Category: History
*The Hidden Victims*
The author is Cormac Ó Gráda, the renowned Irish economic historian, and the subtitle is Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars. This is a first-rate and also horrifying of a still underdiscussed topic. Here is one excerpt:
The death rate from famine in Greece was probably higher than in any other European country with the exceptions of the Soviet Union and Poland. Following its occupation by Axis troops in April-June 1941, the British Navy, which controlled the Mediterranean, blocked sea access to Greece. Greece was one of the few Nazi-occupied economies that depended on imports for much of its food. The theft of meat and dairy cattle in the area around Athens for army use quickly followed occupation. Very soon, essential foodstuffs became scarce, particularly in Athens, which led to a famine at its most intense in 1941-42. The capital and its port city of Piraeus and some of the islands were hit particularly hard. The context was one of hyperinflation, an Allied blockade, and state-sponsored theft by the occupation forces.
This important book will make my best non-fiction of the year list.
Tabarrok on China: World of DAAS Podcast
I was very pleased to appear on Safegraph CEO Auren Hoffman’s World of DAAS podcast. We covered lots of material including this (lightly edited) bit on China.
Auren Hoffman (23:06.518):
Now, you’ve thought a lot about things like reshoring, building manufacturing capacity. How do you think we could be thinking about that differently?
Alex (23:24.058)
I understand that there are some concerns about China, and there is an argument and I think it’s a legitimate argument, that there are some things such as chips that we want to make sure, it’s not good to have them located in Taiwan, right? We want to make sure that we onshore those. However, I have three concerns. One is, fundamentally, I don’t think China and the United States have such a clash of interest. Of course, it’s not perfect harmony, but there’s a lot of harmony of interest between China and the United States. We do lot of trade with China, which benefits both China and the United States.
..China’s getting richer Okay, people are worried because they’re getting more military whatever but also what this means is that people in China are getting cancer. Well now there’s 1 .4 billion people who want to cure for cancer, and they’re willing to put some money into it, right? And then that’s going to increase the amount of research and development for all kinds of high-tech goods, which is amazing for us. Like, I would be thrilled if an American wins the Nobel Prize for curing cancer. I would be 99.5 % as happy if a Chinese scientist wins a Nobel Prize for curing cancer.
So we have a lot to gain from a richer China. That’s point one. Point two is that, yeah, I get the idea that we want to onshore chip manufacturing, but I think we want to friendshore, right? So we don’t want to just have protection against all countries. Like I get it, okay, a hundred percent tariff on your Chinese EVs. It’s kind of crazy, but all right. However, let’s reduce tariffs on Germany.
Let’s reduce tariffs on Europe. In fact, let’s create a free trade, even a free immigration block among the Western democracies, you know, including Japan, Australia, New Zealand. So, let’s not turn a small problem in foreign policy, which is to make sure that we have a ready military supply. Let’s not turn that into trying to create a fortress America Which is going to make us poorer and actually less safe instead, you know, let’s build up the free world. Okay, let’s create an immigration and free trade with Europe and Canada and Mexico and so forth. Let’s build up the free world. That’s point two.
Point three is that look. It’s very, very easy to take a foreign policy argument and turn it into rent seeking for the benefit of special interests and protectionism for the benefit of special interests. Right? So at one point in the United States, probably even still today, you know, we were prohibiting mohair imports. Okay. Why? Because we use mohair to make military uniforms. The whole thing is ridiculous. But it’s very easy, almost inevitable, that this kind of argument is turned into a special interest trough.
I think this is one of my best podcast appearances because we covered some new material on crime, the universities, why Tyler and I are able to cooperate on so many projects, a conspiracy theory I believe and more. Listen to the whole thing.
US Human Experimentation Without Consent or Contract
In July 1946, 20-year-old Helen Hutchison walked into the Vanderbilt University prenatal clinic in Nashville, Tennessee. Helen found herself pregnant after her husband had returned from combat in World War II. The pregnancy, however, had not been easy. During her visit to the clinic Helen’s doctor handed her a small drink.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a little cocktail,” her doctor replied. “It’ll make you feel better.”
“Well I don’t know if I should be drinking a cocktail,” she responded in jest.
“Drink it all. Drink it all down” (quoted in Welsome 1999, p. 220).Helen did as her doctor ordered.
Three months later Helen’s daughter, Barbara, was born. Not long after, Helen began to experience some frightening health problems; her face swelled, and her hair fell out. She then experienced two miscarriages, one of which necessitated 16 blood transfusions (Welsome 1999, p. 220). Baby Barbara experienced her own health problems from early childhood. She suffered from extreme fatigue and developed an autoimmune disorder and eventually skin cancer.
