Category: History
Sentences to ponder
A random sample of new books for sale on Amazon.com shows three times more books initially published in the 1850’s are for sale than new books from the 1950’s.
Here is much more, from Paul J. Heald.
Two excellent new books on the history of technology
1. David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity. The typewriter and the bicycle revolutionized India early in the twentieth century
2. Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America. Two of the takeaways from this book are a) the United States had a more statist approach to electricity infrastructure than did most of Europe, and to its advantage, and b) we didn’t let lots of people accidentally being electrocuted stop progress, again probably to our advantage.
How bad were the Navigation Acts really?
Adam Smith supported them and he was no mercantilist. Here is another take:
…that remains the consensus view among a broad sample of modern scholars: a recent study concluded that nearly 90 percent of the economists and historians surveyed agreed with proposition that “[t]he costs imposed on the colonists by the trade restrictions of the Navigation Acts were small.”
if the burden of the Navigation Acts was so slight — no more than one percent of GDP, according to Thomas’ calculation — why did the Americans make such a fuss over it? The short answer is that although the burden to the American colonies as a whole was low, it did not fall evenly across the entire economy: some sectors and regions suffered disproportionately, while others were barely affected. The regions and sectors that suffered the most from the Navigation Acts tended to be the strongest supporters of the American Revolution.
That is from the forthcoming useful book by Richard S. Grossman Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them. For the two relevant Robert Paul Thomas pieces (jstor) see here and here.
To further brighten your day, here is a non-gated piece by Robert Whaples, “Where is There Consensus Among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions” (pdf).
*Napoleon’s Egypt*
The author of this interesting work is Juan Cole and the subtitle is Invading the Middle East. Here is one excerpt:
Many of the French took seriously Bonaparte’s proclamations that he intended to bring liberty to the Egyptians through institutions such as the clerically dominated divan. The French not only interpreted Egypt in terms familiar to their eighteenth-century world, they were also capable of reinterpreting their own history in light of what they saw in Egypt. Just as rationalist officers coded popular Islam as reactionary Catholicism, so the Republican French mapped the defeated beys as analogous to the French Old Regime and saw their overthrow and institution of municipal elections as the advent of liberty.
This book is one good place to start. Here is the Wikipedia page on the French invasion of Egypt and Syria.
How might democracy disappear?
From my latest request for requests, anonymous asked:
It’s 2050. Democracy has ended in most countries, with a few exceptions. What happened?
Another reader, Dirk, asked:
If democracy ended in the USA, how do you think it would most likely play out?
Maybe you are thinking in terms of war or pandemic, but external conditions would have to be truly extreme to end democracy in the United States. The poor military fortunes of the Confederacy in the South, during the Civil War, did not lead to non-democracy (for Whites, slanted source here). Nor did siege by the Nazis make Great Britain less democratic, if anything the contrary.
If the Anglo democracies are to disappear, it will be because they will have voted themselves out of the idea, democratically of course.
As for many other parts of the world, my view is if you haven’t had democracy for one hundred years or more, it probably isn’t as stable as it may at first appear.
Do positive wealth shocks stick?
There is a new paper by Hoyt Bleakley and Joseph P. Ferrie, titled “Up from Poverty? The 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery and the Long-run Distribution of Wealth.” This paper uses a very clever experimental design, relying on random, lottery-based allocations of land. The question is how much winning this land lottery helped people in the longer run. Here is the abstract:
The state of Georgia allocated most of its land to the public through a system of lotteries. These episodes provide unusual opportunities to assess the long-term impact of large shocks to wealth, as winning was uncorrelated with individual characteristics and participation was nearly universal among the eligible population of adult white male Georgians. We use this episode to examine the idea that the lower tail of the wealth distribution reflects in part a wealth-based poverty trap because of limited access to capital. Using wealth measured in the 1850 Census manuscripts, we follow up on a sample of men eligible to win in the 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery. We assess the impact of lottery winning on the distribution of wealth 18 years after the fact. Winners are on average richer (by an amount close to the median of 1850 wealth), but mainly due to a (net) shifting of mass from the middle to the upper tail of the wealth distribution. The lower tail is largely unaffected.
The bottom line is that the grants increased inequality, many people were helped a great deal, and a large chunk of people weren’t helped at all. An ungated version of the paper is here.
