Category: History
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!
Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of Rice versus Wheat Farming
It’s long been argued that the means of production influence social, cultural and psychological processes. Rice farming, for example, requires complex irrigation systems under communal management and intense, coordinated labor. Thus, it has been argued that successful rice farming communities tend to develop people with collectivist orientations, and cultural ways of thinking that emphasize group harmony and interdependence. In contrast, wheat farming, which requires less labor and coordination is associated with more individualistic cultures that value independence and personal autonomy. Implicit in Turner’s Frontier hypothesis, for example, is the idea that not only could a young man say ‘take this job and shove it’ and go west but once there they could establish a small, viable wheat farm (or other dry crop).
There is plenty of evidence for these theories. Rice cultures around the world do tend to exhibit similar cultural characteristics, including less focus on self, more relational or holistic thinking and greater in-group favoritism than wheat cultures. Similar differences exist between the rice and dry crop areas of China. The differences exist but is the explanation rice and wheat farming or are there are other genetic, historical or random factors at play?
A new paper by Talhelm and Dong in Nature Communications uses the craziness of China’s Cultural Revolution to provide causal evidence in favor of the rice and wheat farming theory of culture. After World War II ended, the communist government in China turned soldiers into farmers arbitrarily assigning them to newly created farms around the country–including two farms in Northern Ningxia province that were nearly identical in temperature, rainfall and acreage but one of the firms lay slightly above the river and one slightly below the river making the latter more suitable for rice farming and the former for wheat. During the Cultural Revolution, youth were shipped off to the farms “with very little preparation or forethought”. Thus, the two farms ended up in similar environments with similar people but different modes of production.
Talhelm and Dong measure thought style with a variety of simple experiments which have been shown in earlier work to be associated with collectivist and individualist thinking. When asked to draw circles representing themselves and friends or family, for example, people tend to self-inflate their own circle but they self-inflate more in individualist cultures.
The authors find that consistent with the differences across East and West and across rice and wheat areas in China, the people on the rice farm in Ningxia are more collectivistic in their thinking than the people on the wheat farm.
The differences are all in the same direction but somewhat moderated suggesting that the effects can be created quite quickly (a few generations) but become stronger the longer and more embedded they are in the wider culture.
I am reminded of an another great paper, this one by Leibbrandt, Gneezy, and List (LGL) that I wrote about in Learning to Compete and Cooperate. LGL look at two types of fishing villages in Brazil. The villages are close to one another but some of them are on the lake and some of them are on the sea coast. Lake fishing is individualistic but sea fishing requires a collective effort. LGL find that the lake fishermen are much more willing to engage in competition–perhaps having seen that individual effort pays off–than the sea fishermen for whom individual effort is much less efficacious. Unlike Talhelm and Dong, LGL don’t have random assignment, although I see no reason why the lake and sea fishermen should otherwise be different, but they do find that women, who neither lake nor sea fish, do not show the same differences. Thus, the differences seem to be tied quite closely to production learning rather than to broader culture.
How long does it take to imprint these styles of thinking? How long does it last? Is imprinting during child or young adulthood more effective than later imprinting? Can one find the same sorts of differences between athletes of different sports–e.g. rowing versus running? It’s telling, for example, that the only famous rowers I can think are the Winklevoss twins. Are attempts to inculcate these types of thinking successful on a more than surface level. I have difficulty believing that “you didn’t build that,” changes say relational versus holistic thinking but would styles of thinking change during a war?
