Category: History

Questions about durable goods

C.J. Chivers, via Andrew Sullivan:

Do you own anything that was manufactured in the 1950s and still is in regular, active use in your life?

Our house!  Otherwise it is a few artworks, but even most of the record collection, or for that matter the book collection, was made after that date.  I was manufactured in the early 1960s.  Am I forgetting something?

Richard T. Gill

Richard T. Gill, in all statistical probability the only Harvard economist to sing 86 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, died on Monday…He was 82.

The article is here.  Gill wrote many widely used texts and oddly he did not begin vocal training until he was almost forty. Up until that point, he had little acquaintance with classical music and he smoked two and a half packs of cigarettes a day.  He first performed in a staging of Figaro at Harvard, directed by John Lithgow and conducted by John Adams (the John Adams).  Later, he was in the world premiere of Philip Glass's Satyagraha.  Gill continued to write and edit textbooks throughout his singing career.

In 1971 he gave up his tenure at Harvard.  In 1984-85 he hosted a 28-part PBS show on economics.  In the 1990s he wrote two books, one on population the other on the decline of the American family.  Here is Gill's proposal for a Parental Bill of Rights.  His short stories for Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker were widely anthologized and in 2003 he published his first novel.

Here is his home page.  At the time of his death he was working on a three to four-volume autobiography.  As a Harvard undergraduate he was a successful boxer and somehow he ended up as an Assistant Dean at Harvard by age 21 and later Master of Leverett House.

*Why the West Rules — For Now*, the new book by Ian Morris

Most of the book is intelligent, well-sourced, easy to read, and non-dogmatic.  It is a "big book" on the scale of Jared Diamond or Paul Kennedy and the author is obviously highly intelligent.  There is a good use of archaeology and mostly the author supports geographical theories of the rise of the West and other civilizations.  It considers energy use, urbanization, and war-making explicitly, all pluses in my view.  Eventually you realize it is going nowhere and has only a weak theoretical framework.  The first two-thirds are still better to read than most books.  It raised my opinion of the importance of coal in the Industrial Revolution.  The final chapter collapses into the lamest of conventional wisdoms.

The WSJ gave it a big review which somehow I cannot find on-line.  Here are other reviews.

Parentheticals to ponder

Geoffrey Johnson, who gave a speech that attempted to debunk any ideas that a machine could have emotions or self-consciousness and could, therefore, be said to think in a human way (Johnson was a pioneer of the frontal lobotomy).

That is from Jane Smiley's new and worthwhile The Man Who Invented the Computer, The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer.  My favorite part of the book was the discussion of Konrad Zuse, who deserves his own popular biography.

A rainfall theory of democracy

From Stephen Haber and Victor Menaldo:

Why have some countries remained obstinately authoritarian despite repeated waves of democratization while others have exhibited uninterrupted democracy? This paper explores the emergence and persistence of authoritarianism and democracy. We argue that settled agriculture requires moderate levels of precipitation, and that settled agriculture eventually gave birth to the fundamental institutions that under-gird today’s stable democracies. Although all of the world’s societies were initially tribal, the bonds of tribalism weakened in places where the surpluses associated with settled agriculture gave rise to trade, social differentiation, and taxation. In turn, the economies of scale required to efficiently administer trade and taxes meant that feudalism was eventually replaced by the modern territorial state, which favored the initial emergence of representative institutions in Western Europe. Subsequently, when these initial territorial states set out to conquer regions populated by tribal peoples, the institutions that could emerge in those conquered areas again reflected nature’s constraints. An instrumental variables approach demonstrates that while low levels of rainfall cause persistent autocracy and high levels of rainfall strongly favor it as well, moderate rainfall supports stable democracy. This econometric strategy also shows that rainfall works through the institutions of the modern territorial state borne from settled agriculture, institutions that are proxied for by low levels of contemporary tribalism.

For the pointer I thank www.bookforum.com.

