Category: History
China fact of the day
Any Chinese person who has gone to elementary school or watched television news can explain the tale of China’s 100 years of humiliation. Starting with the Opium Wars in the 19th century, foreign powers bullied a weak and backward China into turning Hong Kong and Macau into European colonies. Students must memorize the unequal treaties the Qing dynasty signed during that period.
There’s even a name for it: “national humiliation education.”
Here is more from Li Yuan at the NYT.
The ebb and flow of political correctness doctrine
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
What caused the P.C. movement to stall after the ‘90s? One theory is that it was due to two particular events. First, a Democratic president was impeached for his sexual conduct with an intern. That made the left (at least temporarily) less interested in rooting out and punishing all abuses of power. Second, the attacks of Sept. 11, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, created a new and different focal point for activist energy: first anti-terror, then anti-war.
The history of political correctness also shows that ideas can have a long genesis, as this essay by Musa al-Gharbi illustrates. The idea of sensitivity training, for instance, was created by Kurt Lewin in 1946-47, and later popularized by Carl Rogers in 1961. The notion of “safe spaces” started in gay and lesbian bars in the mid-1960s. The term “microaggressions” comes from Chester Pierce in 1974. It is possible that the phrase “identity politics” comes from the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977.
The lesson here is clear: If you are dealing in the world of ideas, play the long game — don’t be too discouraged by momentary setbacks. For all the talk of America having a throwaway culture that moves rapidly from one idea to the next, the history of political correctness does not support that vision. It is possible for people to promote and sustain ideas to give them resonance and influence.
Please note I am trying to learn from the history of the movement, and it is not the point of this column to condemn it excesses (which are very real).
What should I ask Daron Acemoglu?
There will be a Conversation with him, no associated public event. So what should I ask him?
What should I ask Ted Gioia?
I will be doing a Conversation with Ted, no associated public event. He is a musician and most of all a music historian, above all for jazz and blues, with numerous excellent books on those topics.
Here is his home page. Here is Ted on Twitter, one of the very best follows. Here is his latest book Music: A Subversive History, due out next week. And there is more:
Gioia was raised in a Sicilian-Mexican household in Hawthorne, California, a working class neighborhood in the South-Central area of Los Angeles. Gioia was valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar at Hawthorne High School, and attended Stanford University. There he received a degree in English (graduating with honors and distinction), served as editor of Stanford’s literary magazine, Sequoia, and wrote regularly for the Stanford Daily. He was a member of Stanford’s College Bowl team, which was featured on television, and defeated Yale in the national finals. Gioia also worked extensively as a jazz pianist during this period, and designed and taught a class on jazz at Stanford while still an undergraduate.
After graduation, Gioia received a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, where he graduated with first class honors. He then received an MBA from Stanford University.
Gioia has enjoyed successes in the worlds of music, writing and business. In the business world, Gioia has consulted to Fortune 500
companies while working for McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group. He helped Sola International complete an LBO and IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1990s. He has undertaken business projects in 25 countries on five continents, and has managed large businesses (up to $200 million in revenues). While working amidst the venture capital community on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, Gioia stood out from the crowd as the “guy with the piano in his office.”
His knowledge of varied musical genres is virtually without parallel. So what should I ask Ted?
The two must-read books on Pakistan
Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country.
Christophe Jaffrelot, The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience.
They won’t make my best of the year list, because neither is fresh out, but they are two of the best books I have read this year, Lieven being a reread.
Louis XIV and his motto
Louis XIV was both King of France and a global ruler with global ambitions. He founded colonies in America, Africa and India, tried to seize Siam (as Thailand was then known), sent missionaries and mathematicians to the Emperor of China and launched the struggle for France’s global markets which continues to this day. The motto he adopted early in his reign, in 1662, expressed his hopes and desires: “Nec pluribus impar” (literally “Not unequal to more”), meaning “not incapable of ruling other dominions”, as well as “not unequal to many enemies”.
That is from the new Philip Mansel book King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV.
Which thinker from the past would you resurrect?
The Scholar’s Stage writes:
If I were to resurrect one person to comment on our current dilemmas, that person would be Hannah Arendt.
What issue of importance today did she not ponder? How should Western countries understand and respond to authoritarian states? What makes meaningful community possible? Does bureaucracy, technology, and settled life diminish our freedom? Why do politicians lie—and what consequences should there be for lying in office? How do political institutions decay? Should we forgive our political enemies? When is violence justified, and when is it not? How can it be controlled or avoided? What should the ‘justice’ in phrases like ‘social justice’ actually mean? What role should guilt, rage, and fear play in our political lives? How should we translate abstract political principles into living realities?Arendt wrote about all of these things and more. She would have the intellectual background needed to say something useful about the biggest political and social challenges we face today: America’s relationship with China, technology’s encroach upon democracy, the unsettled relation between the sexes, the collapse of American social capital and community life, the strengths and foibles of social justice campaigning, partisanship and ‘post-reality’ politics, and of course, the presidency of Donald Trump.
