Category: History
What should I ask Annie Jacobsen?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Annie Jacobsen (born June 28, 1967) is an American investigative journalist, author, and a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. She writes for and produces television programs, including Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan for Amazon Studios, and Clarice for CBS. She was a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine from 2009 until 2012.
Jacobsen writes about war, weapons, security, and secrets. Jacobsen is best known as the author of the 2011 non-fiction book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, which The New York Times called “cauldron-stirring.”[ She is an internationally acclaimed and sometimes controversial author who, according to one critic, writes sensational books by addressing popular conspiracies.
I very much liked her book Nuclear War: A Scenario. Do read the Wikipedia entry for a full look at what she has written. So what should I ask her?
The Political Economy of Protective Labor Laws for Women
From a new NBER working paper:
During the first half of the twentieth century, many US states enacted laws restricting women’s labor market opportunities, including maximum hours restrictions, minimum wage laws, and night-shift bans. The era of so-called protective labor laws came to an end in the 1960s as a result of civil rights reforms. In this paper, we investigate the political economy behind the rise and fall of these laws. We argue that the main driver behind protective labor laws was men’s desire to shield themselves from labor market competition. We spell out the mechanism through a politico-economic model in which singles and couples work in different sectors and vote on protective legislation. Restrictions are supported by single men and couples with male sole earners who compete with women for jobs. We show that the theory’s predictions for when protective legislation will be introduced are well supported by US state-level evidence.
That is by Matthias Doepke, Hanno Foerster, Anne Hannusch, and Michèle Tertilt.
The Library Burned Slowly
A powerful but grim essay by John McGinnis, Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern. For decades, the federal government—driven by the left—expanded its control over universities. The right, most notably Ronald Reagan, tried to resist, shielding civil society from state overreach. They failed. Now, a new right has turned to the left’s playbook and is imposing its own vision of the good society. Chris Rufo mocks classical liberals like myself and their naive ideas of neutrality, fairness and open institutions. Principles are for losers. Seize power! Crush your enemies. Rufo does know how to crush his enemies. But what happens when the devil turns? Bludgeoning your enemies is fun while it lasts but you can’t bludgeon your way to a civilization. Hayek’s civil society dies in the rubble.
It seems remarkable that seemingly antisemitic protests by undergraduates, such as those at my own university of Northwestern, could threaten the biomedical research funding of its medical school. But the structure of civil rights laws as applied to universities has long allowed the federal government to cut off funding to the entire university based on the wrongful actions of particular units or departments.
Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach, bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.
…Clumsy governmental dictates on contentious matters such as transgender rights do not merely settle disputes; they inflame societal divisions by transforming moral disagreements into winner-takes-all political battles. Civil society, by contrast, thrives precisely because it embraces diversity and facilitates compromise, allowing pluralistic communities to coexist peacefully without being conscripted into ideological warfare. The left, fixated upon uniform outcomes, consistently undervalues the power of voluntary cooperation and cultural persuasion. Their shortsightedness has delivered into the hands of their opponents the very instruments of coercion they forged, vividly confirming an enduring truth: the power you grant government today will inevitably be wielded tomorrow by your adversaries.
Read the whole thing.
The Prophet’s Paradox
The political problem of disaster preparedness is especially acute for the most useful form, disaster avoidance. The problem with avoiding a disaster is that success often renders itself invisible. The captain of the Titanic is blamed for hitting the iceberg, but how much credit would he have received for avoiding it?
Consider a pandemic. When early actions—such as testing and quarantine, ring vaccination, and local lockdowns—prevent a pandemic, those inconvenienced may question whether the threat was ever real. Indeed, one critic of this paper pointed to warnings about ozone depletion and skin cancer in the 1980s as an example of exaggeration and a predicted disaster that did not happen. Of course, one of the reasons the disaster didn’t happen was the creation of the Montreal Protocol to reduce ozone-depleting substances (Jovanović et al. 2019; Tabarrok and Canal 2023). The Montreal Protocol is often called the world’s most successful international agreement, but it is not surprising that we don’t credit it for skin cancers that didn’t happen. I call this the prophet’s paradox: the more the prophet is believed beforehand, the less they are credited afterward.
