Category: History
Unpopular thoughts about obstructionist Republicans
It now seems quite possible that the Syria resolution fails in the House of Representatives. If so, that would be the fault of unreasonable, obstructionist Republicans. (When was the last time a Presidential request to use force was denied by Congress?)
Now, I do understand that this would not be the best path to “not attacking Syria.” (If you doubt that, imagine how such a vote would change Israeli incentives and policy toward Iran.) Still, I can quite readily imagine that a “no” vote on the Syria resolution would be for the better, all things considered. Much could go wrong from an attack, nor would the Congressional vote, the way the process has been conducted, represent much of a victory for constitutionalism.
In any case the net effect of having unreasonable, obstructionist Republicans could well be welfare-improving on a massive global scale, all things considered.
You might prefer to “have your cake and eat it too,” namely by having “reasonable but wise on Syria” Republicans, but that was never on the menu. And you won’t find it among the Democrats, so you do seem to need the unreasonably obstructionist tendencies to get to…actual obstruction.
I still can imagine that the resolution will pass, in which case we could criticize Republicans for not being unreasonable and obstructionist enough.
The whole point of checks and balances is that sometimes the tendency to be unreasonable and obstructionist pays off big time. It’s worth a lot of gridlock to get those gains.
*The Bet*
The author is Paul Sabin and the subtitle is Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future. I found this book informative, charming, and highly readable. Here are a few excerpts:
Ehrlich later described his political development as a “natural progression.” “I didn’t stand up one day and say ‘My God, I’m going to get everybody to stop [fuck]ing.’ It’s sort of one thing led to another.”
But Julian had a very different temperament:
…Simon also helped support himself in college with the winnings he took away from a regular poker game, often staying up until dawn during his senior year. He did not suffer fools lightly, but his close college friends thought him a terrific companion. Simon was curious and funny. He was interested in a broad range of people…
And my favorite part is this (with apologies to Bryan Caplan):
“You can’t choose your relatives,” Simon later wrote. “But one can imagine.” His dream family consisted of a roster of famous theorists, some of them notable conservatives: “William James as my father, Hayek as my uncle, Milton Friedman as my older brother, Theodore Schultz as my thesis adviser, and David Hume as my idol.”
Recommended (who was the dream mother?). There is a good WSJ review of the book here.
Addendum: Here is a new research paper on testing the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis about resource prices over time.
Herbert Simon on stagnation and automation
In his review of a prescient work called The Shape of Automation (1966), by Herbert Simon, a manifold genius who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, Heilbroner scoffed at Simon’s notion that the average family income would reach $28,000 (in 1966 dollars) after the turn of the century: “He has no doubt that these families will have plenty of use for their entire income. . . . But why stop there? On his assumptions of a three percent annual growth rate, average family incomes will be $56,000 by the year 2025; $112,000 by 2045; and $224,000 a century from today. Is it beyond human nature to think that at this point (or a great deal sooner), a ceiling will have been imposed on demand—if not by edict, then tacitly? To my mind, it is hard not to picture such a ceiling unless the economy is to become a collective vomitorium.”
Simon responded drily that he had “great respect for the ability of human beings—given a little advance warning—to think up reasonable ways” of spending that kind of money, and to do so “without vomiting.” He was right about that, of course, even though he was wrong about the particular numbers. Nobody at the time foresaw the coming stagnation of middle-class incomes. His estimate of the average family income in 2006 translates into more than $200,000 in current dollars.
That is from an excellent piece by Daniel Akst on what we can learn from the automation crises of the 1960s.
Ronald Coase has passed away
Very sad news, he was one of the true greats, notice is here. Here is one good appreciation.
The etymology of “serendipity”
The first noted use of “serendipity” in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1797). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic Sarandib. Parts of Sri Lanka were under the rule of South Indian kings for extended periods of time in history. Kings of Kerala, India (Cheranadu)were called Chera Kings and dheep means island, the island belonging to Chera King was called Cherandeep, hence called Sarandib by Arab traders.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Vivian.
