Category: History
*Shock Value: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy*
That is the new and very useful book by Carola Binder, mostly a very good economic history. Here is one excerpt:
The [Nixon price controls] were seen as necessary to support the third component of the Economic Stabilization Program, an expansionary fiscal package that included tax reductions to promote business recovery. The Council of Economic Advisers wrote in its annual report that “action to make fiscal policy more expansive had been limited by the need to avoid intensifying any inflationary expectations and stepping-up the inflation. The establishment of the direct wage-price controls created room for some more expansive measures, because it provided a certain degree of protection against both the fact and the expectation of inflation.”
The ties of the dollar to gold had been cut recently as well, as Bretton Woods turned into floating exchange rates. 1970s macro was a strange thing!
The book is recommended, you can pre-order here, most of American monetary history is covered.
Thwarted markets in everything, antiquities remain underpriced
An auction house has withdrawn 18 ancient Egyptian human skulls from sale after an MP said selling them would perpetuate the atrocities of colonialism.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, believes the sale of human remains for any purposes should be outlawed, adding that the trade was “a gross violation of human dignity”.
The skulls of 10 men, five women, and three people of uncertain sex, were listed by Semley Auctioneers in Dorset, with a guide price of £200-300 for each lot.
They were originally collected by the Victorian British soldier and archaeologist Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, who founded the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum in 1884.
Here is the full Guardian story, indirectly via Samir Varma.
Who was the wealthiest man in the world in the 1830s?
Wu Bingjian, better known in the west as ‘Houqua’, or sometimes ‘Howqua’, was the most successful Chinese merchant of his day. As leader of the Cohong (gonghang), the guild of Chinese traders that had been authorized in the late 18th century by the Qing court to oversee trade with Western merchants at Canton (Guangzhou), he was at once the richest man in the world. In 1834, Wu’s personal wealth was estimated at 26 million Mexican silver dollars (£6.24 million then, around (£680 million today). To put this wealth in perspective, the contemporary European financier Nathan Rotschild held capital equivalent to US $5.3 million (around £1.06 million) in 1828. Wu’s extraordinary ability to maintain a complex balance between his business interests, the Qing court and his Western partners, made him the most importnat player in Western countries’ trade with China for over half a century.
That is from the new and quite interesting Creators of Modern China: 100 Lives from Empire to Republic 1796-1912, edited by Jessican Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell.
Economists’ predictions from 1980
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the intro:
Out of curiosity, I recently cracked open The American Economy in Transition, published in 1980, edited by Martin Feldstein and including contributions from… Nobel-winning economists [Samuelson, Friedman, Kuznets], successful business leaders and notable public servants. Though most of the essays get it wrong, I found the book oddly reassuring
The problems the book describes truly are of a different era. On one hand, I was comforted to learn that many of these fears turned out to be unfounded. On the other, I am concerned that many current economists are not worried about the correct things.
How did they do in their analyses?:
For instance, many authors in the book are focused on capital outflow as a potential problem for the US economy. Today, of course, the more common concern is a possible excess inflow of foreign capital, combined with a trade deficit in goods and services. Another concern cited in the book is European economies catching up to the US. Again, that did not happen: The US has opened up its economic lead. Energy is also a major concern in the book, not surprisingly, given the price shocks of the 1970s. No one anticipates that the US would end up the major energy exporter that it is today.
Then there is the rise of China as a major economic rival, which is not foreseen — in fact, China is not even in the book’s index. Nether climate change nor global warming are mentioned. Financial crises are also given short shrift, as the US had not had a major one since the Great Depression. In 1980 the US financial sector simply was not that large, and the general consensus was that income inequality was holding constant. Nor do the economics of pandemics receive any attention.
So you may see why the book stoked my fears that today’s economists and analysts do not have a good handle on America’s imminent problems.
As for opportunities, as opposed to risks: The book contains no speculation about the pending collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor are the internet, crypto or artificial intelligence topics of discussion.
The column is interesting throughout. Milton Friedman for instance thought that the Fed would not find it politically profitable to fight inflation until inflation reached 25 percent. The best essay in the book was by Samuelson, who noted that such predictions usually misfire.
