Category: History

*Glittering Images*, the new Camille Paglia book

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle is A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars and according to Paglia “The format of the book is based on Catholic breviaries of devotional images, like Mass cards of the saints.”

It presents powerful works of art and tells the reader to submit to them; for that alone it is better than most other books.  The influence of Harold Bloom, Paglia’s earlier teacher, is strong throughout.  The interpretations seem unsure as to whether they are summaries or revelations, bold challenges to orthodoxy or obvious truths.  I am glad I bought the book but still my itch for the Paglia of Sexual Personae — say the Edmund Spenser chapter (the book’s highlight in my view) — remains unscratched.

Here is Paglia on George Lucas, an excerpt from the latter part of the book.  I do not feel the need to criticize her main claim (Lucas is the greatest artist of our time), still her obsession with mythology and cinematographic technique to me misses the import of Lucas’s saga of glorious collapse, discussed only briefly, though I do like this bit: “Lucas crosscuts to the delirious destruction on Coruscant of the Great Rotunda of the Galactic Senate, with its thousand round balconies in cool tonalities of gray and black. This twinned ruination of industrial and political architecture is an epic Romantic spectacle…”

Recommended, but we are still waiting for the last three installments of Camille’s ouevre.

Mark Bittman on the food plan

by  Tyler Cowen in

He writes:

But there is no national food policy that says, for example, the United States will consume one billion pounds of almonds in the next year, so let’s grow 1.5 billion and there’s plenty for export. Let’s not plant 2.5 billion because that land could be used for tomatoes or something else. I mentioned it to my editor and we agreed that it sounds a bit Stalinist.

[Interviewer] Talk about politically toxic.

Right! But that aside, why would you not want to talk about what’s the best thing for the future of the United States? I would argue that the answer is not what amounts to an anarchic market of a million individuals deciding what they want to plant and then having this dogma that the market will decide. Growing a lot of almonds and exporting them to China is not the end of the world, but I do think that when you look at the Midwest, where the vast majority of land is used to raise corn or soybeans used for feeding industrially raised animals or producing corn syrup for junk food, really is. It is something that is not going to change until we say that land is too valuable to us to be used that way. We need more diverse and regional agriculture. What harm would there be in making a plan?

Mark Bittman has done some of the best writing about cooking which the human race has produced, ever, and he has done it repeatedly and on a large scale, toss in writing on food travel as well.  This discussion is…less good than that.

The link is here, and I thank Daniel for the pointer.

The origins of kimchi in Korea

by  Tyler Cowen in

Many would be surprised to discover that this seemingly traditional food was in fact first developed in the late 19th century.  Also, the most important ingredient of kimchi, red pepper, was first introduced to Korea in the early 17th century through either China or Japan.  The import of cabbage in the late 19th century from China explains the rather late emergence of cabbage kimchi.

That is from Seoul: A Window into Korean Culture, a very good book by Choi Joon-sik.

A Brief Visit to North Korea

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Tyler is in North Korea, Alex is in South Korea.

Alex is in North Korea, Tyler is in South Korea.

If we look a little tense it was because it was tense, perhaps even more than usual since just days before a North Korean soldier had killed two of his commanding officers while defecting to the South. North Korea also appears to be undergoing greater food shortages than in many years which no doubt adds to the tension. I had not realized, by the way, that you can see North Korea from a major highway in South Korea and the land is clearly stripped bare of trees which have been cut down for firewood and what little nutrition the bark offers.

Here are the North Koreans watching and photographing us to put into their permanent records.

 

Small knaps to a better scraper: the economics of stone sharpening in Neanderthals

by  Tyler Cowen in

That title is suggested to me by Sam Penrose, who sends this article along:

“A fundamental assumption is that the most important factor in lithic techno-economics is the amount of cutting edge you can extract from your raw material. So making thinner flakes with more edge overall is a more economic use of stone resources. Dibble took a very large scale approach to the archaeological record, and suggests an overarching pattern of increasing economy through time. Early Stone Age flakes from the African Oldowan are variable in size, but have average levels of economy, measured by edge : mass. By the Middle Palaeolithic, techno-economics have become improved, but interestingly through two approaches. Prepared core technology, or the Levallois technique, permits control over the flakes produced, and, depending on the style used, can result in either wide/long and thin flakes.”

A correction from *Nature*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Corrected:    In the original text, we wrongly attributed to Enrico Spolaore the opinion that using genetic data in economics could help policy-makers to set immigration levels. He actually suggested that the work could reduce barriers to the flows of ideas and innovations across populations. The text has been amended to reflect that.

The link is here.  The earlier MR post is here.  I thank a loyal MR reader for the pointer.

Crack cocaine and education

by  Tyler Cowen in

From William N. Evans, Craig Garthwaite, Timothy J. Moore:

We propose the rise of crack cocaine markets as an explanation for the end to the convergence in black-white educational outcomes beginning in the mid-1980s. After constructing a measure to date the arrival of crack markets in cities and states, we show large increases in murder and incarceration rates after these dates. Black high school graduation rates also decline, and we estimate that crack markets accounts for between 40 and 73 percent of the fall in black male high school graduation rates. We argue that the primary mechanism is reduced educational investments in response to decreased returns to schooling.

The ungated version is here.

Controversies over economics and genetics

by  Tyler Cowen in

To critics, the economists’ paper seems to suggest that a country’s poverty could be the result of its citizens’ genetic make-up, and the paper is attracting charges of genetic determinism, and even racism. But the economists say that they have been misunderstood, and are merely using genetics as a proxy for other factors that can drive an economy, such as history and culture. The debate holds cautionary lessons for a nascent field that blends genetics with economics, sometimes called genoeconomics. The work could have real-world pay-offs, such as helping policy-makers to set the right level of immigration to boost the economy, says Enrico Spolaore, an economist at Tufts University near Boston, Massachusetts, who has also used global genetic-diversity data in his research.