…Unbeknownst to Helen, she and her unborn baby had been subjects in a government-funded experiment. She was one of hundreds of women who received an experimental “cocktail” between 1945 and 1947 during one of their prenatal visits, compliments of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which provided the materials (Wittenstein 2014, p. 39).
The 829 women of the Vanderbilt clinic were but a few of hundreds of thousands of individuals, mostly U.S. citizens, who would be subjected to illegal experiments and suffer human-rights violations during in the post-World War II period at the hands of scientists with funding and materials provided by the U.S. government. These experiments were meant to provide the government with information about the effects of atomic weapons on the human body to advance military capabilities in the name of “national security.”
This paper tells the story of U.S. government activities related to human experimentation after World War II.
That’s Coyne and Hall writing on Dr. Mengele, USA Style: Lessons from Human Rights Abuses in Post World War II America. It’s interesting that these immoral experiments using radiation and also agents of chemical warfare are less well known to the public than say the Tuskegee Study even though they involved far more people.
Sam Mendelsohn’s Travel Blog
When I travel abroad, I will often get recommendations of where to eat, what to do and what to read and watch from Sam Mendelsohn. Not just a few sentences, as if from a travel guide, but pages of unique and original material. I often have time to pick only one or two recommended items but invariably they are excellent. When I stayed in the Devigarh palace outside of Udaipur, for example, Sam pointed me to the movie Eklavya: The Royal Guard which is set in the palace. Watching the movie added to the stay. Not your usual material.
Sam is now formalizing his notes into a travel blog. He’s starting with some of lesser known places in India but will soon add more. He is also an expert on Thailand. Email him for some out-of-the-ordinary tips.
Every place is its own distinctive world: some combination of intellectual, literary, culinary, musical, sonic, linguistic, spiritual, philosophical, visual, architectural, geographic, botanic, olfactory, and cinematic worlds, and etc, brought together by different cultural and historical currents, and that’s all only a small part of the story of any given place. That such worlds of worlds actually exist, and the planet is full of them, seems underappreciated. Few people have the time or background knowledge to give anything more than a very superficial exploration of any of these while traveling, and I won’t claim to either. Despite my ambitions, I’m quite mediocre. Nonetheless, attempting to get lost in these worlds, however briefly and incompletely, is incredibly stimulating and meaningful for me. I like cities more than most people because they contain more worlds to get lost in, but on a short trip less can be more.
MR and Guinea (Conakry), a short history (from my email)
I will not double indent:
“Dear Tyler,
I am a great fan. I am currently focused on Guinea (Conakry) and wondered what you might have posted about the country over the years. My search for “Guinea” in Marginal Revolution results in 50 posts:
- In 13 of them you are referring to “guinea pigs”.
- In 9 of them you are referring to “Papua New Guinea”.
- In 9 you refer to “Equatorial Guinea”.
- In 5 of there is no explicit mention of Guinea (I assume the reference to Guinea can be found if one follows the links?)
- In 4 you refer to “Guinea Bissau”.
- In 4 you refer to “Guinea”, the country of that name with capital in Conakry
- In 3 the reference is to the broader region (Gulf of Guinea, etc).
- One reference to the island of “New Guinea”.
- One reference to the “guinea worm”.
- One reference to “guineas” as in the coins.
Of the references to the country of Guinea, one refers to Bembeya Jazz (good one!), another to press coverage from that country on the DSK affair in 2011, one mentions Guinea as one of the countries of origin for Africans in Guangzhou, and a final one appropriately mentions it on the topic of “Wikipedia knowledge deserts”.
None of these is a dedicated post to the country, something each of the other Guineas does enjoy on Marginal Revolution. I wondered if you might consider redressing the balance?
If it helps, here I write for the Centre for African Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University on how Asian demand, investment and policies is driving a mining boom in Guinea. Guinea is posed to be one of the top 2 growing economies in the world over the next five years on the back of the $20 billion Simandou iron ore mining project. You heard it here first!
Cordialement,
Bernabé Sánchez”
That was then, this is now, German edition
Via Scott Sumner.
The Unseen Fallout: Chernobyl’s Deadly Air Pollution Legacy
A fascinating new paper The Political Economic Determinants of Nuclear Power: Evidence from Chernobyl by Makarin, Qian, and Wang was recently presented at the NBER Pol. Economy conference. The paper is nominally about how fossil fuel companies and coal miners in the US and UK used the Chernobyl disaster to successfully lobby against building more nuclear power plants. The data collection here is impressive but that is just how democracy works. I found the political economy section less interesting than some of the background material.
