Category: History

The History of Ethno-National Referendums 1791-2011

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title of a useful article by Matt Qvortrup (or here, both possibly gated).  Here is one excerpt:

To be sure, the British were not adverse to using the referendum as a tactical means of international politics (for example, in the case of the referendum in Moldova in 1857 — where the referendum was a convenient excuse to curb the influence of the Russian Empire after the Crimean War).  Here at the request of the British, a poll was held to unify the two territories Moldavia and Walachia (previously an area that had been under Turkish Suzerainty, though often dominated by Russia) under the name Romania.  However, it should be noted that the referendum was anything but free and fair; “Intimidations and arrests were not infrequent” and up to “nine-tenth of the population were denied the right to vote,” and that the vote only was held after some “bizarres manoevres diplomatiques.”

Here is an older (free) historical book on the employment of plebiscites to determine sovereignty.  Here is the new, well-timed, and not free March 2014 book by Matt Qvortrupp, on same topic.  Qvortrup, by the way, helped design the referendum for South Sudan.

Can too much cultural similarity cause war?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Akos Lada has a new research paper (pdf) on this question:

Does sharing the same religion, civilization or racial proximity lead to more peaceful relations between countries? This paper argues that cultural similarity can actually cause wars, which occur to combat diffusion. This new theory of war combines the models of Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) and Fearon (1995), and shows that cultural similarity can lead to more warfare when old elites are afraid of losing their position to a newly inspired citizenry, as these elites try to destroy the external source of inspiration. The microfoundation for inspiration is derived from revealed information about the income level under given institutions, which are assumed to have positive correlation with cultural proximity. On the empirical side, I present case studies on the 1848 Revolutions, the 2013 Korean Crisis (using content analysis of official North Korean articles) and on the First World War, as well as statistical analysis on all the wars of the last two centuries.

Here is Lada’s blog post on Ukraine and Russia.  Excerpt:

Perhaps because a more democratic Ukrainian government may serve as an example to Russian citizens of how culturally-similar people can be alternatively governed. As history shows, a dictator with an army does not wait for this to happen.

The new Paul Ryan report on poverty and safety net programs

by  Tyler Cowen in

I read much of the document last night, here are a few comments:

1. The so-called “war on poverty” has gone better than most of this document would appear to suggest, although this ends up being acknowledged in the appendix on poverty measures.

2. High implicit marginal tax rates are a problem for poor families, but they receive too much attention in this report.  Those same high implicit rates never stopped higher earners, who at some point were (often) much poorer themselves.  Furthermore, without some assumption of dysfunctional behavior, high implicit marginal tax rates will hurt society but should not hurt lower earners per se.

3. There is an implicit ranking of programs as good or bad.  If a program is ranked as bad, there is a cataloging of its cost, but this is not compared to potential benefits, even granting that net cost is positive.

4. Two things that work to cure poverty are immigration and cash transfers.  These points should be stressed more.  More generally, not much of an analytical framework is imposed on the material.  And the discussion of barriers to advancement is extremely thin.  Collapsing families surely constitute an important issue, but reading the discussion of that topic yields precious little knowledge, not even “false knowledge.”

5. Reading through the long list — the too-long list I would say– of programs, one really does get the feeling that a lot of them ought to be replaced by cash grants or pro-employment cash incentives, such as EITC.  But what else should we be doing differently?  If one insists that the point of the document is simply to list extant programs, so be it.  But what is the point of that exercise?  Why not introduce some material on the causes of dysfunctional health care, educational, and rental sectors?

Overall this needed to be a lot better than it was.  The document has almost no vision, only a marginal command of the scholarly literature, and it is a good example of how the conservative movement is still allowing the poverty issue to defeat it and tie it up in knots.

There are further criticisms here, not all of them convincing.  Paul Krugman had a few posts on the document too.

I am tonight doing an event on poverty with Neera Tanden, Steve Pearlstein, and Reihan Salam, and a few others on the Arlington campus of GMU.

Recommended reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

Anatol Lieven, Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry.  And here is a short essay of his on Ukraine today.

Orlando Figes, A Crimean War.

