Category: History
What should I ask Joanne Paul?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. From the Google internet:
Joanne Paul is a writer, broadcaster, consultant, and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. A BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods…
She has a new book out Thomas More: A Life.
Here is her home page. Here is Joanne on Twitter. She has many videos on the Tudor period, some with over one million views.
So what should I ask her?
How harmful is the decline in long-form reading?
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Oral culture, in contrast, tends to be more fluid, harder to evaluate and verify, more prone to rumor, and it has fewer gatekeepers. Those features have their advantages, as a good stand-up comedian will get louder laughs than a witty author. Or an explanation from YouTube, with moving visuals, may stick in our minds more than a turgid passage from a textbook. We also just love talking, and listening, as those modes of communication reach back into human history much further than reading and writing do. Speech is part of how we bond with each other. Still, if any gross generalization can be made, it is that oral culture makes objectivity and analytic thought harder to establish and maintain.
Given this background, both the good and the bad news is that the dominance of print culture has been in decline for a long time. Radio and cinema both became major communications media in the 1920s, and television spread in the 1950s. Those major technological advances have commanded the regular attention of billions, and still do so. Earlier in the 20th century, it suddenly became a question whether you take your ideas from a book or from the radio. And this was not always a welcome development, as Hitler’s radio speeches persuaded more Germans than did his poorly constructed, unreadable Mein Kampf.
The fact that books, newspapers, and reading still are so important reflects just how powerful print has been. How many other institutions can be in relative decline for over a hundred years, and still have such a hold over our hearts and minds?
The optimistic interpretation of our situation is that reading longer works has been in decline for a long time, and overall our civilization has managed the transition fairly well. Across history we have had various balances of written and oral cultures, and if some further rebalancing is required in the direction of the oral, we should be able to make that work, just as we have done in the past. The rise of television, whatever you may think of it, did not do us in.
A second and more pessimistic diagnosis is that print and reading culture has been hanging by a thread, and current and pending technological advances are about to give that thread its final cut. The intellectual and cultural apocalypse is near. Even if your family thinks of itself as well-educated, your kids will grow up unable to work their way through a classic novel. They will watch the Lord of the Rings movies, but never pick up the books. As a result, they are likely to have less scientific and analytic objectivity, and they will embody some of the worst and most volatile aspects of TikTok culture. They will, however, be able to sample large numbers of small bits of information, or sometimes misinformation, in a short period of time.
There is much more at the link.
Art as Data in Political History
From Valentine Figuroa of MIT:
Ongoing advances in machine learning are expanding opportunities to analyze large-scale visual data. In historical political economy, paintings from museums and private collections represent an untapped source of information. Before computational methods can be applied, however, it is essential to establish a framework for assessing what information paintings encode and under what assumptions it can be interpreted. This article develops such a framework, drawing on the enduring concerns of the traditional humanities. I describe three applications using a database of 25,000 European paintings from 1000CE to the First World War. Each application targets a distinct type of information conveyed in paintings (depicted content, communicative intent, and incidental information) and a cultural transformation of the early-modern period. The first revisits the notion of a European “civilizing process”—the internalization of stricter norms of behavior that occurred in tandem with the growth of state power—by examining whether paintings of meals show increasingly complex etiquette. The second analyzes portraits to study how political elites shaped their public image, highlighting a long-term shift from chivalric to more rational-bureaucratic representations of men. The third documents a long-term process of secularization, measured by the share of religious paintings, which began prior to the Reformation and accelerated afterward.
Here is the link, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Building a cohesive Indonesia
Building a cohesive nation-state amid deep ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity is a central challenge for many governments. This paper examines the process of nation building, drawing lessons from the remarkable experience of Indonesia over the past century. I discuss conceptual perspectives on nation building and review Indonesia’s historical nation-building trajectory. I then synthesize insights from four studies exploring distinct policy interventions in Indonesia—population resettlement, administrative unit proliferation, land reform, and mass schooling—to understand their effects on social cohesion and national integration. Together, these cases underscore the promise and pitfalls of nation-building efforts in diverse societies, offering guidance for future research and policymaking to support these endeavors in Indonesia and beyond.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Samuel Bazzi. As I have noted in the past, Indonesia remains a remarkably understudied and also undervisited country (Bali aside), so efforts in this direction should be appreciated.
