Category: History
Land Reclamation!
“Buy land,” they said, “they aren’t making any more.” But in fact, we used to make a lot of land. Half the land area of Boston, a quarter of Manhattan, and 15% of San Francisco were raised from the sea before 1970. Tyler has already pointed to Zigmund Forrest and Max Tabarrok’s piece on land reclamation in Works in Progress. Check it out, it’s an excellent piece.
But also don’t miss Connor Tabarrok’s historical overview of land reclamation featuring the ancient Iraqi city of Ur, Alexander the Great’s siege of Tyre, and the amazing flood tanks built under the city of Tokyo! Connor, a civil engineer by trade, points out that most land reclamation isn’t done to build cities with land fill but rather to create farmland through drainage:
In the lower 48 states, the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that wetlands covered 221 million acres in the 1780s and 104 million by the 1980s. That is roughly 117 million acres drained in two centuries, a loss rate the report puts at 60 acres an hour, sustained for 200 years. For comparison, the total urban footprint of the United States is around 70 million acres. America has drained substantially more wetland than it has built city, and nearly all of that drained land became farmland.
… The Dutch invented the modern polder and have spent eight centuries pushing back the North Sea, and the result is one of the densest, richest countries in Europe. Yet around two-thirds of the country’s dry land is farmland. Flevoland, the newest province, is 1,410 square kilometers reclaimed from the Zuiderzee in the 1950s and 60s, and it was laid out as an agricultural basin, not a city. The country with the most reclaimed land per person uses it to grow potatoes, graze dairy cattle, and ranks as the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter.
The other reason that we drained land historically was to get rid of mosquito-driven malaria and to improve sewage.
In the mid-1800s the land south and west of the Washington Monument was the Potomac Flats, a tidal marsh that collected the city’s sewage and exposed it to the sun twice a day. The stench reached the White House. In 1882 Congress appropriated $400,000 and the Army Corps of Engineers, under Major Peter Hains, began dredging the river’s shipping channels and pumping the mud onto the flats. The work created more than 600 acres of new ground and a Tidal Basin engineered to flush the Washington Channel with each tide. The Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials stand on that fill. So do the cherry trees, planted in 1912 on land that had been open water within living memory.
Much more of interest at the whole thing.
The tomb of Duns Scotus
Köln!
We spent a few days in the city, and once again I marveled at the splendors of the Cathedral. If it had its original stained glass, it would count as one of the very best churches ever. It still stands in the top tier as it is. Plus the Ludwig and Wallraf museums are excellent, making the city worthy of a visit.
But, and yes there is a but. My first visit to the city was I think in 1984, and I have been maybe five times since. When I walk through the pedestrian zone, the stores there seem far stupider than in earlier times. They seem to reflect a lower level of intelligence from the populace and the city’s numerous visitors. One feels there is not much chance of stumbling upon something interesting or very high quality, not compared to earlier times. And I think MR readers will know I am no paragon of nostalgia per se.
Now that might be an illusion. Perhaps the smart stuff has moved to mail order, to online, and to the outer rims of the city. Perhaps. But is it not dispiriting when one of the best cities in one of the smartest countries in the world, over the decades, starts appearing stupider? If someone told me I had to live in center city Köln, circa 2026 that would simply feel like aesthetic hell.
Why we stopped making land
From Zigmund Forrest and Maxwell Tabarrok in Works in Progress:
In total, around eight percent of the land in America’s major coastal cities was underwater in the 1890s and has since been reclaimed. This includes the land under several major airports, like Newark, Logan, and SFO, as well as neighborhoods like the Financial District in San Francisco, the Back Bay in Boston, and Camden in Philadelphia. Some cities, like Boston and Charleston, have doubled in size by reclaiming land.
Today, reclamation should be more common than ever. Land values in some cities are thirty times what they were in 1950, and high-tide flooding is four to eight times as frequent. Reclamation could extend and protect our coastal cities as it has for centuries. But rather than reclaim more land, we have virtually ceased to reclaim any at all. Since the completion of Battery Park City in 1976, there has not been a single major urban land reclamation project in the United States and only a handful of port expansions.
