Category: History
Were the Civil War and abolition a surprise?
More than I had thought. And Lincoln really was the difference maker:
…prior to 1860, few political events seemed to affect slave prices, and even the Dred Scott decision had only a small and temporary effect. After Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency, slave prices fell, and they continued to fall once the war commenced. The overall decline in slave prices was large (more than one-third from their 1860 peak) and occurred prior to any battle losses by the South.
That is from the new AER piece by Calomiris and Pritchett. There is an ungated version here (pdf).
When should we feel guilt and collective guilt?
Dustin P. writes to me:
I would enjoy a blog post discussing under what circumstances you feel guilt, and how you respond. I am especially interested in instances where you feel a portion of some collective guilt – family actions, neighborhood failures, national politics.
I’ll focus on the social, collective, and intellectual sides of this problem, rather than my own (numerous) personal failings.
I feel the most guilt when eating the meat of intelligent animals raised under poor or tortured conditions. I am not opposed to all meat-eating per se, but most meat-eating in today’s America does not meet satisfactory moral standards. I still do it because I am not that good a person, at least not in this regard. I am struck by the title of the forthcoming book by Frans de Waal: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
I don’t feel so much collective guilt about the course of history. None from my Irish or Irish-American backgrounds, in part because I know very little about my ancestors. I also don’t feel personal guilt for earlier history, such as the genocide against Native Americans. I don’t feel responsible for it. Perhaps irrationally, I do feel some guilt for Americans being such world bullies, even when that is necessary or beneficial for the broader fate of civilization. I feel that indirectly I partake in that, if only by representing what are broadly American points of view in global settings, including on this blog.
I feel guilt for not giving more money to poor people, even though a) I probably give more than average to poor people, typically in Mexico, and b) I don’t hold an extreme Singerian view about our obligations in that regard. I still feel I am failing at the margin.
Overall it is possible that I treat guilt as many voters treat gasoline prices. I am perhaps overly bothered by fairly visible, repeated small transactions of a rather obvious salience.
So now, as a result of thinking about this blog post, I feel guilt about my guilt.
But only to a point. Furthermore guilt is often a substitute for action, rather than a spur to action, which gives me further reason to feel guilt about my guilt, though not in the right action-inducing way.
Race in *Star Wars: The Force Awakens*
I haven’t seen anyone cover this topic yet. I’ll put my remarks in the top blog comment, so this way you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. My analysis does cover some spoilers — unavoidable — but I don’t think they are any of the main plot spoilers, in case you are wondering.
Which technology should we unlearn?
Todd, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
If you had the power to make civilization unlearn one technology or theory in use today, what would it be?
I’m not ready to say nuclear weapons, which so far have been a major net force for peace, at least until the next one goes off.
Music streaming (or is it the MP3?) doesn’t seem important enough, still I do not think it will improve creativity over the longer run. In this sector I care more about the total quality of product than about maximizing the sum total of consumer plus producer surplus.
How about the Facebook technology which limits you to 5000 friends? (just joking…)
Modern ketchup?
Land mines are a possible pick, but that wouldn’t help South Korea any. Drones are another candidate, too early to tell.
In my rather strongly held view, most technologies are net improvements.
But I think I’ll go with cluster bombs. Or poison gas. The Kalashnikov?
By the way, Lemin Wu remains highly undervalued
Lemin is recently out of UC Berkeley, and I have heard that he is on the American market right now.
Here is Lemin’s paper on the Malthusian trap (pdf), one of the most interesting papers of the last few years. The key point is that some kinds of production drive down living standards and other kinds of production do not, therefore enriching and disaggregating Malthus’s theory, some might say overturning it. Here is one excerpt:
It follows that the Romans were rich not because technological progress temporarily exceeded population growth—as Malthusianists claim—but because Rome had a business-friendly legal system and an active market economy. Well-functioning courts and market-places boost industry more than they boost agriculture. Thus biasing production structure to luxury, they raised the average living standards of the whole society. Conversely, the Agricultural Revolution left an unfortunate legacy: the hunter-and-gatherer-turned peasants failed to achieve the level of leisure and nutrition their ancestors once enjoyed (Diamond, 1987). Growth was immiserizing because agriculture biased production structure to subsistence. The same tragedy recurred when potato dominated the Irish diet in the late 18th century.
Lemin then introduces cross-societal migration into the model and shows that “…A tiny bit of bias in migration (say, if people are extremely reluctant to move and slow to learn) can still suppress a strong tendency of growth.” The Industrial Revolutipn did not come to Song China because there were insufficient mechanisms for exclusion.
Here is Lemin Wu’s home page. Here are some of his other papers and ideas.