Origins and persistence of the Mafia in the United States
This paper provides evidence of the institutional continuity between the “old world” Sicilian mafia and the mafia in America. We examine the migration to the United States of mafiosi expelled from Sicily in the 1920s following Fascist repression lead by Cesare Mori, the so-called “Iron Prefect”. Using historical US administrative records and FBI reports from decades later, we provide evidence that expelled mafiosi settled in pre-existing Sicilian immigrant enclaves, contributing to the rise of the American La Cosa Nostra (LCN). Our analysis reveals that a significant share of future mafia leaders in the US originated from neighborhoods that had hosted immigrant communities originating in the 32 Sicilian municipalities targeted by anti-mafia Fascist raids decades earlier. Future mafia activity is also disproportionately concentrated in these same neighborhoods. We then explore the socio-economic impact of organized crime on these communities. In the short term, we observe increased violence in adjacent neighborhoods, heightened incarceration rates, and redlining practices that restricted access to the formal financial sector. However, in the long run, these same neighborhoods exhibited higher levels of education, employment, and social mobility, challenging prevailing narratives about the purely detrimental effects of organized crime. Our findings contribute to debates on the persistence of criminal organizations and their broader economic and social consequences.
That is a new paper in the works by Zachary Porreca, Paolo Pinotti, and Masismo Anelli, here is the abstract online.
Mass Incarceration and Mass Crime
In our Marginal Revolution Podcast on Crime in the 1970s, I pointed out that blacks were often strongly in favor of tough on crime laws:
Tabarrok: [P]eople think that mass incarceration is a peculiarly American phenomena, or that it came out of nowhere, or was due solely to racism. Michelle Alexander’s, The New Jim Crow, takes this view.
…[But] back then, the criminal justice system was also called racist, but the racism that people were pointing to was that black criminals were let back on the streets to terrorize black victims, and that black criminals were given sentences which were too light. That was the criticism back then. It was black and white victims together who drove the punishment of criminals. I think this actually tells you about two falsehoods. First, the primary driver of mass imprisonment was not racism. It was violent crime.
Second, this also puts the lie, sometimes you hear from conservatives, to this idea that black leaders don’t care about black-on-black crime. That’s a lie. Many Black leaders have been, and were, and are tough on crime. Now, it’s true, as crime began to fall in the 1990s, many blacks and whites began to have misgivings about mass incarceration. Crime was a huge problem in the 1970s and 1980s, and it hit the United States like a brick. It seemed to come out of nowhere. You can’t blame people for seeking solutions, even if the solutions come with their own problems.
A new paper The Racial Politics of Mass Incarceration by Clegg and Usmani offer more evidence challenging the now conventional Michelle Alexander view:
Public opinion data show that not just the white but also the black public became more punitive after the 1960s. Voting data from the House show that most black politicians voted punitively at the height of concern about crime. In addition, an analysis of federally mandated redistricting suggests that in the early 1990s, black political representation had a punitive impact at the state level. Together, our evidence suggests that crime had a profound effect on black politics. It also casts some doubt on the conventional view of the origins of mass incarceration.
As the authors note, the fact that blacks supported tough-on-crime laws doesn’t mean racism was absent. Racial overtones surely influenced the specific ways fear of crime was translated into policy. But the primary driver of mass incarceration wasn’t racism—it was mass crime.
Political Organization in Pre-Colonial Africa
We provide an overview of the explanations for the relative lack of state formation historically in Africa. In doing so we systematically document for the first time the extent to which Africa was politically decentralized, calculating that in 1880 there were probably 45,000 independent polities which were rarely organized on ethnic lines. At most 2% of these could be classified as states. [emphasis added by TC] We advance a new argument for this extreme political decentralization positing that African societies were deliberately organized to stop centralization emerging. In this they were successful. We point out some key aspects of African societies that helped them to manage this equilibrium. We also emphasize how the organization of the economy was subservient to these political goals.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Soeren J. Henn and James A. Robinson.
Colors of growth
This looks pretty tremendous:
We develop a novel approach to measuring long-run economic growth by exploiting systematic variation in the use of color in European paintings. Drawing inspiration from the literature on nighttime lights as a proxy for income, we extract hue, saturation, and brightness from millions of pixels to construct annual indices for Great Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany between 1600 and 1820. These indices track broad trends in existing GDP reconstructions while revealing higher frequency fluctuations – such as those associated with wars, political instability, and climatic shocks – that traditional series smooth over. Our findings demonstrate that light, decomposed into color and brightness components, provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.
