Category: History

In a review of Armageddon, a book on WWII by Max Hastings, James Sheehan makes the following bizarre remark.

Hastings recognizes that the generals’ failure to knock Germany out of
the war in late 1944 reflected the kind of armies they led as much as
their own deficiencies as leaders. The British and American armies were
composed of citizen soldiers, who were usually prepared to do their
duty but were also eager to survive.

The corollary being that citizens of non-democracies were not eager to survive and therefore made better warriors.  Uh huh.  I could go on but Brad DeLong has a great smackdown.

…the best estimates now available suggest no acceleration in the rate of growth of national product per head in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and that one of the implications of this revision of the previous orthodoxy is that the English economy…was much more productive in the middle of the eighteenth century than was once supposed…it is unlikely that England enjoyed any advantage over her neighbours in this regard in the sixteenth century.  It would be a major surprise, therefore, if the revised view of the situation c.1750 did not imply that the rate of growth of national product per head for a century or more before 1750 was as high as, or higher than, it was in the century next following.

This turns the spotlight on agriculture, whose centrality to all organic economies is clear by definition.  It must figure prominently in any quest for the industrial revolution, despite its apparent exclusion by the oddities of nomenclature.

There are more shocks.  Between 1600 and 1800 English per capita income rose by no more than 0.35 percent a year.  (At the same time population was roughly doubling, from about 4.2 to 8.7 million.)  Such a measured growth rate may sound low but by the standards of the time it was miraculously high.  Other economies tended to hold steady or shrink in per capita income, especially in light of growing population.

Could it be that England’s ability to manage per capita growth above zero percent, for an extended period of time, is what give birth to the modern world?  Was the Netherlands, with its earlier period of growth and urbanization, in fact the true leader?

On all these issues, and many others, read the new and fascinating collection of essays by E.A. Wrigley, Poverty, Progress, and Population.

My favorite part:

In The Wealth of Nations, at least, Smith believes that he has
an extraordinarily penetrating and largely new insight: that the market
economy–the "system of natural liberty," he calls it–as an immensely
powerful and benevolent social mechanism for promoting general
prosperity. This is, Smith believes, cause for a revolution in how we
should think about Political Oeconomy. The power and benevolence of the
market is not the only important consideration to take into account in
thinking about questions of Political Oeconomy, but it is the most
important consideration–as important, relatively speaking, as is the
gravity of the sun in calculating the motions of the planets. Just as
you cannot ignore the influence of Jupiter or even the Earth when
calculating the orbit of Mars, so you cannot ignore considerations of
civic humanism or employer collusion or monopoly in thinking about
Political Oeconomy. But to not give pride of place to Smith’s love of
the "system of natural liberty" is to be false to Smith’s thought. And
the guy deserves more respect than that.

Read more here.

In the 1830s a man, every business day, would climb to the top of the dome of the Merchant’s Exchange on Wall Street, where the New York Stock and Exchange Board then held its auctions.  There he would signal the opening prices to a man in Jersey City, across the Hudson.  That man would signal them in turn to a man at the next steeple or hill, and the prices could reach Philadelphia in about thirty minutes.

That is from John Steele Gordon’s excellent An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power.  Here is my previous post on the book.

By the 1830s ice had become a very profitable American export.  In 1833 American ice was being shipped as far as Calcutta, when the Tuscany, which had sailed from Boston on May 12, reached the mouth of the Ganges on September 5.  Calcutta, one of the hottest and most humid cities on earth, and then the capital of British India, was ninety miles up the Hooghly River, and the population awaited the ice with breathless anticipation.  The India Gazette demanded that the ice be admitted duty free and that permission be granted to unload the ice in the cool of the evening.  Authorities quickly granted the demands.  Frederic Tudor managed to get about a hundred tons of ice to Calcutta, and the British there gratefully bought it all at a profit for the American investors of about $10,000.

By the 1850s American ice was being exported regularly to nearly all tropical ports, including Rio de Janeiro, Bombay, Madras, Hong Kong, and Batavia (now Jakarta).  In 1847 about twenty-three thousand tons of ice was shipped out of Boston to foreign ports on ninety-five ships, while nearly fifty-two thousand tons was shipped to southern American ports.