The prophet’s paradox can undermine public support for proactive measures. The very effectiveness of these interventions creates a perception that they were unnecessary, as the dire outcomes they prevented are never realized. Consequently, policymakers face a challenging dilemma: the better they manage a potential crisis, the more likely it is that the public will perceive their actions as overreactions. Success can paradoxically erode trust and make it more difficult to implement necessary measures in future emergencies. Hence, politicians are paid to deal with emergencies not to avoid them (Healy and Malhotra 2009).
Since politicians are incentivized to deal with rather than avoid emergencies it is perhaps not surprising to find that this attitude was built into the planning process. Thus, the UK COVID Inquiry (2024, 3.17) found that:
Planning was focused on dealing with the impact of the disease rather than preventing its spread.
Even more pointedly Matt Hancock testified (UK COVID Inquiry 2024, 4.18):
Instead of a strategy for preventing a pandemic having a disastrous effect, it [was] a strategy for dealing with the disastrous effect of a pandemic.
From my paper, Pandemic preparation without romance.
Pandemic Preparation Without Romance
My latest paper, Pandemic Preparation Without Romance, has just appeared at Public Choice.
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic, despite its unprecedented scale, mirrored previous disasters in its predictable missteps in preparedness and response. Rather than blaming individual actors or assuming better leadership would have prevented disaster, I examine how standard political incentives—myopic voters, bureaucratic gridlock, and fear of blame—predictably produced an inadequate pandemic response. The analysis rejects romantic calls for institutional reform and instead proposes pragmatic solutions that work within existing political constraints: wastewater surveillance, prediction markets, pre-developed vaccine libraries, human challenge trials, a dedicated Pandemic Trust Fund, and temporary public–private partnerships. These mechanisms respect political realities while creating systems that can ameliorate future pandemics, potentially saving millions of lives and trillions in economic damage.
Here’s one bit:
…in the aftermath of an inadequate government response to an emergency, we often hear calls to reorganize and streamline processes and to establish a single authority with clear responsibility and decision-making power to overcome bureaucratic gridlock. By centralizing authority, it is argued that the government can respond more swiftly and effectively, reducing the inefficiencies caused by a fragmented system.
Yet, the tragedy of the anti-commons was also cited to explain the failure of the government after 9/11. Indeed, the Department of Homeland Security was created to centralize a fragmented system and allow it to act with alacrity. Isn’t a pandemic a threat to homeland security? And what about the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009? While not nearly as deadly as the COVID pandemic, 60 million Americans were sickened, some 274 thousand hospitalized with over 12 thousand deaths (Shresha et al. 2011). Wasn’t this enough practice to act swiftly?
Rather than advocating for a reorganization of bureaucracies, I propose accepting the tragedy of the anti-commons as an inevitable reality. The tragedy of the commons is an equilibrium outcome of modern-day bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has its reasons and some of those reasons may even be reasonable (Wittman 1995). It is too much to expect the same institution to respond to the ordinary demands of day-to-day politics and to the very different demands of emergencies. Indeed, when an institution evolves to meet the demands of day-to-day politics it inevitably develops culture, procedures and processes that are not optimized for emergencies.
Instead of rearranging organization charts we should focus on what has proven effective: the creation of ad-hoc, temporary, public–private organizations. Two notable examples are Operation Warp Speed in the United States and the British Vaccine Taskforce. These entities were established quickly and operated outside regular government channels, free from the typical procurement, hiring, or oversight rules that hinder standard bureaucracies.
…Operation Warp Speed exemplified the “American Model” of emergency response. Rather than relying on command-and-control or government production, the American Model leverages the tremendous purchasing power of the US government with the agility and innovation of the private sector.
The only problem with the “American Model” was its inconsistent application.
I am especially fond of this paper because it is the first, to my knowledge, to cite separate papers from Alex, Maxwell and Connor Tabarrok.
Addendum: This paper isn’t about lockdowns. It’s about avoiding lockdowns!