But the economists at the forefront of this field clearly need to be prepared for harsh scrutiny of their techniques and conclusions. At the centre of the storm is a 107-page paper by Oded Galor of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Quamrul Ashraf of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It has been peer-reviewed by economists and biologists, and will soon appear in American Economic Review, one of the most prestigious economics journals.

The full story is here.  The previous MR post on the dispute, which includes a link to the paper, is here.

A third Industrial Revolution?

by  Tyler Cowen in

James Tien has a new paper:

The outputs or products of an economy can be divided into services products and goods products (due to manufacturing, construction, agriculture and mining). To date, the services and goods products have, for the most part, been separately mass produced. However, in contrast to the first and second industrial revolutions which respectively focused on the development and the mass production of goods, the next – or third – industrial revolution is focused on the integration of services and/or goods; it is beginning in this second decade of the 21st Century. The Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) is based on the confluence of three major technological enablers (i.e., big data analytics, adaptive services and digital manufacturing); they underpin the integration or mass customization of services and/or goods. As detailed in an earlier paper, we regard mass customization as the simultaneous and real-time management of supply and demand chains, based on a taxonomy that can be defined in terms of its underpinning component and management foci. The benefits of real-time mass customization cannot be over-stated as goods and services become indistinguishable and are co-produced – as “servgoods” – in real-time, resulting in an overwhelming economic advantage to the industrialized countries where the consuming customers are at the same time the co-producing producers.

Keywords: Big data, decision analytics, goods, adaptive services, digital manufacturing, value chain,
supply chain, demand chain, mass production, mass customization, industrial revolution

For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Emails I receive (the consumer surplus of the internet)

by  Tyler Cowen in

…the origins of your name, off by a letter.

RL

> Put the following text into google: freemason Cowan Tyler What is the result?

Interesting. “Tyler” is the title of an officer in the Masonic hierarchy, while a “cowan” is a stonemason who is not a member of the Freemasons guild. This from “Freemasonry for Dummies”:

The Tyler’s job is to keep off all “cowans and eavesdroppers” (for more on the Tyler, see Chapter 5). The term cowan is unusual and its origin is probably from a very old Anglo-Saxon word meaning “dog.” Cowan came to be a Scottish word used as a putdown to describe stonemasons who did not join the Freemasons guild, while the English used it to describe Masons who built rough stone walls without mortar and did not know the true secrets of Freemasonry.

What kind of austerity did Great Britain implement in the 1920s?

by  Tyler Cowen in

When it comes to the post-WWI period, Paul Krugman recently argued: “…Britain demonstrated a fairly awesome commitment to austerity…” (and see here today’s post).

The cited IMF report notes with disapproval:

…the U.K. government implemented a policy mix of severe fiscal austerity and tight monetary policy. The primary surplus was kept near 7 percent of GDP throughout the 1920s. This was accomplished through large expenditure decreases, courtesy of the “Geddes axe,” and a continuation of the higher tax levels introduced during the war.

Is this portrait true?  I say yes and no.  For 1918-1920, government spending plummets, mostly because of demobilization and the end of the war, source here.

Yet there is an alternative perspective.  Even after the demobilization is over, consider that in 1910 British government spending was about 10% of gdp and in the 1920s it runs near 25% of gdp.  Is that such an awesome commitment to austerity?

If we consider a more finely grained approach, and focus on shorter-term rates of change, we do see real restraint on the spending side:

…spending was cut by 10% in real terms in two years, while tax as a share of GDP remained constant. The budget deficit was reduced from 7% GDP in 1920 to near balance in 1923, followed by a swift recovery. Defence bore the brunt of the cuts.

As mentioned in the quotation (“followed by a swift recovery”), this transition went reasonably well.  If you read this very up to date, very careful with the data paper (try p.10), you see a notable gdp plunge from 1920-1921, mostly from a coal strike and a series of postwar shocks, and then solid growth from 1921 to 1926, running over and after the period when Britain was cutting government spending.  It seems that policy was hardly a macroeconomic catastrophe.  Things do go south in 1926, but it is well known that is from bad monetary and exchange rate policy, plus a major coal strike.

Or read Barry Eichengreen (pdf).  He notes that Britain under-performs relative to other European nations in the first half of the 1920s, although he focuses much more on monetary policy and real factors, rather than fiscal policy.  Furthermore, that’s hardly the only period when Britain was under-performing its rivals on the continent.

In other words, I don’t see how the episode as a whole supports the interpretative weight being placed upon it as an anti-austerity parable.  Note that when it comes to the U.S. (switching from the UK for a moment), Krugman wrote the entirely defensible sentence: “…even a cursory examination of the available data suggests that 1921 has few useful lessons for the kind of slump we’re facing now.”  If the UK in 1921 shows more relevance, that has yet to be shown.

A cultural guide for Afghanis

by  Tyler Cowen in

After eleven years, we are trying a new approach:

“Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you,” the guide instructs.

“When Coalition members get excited, they may show their excitement by patting one another on the back or the behind,” it explains. “They may even do this to you if they are proud of the job you’ve done. Once again, they don’t mean to offend you.”

This is news to me, though I would like to see it confirmed:

Fifty-one coalition troops have been killed this year by their Afghan counterparts. While some insider attacks have been attributed to Taliban infiltrators, military officials say the majority stem from personal disputes and misunderstandings.

Finally:

NATO’s coalition is described as a “work of art.”

For my house, I might rather have a Suzani.