That is from John Steele Gordon’s An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Power.  This new book is the best single volume treatment of American economic history I have read, highly recommended.  Here is a review, and note that the book’s perspective is Hamiltonian, not Jeffersonian.

And here is more on the ice trade.  Here are good photos of the Norwegian ice trade, and yes they were exporters not importers.

“The Cost of This Building was 495,544 Rupees”

Carved into Prince Albert Hall, erected in Jaipur, India in 1886. It is also known as Ram Niwas Garden Central Museum.

Here is the obituary, here is a New York Times account.

Do you ever find the history of the ancient world baffling? Grant’s books have been the place to go. Here is his book on the ancient Mediterranean, but read the whole lot.

Being here is number one at the moment, but here are a few specifics:

1. My favorite Indian musician – I have to go with Zakir Hussain; yes the CDs are wonderful but they do not compare with seeing him live. Honorary mentions go to Ali Akhbar Khan (sarod) and L. Subramaniam (violin).

2. My favorite Indian movie – Bollywood stands or falls as a whole, but if I had to pick one film, it is the classic Mother India; this 1957 movie is arguably the defining moment of Indian cinema.

3. My favorite Indian novel – Rushdie is the obvious favorite, but I will opt for Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Better than any Dickens but Bleak House. And did you know that he was an errant economics Ph.d. student at Stanford when he wrote the manuscript?

4. My favorite Indian artist – Indian miniatures are a favorite, but we must go with named artists for this category. How about Nandalal Bose, the Bengali painter from the early twentieth century? Here are more nice pictures by him.

5. Favorite Indian chess player – Vishwanathan Anand is a no-brainer. India has a history of supercalculators, so how about this guy? You give him two and a half hours on his clock and he still uses only thirty minutes, and that is against world class competition. He used to be ranked number two in the world, though he has slipped in the last few years.

The influence of Milton Friedman in ending conscription is well-known. But an economist named William Meckling arguably played a larger role, read the story. Many of you will know that Meckling, working with Michael Jensen, made seminal contributions to the theory of the debt-equity ratio. Here’s hoping that Congress meant its recent vote.

And consider these words from David Henderson:

Many of you who have made or are now making your fortunes would not have done so if the draft had been in the way. Consider Bill Gates, who in 1975 dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft: during the draft years, young men like him who left college risked being certified as prime military meat. Computer programmers and other IT workers, who often do their best work relatively early in life, regularly drop out of college now because high-paying, interesting jobs beckon. If we still had the draft — even a peacetime draft — many wouldn’t have that chance.

People often wonder why today’s 20-somethings have such entrepreneurial spirit. One reason, I believe, is that a whole generation has grown up without the draft looming over its head.

Thanks to Bryan Caplan for the pointer.

The board game that is, not the economic phenomenon. It appears to have sprung from the Henry George movement. George, of course, was obsessed with land monopoly and its unproductive rents. It is no accident that the board game assigns such extortionary power to landholders:

On January 5, 1904, Lizzie J. Magie, a Quaker woman from Virginia, received a patent (view patent) for a board game. Lizzie Magie belonged to a tax movement led by Philadelphia-born Henry George; the movement supported the theory that the renting of land and real estate produced an unearned increase in land values that profited a few individuals (landlords) rather than the majority of the people (tenants). Henry George proposed a single federal tax based on land ownership believing a single tax would discourage speculation and encourage equal opportunity.

Lizzie Magie wanted to use her game, which she called “The Landlord’s Game” as a teaching device for George’s ideas. The Landlord’s Game and Monopoly are very similar, except all the properties in Magie’s game are rented not acquired as in Monopoly and instead of names like “Park Place” and “Marvin Gardens” one finds “Poverty Place”, “Easy Street” and “Lord Blueblood’s Estate”. The objectives of each game are also very different. In Monopoly the idea of the game is to buy and rent or sell property so profitably that one becomes the wealthiest player and eventually monopolist. In The Landlord’s Game, the object was to illustrate how (under the system of land tenure) the landlord had an advantage over other enterprisers and to show how the single tax could discourage speculation.

When I was young I had a counterproductive obsession with owning the yellow properties.

Here is the full story. Here is an NPR account of the origins of monopoly. I am indebted to an email from Lauren Landsburg and Russ Roberts for the initial historical reference.