Category: History
The Conquest of Nature
I had not realized how man-made and engineered the Rhine was, and how early this occurred:
This was the largest civil engineering project that had ever been undertaken in Germany. The Rhine between Basel and Worms was shortened from 220 to 170 miles, almost a quarter of its length. Dozens of cuts were made, more than twenty-two hundred islands removed. Along the stretch between Basel and Strasbourg alone, well over a billion square yards of island or peninsula were excavated and 160 miles of main dikes constructed containing 6.5 million cubic yards of material. During the 1860s the number of fascines being used was running at up to 800,000 a year.
That is from David Blackburn’s The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. This history of water engineering is not a book for all of you, but if you think you might like it, you will.
Addendum: Elsewhere on the new book front, Niall Ferguson is a splendid author, but his new The War of the World doesn’t add much.
Malthus
Jacob, one member of the class of the loyal, asks:
I have only two questions.
Was Thomas Robert Malthus a classical liberal? What were his major
contributions to classical liberalism?
Of course I turn to my colleague David Levy and his co-author Sandra Peart, here and here. Levy and Peart read Malthus as defending the ability of poor people to elevate themselves through moral restraint, criticizing the use of paternalistic experts, and rejecting eugenics. He was neither a pessimist who thought mankind was doomed to subsistence, nor an idiot who failed to grasp technological progress.
I view Malthus as a tempered social revisionist who knocked down myths, thought in terms of social science mechanisms (he had both supply and demand and Keynesian macro in surprisingly sophisticated forms, not to mention an early form of Darwin’s theory of evolution), and was painfully aware of the importance of contingent human choices. He is one of the five most underrated, and also least understood, economists. To be sure, he favored small government and opposed the Poor Laws. But he was skeptical enough about the notion of a voluntary self-regulating order that I would not quite call him a classical liberal. I read his economics as starting with the Bible, and asking whether any mechanisms might bring us to a less tragic outcome than what is found in the Old Testament. He was never quite sure of the answer, and his mix of moralizing and skepticism later attracted Keynes.
The Dark Ages were Dark
It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both the East and the West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form. However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view; it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries. This was a change that affected everyone, from peasants to kings, even the bodies of saints resting in their churches. It was no mere transformation — it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization.’
That is from Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. This recent book is the best integration of archaeology and economics I have seen; it is also a first-rate economic history in its own right, as well as a history of pottery. Highly recommended for those who think they might like it.
Fiasco, III
Don’t be distracted by Alex’s libertarian rhetoric on foreign
policy. It would not produce a very libertarian world. It would lead
to um…fiasco. Ask around in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, or for that
matter Honest Europe. That’s most of the free world. Can anyone else protect Singapore or New Zealand?
Had Alex his way, the first Gulf War never would have
happened. Saddam and his sons would rule Iraq, owning both Kuwaiti oil
revenue and nuclear weapons, and probably itching for a rematch with
Iran. Sound like fun?
It is palatable to oppose the second Gulf War only because we fought the first.
Fiasco
In Fiasco, Thomas Ricks says the war on Iraq and subsequent occupation was ill-conceived, incompetently planned and poorly executed. I have no quarrel with that. What dismays me is that anyone expected any different. All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies. War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale. The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.
If this war has been worse on these scores than others, and I have my doubts, we can at least be thankful that the scale of death and destruction has been smaller. At the Battle of the Somme there were a million casualties and 300,000 deaths over the course of a few months. If we remember previous wars more fondly this is only because those wars we won. Incompetent planning and poor execution are not fatal so long as the other side plans and executes yet more incompetently.
Is this a suggestion to put the current war in context? Not at all. It is suggestion to put government in context.
Did tariffs boost 19th century U.S. economic growth?
It is a common view that the growth experience of the United States represents a strong case for the "infant industry" argument for protection. Bill Lazonick told us this repeatedly in my Harvard history of thought class. But is it true? Via Ben Muse, Douglas Irwin says no:
Were high import tariffs somehow related to the strong U.S. economic growth during the late nineteenth century? One paper investigates the multiple channels by which tariffs could have promoted growth during this period. I found that 1) late nineteenth century growth hinged more on population expansion and capital accumulation than on productivity growth; 2) tariffs may have discouraged capital accumulation by raising the price of imported capital goods; and 3) productivity growth was most rapid in non-traded sectors (such as utilities and services) whose performance was not directly related to the tariff.
