Category: History

The more I read about the guy, the more I dislike him. He was without doubt a man of incandescent brilliance. But he also seems to have been sly, creepy, and an insufferable snob, in addition to having been a racist, slaveholding, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-commercial, Jacobin utopian. When his visage appears on Cato promotional material, as it so often does, I try to stay positive.

I like that Jefferson cared so much about food, but I’ve never found his political writings very illuminating.  Read the whole post, Will serves up some other controversial opinions.

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal
measure – a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the
map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the
holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to
open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect
that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be
revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a
series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides,
Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They
even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of
which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New
Testament.

More here.  Hat tip to The Light of Reason.

I’m reading Adam Hochschild’s excellent history of the abolition movement, Bury the Chains.  I’ll post more in the future but there are lots of interesting tidbits on people, institutions and economic history.  Debates about who should pay for incoming cell phone calls, for example, are nothing new. 

Reverend James Ramsay was an outspoken critic of the slave system and was attacked in a variety of ways by the sugar plantation owners, including this:

His enemies sent him packages of stones from the West Indies, because under the prevailing postal system, charges were paid by the recipient.

When it comes to Uncle Sam doling out disaster
relief dollars to foreign countries, it apparently helps to be a friend
of the United States and to catch the eye of the New York Times.  That’s because each news story in the Times about a
natural disaster abroad produces more than a half-million dollars more
in U.S. disaster relief than what the stricken country otherwise would
have received, based on the magnitude of the calamity and other
factors, claim three political scientists who have studied the politics
of disaster relief.

A. Cooper Drury of the University of Missouri, Richard Stuart Olson of
Florida International University and Douglas A. Van Belle of New
Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington compiled data on 2,337
natural catastrophes occurring between 1964 and the end of 1995,
including how often stories about a disaster appeared in the Times.

The Times, in this context, serves as a proxy for general media attention.  Furthermore:

…disaster assistance is awash in politics at every step of the process.
For example, basic foreign policy concerns have a huge impact on the
initial decision of whether to give aid. Allies of the United States
are about seven times more likely than non-allies or neutral countries
to win OFDA approval. And while the Cold War may have brought the world
to the brink of nuclear extinction, those were the salad days of
disaster relief: Awards were significantly larger during the Cold War
years than they are now…

Here is the story; scroll down further for an interesting but flawed discussion of social security and demography (what about birth control pills?).  So far I cannot find the paper itself on line.

After Shakespeare, playwright Thomas Nashe (who?) contributed more words (nearly 800) to the English language than any other writer.  His successes include: conundrum, grandiloquent, harlequin, impecunious, Latinize, Mediterranean, memorize, multifarious, plausibility, seminary, silver-tongued, terminate and transitoriness.  Balderdash and helter-skelter have been attributed to him as well.

And his failures?

Adequation, apophthegmatical (my personal favorite, it means "pertaining to an apophthegm," what else?), baggagery, clientry, confectionate, intermedium, oblivionize (excellent, no?), bodgery ("botched work"), and collachrymate ("accompany with weeping").  "Chatmate" sounds like a word, and perhaps it will yet receive its due.

"Sparrow-blasting" was intended to mean "being blighted with a mysterious power of whose existence one is skeptical," this could someday come in handy.  By the way, here are some works by Nashe, I am told they include some soft porn.  Here are some amusing quotes from Nashe, including a summary of different ways to be drunk.

The above discussion of words is from David Crystal’s The Stories of English, highly recommended, here is one good review.  The book has more detail than the usual popular treatments of linguistic evolution, yet it remains readable to the educated layman.  Crystal also rebuts the common myth that television is producing a uniform dialect, either in the U.S. or around the world.

Brad DeLong has an arresting post on the costs of the civil war.

• Cost of Civil War to North: $140 per capita (including only economic damages for dead and wounded)
• Cost of Civil War to South: $340 per capita (including only economic damages for dead and wounded)
• "Indirect" additional cost of Civil War to South: $450 per capita.

Cost to buy and free all the slaves?  $90 per capita.

