Category: History

Time travel back to 1000 A.D.: Survival tips

by  Tyler Cowen in

Londenio, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I wanted to ask for
survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random
location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in
the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such
transportation would leave me with what I am wearing, what I know, and
nothing else. Any advice would help.

I hope you have an expensive gold wedding band but otherwise start off by keeping your mouth shut.  Find someone who will take care of you for a few days or weeks and then look for employment in the local church.  Your marginal product is quite low, even once you have learned the local language.  You might think that knowing economics, or perhaps quantum mechanics, will do you some good but in reality people won’t even think your jokes are funny.  Even if you can prove Euler’s Theorem from memory no one will understand your notation.  I hope you have a strong back and an up to date smallpox vaccination.

Readers, do you have any other tips?  Is there any way that Londenio can leverage his knowledge of modernity (he is, by the way, a marketing professor) into socially valuable outputs?  Would prattling on about sanitation and communicable diseases do him any good?

Why did they build expensive medieval churches?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bryan Caplan asks (the rest of the post is interesting on other matters):

Seeing a bunch of French cathedrals makes me even more skeptical of the claim (made by Larry Iannaccone
and others) that people weren’t more religious in earlier centuries. If
people weren’t far more religious in the Middle Ages, why did they pour
such a high fraction of their surplus wealth into century-long
religious architectural projects? You could say "It was primarily
rulers, not donors, who allocated the funds," but that just pushes the
question back a step. Were rulers vastly more religious than the
masses? That’s hard to believe. Were rulers trying to impress the
masses by building churches? Well, why would churches impress the
masses unless they were highly religious?

His answer:

Religious architecture and art were to medieval feudalism what advertising and commercialism are to modern capitalism:
A rather effective way to build support for the status quo using
aesthetics instead of argument. My claim, in short, is that Notre Dame
played the same role during the Middle Ages that fashion magazines play
today. Notre Dame was not an argument for feudalism, and Elle is not an argument for capitalism.  But both are powerful ways to make regular people buy into the system.

I would add that churches were a form of fiscal policy and the associated spending was a way to hand out goodies to political allies.  (This is especially important if the finished project takes decades or centuries to materialize.)  In a time of political decentralization it wasn’t easy to construct or maintain a long distance road.  So you had to put a lot of expense in one easy-to-guard place and in a politically correct way.  Churches were the obvious choice.  Churches may have been an efficient means to store wealth for other reasons as well.  If someone is going to plunder you on the run, they can wreck a church but they can’t dissemble and carry away its value very easily.

Robin Hanson might argue that beautiful churches also signaled the status of the elites who built them. 

Who should be bounced from The Great Books series?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Before leaving for Japan, I’d been pawing through these volumes lately — you know, the U. Chicago fat tomes with two columns on each page?  The obvious question is which books belong and which do not; overall I’m surprised at how well the 1952 picks have held up and yes that is tribute to the University of Chicago or at least its influence.

I’m sad that Hume doesn’t get his own volume, including many of his shorter essays.  Plus I’d like to add Dickens’s Bleak House and at least the first two books of Proust.  And who to bounce?  I nominate Plotinus as the obvious choice, noting that he has only about 24,000 cites on scholar.google.com, not even as many as Joseph Stiglitz.

In 1990 they dropped four books: Apollonius’ On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat.  The loss of Sterne is regretted but the others we can do without.  You’ll find a list of the added books in 1990 at the first link, about halfway down and yes they did include Swann’s Way.  Little Dorrit is not the best or even the second best Dickens selection.  Most are good picks though I would have left the Bergson, the Dewey (unreadable), and tossed out some of the shorter works in favor of Ulysses.  More William James is never a bad idea; how about The Varieties of Religious Experience?  None of the science books will age well.  And how about a wee bit of Mises and Hayek to reflect the failures of socialism?  Absalom, Absalom would help cover race and maybe Mill on The Subjection of Women should be there too.