What should I ask Brian Winter?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is his bio:
Brian Winter is the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and a seasoned analyst of Latin American politics, with more than 20 years following the region’s ups and downs. He lived in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico as a correspondent for Reuters before taking on his current role in New York, where he is also the vice president of policy for the Americas Society and Council of the Americas. He has been called “the best foreign expert on Brazil of this moment” by GloboNews. Brian is the author of several books including Why Soccer Matters, a New York Times bestseller he wrote with the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé; The Accidental President of Brazil, co-authored with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso; and Long After Midnight, a memoir about trying (and failing) to learn to tango in Argentina. He is a regular contributor to television and radio, the host of the Americas Quarterly Podcast and a prolific barbecuer and chef. Proficient in Spanish and Portuguese, Brian speaks frequently about Latin America’s past, present and future to investors and general-interest audiences. Follow him on Twitter @BrazilBrian
So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Fareed Zakaria
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. You can tell he knows what an interview is! At the same time, he understands this differs from many of his other venues and he responds with flying colors. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as a boy, what made his father lean towards socialism, why the Bengali intelligentsia is so left-wing, what’s stuck with him from his time at an Anglican school, what’s so special about visiting Amritsar, why he misses a more syncretic India, how his time at the Yale Political Union dissuaded him from politics, what he learned from Walter Isaacson and Sam Huntington, what put him off academia, how well some of his earlier writing as held up, why he’s become focused on classical liberal values, whether he had reservations about becoming a TV journalist, how he’s maintained a rich personal life, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why couldn’t you talk Singh out of his Nehruvian socialism? He was a great liberal. He loved free speech, very broad-minded, as you know much better than I do. But he, on economics, was weak. Or no?
ZAKARIA: Oh, no, you’re entirely right. By the way, I would say the same is true of my father, with whom I had many, many such conversations. You’d find this interesting, Tyler. My father was a young Indian nationalist who — as he once put it to me — made the most important decision in his life, politically, when he was 13 or 14 years old, which was, as a young Indian Muslim, he chose Nehru’s vision of secular democracy as the foundation of a nation rather than Jinnah’s view of religious nationalism. He chose India rather than Pakistan as an Indian Muslim.
He was politically so interesting and forward-leaning, but he was a hopeless social — a sort of social democrat, but veering towards socialism. Both these guys were. Here’s why, I think. For that whole generation of people — by the way, my father got a scholarship to London University and went to study with Harold Laski, the great British socialist economist. Laski told him, “You are actually not an economist; you are a historian.” So, my father went on and got a PhD at London University in Indian history.
That whole generation of Indians who wanted independence were imbued with . . . There were two things going on. One, the only people in Britain who supported Indian independence were the Labour Party and the Fabian Socialists. All their allies were all socialists. There was a common cause and there was a symbiosis because these were your friends, these were your allies, these were the only people supporting you, the cause that mattered the most to you in your life.
The second part was, a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.
My own view was, that was a big mistake, though I do think there are elements of what the state was able to do that perhaps were better done in a place like South Korea than in India, but that really explains it.
My father was in Britain in ’45 as a student. As a British subject then, you got to vote in the election if you were in London, if you were in Britain. I said to him, “Who did you vote for in the 1945 election?” Remember, this is the famous election right after World War II, in which Churchill gets defeated, and he gets up the next morning and looks at the papers, and his wife says to him, “Darling, it’s a blessing in disguise.” He says, “Well, at the moment it seems very effectively disguised.”
My father voted in that election. I said to him, “You’re a huge fan of Churchill,” because I’d grown up around all the Churchill books, and my father could quote the speeches. I said, “Did you vote for Churchill?” He said, “Oh good lord, no.” I said, “Why? I thought you were a great admirer of his.” He said, “Look, on the issue that mattered most to me in life, he was an unreconstructed imperialist. A vote for Labour was a vote for Indian independence. A vote for Churchill was a vote for the continuation of the empire.” That, again, is why their friends were all socialists.
Excellent throughout. And don’t forget Fareed’s new book — discussed in the podcast — Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.
Strong AI and the O-Ring model
Let’s say the Sumerians were gifted strong AI, simply as an exogenous shock to a historical model. Could they put it to much use? Electricity would be one immediate problem, but not the only problem.
Or give strong AI to a caveman.
