Category: History
Why is there no Milton Friedman today?
You will find this question discussed in a symposium at Econ Journal Watch, co-sponsored by the Mercatus Center. Contributors include Richard Epstein, David R. Henderson, Richard Posner, Daniel Houser, James K. Galbraith, Sam Peltzman, and Robert Solow, among other notables. My own contribution you will find here, I start with these points:
If I approach this question from a more general angle of cultural history, I find the diminution of superstars in particular areas not very surprising. As early as the 18th century, David Hume (1742, 135-137) and other writers in the Scottish tradition suggested that, in a given field, the presence of superstars eventually would diminish (Cowen 1998, 75-76). New creators would do tweaks at the margin, but once the fundamental contributions have been made superstars decline in their relative luster.
In the world of popular music I find that no creators in the last twenty-five years have attained the iconic status of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, or Michael Jackson. At the same time, it is quite plausible to believe there are as many or more good songs on the radio today as back then. American artists seem to have peaked in enduring iconic value with Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, mostly dating from the 1960s. In technical economics, I see a peak with Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow and some of the core developments in game theory. Since then there are fewer iconic figures being generated in this area of research, even though there are plenty of accomplished papers being published.
The claim is not that progress stops, but rather its most visible and most iconic manifestations in particular individuals seem to have peak periods followed by declines in any such manifestation.
David Brooks on the words we use
Daniel Klein of George Mason University has conducted one of the broadest studies with the Google search engine [TC: the paper is here]…On the subject of individualization, he found that the word “preferences” was barely used until about 1930, but usage has surged since. On the general subject of demoralization, he finds a long decline of usage in terms like “faith,” “wisdom,” “ought,” “evil” and “prudence,” and a sharp rise in what you might call social science terms like “subjectivity,” “normative,” “psychology” and “information.”
Klein adds the third element to our story, which he calls “governmentalization.” Words having to do with experts have shown a steady rise. So have phrases like “run the country,” “economic justice,” “nationalism,” “priorities,” “right-wing” and “left-wing.” The implication is that politics and government have become more prevalent.
So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.
This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.
Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.
Here is more, interesting throughout.
The Adam Smith segment of the Great Economists course is underway
You will find it here, at MRUniversity.com. We have recorded videos covering, annotating, and explaining every single chapter of Smith’s masterwork Wealth of Nations, along with some coverage of surrounding historical material. Having to explain a book “along the way” is a very interesting way to read, and I was surprised how much Wealth of Nations rose in my eyes as a result of this project. I would like to do Keynes and Hayek and perhaps Marx in this manner as well.
On the proper interpretation of “The Great Stagnation”
Will Hutton writes:
At least Summers sees some underlying economic dynamism. For techno-pessimists such as economist Professor Tyler Cowen the future is even darker. It is not only that automation and robotisation are coming, but that there are no new worthwhile transformational technologies for them to automate. All the obvious human needs – to move, to have power, to communicate – have been solved through cars, planes, mobile phones and computers. According to Cowen, we have come to the end of the great “general purpose technologies” (technologies that transform an entire economy, such as the steam engine, electricity, the car and so on) that changed the world. There are no new transformative technologies to carry us forward, while the old activities are being robotised and automated. This is the “Great Stagnation”.
Such views make for a convenient target, but that is not close to what I wrote in The Great Stagnation. For instance on p.83 you will find me proclaiming, after several pages of details, “For these reasons, I am optimistic about getting some future low-hanging fruit.” Those are not Straussian passages hidden like the extra Nirvana audio track at the end of Nevermind. The very subtitle of the book announces “How America…(Eventually) Will Feel Better Again.”
I also argue in the book that the internet is the next transformational technology, and that it is already here, though it needs some time to mature and pay off. I devoted an entire separate book to this theme, namely The Age of the Infovore, which suggests that for autistics and other infovores massive progress already has arrived.
It is also odd that Hutton mentions robots and automation. My next book considers those factors in great detail, but you won’t find either term or variants thereof in the index of The Great Stagnation. Nor do I have the dual worry that both everything will be automated and there is nothing left to automate, as stated by Hutton.
The lesson perhaps is that if a book has a pessimistic-sounding title, mentions of optimism will go unheeded, even if they are in the subtitle. Might that be an example of the fallacy of mood affiliation?
*Stories We Tell*
Whose entire body of work is worth reading?
I’d be curious to see Tyler’s “completist” list. In other words, authors whose entire body of work merits reading. If this does get a response, I’m most interested in seeing the list begin with literature.
