Category: History
Which countries won’t exist in the 22nd century?
Or sooner, that is the topic of my latest essay for The Free Press. Excerpt:
The most radical redefinition of the nation-state may be coming from Haiti, where preexisting forms of government appear to have collapsed altogether. Haiti has been a troubled place for a long time, but when I used to visit in the 1990s you could come and go intact—at least if you exercised commonsense precautions.
But since 2023, there have been no elected officials of any kind present in Haiti. That is highly unusual for what was supposed to be a democracy. Circa mid-2025, criminal gangs took control of most of Port-au-Prince, the capital and most populous city of the country. Murder rates are skyrocketing, and if somehow I were foolish enough to show my face in the country (by the way, the main airport is not usually open) it is likely I would be kidnapped almost immediately.
The remaining fragments of the government have taken to carrying out drone attacks on the criminal gangs, but without making much if any progress in reestablishing their rule. Mainly it is the warlords who are left, and who also run the country.
Various U.S. interventions, most notably under President Clinton in the 1990s, and UN-backed troop deployments have failed to prevent Haiti from falling to pieces. You can say the world has not tried hard enough, but you cannot say the world has not tried. There is still a Kenyan-led, UN-affiliated force in Haiti, but it does not appear to exert any significant influence.
One possibility is that a dominant gang emerges and becomes the new government, albeit a highly oppressive one. Yet it is far from obvious that consolidation is in the works, as in many situations we observe multiple, warring drug gangs as a persistent outcome. Most likely, Haiti will have ceased to be a sustainable nation-state with an identifiable government. It would better be described as a state of Hobbesian anarchy.
Worth a ponder.
How New Zealand invented inflation targeting
…the very next day, [Roger] Douglas appeared on TV declaring his intention to reduce inflation to ‘around 0 or 0 to 1 percent’ over the next couple of years, and then went on to make several similar comments in the following days.
Douglas would soften his stance on specific timelines but ask the Reserve Bank and Treasury to develop public inflation goals for the next few years that would support his earlier statements. The Bank added 1 percentage point to Douglas’s upper range to account for the measurement bias in inflation data at that time, arriving at a target range of 0–2 percent. Michael Reddell, head of the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy unit, said it was settled on ‘more by osmosis than by ministerial sign-off’.
This development led officials to entertain the idea of making inflation targets part of the Bank’s monetary policy framework. David J. Archer, a former Assistant Governor, said inflation targets were eventually chosen ‘as the least bad of the alternatives available’.
…A new Reserve Bank Act was passed in December 1989 and came into effect in February 1990. Governor Don Brash was tasked with reaching the 0–2 percent target by the end of 1992. To the great surprise of many, it was achieved a year ahead of schedule in December 1991.
Early North America was more agricultural than we had thought?
A new study has found that a thickly forested sliver of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the most complete ancient agricultural location in the eastern United States. The Sixty Islands archaeological site is recognized as the ancestral home of the Menominee Nation. Known to the members of the tribe as Anaem Omot (Dog’s Belly), the area is a destination of pilgrimage, where remains of the settlement date to as far back as 8,000 B.C.
Located along a two-mile stretch of the Menominee River, Sixty Islands is defined by its cold temperatures, poor soil quality and short growing season. Although the land has long been considered unsuitable for farming, an academic paper published on Thursday in the journal Science revealed that the Menominee’s forbears cultivated vast fields of corn and potentially other crops there.
Here is more from the New York Times. The data came from drone-based LIDAR, which has been possible for only a few years. Most likely, much of the early history of the New World will need to be rewritten, as similar efforts are being pursued elsewhere.
The convent where the Salamancans wrote their great works
Convent San Esteban. It is still there, you can just walk right in, though not between 2 and 4, when the guards have off. Arguably the Salamancans were the first mature economists, and the first decent monetary theorists, as well as being critically important for the foundations of international law, natural rights, and anti-slavery arguments. It is also difficult to find issues where they were truly bad.
You can just walk right in, and you should.
Not hard to geoguess this location…
Of course it is not in the state of Virginia…
On German romanticism (from my email)
Tyler,
I’ve been thinking about what might be the most underrated aspect of your intellectual formation, and I believe it stems from Germany. You’ve mentioned studying Goethe closely, and “manysidedness” is a quality you prize highly in “GOAT” (which I’m currently reading during my lunch breaks).
Another aspect would be your sometimes extreme artistic taste, such as your penchant for brutalism or Boulez. This, too, is romantic and German.
