Category: History
Edward Moore asks
From a reader email:
This hypothetical question just popped into my head and after mulling it over for a while it occurred to me that it’s really a great stagnation question.
“Would you trade your last five years of life to always have the best personal technology provided to you (iPhones, iPads, google glass, whatever implantable, wearable things are coming) if the consequence of not making the trade was that you were limited to basic desktop technology for the rest of your life?” The decision must be made now and is binding. Right now I think I would make the trade because I would hate to miss out on all the things that are coming. I think I would have said no in 1995. Does that make me a great stagnation skeptic?
I love your blog.
Go for the years, I say. But at “six months” it is a tougher call…and perhaps Ed is a younger man than I am. I certainly would advise an eighty-year-old to take the years, or for that matter the six months.
Arrived in my pile
Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. Here is a short related piece by the author.
The credibility of the gold standard
There is a new published paper from Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick:
Abstract:
We ask whether developing countries reap credibility gains from submitting policy to a strict monetary rule. We look at the gold standard era, 1880-1914, to test whether adoption of a rule-based monetary framework such as the gold standard increased policy credibility, focusing on sixty independent and colonial borrowers in the London market. We challenge the traditional view that gold standard adherence was a credible commitment mechanism rewarded by financial markets with lower borrowing costs. We demonstrate that for the poor periphery – where policy credibility is a particularly acute problem – the market looked behind “the thin film of gold”.
Here is the published version, and here, here is an earlier version, all with varying degrees of gatedness.
For the pointer I thank Rob Raffety.
The culture that was Russian math departments, part II
There is a newly published paper by George Borjas and Kirk Doran, entitled “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians”, here is the abstract:
It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a large, post-1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their U.S. counterparts. We find a negative productivity effect on those mathematicians whose research overlapped with that of the Soviets. We also document an increased mobility rate (to lower quality institutions and out of active publishing) and a reduced likelihood of producing “home run” papers. Although the total product of the preexisting American mathematicians shrank, the Soviet contribution to American mathematics filled in the gap. However, there is no evidence that the Soviets greatly increased the size of the “mathematics pie.” Finally, we find that there are significant international differences in the productivity effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and these international differences can be explained by both differences in the size of the émigré flow into the various countries and in how connected each country is to the global market for mathematical publications.
The link is here, possibly gated, there are earlier and ungated versions here.
For the pointer I thank Stuart Harty.
The culture that was Russian math departments
Here is a new paper (pdf) by Tanya Khonanova and Alexey Radul, entitled “Jewish Problems”:
This is a special collection of problems that were given to select applicants during oral entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. These problems were designed to prevent Jewish people and other undesirables from getting a passing grade. Among problems that were used by the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find. Using problems with a simple solution protected the administration from extra complaints and appeals. This collection therefore has mathematical as well as historical value.
For the pointer I thank Rahul R, a loyal MR reader.
In case you hadn’t noticed
A slim majority of Puerto Ricans sought to change their ties with the United States and become the 51st U.S. state in a non-binding referendum that would require final approval from Congress.
Here is more.
Very good sentences
Call this hyperscience, a claim to scientific status that conflates the PR of science with its rather more messy, complicated and less than ideal everyday realities and that takes the PR far more seriously than do its stuck-in-the-mud orthodox opponents. Beware of hyperscience. It can be a sign that something isn’t kosher. A rule of thumb for sound inference has always been that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But there’s a corollary: if it struts around the barnyard loudly protesting that it’s a duck, that it possesses the very essence of duckness, that it’s more authentically a duck than all those other orange-billed, web-footed, swimming fowl, then you’ve got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a quack.
That is from Shapin on Velikovsky, with the link from The Browser.
Andreu Mas-Collel calls for Catalonian secession
The article, in Spanish, is here. He refers to staying in Spain as “el camino de la decadencia.” By the way, he is now the finance minister of Catalonia.