Division of labor in the Babylonian Talmud

by  Tyler Cowen in

This reminds me of Leonard Read’s "I, Pencil," but of course it came much earlier:

Ben Zoma once saw a crowd on one of the
steps of the Temple Mount. He said, Blessed is He that discerneth
secrets, and blessed is He who has created all these to serve me. [For]
he used to say: What labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained
bread to eat! He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped, he bound [the sheaves],
he threshed and winnowed and selected the ears, he ground [them], and
sifted [the flour], he kneaded and baked, and then at last he ate;
whereas I get up, and find all these things done for me.

And how many labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained a
garment to wear! He had to shear, wash [the wool], comb it, spin it,
and weave it, and then at last he obtained a garment to wear; whereas I
get up and find all these things done for me. All kinds of craftsmen
come early to the door of my house, and I rise in the morning and find
all these before me.

Credit goes to Stephen Dubner.

The Man Who Loved China

by  Tyler Cowen in

That’s the new Simon Winchester book and it concerns Joseph Needham, who wrote the famous series on the history of science in China and focused the attention of the scholarly world on the question: why no capitalism in China?  This books offers a love story, a story of a quest, a story of science, a tale of politics, and did you know that Needham (unwittingly) was the guy who taught the Unabomber to use explosives?

Here is one short bit from the book:

In 1989, more than half a century after they first met, Needham and Lu Gwei-djen were married in Cambridge.  She died two years later, whereupon Needham invited three other women to marry him.  All politely declined.

Definitely recommended.  The subtitle is "The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom."  Here is one review.

A Public Choice theory of Chinese food

by  Tyler Cowen in

Seth Roberts, citing Jennifer 8 Lee, writes:

Why did Chinese immigrants to America start so many restaurants? Because Chinese cuisine is glorious, right? Well, no. Chinese immigrants started a lot of laundries, too, and there is nothing wonderful about Chinese ways of washing clothes. As Jennifer Lee explains in this excellent talk, the first Chinese immigrants were laborers. They were taking jobs away from American men, and this caused problems. Restaurants and laundries were much safer immigrant jobs because cooking and cleaning were women’s work.

By the way, here is some work on immigrant complementarity with native labor.  George Borjas rebuts.

The Horse the Wheel and Language

by  Tyler Cowen in

The tribes Europeans encountered in their colonial ventures in Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas were at first assumed to have existed for a long time.  They often claimed antiquity for themselves.  But many tribes are now believed to have been transient political communities of the historical moment.  Like the Ojibwa, some might have crystallized only after contact with European agents who wanted to deal with bounded groups to facilitate the negotiation of territorial treaties.  And the same critical attitude toward bounded tribal territories is applied to European history.  Ancient European tribal identities — Celt, Scythians, Cimbri, Teoton, and Pict — are now frequently seen as convenient names for chamelon-like political alliances that had no true ethnic identity, or as brief ethnic phenomena that were unable to persist for any length of time, or even as entirely imaginary later inventions.

That is from David W. Anthony’s The Horse The Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppe Shaped the Modern World.  In particular this book focuses on the origin of the Indo-European language group and the relationship between archeology and linguistics.  He is also skeptical of Jared Diamond’s well-known thesis that early Europe had much diffusion of innovation in the East-West direction.  Recommended.

Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America

by  Tyler Cowen in

That’s the subtitle, the title is Bound for Freedom and it is by Douglas Flamming.  This book is a good antidote to libertarians who assign too much blame to state governments, and not enough blame to voluntary norms, when it comes to Southern segregation and Jim Crow.  Early in the twentieth century, Los Angeles was devoid of the oppressive Jim Crow laws that were so common in the South.  In fact California had some (unenforced) laws prohibiting discrimination according to race.  Yet according to one survey only three of two hundred saloons would serve blacks.  Most hotels did not accept blacks either and that was in direct contradiction to state law.  Both Hollywood and the petroleum industry for the most part refused to hire blacks, even for jobs of unskilled labor.  On the positive side, many of the businesses along Central Avenue were fully integrated, serving Latino and Japanese customers as well.  Blacks did have, overall, a much better existence in LA than in the South but this volume shows that Jim Crow cannot simply be blamed on oppressive government regulations.

Here is my earlier post on Jim Crow in sports.

