Category: History
The roots of racial segregation in Baltimore
The residential segregation bill won the City Council’s approval of December 9, 1910…
Blacks simply were not allowed to live in white neighborhoods, and when it comes to mixed blocks, it was hardly the rule of law which reigned. Blacks who moved into mixed blocks were penalized when white politicians wanted to do so. The entire regime was extreme:
Baltimore’s innovation was the use of government legislation to achieve systematic, citywide race separation. “Nothing like it can be found in any statute book or ordinance record of this country,” the New York Times wrote. “It is unique in legislation, Federal, State, or municipal — an ordinance so far-reaching in the logical sequence that must result from its enforcement that it may be said to mark a new era in social legislation.” Baltimore thus became a national leader in residential segregation.
That is from Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, by Antero Pietila. Anyone interested in the roots of current problems in Baltimore should read this book
Spain was a weak state, and that still matters
Robin Grier (with Jerry F. Hough) puts it thus:
The great weakness of the Spanish government was not its bureaucratic nature, but its inability to build an effective bureaucracy until the 1700s. Without an effective bureaucracy, Spain was doomed to a personalistic policy process in which options and tradeoffs often were not properly weighed. Rulers could not trust the market because they were incapable of taxing decentralized economic activity.
One example of the lack of bureaucratic capability during the 1500s and 1600s is found in the example of Philip’s attempt to conquer England with the Spanish Armada. Until the 1580s Philip’s “defense department” had only one secretary assisted by a handful of clerks, none with military experience.
As he prepared to launch the Spanish Armada to try to conquer England, he doubled the number of responsible defense officials to two – one for the army and one for navy!
The ships were largely rented from Genoa. Although many of them were sunk in the failed attack, Philip did not try to build a merchant fleet of his own to match Elizabeth’s rapid expansion of her armed merchant fleet at the same time.
That is from her new and excellent The Long Process of Development: Building Markets and States in Pre-industrial England, Spain and their Colonies, recommended. This is essential reading for the history of colonial Mexico in particular.
*Digital Gold*
The author is Nathaniel Popper and the subtitle is Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money.
This excellent work is the book on Bitcoin you’ve been waiting for, most importantly it doesn’t require that you are the kind of person who wants to read a book on Bitcoin. I devoured my copy right away, it is full of information, explanation, and good humor, definitely recommended and entertaining throughout.
Here is Popper’s piece on Bitcoin and Argentina, here is Popper on Twitter.
Who here mourns the destruction of the Serapeum?
After the pagan fighters left their stronghold, a crowd of Christian Alexandrians and soldiers swarmed the hill. One of them took an axe and with all his strength struck the jaw of the monumental statue of Serapis…The crowd then hacked the rest of the statue into pieces and dragged the fragments off to each of the city’s regions to be burned.
…The destruction of the Serapeum [A.D. 392] was a momentous event, second perhaps only to the Gothic sack of Rome in 410 for the amount of attention it received from contemporary sources.
That is from the new and excellent book The Final Pagan Generation, by Edward J. Watts. Watts tries to reconstruct the worldviews and impressions of the pagans who witnessed the onset of Roman state-sanctioned Christianity; an underlying theme of the work is how weak a sense we have of what is truly significant in our time, or not. I often find Roman histories to be difficult to parse, but this one is a model of lucidity.
Here is Wikipedia on that temple and its destruction. Here is another discussion.
Will the Black Panthers make a comeback?
In my spare time I was reading some Huey Newton, and it struck me how contemporary his ideas were in some regards, in particular the risk of arbitrary violence at the hands of the police. Here is an excerpt from Revolutionary Suicide:
As our forces built up, we doubled the patrols, then tripled them; we began to patrol everywhere — Oakland, Richmond, Berkeley, and San Francisco. Most patrols were a part of our normal movement around the community. We kept them random, however, so that the police could not set a network to anticipate us. They never knew when or where we were going to show up…The chief purpose of the patrols was to teach the community security against the police, and we did not need a regular schedule for that. We knew that no particular area could be totally defended; only the community could effectively defend and eventually liberate itself. Our aim simply was to teach them how to go about it. We passed out our literature and ten-point program to the citizens who gathered, discussed community defense, and educated them about their rights concerning weapons.