I’ll repeat my earlier mention of Geza Vermes. And to make the exercise meaningful, let’s rule out people who wrote one or two excellent books and then stopped. Adam Smith is too easy a pick. I won’t start with literature, however, but here are some choices:
1. Fernand Braudel.
2. George Orwell. Plato. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Hume. William James.
3. Franz Kafka, he died young.
4. T.J. Clark, historian of art and European thought.
5. J.C. D. Clark, the British historian.
Let’s stop here and take stock. Many historians will make the list, because if they are good they will find it difficult to produce crap. Without research, they cannot put pen to paper, and with research a careful, thoughtful historian is likely to be interesting. With thought you could come up with a few hundred historians who were consistently interesting and never wrote a bad book. Then you have a few extreme geniuses, and J.S. Mill might make the list if not for System of Logic, which by the way Mill himself thought stood among his best works. Timon of Athens hurts Shakespeare but he also comes very close.
Do any producers of “ideas books” make this list? Other than those listed under #2 of course. And are there truly consistent (and excellent) authors of fiction, other than those with a small number of works? I’m not thinking of many. How about Virginia Woolf or John Milton or Jane Austen?
One also could make an “opposite” of this list, namely important authors whose works are mostly not worth reading, and you could start with Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley. The existence of Kindle makes it easier to discover who these people really are.
Stereotyping in Europe
Each column is interesting, for instance read down for “Most Compassionate.” It’s funny how many individuals do the same for themselves, I might add, in what has to be one of the simplest and most common of all intellectual mistakes.
Those results are from the new Pew report, summarized by David Keohane here. The French are growing increasingly disillusioned with the European project, and on key questions the French see the world as the Italians or Spanish do, not the Germans. And there is this: “The report also takes down a few German stereotypes. Apparently, Germans are among the least likely of those surveyed to see inflation as a very big problem and the most likely among the richer European nations to be willing to provide financial assistance to other European Union countries that have major financial problems.”
Thailand book bleg
From Chris Acree:
I’m planning a trip which will take me through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. I recently began selecting a few books about each country to read to cover the history, culture, or other interesting aspects of the area. In particular, my favorite books in this vein are Country Driving and China Airborne, both about China.
However, in searching, I’ve found Cambodia has plenty of literature (Cambodia’s Curse by Pulitzer winner Joel Brinkley seems a good starting point), and Vietnam has at least a couple good books (I picked up Vietnam: Rising Dragon at your recommendation), whereas Thailand seems bereft of strong English-language histories or non-guide travel books. Amazon searches return almost exclusively books targeted towards sex tourists, and the Economist article here http://www.economist.com/node/16155881 is mostly over 10 years old. Kindle availability is also unavailable for most of their selections, which, while not a necessity for me, hints at books that aren’t aging well or being actively updated.
Has no reputable author written a great Thai travel book in the last 10 years? If not, why not? What books would you recommend on Thailand?
How about this biography of Bhumibol Adulyadej? Falcon of Siam is historical fiction of note. Thailand — Culture Smart! is good for browsing. You can read a variety of books on Jim Thompson, and speaking of Thompson this cookbook by David Thompson is a must. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is one of the best movies ever made; watch these too, noting that Syndromes and a Century offers insight into the Thai health care system. I am not recommending use of such services, but perhaps the best of the books for sex tourists are interesting too? Siamese Soul is a good retro collection of Thai popular music from the 1960s through 1980s, hard on some ears but I like it.
Here is where Amazon sends you. Here is where Lonely Planet sends you. While you’re at it, why not read about Skyping with elephants in Thailand, in the service of science of course.
People, what else do you recommend?
C.S. Lewis on TV cooking shows
Well, in a time travel sort of way. Lewis once wrote this:
You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act — that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?
That quotation is from the new eBook by Steven Poole, You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture. The book is cranky, often self-contradictory, and also reasonably entertaining.
*A History of England in 100 Places*
This 2011 book by John Julius Norwich is both an excellent travel book and one of the very best ways of learning more about the history of England. It is remarkably wide-ranging and properly treats economic and technological (and artistic) history on a par with political history. Here is one short excerpt:
Of all the villages of Suffolk, Lavenham — pronounced with a short ‘a’ as in have — is the most enchanting. It is a monument to the huge boom in the wool industry that occurred between about 1380 and 1550, and seems to have changed amazingly little since. Here you will find not just individual timber-framed houses but whole streets of them, their overhanging jetties leaning and lurching like drunken platoons. The Guildhall in the Market Place was built in the 1520s by one of the three guilds founded to regulate the wool trade. Another, now known simply as the Wool Hall, dates from 1464; it stands on the corner of Lady Street and now forms part of the Swan Hotel.
