Category: History

Chris Bertram writes in the comments of MR:

As it happens I spent some time in East Germany in 1984.  As I
recall, it was then claimed that the per capita GDP was comparable to
that of the UK.  It was immediately obvious to me that the standard of
living for most people was far far lower.  But real problem with East
Germany was not its comparative level of economic development or the
level of health care its citizens could receive (rather good,
actually).  It was the fact that it was a police state where people were
denied the basic liberties.

Given them those liberties and I think you’ve achieved most of
what’s morally important.  If they then choose a policy of more leisure
and lower growth or the opposite … that’s up to them.  I don’t think
it matters, morally speaking, that they are poorer than Americans are.

I am genuinely puzzled by this.  I visited East Berlin — supposedly the showcase of the country – in 1985.  Let me try to sound as superficial as possible, in light of the extreme poverty in Africa.

The food was terrible.  The cars were a joke, if you even had one.  There were hardly shops to be found.  I had to spend 40 or so "Ostmarks" and literally could not find a single thing I wanted.  I bought a Stendahl book and left the rest of the money on a bench.  Few people had the means to travel, even if politics had permitted it.  I am skeptical about the health care though I will admit I am not informed.  Had the relatively productive people been free to leave, this all would have been much worse.  It should also be noted that the country was neither donating much to Africa, nor taking in many immigrants, and again that is not just because of the politics. 

Chris and I have a very different notion of what is morally important.  I don’t wish to force anyone to be richer than East Berlin circa 1985, but if you give them liberty, almost everyone will try to exceed that level, and not just by a little bit.

Andrew Smith, a loyal MR reader, writes:

You said in one of your
recent MR posts that although you did not find the European model
sustainable over the long run, frequent trips to Europe revealed much
in the model that delighted you. I believe you singled out Stockholm…as being a particularly vivid illustration of all that
social democracy could do right.

I, too, am a free-market enthusiast who is delighted by
European cities, but when I think carefully about what delights me I
find that it is less anything developed since World War II and more the
remnants of the Europe that existed before the First World War.

First, there is the dense urban development that created
incredible communities from the rise of Venice in the Middle Ages to
the Paris that Haussmann created in the mid-19th century.  I cannot
think of a single community built mostly after World War I that has
much charm and those built mostly after WWII — like the tower
communities that ring Paris — are downright depressing, worse than any
of the strip malls and sprawl American capitalism has produced since
the war.

The regional cuisines, the sidewalk cafes, the specialty merchants, the distinctive aspects of each area’s art and music — it all came about before WWI and now lingers as
a slowly fading twilight of Europe’s high noon.  (True, farm subsidies and merchant regulations do help maintain the beautiful countryside and the small shops, but I think Europeans have enough passion for local that both things would mostly survive in a free market.)

 
What part of the Europe that you enjoy so much owes its existence to social democracy?  Just curious.

Excellent points.  My answer is twofold.  First, social democracy has kept Europe, its high standard of living, and its historical wonders, more or less intact.  Through much of 1914-194? this outcome was by no means obvious.  I am willing, at times, to resort to crude historicism.

Second, European social democracy offers its citizens the most wonderful vacations elsewhere.  I just don’t see how most Americans tolerate only two weeks’ vacation. 

(Mind you, I am not lazy; my vacations, done my way, are more strenuous than any work day.  In fact I consider a work day my source of relaxatoin.  If I have to relax, at least I want to be getting lots done.)

As an aside, I do find contemporary Finland visually attractive, and I believe Lille would please me also, from the photos I have seen.

In any case, Smith’s points should cause us to downgrade that "aesthetic halo of achievement" which social democracy has around many of our heads.

A lot, according to Comin, Easterly, and Gong:

We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 B.C., 0 A.D., and
1500 A.D. for the predecessors to today’s nation states.  We find that
this very old history of technology adoption is surprisingly
significant for today’s national development outcomes.  Although our
strongest results are for 1500 A.D., we find that even technology as
old as 1000 BC matters in some plausible specifications.

Here is the NBER version, here is a free version.

Kevin Drum writes:

…today’s colonials fight back.  Britain occupied India with a tiny force
because the Indians mostly let them, and on the rare occasions when
they rebelled the British (like all the other European colonial powers)
felt free to crush them in the most brutal manner imaginable.

No matter how we compare American and British brutalities (we dropped many bombs on Vietnam), I place greater stock in the railroad (later the car and bus) and the radio.  In the early days of British control, most Indians couldn’t get within shouting distance of a fight if they wanted to.  The Brits had only to control some key garrisoned cities and some trade routes.  Local rulers did the rest.  Radio, which spread in the 1920s, told people what was going on and cemented national consciousness.  Those technologies heralded the later end of colonialism, with WWII hurrying along the new equilibrium.

Might some future technology might render colonialism more likely (NB: I am not saying "more desirable")?  Extreme surveillance is one possiiblity, but this appears far off for poorer locales.  More likely is simply that rich countries buy the loyalty of some (smaller) poor countries, as the French seem to have done with Martinique.

If the world’s very poor countries stay in Malthusian traps, how long will it be before wealthy philanthropists can try to "adopt a country"?  Measured Haitian gdp, for instance, is only a few billion dollars a year (TC: don’t ask about the storms!).  Yes many countries have laws against foreign investment and land ownership, but at some point a correct strategy can put the money to good use.  Can an entire corrupt government simply be bought out?  Just how much money, and what kind of plan, would a private philanthropist need each year to turn Haiti around, or at least bring it to the standards of Martinique?

I’ve been reading The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare, by Brenda James and William Rubinstein.  The book’s major claim is that Sir Henry Neville wrote the works of William Shakespeare.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been one for conspiracy theories.  I even believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.  And I’ve never bought into the attribution of Shakespeare’s works to de Vere; the guy died too soon for the chronology to make sense.

But I found this book — no, "convincing" is too strong a word — but difficult to dismiss.  It has the first good arguments I’ve read that Shakespeare, were he the real guy, would have a very different paper trail than what we find.  Some of the plays appear to show detailed knowledge of the Continent that Shakespeare did not seem to have.  The topics of the plays match Neville’s life and experience closely, right down to the timing.  Some scenes from the plays match incidents from Neville’s life, down to some very particular numbers.

To be sure, there is no smoking gun.  It is all circumstancial evidence.  And we should remain skeptical toward speculative theses which captivate the giddy minds of scholars.  But — if this book were a blog post I would link to it.

Here is one brief summary of the argument.  Here is a short piece by Rubinstein.  Here is a CrookedTimber post.  Here is a Times story.  Here are links to critiques.

Optimistically, we find that adjustments to imbalances in the past have generally been smooth, even under a regime as hard as the gold standard.

Here is the full paper (non-gated here), which looks at international adjustments throughout history.  Here is a version of the slides.  On the more pessimistic side, return differentials across countries do not seem to persist.