Classical economics reading list

Joel, a loyal MR reader, asks me:

I am an undergraduate economics student curious about which of the classical economists and books you find most valuable. Classical not just meaning Ricardian but in terms of significant non purely quantitative works that influenced economics as a whole. If one were to put together a reading list of twenty or so of the most influential or important books, what would you recommend? The Wealth of Nations and General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money seem logical starting points, beyond them though it's hard to wade through the range of choices (Ricardo or Hayek? Schumpeter or Jean Baptiste Say?)

For now I'll stick with classical economics in the narrow sense, as it ends in 1871.  If you can read only a few works, I recommend these:

1. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations.  Duh.

2. David Hume, Economic essays.  He lacks some of Smith's profundity as an economist, but he is more precise analytically and as always a beautiful writer.

3. David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy, the first six chapters.  Rigor arrives, though at the expense of truth.  Still there is something to it.  Supplement with Mark Blaug on Ricardo, if you want the model spelt out mathematically.

4. The early marginalists: I'll recommend Samuel Bailey on value and Mountifort Longfield on price theory.  Yet still it was a (temporary) dead end and you should read them with that puzzle in mind.  At what level of technical sophistication do the contributions of marginalism suddenly seem impressive?

5. Thomas Robert Malthus, on population (don't ask which edition) and Principles of Political Economy.  He understood supply and demand, elasticity, a version of the Keynesian model, and environmental economics, and yet he is mainly criticized for being wrong about population.  He is one of the strongest and most profound and most underrated economists of all time.  Also read Keynes's biographical essay on him.

6. Edinburgh Review.  The econ blogosphere of its day.  Read the economic essays published in that outlet, by Malthus and many others, especially on monetary theory.  I don't know any easy way to track this stuff down, but if you do please tell us in the comments.

7. John Stuart Mill: Autobiography (yes, for economics) and his Some Essays on Unsettled Questions in Political Economy (Kindle edition is free).  Mill has underrated depth as an economic thinker and he encompassed virtually all of the interesting trends of his time.  That was both his greatest strength and his biggest weakness.

8. Marx: The 1844 manuscripts.  More generally, read the Romantics as critics of classical political economy.  Coleridge and Carlyle are good places to start.

What about the French?:  I find Say boring, Bastiat fun, Cournot incredible but there is no reason to read the original.  Try someone weird like Comte or LePlay to get a sense of what economic discourse actually was like back then.

Ahem

I'll go back to my sourdough after all:

The popular image may be of Stone Age people gnawing on a chunk of woolly mammoth, but new research indicates their diet may have been more balanced after all.

Many researchers had assumed people living in Europe thousands of years ago ate mainly meat because of bones left behind, and little evidence of plant food.

Now, new findings indicate grains were part of the diet at ancient sites in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic, researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

*The Gold Standard at the Turn of the Twentieth Century*

The author is Steven Bryan, a historian, and the subtitle is Rising Powers, Global Money, and the Age of Empire.  This book offers a great deal of previous unpresented information on the operation of the gold standard in Japan, Russia, Turkey, and Argentina, based on original rather than secondary sources.  Here is a summary paragraph at the end of the book:

The connection between nineteenth-century great power politics, empire building, and militarism and the gold standard was obscured after World War I in the rush to reinstate the form of the gold standard while ignoring its substance and the varied rationales and motivations that had supported it.  Despite the rose-colored hues of nostalgia that flourished after the war, the gold standard did not exist in some magical land separate from the rest of the late nineteenth-century world.  For better or worse, the gold standard was as much a part of the age of empire as it was of the age of industry.

Here is the book's home page.  Here is the p.99 test applied to the book.

*Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. I*

Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life' talk only about the thing which interests you at the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.

Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography.  In this way you have the vivid things of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own.  No talent is required to make a combined Diary and Autobiography interesting.

And so, I have found the right plan.  It makes my labor amusement — mere amusement, play, pastime, and wholly effortless.  It is the first time in history that the right plan has been hit upon.

I spent about ninety minutes browsing this new book, but found it only moderately interesting, with more emphasis on the "moderately" than the "interesting."  If you're obsessed with Twain, you'll find it worth the $20, but the above paragraphs sum up the main problem with the text.