Assortative mating is returning to Gilded Age levels
There is a new and interesting paper by Robert D. Mare on this topic, here is the abstract:
Patterns of intermarriage between persons who have varying levels of educational attainment are indicators of socioeconomic closure and affect the family backgrounds of children. This article documents trends in educational assortative mating throughout the twentieth century in the United States, using socioeconomic data on adults observed in several large cross section surveys collected between 1972 and 2010 and on their parents who married a generation earlier. Spousal resemblance on educational attainment was very high in the early twentieth century, declined to an all-time low for young couples in the early 1950s, and has increased steadily since then. These trends broadly parallel the compression and expansion of socioeconomic inequality in the United States over the twentieth century. Additionally, educationally similar parents are more likely to have offspring who themselves marry within their own educational level. If homogamy in the parent generation leads to homogamy in the offspring generation, this may reinforce the secular trend toward increased homogamy.
Having read through the paper, my immediate wonder was to what extent assortative mating is an effect rather than a cause of inequality?
The pointer is from Claire Lehmann.
In which English counties was the Industrial Revolution most strongly rooted?
There is a new and very interesting paper by Morgan Kelly, Joel Mokyr, and Cormac Ó Gráda on this topic, here is the abstract:
We analyze factors explaining the very different patterns of industrialization across the 42 counties of England between 1760 and 1830. Against the widespread view that high wages and cheap coal drove industrialization, we find that industrialization was restricted to low wage areas, while energy availability (coal or water) had little impact Instead we find that industrialization can largely be explained by two factors related to the human capability of the labour force. Instead of being composed of landless labourers, successful industrializers had large numbers of small farms, which are associated with better nutrition and height. Secondly, industrializing counties had a high density of population relative to agricultural land, indicating extensive rural industrial activity: counties that were already reliant on small scale industry, with the technical and entrepreneurial skills this generated, experienced the strongest industrial growth. Looking at 1830s France we find that the strongest predictor of industrialization again is quality of workers shown by height of the population, although market access and availability of water power were also important.
Garett Jones, telephone! Here is a related paper on human capital and industrialization (pdf), in that study it is the elites who matter. And here is a new Eric Chaney paper (pdf) on the decline of Islamic science and the role of political elites.
I also found this summary bit from the first paper interesting: “…the early Industrial Revolution was less about the sudden appearance of radically new technologies than about improving fairly familiar technologies to the stage where they became commercially viable…”
Is there actually good news on carbon emissions?
From a recent issue of Nature, from Robert B. Jackson, et.al.:
Rapid growth in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry ceased in the past two years, despite continued economic growth. Decreased coal use in China was largely responsible, coupled with slower global growth in petroleum and faster growth in renewables.
I would call that speculative, most of all because we don’t know how much of China’s current economic and thus coal-burning slowdown is cyclical rather than structural. Still, it might be true.
How much news has this received, relative to the Paris meetings? Less than a hundredth, I suspect. Typical readers and viewers are far more interested in the deliberate actions of high-status political leaders than they are interested in underlying structural developments, even when the latter are probably of more import. We need dramatic stories with prestigious protagonists, leading the way. Even if some hate those individuals and their status, at least they then have someone to rail against, as indeed you will find in the comments section of this blog, among many other places.
This is just one way in which I feel the world I live in is a delusion and shadow play, relative to the truth.
The original pointer was from Marc Andreessen, with later re-emphasis from Noah Smith.
How to visit Singapore
Two different people have asked me this question this week, so I thought I would write out my answer. My approach is slightly unorthodox, but here goes:
1. Go to the top of Marina Bay Sands hotel and get a view of the skyline, the harbor, and the Straits. Watch the ships queuing. This is one of my favorite views in the whole world. Most of all I am struck by the contrast between what Singapore has achieved so quickly and also its continuing ultimate vulnerability; the view captures both of those. If you can afford it, stay in the hotel and swim in the Infinity Pool. That alone justifies dragging your body all the way to Singapore.
2. Organize the rest of your trip around food. For Malay food, visit the hawker centre at Geylang Serai Night Market. For Indian food, go to the hawker centre at the entrance to Little India, and walk around the adjacent shopping bazaar as well. For Singaporean food, there are many good choices, depending on your location. The optimal time to arrive is by 10:30, before most of the queues start. Ask cabbies for the best chili and pepper crab.
3. Eat at David Thompson’s Thai restaurant, in the mall next to Marina Bay Sands.
4. Once it is dark, and edging toward 9 p.m., walk around the Merlion area and the bridge, where the city comes to life.
5. Spend the rest of your time seeking out “retro Singapore” as much as possible. Haw Par Villa is one place to start, but there are multiple substitutes, including the hawker centres away from downtown and their special dishes.
