Category: History
*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.
Nazi Nudging
Dan Ariely probably isn't doing his field of behavioral economics any favors when he points out that before he pushed, Hitler was not averse to using a nudge. Still, this 1938 voting ballot which reads, "Do you agree with the reunification of Austria with the German Reich that was enacted on 13 March 1938 and do you vote for the party of our leader; Adolf Hitler?; Yes; No,” is quite amusing as an early example of primitive nudge technology.
*Red Plenty*
"No!" said the Chairman in triumph. "No subsidy!" This is America! Don't you see that the very fact that the hemburger [sic] kiosk is there means that somebody has worked out how to make a profit by selling the meal at fifteen cents. If the capitalist who owns the kiosk couldn't make a profit at that price, he wouldn't be doing it. That is the secret of everything we see here."
Here is one Amazon review of the book, Francis Spufford's latest:
This is a fantastic, innovative look at the economic policies of the USSR under Khrushchev. If my opening sentence sounds dull, please don't see it as a true representation of this book. Spufford's approach is to interweave extensive research with the imagination and invention of a novelist. The end result is a fantastic patchwork in which fictional characters rub shoulders with historical ones and stunning descriptive passages add lustre to what might have been dry, factual information.
It's one of the most stylish fictional experiments of the year, and yet it suddenly, and repeatedly, breaks into disquisitions about market socialism, Oskar Lange, the measurement of Soviet gdp, and Leonid Kantorovich.
Here is one Guardian review of the book. Here is a Telegraph review, also a rave. Here is more praise. Here is the Amazon UK listing. For a while Amazon US claimed the book would come out in March, now there is just this strange and useless listing.
I thank a loyal MR reader for the pointer.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Spiegel Online: Germany will make its last reparations payment for World War I on Oct. 3, settling its outstanding debt from the 1919 Versailles Treaty and quietly closing the final chapter of the conflict that shaped the 20th century.
…in 1953, West Germany agreed at an international conference in London to service its international bond obligations from before World War II. In the years that followed it repaid the principal on the bonds, which had been issued to private and institutional investors in countries including the United States.
Under the terms of the London accord, Germany was allowed to wait until it unified before paying some €125 million in outstanding interest that had accrued on its foreign debt in the years 1945 to 1952. After the Berlin Wall fell and West and East Germany united in 1990, the country dutifully paid that interest off in annual instalments, the last of which comes due on Oct. 3.
It is surprising that Germans are not more Keynesian.
On which issues will we become less moral?
Ross Douthat considers the hoary question of which current practices we will someday condemn, linking also to Appiah, who raised it, and Will Wilkinson. Prisons, factory farming, immigration barriers, and abortion are among the nominations. I would suggest an alternate query, namely which practices currently considered to be outrageous will make a moral comeback in the court of public opinion. Torture and loss of privacy — in some of its forms at least — already seem to be on the rise, at least in terms of their acceptability in the United States.
What kind of moral status will "probabilistically causing natural disasters" have in the future? What status does it have now?
With rising health care costs and tight budgets in many countries, can we not expect euthanasia to rise in moral popularity? Will the principles for cutting off care force us to transparently embrace some ugly moral principle, or will the ugliness be our lack of transparency and arbitrariness on these matters?
Preemptive warfare feels unpopular, because Iraq and Afghanistan have gone poorly, and because there have no more major successful terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. I predict the idea will make a comeback. Robot and drone warfare may become even more commonplace, as will targeting at a distance and selective cyberwarfare. Those practices don't have to be wrong, but they could lead us to be morally cavalier about fighting a destructive war, even more than we are today. By the way, the French seem pretty happy about the recent U.S. intensification of drone warfare in Pakistan, which is directed at stopping an planned attack in Europe.
Tolerance of gay individuals and alternative lifestyles is at a historic high. I would not endorse a crude "regression toward the mean" hypothesis, but we should at least try it on for size. That tolerance is as likely to fall back as to progress.
Won't targeted genetic tests make abortion more popular and less sanctioned? Rural India is already full of ultrasound clinics. Won't the possibility of discrimination on the basis of genes (not many will refuse to do it, or make use of the information, if only implicitly) make discrimination more acceptable altogether?
On the bright side, totalitarianism and mass murder of one's civilian population have been out of style since the Nazis, the Soviets, and Mao. In that sense we still can expect the future to be morally superior to the past. But those gains were achieved some time ago. If we capitalize them, and take them for granted, at the other margins I am not convinced that we are going to see lots of moral improvement over the next fifty to one hundred years.
*Berlin at War*
That's an excellent new book by Roger Moorhouse. I found good material on virtually every page:
Heinz Knobloch was dispatched by his mother to a department store by the Hallesches Tor to buy something — anything — exempt from the rationing. He managed to return with two tins of sardines. He was lucky to have escaped with his booty intact: the new legislation against hoarding meant that some of the more punctilious shopkeepers were already insisting on opening all tins immediately upon purchase.
I also learned that many Berliners starting suspecting the Holocaust because of the rather efficient German postal system. When letters would be sent to "ghetto inhabitants" on the Eastern front, often they would be returned with notice that the intended recipient had passed away.
Adam Smith is usually smarter than you think
In passing, Jacob T. Levy effectively scores the point and fills us in:
Adam Smith, generally thought of as the first systematic analyst of the market economy, was in my view the first major analyst of the modern state who saw it more or less completely: its permanent system of taxation and debt, its permanent expenditures on public works, its standing army, its bureaucratic structure, its colonial and imperial ventures, its complicated relationship with economic growth and prosperity, and in general the inevitability of a system of “police” or policy. This is not wholly distinct from his work as an analyst of the market; standing armies and professional bureaucracies are aspects of the division of labor, and the wealth of nations is a key determinant of their ability to fulfill their state projects. But it is partly distinct.
The Institutional Causes of China’s Great Famine, 1959-61
Written by Xin Meng, Nancy Qian, and Pirerre Yared, this paper is a very good applied study of Mises and Hayek:
This paper investigates the institutional causes of China’s Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered higher famine mortality rates, a surprising reversal of a typically negative correlation. A simple model based on historical institutional details shows that these patterns are consistent with the policy outcomes in a centrally planned economy in which the government is unable to easily collect and respond to new information in the presence of an aggregate shock to production.
You can find ungated copies here.
*Pictures of the Socialistic Future*
In his preface, Bryan Caplan writes:
Yet almost no one questioned the socialists' idealism. By 1961, however, the descendents of the radical wing of the Social Democratic Party had built the Berlin Wall — and were shooting anyone who tried to flee their "Workers' Paradise."…Who could have foreseen such a mythic transformation?
Eugene Richter, that's who, in 1893. There is now a reissue of Richter's Pictures of the Socialistic Future. There is an interview with Bryan Caplan about the book here. Here is the book on-line and free.