Thomas Edison had electricity, but how much could he do with strong AI? Lord Asquith? Adlai Stevenson?
Where exactly are we in this historical sequence?
Opening Borders
Open borders hasn’t been getting a lot of good press recently but next week Bulgaria and Romania will join the Schengen Area for air and sea travel (road travel will likely follow). No more passports or visa necessary! The Schengen Area is a remarkable achievement for a part of the world once riven by violence and rivalry. Recall:
Created in 1995 with 10 countries, the Schengen Area has since grown to cover more than 1.5 million square miles, allowing almost 420 million people to move freely between 27 countries, currently. It’s important not to confuse the Schengen Area with the European Union—the former is a travel zone where citizens can cross country borders without a passport or visa, whereas the latter is an economic and political union of countries. The Schengen Area currently includes Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
According to the Council of the European Union, “Each day around 3.5 million people cross internal borders for work or study or to visit families and friends, and almost 1.7 million people reside in one Schengen country while working in another.” Being a part of the zone saves citizens time and hassle from passport checks. It also helps travelers from 59 countries outside the EU, including the United States, as they can travel without visas for up to 90 days within the Schengen Area for tourism and business.
Unfortunately, the European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS) means that US citizens will require a visa to travel to Europe next year–this is a step in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, the entry of Bulgaria and Romania to the Schengen Area is something to celebrate.
It would be great to see a Schengen Area for say the United States, Canada, Australia, the U.K and New Zealand (the US plus the CANZUK countries).
*Star Maker*, by Olaf Stapledon
Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago. To most men, if course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more civilized than any earlier age. In their view civilization and mechanization were almost identical, and never before had there been such a triumph of mechanization. The benefits of a scientific civilization were obvious. For the fortunate class there was more comfort, better health, increased stature, a prolongation of youth, and a system of technical knowledge so vast and intricate that no man coul dknow more than its outline or some tiny corner of its detail. Moreoever, increased communications had brought all the peoples into contact. Local idiosyncrasies were fading out before the radio, the cinema, and the gramophone. In comparison with these hopeful signs it was easily overlooked that the human constitution, through strengthened by improved conditions, was intrinsically less stable than formerly. Certain disintegrative diseases were slowly but surely increasing. In particular, diseases of the nervous system were becoming more common and more pernicious. Cynics used to say that the mental hospitals would soon outnumber even the churches.
Here is a recent short essay on Starmaker, first published in 1937.
*Revolusi*
The subtitle is Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, and the author is David van Reybrouck. An excellent book, and I found two points of particular interest in it. First, just how weak and incomplete was the Dutch colonization of Indonesia for centuries. Second, just how complicated and rapidly changing was the postwar transition from Japanese rule to independence. Excerpt:
In total no fewer than 120,000 Dutch conscripts would depart between 1946 and 1949, an enormous number that approached the general mobilization before World War II (150,000). Six thousand recruits who were examined and judged ‘fit for the tropics’ refused to embark. Many of these were tracked down and hauled out of beds to the military police. This hunt for deserters went on until 1958! Strict sentences were passed on 2,565 war resisters. Almost three-quarters received custodial sentences of up to two years, the rest remain in jail even longer. Altogether a total of fifteen centuries of prison sentences were pronounced, a remarkably large amount compared to the complete immunity granted to later war criminals. The conclusion was clear: those who refused to kill were locked up, those who murdered without reason went free.
Recommended, there should of course be more such books on Indonesia.
R.I.P. The Scottish Enlightenment 1697-2024
The Scottish Enlightenment will die on April 1st 2024, exactly 327 years, eight months and 24 days after the incident that provoked it. For on April 1st the Hate Crime and Public Order Act (Scotland) 2021 comes into force, an Act which will criminalise speech and opinion deemed ‘hateful’ even if spoken in the privacy of your own home.