*The German Empire, 1871-1918*
By Roger Chickering, this is so far the best book I have read this year, and I knew that within the first fifty pages (or less). It is everything one could want from a book on this very important country and time period. Likely I will report more on it as I read more, for the moment here is one excerpt:
Together, the new smelting techniques had driven the price of crude steel in Europe down nearly 90 percent by the end of the nineteenth century. In Germany, the results of this trend registered in a thirty-fold increase in the annual production of steel between 1879 and 1913. Thanks in great part to the iron fields of Lorraine, German output overtook British annual production in 1893; by 1913, German mills produced more steel than their British, French, and Russian counterparts combined. Much of this steel was poured into the German railways. Rail networks were extended; primarily at the insistence of the army, trunk lines were enlarged to two, in some cases four tracks. Iron rails were replaced with more durable steel. Wheels, axles, couplings, and wagons were modernized into steel, as were bridges. These substitutions not only made railroads faster but also increased their capacity. Meanwhile, palaces of rail travel emerged out of metal and glass as the great train stations of Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, and Germany’s other main cities. Late in the century travel along the steel rails also expanded in the form of tramways onto the streets of the cities themselves.
It is wonderful on the politics of the time as well, for instance tracing out the rise of Bismarck, or how the rivalries between Prussia and Austria shaped so many issues at the time. You can buy the book here.
I never knew Joseph Smith ran for President
Eventually, Smith declared himself a candidate for the White House. His proposed platform was an awkward conglomeration of popular, though incongruent, principles including restoring the national bank, cutting Congress members’ salaries, annexing Texas, and instituting the gradual abolition of slavery. Hundreds of Mormon men, including Brigham Young, swarmed the nation campaigning for their prophet to become president.
That is from the new and excellent Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism. An excellent book, good enough to make the year’s best non-fiction list.
I also learned recently (from Utah, not from this book) that early Mormons would drink alcohol and “Brigham Young even operated a commercial distillery east of Salt Lake City, and his southern‐Utah “Dixie Wine Mission” (1860s‑80s) was organized to supply sacramental, medicinal, and commercial wine for the territory.” By the time Prohibition rolled around, however, Mormons were close to completely “dry.”
Parallels between our current time and 17th century England
That is the topic of my recent essay for The Free Press. Excerpt:
Ideologically, the English 17th century was weird above all else.
Millenarianism blossomed, and the occult and witchcraft became stronger obsessions. This was an age of religious and economic upheaval; King James I even wrote a book partly about witches called Daemonologie. The greater spread of pamphlets and books meant that witch accusations circulated more widely and more rapidly, and so the 1604 Witchcraft Act applied harsher punishments to supposed witches.
People were more likely to fear imminent transformation, and new groups sprouted up with names such as “Fifth Monarchy Men,” devoted to the idea that a new reign of Christ would usher in the end of the world. Protestantism splintered, giving rise to Puritanism and numerous sects, many of them extreme.
Meanwhile, Roger Williams brought ideas of free speech and freedom of conscience to America, founding what later became the state of Rhode Island. The development of economics as a science with an understanding of markets (credit Nicholas Barbon and Dudley North) dates from that time, as do the first libertarians, namely the Levellers, a liberty-oriented group from the time of the English Civil War.
All of these developments were supported by the falling price of printing, giving rise to an extensive use of pamphlets and broadsheets to communicate and debate ideas, often in London coffeehouses. Johannes Gutenberg had built the printing press for Europe much earlier, in the middle of the 15th century—but 17th-century England was the time and place when a commercial middle class could start to afford buying printed works.
I explore the parallels with today at the link, recommended.
Nikolaus Matthes finishes The Art of the Fugue
My Conversation with the excellent Sheilagh Ogilvie
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Sheilagh discuss the economic impacts of historical pandemics, the “happy story” of the Black Death and why it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, the history of variolation and how entrepreneurs created vaccination franchises in 18th-century England, why local communities typically managed epidemics better than central authorities, the dastardly nature of medieval guilds, the European marriage pattern and its disputed contribution to economic growth, when sustained economic growth truly began in England, why the Dutch Republic stagnated despite its early success, whether she agrees with Greg Clark’s social mobility hypothesis, her experience and conducting “anthropological fieldwork” on English social customs, the communitarian norms she encountered while living in Germany, her upcoming research project on European serfdom, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
OGILVIE: …If you were a teenager in an English village in the 18th century and you were deciding, “I’m going to move to London and get a job,” you and your friendship group from the village would all go into the nearest town and pay a commercial variolator. You’d all get smallpox together. You’d go back to your village. You’d suffer through this mild case of smallpox, and then you would be immunized for life, assuming that you hadn’t died. You would go off to London and seek your fortune. It was very much a normal teenage thing to do.
