Category: History

The Paradox of India

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Tyler often talks about cracking cultural codes. India is the hardest—and therefore the most fascinating—cultural code I’ve encountered. The superb post The Paradox of India by Samir Varma helps to unlock some of these codes. Varma is good at describing:

In 2004, something extraordinary happened that perfectly captured India’s unique nature: A Roman Catholic woman (Sonia Gandhi) voluntarily gave up the Prime Ministership to a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) in a ceremony presided over by a Muslim President (A.P.J. Abdul Kalam) in a Hindu-majority country.

And nobody commented on it.

Think about that. In how many countries could this happen without it being THE story? In India, the headlines focused on economic policy and coalition politics. The religious identities of the key players were barely mentioned because, well, what would be the point? This is how India works.

This wasn’t tolerance—it was something deeper. It was the lived experience of a civilization where your accountant might be Jain, your doctor Parsi, your mechanic Muslim, your teacher Christian, and your vegetable vendor Hindu. Where festival holidays meant everyone got days off for Diwali, Eid, Christmas, Guru Nanak Jayanti, and Good Friday. Where secularism isn’t the absence of religion but the presence of all religions.

But goes beyond that:

You might be thinking: “This is fascinating, but I’m not Indian. I can’t draw on 5,000 years of civilizational memory. How does any of this help me navigate my increasingly polarized world?”

Here’s what I’ve learned from watching India work its magic: The mental moves that make pluralism possible aren’t mystical—they’re learnable. Think of them as cognitive tools:

The And/And Instead of Either/Or: When faced with contradictions, resist the Western urge to resolve them. Can something be both sacred and commercial? Both ancient and modern? Both yours and mine? Indians instinctively answer yes.

Contextual Truth Over Universal Law: What’s right for a Jain isn’t right for a Bengali, and that’s okay. Truth can be plural without being relative. Multiple valid perspectives can coexist without canceling each other out.

Strategic Ambiguity as Wisdom: Not everything needs to be defined, categorized, and resolved. Sometimes the wisest response is a head waggle that means yes, no, and maybe all at once.

Code-Switching as a Life Skill: Indians don’t just switch languages—they switch entire worldviews depending on context. At work, modern. At home, traditional. With friends, fusion. This isn’t hypocrisy; it’s sophisticated social navigation.

The lesson isn’t “be more tolerant.” It’s “develop comfort with unresolved multiplicity.” In a world demanding you pick sides, the Indian model suggests a radical alternative: Don’t.

In our age of rising nationalism and cultural purism, when countries are building walls and communities are retreating into echo chambers, India stands as a glorious, maddening, inspiring mess—proof that diversity isn’t just manageable but might be the secret to civilizational immortality.

After all, it’s hard to kill something that contains multitudes. When one part struggles, another thrives. When one tradition calcifies, another innovates. When one community turns inward, another builds bridges.

It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s exactly what the world needs to remember right now.

Read the whole thing. Part 1 of 3.

The anti-alcohol campaign in the USSR

by  Tyler Cowen in

Although alcohol consumption remains high in many countries, causal evidence on its effects at the societal level is limited because sustained, society-wide reductions in alcohol consumption rarely occur. We take advantage of a country-wide 1985-1990 anti-alcohol campaign in the Soviet Union that resulted in immediate, substantial and sustained reductions in alcohol consumption. We exploit regional differences in precampaign alcohol related mortality in the Russian republic and show immediate declines in male and female adult mortality in urban and rural areas across the entire age distribution, which translate into a rise in life expectancy. The campaign led to a substantial decline in deaths that are both directly (alcohol poisoning, homicides and suicides) and indirectly linked to alcohol consumption (respiratory and infectious). We find a decline in infant mortality rates among boys and girls due to causes most affected by post-natal parental behavior (choking and respiratory). Finally, both divorce and fertility rates rose, while abortions and maternal mortality due to abortions declined. This study provides novel evidence that alcohol consumption not only directly affects the mortality of drinkers but can have spillover effects on family outcomes.

That is from a recent paper by Elizabeth Brainerd and Olga Malkova.