*Bloodlands*

The author is Timothy Snyder and the subtitle is Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.  I learned that this period was even bloodier and more brutal than I had thought:

Mass killing in Europe is usually associated with the Holocaust, and the Holocaust with rapid industrial killing.  The image is too simple and clean.  At the German and Soviet killing sites, the methods of murder were rather primitive.  Of the fourteen million civilians and prisoners of war killed in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945, more than half died because they were denied food.  Europeans deliberately starved Europeans in horrific numbers in the middle of the twentieth century.

It is a very powerful book and I can recommend this review and this review.  Along somewhat related lines, some of you may wish to read Paul R. Gregory's Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina.  Bukharin, of course, was also an economist.  Here is Gregory on the book.  Here is Gregory on Germany's currently low unemployment rate.

*Washington: A Life*, by Ron Chernow

When the news from Boston reached Mount Vernon around New Year's Day, Washington deplored the methods of the tea party, even if he loathed the tax on tea.  It was the next step in a fast-unfolding drama that would fully radicalize him.  The administration of the bluff, portly Lord North had decided that Boston should pay for the destroyed tea and that Parliament should assert its supremacy, cracking down on harebrained schemes of independence now beginning to ferment in the colonies…the tea party convinced many British sympathizers that colonial protestors had become a violent rabble who had to pay a steep price for their inexcusable crimes.

I read only a few hundred pages of this book.  The level of quality is high, but I find Alexander Hamilton's life much more interesting.  This book does have an especially good discussion of Washington's contradictory attitudes and behavior toward his slaves.

Rereading *The Road to Serfdom*

Given all the recent fuss, I picked it up again and found:

1. It was more boring and less analytic on matters of public choice than I had been expecting.

2. Although some of Hayek's major predictions have been proven wrong, they are more defensible than I had been expecting.

3. The most important sentence in the book is "This book, written in my spare time from 1940 to 1943…"  In those years, how many decent democracies were in the world?  How clear was it that the Western powers, even if they won the war, would dismantle wartime economic planning?  How many other peoples' predictions from those years have panned out?  At that time, Hayek's worries were perfectly justified.

4. If current trends do turn out very badly, this is not the best guide for understanding exactly why.

It's fine to downgrade the book, relative to some of the claims made on its behalf, but the book doesn't give us reason to downgrade Hayek.

Bill Bryson’s *At Home*

Indeed, the history of early America is really a history of coping with shortages of building materials.  For a country famed for being rich in natural resources, America along the eastern seaboard proved to be appallingly deficient in many basic commodities necessary to an independent civilization.  One of those commodities was limestone, as the first colonists discovered to their dismay.  In England, you could build a reasonably secure house with wattle and daub — essentially a fraework of mud and sticks — if it was sufficiently bound with lime.  But in America there was no lime (or at least none found before 1690), so the colonists used dried mud, which proved to be woefully lacking in sturdiness.  During the first century of colonization, it was a rare house that lasted more than ten years…A hurricane in 1634 blew away — literally just lifted up and carried off — half the houses of Massachusetts.  Barely had people rebuilt when a second storm of similar intensity blew in…Even decent building stone was not available in many areas.  When George Washington wanted to pave his loggia at Mount Vernon with simple flagstones, he had to send to England for them.

The one thing America had in quantity was wood.

That is all from the new Bill Bryson book, subtitled A Short History of Private Life, which is both entertaining and informative.

Canada’s budget triumph

From a new paper by David Henderson:

A federal government runs a large deficit. Deficits are so large that the ratio of federal debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) approaches 70 percent. A constituency of voters have gotten used to large federal spending programs. Does that sound like the United States? Well, yes. But it also describes Canada in 1993. Yet, just 16 years later, Canada’s federal debt had fallen from 67 percent to only 29 percent of GDP. Moreover, in every year between 1997 and 2008, Canada’s federal government had a budget surplus. In one fiscal year, 2000–2001, its surplus was a whopping 1.8 percent of GDP. If the U.S. government had such a surplus today, that would amount to a cool $263 billion rather than the current deficit of more than $1.5 trillion.