*Concise History of the Arabs*
That is the new and excellent book by John McHugo, and it is perhaps the best short one-volume introduction to its topic (with Hourani being the best single longer book). Here is one short bit, concerning 1925 in Syria:
Some local Muslim and Christian villages joined the Druze, and nationalists stirred up activity elsewhere. The conservative Sunni city of Hama exploded into sudden revolt, and had to be crushed by punitive bombing by the French air force, but the insurgents only fled to the countryside and continued fighting. The revolt also gripped the Ghutah, the cultivated area around Damascus. The city itself rose. Realising that the capital had come under effective rebel control, the French army responded in the same way as in Hama and bombarded it indiscriminately, killing 1,500 people and causing an international outcry. Once again, this forced the rebels out into the countryside where they disrupted supply routes.
Most of the book is actually more conceptual and more “macro” than that passage.
From the comments
This is from Ted Craig:
Another way to look at the effect of mechanization is to look at how it affected the other living employees of farmers. The U.S. horse population peaked at 26.5 million in 1915. It declined rapidly after that, hitting a low of just over 3 million in 1960. While it is about 9 million now, that’s because of increased ownership as pets.
I’m not saying humans will be destroyed like horses, but it raises some questions about the ease of transition.
Strategies for wealth preservation
The Fuggerei is the world’s oldest social housing complex still in use. It is a walled enclave within the city of Augsburg, Bavaria. It takes it name from the Fugger family and was founded in 1516 by Jakob Fugger the Younger (known as “Jakob Fugger the Rich”) as a place where the needy citizens of Augsburg could be housed. By 1523, 52 houses had been built, and in the coming years the area expanded with various streets, small squares and a church. The gates were locked at night, so the Fuggerei was, in its own right, very similar to a small independent medieval town. It is still inhabited today, affording it the status of being the oldest social housing project in the world.
…The Fuggerei is supported by a charitable trust established in 1520 which Jakob Fugger funded with an initial deposit of 10,000 guilders. According to the Wall Street Journal the trust has been carefully managed with most of its income coming from forestry holdings, which the Fugger family favored since the 17th century after losing money on higher yielding investments. The annual return on the trust has ranged from an after inflation rate of 0.5% to 2%. Currently the trust is administered by Wolf-Dietrich Graf von Hundt.
Someone (not me) could write a very good popular economic history book on how they managed this success.
For the pointer I thank Patrick of Singapore.
Eliezer Yudkowsky asks about automation
From the MR comments:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/
(Tyler, have you read that?)
I don’t actually get Brynjolfsson and McAfee. I read the original book and it seemed very unoriginal and not to address at all the basic question of “Why did Ricardian reemployment work fine when agricultural jobs went from 95% to 3%, work fine when automobiles put the whole horse-and-buggy industry out of existence, work fine when women entered the workforce during WWII, and then suddenly stop working?”
The Ricardian comparison is the technology-relevant one here, and I would challenge the notion that it went fine. Think of the machines of the industrial revolution as getting underway sometime in the 1770s or 1780s. The big wage gains for British workers don’t really come until the 1840s. Depending on your exact starting point, that is over fifty years of labor market problems from automation, and yes it is correct to also blame various bad laws, mobility restrictions, wars and taxes, and the like. Even Ricardo, very much a free market economist, worried about the machinery question in his day and rightly so. The industrial revolution was a wonderful development with huge ongoing gains, but still it did bring some very real adjustment issues.
A second point is that now we have a much more extensive network of government benefits and also regulations which increase the fixed cost of hiring labor. Insofar as automation creates short-run adjustment problems, those problems are more likely to show up in the form of decreased labor force participation than they did in previous eras. We are living in a time where the long-run trend is for labor force participation to fall in any case, and that was not in general the case during those earlier episodes.
You also might try to run with a “back then machines substituted for brawn, now they are substituting for brains” argument. Maybe so, but you don’t even need to make that work to have a substantial (non-Luddite) worry.
