian Europe and highlighting the differences in the structure, methodologies, procedures, curricula and legal status of the "Islamic college" (madrasa) versus the European university.[18][19][20]

Also from searching for the answer to this, the top comment here gives the idea that Al Quaraouiyine and Bologna are not comparable.

However, tertiary sources such as Wikipedia are not as good. They are often useful for checking dates and facts, but not as good for interpretation and analysis. Furthermore, Wikipedia articles are open to random vandalism and can contain factual errors; therefore, please double-check anything you cite from Wikipedia. As outlined here, Wikipedia, or any other single tertiary resource, used by itself not a suitable basis for a comment in this subreddit.

The main problem is that it is, as I said, a reference, like an encyclopedia. It has some information on a broad range of topics, but does not intend to exhaustively discuss any particular subject with rigor. A tertiary source alone would not be a good basis for an answer. Generally going to a reference text, rather than a subject-specific work, is an indicator that the commenter either knows better sources and is choosing not to use them, or does not have adequate command of the material. If your go-to is one of these sources it's probably an indication that you're not in any position to evaluate the quality of the material you're reading.

Why single out wikipedia, when all tertiary sources fall under the same restriction?

We single out Wikipedia because its editorial practices cause some specific problems, and because its ubiquity means that people try to cite it a lot more than traditional encyclopedias. There also are issues specific to wikipedia that make it, in some ways, worse than a traditional encyclopedia. See this article. Editors of wikipedia are a fairly exclusive group, who are not subject experts in history (or any subject, for that matter), and who have certain biases in what they write about. That is perpetuated by the wikipedia common practice of particular editors feeling they "own" a page, and rolling back changes anyone else does, even if it does not change existing material, despite wikipedia's repudiation of that.

Another issue that article doesn't touch on is that in many subjects, it is clear that proponents of a particular academic or academic theory have had an outsized contribution to articles in that a particular subject. While what's there might rightfully be a part of scholarly discussion, a casual reader may assume a fringe theory is widely accepted when it isn't.

Wikipedia cites its sources for the article I’m citing, why can’t I use it?

Citing sources is not necessarily an indicator of quality. The sources could be misinterpreted, out-of-date, or not representative of the range of opinions among scholars. For the reasons above this is a particularly troublesome task on wikipedia, where there's no way of verifying whoever added the source knows whether a source is reliable, and whether it represents academic thought on a subject.

It is for that reason that simply reading and citing what Wikipedia cites isn’t any better—you’ve picked your sources through the lens of the Wiki editor, who could be someone with no particular expertise. While in some cases this is not a problem, you’re still not necessarily seeing the body of scholarship on an issue. It be mentioned that simply citing Wiki authors without actually reading the sources, even if you do not re-use Wiki’s writing, would be considered plagiarism, since you are copying their citation work without doing the study yourself and without attribution.

What if I wrote the wikipedia page?

In formal academia re-using your own work is considered self-plagarism, which is bad (you're double-dipping, basically). We aren't strict on self-plagarism in general, but if you were to do this, it's important that you say you're copying your own work so we don't think you're plagiarizing. We don't have a firm rule on this, but it'd really be better if you didn't use wikipedia if you're the one who wrote it, since we have no way of verifying that you wrote it.

Even if it weren't for that, there are certain preferred elements of a wikipedia article that make it poorly suited for use on /r/askhistorians. Wiki writers are instructed to use secondary sources only, whereas we prefer comments to use primary sources and secondary sources where possible. Wikipedia does not allow for addressing the reader, but we don't mind that. Wikipedia has elaborate rules for capitalization, spelling, grammatical style, etc that we don't really follow. Users are free here to engage in back-and-forth discussion (and even encouraged to do so), which would not be possible on wikipedia, as it is not a forum or a discussion venue. Images work differently on wikipedia and on reddit. Wikipedia has a particular "house style" for citations, which we're not picky about.

Basically, what makes a good wikipedia article is pretty different than what makes a good comment on /r/askhistorians. So even if there weren't plagarism issues with this, it's probably not a good idea.

I really appreciated the open access policy for digital images of the Washington's National Gallery of Art: we can freely use theme, even for commercial use.

The British Museum also launched a similar project but for commercial use images aren't free.

Do you know some other history museums that launched a digital images database?