Category: History

*Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power*

by  Tyler Cowen in

I quite liked this book, which is by Jon Meacham.  Here is the bit best suited to MR:

“She [Sally Hemings] was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved,” said Madison Hemings.  “So she refused to return with him.”

It was an extraordinary moment.  Fresh from arranging terms with the bankers of Europe over a debt that was threatening the foundation of the French nation, Thomas Jefferson found himself in negotiations with a pregnant enslaved teenager who, in a reversal of fortune hardly likely to be repeated, had the means at hand to free herself.

…So he began making concessions to convince Sally Hemings to come home to Virginia.  “To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years,” Madison Hemings said.

Sally Hemings agreed…

Their father kept the promise he had made to Sally in Paris. “We all became free agreeably to the treaty entered into by our parents before we were born,” Madison Hemings said.  It was one of the most important pacts of Jefferson’s life.

The High Price of False Security

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Charles Kenny has an excellent piece in Bloomberg BusinessWeek about security:

The attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is considerably out of proportion to the relative threat it presents. That’s especially true when it comes to Islamic-extremist terror. Of the 150,000 murders in the U.S. between 9/11 and the end of 2010, Islamic extremism accounted for fewer than three dozen. Since 2000, the chance that a resident of the U.S. would die in a terrorist attack was one in 3.5 million, according to John Mueller and Mark Stewart of Ohio State and the University of Newcastle, respectively. In fact, extremist Islamic terrorism resulted in just 200 to 400 deaths worldwide outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq—the same number, Mueller noted in a 2011 report (PDF), as die in bathtubs in the U.S. alone each year.

…According to one estimate of direct and indirect costs borne by the U.S. as a result of 9/11, the New York Times suggested the attacks themselves caused $55 billion in “toll and physical damage,” while the economic impact was $123 billion. But costs related to increased homeland security and counterterrorism spending, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $3,105 billion.

Matt Yglesias adds a good point:

Something that I would love to see the Transportation Security Administration, the FBI, the CIA, and whoever else do is pull together an estimate of how many airplanes they think would have been blown up by terrorists if there was no passenger or baggage screening whatsoever. One way of thinking about it is this. If commercial airplanes were no more secure than your average city bus, planes would be blown up as frequently as city buses—which is to say never. I’ve heard some people postulate that terrorists have a special affection for blowing up planes, but I’m not sure that’s right. In the not-too-distant past, Israel had a substantial terrorists-blowing-up-buses problem and had to take countervailing security measures. But unlike Israel, we’re not doing anything to secure our buses. It’s at least possible that nobody blows up American buses because nobody is trying to blow anything up.

I would also add to the monetary costs the price of lost civil liberties and a populace that has sadly grown accustomed to government surveilling, scanning, and groping. As I said some years ago when visiting Independence Hall, the price of eternal vigilance is liberty.

The changing economics of youth subculture

by  Tyler Cowen in

From a Metafilter discussion, here is one comment:

Music distribution, music purchasing and the ethics around them have changed. When I was a mere slip of a girl, it really mattered whether one was on a major label or not, and everyone knew someone who ran a tiny label out of their bedroom, etc etc. I can’t get over how my fellow anarchists listen to, like, Beyonce. That would not have gone over well in 1996. As a result, fashion/music subcultures are, I think, more permeable and fluid, and there’s less oppositionality associated with music.

Also, fast fashion and big changes in the distribution and status of vintage and thrift store fashion. I’d argue that up through the nineties, second hand clothes were a little bit declasse; they aren’t anymore. Clothes more than 20 years old were easy to find in the thrift stores and were of fairly high quality. Now even the last of the union-made eighties clothes are hard to find and can be quite pricey. (I mean, I remember when I bought a 50s silk-satin Dior dress – not atelier, but still – for $5.99 at Saver’s.) So style changes faster and it’s harder to associate style with oppositionality and with a stable ‘style tribe’.

“Style tribes” themselves are pretty well commodified, too – you can make a nice living catering to goths or VLV folks or whatever. So there’s less, I guess, libidinal investmentthere.

Also, life is more precarious and it’s harder to get work. Back when I was properly young in the nineties, if you didn’t have a job you could just temp. It wasn’t fun (remember that zine Temp Slave) but you could keep a roof over your head. A lot easier to do subculture stuff then. Even the serious anarchists I know now scrabble a lot more for work, food and money than back then.

Rents are higher – where in 1995 you could run a whole anarchist community center on $300/month plus utilities – which could be paid with three people who had jobs and could chip in $100 each, now you’re looking at $1200/month plus utilities and fewer people who can kick down $100.

I mean, there’s still plenty of youth fashion, music and neat stuff going on – it’s just that the support structures are more fragile and temporary and the borders between things are thinner.

That is from Frowner.  Hat tip goes to @NatashaPlotkin, the most underrated tweeter I know of, with only 76 followers.

Edward Moore asks

by  Tyler Cowen in

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.

The credibility of the gold standard

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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.

Very good sentences

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

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*

by  Tyler Cowen in

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?

by  Tyler Cowen in

…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.