Category: History
My excellent Conversation with Tom Tugendhat
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tom Tugendhat has served as a Member of Parliament since 2015, holding roles such as Security Minister and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Before entering Parliament, Tom served in in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also worked for the Foreign Office, helped establish the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and served as military assistant and principal adviser to the Chief of the Defense Staff.
Tyler and Tom examine the evolving landscape of governance and leadership in the UK today, touching on the challenges of managing London under the UK’s centralized system, why England remains economically unbalanced, his most controversial view on London’s architecture, whether YIMBYism in England can succeed, the unique politics and history of Kent, whether the system of private schools needs reform, his pick for the greatest unselected prime minister, whether Brexit revealed a defect in the parliamentary system, whether the House of Lords should be abolished, why the British monarchy continues to captivate the world, devolution in Scotland and Northern Ireland, how learning Arabic in Yemen affected his life trajectory, his read on the Middle East and Russia, the Tom Tugendhat production function, his pitch for why a talented young person should work in the British Civil Service, and more.
And here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Okay. First question, what is your favorite walk around London, and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand?
TUGENDHAT: Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. A lot of people walk down the river. One of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. Very often, even in the middle of the day, there’s nobody there. You walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. It’s not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past, obviously, the Tower of London. You walk past Tower Bridge. You walk past many things like that.
Actually, you’re walking past a lot of modern London as well, and you see the reality of London, which is — the truth is, London isn’t a single city. It’s many, many different villages, all cobbled together in various different ways. I think outsiders miss the fact that there’s a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you’re doing is you’re going on the Tube, or if you’re going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see real communities and real smaller communities.
And:
COWEN: Can the British system of government in its current parliamentary form — how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion?
TUGENDHAT: I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truly liberal foundations are maintained. I mean that not in the American sense; I mean in a genuine, the old liberal tradition that emerges from the UK in the 1700s, 1800s, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property, and all those principles that then became embedded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own. I think it does very well at doing that because it forces you, our system forces you, into partnership. There are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in Parliament over the next four or five years.
And there’s four of us currently going for leadership at the Conservative Party. There’s one reason why, despite the fact that we’re competing almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we’re all going to have to work together for the next four years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other three, and the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn’t true. There’s only 121 of us Conservative MPs in Parliament, and what this system forces on us is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with somebody if you’re going to deal with them tomorrow. I think that’s one of the reasons why the British political system has endured because it forces you to remember that there’s a long-term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short-term one.
Recommended, highly intelligent throughout, including on China, Russia, and Yemen.
The Marginal Revolution Podcast: The Nobel Prize
We interrupt our regularly scheduled series of podcasts on the 1970s–first one here on inflation and monetary policy–to bring you a new podcast in honor of next week’s Nobel Prize in economics. Who will win? Who should win? Who should have won but didn’t? Who won but shouldn’t have?
Here’s one bit:
COWEN: I would give it to Robert Barro.
TABARROK: Okay. Tell me why you would give it to Robert Barro.
COWEN: “Are government bonds net wealth?” as a fundamental way of thinking about fiscal policy remains central. Also, he did early work on political business cycle theory. The status of cross-country growth regressions has fallen greatly. People once thought he might get it for that. That may now even be hurting his chances, but I think overall, what he’s created and done is enough for a Nobel Prize. He’s had five or six key articles in major macro fields.
TABARROK: Yes, I agree with you. I think you’re right about the cross-country regressions have fallen in favor over time, but still hugely important and really pushed the profession in that direction for a long time. Just because it’s not fashionable today doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a major contribution.
COWEN: It does mean fewer people will nominate him for fear of looking a bit low status, like, “Oh, you still think cross-country growth progressions are the thing.” I think it matters how many people nominate you in the early rounds.
TABARROK: Yes. I think it’s Barro’s birthday this week. He’s 80, I think.
I’d be pleased if Barro won, not for the least reason that he will be here at GMU next week which would be extra exciting if we can also celebrate a Nobel.
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The value of books on tractors
In addition, there were no textbooks to be found, except in libraries, where the numbers who tried to get in were so immense that readers could only access the building for one hour, according to surname. An enterprising Shanghai publisher began reprinting textbooks from the early 1960s, which soon were worth their weight in gold. Young people in faraway places were pleading to relatives to send the books to them. Soon there was a black market. Printers sold imperfect copies outside the printworks. Textbooks were resold at phenomenal prices. In one part of the country, manuals on tractor repairs, normally in high demand, were exchanged twenty to one for physics textbooks. When the doors to the examination halls were finally opened, few prospective students were surprised that one topic set for Chinese composition was “An unforgettable day.” In the end, 278,000 students were admitted for college starting in the fall of 1978. One student, enrolled at Yan’an University in Shaanxi, wrote home to his family about how surprised he was that people in the city were nearly as poor as those in his village. But his admission to college opened a new world for him, with new kinds of people.