My Conversation with the excellent Coleman Hughes
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a color-blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be ‘autism-blind’, and Coleman’s personal experience with lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman’s learned from J.J. Johnson, the hardest thing about performing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, what reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he’s learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, the Coleman Hughes production function, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How was it you ended up playing trombone in Charles Mingus Big Band?
HUGHES: I participated in the Charles Mingus high school jazz festival, which they still do every year. It was new at the time. They invite bands from all around to audition, and they identify a handful of good soloists and let them sit in for one night with the band. I sat in with the band, and the band leader knew that I lived close by in New Jersey, and so essentially invited me to start playing with the band on Monday nights.
I was probably 16 or 17 at this point, so I would take the NJ Transit into New York City on a Monday night, play two sets with the Mingus Band sitting next to people that had been my idols and were now my mentors — people like Ku-umba Frank Lacy, who is a fantastic trombone player; played with Art Blakey and D’Angelo and so forth. Then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning.
COWEN: Why is the music of Charles Mingus special in jazz? Because it is to me, but how would you articulate what it is for you?
Here is another:
COWEN: If I understand you correctly, you’re also suggesting in our private lives we should be color-blind.
HUGHES: Yes. Broadly, yes. Or we should try to be.
COWEN: We should try to be. This is where I might not agree with you. So I find if I look at media, I look at social media, I see a dispute — I think 100 percent of the time I agree with Coleman, pretty much, on these race-related matters. In private lives, I’m less sure.
Let me ask you a question.
HUGHES: Sure.
COWEN: Could jazz music have been created in a color-blind America?
HUGHES: Could it have been created in a color-blind America — in what sense do you mean that question?
COWEN: It seems there’s a lot of cultural creativity. One issue is it may have required some hardship, but that’s not my point. It requires some sense of a cultural identity to motivate it — that the people making it want to express something about their lives, their history, their communities. And to them it’s not color-blind.
HUGHES: Interesting. My counterargument to that would be, insofar as I understand the early history of jazz, it was heavily more racially integrated than American society was at that time. In the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in, say, New Orleans and New York City was many, many decades ahead of the curve in terms of its attitudes towards how people should live racially: interracial friendship, interracial relationship, etc. Yes, I’d argue the ethos of jazz was more color-blind, in my sense, than the American average at the time.
COWEN: But maybe there’s some portfolio effect here. So yes, Benny Goodman hires Teddy Wilson to play for him. Teddy Wilson was black, as I’m sure you know. And that works marvelously well. It’s just good for the world that Benny Goodman does this.
Can it still not be the case that Teddy Wilson is pulling from something deep in his being, in his soul — about his racial experience, his upbringing, the people he’s known — and that that’s where a lot of the expression in the music comes from? That is most decidedly not color-blind, even though we would all endorse the fact that Benny Goodman was willing to hire Teddy Wilson.
HUGHES: Yes. Maybe — I’d argue it may not be culture-blind, though it probably is color-blind, in the sense that black Americans don’t just represent a race. That’s what a black American would have in common — that’s what I would have in common with someone from Ethiopia, is that we’re broadly of the same “race.” We are not at all of the same culture.
To the extent that there is something called “African American culture,” which I believe that there is, which has had many wonderful products, including jazz and hip-hop — yes, then I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s a cultural product in the same way that, say, country music is like a product of broadly Southern culture.
COWEN: But then here’s my worry a bit. You’re going to have people privately putting out cultural visions in the public sphere through music, television, novels — a thousand ways — and those will inevitably be somewhat political once they’re cultural visions. So these other visions will be out there, and a lot of them you’re going to disagree with. It might be fine to say, “It would be better if we were all much more color-blind.” But given these other non-color-blind visions are out there, do you not have to, in some sense, counter them by not being so color-blind yourself and say, “Well, here’s a better way to think about the black or African American or Ethiopian or whatever identity”?
Interesting throughout.