That is new research by Lars Boerner, Tim Reinicke, Samad Sarferaz, and Battista Severgnini. Via Ethan Mollick.
My 2011 Review of Contagion
I happened to come across my 2011 review of the Steven Soderberg movie, Contagion and was surprised at how much I was thinking about pandemics prior to COVID. In the review, I was too optimistic about the CDC but got the sequencing gains right. I continue to like the conclusion even if it is a bit too clever by half. Here’s the review (no indent):
Contagion, the Steven Soderberg film about a lethal virus that goes pandemic, succeeds well as a movie and very well as a warning. The movie is particularly good at explaining the science of contagion: how a virus can spread from hand to cup to lip, from Kowloon to Minneapolis to Calcutta, within a matter of days.
One of the few silver linings from the 9/11 and anthrax attacks is that we have invested some $50 billion in preparing for bio-terrorism. The headline project, Project Bioshield, was supposed to produce vaccines and treatments for anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola, and plague but that has not gone well. An unintended consequence of greater fear of bio-terrorism, however, has been a significant improvement in our ability to deal with natural attacks. In Contagion a U.S. general asks Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) of the CDC whether they could be looking at a weaponized agent. Cheever responds:
Someone doesn’t has to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that.
That is exactly right. Fortunately, under the umbrella of bio-terrorism, we have invested in the public health system by building more bio-safety level 3 and 4 laboratories including the latest BSL3 at George Mason University, we have expanded the CDC and built up epidemic centers at the WHO and elsewhere and we have improved some local public health centers. Most importantly, a network of experts at the department of defense, the CDC, universities and private firms has been created. All of this has increased the speed at which we can respond to a natural or unnatural pandemic.
In 2009, as H1N1 was spreading rapidly, the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency asked Professor Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, to sequence the virus. Working non-stop and updating other geneticists hourly, Lipkin and his team were able to sequence the virus in 31 hours. (Professor Ian Sussman, played in the movie by Elliott Gould, is based on Lipkin.) As the movie explains, however, sequencing a virus is only the first step to developing a drug or vaccine and the latter steps are more difficult and more filled with paperwork and delay. In the case of H1N1 it took months to even get going on animal studies, in part because of the massive amount of paperwork that is required to work on animals. (Contagion also hints at the problems of bureaucracy which are notably solved in the movie by bravely ignoring the law.)
It’s common to hear today that the dangers of avian flu were exaggerated. I think that is a mistake. Keep in mind that H1N1 infected 15 to 30 percent of the U.S. population (including one of my sons). Fortunately, the death rate for H1N1 was much lower than feared. In contrast, H5N1 has killed more than half the people who have contracted it. Fortunately, the transmission rate for H5N1 was much lower than feared. In other words, we have been lucky not virtuous.
We are not wired to rationally prepare for small probability events, even when such events can be devastating on a world-wide scale. Contagion reminds us, visually and emotionally, that the most dangerous bird may be the black swan.
Two things that really matter
When analyzing the macro situations of countries or regions, I place more stress than many people do on the following two factors:
1. Human capital: How much active, ambitious talent is there? And how high are the averages and medians?
2. Matching market demands: Are you geared up to produce what the market really wants, export markets or otherwise?
Those may sound trivial, but in relative terms they remain undervalued. They are, for instance, the biggest reasons why I do not buy “the housing theory of everything.”
They are also, in my view, the biggest reasons why the UK currently is in economic trouble. Both #1 (brain drain) and #2 have taken a hit in recent times. The UK continues to deindustrialize, business consulting is not the future, and London as a financial centre was hurt by 2008, Brexit, and superior innovations elsewhere. More and more smart Brits are leaving for the US or Dubai.
You also will notice that #1 and #2, when they are in trouble, are not always easily fixed. That is why reforms, while often a good idea, are by no means an easy or automatic way out of trouble.
These two factors also are consistent with the stylized fact that growth rates from the previous decade are not so predictive of growth rates for the next decades. Human capital often drives levels more than growth rates. And matching market demands often has to do with luck, or with shifting patterns of demand that the supplying country simply cannot match. Once people abandon Toyotas for Chinese electric cars, Japan does not have an easy pivot to make up the loss.
Most other theories of growth rates, for instance those that assign a predominant weight to institutions, predict much more serial correlation of growth rates than we find in the data. That said, institutions do indeed matter, and in addition to their usual effects they will shape both #1 and #2 over the longer run.