On January 8th 1697, Thomas Aikenhead, a 20 year-old student, was marched the two miles from the Old Tolbooth Prison on the High Street to a windswept sandy hillock just to the west of the causeway that crossed the marshes between Edinburgh and the port town of Leith, known as Gallow Lee. Surrounded by the pious prayers of the clergymen of the Kirk (the Church of Scotland), Thomas was hanged by the neck until he was dead.
What was Thomas – a murderer? A rapist? Was he one of Edinburgh’s notorious ‘Resurrection Men’? No. Young Thomas’s crime was that in an Edinburgh tavern on Christmas Eve 1696, he had a drink and went on a rant offending the Church and its stranglehold on Scottish culture. He was reported, arrested and tried: “The jury found Aikenhead guilty of cursing and railing against God, denying the incarnation and the Trinity and scoffing at the Scriptures.”
Thomas Aikenhead was the last person to be hanged for Blasphemy in Britain. As such he became a martyr and inspiration. The hanging of a young man for the crime of having a rant in a pub late at night became seen as an act of tyranny and oppression so heinous it was the spark that turned a barren minor nation on the north west fringe of Europe into the blazing furnace of ideas that was the Scottish Enlightenment. Ideas that would change the world forever.
… I am truly appalled that the legacy of Aikenhead and the Scottish Enlightenment…has been trashed by the Scottish Parliament and the Yousaf Government. From April 1st 2024, saying the wrong thing at your own dinner table, let alone in a drunken pub rant like young Thomas did, will once again land you in significant trouble with the law, 327 years, eight months and 24 days after Thomas died.
Mr. Yousaf, his ministers and those who drafted and will enforce this law would do well to remember how history judged those who hanged Thomas Aikenhead on that bleak winter morning on the road to Leith. In doing so they should recall that this gross act of overreach and tyranny was the high tide of the power of the Kirk, power which was swept aside by the forces unleashed when the people said ‘enough’.
An important piece from “C.J. Strachan”. Read and circulate the whole thing.
My excellent Conversation with Marilynne Robinson
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Marilynne Robinson is one of America’s best and best-known novelists and essayists, whose award-winning works like Housekeeping and Gilead explore themes of faith, grace, and the intricacies of human nature. Beyond her writing, Robinson’s 25-year tenure at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop allowed her to shape and inspire the new generations of writers. Her latest book, Reading Genesis, displays her scholarly prowess, analyzing the biblical text not only through the lens of religious doctrine but also appreciating it as a literary masterpiece.
She joined Tyler to discuss betrayal and brotherhood in the Hebrew Bible, the relatable qualities of major biblical figures, how to contend with the Bible’s seeming contradictions, the true purpose of Levitical laws, whether we’ve transcended the need for ritual sacrifice, the role of the Antichrist, the level of biblical knowledge among students, her preferred Bible translation, whether The Winter’s Tale makes sense, the evolution of Calvin’s reputation and influence, why academics are overwhelmingly secular, the success of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, why she wrote a book on nuclear pollution, what she’ll do next, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: As a Calvinist, too, would not, in general, dismiss the Old Testament, what do you make of a book such as Leviticus? It’s highly legalistic, highly ritualistic. Some Christians read Leviticus and become a split Christian Jew almost. Other Christians more or less dismiss the book. How does it fit into your worldview?
ROBINSON: I think that when you read Herodotus, where he describes these little civilizations that are scattered over his world — he describes them in terms of what they eat or prohibit, or they paint themselves red, or they shave half their head. There are all these very arbitrary distinctions that people make in order to identify with one clan over against another.
At the point of Leviticus, which of course, is an accumulation of many texts over a very long time, no doubt, but nevertheless, to think of it as being Moses — he is trying to create a defined, distinctive human community. By making arbitrary distinctions between people so that you’re not simply replicating notions of what is available or feasible or whatever, but actually asking them to adopt prohibitions of food — that’s a very common distinguishing thing in Herodotus and in contemporary life.