He taught me Ph.d Micro I at Harvard, so it’s too bad he wants to wreck both Spain and Europe, and for so little in return. Didn’t one of his theorems suggest this was a bad idea? It’s not as if Catalonia is treated like Tibet. (Haven’t I spent a few nice days walking around Barcelona in my time? Didn’t Air Genius Gary Leff get a decent meal at El Bulli? Didn’t they once make a young people’s movie about the place in which no one has to do any work?) Don’t we have bigger problems to worry about? How easily does he think negotiations for separation can go, especially with entire eurozone deals at stake and a Spanish history of sending in troops? He mentions that the territory is subjected to «humillación constante» de España. Maybe he’s been misquoted, but from what I see I take this as a paradigm example of how a really smart person can be taken in by rather primitive tribal arguments.
The only way to defend this move is a kind of Leninist “things must get worse before they get better” approach to the eurozone. Even if that is true, this hardly seems like the smoothest way of traversing that path.
For the pointer I thank @AlexFont.
Why Milk?
Throughout evolutionary history, most adult homo sapiens could not drink milk. Even today, most adults cannot drink milk. Adults who cannot drink milk don’t seem to lose very much, particularly as they can still eat yogurt and cheese. And yet the gene that allowed some adults to drink milk spread incredibly rapidly suggesting massive advantages to milk drinkers. Why? No one knows for sure but it seems to coincide with civilization. Slate has more:
[A]round 10,000 B.C….a genetic mutation appeared, somewhere near modern-day Turkey, that jammed the lactase-production gene permanently in the “on” position. The original mutant was probably a male who passed the gene on to his children. People carrying the mutation could drink milk their entire lives. Genomic analyses have shown that within a few thousand years, at a rate that evolutionary biologists had thought impossibly rapid, this mutation spread throughout Eurasia, to Great Britain, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, India and all points in between, stopping only at the Himalayas. Independently, other mutations for lactose tolerance arose in Africa and the Middle East, though not in the Americas, Australia, or the Far East.
In an evolutionary eye-blink, 80 percent of Europeans became milk-drinkers; in some populations, the proportion is close to 100 percent. (Though globally, lactose intolerance is the norm; around two-thirds of humans cannot drink milk in adulthood.) The speed of this transformation is one of the weirder mysteries in the story of human evolution, more so because it’s not clear why anybody needed the mutation to begin with.
…A “high selection differential” is something of a Darwinian euphemism. It means that those who couldn’t drink milk were apt to die before they could reproduce. At best they were having fewer, sicklier children. That kind of life-or-death selection differential seems necessary to explain the speed with which the mutation swept across Eurasia and spread even faster in Africa. The unfit must have been taking their lactose-intolerant genomes to the grave.
…The rise of civilization coincided with a strange twist in our evolutionary history. We became, in the coinage of one paleoanthropologist, “mampires” who feed on the fluids of other animals. Western civilization, which is twinned with agriculture, seems to have required milk to begin functioning. No one can say why.
Hat tip: John Chilton.
*Searching for Sugar Man*
There is plenty of social science in this unexpected indie hit, which depicts the musical career of Sixto Rodriguez. Rodriguez had two very good albums in the early 1970s but faded into obscurity after failing to gain commercial traction. Unbeknown to the artist, he had become an enduring national celebrity in South Africa. His fans there had no idea he had been working in Detroit as a construction demolitionist (this is before the modern internet, although eventually the internet helped his daughter discover his fame in South Africa, through a fan’s web site). Here is Cass Sunstein on the movie and its portrayal of social and cultural dynamics.
The music is quite appealing — imagine a mix of Donovan, Motown, and low-tech psychedelia, the latter a’la Love. If you are looking to hear or download one song, I recommend the iconic “I Wonder.”
To my ear it sounds naive but charming, but to the South Africans it was revelatory and cool. Furthermore here was a non-Black coming out of Motown (Mexican ancestry but born in the United States), yet with much of the anti-establishment feel of a black artist of the time. The movie never touches on this racial angle as possibly relevant to his popularity; did the South Africans require a non-black version of a black idol? And what does he now symbolize, given that white rule has ended? When they show Rodriguez’s post-apartheid concerts in South Africa, there is not a black face to be seen, as if he has become a nostalgia act in a slightly unsettling manner with the anti-establishment gloss now drained away.
The full story has not yet been told, not even on the American side. From watching the movie, the viewer receives the feeling that Rodriguez fell into a hole circa 1973. The reality is that he was touring Australia as late as 1981 (more here) and even put out a live album from that country in the same year. Music aficionados will know all about the close cultural connections between Australia and South Africa at that time; did Rodriguez really have no idea of his South African following? And what kind of connections was he keeping with the commercial world of music?