Overall, I believe conclusions would be less pat and economic understandings would be more effective if people paid greater attention to these factors #1 and #2. Not putting enough weight on #1 and #2 is one of the biggest mistakes I see smart people — and indeed very smart people — making.
Addendum: You will note the contributions of Fischer Black here. Apart from his contributions to options pricing theory, which are widely known, he remains one of the most underrated modern economists.
Political pressure on the Fed
From a forthcoming paper by Thomas Drechsel:
This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify variation in political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not necessarily reflect political pressure, I develop a narrative identification strategy based on President Nixon’s pressure on Fed Chair Burns. I exploit this narrative through restrictions on a structural vector autoregression that includes the President-Fed interaction data. I find that political pressure to ease monetary policy (i) increases the price level strongly and persistently, (ii) does not lead to positive effects on real economic activity, (iii) contributed to inflationary episodes outside of the Nixon era, and (iv) transmits differently from a typical monetary policy easing, by having a stronger effect on inflation expectations. Quantitatively, increasing political pressure by half as much as Nixon, for six months, raises the price level by about 7% over the following decade.
That is not entirely a positive omen for the current day.
My Conversation with the excellent Dan Wang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Dan debate whether American infrastructure is actually broken or just differently optimized, why health care spending should reach 35% of GDP, how lawyerly influences shaped East Asian development differently than China, China’s lack of a liberal tradition and why it won’t democratize like South Korea or Taiwan did, its economic dysfunction despite its manufacturing superstars, Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives, a 10-day itinerary for Yunnan, James C. Scott’s work on Zomia, whether Beijing or Shanghai is the better city, Liu Cixin and why volume one of The Three-Body Problem is the best, why contemporary Chinese music and film have declined under Xi, Chinese marriage markets and what it’s like to be elderly in China, the Dan Wang production function, why Stendhal is his favorite novelist and Rossini’s Comte Ory moves him, what Dan wants to learn next, whether LLMs will make Tyler’s hyper-specific podcast questions obsolete, what flavor of drama their conversation turned out to be, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: When will Chinese suburbs be really attractive?
WANG: What are Chinese suburbs? You use this term, Tyler, and I’m not sure what exactly they mean.
COWEN: You have a yard and a dog and a car, right?
WANG: Yes.
COWEN: You control your school district with the other parents. That’s a suburb.
WANG: How about never? I’m not expecting that China will have American-style suburbs anytime soon, in part because of the social engineering projects that are pretty extensive in China. I think there is a sense in which Chinese cities are not especially dense. Indian cities are much, much more dense. I think that Chinese cities, the streets are not necessarily terribly full of people all the time. They just sprawl quite extensively.
They sprawl in ways that I think the edges of the city still look somewhat like the center of the city, which there’s too many high-rises. There’s probably fewer parks. There’s probably fewer restaurants. Almost nobody has a yard and a dog in their home. That’s in part because the Communist Party has organized most people to live in apartment compounds in which it is much easier to control them.
We saw this really extensively in the pandemic, in which people were unable to leave their Shanghai apartment compounds for anything other than getting their noses and mouths swabbed. I write a little bit about how, if you take the rail outside of major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you hit farmland really, really quickly. That is in part because the Communist Party assesses governors as well as mayors on their degree of food self-sufficiency.
Cities like Shanghai and Beijing have to produce a lot of their own crops, both grains as well as vegetables, as well as fruits, as well as livestock, within a certain radius so that in case there’s ever a major devastating war, they don’t have to rely on strawberries from Mexico or strawberries from Cambodia, or Thailand. There’s a lot of farmland allocated outside of major cities. I think that will prevent suburban sprawl. You can’t control people if they all have a yard as well as a dog. I think the Communist Party will not allow it.
COWEN: Whether the variable of engineers matters, I went and I looked at the history of other East Asian economies, which have done very well in manufacturing, built out generally excellent infrastructure. None of these problems with the Second Avenue line in New York. Taiwan, like the presidents, at least if we believe GPT-5, three of them were lawyers and none of them were engineers. South Korea, you have actually some economists, a lot of bureaucrats.
WANG: Wow. Imagine that. Economists in charge, Tyler.
COWEN: I wouldn’t think it could work. A few lawyers, one engineer. Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, he’s a lawyer. He thinks in a very lawyerly manner. Singapore has arguably done the best of all those countries. Much richer than China, inspired China. Why should I think engineers rather than just East Asia, and a bunch of other accompanying facts about these places are what matter?
