Category: History
A change in culture or a failure of memory and a glorification of the past?
From Great Britain:
A bedtime story used to be a way for children and parents to bond at the end of the day, but the tradition has undergone a dramatic decline in a single generation.
A poll of 2,000 mothers with children aged 0-7 years, carried out by the clothing and homeware retailer Littlewoods, highlighted the extent of the change. Only 64% of respondents said they read their children bedtime stories, even though 91% were themselves read bedtime stories when young.
The survey also found that in previous generations, parents who read bedtime stories did so more regularly than their modern counterparts. Only 13% of respondents read a story to their children every night, but 75% recall being read to every night when they were kids. On average, today’s parents read bedtime stories to their children three times a week.
The findings are all the more surprising since 87% of those polled believe that bedtime reading is vital to children’s education and development.
The poll discovered that 9% feel “too stressed” to read bedtime stories; 13% admit that they haven’t enough time.
There is more here.
Wilson.cat and the movement for independence for Catalonia
The Catalonian “human chain” was yesterday, and it drew hundreds of thousands of people, a large number for a single region. According to the Washington Post, it was more than one million people.
If you would like to read more on this — by economists and other social scientists — Wilson.cat is one intellectual resource for independence. The site represents writings of prominent scholars favoring independence — or at least an informed referendum — for Catalonia.
I am surprised this initiative is not receiving more attention. If you were to ask in which ways economists today are having the most influence on the world, this movement would be close to the top of the list. Among the economists involved are Andreu Mas-Colell, Pol Antràs, Jordi Galí, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, all of whom are extremely well known in the profession.
Personally, I am still waiting to hear why Catalonian independence would not bring the fiscal death knell of current Spain, and thus also the collapse of current eurozone arrangements and perhaps also a eurozone-wide depression. Otherwise I would gladly entertain Catalonia as an independent nation, or perhaps after the crisis has passed a referendum can be held. When referenda are held during tough times, it is often too easy to get a “no” vote against anything connected with the status quo.
Is the view simply that “now is the time to strike” and “it is worth it”? Obviously, an independence movement will not wish to speak too loudly about transition costs, but I would wish for more transparency. Or is the view that Spain could fiscally survive the shock of losing about twenty percent of its economy, with all the uncertainties and transition costs along the way? That could be argued, but frankly I doubt it, OMT or not, furthermore other regions would claim more autonomy too. An alternative, more moralizing view is that the fiscal problems are “Spain’s fault in the first place” and need not be discussed too much by the pro-independence side, but I am more consequentialist and marginal product-oriented than that.
This piece, in Catalan, does cover the fiscal implications of debt assumption for an independent Catalonia. The site also links to this somewhat spare piece by Gary Becker, but I still want more of a discussion of the issues raised above.
Keep in mind that two clocks are ticking. The first is that education in Catalonia is becoming increasingly “hispanicized,” the second is that as economic conditions in Spain improve, or maybe just become seen as a new normal, getting a pro-secession vote in a referendum may become harder. It doesn’t quite seem like “do or die” right now, but overall time probably is not on the side of Catalonian independence.
If anyone connected with the independence movement could point me to source materials addressing my questions, I would gladly cover it more on MR.
Here is Edward Hugh on the Catalan Way explained. And here is more from Hugh.
*The Empire Trap*
That is the new book by Noel Maurer and the subtitle is The Rise and Fall of U.S. Intervention to Protect American Property Overseas, 1893-2013. This is an excellent book and somehow the title, while descriptively accurate, does not do justice to its interest and contents.
My favorite part of the book is about the fiscal receiverships applied to various Latin American countries in the early twentieth century. They were much more extensive than I had realized, and virtually all of them failed.
Here is an interesting sentence in a slightly different direction:
At the turn of the twentieth century, the leaders of American foreign policy believed they had identified poor fiscal conditions as the key factor destabilizing the nations of Latin America.
Do you want your Scott Sumner fact of the day? In 1931, nominal gdp in El Salvador fell by 37%.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in Latin America, 20th century American foreign policy, extra-territorial relationships, or the history of public finance.
My favorite things Minnesota
I am here for but a short time, speaking at the university, but here is what comes to mind:
1. Folk singer: Is that what he is? Bringing it All Back Home remains my favorite Dylan album, of many candidates.
2. Rock music: The Replacements were pretty awesome for a short while. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince has an impressive body of work, with Sign of the Times as my favorite or maybe Dirty Mind, though when viewed as a whole I find the corpus of work rather numbing and even somewhat off-putting. Bob Mould I like but do not love, the peaks are too low.
3. Jazz: The Bad Plus come to mind.
4. Writer: Must I go with F. Scott Fitzgerald? I don’t like his work very much, so Ole Rolvaag is my choice.
5. Coen Brothers movie: Raising Arizona or Fargo. The more serious ones strike me as too grim.
6. Director: George Roy Hill, how about A Little Romance?
7. Columnist: The underrated Thomas Friedman, who ought to be considered one of the world’s leading conservative columnists but is not.
8. Scientist: Norman Borlaug. I hope you all know who he is by now.
9. Advice columnist: Ann Landers, most of the time she was right, much better and sharper than her sister Dear Abby, plus she coined better phrases.
What else? Garrison Keillor belongs somewhere, even though he isn’t funny. Thorstein Veblen is often unreadable but on status competition, and its Darwinian roots, he was way ahead of his time.
Overall this is a very strong state, and on top of that I feel I am missing some significant contributors with this list. Are there painters or sculptors of note from Minnesota? I can’t think of any.
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.