*Native Nations*
The author is Kathleen Duval, and the subtitle is A Millennium in North America. This is an excellent book. Here is one excerpt, strung together by me from three separate pages:
By 1400, the cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam were abandoned. People continued to live nearby and, in many cases, continued to use the ruins as part of their ceremonies, but they no longer lived in the cities. Trade, religion, and politics became democratized, more the domain of the people. North America changed dramatically between 1200 and 1400, and the causes had nothing to do with Europeans.
Climate change, and The Little Ice Age, are the most likely culprits here:
The Little Ice Age was particularly hard on large, centralized agriculture-based cities around the world, including those of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam. In times of hardship and famine, leaders struggled to maintain their positinos, especiallly if they had claimed special powers over natural forces that were out of their control: rain, rivers, and tempereature. The urbanized settlments of North America were unable to deliver the healthand prosperity that people had enjoyed for generations. Now people saw conditions getting worse in their lifetimes: less food, more poverty, a declining future for their children…
Gradually, across Native North America, people developed a deep distrust of centralization, hierarchy, and inequality. The former residents of North America’s great cities reversed course, turning away from urbanization and political economic centralization to build new ways of living…
The first European explorers who crossed North America got a glimpse of this changing world.
I am excited to read the entire book.
Four Thousand Years of Egyptian Women Pictured
In an excellent, deep-dive Alice Evans looks at patriarchy in Egypt using pictures drawn from four thousand years of history. Here are three examples.
A wealthy woman, shown at right circa 116 CE. Unveiled, immodest, looking out at the world. A person to be reckoned with.
After the Arab conquests, pictures of people in general disappear, and there are no books written by women. With the dawn of photography in the 19th century we see (at left) what was probably typical, veiled women, and very few women on the street.
In the 1950s and 1970s we see a remarkable revitalization and liberalization noted most evidently in advertisements (advertisers being careful not to offend). Note the bare legs and the fact that many advertisements are directed at women (below)
This period culminates in a remarkable video unearthed by Evans of Nasser in 1958 openly laughing at the idea that women should or could be required to veil in public. Worth watching.
In the 1980s, however, it all ends.
Egyptians who came of age in the 1950s and ‘60s experienced national independence, social mobility and new economic opportunities. By the 1980s, economic progress was grinding down. Egypt’s purchasing power was plummeting. Middle class families could no longer afford basic goods, nor could the state provide.
As observed by Galal Amin,
“When the economy started to slacken in the early 1980s, accompanied by the fall in oil prices and the resulting decline in work opportunities in the Gulf, many of the aspirations built up in the 1970s were suddenly seen to be unrealistic and intense feelings of frustration followed”.
‘Western modernisation’ became discredited by economic stagnation and defeat by Israel. In Egypt, clerics equated modernity with a rejection of Islam and declared the economic and military failures of the state to be punishments for aping the West. Islamic preachers called on men to restore order and piety (i.e., female seclusion). Frustrated graduates, struggling to find white collar work, found solace in religion, whilst many ordinary people turned to the Muslim Brotherhood for social services and righteous purpose.
That’s just a brief look at a much longer and fascinating post.
Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture
Forthcoming from the QJE, here is a new paper by Andrea Matanga:
The Neolithic revolution saw the independent development of agriculture among at least seven unconnected hunter-gatherer populations. I propose that the rapid spread of agricultural techniques resulted from increased climatic seasonality causing hunter-gatherers to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and store food for the season of scarcity. Their newfound sedentary lifestyle and storage habits facilitated the invention of agriculture. I present a model and support it with global climate data and Neolithic adoption dates, showing that higher seasonality increased the likelihood of agriculture’s invention and its speed of adoption by neighbors. This study suggests that seasonality patterns played a dominant role in determining our species’ transition to farming.
Here are various less gated copies. Via Nicanor Angle.
What should I ask Alan Taylor?
He is one of the greatest of living American historians, here is from Wikipedia:
Alan Shaw Taylor (born June 17, 1955) is an American historian and scholar who is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A specialist in the early history of the United States, Taylor has written extensively about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution and the early American Republic. Taylor has received two Pulitzer Prizes and the Bancroft Prize, and was also a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction.
