Category: Books
Who invented interchangeable parts?
This I had not known, but apparently it is old news:
The symbolic kingpin of interchangeable parts production fell in 1960 when Robert S. Woodbury published his essay “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts”…Woodbury convincingly argued that the parts of Whitney’s guns were not in fact constructed with interchangeable parts…
With Eli Whitney reinterpreted as a promoter rather than as a pioneer of machine-made interchangeable parts manufacture, it remained for Merritt Roe Smith to identify conclusively the personnel and the circumstances of this fundamental step in the development of mass production. Smith demonstrated that the United States Ordnance Department was the prime mover in bringing about machine-made interchangeable parts production of small arms. The national armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, played a major role in this process, especially in its efforts to coordinate its operations with those of the Harpers Ferry Armory and John Hall’s experimental rifle factory, also at Harpers Ferry.
That is from David A. Hounshell’s excellent From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932. Here is a related article, possibly gated, here is another.
*Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China*
That is the new book by Ezra F. Vogel, excerpt:
Deng in 1978 had an equally dramatic effect on the Japanese people. In the 2,200 years of contact between China and its island neighbor, Deng was the first Chinese leader to set foot in Japan. He was also the first to meet the Emperor of Japan.
So far the main lesson I am drawing from this book is how provincial the Chinese leaders were circa 1978, but also how willing they were to absorb evidence and change their minds, especially following visits to Western Europe and Singapore, both of which had significant impacts on them. I am also learning that the 1979 war with Vietnam was a more significant event than I had thought.
The publication date of the book is listed as 26 September, but Amazon shipped my copy earlier this week.
Eating in besieged wartime Leningrad
One of the surest survival techniques was to get employment in food processing or distribution. Leningraders with these sorts of jobs, unsurprisingly, seldom died of starvation. All 713 employees of the Krupskaya sweet factory survived; so did all those at the no.4 bakery and at a margarine manufacturer. At the Baltika bakery, only twenty-seven out of what grew from 276 to 334 workers died, all of the victims being men. Canteen waitresses and bread-shop sales girls were notoriously “fat,” as were orphanage staff — a friend of Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s, spotting “Rubenesque” young women in a newly reopened public bathhouse in the spring, automatically assumed that they worked in bakeries, soup kitchens or children’s homes. Menstruation having ceased for most during the winter, women who gave birth in 1942 were also assumed to have worked in a food plant or dining hall. (The only two pregnant women Chekrizov saw during the whole of the siege were both waitresses in his shipyard’s cafeteria.)
That is from Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, by Anna Reid. Here is my previous post on the book.
*Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II*, by Anna Reid
The point at which an entire family was doomed was when its last mobile member became too weak to queue for rations. Heads of households — usually mothers — were thus faced with a heartbreaking dilemma: whether to eat more food themselves, so as to stay on their feet, or whether to give more to the family’s sickest member — usually a grandparent or child — and risk the lives of all. That many or most prioritised their children is indicated by the large numbers of orphans they left behind. The lucky ones were put into children’s homes; the unlucky had their cards stolen by neighbours, took to thieving on the streets or simply died alone.
And:
The Russian language makes the morally vital distinction between trupoyedstvo — ‘corpse-eating’ — and lyudoyedstvo — ‘person-eating’, or murder for cannibalism.
This is an excellent book, you can order it here. You can find reviews here.
Was there ever a Chinese tea party?
…best estimates are that during the second half of the 18th century imperial taxes captured only 5 percent of the gross national product in China, compared to 12-15 percent in Russia, 9-13 percent of national commodity production in France, and 16-24 percent of national commodity production in Britain. During the 18th century in Russia, moreover, corvees and military service were far more onerous than in China, where most labor services had been commuted. If we consider that under the Northern Song in 1080, imperial revenue averaged about 13 percent of national income, and under the Ming in 1550 6-8 percent, we find some support for Skinner’s thesis that percentage of the surplus captured in imperial taxes shrank steadily relative to the share retained by local systems.
Victor Lieberman presents “philosophical commitment to low taxes” as a major reason for this pattern. Further explanations are a lack of foreign threats and that the Chinese state did not always have the capacity to collect much more.
Those points can be found in Lieberman’s quite interesting Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830, volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands. The book is even longer than that title, clocking in at 947 pp. and that is only the second part of the whole.