By the way, Hillary Clinton worked as a young intern for the Huey Newton legal defense team (he was accused of shooting a policeman).
*Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes*
That is the new Keynes biography by the renowned Richard Davenport-Hines. It’s not like most biographies I know. The font is fairly large, and the presentation is non-comprehensive and fairly subjective. It is more like reading the transcript of some very good talks on Keynes, and less of a trudge than many bios. There is even a chapter on Keynes as lover, but actually quite serious and good, as it helps set the man in context. For Davenport-Hines, Keynes was most of all a Cambridge Apostle. This book will help you get inside the mind of Keynes, definitely recommended.
My review of *The Rambler*, by Samuel Johnson
Eric Posner’s (with Adrian and Blakey Vermeule) new and excellent venture The New Rambler asked me to write a book review for them. The impish side of me thought “what book better to review than the old Rambler?”, namely by Samuel Johnson? Here is the opening of my piece:
A blogger by the ostensible name of “Samuel Johnson” has compiled his previous posts into a book, edited by a supposed W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. But the true work here is “Johnson’s,” and the sequential editing, as such, seems to have been done by WordPress. The editorial illusion, of course, is a trick dating from the eighteenth century, as for instance Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope presented the work of an imaginary Martinus Scriblerus in the 1740s. These Johnson posts claim to date from the early 1750s, a typical blogger’s conceit and misdirection, but the content is too modern and innovative to sustain that illusion for long.
Cutting through the postmodern trappings, Johnson’s blog reflects his ongoing interest in behavioral economics. He is continually skirting the frontier of the latest research insights, although like many bloggers he is lax in providing the proper citations. He writes off the top of his head, though without care for what came before from Thomas Schelling, Jean Tirole, or Cass Sunstein, among other titans of the field. Reading these short pieces is thus a fascinating but often frustrating experience. And as is true for most of the work in behavioral economics, there are insights but a fully fleshed out model, applied consistently to all human choices, is nowhere to be found.
Here is the full review, recommended!
Is globalization going in reverse?
Jeffrey Rothfeder has a very good piece on that question, here is one excerpt:
Somewhat surprisingly, cross-border capital flows are equally anemic. Despite the common perception that multinationals these days manufacture their products anywhere but the West, global foreign direct investment (which reflects the amount that companies earmark for doing business in other countries) has fallen to a mere 2 percent of global GDP from 4 percent before the recession.
Still, the most tangible metric that belies the Pollyannaish depictions of globalization is corporate financial performance, which is also a window into the fundamentals of local economies. Although most companies don’t separate out geographical earnings, revenue comparisons provide an apt picture — and few multinationals can boast big returns in global markets.
There is much more to the argument, do read the whole thing.
What I’ve been reading about totalitarian societies
1. Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life, by Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine. Why not read a biography of one of the most important men of the twentieth century? I found this book valuable even though I am already familiar with the Ezra Vogel tome on Deng. Recommended.
2. Restless Empire: A Historical Atlas of Russia, by Ian Barnes, Belknap Press. This is not only one of the best introductions to Russian history, there are clear and excellent maps every two or three pages. More history books should follow this standard.
Abolish the National Raisin Reserve
I had not known such a thing exists:
There are raisins stored in California warehouses as part of the U.S. government’s National Raisin Reserve — but the program may shrivel in the face of a Supreme Court challenge.
The National Raisin Reserve — which is overseen by the Fresno-based Raisin Administrative Committee — is part of post-World War II-era program that forces raisin producers to give part of their annual crop to the government to prevent an oversupply of the dried fruit. Controversially, the program seizes the raisins from the farmers without paying them, and that has created friction, lawbreaking farmers, and a Supreme Court case. One scofflaw farmer, Marvin Horne, has refused to surrender his raisins to the government and owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and over 1 million pounds of the sweet dried fruit to Uncle Sam.
The controversial raisin-seizing program could soon be, however, a relic of history.