Vassily Aksyonov, The Island of Crimea, discussed here: “Written in 1979, Vassily Aksyonov’s “The Island of Crimea” imagines an alternative history (abetted by alternative geography—the Crimea is a peninsula) wherein the Russian civil war ends with the tsarist forces able to hold onto this southern scrap of the old empire. “

*The System Worked*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new and excellent book by Daniel W. Drezner and the subtitle is How the World Stopped Another Great Depression.  It is largely if not entirely correct, here is a summary excerpt:

A closer look at the global response to the financial crisis reveals a more optimistic assessment.  Despite initial shocks that were more severe than the 1929 financial crisis, global economic governance responded in a nimble and robust fashion.  Whether one looks at economic outcomes, policy outputs, or institutional operations, these governance structures either reinforced or improved upon the pre-crisis status quo.  The global economy bounced back from the 2008 financial crisis with relative alacrity.

I would myself stress two additional points, whether you call them addenda or qualifications is up to you.  First, we now know that the Fed could have done much more in 2008.  I consider this a mistake rather than a mistake in governance, and later the Fed did a great deal to try to make up for this error.  Second, the performance of the eurozone is hardly spectacular, to say the least, and the ECB should have moved to a much looser monetary policy in 2009 if not sooner.  Still, given what a screwy, seventeen-nation system had been set up, and given the severe distributional consequences of four percent inflation in the eurozone, I am surprised the system performed as well as it did.

John Mearsheimer on Ukraine and nuclear weapons, in 1993

by  Tyler Cowen in

This Foreign Affairs piece (pdf) is interesting and prescient thoughout, here is one excerpt:

Despite some testy moments, relations between Russia and Ukraine have generally been stable since the Soviet break-up.  There are, however, good reasons to fear these relations might deteriorate.  First, the situation between Ukraine and Russia is ripe for the outbreak of security competition between them.  Great powers that share a long and unprotected common border, like that between Russia and Ukraine, often lapse into competition driven by security fears.  Russia and Ukraine might overcome this competition and learn to live together in harmony, but it would be unusual if they do.

Most of all, Mearsheimer argues that Ukraine should have kept its nuclear deterrent.  Here is my previous post on that topic.

For the pointer I thank Shivaji Sondhi.

The expected rate of return from denuclearization has fallen

by  Tyler Cowen in

Right?  That is just one piece of fallout from the current crisis.  As an American, with little at stake in Ukraine per se, I am glad the country gave up its nuclear weapons, so as to limit the risk of broader conflict.  But if I were a Ukrainian citizen, my view would be somewhat different.

Here is an interesting study by Robert Stephen Mathers (pdf) on the denuclearization of Ukraine.  It appears to have been written as a term paper for Martin Felstein in 2003.  Excerpt:

The back and forth negotiations about Ukraine’s nuclear status would finally end in Moscow in January 1994 with the signing of the Trilateral Statement by Presidents Clinton, Yeltsin and Kravchuk.  The agreement held Ukraine to the promise of “the elimination of all nuclear weapons, including strategic offensive arms, located in its territory.”  In exchange for these concessions, the U.S. and Russia agreed to preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity (a primary concern for Ukraine) and ensured that no state would use or threaten to use military force or coercion against it…Ukraine’s main concerns were finally met.

It seems the value of a formal NATO guarantee is falling as well.  Rapidly.  Various Eastern European countries are asking for stronger or clarified U.S. guarantees.  What are they thinking in Latvia?  Taiwan?  Japan?  How about the Israelis negotiating with John Kerry?

For the pointer I thank Bill Badrick.

What I worry about

by  Tyler Cowen in

For Russia, matters in Ukraine are close to an existential crisis, as Ukraine is intimately tied up with Russia’s sense of itself as presiding over a mini-empire of sorts.  Nor could an autocratic Russia tolerate a free and prosperous Ukraine, developing along the lines of Poland.  America cares about Ukraine less, and cares more about Syria and Iran, or at least cares about saving face in those latter venues.  Therefore there is a Coasean deal to be had between America and Russia, where Russia gets to partition part of Ukraine, create a buffer against Europeanization and democratization, keep the larger Ukraine unit weak, and also keep its Black Sea fleet.  In turn Russia would do something less than totally sabotage all American plans for Syria and Iran.  (Of course that is Coasean for the leaders, and not necessarily for the citizenries.)

The thing is…China.  What kind of signal would such a Coasean deal of partition send to China?

That is what I worry about.

