Results for “pompeii”
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The Destruction of Pompeii

The Art Newspaper: A Unesco report has identified serious problems with the World Heritage Site, including structural damage to buildings, vandalism and a lack of qualified staff….The collapse of a column at Pompeii on 22 December raised further alarm. The column was in a pergola in the courtyard of the House of Loreio Tiburtino, whose adjacent rooms have very fine frescoes.

…The Pompeii crisis came to a head with the collapse of the Schola Armaturarum, known as the House of the Gladiators, in November 2010, along with three further collapses later in the month. This was after extremely heavy rain.

The problems at Pompeii are all too familiar in Italy:

Staffing at Pompeii remains a fundamental problem. The structure is “very rigid”, with “jobs ­being secure until retirement”, making it “virtually impossible to recruit new staff”. Although around 470 people are employed at Pompeii, it is “very short” of professional staff, there are “very few” maintenance workers and only 23 guards are on site at any one time.

The guards do not wear uniforms and fail to display their badges. The experts observed them “grouped together in threes or fours”, which meant there was a limited presence on the enormous site. Since 1987, the number of guards has been reduced by a quarter while visitor numbers have increased considerably.

And how about this for an Italian microcosm:

Management changes have resulted in further problems. In July 2008, the Italian government declared Pompeii to be in a “state of emergency”, putting it under special administration until July 2010 (two commissioners served during this period: Renato Profili and then Marcello Fiori). There have been four successive superintendents since September 2009: Mariarosaria Salvatore, Giuseppe Proietti, Jeannette Papadopoulos and Teresa Elena Cinquantaquattro.

The update from Pompeii

Almost every word of  this report reflects some of Italy’s broader problems:

A labour union on Thursday reported that a chunk of the wall from Domus of Diomede building on Via Consolare collapsed a day after European Commissioner Johannes Hahn announced that the European Union would give up to 105 million euros to protect and restore the fragile site UNESCO World Heritage site that was buried by volcanic ash around two thousand years ago.

The funds are part of one billion euros earmarked for cultural heritage projects, with particular emphasis on southern Italy, according to Italian minister for regional affairs Raffaele Fitto.

An similar collapse last week prompted Italian culture minister Giancarlo Galan to promise that he would make Pompeii his “the utmost priorty.”

He made almost identical remarks in March shortly after the state of Pompeii led to his predecessor’s resignation.

Only thirty percent of the buildings at the site are considered to be in good condition.

Addendum: Here is a report which doubts whether in fact another wall has collapsed.

What I’ve been reading

1. Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World: How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.  An excellent book with sound conclusions, think of it as moderate Julian Simon-like optimism on environmental issues, but with left-coded rhetoric.

2. Colin Elliott, Pox Romana: The Plague that Shook the Roman World.  Think of this as a sequel to Kyle Harper’s tract on Roman plagues and their political import, this look at the Antonine plague and its impact has both good history and good economics.  It is also highly readable.

3. Carrie Sheffield, Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.  A highly effective and harrowing tale of a lifetime journey from abuse to Christianity: “Carrie attended 17 public schools and homeschool, all while performing classical music on the streets and passing out fire-and-insurance religious pamphlets — at times while child custody workers loomed.”  The author is well known in finance, ex-LDS circles, public policy, and right-leaning media, and she has a Master’s from Harvard.  This story isn’t over.

4. Charles Freeman, The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 BC0-400 AD.  Avery good guide to the intellectual life surround the period of the Pompeii library scrolls that will be deciphered by AI.  If you want background on the import of what is to come, this book is a good place to start.  And it is a good and useful work more generally.

5. Erin Accampo Hern, Explaining Successes in Africa: Things Don’t Always Fall Apart.  I found this book highly readable and instructive, but I find it more convincing if you reverse the central conclusion.  There is too much talk of the Seychelles and Mauritius, and is Gabon the big success story on the Continent?  Population is 2.3 million, the country ranks 112th in the Human Development Index, and almost half the government budget is oil revenue.  Still, this book “tells you how things actually are,” and that is more important than any objections one might lodge.

Recent and noteworthy is Peter Jackson, From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: The Reawakening of Mongol Asia.  You may recall that the Mongol empire at its peak was much larger than the Roman empire at its peak, but how many young men think about it every day?

Then there is Jian Chen’s Zhou Enlai: A Life, which seems like a major achievement.  I’ve only had time to read small amounts of it…is it “too soon to tell”?  I say no!

Assorted links

1. After the food court closes.

2. Thursday night, a dialogue between me and Megan McArdle about her new book.

3. How to build truly cheap housing for the poor.

4. Rafael Yglesias on…a bunch of stuff, including Woody Allen.  And how will authors (but not Rafael) respond to the demand for binge reading?

5. The weight of rain.

6. There is no Japanese great stagnation.  And buy shares in a football player.

Where is the deflationary pressure in the eurozone “going”?

The difficulty of wording this question is indicative of Scott Sumner’s point about the poverty of our language.  Here is Scott:

The most recent inflation rate in Greece is 1.7%, whereas Spain has 1.9% inflation.  I don’t know about you, but I find those figures to be astounding.  That’s not deflation, and yet Tyler’s clearly right that they are being buffeted by powerful deflationary forces.

1.  This shows the poverty of our language.  Economics lacks a term for falling NGDP, even though falling NGDP is arguably the single most important concept in all of macro, indeed the cause of the Great Depression.  So we call it “deflation” which is actually an entirely different concept.  I wouldn’t be the first to find connections between the poverty of our language and the poverty of our thinking.