I wish we could hear her opinions on these things. I wish this because I honestly do not know what her opinions would be. I recognize positions she would not adopt, but I can only guess what she would make of Facebook or consider the proper political grounding for impeachment.
A case is made against several other plausible options, including the Founding Fathers. One approach is simply to ask who would be good on television, or on social media. Another is to pick a person whose historical reputation is so strong that he or she cannot be ignored — perhaps that would militate in favor of Abraham Lincoln or how about Jane Austen? Perhaps attention is the true scarcity that needs to be overcome.
I believe I would revive Confucius, at least assuming everyone would accept that it is indeed the real Confucius. He is perhaps the person most likely to have an influence in China, and there is some chance he would seek to reverse the current course of political events.
The generator mafia in Lebanon
…blackouts are costing the Lebanese economy about $3.9 billion per year, or roughly 8.2 percent of the country’s GDP.
I asked why the Lebanese government can’t put the private generators out of business. He replied that EdL [the state-owned electricity company] is losing some $1.3 billion per year, while the private generators are taking in as much as $2 billion per annum. “It’s a huge business,” he said, “and it’s very dangerous to interfere with this business.”
…Nakhle, an official in the Energy Ministry, was admitting that the generator mafia bribes Lebanese politicians to make sure that EdL stays weak and blackouts persist…
Maya Ammar, a model and architect in Beirut…told me, “The one reason is in Lebanon that we do not have electricity is corruption, plain and simple.”…The electric grid, she continued, is “a microcosmic example of how this country runs.”
That is from the forthcoming and excellent book by Robert Bryce, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations.
Economists have not exactly screwed things up
The lack of growth response to “Washington Consensus” policy reforms in the 1980s and 1990s led to widespread doubts about the value of such reforms. This paper updates these stylized facts by analyzing moderate to extreme levels of inflation, black market premiums, currency overvaluation, negative real interest rates and abnormally low trade shares to GDP. It finds three new stylized facts: (1) policy outcomes worldwide have improved a lot since the 1990s, (2) improvements in policy outcomes and improvements in growth across countries are correlated with each other (3) growth has been good after reform in Africa and Latin America, in contrast to the “lost decades” of the 80s and 90s. This paper makes no claims about causality. However, if the old stylized facts on disappointing growth accompanying reforms led to doubts about economic reforms, new stylized facts should lead to some positive updating of such beliefs.
*Virtue Politics*
The author is James Hankins, and the subtitle is Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy. Here is one excerpt:
I have sought to present the political ideas of the humanists as the expression of a movement of thought and action, similar in its physiognomy if not in its content to the movement of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. It was a movement that was stimulated by a crisis of legitimacy in late medieval Italy and by widespread disgust with its political and religious leadership. Its adherents were men who had wide experience — often bitter, personal experience — with tyranny. They knew that oligarchs and even popular governments could be as tyrannical as princes. Their movement was largely in agreement about its goals: to rebuild Europe’s depleted reserves of good character, true piety, and practical wisdom. They also agreed widely about means: the revival of classical antiquity, which the humanists presented as an inspiring pageant, rich in examples of noble conduct, eloquent speech, selfless dedication to country, and inner moral strength, nourished by philosophy and uncorrupt Christianity. The humanist movement yearned after greatness, moral and political. Its most pressing historical questions were how ancient Rome had achieved her vast and enduring empire, and whether it was possible to bring that greatness to life again under modern conditions. This led to the question of whether it was the Roman Republic or the Principate that should be emulated; and, once the humanists had learned Greek, it provoked the further question of whether Rome was the only possible ancient model to emulate, or whether Athens or Sparta, or even the Persia of Xenophon’s Cyrus, held lessons for contemporary statesmen.
An excellent book, you can order it here.
*Sontag: Her Life and Work*
That is the new biography by Benjamin Moser, along with Ingmar Bergman bios you can call this topic my soap opera equivalent. Here are a few scattered bits:
“I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation,” Susan wrote in 1971…she read about the University of Chicago, “which didn’t have a football team, where all people did was study, and where they talked about Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas day and night. I thought, that’s for me.”
And:
The connection between sex and pain was so natural for her — “All relationships are essentially masochistic,” she told Burch — that she could never imagine the loving partnership of equals that Freud had posited. Her “profoundest experience,” of her mother’s giving and then withdrawing her love, was perpetually renewed. Harriet dribbled out her affection by the scant thimbleful, which Susan gratefully slurped down: “I suppose, with my sore heart + unused body, it doesn’t take much to make me happy.” A couple of weeks later, she described the “total collapse” of their relationship and “blindly walking through a forest of pain.”
And:
Brodsky, after all, was the friend she dreamed of…the teacher she hoped to find in Philip Rieff; the companion she had sought all her life, an intellectual and artistic equal, and even a superior. She never found another friend as congenial, and it was in these terms that she mourned his premature death, at fifty-five. I’m all alone,” she told a friend. There’s nobody with whom I can share my ideas, my thoughts.”