…These churches [TC: they are sometimes called “Wool Churches”] demonstrate, better than anything else could, the fabulous wealth of their benefactors, the late medieval wool merchants, some of whom, by the end of the fourteenth century, had become rich enough to replace the Florentine financiers who underwrote the royal debts.
Definitely recommended, you can buy the book here.
Daniel Klein views the rise of government through Ngram
Here is the abstract:
In this very casual paper, I reproduce results from the Google Ngram Viewer. The main thrust is to show that around 1880 governmentalization of society and culture began to set in — a great transformation, as Karl Polanyi called it. But that great transformation came as a reaction to liberalism, the first great transformation. The Ngrams shown include liberty, constitutional liberty, faith, eternity, God, social gospel, college professors, psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, criminology, new liberalism, old liberalism, public school system, Pledge of Allegiance, income tax, government control, run the country, lead the country, lead the nation, national unity, priorities, social justice, equal opportunity, economic inequality, forced to work, living wage, social needs, our society, bundle of rights, property rights, capitalism, right-wing, left-wing, virtue, wisdom, prudence, benevolence, diligence, fortitude, propriety, ought, good conduct, bad conduct, good works, evil, sentiments, impartial, objective, subjective, normative, values, preferences, beliefs, and information.
The paper is here. Here is one example:
A Marxist take on “the great stagnation”
From Will Davies:
Wandering around Stratford Westfield the other day, I had a similar but more pessimistic thought: maybe capitalism is gradually morphing into the ‘actually existing’ state socialism of the old Eastern Bloc. (For international readers, Stratford Westfield is a vast shopping centre that was strategically located between the 2012 Olympic Park and the nearest train station, in the hope of rinsing unfortunate athletics fans for some cashen route to the games.) British capitalism already has many of the hallmarks of Brezhnev-era socialist decline: macroeconomic stagnation, a population as much too bored as scared to protest about very much, a state that performs tongue-in-cheek legitimacy, politicians playing with statistics to try and delay the moment of economic reckoning.
…My feeling is (and I discuss this in a book I’m just finishing) that neoliberalism has entered a post-critical, repetitive phase, in which certain things have to be spoken – delivery, efficiency, security, competitiveness – but in order to hold the edifice together, rather than to reveal anything as objectively ‘delivered’, ‘efficient’, ‘secure’ or ‘competitive. Political systems which do not create space for critique encounter this need for mandatory repetition immediately, as occurred to state socialism.
Eastern bloc socialism had to keep going through the 1970s and 80s, in spite of lagging growth and failed ideological hegemony, because nobody knew what else to do. This is the stage neoliberal policy-making has now reached. The difference is that there is still one area of our economy that is still moving and changing, namely the money economy, with corporate profits high and financial innovation ongoing. What seems to have changed, post-2008, is that the price paid for this monetary dynamism is that the rest of us all have to stand completely still. In order that ‘they’ in the banks can cling on to their modernity of liquidity and ultra-fast turnover, ‘we’ outside have to relinquish our modernity, of a future that is any different from the present. Finance is to our stagnant societies what the space race and the Cold War were to the Eastern Bloc countries of the 1970s and 80s – a huge cost that the state imposes on its public, with the result that cities and economies start to become tedious processions of the same.
The link is here (good photos), and the underlying Potlatch blog is here. The blog has plenty of interest, and this is an amusing post about advertising.
Sodomy and Usury
Aristotle thought that usury and sodomy were related because in both cases there was attempted reproduction in an unnatural way. (Yeah, I don’t get it either. The argument would have been better as an argument against cloning. No matter, the argument was influential).
In a very good piece, Jeet Heer contrasts the ancients with Adam Smith and the liberal, free market tradition:
Aristotle’s linkage of non-procreative sex with usury profoundly influenced Christian thinkers. Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica codified the fusion of Aristotle with Christianity, argued that sodomy and usury were both “sins against nature, in which the very order of nature is violated, an injury done to God himself, who sets nature in order.” Echoing Aquinas, Dante placed sodomites and usurers in the same circle of Hell in the Divine Comedy. In his 1935 tract “Social Credit,” Ezra Pound, whose obsession with crackpot economics took him down many historical byways, argued that “usury and sodomy, the Church condemned as a pair, to one hell, the same for one reason, namely that they are both against natural increase.”