Several Supreme Court justices expressed doubts Wednesday that federal officials can legally take raisins away from farmers without full payment even if the goal is to help boost overall market prices.
The article is here, via Jeffrey Lessard. Here is commentary from Ilya Somin, here is an IJ video on the case.
Which of your priors need updating now?
The oldest stone tools on record may spell the end for the theory that complex toolmaking began with the genus Homo, to which humans belong. The 3.3-million-year-old artefacts, revealed at a conference in California last week, predate the first members of Homo, and suggest that more-ancient hominin ancestors had the intelligence and dexterity to craft sophisticated tools.
“This is a landmark discovery pertaining to one of the key evolutionary milestones,” says Zeresenay Alemseged, a palaeoanthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco…
The article is here, and the pointer, not surprisingly, is from Robin Hanson. I say this should make us more pessimistic about dysgenics, and more pessimistic about the likely prospects for civilization in the future. Ideally we would like to think that once brains reached a critical threshold, all sorts of good things started happening. That scenario now seems yet further away from the truth, and the notion of civilizational dead ends, if only for long stretches of time, now seems more likely. Your views?
Guns, race, and the civil rights movement…what a crosshatch of mood affiliation…
This passage shook me up, bravo to the author:
…although nonviolence was crucial to the gains made by the freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, those gains could not have been achieved without the complementary and still underappreciated practice of armed self-defense. The claim that armed self-defense was a necessary aspect of the civil rights movement is still controversial. However, wielding weapons, especially firearms, let both participants in nonviolent struggle and their sympathizers protect themselves and others under terrorist attack for their civil rights activities. This willingness to use deadly force ensured the survival not only of countless brave men and women but also of the freedom struggle itself.
That is from the recent book This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, by Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Also related is the 1962 book Negroes with Guns, by Robert F. Williams, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Truman Nelson, about the use of guns for protection against the Ku Klux Klan. Martin Luther King of course did keep a gun in the house, and he relied on neighbors who, at times, protected his house by carrying guns.
What does Robin Hanson think is the most likely “Great Filter”?
Here is a long and excellent post, whereby Robin outs himself as a strange kind of environmentalist. Do need the whole thing, but here is one summary excerpt:
So, bottom line, the future great filter scenario that most concerns me is one where our solar-system-bound descendants have killed most of nature, can’t yet colonize other stars, are general predators and prey of each other, and have fallen into a short-term-predatory-focus equilibrium where predators can easily see and travel to most all prey. Yes there are about a hundred billion comets way out there circling the sun, but even that seems a small enough number for predators to careful map and track all of them.
“At first they came for the rabbits…and then they came for me.” I find that intriguing, but I have a more marginalist approach, and perhaps one which encompasses Robin’s hypothesis as a special case. The death of human (and other) civilizations may be a bit like the death of the human body through old age, namely a whole bunch of things go wrong at once. If there were a single key problem, it would be easier to find a patch and prolong things for just a bit more. But if we have reason to believe that, eventually, many things will go wrong at once…such a concatenation of problems is more likely to defeat us. So my nomination for The Great Filter, in a nutshell, is “everything going wrong at once.” The simplest underlying model here is that a) problems accumulate, b) resources can be directed to help solve problems, and c) sometimes problems accumulate more rapidly than they can be solved.
This is also why, in many cases, there is no simple “fact of the matter” answer as to why various mighty empires fell in the past. Here is my earlier review of Apocalypto, a remarkable and still underrated movie.
*Those Who Write for Immortality*
Joshua Rothman writes in The New Yorker about a new book by H.J. Jackson, on the romantic poets:
Truly long-term literary endurance depends, Jackson writes, on “regular reinterpretation,” and, for that to happen, your writing has to be rich and multi-dimensional. That doesn’t mean, though, that other factors can’t help it along. Thanks to Wordsworth’s liberal, politically active youth, biographers were able to keep discovering previously-unknown political episodes in his early life; that allowed them to keep publishing controversial biographies, which kept him in the public eye long after his death. That distinction between youth and age was also useful for professors: it allowed them to keep arguing over who was better, the “early” or “late” Wordsworth. Even without all these factors, Jackson concedes, Wordsworth’s poetry would still be read today, especially in universities—but academic study alone could never have given him the high cultural profile that he enjoys now. “To sum up,” she writes, Wordsworth’s fame “is due to a concatenation of circumstances, most of which Wordsworth himself could not have foreseen, most of which he would have objected to if he could have foreseen them, and most of which had little to do with the communication of eternal truths.”