*World War Z*
I was surprised how serious a movie it is and also by how deeply politically incorrect it is, including on “third rail” issues such as immigration, ethnic conflict, North Korean totalitarianism, American urban decay as exemplified by Newark, gun control, Latino-Black relations, songs of peace, and the Middle East. Here is one (incomplete) discussion of the Middle East angle, from the AP, republished in el-Arabiya (here is a more detailed but less responsible take on the matter, by a sociology professor and Israeli, spoilers throughout).
The movie is set up to show sympathy for the “Spartan” regimes and to have a message which is deeply historically pessimistic and might broadly be called Old School Conservative, informed by the debates on martial virtue from pre-Christian antiquity. But they recut the final segment of the movie and changed the ending altogether, presumably because post-Christian test audiences and film executives didn’t like it. Here is one discussion of the originally planned finale. It sounds good to me. The actual movie as it was released reverts to a Christian ending of sorts. My preferred denouement would have relied on the idea of an asymptomatic carrier or two, go see it and figure out the rest yourself.
By the way, for all the chances taken by the film makers, they were unwilling to offend the government of China (see the first link), in part because you cannot trick them easily with subtle, veiled references. Such tomfoolery works only on Americans — critics included — which I suppose suggests a lesson of its own.
Here is a Times of Israel review of the movie, interesting throughout, and it notes that the Israel scenes are simply translated to “the Middle East” for Turkish audiences.
A good film, I liked it. How many other movies offer commentary on Thucydides, Exodus, Gush-Shalom, Lawrence Dennis, and George Romero, all rolled into one?
On the Hayek-Pinochet connection
Corey Robin has a long post on this, here is one part:
Hayek complied with the dictator’s request. He had his secretary send a draft of what eventually became chapter 17—“A Model Constitution”—of the third volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty. That chapter includes a section on “Emergency Powers,” which defends temporary dictatorships when “the long-run preservation” of a free society is threatened. “Long run” is an elastic phrase, and by free society Hayek doesn’t mean liberal democracy. He has something more particular and peculiar in mind: “that the coercive powers of government are restricted to the enforcement of universal rules of just conduct, and cannot be used for the achievement of particular purposes.” That last phrase is doing a lot of the work here: Hayek believed, for example, that the effort to secure a specific distribution of wealth constituted the pursuit of a particular purpose. So the threats to a free society might not simply come from international or civil war. Nor must they be imminent. As other parts of the text make clear, those threats could just as likely come from creeping social democracy at home. If the visions of Gunnar Myrdal and John Kenneth Galbraith were realized, Hayek writes, it would produce “a wholly rigid economic structure which…only the force of some dictatorial power could break.”
Hayek came away from Chile convinced that an international propaganda campaign had been unfairly waged against the Pinochet regime (and made explicit comparison to the campaign being waged against South Africa’s apartheid regime). He set about to counter that campaign.
He immediately wrote a report lambasting human rights critics of the regime and sought to have it published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The editor of this market-friendly newspaper refused, fearing that it would brand Hayek as “a second Chile-Strauss.” (Franz Josef Strauss was a right-wing German politician who had visited Chile in 1977 and met with Pinochet. His views were roundly repudiated by both the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats in Germany.) Hayek was incensed. He broke off all relations with the paper, explaining that if Strauss had indeed been “attacked for his support for Chile he deserves to be congratulated for his courage.”
There is much more at the link.
On the prospects for emerging economy upward mobility
Angus has some thoughts, here is one bit:
In my own research with Norman Maynard (trans-dimensional Bayesian mixture modelling alert!!), we find that in the 1950s and 1960s and most of the 1970s, there were two distinct groups in the global distribution of cross-country income, and there was a high degree of mobility from the poor to the rich group. Since the second age of globalization began in the 1980s, a new distinct group of super-rich countries has formed, the gaps between the poor group and the richest group have grown, and inter-group upward mobility has become a rarity.
There is more at the link, where he serves up a triple yikes.
Emerging markets, hitting a wall
That is the title of my new New York Times column. Here is an excerpt:
The disconcerting truth is that the great “age of industrialization” may be behind us, a possibility that has been outlined most forcefully by the economist Dani Rodrik, who is leaving Harvard for Princeton next month. And evidence for this view is coming from at least four directions:
THE RISE OF AUTOMATION First, machines can perform more and more functions in manufacturing, and sometimes even in services. That makes it harder to compete via low wages.