Firewood in the American Economy: 1700 to 2010

by  Tyler Cowen in

Despite the central role of firewood in the development of the early American economy, prices for this energy fuel are absent from official government statistics and the scholarly literature. This paper presents the most comprehensive dataset of firewood prices in the United States compiled to date, encompassing over 6,000 price quotes from 1700 to 2010. Between 1700 and 2010, real firewood prices increased by between 0.2% and 0.4%, annually, and from 1800 to the Civil War, real prices increased especially rapidly, between 0.7% and 1% per year. Rising firewood prices and falling coal prices led to the transition to coal as the primary energy fuel. Between 1860 and 1890, the income elasticity for firewood switched from 0.5 to -0.5. Beginning in the last decade of the 18th century, firewood output increased from about 18% of GDP to just under 30% of GDP in the 1830s. The value of firewood fell to less than 5% of GDP by the 1880s. Prior estimates of firewood output in the 19th century significantly underestimated its value. Finally, incorporating the new estimates of firewood output into agricultural production leads to higher estimates of agricultural productivity growth prior to 1860 than previously reported in the literature.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Nicholas J. Muller.

Fred Smith, RIP

by  Tyler Cowen in

He founded FedEx, a company that before the internet truly was a big deal.  The plan for the company was based on an undergraduate economics paper.  At age thirty Fred was in deep trouble.  And “In the early days of FedEx, when the company was struggling financially, Smith took the company’s last $5,000 to Las Vegas and played blackjack. He reportedly won $27,000, which was enough to cover an overdue fuel bill and keep the company afloat for another week.”

Way back when, receiving a FedEx package was really a thrill.

Reims and Amiens

by  Tyler Cowen in

Both cities have significant war histories, but they are very different to visit, even though they are only two hours apart by car.

Reims was largely destroyed in World War I, and so the central core was rebuilt in the 1920s, with a partial Art Deco look.  The downtown is attractive and prosperous, the people look sharp and happy, and it is a university town.  You arrive and feel the place is a wonderful success.  If you had to live in a mid-sized French city, you might choose this one.

The main cathedral is one of the best in France, and arguably in the world.  The lesser-known basilica also is top tier.  There are scattered Roman ruins.  French kings were coronated in Reims from early on, all the way up through 1825.

Amiens is on the Somme, and the 1916 Battle of the Somme, followed by a later 1918 offensive, was a turning point in WWI history.  The town is a melange of architectural styles, with many half-timbered homes but also scattered works from different centuries.  The town also has France’s “first skyscraper,” renowned in its time but now a rather short and out of place embarrassment.  The main Amiens cathedral, however, is perhaps the best in all of France.

The town itself feels like visiting a banlieu, with large numbers of African and Muslim immigrants.  It is lively, and it feels as if a revitalization is underway, though I do understand opinions on these matters differ.  Real estate prices are at about 3x their 1990s levels.  That to me is strong evidence that things are going well.

Restaurant Momos Tibetian has excellent Chinese and Tibetan food.  The Picardy museum has some very good works by Boucher, Balthus, Picabia, El Greco, and Chavannes.

Both cities are radically undervisisted.  They do attract some tourists, but for the most part you feel you have them to yourself.

Joshua Rothman on the future of reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

The New Yorker piece is very good, I especially enjoyed this part:

In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen announced that he’d begun “writing for the AIs.” It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems—and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. “With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,” Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it “a model of how you think,” with which future readers could interact. “Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas,” Cowen wrote. Around this time, he began posting on his blog about mostly unremarkable periods of his life—ages four to seven, say. His human readers might not care about such posts, but the entries could make it possible “for the advanced A.I.s of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowen biography.”

Cowen can think this way because large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, are, among other things, reading machines.

Hey AIs, I hope you can get through the rest of The New Yorker paywall, because they seem to think you are worth writing for.

Markets are forward-looking

by  Tyler Cowen in

LPL Financial analyzed 25 major geopolitical episodes, dating back to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. “Total drawdowns around these events have been fairly limited,” Jeff Buchbinder, LPL’s chief equity strategist, wrote in a research note on Monday. (Full recoveries often “take only a few weeks to a couple of months,” he added.)

Deutsche Bank analysts drew a similar conclusion: “Geopolitics doesn’t normally matter much for long-run market performance,” Henry Allen, a markets strategist, wrote in a note on Monday.

Here is the NYT piece, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The Deadly Cost of Ideological Medicine

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Excellent Megan McArdle column in the Washington Post tracing how we have swung from one form of insanity on vaccine policy to another with barely a pause in between:

In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

…Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

…That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn’t the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a “worst supporting actor” award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that “public health” was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives.