…Reclamation stopped abruptly in the 1970s when a wave of environmental regulations made it enormously expensive to reshape the landscape. And it halted at the same time in every other country that passed similar laws.
Recommended.
What should I ask Liaquat Ahamed?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. From Wikipedia:
Ahamed is the author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (2009). The book was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2010 Spear’s Book Award (Financial History Book of the Year), the 2010 Arthur Ross Book Award Gold Medal, the 2009 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. For 2009 it was recognized as one of Time magazine’s “Best Books of the Year”, New York Times “Best Books of the Year” and Amazon.com’s “Best Books of the Year”. It was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize…The book narrates the events preceding the Black Tuesday stock market crash of 1929 and the disastrous response of the world’s major central banks.
He has a new and excellent book out, namely 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World.
Liaquat Ahamed also has extensive experience in the private sector, and dealing with the World Bank and IMF. He has produced a movie and done much more as well.
So what should I ask him?
Ilya Somin defends the American Revolution
1. Far from retarding the abolition of slavery, the Revolution actually accelerated it. Its triumph gave a big boost to Enlightenment liberalism, which inspired the First Emancipation in the US (the abolition of slavery in the North that became the first large-scale emancipation of slaves in modern history), and boosted antislavery movements in Europe, as well.
2. Had the Revolution been defeated, Enlightenment liberal ideology would have been dealt a setback in Britain and France, too. That would have set back antislavery movements there, as well. It is no accident that many antislavery leaders in Europe were also sympathizers with the American Revolution. The Marquis de Lafayette was just one of the most famous examples of European liberals who actively backed both.
3. The West Indian slaveowner lobby in Parliament was strong enough to block abolition of slavery until 1833. Had Britain also been saddled with the much larger proslavery lobby of the American South, it would have taken far longer. Especially when you combine the impact of the larger slavery lobby with the force of point 2 above.
Here is the full piece, with additional arguuments.
The Troubled History of Government Equity in Technology
Even though Germany privatized Deutsche Telekom in 1996, the federal government retained a substantial ownership stake. This partial state ownership status, which remains to this day, presents a textbook example of how this type of arrangement distorts incentives and delays the competitive dynamism necessary for technological progress.
Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Deutsche Telekom was buttressed by its privileged position and implicit government backing and leveraged this support to resist infrastructure competition. Rather than aggressively deploying broadband in order to compete with rivals, the company lobbied for regulatory arrangements that protected its legacy copper network. As a result, Germany—one of the world’s largest economies and a hub of engineering excellence—consistently trailed other European competitors in broadband deployment. To see German broadband stagnate while the competitive markets in Scandinavia and other European countries surged ahead was particularly jarring, as Germany had directly linked its economy to workplace digitization.
Germany’s broadband woes did not result from a lack of capital or engineering talent at Deutsche Telekom. Instead, government ownership produced a fundamental alteration of the company’s incentive structure. With state backing, Deutsche Telekom had fewer reasons to take risks, cannibalize its own infrastructure, or accept short-term losses in favor of long-term technological leadership and more reasons to cultivate political relationships that protected their existing revenue streams. This dynamic is reliably produced by partial government ownership of private companies.
The history of heat deaths in Europe (from my email)
I will not double indent, all of what follows is from economic historian Daniel Gallardo Albarrán of the Netherlands:
“…you posted a link to an article on how Europe became the world champion of heat deaths.
Something that the article did not cover, which I find particularly outrageous is that Europe used to be at the forefront of reducing deaths due to extreme temperatures in the early 20th century, but then AC came in and the US took the lead. To flesh this out a bit, let’s consider some recent research on this field, including my own, that is comparable to the article by Barreca et al. referenced in the post, the following points are important:
- Summers became increasingly deadly during the 19th century as a result of urbanization and overcrowding. They were incredibly deadly, mostly, for infants who died in disproportionate amounts due to gastrointestinal diseases. Children and adults died as well from heatstrokes and the like, but their relative importance in the death statistics was rather small
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The turning point in Europe happened in the 1900s and 1910s.
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For instance, in Germany summers began being less deadly after ca. 1905, as a result of investments in water provision, healthcare and infant care. (See my own paper on this in the EHES Working Paper Series, no. 290)
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In England the turning point is somewhere around WWI (see Hanlon et al., 2021, JEH), possibly due to improvements in the disease environment.