Say you run a company in a developed nation and have been automating many of its processes. Because your total bill for employee wages would be low, why not choose the proximity and familiarity of investing in labor in or near your home country? This change would help the jobs picture in the United States and probably countries like Mexico, but could hurt many other lower-wage nations.
GLOBAL SUPPLY SOURCES Supply chains are now scattered across many countries. Think of the old development model as a nation, such as South Korea, trying to build a nearly complete domestic supply chain for its automobile and other industries. The newer model is more distributed, as reflected by the iPhone, with the bounty from the investment spread across many locations, including the Philippines, Taiwan and mainland China. As for cars, Thailand has courted automobile factories with success, but the parts usually come from outside the country and the benefits for the Thai economy are limited.
Richard Baldwin, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, refers to the internationalization of the supply chain as “globalization’s second unbundling.” He sees the new world as one of “development enclaves,” in which parts of countries will stand out as advanced or wealthy, without fundamentally transforming the entire economy.
I end with the following:
In any case, we should be prepared for the possibility that, while Seoul now looks a fair amount like Los Angeles, perhaps La Paz, Accra and Dhaka will never look much like Seoul.
Traditional dress from the Gulf States, and its origins
This is from the latest book by Christopher M. Davidson, After the Sheikhs:
Another prominent mechanism for guarding and preserving the social base of national elites in the Gulf monarchies has been the adoption of a “national dress” code. There are significant variations across the region, with men and women in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait wearing several different styles of garments, and with the younger generations in all six Gulf monarchies increasingly wearing western clothes during their leisure time. For the most part the older generations in all these countries, and most citizens — young and old — in the wealthiest of the Gulf monarchies tend to wear a fairly strict uniform of white thobes or dishdashas (men) or black abayas (women). Such quotidian sartorial choices allow the observer to differentiate instantly between a citizen and an expatriate, which helps the former to access the aforementioned privileges associated with citizenship and the concomitant elevated social status they bring. In those monarchies such as Qatar or the UAE where the material rewards of citizenship are the greatest and where the expatriate component of the total resident population is the highest, adherence to the dress code is most prevalent. As one recent study put it, “it is no mere fashion that leads all Qatar national men to wear their traditional thoh at all times…the emir and his government have perpetuated these neo-traditional myths of authenticity, allowing the creation of a citizen autocracy.” Certainly it is very important to note that this dress code is primarily a product of the oil era and the rentier state: although sometimes referred to as “traditional dress” or even “Islamic dress” by foreigners, the current national dress code in these Gulf monarchies has few roots in tradition or religion, with early pre-oil photographs from the region demonstrating that the indigenous populations once wore a variety of colours and styles.
As for the book as a whole, I don’t think the author makes a convincing case for his extremely pessimistic forecasts, but still it is an interesting read.
No One is Innocent
I broke the law yesterday and again today and I will probably break the law tomorrow. Don’t mistake me, I have done nothing wrong. I don’t even know what laws I have broken. Nevertheless, I am reasonably confident that I have broken some laws, rules, or regulations recently because its hard for anyone to live today without breaking the law. Doubt me? Have you ever thrown out some junk mail that came to your house but was addressed to someone else? That’s a violation of federal law punishable by up to 5 years in prison.
Harvey Silverglate argues that a typical American commits three felonies a day. I think that number is too high but it is easy to violate the law without intent or knowledge. Most crimes used to be based on the common law and ancient understandings of wrong (murder, assault, theft and so on) but today there are thousands of federal criminal laws that bear no relation to common law or common understanding. The WSJ illustrates:
Last September (2011), retired race-car champion Bobby Unser told a congressional hearing about his 1996 misdemeanor conviction for accidentally driving a snowmobile onto protected federal land, violating the Wilderness Act, while lost in a snowstorm. Though the judge gave him only a $75 fine, the 77-year-old racing legend got a criminal record.
Mr. Unser says he was charged after he went to authorities for help finding his abandoned snowmobile. “The criminal doesn’t usually call the police for help,” he says.
Or how about this:
In 2009, Mr. Anderson loaned his son some tools to dig for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs. Unfortunately, they were on federal land….
There is no evidence the Andersons intended to break the law, or even knew the law existed, according to court records and interviews. But the law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn’t require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.
The Anderson’s didn’t even find any arrowheads but the attempt to find was punishable by imprisonment. Under statutes such as the Lacey Act one can even face criminal prosecution for violating the laws of another country. Ignorance of another country’s laws is no excuse.