Very good sentences
He was an ironic rationalist who, like all rationalists, had an irrational personal history.
That is from Adam Phillips, on Byron, in a review entitled Stag at Bay, in the latest LRB. From elsewhere, here is an article on how to die a greener death.
Claims about Manute Bol
As a child, he may have killed a lion; he quite possibly coined the phrase “my bad”; he certainly warned Congress about Osama bin Laden in 1993.
That is from a review of Jordan Conn’s The Defender, a new Kindle Single biography of Manute Bol. I bought my copy right away. There is an explanatory photo here.
North Korea: The Long Coma
How has the dictatorship in North Korea survived despite mass starvation and economic failure? One factor that comes out of reading Nothing to Envy is that the North Korean iron curtain has been much more impenetrable than that of Eastern Europe. Consider:
In the nearly half a century that elapsed between the end of the Korean War and Mi-ran’s defection in October 1998, only 923 North Koreans had fled to South Korea. It was a minuscule number if you consider that while the Berlin Wall stood an average of 21,000 East Germans fled west every year.
The border with China is longer and more porous than the border with South Korea but until the 1990s there wasn’t much of an incentive to escape in that direction since China wasn’t much better off than North Korea. Moreover, if North Koreans are caught in China then even today they will be sent back,probably to a North Korean gulag; so many defectors try to cross from China to Mongolia through the forbidding Gobi desert. Mongolia will then “deport” them to South Korea.
North Korean propaganda has also been very effective because unlike leaders in Eastern Europe, Kim Il-sung “wasn’t merely the father of their country, their George Washington, their Mao, he was their God.” Here is Nothing to Envy:
Broadcasters would speak of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il breathlessly, in the manner of Pentecostal preachers. North Korean newspapers carried tales of supernatural phenomena. Stormy seas were said to be calmed when sailors clinging to a sinking ship sang songs in praise of Kim Il-sung. When Kim Jong-il went to the DMZ, a mysterious fog descended to protect him from lurking South Korean snipers. He caused trees to bloom and snow to melt. If Kim Il-sung was God, then Kim Jong-il was the son of God. Like Jesus Christ, Kim Jong-il’s birth was said to have been heralded by a radiant star in the sky and the appearance of a beautiful double rainbow. A swallow descended from heaven to sing of the birth of a “general who will rule the world.”
To us this sounds ludicruous but I think Demick is correct when she writes:
…consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers, that for the subsequent fifty-years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung’s divinity. Who could possibly resist?
When Kim Il-sung dies, Demick describes one woman’s reaction:
Mrs. Song went blank. She felt an electric jolt shoot through her body as though the executioner had just pulled the lever. She’d felt this way only once before, a few years back when she’d been told her mother had died but in that case the death was….This couldn’t be true. She tried to concentrate on what the television broadcaster was saying. His lips were still moving, but the words were incomprehensible. Nothing made sense. She started to scream
“How are we going to live? What are we going to do without our marshal?” The words came tumbling out….She rushed down the staircase and out into the courtyard of her building. Many of her neighbors had done the same. They were on their knees, banging their heads on the pavement. Their wails cut through the air like sirens.
(See also this short video.) FYI, Demick also shows that not everyone believed and preference falsification certainly occurred, although until the regime collapses it is difficult, of course, to say by how many.
All of this works I think to explain the first few decades. Kim il-sung did help to expel the Japanese, and after the Korean war, North Korea was in fact getting better. Without knowledge of the outside world, claims of being the most developed nation on earth could be sustained. But by the 1990s it was clear things were getting worse and as China grew and starvation took hold in North Korea, the North Korean’s could see that the grass was greener on the other side. As a result, defections to China increased tremendously (see my previous post). Moreover, the transfer wasn’t only in one direction, goods and information from China came into North Korea and some North Koreans even traveled back and forth across the Chinese border. Yet, even with this increase in communication and the death of Kim Il-sung the regime held together.
Can North Korea continue to hold together after Kim Jong-il passes? It wasn’t easy to reintegrate Germany after the Berlin Wall fell and the ties there were much greater. North Koreans, it is said, still do not know that a man has walked on the moon let alone that South Korea has a far higher standard of living. What will happen when the regime in North Korea falls and North Koreans awake from their long coma?