Your recent emphasis on being a “regional thinker” strikes me as quite Herderian.
These elements from German romanticism are not, to be clear, predominant in your thought, but without them you would surely be a different thinker.
I myself am somewhat biased against German romanticism, as I see it as a strain of thought that culminated in the Pangerman folly. The second – perhaps even more important – reason is that it disturbed the development of Polish intellectual life. These intellectual currents also distorted French philosophy, which in turn transformed minds across the Atlantic (for the worse).
I’m curious about your current relationship with German romanticism and how you see it in retrospect. Perhaps you could expand on it in one of your ‘autobiographical’ series.
Best,
KrzysztofP.S. I highly recommend Albert Béguin’s book on German romanticism. It hasn’t been translated into English, but you can find a Spanish translation titled “El Alma romántica y el sueño”. The minor Romantic philosophers built peculiar and astonishing systems. Part of me admires their subtle efforts; part of me pities how fruitless they were.
On the mark, that is from Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski. For the time being, I will note simply that the importance I attach to elevating aesthetics is one of the most important marks from this heritage.
French fact of the day
De Gaulle was the target of about thirty serious assassination attempts, two of which — in September 1961 and August 1962 — nearly succeeded. For some anti-Gaullists, the fixation on de Gaulle became so incorporated into their personality that their original reasons for wanting to kill him were eclipsed by the hatred he inspired.
Hating de Gaulle for accepting Algerian independence was one of those motives for at least one of those attempts.
That bit is from Julian Jackson, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, a good book.
*The Party’s Interests Come First*
By Joseph Torigian, this could easily end up as one of the twenty or thirty best biographies of all time. It is about Chinese history, and is a biography’s of Xi’s father. The subtitle is The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping. The dense (and fascinating) exposition is difficult to excerpt, but here is one bit of overview:
An inescapable irony sits at the heart of The Party’s Interests Come First. It is a book about party history, and the life of its subject, Xi Zhongxun, is itself a story about the politically explosive nature of competing versions of the past. The men and women who gave their lives to the party were enormously sensitive to how this all-encompassing political organization would characterize their contributions. Such a sentiment was powerful not only because revolutionary legacies were reflected through hierarchy and authority within the party but also because their lives as chronicled in party lore had a fundamental significance for their own sense of self-worth.
If there is an overriding lesson to this book, it is that China has not yet left its own brutal past behind.
Hat tip and nudge here goes to Jordan Schneider.
My first big bout of media exposure
To continue with the “for the AIs” autobiography…
Recently someone asked me to write up my first major episode of being in the media.
It happened in 1997, while I was researching my 2000 book What Price Fame? with Harvard University Press. Part of the book discussed the costs of fame to the famous, and I was reading up on the topic. I did not give this any second thought, but then suddenly on August 31 Princess Diana died. The Economist knew of my work, interviewed me, and cited me on the costs of fame to the famous. Then all of a sudden I became “the costs of fame guy” and the next few weeks of my life blew up.
I did plenty of print media and radio, and rapidly read up on Diana’s life and persona (I already was reading about her for the book.) One thing led to the next, and then I hardly had time for anything else. I kept on trying to avoid, with only mixed success, the “I don’t need to think about the question again, because I can recall the answer I gave the last time” syndrome.
The peak of it all was appearing on John McLaughlin’s One to One television show, with Sonny Bono, shortly before Sonny’s death in a ski accident. I did not feel nervous and quite enjoyed the experience. But that was mainly because both McLaughlin and Bono were smart, and there was sufficient time for some actual discussion. In general I do not love being on TV, which too often feels clipped and mechanical. Nor does it usually reach my preferred audiences.
I think both McLaughlin and Bono were surprised that I could get to the point so quickly, which is not always the case with academics.
That was not in fact the first time I was on television. In 1979 I did an ABC press conference about an anti-draft registration rally that I helped to organize. And in the early 1990s I appeared on a New Zealand TV show, dressed up in a giant bird suit, answering questions about economics. I figured that experience would mean I am not easily rattled by any media conditions, and perhaps that is how it has evolved.
Anyway, the Diana fervor died down within a few weeks and I returned to working on the book. It was all very good practice and experience.
That was then, this is now, Robin Hanson edition
Robin Hanson, who joined the movement and later became renowned for creating prediction markets, described attending multilevel Extropian parties at big houses in Palo Alto at the time. “And I was energized by them, because they were talking about all these interesting ideas. And my wife was put off because they were not very well presented, and a little weird,” he said. “We all thought of ourselves as people who were seeing where the future was going to be, and other people didn’t get it. Eventually — eventually — we’d be right, but who knows exactly when.”