Recommended, for those who care.
Karachi, and the greater violence of New World cities
I like to ask some CWT guests (Charles Mann, Juan Pablo Villarino, and Alain Bertaud) why New World cities are so often so much more violent than Old World cities, including in Europe and Asia. In the case of Asia, wartime episodes aside, it does seem that so many Asian cities are remarkably safe, especially for men but often for women too.
Recall one of the key principles of reasoning: look for the cross-sectional variation.
While Karachi is relatively safe now, before 2013 it had at least two decades of fairly extreme violence.
And what are some special features of Karachi history, relative to many other Old World and Asian cities?
The city had a very large “new” population, with Hindus (formerly the majority inhabitants) having left and migrants having come from many other parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Myanmar too.
The city was hit by a major wave of drug trafficking, heroin in particular.
The city was hit by a major wave of arms trafficking, run by thugs and mafias, often related to the wars in Afghanistan.
This is only one data point, but it supports hypotheses that higher levels of New World violence stem from relatively recent population shifts, drug trafficking, and arms trafficking. When Old World cities have that blend, they too become quite violent.
Philip K. Dick predicts the future
From 1981:
1995: Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts
2010: Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to alter the past with scientific information.
That is from The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin.
My Conversation with Alain Bertaud
Excellent throughout, Alain put on an amazing performance for the live audience at the top floor of the Observatory at the old World Trade Center site. Here is the audio and transcript, most of all we talked about cities. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Will America create any new cities in the next century? Or are we just done?
BERTAUD: Cities need a good location. This is a debate I had with Paul Romer when he was interested in charter cities. He had decided that he could create 50 charter cities around the world. And my reaction — maybe I’m wrong — but my reaction is that there are not 50 very good locations for cities around the world. There are not many left. Maybe with Belt and Road, maybe the opening of Central Asia. Maybe the opening of the ocean route on the northern, following the pole, will create the potential for new cities.
But cities like Singapore, Malacca, Mumbai are there for a good reason. And I don’t think there’s that many very good locations.
COWEN: Or Greenland, right?
[laughter]
BERTAUD: Yes. Yes, yes.
COWEN: What is your favorite movie about a city? You mentioned a work of fiction. Movie — I’ll nominate Escape from New York.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: Casablanca.
Here is more:
COWEN: Your own background, coming from Marseille rather than from Paris —
BERTAUD: I would not brag about it normally.
[laughter]
COWEN: But no, maybe you should brag about it. How has that changed how you understand cities?
BERTAUD: I’m very tolerant of messy cities.
COWEN: Messy cities.
BERTAUD: Yes.
COWEN: Why might that be, coming from Marseille?
BERTAUD: When we were schoolchildren in Marseille, we were used to a city which has a . . . There’s only one big avenue. The rest are streets which were created locally. You know, the vernacular architecture.
In our geography book, we had this map of Manhattan. Our first reaction was, the people in Manhattan must have a hard time finding their way because all the streets are exactly the same.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: In Marseille we oriented ourselves by the angle that a street made with another. Some were very narrow, some very, very wide. One not so wide. But some were curved, some were . . . And that’s the way we oriented ourselves. We thought Manhattan must be a terrible place. We must be lost all the time.
Finally:
COWEN: And what’s your best Le Corbusier story?
BERTAUD: I met Le Corbusier at a conference in Paris twice. Two conferences. At the time, he was at the top of his fame, and he started the conference by saying, “People ask me all the time, what do you think? How do you feel being the most well-known architect in the world?” He was not a very modest man.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: And he said, “You know what it feels? It feels that my ass has been kicked all my life.” That’s the way he started this. He was a very bitter man in spite of his success, and I think that his bitterness is shown in his planning and some of his architecture.
COWEN: Port-au-Prince, Haiti — overrated or underrated?
Strongly recommended, and note that Bertaud is eighty years old and just coming off a major course of chemotherapy, a remarkable performance.
Again, I am very happy to recommend Alain’s superb book Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.
From the comments, on the Coase theorem
#1 on prefiguring of the so-called Coase theorem, consider also p. 396-7 of W.H. Hutt, “Co-ordination and the Size of the Firm,” South African Journal of Economics 2(4), December 1934:
“Now, under one ownership, their relations would, given competitive institutions, be exactly the same, provided that both methods were equally efficient from the social standpoint. There is no reason why the spreading of the lines of responsibility back to several sources should lead to less effective planning than subordinacy to an authority emanating from one source, given the equal availability of relevant knowledge to the managers who devise the plans…The most important significant difference between the two cases is that, in practice, in the one case there may not be the availability of relevant knowledge that there is in the other.”
That is from Daniel B. Klein. And:
For a still earlier ‘discovery’ with transaction costs and all see my former colleague Yehoshua Liebermann’s “The Coase Theorem in Jewish Law,” Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1981), pp. 293-303
That is from Moshe Syrquin, link for both here.