WANG: Japan, a lot of lawyers in the top leadership. What exactly was the leadership of Hong Kong? A bunch of British civil servants.
COWEN: Some of whom are probably lawyers or legal-type minds, right? Not in general engineers.
WANG: PPE grads. I think that we can understand the engineering variable mostly because of how much more China has done relative to Japan and South Korea and Taiwan.
COWEN: It’s much, much poorer. Per capita manufacturing output is gone much better in these other countries.
And:
WANG: Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let’s call it books, music, all sorts of things, but when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. I much prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace. I prefer Buddenbrooks to Magic Mountain. Here again, you oppose me. What’s the deal?
COWEN: I don’t think the differences are that big. For instance, if we ask ourselves, what’s the relative ranking of Chengdu plus Chongqing compared to the rest of the world? We’re 98.5% in agreement compared to almost anyone else. When you get to the micro level, the so-called narcissism of petty differences, obviously, you’re born in China. I grew up in New Jersey. It’s going to shape our perspectives.
Anything in China, you have been there in a much more full-time way, and you speak and read Chinese, and none of that applies to me. I’m popping in and out as a tourist. Then, I think the differences make much more sense. It’s possible I would prefer to live in Shanghai for essentially the reasons you mentioned. If I’m somewhere for a week, I’m definitely going to pick Beijing. I’ll go around to the galleries. The things that are terrible about the city just don’t bother me that much, because I know I’ll be gone.
WANG: 98.5% agreement. I’ll take that, Tyler. It’s you and me against the rest of the world, but then we’ll save our best disagreements for each other.
COWEN: Let’s see if you can pass an intellectual Turing test. Why is it that I think Yunnan is the single best place in the world to visit? Just flat out the best if you had to pick one region. Not why you think it is, but why I think it is.
Strongly recommended, Dan and I had so much fun we kept going for about an hour and forty minutes. And of course you should buy and read Dan’s bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
*Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect*
By H.S. Jones, an excellent book. For all the resurgence of interest in government and its problems, Bryce has received remarkably little attention. But his theory of low-quality, careerist politcians, combined with imperfectly informed voters, seems highly relevant to our current day. Public opinion is slow, and largely reactive, but potent once mobilized. Leadership can truly matter, and he stresses national character and civic education. In other words, Bryce’s The American Commonwealth is a book still worth reading.
I had not known that Bryce was born in Belfast, or that he was so opposed to women’s suffrage. Or that he was so interested in Armenia, climbed Mount Ararat, and was fascinated by the inevitability of interracial marriage and its consequences (no, not in the usual racist way). He was an expert on Roman law.
Recommended, and also very well written.
*FDR: A New Political Life*
From historian David T. Beito, here is one excerpt:
FDR gave unquestioning support to President Wilson’s crackdown on free speech during World War I, including his enforcement of the Sedition and Espionage Acts. According to Kenneth S. Davis, Roosevelt “went along with prevailing trends in the realm of the national spirit, uninhibited by any strong ideological commitment to the Bill of Rights.” After reading about the conviction of the publisher of an antiwar socialist pamphlet, for example, he sent a congratulatory letter to the federal prosecutor…
There is much more here than just the standard market-oriented “Roosevelt had bad economic policies” line, and the more left-leaning critique of Roosevelt on segregation and the southern coalition. For instance, Roosevelt supported policies that required the telegram companies to keep copies of all telegrams sent, and he used the FCC licensing process to help keep radio in his corner politically.
There is more. It can be said that this book offers a very negative view of FDR.
*Policing on Drugs*
The author is Aileen Teague, and the subtitle is The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000. I had been wanting to read a book on this topic, and this manuscript covered exactly the ground I was hoping for. Excerpt:
…in 1965, only 4.8 percent of college students in the Northeast had ever tried marijuana. By 1970, that figure jmped to 48 percent of college students from Northeast schools having used marijuana within the last year.
Jim Buchanan was right? Blame the Beatles? Remember when so much of the drug trade was a Turkish-French thing?
If you are wondering, the Mexican drug cartels emerged during the 1970s. Perhaps the author blames more of this on U.S. policy than I think is correct? If Nixon had never cracked down and militarized the issue, I suspect the evolution of the matter would not be so different from current status quo? Unless of course you wish to go the Walmart route.
In any case a good book on a topic of vital importance.