He has a new and excellent book out, namely American Civil Wars: A Continental History 1850-1873. Among his other virtues, he is renowned for tying in American history to developments in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. So what should I ask him?
What I am nostalgic about
With a group of friends I was having a chat about the merits of the current vs. past America. Battle of the Ancients and Moderns! I generally favor current times, but not unconditionally. So I promised them a list of what I missed from the past. To be clear, these are personal judgments, not claims about net social value. I’ll also offer comments on features from the past that many miss, but I do not. Here goes:
1. Visiting Borders in its heyday. Nowadays I have to go to London to have comparable experiences.
2. That you could just show up at various venues, pay modest prices, and see incredible performers. For instance I saw Horowitz and also McCartney at his peak. Leo Kottke at his peak. Pierre Boulez. Many more. Such experiences are hardly gone, but in terms of cultural resonance the earlier times were much better. How did I fail to go see Miles Davis!?
Similarly, you could just go see Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, Derek Parfit, and many other famous figures. No current economist or philosopher is comparable in this regard.
2b. Note that in some areas, such as NBA basketball, there are more “must see” players today than in any earlier era. Or say tech titans. So I am not favoring the nostalgic perspective per se, but for music, economics, and philosophy the nostalgic perspective on live performance is correct.
3. There were more and better museum art exhibits to see before 9/11. Much of that has to do with insurance rates and the ease of international agreements.
4. Good seafood was cheap and readily available.
5. Reading the Far Eastern Economic Review in its heyday.
6. Awaiting the arrival of a new issue of the Journal of Political Economy, knowing it would have exciting new ideas.
7. Many, many locations were better to travel to and visit. Amsterdam is one obvious example. But by no means is this true for all places, India for instance is better to visit today than before.
8. Hollywood movies used to be better, though global cinema overall is doing fine.
9. Very recently there are too many parts of the world you really just can’t visit, Iran and Russia most notably.
10. Mainstream media was much better, noting I nonetheless would rather have the internet. Still, I miss the quality of cultural reviews, local news, and several other features of normal newspapers.
11. San Francisco of the 1980s and Miami Beach of the 1990s.
12. So many intellectuals could afford to live in New York City, and indeed Manhattan. The city was overall more interesting, though worse to live in or to have to deal with.
13. Parking was much easier, even in Manhattan. I used to just get parking spots, even in the Village or Midtown. Now I would never bother to look.
14. The emphasis on personal freedom in American popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s.
15. Paperback editions of the classics were so often far superior in earlier times. Nowadays most of them look and feel like crap.
A few things I have no nostalgia for:
1. I feel America today is overall a higher-trust society, admittedly with the picture being somewhat complex. American cities certainly are much safer, and most of them look much better.
2. I prefer current airport procedures to those before 9/11.
3. Young people are overall smarter, and arguably more moral.
4. Just seeing white (and sometimes black) people everywhere, except a few cities on the coasts.
5. The seafood issue aside, food in America is obviously much much better.
6. I can’t think of anything in the category of “how people interacted with each other” that I preferred in earlier times.
7. I don’t miss having more snow, quite the contrary.
8. Medical and dental care are far superior, obviously.
What else should be on these lists?
Michael Cook on Iran
Our primary concern in this chapter will be Iran, though toward the end we will shift the focus to Central Asia. We can best begin with a first-order approximation of the pattern of Iranian history across the whole period. It has four major features. The first is the survival of something called Iran, as both a cultural and a political entity; Iran is there in the eleventh century, and it is still there in the eighteenth. the second is an alternation between periods when Iran is ruled by a single imperial state and periods in which it break up intoa number of smaller states. The third feature is steppe nomad power: all imperial states based in Iran in this period are the work of Turkic or Mongol nomads. The fourth is the role of the settled Iranian population, whose lot is to pay taxes and — more rewardingly — to serve as bureaucrats and bearers of a literate culture. With this first-order approximation in mind, we can now move on to a second-order approximation in the form of an outline of the history of Iran over eight centuries that will occupy most of this chapter.