6. The Asian Civilizations Museum is by far the best museum in town. The zoo and the bird park are first-rate.
7. Much as Singapore calls itself a “city-state” I think of it as a “suburb-state,” unlike Hong Kong which is a true city. I consider this high praise, but Singaporeans often are slightly insulted when I put it this way. Your mileage may vary, but I say enjoy it as you would a suburb.
8. Talk to as many Singaporean civil servants as you can.
9. Take a day trip by cab or bus into Johor Bahru, in neighboring Malaysia, a thirty minute trip if there are no delays. The food there is even better and you will learn some political science. Read this book for background on both countries. Read Lee Kuan Yew.
Here is my earlier post “Why Singapore is special.” In a nutshell, it’s one of the world’s greatest trips, safe and easy to deal with too.
Arrived in my email pile
Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy
By Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong, it is due out in February.
How martial a country should the United States be? #guncontrol
Chris Blattman cites a recent estimate that Americans own 42% of the civilian guns in the world.
You’ll also see estimates that America accounts for about half of the world’s defense spending. I believe those numbers are a misuse of purchasing power parity comparisons, but with proper adjustments it is not implausible to believe that America accounts for…about 42% of the defense spending. Or thereabouts.
I see those two numbers, and their rough similarity, as the most neglected fact in current debates about gun control.
I see many people who want to lower or perhaps raise those numbers, but I don’t see enough people analyzing the two as an integrated whole.
I don’t myself so often ask “should Americans have fewer guns?”, as that begs the question of how one might ever get there, which indeed has proven daunting by all accounts. But I do often ask myself “should America be a less martial country in in its ideological orientation?”
Note that the parts of the country with the most guns, namely the South, are especially prominent in the military and support for the military.
More importantly, if America is going to be the world’s policeman, on some scale or another, that has to be backed by a supportive culture among the citizenry. And that culture is not going to be “Hans Morgenthau’s foreign policy realism,” or “George Kennan’s Letter X,” or even Clausewitz’s treatise On War. Believe it or not, those are too intellectual for the American public. And so it must be backed by…a fairly martial culture amongst the American citizenry. And that probably will mean a fairly high level of gun ownership and a fairly high degree of skepticism about gun control.
If you think America can sustain its foreign policy interventionism, or threat of such, without a fairly martial culture at home, by all means make your case. But I am skeptical. I think it is far more likely that if you brought about gun control, and the cultural preconditions for successful gun control, America’s world role would fundamentally change and America’s would no longer play a global policeman role, for better or worse.
So who’s in this debate?
1. There are the anti-gun modern Democrats, who want Americans to own many fewer firearms, and who maybe favor slight cuts in defense spending, in order to spend more on redistribution. They don’t come to terms with the reality that their vision for America’s international state requires a fairly martial supporting culture at home, including strong attachments to gun ownership.
By the way, citations of the Australian gun control experience are a good indicator of this position and its partial naivete; Australian pacifism can to some extent free ride upon American martial interest. Another “warning sign” is if someone is incredulous that the San Bernardino attack is strengthening America’s attachment to a relatively martial internal culture, rather than leading to gun control. That person is out of touch, even if he or she is right about the substance of the issue.
2. There is the radical, anti-war, anti-military-industrial complex, semi-pacifist, anti-gun Left. Their positions on these issues are quite consistent, though this branch of the Left has disappeared almost entirely.
3. There are the libertarians, who hate martial culture on the international scene, but who wish to allow it or maybe even encourage it (personally, not through the government) at home, through the medium of guns. They are inconsistent, and they should consider being more pro-gun control than is currently the case. But I don’t expect them to budge: they will see this issue only through the lens of liberty, rather than through the lens of culture as well. They end up getting a lot of the gun liberties they wish to keep, but losing the broader cultural battle and somehow are perpetually surprised by this mix of outcomes.
I except non-American libertarians from these charges, and indeed many of them, albeit under the table, in fact support gun control as a libertarian and indeed pro-peace position.
4. There are the “right-wing conservatives.” They support a martial ethic, they support America’s active foreign policy abroad, and they are anti-gun control for the most part. And they find their greatest strength in the relatively martial American South. Like the old anti-war Left, their positions are consistent, and their positions are rooted in a cultural understanding of the issue. They see the gun control movement as a war on America’s greatness, America’s martial culture and the material embodiments of said culture. They don’t understand why “the world’s greatest nation” should give up its superpower role, and its supporting internal martial culture, all for the sake of limiting the number of suicides and maybe stopping a few shootings too. To them it’s not close to being worth it.