Jonathan Swift, a father of micro-credit
Swift was so, so, so smart and also hilariously funny. Recently I learned that he was one of the early progenitors of micro-credit. He started the Irish Loan Funds in the early 1700s to provide credit –without collateral — to the poor of Dublin. These loan funds started on a charitable basis but continued to grow and play a positive role in alleviating Irish poverty throughout the nineteenth century. Here is one account. Here is a broader piece on the history of microfinance. Here is a history of the Irish Loan Funds.
Here is Swift on reforming the coinage.
What caused the Agricultural Revolution?
I have long assumed (without much evidence) that mankind invented agriculture about 10,000 years ago because we suddenly, for some reason, became smarter. Now I see an alternative explanation:
It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the
globe, it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have,
that this is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly
this is not true. They needed the power of flooding, which scoured
landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I
think, that agriculture arose independently and simultaneously around
the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of enormous upheaval
when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal waves of
erosion. It was a time of catastrophe.
Here is the source. Should I take the author seriously? Most of the article is terrible.
His main kind of argument — thinking about food in terms of energy costs — is popping up more and more. No, I don’t think a quick perusal of Debreu’s Theory of Value refutes the resource pessimists, but a) the author rarely talks about the role of prices, and b) technological efficiency and economic efficiency are confused frequently.
Perhaps most disturbingly, a healthy, wealthy, and happy human life is considered a burden upon the earth. For instance we are told that if the entire world lived like the United States, fossil fuels would run out within seven year’s time, or maybe ten. What a horror such a world would be. There is no talk of how much higher the rate of invention would be, or how much we would save by having better institutions.
By the way, here is my highly relevant post on the economics of mulch.
Immigration and regional wage rates
I was reading the interesting-but-not-nearly-as-good-as-it could-have-been Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America, by Eric Rauchway. The main argument concerns how modern-day America is rooted in choices from the early twentieth century. I came across the following passage:
The great push of people west across the oceans and west again across the continent passed the South by. Its people lived in an eddy of the global flow that entered the country at New York (where almost a quarter of the new immigrants stayed) and sluiced along the rail lines to California. Indeed, in the wash of this passing current, the South was losing its own labor force, more swiftly each year, as black workers left their homes looking for the better chances they had heard about in the North and West. Of those who left the South, the largest part (about 40 percent) went to the industrial states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Illinois…
OK, this is not a controlled experiment. But we have one part of the country — the North — taking in many immigrants. The South is losing a great deal of its unskilled, low-education labor at the same time, and it is losing that labor to the North. Think of that as additional immigration into the North and of course away from the South.
I am far away from home and have no access to data. Does anyone know? If we look at the wages of native white Americans — in the South and in the North — over this same period of time, where do people fare better?
Please leave your knowledge in the comments.
Why did the electric car die?
David Friedman cites one critic of the idea:
General Motors lost two billion
dollars on the project, and lost money on every single EV1 produced.
The leases didn’t even cover the costs of servicing them.The
range of 130 miles is bogus. None of them ever achieved that under
normal driving conditions. Running the air conditioning or heater could
halve that range. Even running the headlights reduced it by 10%.
Minimum
recharge time was two hours using special charging stations that except
for fleet use didn’t exist. The effective recharge time, using the
equipment that could be installed in a lessee’s garage, was eight
hours. …NiMH
batteries that had lasted up to three years in testing were failing
after six months in service. There was no way to keep them from
overheating without doubling the size of the battery pack. Lead-acid
batteries were superior to NiMH in actual daily use.
Believe it or not, it wasn’t because of an oil company conspiracy. Here is an article on the importance of range. Here is a negative review of the new movie on the electric car.