No, I don’t mean historically, but rather as a thinker to read today.  Bryan Caplan tells me this is the one hundredth anniversary of her birthday, so here are my bottom lines:

1. Her greatest strength: Her analysis of the mentality of resentment.  She is, oddly, best as a sociologist, albeit in fictional settings.  Wesley Mouch is a brilliant character in his loathesomeness.  Her treatment of cocktail party conversations, while unintentional ridiculous parodies, also point to sad truths.

2. Her worst intellectual tendencies: The competition here is strong.  One could list sheer dogmatism, a necessity to make everything black or white, or an unwillingness to read others carefully or charitably.  More specifically, I will cite her tendency to redefine any favorable aspect of altruism as something other than altruism.

3. What do you really learn from her?  Most of her formal philosophy is wrong or at the very least underargued.  The true take-away message is a reaffirmation of how the enormous productive powers of capitalism — the greatest force for human good ever achieved — rely on the driving human desire to be excellent.  I don’t know of any better celebration of that combination of forces.

4. Her quirkiest yet correct view: That landing on the moon was an intrinsically wonderful thing to do, and libertarian objections be damned.

5. Her quirkiest yet incorrect view: That Mickey Spillane was a titan of American literature.

Addendum: Here are Bryan’s bottom lines, which with I cannot agree.  Try Alex also, directly above.  Here is Steve Chapman on whether Rand has gone mainstream.  Reason magazine weighs in too.  And here isa humorous treatment of Rand on food.

"What Bill Buckley once called the "hysteresis effect". When he was traveling around the world on the Concorde, some years back, he observed that–although long-haul transportation as such had gotten much faster in his lifetime–the total amount of time actually needed to get from point A to point B had not diminished proportionately, because of the increasing amount of distance (and therefore time) between the point of departure and the point of embarcation: that whereas when trains were the done thing, it took maybe 10-20 minutes to get from your front door to the station; with prop aircraft and downtown airports, maybe 30-40 minutes; with jet aircraft and "modern" air terminals, an hour or two; and that–speculatively–if there were ever hypersonic transports capable of going from Los Angeles to Tokyo in 45 minutes, it would take three to four hours at each end to travel to and from the spaceport…"

Gladiators’ combat had become a martial art by the beginning of the first millennium, according to a controversial theory based on reconstructing the fighters’ tactics from Roman artefacts and medieval fight books.

To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad fighting skills rather than fight for their lives, argues archaeologist Steve Tuck of the University of Miami. "Gladiatorial combat is seen as being related to killing and shedding blood," he says. "But I think that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial art that was spectator-oriented."

Here is the full story.  Here is the home page of the researcher, Steve Tuck.  Here is a page on Bruno Sammartino.

Nicholas Kristof updates his story on the sex slaves that he bought (and freed) in Cambodia.  For the main story read the whole thing but the following anecdote caught my eye as saying a lot about problems of development that are not much discussed in the literature: short-time horizons, envy, the dragging down of the ambitious and the almost inherent lack of property rights in small communities.

At first, it turns out, everything went well for Srey Neth. Our plan was for
her to start a shop in her village, near Battambang. She invested $100 I had
given her to build a shack and stock it with food and clothing. For a few
months, business boomed.

The problem was her family. Srey Neth’s parents and older brothers and
sisters had a hard time understanding why they should go hungry when their
sister had a store full of food. And her little nephews and nieces, running
around the yard, helped themselves when she wasn’t looking.

"Srey Neth got mad," her mother recalled. "She said we had to stay away, or
everything would be gone. She said she had to have money to buy new things."

But in a Cambodian village, nobody listens to an uneducated teenage girl.
Indeed, the low status of girls is the underlying reason why so many daughters
are sold to the brothels. So by May, Srey Neth’s shop was empty, and she had no
money to restock it.

Eventually, and with help, Srey Neth moves to the city, in the process recapitulating an important aspect of Western economic development best encapsulated by the German phrase Stadtluft macht frei, city air makes one free (PDF).