Antiquity was richer than we think

by  Tyler Cowen in

George Grantham writes:

In recent decades the conventional dating of the origins of Western Europe’s economic ascendancy to the tenth and eleventh centuries AD has been called in question by archaeological findings and reinterpretations of the early medieval texts indicating significantly higher levels of material prosperity in Antiquity than conventional accounts consider plausible. On the basis of that evidence it appears likely that at its peak the classical economy was almost as large as that of Western Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

Here is sixty pages more, noting that every single page of this paper has interesting material, a remarkable achievement.  Here is one bit:

Between 1300 and 900 BC three innovations turned out to be crucial for the eventual integration of Europe’s economic space. The earliest was the improvement in ship construction and sailing technique. As will be discussed in more detail below, the decisive changes in rigging and hull construction that permitted larger and more robust ships were achieved before the Aegean collapse in response to the growing bulk trade in timber and agricultural produce. The perfection of ferrous metallurgy by Cypriot and Aegean smiths was the second decisive innovation. Unlike the changes in naval architecture, the metallurgical innovations of the Aegean Dark Age were an unexpected by-product of economic collapse. The third major development affecting the later expansion of trading networks was the transformation of Proto-Canaanite syllabaries into a true alphabet consisting of approximately two dozen phonetic signs. The triumph of the alphabet was also a consequence of the Aegean collapse, which destroyed the earlier and slightly more cumbersome cuneiform script employed to document administrative and commercial transactions outside Egypt.

The pointer is from Razib.  Here is Grantham on the agricultural revolution.

Why is monogamy associated with economic development?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Eric Gould, Omer Moav and Avi Simhon offer a new answer in the March 2008 American Economic Review: female inequality.  Economic growth means that some women have higher human capital than others and thus they are better suited at producing and rearing high quality children.  Wealthy men with lots of human capital will start to bid for these women and they will have to offer them exclusive status; these men also wish to invest in a smaller number of higher quality children.

In other words, male inequality encourages polygamy while female inequality discourages it.  Apparently female inequality has been winning that race.

The hypothesis also helps explain why polygamy unravels so decisively at some point.  Since monogamy itself encourages children (including daughters) with higher human capital, initial tendencies toward monogamy are self-reinforcing.

Here is an earlier ungated version of the paper.  Or buy the new version here for $7.50.  Here are previous MR posts on polygamy.

Why economics was late in starting

by  Tyler Cowen in

I’ve already posed the question, I’d like to add two points.  First, sustained economic growth in the Western world starts in 17th century England, as shown by Greg Clark.  Interest in economic reasoning then comes rapidly, first from the mercantilists, then in Adam Smith and some earlier free trade thinkers, such as Dudley North and Nicholas Barbon.

Second, the idea of "private vices, publick virtues" was central for eighteenth century economic thought and for social science more generally.  This came from Bernard Mandeville (drawing upon the French Jansenists) in 1720.  It’s no accident that Mandeville lived in the Dutch Republic, which had very little censorship.  No, I am not a Straussian but the merits of that viewpoint are often overlooked.

The School of Salamanca had an excellent marginal utility theory in 17th century Spain, the framework simply did not go anywhere.  For that matter we can look later and see that Samuel Bailey, Mountifort Longfield (1834), and others had critical components of Marshall.  But no one really cared because they could not yet see how important those contributions would turn out to be.  This is a central theme in why the growth of economic thought took so long.

It also suggests that today we might have some very important ideas amongst us, we simply cannot yet see how fruitful they will be.  Their own proponents may not even know it.

Was Avner Greif right about the Maghribi traders?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jeremy Edwards and Sheilagh Oglivie write:

Economists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, according to Greif, enforced contracts multilaterally through a closed, private-order ‘coalition’. We show that this view is  untenable. The Maghribis used formal legal mechanisms and entered business associations with non-Maghribis. Not a single empirical example adduced by Greif shows that any ‘coalition’ actually existed. The Maghribis cannot be used  to argue that the social capital of exclusive networks will facilitate exchange in developing economies. Nor do they provide any support for the cultural theories of economic development and institutional change for which they have been mobilised.

Here is the paper, which if it is correct amounts to a stunning refutation of what was once a seminal contribution to economic history and the theory of social norms.  Thanks to a loyal MR reader for the pointer.