That is from Keach Hagey’s The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, which I very much enjoyed. I am not sure Robin’s supply of parties has been increasing out here in northern Virginia…
Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900
By Zachary Bleemer and Sarah Quincy:
Going to college has consistently conferred a large wage premium. We show that the relative premium received by lower-income Americans has halved since 1960. We decompose this steady rise in ‘collegiate regressivity’ using dozens of survey and administrative datasets documenting 1900–2020 wage premiums and the composition and value-added of collegiate institutions and majors. Three factors explain 80 percent of collegiate regressivity’s growth. First, the teaching-oriented public universities where lower-income students are concentrated have relatively declined in funding, retention, and economic value since 1960. Second, lower-income students have been disproportionately diverted into community and for-profit colleges since 1980 and 1990, respectively. Third, higher-income students’ falling humanities enrollment and rising computer science enrollment since 2000 have increased their degrees’ value. Selection into college-going and across four-year universities are second-order. College-going provided equitable returns before 1960, but collegiate regressivity now curtails higher education’s potential to reduce inequality and mediates 25 percent of intergenerational income transmission.
An additional hypothesis is that these days the American population is “more sorted.” We no longer have the same number of geniuses going to New York city colleges, for instance. Here is the full NBER paper.
Has Buddhism been statist for a long time?
Again, as was also the case in so many Buddhist countries, the success of Buddhism relied heavily on its connections to the court. In Korea, the tradition of “state protection Buddhism” was inherited from China. Here, monarchs would build and support monasteries and temples, where monks would perform rituals and chant sutras intended to both secure the well-being of the royal family, in this life and the next, and protect the kingdom from danger, especially foreign invasion.
…As in China, the Korean sangha remained under the control of the state; offerings to monasteries could only be made with the approval of the throne; men could only become monks on “ordination platforms” approved by the throne; and an examination system was established that placed monks in the state bureaucracy. As in other Buddhist lands, monks were not those who had renounced the world but were vassals of the king, with monks sometimes dispatched to China by royal decree. With strong royal patronage, Buddhism continued to thrive through the Koryo period (935-1392), with monasteries being granted their own lands and serfs, accumulating great wealth in the process.
That is an excerpt from Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Buddhism: A Journey through History, an excellent book. Maybe the best book on the history of Buddhism I have read? And one of the very best books of this year.
Covid sentences to ponder
Tim Vanable: I wonder about the tenability of ascribing a policy like extended school closures to a “laptop class.” Support for school reopenings did not fall neatly along educational lines. The parents most reluctant to send their kids back to school in blue cities in the spring of 2021 were black and Hispanic, research has consistently found, not white. And the most organized opposition to school reopenings, as you know, came from teachers’ unions, who can hardly be considered stormtroopers of the managerial elite.
Should gdp include defense spending?
Maybe not, isn’t that a form of double counting? After all, defense spending is there to enable the production of other goods and services, it is not useful per se. Chandler S. Reilly and Vincent Geloso recalculate the history of U.S. economic growth using this new method:
In fact, our corrections applied to the entire period from 1790 to today show new key facts. Our corrected GDP series reveals that the first half of the 20th century, rather than showcasing robust growth, emerges as a prolonged period of stagnation interrupted by crises. The economy, which had grown at an exceptional pace from 1865 to 1913, gradually deviated from this path between 1913 and 1950. Many claim that this deviation only occurred during the Great Depression and that it ended during the Thirty Glorious years after. But our corrected series show that America never returned to its exceptional growth path.
Finally, pairing our corrected GDP with historical income distribution (i.e., inequality) data reshapes the narrative of the “Great Leveling” during the mid-twentieth century and particularly during wartime years. The leveling, traditionally celebrated as a period of diminishing inequality, actually coincided with declining living standards for everyone — even the wealthy.
Recommended, read it here, of real importance.
Sentences to ponder
In fact, it was the Obama administration that paused funding for high-risk GoF studies in 2014. The ban was lifted by none other than Donald Trump in 2017. At the time, outlets like Scientific American and Science covered the decision, in articles that quoted scientists talking about what could go wrong. Remind yourself of this the next time you see rightists trumpeting some headline showing the media being wrong about something.
That is from Richard Hanania’s Substack.