First, the Chernobyl disaster ended nuclear power plant (NPP) construction in the United States (top-left panel), the country with the most NPPs in the world . Surprisingly, the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 (much less serious than Chernobyl) had very little effect on construction; albeit the 1-2 punch with Chernobyl in 1986 surely didn’t help. The same pattern is very clear across all countries and also all democracies (top-right panel). The bottom two panels show the same data but looking at new plants rather than the cumulative total–there was a sharp break in 1986 with growth quickly converging to zero new plants per year.
Fewer nuclear plants than otherwise would have been the case might have made a disaster less likely but there were countervailing forces:
We document that the decline in new NPPs in democracies after Chernobyl was accompanied by an increase in the average age of the NPPs in use. To satisfy the rise in energy demand, reactors built prior to Chernobyl continued operating past their initially scheduled retirement dates. Using data on NPP incident reports, we show that such plants are more likely to have accidents. The data imply that Chernobyl resulted in the continued operation of older and more dangerous NPPs in the democracies.
Moreover, safety declined because the existing plants got older but in addition “the slowdown of new NPP construction…delayed the adoption of new safer plants.” This is a point about innovation that I have often emphasized (see also here)
The key to innovation is continuous refinement and improvement…. Learning by doing requires doing….Thus, when considering innovation today, it’s essential to think about not only the current state of technology but also about the entire trajectory of development. A treatment that’s marginally better today may be much better tomorrow.
Regulation increased costs substantially:
The U.S. NRC requires six-to-seven-years to approve NPPs. The total construction time afterwards ranges from decades to indefinite. Cost overruns and changing regulatory requirements during the construction process sometime forces construction to be abandoned after significant sunk costs have been made. This often leads investors to abandon construction after already sunk billions of dollars of investment. Worldwide, companies have stopped construction on 90 reactors since the 1980s. 40 of those were in the U.S. alone. For example, in 2017, two South Carolina utilities abandoned two unfinished Westinghouse AP1000 reactors due to significant construction delays and cost overruns. At the time, this left two other U.S. AP1000 reactors under construction in Georgia. The original cost estimate of $14 billion for these two reactors rose to $23 billion. Construction only continued when the U.S. federal government promised financial support. These were the first new reactors in the U.S. in decades. In contrast, recent NPPs in China have taken only four to six years and $2 billion dollars per reactor. When considering the choice of investing in nuclear energy versus fossil fuel energy, note that a typical natural gas plant takes approximately two years to construct (Lovering et al., 2016).
Chernobyl, to be clear, was a very costly disaster
The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, required more than 500,000 personnel and an estimated US$68 billion (2019 USD). Between five and seven percent of government spending in Ukraine is still related to Chernobyl. (emphasis added, AT) In Belarus, Chernobyl-related expenses fell from twenty-two percent of the national budget in 1991 to six percent by 2002.
The biggest safety effect of the decline in nuclear power plants was the increase in air pollution. The authors use satellite date on ambient particles to show that when a new nuclear plant comes online pollution in nearby cities declines significantly. Second, they use the decline in pollution to create preliminary estimates of the effect of pollution on health:
According to our calculations, the construction of an additional NPP, by reducing the total suspended particles (TSP) in the ambient environment, could on average save 816,058 additional life years.
According to our baseline estimates (Table 1), over the past 38 years, Chernobyl reduced the total number of NPPs worldwide by 389, which is almost entirely driven by the slowdown of new construction in democracies. Our calculations thus suggest that, globally, more than 318 million expected life years have been lost in democratic countries due to the decline in NPP growth in these countries after Chernobyl.
The authors use the Air Quality Life Index from the University of Chicago which I think is on the high side of estimates. Nevertheless, as you know, I think the new air pollution literature is credible (also here) so I think the bottom line is almost certainly correct. Namely, Chernobyl caused many more deaths by reducing nuclear power plant construction and increasing air pollution than by its direct effects which were small albeit not negligible.
Mark Skousen on free trade (from my email)
Why do so many economic historians ignore the benefits of the largest free-trade zone in history: inside the US! Thanks to the “dormant” commerce clause of the US Constitution, the US has achieved rapid growth, despite the tariffs. I write about it here: This Little-Known Section of the Constitution Made America the World’s #1 SuperPower – Mark Skousen
Cowen’s Third Law, illustrated
We further show that demographic and productivity factors do not represent convincing drivers of real interest rates over long spans.
That is from a new AER piece by Kenneth S. Rogoff, Barbara Rossi, and Paul Schmelzing. Here are less gated copies of the piece. Here are some MR posts on Cowen’s Third Law.
Rent Control Reduces New Development: Bug or Feature?