Marketing the asylum
Gentrification and rising real estate prices will lead to many kinds of capital conversion. Here is Mind Hacks:
Regular readers will know of my ongoing fascination with the fate of the old psychiatric asylums and how they’re often turned into luxury apartments with not a whisper of their previous life.
It turns out, a 2003 article in The Psychiatrist looked at exactly this in 71 former asylum care hospitals.
It’s cheekily called ‘The Executives Have Taken Over the Asylum’ and notes how almost all have been turned into luxury developments. Have a look at Table 1 for a summary.
The authors also had a look at the marketing material for these new developments and wrote a cutting commentary on how the glossy brochures deal with the institutions mixed legacies.
The estate agents want to play on the often genuinely beautiful architecture and, more oddly, the security of the sites, while papering over the fact the buildings had anything to do with mental illness.
Here is the article, here is the original 2003 piece (pdf). Here is one summary from Chaplin and Peters:
The only reminders of the former inhabitants found by the authors at any of the 32 redeveloped sites were a memorial garden dedicated to the patients of Cell Barnes and Hill End Hospitals, St Albans, a plaque at Littlemore Hospital, Oxford, and photographs of the former Bethlem Hospital at the Imperial War Museum.
Former mental hospital buildings appear to be undergoing a metamorphosis from containing the most disadvantaged and least-valued members of society to providing homes with character at a high market price. Paradoxically, asylum can now be bought in an ideal self-contained community, with security to keep society out.
Do Not Mock the Freshmen
Here from a 1495 Leipzig University Statute is some good advice for the first day of classes:
Statute Forbidding Any One to Annoy or Unduly Injure the Freshmen.
Each and every one attached to this university is forbidden to offend with insult, torment, harass, drench with water or urine, throw on or defile with dust or any filth, mock by whistling, cry at them with a terrifying voice, or dare to molest in any way whatsoever physically or severely, any, who are called freshmen, in the market, streets, courts, colleges and living houses, or any place whatsoever, and particularly in the present college, when they have entered in order to matriculate or are leaving after matriculation.
Hat tip: Jason Kuznicki.
Child labor during World War II
Many states had induced this crisis by suspending or relaxing their child labor laws, but even those still operative proved ineffective. By one estimate 900,000 children between twelve and eighteen were working in defiance of the law in their state. Philadelphia saw a decline of 13 percent in high school attendance,while in Oakland 15 percent of the children under sixteen had gone to work. Nothing demonstrated the failings of the educational system more than the irony that many of these kids earned more than their teachers did.
That is from the new Maury Klein book A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II.
The Vietnam War was worse than most people think
That is the central message of the new and excellent Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse.
For the entire course of the war, Turse considers an estimate of 2 million civilian Vietnamese dead and 5.3 million civilian wounded. Of course by no means were all of those the result of U.S. military action but many were. Here is a staggering estimate:
…between 1965 and 1968, thirty-two tons of bombs per hour were dropped on the North.
And yet, in fact, even more tonnage was dropped on the South, the ostensible ally! The total quantity of explosives dropped is estimated to have been equal to 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.
There is a very good review of this book here.
*Ninety Percent of Everything*
The author is Rose George and the subtitle is Inside Shipping, The Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate. Here is one excerpt:
The biggest container ship can carry fifteen thousand boxes. It can hold 746 million bananas, one for every European..
And here is one other part:
EU-NAVFOR releases 80 percent of detained pirates because it can’t find willing courts.
Here is the book’s home page.
Great Economists class
We now have up all the videos and also the final exam for our class on The Great Economists. The class includes coverage of the entire Wealth of Nations, as well as a section on economic history, which covers the Bullionist debates, the Irish famine, the debt and sinking fund controversies, living standards in the Industrial Revolution, and other topics from economic history which influenced the classical economists.
You can find the iTunes downloads here.
Our next class will be International Trade and it will be available late August/very early September.