That is from his new book A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity. I had not known that in the early 16th century Iran was still predominantly Sunni. And:
There were also Persian-speaking populations to the east of Iran that remained Sunni, and within Iran there were non-Persian ethnic groups, such as the Kurds in the west and the Baluchis in the southeast, that likewise retained their Sunnism. But the core Persian-speaking population of the country was by now [1722] almost entirely Shiite. Iran thus became the first and largest country in which Shiites were both politically and demographically dominant. One effect of this was to set it apart from the Muslim world at large, a development that gave Iran a certain coherence at the cost of poisoning its relations with its neighbors.
This was also a good bit:
Yet the geography of Iran in this period was no friendlier to maritime trade than it had been in Sasanian times. To a much greater extent than appears from a glance at the map, Iran is landlocked: the core population and prime resources of the country are located deep in the interior, far from the arid coastlands of the Persian Gulf.
In my earlier short review I wrote “At the very least a good book, possibly a great book.” I have now concluded it is a great book.
*The Carnation Revolution*
The author is Alex Fernandes, and the subtitle is The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell. A very good and well-written book, here is one short excerpt:
The First Republic is sixteen years of unrelenting chaos, one that sets the scene for the fascist state that follows it. Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal goes through eight presidents and forty-five governments, all the while experiencing an economic crisis, crushing debt and the Europe-spanning threats of the First World War. Mirroring similar movements in France and Mexico, early Portuguese republicanism’s defining feature is its fierce anti-clericalism, imposing a crackdown on churches, convents and monasteries and persecuting religious leaders. The turbulent political landscape is marked by escalating acts of violence, militant strike action, periodic military uprisings and borderline civil war, the government fluctuating wildly between different republican factions.
Unfortunately, this book does not read as if it is about a niche topic. And don’t forget Salazar was an economist.
History of economic thought paper ideas
These topics seem underexplored to me:
Montesquieu
Economics in the Talmud
Rise of econometrics in the 19th century
The Irish economists, including Cairnes and Longfield
The last 50 years of economics are in general very poorly covered
Works in any foreign language you might read
Chinese economic thought
Economic thought in India
The funding of economics, and economists, through the ages (very underdone)
The institutionalization of economics
History of women in economics, especially recently
History of prizes and awards in economics
Economic ideas and fascism, in various eras
Economic thoughts on the arts, starting with Hume
History of finance and financial economics, considerably understudied
Economics and demographic thought, throughout the ages, for instance the 1920s
The very early history of law and economics
Economic thought in various religions
Economics and 19th century psychology
History of experimental economics
History of RCTs
History of economics and education, as a topic
History of what has been taught in economics classes, over the generations
History of textbooks
History of economists in government
History of economists in multi-lateral institutions
History of economists working in central banks
History of how various economic databases have been built
History of economists doing journalism (both Menger and Walras were first journalists)
Early history of “environmental economics”
Early history of economics/water supply issues
Earlier writings on the economics of slavery
History of economists holding public office, J.S. Mill, Einaudi, many others, or as central bankers
The Henry Geoge movement over the generations
Economic “dissidents” of various kinds
History of economists working with the military and national security
Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT*
An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular:
Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral of prices and wages, monetary and exchange rate policies were out of whack, multipliers operate, the quest for savings could lower incomes overall, and the influence of liquidity factors on money demand and interest rates was especially high. All at once” (p. 72, emphasis in the original). In other words, Cowen drives home the point that this “general theory” isn’t actually general, it’s about very special, very unusual circumstances.
He considers Lord Keynes the GOAT contender whom he would most “want to hang around with” (p. 54). I had exactly the opposite reaction. The Keynes he portrays is virtually an egotistical monster. One who, for example, “kept an extended spreadsheet of his lovers and sexual encounters … each one rated by number” (p. 58). Anyone who treats other human beings this way—let alone writing it down—isn’t the kind of person I want to hang around with.
Recommended.
The $20 bill gets picked up, body parts markets in everything
At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t explain the loss here. How did so many bones up and vanish?
In a new book, an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond.
Here is the full article, via William Meller. And, as Alex has stressed in the past, never underestimate the elasticity of supply!