OK, now look at who is winning this debate in terms of actual policy changes. It is the conservatives, for the most part. No matter how much you may disagree with them, they have the most coherent cultural and intellectual position, apart from the old anti-war Left. And in a fight between the right-wing conservatives, and the old anti-war Left, for the hearts and minds of the American people, we already know that, for better or worse, the conservatives usually will win.
I find that pro-gun control Democrats, and libertarians, are incapable of understanding the issue in these cultural terms. But if you read something by a “really stupid conservative” on gun control, the more emotive and manipulative the text the better, it is often pretty close to the mark on the actual substance of what is at stake here.
Here is my earlier post, The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol.
What I’ve been reading, and not reading
1. Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. How recording began to revolutionize “world music” in the 1920s, a bit scattershot but still an interesting conceptual book about the history of music.
2. Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. I have only browsed this one, but it does appear to be one of the best and most readable overall histories of Rome. I’m keeping it in the basement and someday I’ll go back to it.
3. Peter Turchin, Ultra Society: how 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators on earth: “The central idea of this book is that it was competition between groups, usually taking the form of warfare, that transformed humanity from small-scale foraging bands and farming villages into huge societies with elaborate governance institutions and complex and highly productive economic life.” Basically true, in my view,and this book argues for that position persuasively.
4. Karthik Ramanna, Political Standards: Corporate Interest, Ideology, and Leadership in the Shaping of Accounting Rules for the Market Economy. Here is one opening summary bit: “With the financialization of the U.S. economy, particularly since the 1990s, we see a growing impact of investment banks and asset-management firms in accounting rule-making. These groups are more likely to propose rules that accelerate financial-statement recognition of anticipated economic gains — that is, fair-value accounting rules. Under certain circumstances, this can result in higher compensation to executives in these firms.” Most generally, the amount of lobbying over accounting rules seems to be increasing. Here is an NYT Op-Ed by Ramanna. Underdiscussed topics, I have only pawed through this one but it appears to be wel-informed.
How did China’s Cultural Revolution affect adolescent outcomes for the rusticated?
Yes, I thought this year it was time to search the job market candidates at National University of Singapore. I ran across some fascinating work by Huihua Xie:
Does a difficult environment in early life shape people’s core beliefs and values? We examine the long-term impact of the send-down movement during China’s Cultural Revolution, when urban educated youths were forced out of cities to work and live in undesirable rural areas. The mandatory policy applied to urban youth who graduated from junior or senior high school between 1966 and 1976. We identify the send-down effect by regression discontinuity, comparing individuals who graduated just before and just after the implementation of the policy. Using individual-level survey data, we find that rusticated individuals value family and relationships more highly, are less likely to believe in luck as the most important factor for success, and support social equality more strongly.
The paper, with Jie Gong and Yi Lu, is here, under resubmission at the JPE. She also has an interesting paper on how being rusticated during the Cultural Revolution led to later problems with chronic illness and mental health. Yet another paper considers whether and how the education of your sibling can make you better off or worse off, using regression discontinuity methods.
Why older halls for symphony orchestras sound better than new ones?
According to Witold Rybczynski, it is partly a matter of size and shape. Older halls were more likely in a shoe-box shape, such as Musikvereinsaal (1870),the Concertgebouw (1888), and Symphony Hall (1900). The orchestra is at the narrow end of the hall, and “Sound is reflected to the listener from the two parallel walls (which are about sixty to eighty feet apart) as well as from the ceiling. Because the concertgoer is relatively close to the musicians, the atmosphere is intimate, visually as well as acoustically.”
The need for greater seating capacity, because of revenue, swells the halls to as large as 3,000 seats and renders these properties more difficult to achieve. Most of all, it is now difficult “to reflect bass notes from the side walls.”
Different halls also have different “reverberation” times, and thus the more that a hall is used for different kinds of music, the more the design of that hall reflects a compromise. In theory there should be different halls for playing Gorecki and Bach, so an all-purpose hall will sound ideal only rarely.
That is all from his new book Mysteries of the Mall and Other Essays, pp.188-192.
That was then, this is now
From the headlines:
The economy of Greece is in shambles. Internal rebellions have engulfed Libya, Syria, and Egypt, with outsiders and foreign warriors fanning the flames. Turkey fears it will become involved, as does Israel. Jordan is crowded with refugees. Iran is bellicose and threatening, while Iraq is in turmoil. AD 2031? Yes. But it was also the situation in 1177 BC, more than three thousand years ago,when Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations collapsed one after the other, changing forever the course and the future of the Western world. It was a pivotal moment in history — a turning point for the ancient world.
That is from Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed, an interesting read.