There was this incredible franchising set up in England. It was like a McDonald’s, but to get variolated. There were these entrepreneurs who advertised themselves as having lower-risk ways of getting immunized and cheaper ways of getting immunized. There was this famous family of the Suttons that started a franchise in 18th-century England in the 1750s. Then they spread into the continent of Europe and actually into North America.
COWEN: You would have done it back then?
OGILVIE: Oh, definitely.
COWEN: With enthusiasm.
And this:
COWEN: You’ve now lived in England for well over 30 years. What’s been your biggest surprise about the place, if anything has stuck?
OGILVIE: It keeps on surprising me. I’ve actually lived here for more than 46 years. I moved here as an undergraduate. I came here when I was 16, and I feel as if I’m still doing anthropological fieldwork on the behavioral patterns of these strange local tribes. There are these systematic things — they’re charming, but they’re very strange.
For instance, just to give one example, English people are very reserved. I get on with that because Canadians are fairly reserved as well. It’s okay to talk to people in your neighborhood if they have a dog with them. That’s a conversation mediator. Or if you are gardening in your front garden, but if you’re in your back garden, you’re not supposed to talk to people. It’s taken me a few decades to observe this as an empirical regularity.
Nobody ever tells you that this is how you’re supposed to behave, but if you keep your field notebooks going as an anthropologist, you begin to notice the tribal patterns of the English. I must like them, since here I still am after more than four decades.
Recommended.
That was then, this is now — Liverpool heliport edition
For a brief moment in the mid-1950s, it seemed as if Liverpool’s transportation system was about to be revolutionised, not by cars, trams, buses or ferries, but instead by helicopters. As strange as it may seem, Liverpool was at the forefront of a flurry of interest from planners and politicians who imagined that an age of mass helicopter transit was just around the corner. With their vertical life, small size and ability to land on the roofs of buildings, helicopters seemed ideal for short trips between and even within cities. From 1953, Liverpool’s City Engineer, Henry Hough, began to draw up plans for a network of heliports that would connect seamlessly with buses and form the basis of an integrated ground and sky transit system…After flirting with the idea of using floating pontoons in the Mersey to land helicopters, he settled on plans for a new integrated bus and helicopter station on a patch of bombed ground between Paradise Street and Canning Place.
That is from the new Sam Wetherell book Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain. All those plans ended, however, as the popularity of the car spread amongst Liverpool residents.
More broadly, the book has quite a bit of useful and interesting content, though reading it you would never realize that Liverpool today is a far wealthier place than in times past. It seems always to be in decline. There is also too much “fashionable left-wing jargon,” plus an unwillingness to stress that capital accumulation is what boosts wages. Will books like this one ever be willing to shed those features?
Canada and America in Better Times
On November 4, 1979, a mob of radical university students and supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, surged over the wall and occupied the US Embassy in Tehran. Fifty two Americans were taken hostage but six evaded capture. Hiding out for days, the escapees managed to contact Canadian diplomat John Sheardown and Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and asked for help. The Government of Canada reports:
Taylor didn’t hesitate. The Americans would be given shelter – the question was where. Because the Canadian Chancery was right downtown, it was far too dangerous. It would be better to split up the Americans. Taylor decided Sheardown should take three of hostages to his house, while he would house the others at the official residence. They would be described to staff as tourists visiting from Canada. Taylor immediately began drafting a cable for Ottawa.
…Taylor’s telegram set off a frenzy of consultation in the Department of External Affairs….Michael Shenstone, immediately concurred that Canada had no choice but to shelter the fugitives. Under-Secretary Allan Gotlieb agreed. Given the danger the Americans were in, he noted, there was “in all conscience…no alternative but to concur” despite the risk to Canadians and Canadian property.