This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories.

I recall this episode well. Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias deserve credit for publicizing the insanity and stopping it–although similar policies continued at the state level.

Which countries won’t exist in the 22nd century?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Or sooner, that is the topic of my latest essay for The Free Press.  Excerpt:

The most radical redefinition of the nation-state may be coming from Haiti, where preexisting forms of government appear to have collapsed altogether. Haiti has been a troubled place for a long time, but when I used to visit in the 1990s you could come and go intact—at least if you exercised commonsense precautions.

But since 2023, there have been no elected officials of any kind present in Haiti. That is highly unusual for what was supposed to be a democracy. Circa mid-2025, criminal gangs took control of most of Port-au-Prince, the capital and most populous city of the country. Murder rates are skyrocketing, and if somehow I were foolish enough to show my face in the country (by the way, the main airport is not usually open) it is likely I would be kidnapped almost immediately.

The remaining fragments of the government have taken to carrying out drone attacks on the criminal gangs, but without making much if any progress in reestablishing their rule. Mainly it is the warlords who are left, and who also run the country.

Various U.S. interventions, most notably under President Clinton in the 1990s, and UN-backed troop deployments have failed to prevent Haiti from falling to pieces. You can say the world has not tried hard enough, but you cannot say the world has not tried. There is still a Kenyan-led, UN-affiliated force in Haiti, but it does not appear to exert any significant influence.

One possibility is that a dominant gang emerges and becomes the new government, albeit a highly oppressive one. Yet it is far from obvious that consolidation is in the works, as in many situations we observe multiple, warring drug gangs as a persistent outcome. Most likely, Haiti will have ceased to be a sustainable nation-state with an identifiable government. It would better be described as a state of Hobbesian anarchy.

Worth a ponder.

How New Zealand invented inflation targeting

by  Tyler Cowen in

…the very next day, [Roger] Douglas appeared on TV declaring his intention to reduce inflation to ‘around 0 or 0 to 1 percent’ over the next couple of years, and then went on to make several similar comments in the following days.

Douglas would soften his stance on specific timelines but ask the Reserve Bank and Treasury to develop public inflation goals for the next few years that would support his earlier statements. The Bank added 1 percentage point to Douglas’s upper range to account for the measurement bias in inflation data at that time, arriving at a target range of 0–2 percent. Michael Reddell, head of the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy unit, said it was settled on ‘more by osmosis than by ministerial sign-off’.

This development led officials to entertain the idea of making inflation targets part of the Bank’s monetary policy framework. David J. Archer, a former Assistant Governor, said inflation targets were eventually chosen ‘as the least bad of the alternatives available’.

…A new Reserve Bank Act was passed in December 1989 and came into effect in February 1990. Governor Don Brash was tasked with reaching the 0–2 percent target by the end of 1992. To the great surprise of many, it was achieved a year ahead of schedule in December 1991.

Here is much more from Oscar Skyes at Works in Progress.

Early North America was more agricultural than we had thought?

by  Tyler Cowen in

A new study has found that a thickly forested sliver of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the most complete ancient agricultural location in the eastern United States. The Sixty Islands archaeological site is recognized as the ancestral home of the Menominee Nation. Known to the members of the tribe as Anaem Omot (Dog’s Belly), the area is a destination of pilgrimage, where remains of the settlement date to as far back as 8,000 B.C.

Located along a two-mile stretch of the Menominee River, Sixty Islands is defined by its cold temperatures, poor soil quality and short growing season. Although the land has long been considered unsuitable for farming, an academic paper published on Thursday in the journal Science revealed that the Menominee’s forbears cultivated vast fields of corn and potentially other crops there.

Here is more from the New York Times.  The data came from drone-based LIDAR, which has been possible for only a few years.  Most likely, much of the early history of the New World will need to be rewritten, as similar efforts are being pursued elsewhere.

The convent where the Salamancans wrote their great works

by  Tyler Cowen in

Convent San Esteban.  It is still there, you can just walk right in, though not between 2 and 4, when the guards have off.  Arguably the Salamancans were the first mature economists, and the first decent monetary theorists, as well as being critically important for the foundations of international law, natural rights, and anti-slavery arguments.  It is also difficult to find issues where they were truly bad.

You can just walk right in, and you should.