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In the United States, before the arrival of AC, summer diarrheal disease that largely affected infants would only go down much later during the 1920s and 1930s (see Anderson et al., 2022, EEH). A few decades after European cities had progressed substantially in this regard…
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This reversal does not get much attention in accounts of current differences in the deadliness of extreme temperatures. This is unfortunate because from an early-20th century perspective, it was far from obvious at the time that this would happen. But the lack of willingness to adopt the arrival of a very useful technology (AC) was something that we (Europeans) have brought onto ourselves over many decades, and this is largely independent from recent phenomena such as rising global temperatures, inequality trends, etc. This is simply inefficient governance and lack of attention to a problem that takes the lives of many.”
*What Makes a Great Composer?: A Data-Driven Exploration of Music History*
A very good book, forthcoming, by Karol J. Borowiecki and Marc Lawx, here is the Amazon link, here is the Princeton University Press page.
Why we love this country
A Free Press feature for the 250th, here is my entry:
Tyler Cowen can’t decide, so he picks about 20 things instead.
My favorite thing about America is that I do not have a single favorite thing. We have the NBA (with a Toronto team too), the world’s best AI models, Alexander Calder sculptures, a few wonderful R.E.M. albums, southern Utah, the world’s best Constitution, lots of air-conditioning, sausage in southwest Louisiana, the infield fly rule in baseball, Winslow Homer, Sioux Plains drawings and Navajo blankets, the music of Chuck Berry and Brian Wilson, cheeseburgers, deep capital markets, the world’s best universities, the Museum of Modern Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee, lots of big airports, the north rim of the Grand Canyon, red cardinals and blue jays, about two dozen cities and towns named Paris, self-driving vehicles, not just one but two Dakotas, three branches of government (I hope not four), and the best set of immigrants in the world. And that is just scratching the surface.
The other contributors are notable as expected.
Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap
Rent control is in the news again. Check out my new website, Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap. Here is just one bit:
Norway abolished its rent control in 1982, and the economist Are Oust realized the newspapers had been quietly recording the whole experiment. He collected housing classifieds from Oslo’s Aftenposten from 1970 to 2008 and watched the market turn inside out.
Under rent control, Oslo’s listings pages looked nothing like a housing market. It was tenants who advertised, pleading their qualities to landlords — “housing wanted” ads outnumbered “housing for rent.” Ten to fifteen percent of those ads were placed by the tenant’s employer, vouching for them the way a bank vouches for a borrower. Tenants offered babysitting, gardening, snow-shoveling, and janitorial work on the side to sweeten the deal. Landlords, for their part, could demand a tenant of a particular gender, age, occupation, region of origin — some ads specified “strong Christian beliefs.” Deposits commonly ran to 50 or 60 months’ rent, occasionally 100 or more: tenants effectively lent the landlord the equity of the flat, interest free. And only about 20 percent of “for rent” ads dared print the rent, much of which would have been illegal.
Then the ceiling lifted. Within a few years the page flipped: landlords advertised to tenants, roughly 80 percent of listings printed an asking rent, the mega-deposits vanished, and the demands for snow-shoveling Christians of specified gender dwindled to nothing. The price went back to doing the rationing — so nothing else had to.
Check out the whole thing–it’s fabulous.
Is Alexander Calder the great American artist?
I am not ready to make this claim, but I wondered this after seeing the marvelous exhibit at Fondation Vuitton. To Calder’s credit:
1. His work is both beautiful and deep. It also can be fun. Unlike many other high-status artists, most Americans like or could like his work.
2. It is immediately recognizable and the body of work has a coherence as a whole.
3. He invented a new form — the mobile — and showed it could be art.
4. His works have iconic placement in many major American cities, namely Chicago, Grand Rapids, New York, Los Angeles, Cambridge, Philadelphia, Houston, Minneapolis, Seattle, and a bunch more. Who else can match that list?
5. He worked in multiple genres with great success, including not just sculpture (of various kinds, including wire sculpture and bronze sculpture) but also painting, works on paper, and jewelry (!). He worked with metal and wood and wire and string in his sculptures. The exhibit is wonderful in showing all this.