So, the arbitrariness of the laws is not a fault. It is a way of establishing identification of one group as separate from other groups.
COWEN: So, you read it as a narrative of how human communities are created, but you still would take a reading of, say, Sermon on the Mount that the Mosaic law has been lifted? Or it’s still in place?
ROBINSON: Oh, it’s not still in place. We’ve been given other means by which to create identity. Moses was doing something distinctive in a certain period of the evolution of Israel as a people. He didn’t want them to be Egyptians. He didn’t want them to subscribe to the prevailing culture, which was idolatrous, and so on. He’s doing Plato in The Republic. He’s saying, “This is how we develop the idea of a community.”
Having said that, then there are certain other things like “Thou shall not kill,” or whatever, that become characterizing laws. Jesus very often says, when someone says to him, “How can I be saved?” He says, “You know the commandments.” It’s not as if God is an alien figure from the point of view of Christ, whom we take to be his son.
Interesting throughout.
Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic
I am setting aside most of the cultural and “macro” issues, and just considering policy, in my latest Bloomberg column. Excerpt:
Consider agriculture. If you fly over Hispaniola, you can see a notable difference between the Haitian and Dominican sides of the border. The Dominican side has plenty of trees, whereas the Haitian side is denuded. Much of that can be explained by Haiti’s history of weaker property rights. A “tragedy of the commons” has led to systematic exploitation of Haitian land.
The deforestation of Haiti dates from at least 1730, when French colonial policies, timber exports and the clearing of the land for coffee production all did damage. That hurt the prospects for Haitian agriculture, but much of the tree-clearing took place in the middle of the 20th century. Haitians have long used charcoal as an energy source, which led to unchecked deforestation, soil erosion and desertification. Thus, despite its beautiful natural setting, most of Haiti does not appear green and sparkling.
In the Dominican Republic, deforestation is also a problem — but not nearly on the scale of Haiti. Forests still cover about 40% of the country’s land (estimates for Haiti have ranged as low as 2%). The Dominican Republic has some national parks and reforestation programs, and developed alternative energy sources to reduce the demand for charcoal. Forest cover, and the quality of the soil, made a comeback. The country is also working toward selling its reforestation for carbon credits, giving it further economic incentive to protect its land.
To the extent that the Dominican Republic still experiences deforestation, it often comes from livestock cultivation, a far more economically productive activity than gathering wood for charcoal.
To citizens of wealthy countries, these differences may not sound enormous. But agriculture is an important driver of early economic development. Surpluses from agriculture enable the accumulation of savings, which finances broader commercial investment and helps people start small businesses. The economy obtains a base for diversifying into manufacturing, as happened in East Asia. Ethiopia’s double-digit growth spurt, before the recent tragic civil wars, also was rooted in agricultural productivity gains.
Today the Dominican Republic is essentially self-sufficient in food, including rice. According to the US government, Haiti now relies on imports for “a significant portion of the agricultural products it consumes,” including 80% of its rice. In 1981, by contrast, food imports were only 18% of the Haitian diet.
There are further arguments at the link.
Some triumphs of 19th century liberalism
Here is an outline of part of my lecture. I presented “free trade” (NB: it wasn’t totally free), the classical gold standard, and some modicum of free immigration (not everywhere) as three successful and mostly stable pillars of 19th century classical liberal achievement. Of course that was for limited parts of Western Europe and North America only, and with major exceptions for women, blacks, and more. Nonetheless, something in that formula worked, at least when it was actually appplied. Here is the outline:
Extreme trade protectionism after Napoleonic Wars
Later sliding scale for tariffs, maybe 50% rate of effective protection?
Complete free trade for Corn [wheat] during the 1840s, Cobden and Bright and Anti-Corn Law League
Terms of trade arguments: Robert Torrens, J.S. Mill
Protectionism does best when inelastic demand for your exports, elastic demand for your imports (two-country model)
The tariff in essence helps your buyers collude as one
That can outweigh the efficiency losses from the tariff
Removing labor from the corn sector also can boost British manufactures
What were terms of trade for GB then?