The minimum wage will tend to increase unemployment among low-skill workers, often minorities. To many people that’s an argument against the minimum wage. But to progressives at the opening of the 20th century that was an argument for the minimum wage–progressive’s demanded minimum wages to get women and racial minorities out of the work force.
Something similar may be happening with rent control. Rent control reduces new development. Bug or feature? California Republican Tony Strickland argues that reduced development is a feature. New state laws in California prevent cities from restricting development but if rent control was legal cities could be used it to do the same thing just by making it unprofitable to build.
Politico: Strickland said Weinstein’s rent control measure [allowing cities to use rent control] would block “the state’s ability to sue our city” because Huntington Beach could slap steep affordability requirements on new, multi-unit apartment projects that are now exempt from rent control. Such requirements, he argued, could stop development that would “destroy the fabric” of the town’s quaint “Surf City” vibe…. “It gives local governments ironclad protections from the state’s housing policy and therefore overreaching enforcement.”
“On paper, it would be legal to build new homes. But it would be illegal, largely speaking, to make money doing so,” said Louis Mirante…
Hat tip: Ben Krauss at Slow Boring.
The French Olympic opening ceremony
I’ve only seen excerpts, but many people are upset. I can vouch “this is not what I would have done,” but perhaps the over the top, deviance-drenched modes of presentation are reflecting some longer-running strands in French culture. La Cage aux Folles? Le Bal des Folles? The whole Moulin Rouge direction? How about Gustave Moreau, not to mention his lower-quality followers? Jean Paul Gaultier? (NYT, “Fashion Freak Show”) Pierre et Gilles?
Zaza Fournier? Even Rabelais.
In my view, these styles work best on the painted canvas, thus Moreau is the one creator on the list I truly like. But please note these Olympics may be less of a break from traditional French culture — or some of its strands — than you may think at first.
My excellent Conversation with Alan Taylor, on American history
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Taylor take a walking tour of early history through North America covering the decisions, and ripples of those decisions, that shaped revolution and independence, including why Canada didn’t join the American revolution, why America in turn never conquered Canada, American’s early obsession with the collapse of the Republic, how democratic the Jacksonians were, Texas/Mexico tensions over escaped African American slaves, America’s refusal to recognize Cuban independence, how many American Tories went north post-revolution, Napoleon III’s war with Mexico, why the US Government considered attacking Canada after the Civil War, and much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, here’s a quotation from your writings, page 37: “One of the great ironies of the American Revolution was that it led to virtually free land for settlers in British Canada while rendering land more expensive in the United States.” Could you explain that, please?
TAYLOR: Sure. The war was very expensive. All the states and the United States also incurred immense debts. How are you going to pay for that? This is the time when there’s no income tax, and the chief ways in which governments could raise money were on import duties and then on selling land. There was a lot of land, provided you could take it away from native peoples. All of the states and the United States were in the business of trying to sell land, but also they’re reliant within the states on these land taxes. All of these go up, then, to try to finance the war debt.
Whereas in British Canada, the British government is subsidizing the local government. They’re paying the full freight of it, which means that local taxes were much lower there. It also meant that they could afford to basically give away land to attract settlers. They had this notion that if we offer free land to Americans, they will want to leave that new American republic, move back into the British Empire, strengthen Canada, and provide a militia to defend it.
Substantive and interesting throughout. And can you guess what in his answers surprised me most?
Overturn Euclid v. Ambler
An excellent post from Maxwell Tabarrok at Maximum Progress:
On 75 percent or more of the residential land in most major American cities it is illegal to build anything other than a detached single-family home. 95.8 percent of total residential land area in California is zoned as single-family-only, which is 30 percent of all land in the state. Restrictive zoning regulations such as these probably lower GDP per capita in the US by 8–36%. That’s potentially tens of thousands of dollars per person.
The legal authority behind all of these zoning rules derives from a 1926 Supreme Court decision in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. Ambler realty held 68 acres of land in the town of Euclid, Ohio. The town, wanting to avoid influence, immigration, and industry from nearby Cleveland, passed a restrictive zoning ordinance which prevented Ambler realty from building anything but single family homes on much of their land, though they weren’t attempting to build anything at the time of the case.
Ambler realty and their lawyer (a prominent Georgist!) argued that since this zoning ordinance severely restricted the possible uses for their property and its value, forcing the ordinance upon them without compensation was unconstitutional.
The constitutionality claims in this case are about the 14th and 5th amendment. The 5th amendment to the United States Constitution states, among other things, that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The part of the 14th amendment relevant to this case just applies the 5th to state and local governments.