6. He built things, a very American endeavor, and he trained as a mechanical engineer. Mobility is also a very American idea.
7. He lived during the major period of American growth and hegemony, namely 1898-1976, very American years to have been on the scene.
I would note that most people think first of his large installations, which to me are his least interesting works. The small sculptures I admire the most? In this regard he remains underrated.
Who else are possible candidates for this designation? A while back Jasper Johns might have been an obvious leader for the title, and he remains in contention. But perhaps it is all a tad too formal and serious?
Rothko and Pollock are too one-dimensional, no matter how much you may admire the dimension. The Hudson River School does not boil down easily enough to a single artist, plus it is mainly just painting. Winslow Homer is a possibility. Warhol is another candidate, as his work is both seminal and “very American,” but currently it feels overexposed? (I am not anti-Warhol but perhaps his influence peaked some while ago.) Roy Lichtenstein did very well in sculpture as well as painting and prints, and he is in the running as well.
But I no longer think Calder is such a crazy choice for this designation. Do go see the show! The people we saw the show with were amazed at how much they had underrated his depth, breadth, and quality.
Politically Incorrect Paper of the Day: The US Racial Wealth Gap
Writing in the QJE, Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, & Schularick argue that today’s black-white wealth gap can be explained by differences in initial conditions from over a hundred and fifty years ago, i.e. slavery. But there is an important, and glaring objection: in the age of immigration (1850–1924) millions of whites immigrated to the United States with essentially no wealth and yet they caught up to the “heritage” whites quite quickly and indeed today are richer than heritage whites.
Brian Marein collects and carefully analyzes the data:
Persistent racial wealth inequality in the United States is often attributed to the intergenerational transmission of historical wealth disparities. However, inferring the determinants of long-run inequality from group-level data is complicated by the arrival of 30 million Europeans during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1924), who are by construction included in average white wealth despite having no direct claim to the wealth accumulated by earlier Americans. This paper accounts for this compositional change in the white population by documenting wealth dynamics among European immigrants and their descendants. Cash-on-arrival data show that immigrants began with substantial wealth deficits relative to the native-born. Yet by the late twentieth century, these deficits had closed, as indicated by comparisons between the descendants of later-arriving Southern and Eastern Europeans and those of longer-established Northwestern Europeans. This pattern implies rapid intraracial wealth convergence, in contrast to the slower convergence observed across racial groups. A stylized model shows that these differences can be largely accounted for by income. These findings demonstrate that large wealth disparities do not mechanically persist when groups have access to comparable economic opportunities.
If initial conditions don’t explain the wealth gap then the most likely explanation is an income and/or savings gaps. I am reminded of an earlier politically incorrect paper of the year by Nathaniel Hilger and see also my review of his book The Parent Trap.
Typewriters and fertility
Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed from a transition of White women from households into office work and an indirect crowding-in effect drawing Black women into household services. Acting as a “meeting technology,” the typewriter reshaped social interactions, enabling White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.
That is from a recent paper by Myera Rashid. Via Kris Gulati.
Chloe vs. History
Excellent use of AI to create relatively accurate and realistic tours through history. Chloe is an engaging and personable guide–a fact of some importance.
Hat tip: Kevin Bryan.
Blackpool fact of the day, observations on northern England
Blackpool Central was the world’s busiest station in 1911. It was the station with the most platforms to close in UK in the Beeching cuts of 1964.
That is from the recent fun book Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that Made the Modern World, by Chris Moss. And I enjoyed this paragraph:
I’ve never felt or fully understood the alleged tension between Lancashire and Yorkshire. The latter’s residents have good reason to boast, as they do with gusto, even if the ‘God’s own count(r)y’ schtick is wearisome nonsense. Yorkshire is the UK’s largest county. It has three national parks, two national landscapes (the new name for AONBs) and some of the most dramatic stretches of thePennine range. Like Lancashire, it reaches from the hills to the coast. There are fundamental differences. Lancashire is Irish and Atlantic. East Yorkshire is European and North Sea-facing. Yorkshire is Anglican and past tense. Lancashire is Catholic and forward-looking. Lancastrians go in sideways; Yorkshire men, at least, barge in frontally.
I consider this book to be properly subjective.