Jeffrey Williamson paper 1990 – Repeal helped the working class, hurt the landlords
Doug Irwin (EJ, 2021) – Efficiency-neutral but broadly egalitarian
American farmers were big winners
Greatest liberal triumph of the 19th century?
The other great triumph – the classical gold standard – dating from 1815-1914
Price-specie flow mechanism
Overvalued exchange rate – 1815, 1920s for Britain
Nassau Senior, Four Lectures on the Transmission of Precious Metals, 1827
Henry Thornton, An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain, 1802 – prices, interest rates, exchange rates
How good a song is Quarter to Three?
You know, the 1961 #1 hit by Gary U.S. Bonds? I’ve been thinking about this question for months. I feel a good amount is at stake. If songs such as Quarter to Three (or done live with dancers) are still great, our assessment of early times risesconsiderably. But if they are dispensable throw-aways, the history of popular music (and film) in the earlier twentieth century needs to be rewritten.
What makes the song such a classic? Claude praises “the upbeat rhythm, engaging call-and-response vocals, relatable lyrics, catchy melody, historical context, and instrumental breaks,” but none of those seem quite scarce or special enough to elevate the tune to classic status. With a bit of prodding Claude also cited “raw, unpolished energy,” a genuine sense of fun, and “chemistry amongst the performers.” To that you might add a creative use of repetition and small, stepwise changes, plenty of syncopation, and the hooks are iconic. The use of echo and phase shifting looks to the future, and the shuffle-like groove drew on calypso influences and also ska. Nonetheless the chord structure, while effective, is hardly revelatory.
So I’m still wondering — if a song has that ineffable “something” — how much is that the product of our collective imaginations? How much is it real and objectively there? Or does a Generation Z teen, with a very different ear, dismiss it as muddled and mediocre rather than memorable? After all, Gary’s career was not replete with enduring creations.
A critic could allege the dance lyrics are ordinary and the production sloppy. But was that all part of the calculation? Wikipedia relates:
The single was recorded with very rough sound quality (compared to other records at the time). Producer Frank Guida has been quoted on subsequent CD reissues that his production sound was exactly what he wanted it to sound like.
Bob Roman wrote:
The song opens with muffled crowd noise and a bandleader counting off the beginning of a song. It’s not a live recording, but it sounds like one — and not even like a good one. It sounds like an amazing party happening down the street — wild, frenzied, mysterious, its sound obscured by what might as well be a couple of sets of walls. In any era, it’s crazy that a record this lo-fi managed to hit #1. In the pre-Beatles era where labels were pushing cleaned-up teenage dreamboats, it seems especially strange.
So we’ve got amazing hooks, controlled chaos, and extreme innovation?
The song also has a lineage. Bill Wyman put it on one of his solo albums. It inspired Dion’s “Runaround Sue.” Bruce Springsteen played it regularly in his concerts, and later worked with Gary, writing songs for him and doing two albums together. Most importantly, Paul McCartney references it in his Sgt. Pepper classic “When I’m Sixty-Four“:
If I’d been out ’til quarter to three, would you lock the door?
In essence Paul is teasing us with the notion that the 64-year-old McCartney might someday still be out there, dancing, rather than knitting tea cozies on the Isle of Wight. And true to Straussian form, Paul released the dance song “Dance Tonight” when he was sixty-four, days before turning sixty-five.
In 1963, during a Beatles European tour, Gary U.S. Bonds was the headliner for them.
You will note that the lineage of the song runs mostly through white performers, though Gary U.S. Bonds was black (or possibly mixed race). Perhaps one special feature of Quarter to Three is how it spans black and also white R&B, a rare feature at the time but hearkening back to the much earlier years of the blues, when black and white musical styles could be hard to distinguish. In addition to the Caribbean vein, Gary could span Latino styles as well.