The local judge in the case, who ruled in favor of Ambler (overturned by the Supreme Court), understood exactly what was going on:
The plain truth is that the true object of the ordinance in question is to place all the property in an undeveloped area of 16 square miles in a strait-jacket. The purpose to be accomplished is really to regulate the mode of living of persons who may hereafter inhabit it. In the last analysis, the result to be accomplished is to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life … Aside from contributing to these results and furthering such class tendencies, the ordinance has also an esthetic purpose; that is to say, to make this village develop into a city along lines now conceived by the village council to be attractive and beautiful.
Note that overturning Euclid v. Ambler would not make zoning in the interests of health and safety unconstitutional. Indeed, it wouldn’t make any zoning unconstitutional it would just mean that zoning above and beyond that required for health and safety would require compensation to property owners.
Read the whole thing and subscribe to Maximum Progress.
Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revoluton
Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.
After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.
In a remarkable new paper, Juhász, Sakabe, and Weinstein show how the key to this transformation was a massive effort to translate and codify technical information in the Japanese language. This state-led initiative made cutting-edge industrial knowledge accessible to Japanese entrepreneurs and workers in a way that was unparalleled among non-Western countries at the time.
Here’s an amazing graph which tells much of the story. In both 1870 and 1910 most of the technical knowledge of the world is in French, English, Italian and German but look at what happens in Japan–basically no technical books in 1870 to on par with English in 1910. Moreover, no other country did this.
Translating a technical document today is much easier than in the past because the words already exist. Translating technical documents in the late 19th century, however, required the creation and standardization of entirely new words.
…the Institute of Barbarian Books (Bansho Torishirabesho)…was tasked with developing English-Japanese dictionaries to facilitate technical translations. This project was the first step in what would become a massive government effort to codify and absorb Western science. Linguists and lexicographers have written extensively on the difficulty of scientific translation, which explains why little codification of knowledge happened in languages other than English and its close cognates: French and German (c.f. Kokawa et al. 1994; Lippert 2001; Clark 2009). The linguistic problem was two-fold. First, no words existed in Japanese for canonical Industrial Revolution products such as the railroad, steam engine, or telegraph, and using phonetic representations of all untranslatable jargon in a technical book resulted in transliteration of the text, not translation. Second, translations needed to be standardized so that all translators would translate a given foreign word into the same Japanese one.
Solving these two problems became one of the Institute’s main objectives.
Here’s a graph showing the creation of new words in Japan by year. You can see the explosion in new words in the late 19th century. Note that this happened well after the Perry Mission. The words didn’t simply evolve, the authors argue new words were created as a form of industrial policy.
By the way, AstralCodexTen points us to an interesting biography of a translator at the time who works on economics books:
[Fukuzawa] makes great progress on a number of translations. Among them is the first Western economics book translated into Japanese. In the course of this work, he encounters difficulties with the concept of “competition.” He decides to coin a new Japanese word, kyoso, derived from the words for “race and fight.” His patron, a Confucian, is unimpressed with this translation. He suggests other renderings. Why not “love of the nation shown in connection with trade”? Or “open generosity from a merchant in times of national stress”? But Fukuzawa insists on kyoso, and now the word is the first result on Google Translate.
There is a lot more in this paper. In particular, showing how the translation of documents lead to productivity growth on an industry by industry basis and a demonstration of the importance of this mechanism for economic growth across the world.
The bottom line for me is this: What caused the industrial revolution is a perennial question–was it coal, freedom, literacy?–but this is the first paper which gives what I think is a truly compelling answer for one particular case. Japan’s rapid industrialization under the Meiji Restoration was driven by its unprecedented effort to translate, codify, and disseminate Western technical knowledge in the Japanese language.
Hollywood evidence on McCarthyism
There is a new NBER working paper on this topic by Hui Ren Tan and Tianyi Wang, here is the abstract:
We study a far-reaching episode of demagoguery in American history. From the late 1940s to 1950s, anti-communist hysteria led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others gripped the nation. Hundreds of professionals in Hollywood were accused of having ties with the communist. We show that these accusations were not random, targeting those with dissenting views. Actors and screenwriters who were accused suffered a setback in their careers. Beyond the accused, we find that the anti-communist crusade also had a chilling effect on film content, as non-accused filmmakers avoided progressive topics. The decline in progressive films, in turn, made society more conservative.
Here is extensive (positive) commentary by Alice Evans:
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- Dissidents who had organised against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) were 27 to 32 percentage points more likely to be accused.
- Celebrities – actors with more experience and Academy Award nominations were more likely to be accused.
- Actors and writers involved in progressive films were more likely to be accused.
Quicker and easier to read than the paper. I also would like to see numbers on how many exactly were in fact communists.