You can order the book here, the subtitle is Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame.
Is the Income Tax Legal? Voluntary?
Just in case you are tempted to go all Wesley Snipes and refuse to pay your taxes on “constitutional” grounds, the income tax is legal and mandatory. Sorry.
Jonathan Siegel, professor of law at GWU has carefully examined all the primary tax protester arguments. All are wrong. Some are quite interesting
Some tax protestors claim that [the 16th] amendment is not really part of the Constitution — it was never ratified! Therefore, they say, the income tax is unconstitutional. This argument was popularized by Bill Benson in a book called “The Law That Never Was.”
Surprisingly enough, this argument has a little something to it. When the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified by state legislatures in the early twentieth century, the versions that some states voted on contained minor textual errors. Some of them neglected to capitalize the word “States,” one had “income” in place of “incomes,” one said “remuneration” instead of “enumeration,” one said “levy” instead of “lay,” and so on.
If the states didn’t all vote on the same, identical text for the Sixteenth Amendment, can the amendment really be considered ratified? When Congress makes a law, the House and the Senate must vote on the same text. Similarly, if the states didn’t vote on the right text, one could argue that they didn’t ratify the amendment. No Sixteenth Amendment, no income tax, the argument goes.
However, it seems that the amendment really was ratified. The alleged defects in the ratification process were considered at the time of ratification in 1913. The Solicitor of the Department of State convincingly explained why the minor textual variations in the versions the states voted on should be disregarded.
First, it seems that the state legislatures intended to ratify the amendment as proposed by Congress. They understood themselves to be voting to approve the proposed Sixteenth Amendment. The text set forth in their instruments of ratification was for recitation purposes only. The errors in the text were not proposals to change the text being ratified; they were just inadvertent errors that do not detract from the intention of the state legislatures to ratify the amendment as proposed.
Benson denies this. He claims that states deliberately altered the text of the proposed amendment. But the evidence just isn’t there. In one of his court filings, Benson singles out Oklahoma as a particularly clear case. He says the facts “unequivocally show that Oklahoma intentionally amended what the United States Congress had proposed” (see page 2 of Benson’s filing). But looking at Benson’s own book (pp. 61-67), one can see that the Oklahoma legislature adopted what it called “A resolution ratifying an amendment proposed by the sixty-first Congress of the United States” (emphasis added). This resolution then begins its ratification by reciting that “Whereas . . . Congress . . . on Monday the fifteenth day of March, one thousand nine hundred and nine, by joint resolution proposed an amendment to the constitution of the United States, in words and figures as follows:” Then, it’s true, the resolution misstates the text of the amendment (and pretty badly too). But it sure looks as though the Oklahoma legislatorsthought they were ratifying the amendment that Congress had proposed on the specified date and just misstated it. So even in a case that Benson himself singles out, it seems quite clear that the state legislature thought it was ratifying the Sixteenth Amendment, not proposing to change it.
…For all these reasons, it seems clear that the Sixteenth Amendment really is part of the Constitution.
Certainly that has been the uniform holding of the courts in cases in which this argument has been raised. For some representative cases, see United States v. Benson, 941 F.2d 598 (7th Cir. 1991) (rejecting these arguments in a criminal case brought against the author of the “Law that Never Was” book); United States v. Foster, 789 F.2d 457 (7th Cir. 1986); Cook v. Spillman, 806 F.2d 948 (9th Cir. 1986) (calling the argument that the Sixteenth Amendment was never ratified “frivolous” and imposing sanctions of $1,500 on the party making it); United States v. House, 617 F.Supp. 237, 238-39 (W.D. Mich.1985).
So while this argument is not as utterly absurd as most tax protestor arguments, one can be confident that it would not succeed in any actual court proceeding.