The Minister, Flora MacDonald, could not be immediately reached as she was involved in a television interview. However, when finally informed of the situation, she agreed that Taylor must be permitted to act…[Prime Minister Joe Clark was pulled] from Question Period in the House of Commons, she briefed him on the situation and obtained his immediate go-ahead. Soon after, a telegram was sent to Tehran – Taylor could act to save the Americans. He was told that knowledge of the situation would be on a strict “need-to-know” basis.
The CIA reports:
The exfiltration task was daunting–the six Americans had no intelligence background; planning required extensive coordination within the US and Canadian governments; and failure not only threatened the safety of the hostages but also posed considerable risk of worldwide embarrassment to the US and Canada.
…After careful consideration of numerous options, the chosen plan began to take shape. Canadian Parliament agreed to grant Canadian passports to the six Americans. The CIA team together with an experienced motion-picture consultant devised a cover story so exotic that it would not likely draw suspicions–the production of a Hollywood movie.
The team set up a dummy company, “Studio Six Productions,” with offices on the old Columbia Studio lot formerly occupied by Michael Douglas, who had just completed producing The China Syndrome. This upstart company titled its new production “Argo” after the ship that Jason and the Argonauts sailed in rescuing the Golden Fleece from the many-headed dragon holding it captive in the sacred garden–much like the situation in Iran. The script had a Middle Eastern sci-fi theme that glorified Islam. The story line was intentionally complicated and difficult to decipher. Ads proclaimed Argo to be a “cosmic conflagration” written by Teresa Harris (the alias selected for one of the six awaiting exfiltration).
President Jimmy Carter approved the rescue operation.
The American diplomats escaped and all the Canadians quickly exited before the Iranian government realized what had happened. The Canadian embassy was closed. The story of the ex-filtration is told in the excellent movie, Argo, directed by and starring Ben Affleck. (The movie ups the American involvement for Hollywood but is still excellent.)
The CIA reports on what happened when the Americans made it back home:
News of the escape and Canada’s role quickly broke. Americans went wild in celebrating their appreciation to Canada and its Embassy staff. The maple leaf flew in a hundred cities and towns across the US. Billboards exclaimed “Thank you Canada!” Full-page newspaper ads expressed American’s thanks to its neighbors to the north. Thirty-thousand baseball fans cheered Canada’s Ambassador to Iran and the six rescued Americans, honored guests at a game in Yankee Stadium.
I remember this time well because my father, a professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Toronto, happened to be giving a talk in Boston when the news broke. He was immediately mobbed by appreciative Americans, who thanked him, clapped him on the back, and bought him drinks. My father was moved by the American response but was also somewhat bemused, considering he was also Iranian. (Though, in truth, my father was the ideal Canadian and he had his own experiences exfiltrating people from Iran—but that story remains Tabarrok classified.)
Some history of higher education
To Dr. Damrosch, who has studied academic culture at colleges, the current turmoil was vaguely reminiscent of a 1940s episode at the school now known as Iowa State University.
The school’s economics department — in a paper on economic policy for wartime food production — had proposed replacing butter with margarine, said Dr. Damrosch. The dairy industry and its supporters in the state legislature “went ballistic,” he said, pressuring the school’s president to place the department under receivership.
The move triggered an immediate backlash and mass departure of faculty members.
It might have also played a small role in the reshaping of the higher education landscape: At least six professors fled to Chicago, where they helped build one of the most renowned economics departments in the world.
Here is the full NYT piece, mostly about Columbia, via Anecdotal.
What should I ask Helen Castor?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Helen Ruth Castor FRSL (born 4 August 1968) is a British historian of the medieval and Tudor period and a BBC broadcaster. She taught history at the University of Cambridge and is the author of books including Blood and Roses (2004) and She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (2010). Programmes she has presented include BBC Radio 4‘s Making History and She-Wolves on BBC Four. Her most recent book is The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (2024).
I very much liked her last book in particular. And here is a good interview with her. So what should I ask her?
Why Spain’s transition to democracy remains controversial
New podcast series on Latin American political economy, with Rasheed Griffith and Diego Sánchez de la Cruz, all in English.