If someone tracked you for a year are you confident that they would find no evidence of a crime? Remember, under the common law, mens rea, criminal intent, was a standard requirement for criminal prosecution but today that is typically no longer the case especially under federal criminal law .
Faced with the evidence of an non-intentional crime, most prosecutors, of course, would use their discretion and not threaten imprisonment. Evidence and discretion, however, are precisely the point. Today, no one is innocent and thus our freedom is maintained only by the high cost of evidence and the prosecutor’s discretion.
One of the responses to the revelations about the mass spying on Americans by the NSA and other agencies is “I have nothing to hide. What me worry?” I tweeted in response “If you have nothing to hide, you live a boring life.” More fundamentally, the NSA spying machine has reduced the cost of evidence so that today our freedom–or our independence–is to a large extent at the discretion of those in control of the panopticon.
Report from Bangalore, 2013
Okalipuram corporator Queen Elizabeth was granted anticipatory bail in a forgery case.
Allowing her bail plea, high court vacation judge AN Venugopala Gowda told her to surrender her passport before the trial court and execute a personal bond for Rs 50,000.
The corporator has to be available for interrogation as and when required on any day between 8am and 6pm and shouldn’t make attempts to induce or issue threat/promise to persons acquainted with the facts of the case, the judge said.
An FIR was registered against Queen Elizabeth under sections 198 and 420 of the IPC and section 3(1)(ix) of SC/ST(Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, for allegedly forging documents and obtaining a false caste certificate.
The story is here, via James Crabtree, and yes the person’s name is Queen Elizabeth and she is on the city council.
Do Presidents become more interventionist once they take office?
Andrew Sullivan is upset with President Obama over Syria. I’d like to consider the background question of whether individuals, upon assuming the presidency, subsequently come to look more kindly on foreign intervention (and perhaps also surveillance?) than before holding office. I can think of a few reasons why this might occur:
1. Presidents become used to holding power, and this makes them more statist, including more interventionist. It’s not that they wake up one morning as evil, but rather they must make many small compromises along the way, and since they are committed to holding good images of themselves, their moral views shift subtly over time to accommodate this positive self-image. Many libertarians favor this kind of explanation.
2. Presidents learn the actual truth about the international situation, and becoming more interventionist is a rational implication of Bayesian updating. Many Presidents favor this kind of of explanation.
3. Presidents must live with a great sense of responsibility for their decisions, and this makes them more utilitarian and less deontological. Arguably the same is true of CEOs of major companies, and of the major characters in the new Superman movie. Superman seems willing to toss around infrastructure to increase his chance of taking out some bad guys, and none of the viewers in the Angelika Mosaic multiplex seemed to find this implausible or undesirable.
4. Presidents come to rely on the national security and defense establishment as an important part of their coalition, and this establishment is, for reasons of its own, often favorably predisposed to intervention, at least if done according to their self-imposed standards. There is a bit of trade going on here and also a bit of cognitive capture, but in any case presidents move closer to the views of their national security establishments over time.
5. Presidents, upon assuming office, become increasingly aware of what it takes to maintain America’s network of global alliances. For instance behind any Syria decision are a variety of pressures from the Gulf States, from Israel, from the Europeans, from ongoing push-and-shove with Russia, and so on. The President has a stronger sense of how inaction can lead to an unraveling of America’s credibility and previous agreements, both explicit and implicit. We are never playing from t = 0.
6. Presidents come to favor actions which correspond to them receiving a stronger place in history. In their second terms this is especially likely to involve foreign affairs.
Perhaps there is something to all of these hypotheses. Is there a way to describe them all under a common heading of what loses salience to an individual, once he or she becomes President of the United States? It doesn’t seem quite right to postulate “they forget about the little people.” So what is it then?
The follow-up question whether these are on the whole destructive biases, or are they useful counters to other, less cosmopolitan biases which otherwise favor too little intervention?
I sometimes wonder how much Presidents trust their own judgments.
Malcolm Gladwell on the new Albert Hirschman biography
It is an excellent overall review, here is one good excerpt of many:
“We may be dealing here with a general principle of action,” Hirschman wrote:
“Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.”
And from there Hirschman’s analysis took flight. People don’t seek out challenges, he went on. They are “apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.” This was the Hiding Hand principle—a play on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.
You can buy the book here.