Just as we are finding it impossible to rebuild Notre Dame cathedral as it was, a mere sixty-three years later could any of us still make something akin to “Quarter to Three”? Or have we lost those “technologies”?
I, for one, have decided to vote in favor of masterpiece status for Quarter to Three. At least for now. And by the way Gary U.S. Bonds is still on tour.
19th century British economic thought (another outline for my class)
1760-1830, typically considered peak of Industrial Revolution
Malthus, first decade of the 19th century
Ricardo’s Principles, 1817
Theory of rent
Theory of comparative advantage
The machinery question
Ricardo, The High Price of Bullion, 1810
Bullionist debates, Napoleonic wars, Ricardo and Malthus and Thornton
Ricardian equivalence, thinking in terms of systems and models
The Ricardians: James Mill and James Ramsey McCullough
The reign of classical economics, Nassau Senior
Poor Law debates
Unions and working hours
Ricardian socialists
John Stuart Mill: 1806-1873
Synthesis with French and Germans
Karl Marx
Shruti Rajagopalan interviews Doug Irwin
Doug of course is one of the top trade economists. Here is the audio, video, and transcript, from the same wonderful Mercatus team that brings you CWT. Here is one excerpt:
RAJAGOPALAN: I have a different question on Adam Smith. We’re all taught Adam Smith’s division of labor, specialization, economies of scale, the cliff notes version of that. Then, we learn about absolute advantage in about five minutes. Then, we set it aside and start thinking about comparative advantage.The first question I have is does Adam Smith’s basic model of division of labor, specialization, and economies of scale anticipate the comparative advantage trade models, or does it actually undermine the comparative advantage trade models in the way that Krugman wrote about or something else?IRWIN: I think that Adam Smith has a broader view of trade, a much richer view of trade than what I would think is of the narrower David Ricardo theory of comparative advantage. If you have to read one of the two, read Adam Smith because it’s much more fun to read. Reading David Ricardo is more like reading a textbook in the sense that he doesn’t have this broad historical sense and these new rich ideas and how they’re interacting that leaves a lot to the imagination and leaves a lot to future research to flesh out.He’s saying, “England can produce wine and cloth. Here are the labor coefficients, and we’re going to do this static comparison between England and Portugal.” That’s a very narrow way of thinking about trade.RAJAGOPALAN: So badly written, you want the wine by the end of it.IRWIN: There’s a wonderful quote by George Stigler saying: “the only thing that someone will take away from reading Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is that they need a bottle of wine to get through it,” or something along those lines.RAJAGOPALAN: I agree.IRWIN: Adam Smith isn’t technically as sophisticated if you will, but in terms of the ideas, they’re very sophisticated. Obviously, he wasn’t thinking in terms of an economic model directly, but it’s a much richer overall discussion of trade that I think you can learn a lot from, even reading today.RAJAGOPALAN: When you see the world today, what do you think the world looks like more? Does it look more like Ricardian comparative advantage and the more recent models like Heckscher–Ohlin, and those things that came about? Do you think it really looks like the Adam Smith story, which is much more nuanced, pay attention to what’s happening in the domestic economy in terms of division of labor, specialization, and that is the lead-in to foreign trade, which is so deeply entangled with domestic trade?IRWIN: Well, I hate to waffle, but I think you need a little bit of both. It depends on the question, depends on the country, depends on the issue that you’re examining. These are just tools that you draw to help out your understanding of a particular situation. I will confess I’m a little bit more in favor of Adam Smith. I’ve always said that his theory of trade, and in particular his analysis of trade policy, which I think is underrated, is very sophisticated, and very wise, and has a lot to say to us today.RAJAGOPALAN: Beautifully written, if I may add.
There are now 100 episodes of Ideas of India, here is a link to all of them. And here is my own earlier CWT with Doug.