That is from the new and interesting Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, The Great Transformation: China’s Road to Reform.
A country run by schoolteachers?
One disgruntled veteran at a FF annual meeting in 2016 was heard to complain, ‘They’re all fucking schoolteachers now.’ He was partly right. In the thirtieth Dáil in 2007 there were 3 university lecturers, 14 primary school teachers and 14 secondary school teachers; there were also 16 lawyers, 5 doctors, 3 nurses and 14 farmers; 22 TDs described themselves as business people and 26 ‘now qualify for the bus pass’; 31 were the children of former TDs. By 2011, the number of TDs from a business background had only increased from 22 to 25, while the number of primary and secondary teachers was 30, making teaching still the largest profession represented in the Dáil, although the number of TDs who were offspring of former TDs was reduced to 15.
That is from the new and highly useful Diarmaid Ferriter book The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020.
What should I ask Stephen Kotkin?
Kotkin’s most prominent book project is his three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin: The first two volumes have been published as Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2014) and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (2017), and the third volume remains to be published.
Here is more from Wikipedia, of course he is an expert on the Soviet Union and also Russia more generally:
Among scholars of Russia, he is best known for Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization which exposes the realities of everyday life in the Soviet city of Magnitogorsk during the 1930s. In 2001, he published Armageddon Averted, a short history of the fall of the Soviet Union…
He is currently writing a multi-century history of Siberia, focusing on the Ob River Valley.
He is currently at the Hoover Institution. So what should I ask him?
*Emancipation*
The author is Peter Kolchin, and the subtitle is The Abolition and Aftermath of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Here is one interesting excerpt of many:
Despite the surge in schools and teachers after 1880, Russian peasant children were considerably less likely to receive schooling than were African American children, especially if they were girls. As the statement about not needing literacy in order to make cabbage soup indicated, the subordination of females that characterized Russian society in general was as evident in peasant education as in any other sphere of life. Statistics on school attendance by sex indicates that, in contrast to former slaves in the Southern United States, for whom serfs in Russia rarely sent their daughters to school during the 1860s and 1870s, regarding it as a waste of time that would fill their heads with needless knowledge and make them less fit for their feminine duties. The evidence is consistent and overwhelming. Among African Americans in the Southern United States, girls were at least as likely as boys to attend school: the Freedmen’s Bureau Consolidated Monthly School Report for June 1867, for example, listed 45,855 male and 52,981 female pupils in the schools that it monitored throughout the South; in almost every state, female pupils outnumbered male pupils and there were slightly more males than females. The decennial census returns showed a similar pattern between 1870 and 1910: school enrollment rates in the United States for Black children aged five to nineteen (the great majority of whom lived in the South) were fairly evenly balanced between the sexes, with female rates slightly higher than male in four of the five census years. (The male rate was slightly higher than the female in 1880.)
You can buy the book here.
Nixon’s ten percent import duty
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, with a big assist from Doug Irwin. Here is one excerpt:
In 1971, President Richard Nixon imposed a 10% tax on foreign goods brought into the US, and kept it in place for four months. The best that can be said about this experience, well-documented by Dartmouth economist Douglas A. Irwin in a 2012 essay, is that the US economy survived it.
That is hardly good news, but it is a partial comfort. At the time, Republican officials were demanding an end to undervalued foreign currencies, better trade treatment of US exports and more spending on defense by US allies. (Sound familiar?) After this rhetoric and policy, however, came an era of trade liberalization. The costs of protection and the incentives for freer trade simply proved too strong, and subsequent presidents of both parties oversaw tariff reductions.
In 1971, Nixon’s key demand was specific: Countries had to let their currencies float upward against the US dollar. The goal was to weaken the dollar in relative terms and thus help US exports.
And these key points:
After imposing the tariff, and much negotiation, the US did receive something concrete in return: More countries allowed their currencies to float against the dollar — notably the yen, the mark and the franc. Those moves then led to a broader collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, and accelerated the arrival of floating exchange rates with the Smithsonian agreement of December 1971.