2.  Through experience I’ve learned that whenever a data point seems way off, there are probably multiple reasons.  Thus Greece and Spain probably have less price level flexibility due to structural rigidities in their economies.  And the inflation might be partly due to special factors like increased VAT or higher oil prices.  Nonetheless, these sorts of depressions would have been associated with falling prices in the 1930s, so it’s not your grandfather’s business cycle.

One option (not the only piece of the puzzle) is that automatic stabilizers, in the form of highly inefficient government jobs and government-privileged jobs, are maintaining consumption, at some level, in the periphery economies.  The deflationary pressures are being driven by the collapse of intermediation and are being “taken out” in the form of lower investment and lower capital maintenance.  Look for instance at the M3 collapse in Italy.

This would have a few implications.  First, the fiscal austerity story becomes more obviously secondary to the deflationary story, though not irrelevant.  If the fiscal austerity story were driving the deflationary pressures, you might expect to see lower rates of price inflation, unless you think it all can be pinned on VAT increases (doubtful).  Second, it is probably a more pessimistic view, since it implies things only look as good [sic] as they do because in essence current consumption is being funded by eating into capital growth and maintenance.

Third, given high rates of unemployment in Spain and Greece, those economies should not be operating at or near full capacity.  High rates of price inflation suggests the importance of bottlenecks, which in turns means this is an AD and also an AS story, and not just a pure AD story.

I would stress the speculative nature of this discussion.  In any case this is an extremely important but radically underdiscussed issue.  It makes a lot of different theories look bad, and thus makes it harder to maintain an attitude of thundering certainty.

Markets in everything: vanquished empires edition

Here's one I actually wish to buy:

A 2,000-year-old snack-bar in the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii will 'open for business' once more this Sunday, with a special one-off event marking its restoration. A limited number of visitors to the Campanian archaeological site will be taken on a 45-minute guided tour of the Thermopolium (snack-bar) of Vetutius Placidus, which was previously closed to members of the public. Once inside the thermopolium, participants will also be treated to a typical Roman snack of the type once served to customers. The shop takes its name from electoral graffiti engraved on the outside of the shop, calling on passersby to vote for the candidate Vetutius Placidus, and on three amphorae found inside the premises.

Hat tip goes to Brad DeLong.

My favorite things Mars

This was a reader request, so here goes:

1. Song about: Venus and Mars, by Paul McCartney and Wings.  The melody is nice, the synthesizer is used well, and the song doesn't wear out its welcome.

2. Album about: David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Venus and Mars is not overall a good album; it is mostly dull and overproduced.  So Bowie is a clear winner here.

3. Novel about: The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury.  Worth a reread, especially if you first encountered it when young.  Red Mars by Kim Robinson is a runner-up.  What else am I missing?

4. Film about: Mission to Mars.  Underrated de Palma, much better on a big screen, where it has a nice poetry of motion.  I already know that some of you hate this movie, so there is no need to pillory me again on this count.  I have never seen The Eyes of Laura Mars.  What's that old science fiction movie modeled after The Tempest?

5. TV show about: Veronica Mars, especially season one.  Excellent dialogue, and it asks what family really consists of.  One of my favorite years of any TV show.  Is the British show Life on Mars good?  I vaguely recall My Favorite Martian from when I was a kid.  Was it actually about being gay?

6. Musician: Sun Ra.

7. Mars, painting of:  Jacques Louis David probably wins this oneThis image is from Pompeii.

8. Best Cato Institute essay about Martian economics: By Ed Hudgin.

The bottom line: It's not just a culture, they've got a whole planet to work with.

How robust are cities?

Can New Orleans take some small comfort in history?

Their [David Weinstein and Donald Davis] conclusions are based on a study of population growth in Japanese cities that suffered through earthquakes in 1923 and 1995 and bombing during World War II. Following these catastrophes, many Japanese cities suffered greater population and building losses than did New York on September 11. Yet, these cities rebounded not only to where they had been before the attacks, but actually saw their populations rise to levels that one would have predicted based on their prewar size and growth rates. Not only was there no discernable impact from bombing on city size 20 years after the end of the war, recovery from earthquakes seems, if anything, faster. Following the 1923 earthquake in Tokyo and the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, both cities recovered their pre-quake populations within five years.

Paul Krugman summarized this research.  Here is the paper.  Here is Davis’s home page, with related papers.

My doubts: Postwar Japan offered healthier institutions than what came before, so the motives for rebuilding cities were obvious.  Plus much of Japan was destroyed, so there was less reason to reallocate resources elsewhere in the country.  Post-1995 Kobe is the more relevant case for optimism, or try post-1905 San Francisco.  But New Orleans has, for a long time, had subpar urban government compared to the rest of the United States.  And the city has been declining in relative status for 150 years.  If we are starting urban decisions over again from scratch, why reinvest in a lower quality legal environment?  And did Johnstown ever recover its previous position, after its flood?  Will New Orleans see recurrent flooding, as did Johnstown?  What ever happened to Pompeii?

Here is a short essay on the natural geography of New Orleans.  Will the new city simply be support services for nearby oil and natural gas, or will the residents and tourists return in their previous numbers?  Will the unique position of its Mississippi port guarantee its future?  Or will the destruction of the Garden District herald the beginning of the end?

Addendum: Here is a Wall Street Journal article on said topic.