Bringing extinct species back to life

by  Tyler Cowen in

It will happen, in fact it has already happened and more than ten years ago:

Novak is tall, solemn, polite and stiff in conversation, until the conversation turns to passenger pigeons, which it always does. One of the few times I saw him laugh was when I asked whether de-extinction might turn out to be impossible. He reminded me that it has already happened. More than 10 years ago, a team that included Alberto Fernández-Arias (now a Revive & Restore adviser) resurrected a bucardo, a subspecies of mountain goat also known as the Pyrenean ibex, that went extinct in 2000. The last surviving bucardo was a 13-year-old female named Celia. Before she died — her skull was crushed by a falling tree — Fernández-Arias extracted skin scrapings from one of her ears and froze them in liquid nitrogen. Using the same cloning technology that created Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, the team used Celia’s DNA to create embryos that were implanted in the wombs of 57 goats. One of the does successfully brought her egg to term on July 30, 2003. “To our knowledge,” wrote the scientists, “this is the first animal born from an extinct subspecies.” But it didn’t live long. After struggling to breathe for several minutes, the kid choked to death.

There is more here, interesting throughout.  One risk is that these newly recreated animals may turn out to be efficient carriers of modern diseases.  And the economic benefits of recreating extinct species are…? And here is a legal perspective:

In “How to Permit Your Mammoth,” published in The Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Norman F. Carlin asks whether revived species should be protected by the Endangered Species Act or regulated as a genetically modified organism. He concludes that revived species, “as products of human ingenuity,” should be eligible for patenting.

And are they really the same animals after all, given the imperfections in the process of cloning and recreation?  The philosopher might say this:

“I would like to have an elephant that likes the cold weather,” he told me. “Whether you call it a ‘mammoth’ or not, I don’t care.”

I say we would be wise to exercise option value on this one, but of course the incentives of scientists are to do something first.

Catholics were much less likely to vote for the Nazis

by  Tyler Cowen in

A new paper was presented at the AEA meetings this January, “Religion, Economics, and the Rise of the Nazis,” by Philipp Tillman and Jörg Spenkuch, and the abstract for one version of the paper is this:

We investigate the role of religion in the electoral success of the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany. Among historians, it is a well known fact that Protestants were much more likely than Catholics to vote for Adolf Hitler. However, in spite of the historical importance of the Nazis’ rise to power, the question of whether this correlation reflects a causal effect of religion has so far remained unanswered. We use an instrumental variable approach by relying on geographic variation in religious beliefs dating back to a peace treaty in the sixteenth century. According to the principle “cuius regio, eius religio.” the Peace of Augsburg granted local rulers the right to determine the religion of their serfs. Using rulers’ choices in the aftermath of the peace as an instrumental variable for the religion of Germans living in the respective areas more than three hundred years later, we are able to document an economically large effect of Protestantism on Nazi vote shares— even after controlling for a wide range of region fixed effects and socioeconomic characteristics. Taken at face value, our estimates suggest that Catholics were about 50% less likely to vote for the Nazi Party than their Protestant counterparts. We are currently testing multiple hypotheses to explain this effect and are in the process of collecting additional data.

That is not a new claim but it is new to have serious econometrics to back it up and show the vote tallies were not caused by associated demographic factors.  You will find a related copy of the paper at the first link here.  Tillman’s home page is here.  Spenkuch is here.  Here is Spenkuch’s paper on immigration and crime.  Immigration is connected to higher rates of theft crime, although by small amounts, and not positively related to violent crime.

Addendum: Here is the most current version of the paper (pdf), with notable additions.

When was money less important than we thought?

by  Tyler Cowen in

ModeledBehavior tweeted:

Name the period or event in economic history where we looked backed and said “hmm, money was less important than we thought at the time

I would nominate much of the 19th century.  To be sure, distribution in those times really did matter, more so than today because overall levels of income and wealth were much lower.  And monetary policy redistributes wealth.  But the overall story of the century is one of European peace (mostly but not entirely), economic growth, and the unfolding of various industrial revolutions.  Yet monetary policy was very much in the public eye, including in the United States.  Monetary economics develops much more rapidly than does, say, law and economics or the economics of how to boost innovation.  By the time you reach 1820, monetary economics in Great Britain is quite sophisticated, even though they lacked good data.

In the 1920s and 30s, monetary economics mattered an enormous amount — a world changing, World War-creating amount, I would say.  That alone makes it worthy of very very serious study.  But most important economic stories are about the long run, and if anything the human tendency is to fixate on the short run too much.

Monetary policy also did not matter so much for the East Asian economic revolutions of the postwar era.  No one looks back and worries how often South Korea had double digit inflation, sometimes over twenty percent.  And here is a recent inflation index for some emerging economies.