Trump has no equivalent concrete demands for US trading partners. Nixon’s demand to let the exchange rates float was something that could happen immediately and was fully transparent. And it was virtually impossible to reverse. Once it happened, the US could remove the import duty. The other demands of the time — better treatment of US exports and more burden-sharing for defense — went largely unheeded, as it is much harder to negotiate over such long-term and hard-to-define changes.
Recommended.
What should I ask Neal Stephenson?
Yes I will be doing another Conversation with him, in honor of his forthcoming book Polostan, which initiates a new series. It is set in the 1930s, has some spies in it, and parts are set in the town of Magnetogorsk in the Ural mountains, as well as Montana and WDC in the U.S. So far I like the first thirty pages very much.
Here is my 2019 Conversation with Neal Stephenson. So what should I ask him?
Marginal Revolution Podcast, my excellent conversations with Alex Tabarrok
Alex and I have started this, and today is the premiere of the first episode. Here is the audio, video, and transcript, as with CWT (which by the way will continue as usual). This episode covers the breakdown of monetary policy in the 1970s, and Alex and I have recorded a series of other episodes on the economics of the 1970s, among other topics.
Currently I think we have six (?) more episodes in the can. Unlike CWT, this won’t be released once every two weeks, rather every now and then Alex and I will do a batch and then release them as a set, sequentially in fairly close succession.
From the current episode here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Barbarous relic. Look, we had to get rid of the gold standard.
TABARROK: No, no, we did not.
COWEN: It’s not an accident that it collapsed.
TABARROK: No, no, no. It definitely wasn’t an accident. No, it was done on purpose. It was done on purpose so that the politicians could further stimulate the economy. You think about all of the things which were holding them back. One of them was this idea of prudence and frugality. Then the Keynesians come along and it’s like Chesterton’s Fence. They say, “Oh, what’s this fence doing here? We don’t need that.”
They didn’t understand what the fence was doing in the first place. The purpose of the fence was to hold back the political inclinations to spend more and to try and stimulate the economy to win reelection. You got rid of the prudence and frugality, and then you got rid of the gold standard, which was also holding them back. That was like the second fence, which was eliminated.
COWEN: Look, I don’t like the Keynesians, but Friedman for one, was very happy to see the gold standard go. Had we stayed on the gold standard, given subsequent volatility in the price of gold, there would’ve been phenomenal macroeconomic volatility. In fact, we would’ve just cut the tie anyway. It was never going to last.
There was this fundamental contradiction that Europe in particular relied on the US to keep on increasing the supply of dollars, because there was a dollar shortage over there, and it was their reserve currency. The other economies weren’t strong enough, and there was no euro. Yet at the same time, the dollar was to be convertible into gold.
In the short run, we solved that “problem” by just twisting the arms of them, especially the French, and saying, “We’re not actually going to let you convert your dollars into gold, and we’re going to keep on sending you dollars.” At some point, the French just said like, “No way.” They started converting and the thing collapsed. There was never a way to keep it going that I can see. Unless you just pose a lot of deflation on the global economy, which would’ve been worse than what we did.
TABARROK: No, the increase in the volatility of the price of gold, that was endogenous, that was caused by going off the gold standard.
COWEN: At first but later on it was China, other demands, right?
Recommended!
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Sometimes people are just wrong
The puzzle was that, despite M1 growth in excess of 5 percent during 1970 and 10 percent during the first half of 1971, the engine still continued to sputter. At the June 1971 meeting of the FOMC, the Fed’s chief economist admitted bafflement. “Why is it that the very high recent growth rates of money…fail to produce a satisfactory real performance?” asked Charles Partee.
At the same time, Milton Friedman was writing Arthur Burns and telling him he was “appalled” by the high rates of money growth.
That is from the quite interesting 1998 book Allen J. Matusow, Nixon’s Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars, and Votes.
I had not known that in 1971, for a while, President Nixon was pushing for a uniform ten percent tax on imports into the United States, and indeed he imposed it temporarily. That was then, this is now…
How has human DNA evolved?