There is a flipside to this tradition of seeing sodomy as the enemy of the natural economy of the household: The counter-tradition of liberal economics founded by Adam Smith challenged the household model by seeing economics as rooted in the free trade of goods between households and nations. Precisely because Smith was more receptive to previously condemned or taboo economic activities like trade and manufacturing, he was also more open to sexual liberalism.
Smith’s friend Alexander Dalrymple is now thought to have written an anonymous tract, Thoughts of an Old Man (1800), recalling that the founder of modern economics believed that “sodomy was a thing in itself indifferent”—a radical thing to say even in private at a time when sodomy was a capital offence, condemned by church and state.
…Smith’s new and somewhat inchoate ideas were pushed further by Bentham, who in an unpublished essay observed that sodomy “produces no pain in anyone” but “on the contrary it produces pleasure.”
…It’s no accident that in 1787 Bentham wrote a “Defence of Usury,” which tried to convince Adam Smith to take a more benevolent view of the hitherto morally sanctioned economic activity. On the subject of both usury and sodomy, Bentham’s inclination was to take Smith’s liberal impulses to their logical end. Bentham was in favour of consensual adult acts (be they sexual or economic) that led to greater happiness, whether they violated pre-existing taboos or not.
It was, of course, also no accident that Tyler posted on Bentham last week. Here is a good extract of Bentham on usury.
Hat tip: The Browser.
On the merits of Hayek’s *Road to Serfdom*
I’ve seen this work bashed a number of times in the blogosphere over the last few years. It didn’t get everything right, but it remains an important and seminal work and at the time of its publication it was a revelatory work. Let’s turn the microphone over to Albert Hirschman, hardly a right-wing ideologue. This is from Jeremy Adelman’s very useful biography of Hirschman:
…when he [Hirschman] found a copy of Friedrich von Hayek’s recently published…The Road to Serfdom in a Rome bookstore, a nerve was struck: “Reading this book is very useful for someone like me who grew up in a ‘collectivist’ climate — it makes you rethink many things and has shown me in how many important points I have moved away from the beliefs I had when I was 18 years old. The experience of the army has also confirmed or rather demonstrated forcefully the advantages of a monetary society, anonymous, and where one preserves at least a sector of private initiative.”
…Even more than a reminder of his skepticism of statist planners, Hayek got at something Hirschman felt strongly: the need to acknowledge the basic limits to the “intelligibility” of our complex world. Leaders were wont to claim complete knowledge when they did not have it and thus to squash the individual’s ability to make adjustments “to changes who cause and nature he cannot understand.”
Hirschman was never convinced by Hayek’s desire to rely so heavily on the market, but in this appreciation of the book you will find more wisdom than in the recent attempted take downs. In essence, the critics are not grasping how backward was the intellectual climate when Hayek’s book came out and what a useful corrective it was.
By the way, here is a new and good Cass Sunstein review of the Adelman bio of Hirschman.
Addendum: From the comments, Ricardo points us to Sen’s nice words about the book.
Jeremy Bentham’s *Not Paul, but Jesus, vol. III*
Bentham’s famous defense (or should I say advocacy?) of homosexuality and other non-traditional sexual and romantic relationships — he describes them as the “eccentric mode” — is now available in its entirety, for the first time I believe. Here is a blog post about the new publication. It is a fascinating work throughout and homosexuality is central to his answer to Malthus and the dangers of excess population.
The full text is freely available here (pdf), about two hundred pages. Here is one typical excerpt:
Yet by such a multitude of those who would start with horror at the very mention of a gratification afforded to the sexual appetite in any eccentric mode, how compleatly dissolute and unlimited is the indulgence afforded to the appetites of which the organs of taste and smell are the instruments, and how enormous is the expence at and by which this indulgence is so constantly and regularly procured.
By those by whom, to the pleasures of the table, no limits are attempted to be set other than those set, as above, by the allied considerations [of] self-regarding prudence and benevolence, why to the pleasures of the bed should any narrower limits be assigned? With what consistency can any difference be made in the extent given to the limits in the two cases? So much as to the question between the pleasures of the table taken in the aggregate on the one part, and the pleasures of the bed on the other.
Has Andrew Sullivan read this book? Through jstor, here is a related David M. Levy piece.