Addendum: For more see this National Geographic video with secret footage from inside North Korea. Hat tip on the latter to Dan Klein and Fred Foldvary.
*Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius*
By Sylvia Nasar, due out September 13.
In a sweeping narrative, the author of the megabestseller A Beautiful Mind takes us on a journey through modern history with the men and women who changed the lives of every single person on the planet. It’s the epic story of the making of modern economics, and of how economics rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands rather than in Fate.
I just pre-ordered my copy.
Nothing to Envy
Based on hundreds of interviews with escaped North Koreans, the novel-like Nothing to Envy is a fascinating portrait of North Korea, a sociological investigation of how a totalitarian state operates and a love-story with an O. Henry like ending. Here is one stunning excerpt that describes a defector as she crosses over into China.
Dr. Kim staggered up the riverbank. her legs were numb, encased in frozen trousers. She made her way through the woods until the first light of dawn illuminated the outskirts of a small village.…
Dr. Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer – it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr. Kim couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog’s bark.
Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plain in the face; dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
Highly recommended. I will say more in future posts.
Hat tip: Bryan Caplan.
What I’ve been reading
1. David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War. This would appear to be a new angle on WWII, arguing that Britain circa 1940 was not the lame duck — either economically or technologically — that it is often made out to be. Readable, persuasive to this non-expert, and it does help explain why the Nazis didn’t just take them over.
2. Robert F. Moss, Barbecue: The History of an American Institution. This is in fact the first serious history of barbecue, as a historian might write it, and it is a good one.
3. E.A. Wrigley, Energy and the Industrial Revolution. This is both one of the best books on the history of energy and one of the best books on the Industrial Revolution, definitely recommended to anyone who reads in economic history.
4. Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. Imagine TGS applied to musical aesthetics, excerpt: “Pitchfork writer Eric Harvey recently observed that the 2000s may be destined to be “the first decade of pop music…remembered by history for its musical technology rather than the actual music itself.” Napster Soulseek Limewrire Gnutella iPod YouTube Last.fm Pandora MySpace Spotify…these super-brands took the place of super-bands…It’s glaringly obvious that all the astounding, time-space rearranging developments in the dissemination, storing and accessing of audio data have not spawned a single new form of music.”
Just arrived, in my pile
Sentences to ponder
Finally, even if Mr. Powdthavee is right about the unhappy effects of income comparison, you shouldn’t conclude that redistribution is the solution. Yes, you could fight inequality of income. But you could just as easily fight comparison of income. Instead of praising those who “raise awareness” about inequality, perhaps we should shame them, like the office gossip, for spreading envy and discontent. In the end, happiness research and history teach the same lesson: If you live in the First World, you should be very grateful for what you have. So cheer up!
That is from Bryan Caplan, here is more. I am still giggling over this earlier post of Bryan’s; it gives you a good idea of my typical day.
*A Handbook of Cultural Economics*, second edition
The editor is Ruth Towse and the Amazon link to this now-definitive edition is here. Contributors include William Baumol, David Throsby, Mark Blaug, yours truly (“Creative Economy”), Dick Netzer, Ruth Towse, Orley Ashenfelter, Michael Rushton, William Landes, and other luminaries from the field.
*The Institutional Revolution*
The author is Douglas W. Allen and the subtitle is Measurement & the Economic Emergence of the Modern World. I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent book, here is a summary paragraph:
Having consistent weights and measures, like knowing the precise time, allowed for — almost by definition — more accurate and less costly monitoring. The lowered transaction costs of measurement meant that institutions which relied on measurement could be used more effectively. Productivity could be measured in terms of output per unit of time, speeds could be accurately recorded and tracked, commerce could flourish without confusion and error, land and buildings could be surveyed accurately, and fraud could be mitigated. Today, these matters are dealt with easily and to a much tighter standard. Without the ease of measurement, the variability of life would be drastically higher; we would be uncertain about what we were getting and giving in most exchanges.
Allen (p.177) argues that private lighthouses worked well when ships had to hug the coast, but less well when sail power improved and ship routes became more distant and more variable and less tied to port proximity and coast hugging. Also good was the discussion of how Industrial Revolution factories were located in isolated areas to minimize theft costs (pp.214-215), and how this later changed.
The book is due out in December.