The full title of this paper is “Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation.” It truly has an all-star cast of authors, including David Reich and Eric S. Lander, and also numerous others at top schools. I did read through this paper, but understood it only in part. In any case, here is the abstract:
We present a method for detecting evidence of natural selection in ancient DNA time-series data that leverages an opportunity not utilized in previous scans: testing for a consistent trend in allele frequency change over time. By applying this to 8433 West Eurasians who lived over the past 14000 years and 6510 contemporary people, we find an order of magnitude more genome-wide significant signals than previous studies: 347 independent loci with >99% probability of selection. Previous work showed that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution, but in the last ten millennia, many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. Discoveries include an increase from ∼0% to ∼20% in 4000 years for the major risk factor for celiac disease at HLA-DQB1; a rise from ∼0% to ∼8% in 6000 years of blood type B; and fluctuating selection at the TYK2 tuberculosis risk allele rising from ∼2% to ∼9% from ∼5500 to ∼3000 years ago before dropping to ∼3%. We identify instances of coordinated selection on alleles affecting the same trait, with the polygenic score today predictive of body fat percentage decreasing by around a standard deviation over ten millennia, consistent with the “Thrifty Gene” hypothesis that a genetic predisposition to store energy during food scarcity became disadvantageous after farming. We also identify selection for combinations of alleles that are today associated with lighter skin color, lower risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, slower health decline, and increased measures related to cognitive performance (scores on intelligence tests, household income, and years of schooling). These traits are measured in modern industrialized societies, so what phenotypes were adaptive in the past is unclear. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.9 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.
I can report that nothing in their exposition seemed unreasonable or unsupported to me. But also the paper didn’t much change my worldview? There is the usual Twitter speculation about how this might apply to different groups, but note the data aggregation methods of the paper in fact require that various human groups (Europe only in the dataset) evolved in tandem and in similar ways over time. Without that assumption, the entire piece of work collapses.
*Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success*
An excellent book, stressing Rand’s Jewish heritage and its ongoing influence over her work, in spite of her self-professed atheism. The author is Alexandra Popoff, who wrote the wonderful biography of Vassily Grossman as well.
Here is one bit from the preface:
I believe that writers cannot hide themselves in a literary text, even when they later go back to revise it, as Rand had done. She had claimed that being Jewish did not matter to her, but her Jewishness was about the text, crrammed full of ideas, parables, paradoxes, questions, and arguments. Her fictional stories are moral and legal at the same time.
Rand was at one point slated to write the screenplay for a movie about Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb, though the project never realized. Here is an excerpt from the latter part of the book:
In her declining years Rand pursued her passion of stamp collecting. She attended stamp shows and auctions with fellow collectors, one of whom was her surgeon Dr. Cranston Holman. She shopped at Gimbels, her favorite store, played Scrabble with visitors, read Agatha Christie, watched TV cops and robbers, and in her mid-seventies, studied algebra.
The Burns and Heller biographies of Rand are excellent, but this one has plenty of fresh material and insight.
Civil War
I knew Civil War (now streaming on HBO/Max) was going to be good when just a minute or so in you see an explosion in the distance and only later do you hear the sound wave. [Mild spoilers may follow.] Shortly after, we meet war journalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst in a standout performance). I thought, “She looks like Lee Miller,” and seconds later, the name is dropped. In the next shot, Lee is in a bathtub—a clear sign you’re in the hands of a master. It is not without import that Lee Miller photographed Dachau or a little less obviously that she was a pioneer of the surreal. Both will reappear in Civil War.
In a scene where the journalists need to buy gas, they offer $300. The armed attendant scoffs, “$300 will get you a ham sandwich.” “$300 Canadian,” comes the reply, telling you everything you need to know about the state of the economy.
Civil War was written and directed by Alex Garland, who also made Annihilation, Ex Machina, and the underrated Dredd (the 2012 reboot not the Stallone movie). Many viewers expected Civil War to serve some lectures about red state/blue state politics, but it doesn’t. Tyler makes astute comments about the hidden politics (and reviews the movie here).
My interest was more on how the film portrays war—war is hell but it’s also fucking amazing. The photojournalists at the heart of the story justify their actions as serving a higher purpose, but in reality, they have become addicted to the adrenaline. Civil War shares themes with Nightcrawler. The journalists also share more than they think with the sick fucks who also love war because it gives them a chance to torture and kill.
A great scene at the climax incarnates the “when one dies, another is born” trope. The lead character starts to feel and gain a moral code, only to be killed for it, while the apprentice simultaneously sheds hers, emerging as a new, amoral hero. And it’s all caught on film. Karma is a bitch. The transition isn’t surprising given the logic of the setup but it is handled with originality and grace.
Recommended, given the obvious strictures about violence and serious themes.
*Religious Influences on Economic Thinking*
The subtitle is The Origins of Modern Economics, and the author is Benjamin M. Friedman. Here is the book’s home page, you can order here. I very much look forward to reading this one. Here is my earlier CWT with Ben Friedman.
Here is the link.