I would gladly read a book about how failing artists string out their careers by playing in niche markets or writing for them. For instance Harry Nilsson released some of his late albums in the UK, Australia, and Japan only. Erwin Nyiregyhzai kept giving periodic piano recitals in Japan, well after his prodigy years were over and he supposedly was “lost” and thus before his “rediscovery.” What is a rediscovery anyway?
Here is Rodriguez’s eBook guide to happiness. For pointers I thank Cass Sunstein and also Angus.
Why are growth declines sharp and sudden?
…these econometric studies imply that the decline in growth rates should be gradual, since convergence to high incomes is gradual. Actual experience, however, rarely displays such a smooth adjustment. More commonly there is a sharp drop to a new, lower growth rate, as noted above. In Japan the drop was probably precipitated by the OPEC oil price increases, given Japan’s heavy dependence on imported energy, and by the concurrent worldwide stagflation, particularly in Japan’s major export markets. In Korea, enormous chaebol-initiated investment projects artificially supported growth for a time but also laid the foundations for the financial crisis that precipitated the sharp decline in growth.
This is one of the most neglected questions in macroeconomics and the theory of economic growth, and these days our understanding of the world, and our fiscal future, may well turn on this matter. We still don’t have a good sense of why growth fall-offs are so sharp and why they seem so hard to reverse.
In any case that excerpt is from Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Khanho Shin, From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy.
More generally, I loved reading this book, perhaps all the more because I had just returned from Korea when it arrived. It is clearly written and full of useful information on virtually every page. In my opinion every economist should study the Korean growth miracle, as a) it is in some ways mankind’s most impressive and least precedent-backed growth miracle, and b) it overturns or at least challenges many preconceptions about economic growth. It is perhaps the case where government policy has been most effective in spurring economic growth. This is now one of the go-to books on that topic.
Words of wisdom
Some people I know will hate it when I say this, but as written by E.J. Dionne, this seems to me true, true, true:
The right wing has lost the election of 2012.
The evidence for this is overwhelming, yet it is the year’s best-kept secret. Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to endorse the full-throated conservatism he embraced to win the Republican nomination.
…The right is going along because its partisans know Romney has no other option. This, too, is an acknowledgment of defeat, a recognition that the grand ideological experiment heralded by the rise of the tea party has gained no traction.
There is more at the link.
There is a great stagnation
Singapore Airlines Ltd. (SIA) will end non-stop services to Newark, the world’s longest commercial flight, next year as it phases out the aging planes used on the route.
The all-business-class flights will end in the fourth- quarter of next year, along with similar services to Los Angeles, the airline said in a statement yesterday, as it announced an order for 25 Airbus SAS aircraft. The Toulouse- based planemaker will acquire the five four-engine A340-500s used on the non-stop routes as part of the deal.
The end of the almost 19-hour service to Newark will lengthen Singapore travelers’ trip by more than three hours as they will have to change planes in London.
Here is more, and note that the new aircraft are designed to serve the budget market in the future.
*The Bretton Woods Transcripts*
That is the new eBook edited by Kurt Schuler and Andrew Rosenberg. I cannot open the file they sent along to me, but Amazon summarizes:
The Bretton Woods Transcripts is the confidential, verbatim record of meetings of the historic conference that established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Bretton Woods conference, named after the New Hampshire town where the conference was held in July 1944, began a new era in international economic cooperation that continues today. Delegates from 44 countries attended the conference. The best known then and now was John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century.
A companion Web site for the book contains extensive background material, including photos of the original transcripts and previously unreleased conference documents: http://www.centerforfinancialstability.org/brettonwoods.php
In case there was any remaining doubt
The Supreme Court of Honduras ruled today that the Honduras legislation establishing charter or model cities was unconstitutional. A ruling two weeks ago from the constitutional branch of the court established by a 4-1 vote that the law was unconstitutional. Because that decision was not unanimous, the entire Supreme Court had to consider and vote on the issue.
The full court voted 13-2 that decreto 283-2010 which reformed two constitutional articles to enable the model cities legislation violated the constitution.
There is a bit more here, including some information on one of the companies involved.