Markets in Everything: Child Brides
Another sad one (from the NYT Magazine):
In Afghanistan, a child bride is very often just that: a child, even a preteen,
her innocence betrothed to someone older, even much, much older. Rather than a willing union between a man and woman, marriage is frequently a
transaction among families, and the younger the bride, the higher the price she
may fetch.
What is Robert Skidelsky doing?
That’s Lord Skidelsky, author of the excellent biographies of Keynes. His Oswald Mosley biography earned him much enmity in academia. And now?
Late in life, the historian and peer of the realm has re-connected with
his Russian roots. He has learned the language (he took his A-level at
the age of 64) and keeps a flat in Moscow. "I went there first in the
early 90s to research a book called The World After Communism," he
says. "Now I’ve started to feel more Russian, I go at least half a
dozen times a year." He also travels regularly in the other direction.
He is on the board of one of the most successful mutual funds in
America and is about to become a director of a large employment agency
in Florida. "I’m just modestly restoring the Skidelsky family fortune
after all those years in academia," he says.
Here is the full story, and thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.
Would I have supported the American Revolution?
These modal questions are tricky. Which "Tyler" is doing the choosing? (If I were an elephant, would pink be my favorite color? Living in 1773, have I at least still read Jonathan Swift? Would a modern teenage Thomas Jefferson have a crush on Veronica Mars?)
But think about it, wasn’t it more than a wee bit whacky? "Let’s cut free of the British Empire, the most successful society the world had seen to date, and go it alone against the French, the Spanish, and the Indians." [TC: they all seemed more formidable at the time than subsequently]
Taxes weren’t that high, especially by modern standards. The British got rid of slavery before we did. Might I have concluded the revolution was a bunch of rent-seekers trying to capture the governmental surplus for themselves?
Or would I have been swept up by love of liberty and love of ideas and the desire for adventure…?
Or would I have estimated the long-run political equilibrium and tried to calculate when would be the optimal time for a break, in which case 1776 seemed just about right, so as to capture the intellectual Enlightenment at its peak…
Those guys expected a re-flowering of Periclean Athens; few of them were or would have been ready for the subsequent levels of 19th century alcoholism, partisan political bickering, or the later cult of Princess Diana. What would I have expected?
What would James Madison expect today? And would he find a TV show worth watching?
Revolutionary Characters
If we want to know why we can never again replicate the extraordinary generation of the founders, there is a simple answer: the growth of what we today presumably value most about American society and culture, egalitarian democracy. In the early nineteenth century the voice of ordinary people, at least ordinary white people, began to be heard as never before in history, and they soon overwhelmed the high-minded desires and aims of the revolutionary leaders who had brought them into being. The founders had succeeded only too well in promoting democracy and equality among ordinary people; indeed, they succeeded in preventing any duplication of themselves.
That is from Gordon Wood’s new and excellent Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. It is in my view the best introduction to the lives and thoughts of the Founders.
I don’t, by the way, agree with the above quotation. The Founders were not the smartest Americans to have come down the pike. Instead they a) were extremely wise, and b) had a unique chance to be both great and famous because they were first. It has not exactly been a string of mediocrities since then, and of course there is more to American life besides the Presidency.
The Nutty Professor
Here’s an amazing piece of the life of Timothy Leary from the NYTimes book review of Timothy Leary: A Biography.
…he finally went to jail, and was likely to be kept there for years
before he would be considered for parole. Characteristically, he
compared himself to "Christ . . . harassed by Pilate and Herod." In a
twist that could have occurred only in 1970, a consortium of drug
dealers paid the Weather Underground to spring Leary from the
California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo – he pulled himself along a
telephone cable over the fence, then was picked up by a car – and
transport him to Algeria. He duly issued a press statement written in
the voice of the Weathermen, the money line of which was: "To shoot a
genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act."But
when he and his wife, Rosemary, arrived in Algiers, they found
themselves wards of the exiled Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver,
who was probably smarter than Leary, possibly crazier, and had little
use for him. As Leary acknowledged, rather shrewdly: "It was a new
experience for me to be dependent on a strong, variable, sexually
restless, charismatic leader who was insanely erratic. I usually played
that role myself."