Category: History
Economic growth and diet
…at that time [eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries] food constituted between 50 and 75 percent of the expenditures of laboring families…however…the energy value of the typical diet in France at the start of the eighteenth century was as low as that of Rwanda in 1965, the most malnourished nation for that year in the tables of the World Bank. England’s supply of food per capita exceeded that of France by several hundred calories but was still exceedingly low by current standards. Indeed, as late as 1850, the English availability of calories hardly matched the current Indian level.
Not surprisingly, meat was not a major source of calories in earlier times.
One implication of these low-level diets needs to be stressed: Even prime-age males had only a meager amount of energy available for work.
And get this:
…the average efficiency of the human engine in Britain increased by about 53 percent between 1790 and 1980. The combined effect of the increase in dietary energy available for work, and of the increased human efficiency in transforming dietary energy into work output, appears to account for about 50 percent of the British economic growth since 1790.
Keep all that in mind next time you despair about the modern world. The data and quotation are from Robert Fogel’s The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death.
Into the Fire
May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love give us love
May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love bring us love
You gave your love to see, in fields of red and autumn brown
You gave your love to me and lay your young body down
Up the stairs, into the fire
Up the stairs, into the fire
I need you near, but love and duty called you someplace higher
Somewhere up the stairs, into the fire
May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love give us love
May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love bring us love
May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love bring us love
It was dark, too dark to see, you held me in the light you gave
You lay your hand on me
Then walked into the darkness of your smoky grave
Up the stairs, into the fire
Up the stairs, into the fire
I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher
Somewhere up the stairs, into the fire
May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love bring us love…
May your love bring us love.
Bruce Springsteen. From The Rising.
Mexican economic growth – a revision
My good friend, the ever-reliable, ever-intelligent Kevin Grier, writes to me the following about Mexican economic growth:
I believe the primary two problems with mexico are both political (1) very little real competition in the domestic economy (2) no true rule of law. Fundamentally its still a society where personal connections or bribes get lots of things done. The “ideal” of everyday anonymous transactions working out well even when there are time intervals between beginning and end (payment and reward) just is not there.
Also the Mexican civil war at the beginning of the 20th century probably had something to do with the low growth in the first half of the century. That was no joke, that war. The “golden years” could easily be high transitional growth getting back on the BGP after the devastation of the civil war, kind of Mexico’s mini version of the Japanese and German growth miracles after WWII.
imho Mexico is middle income due to “location location location” and is still chained to an almost feudal social and political system.
More specifically, Kevin points out that the available data show Mexican convergence to the U.S. from 1950-75, and from 1870-1900, but not for the twentieth century more generally, I offer apologies for my previous error.
Addendum: Don’t forget to check out Kevin’s Haitian art page, or his music tastes.
Can we judge thinkers by their followers?
Having written recently on what is valid in Karl Marx, I am reminded of an ongoing debate I have with my colleague Bryan Caplan. I like to tell Bryan, only half in jest, that thinkers are responsible for the quality of their followers. Surely if a thinker is bright and rich and multi-faceted, that thinker would attract followers of a similar quality. And a rotten thinker ought not to attract many students of a higher quality. This test is not failproof but it is one way of approaching the question of intellectual quality.
On the negative side, Marx attracted Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. I’ll go out on a limb and claim that Gramsci, Lukacs, Althusser, and Luxembourg are all vastly overrated, even by many non-Marxists. Who then would I cite as illustrating Marx’s positive intellectual heritage? Here are a few options:
1. Walter Benjamin. His work on mechanical reproduction and aura continues to shape debates over contemporary culture. Plus you can mine his notebooks for incisive nuggets of insight; some of them are no more than a sentence.
2. Michel Foucault. Yes the specialists have poked holes in the histories. And his mechanisms are often murky and insufficiently grounded in methodological individualism. Still his accounts of the dark side of the Enlightenment — as found in prisons and hospitals – remain justly influential. And The Order of Things is an interesting albeit flawed look at the comovement of ideas in many disciplines in early modern times. By the way, he developed a strong interest in Mises and Hayek in the latter years of his life.
3. Juergen Habermas. I find much of his work unreadable; he is the strongest argument extant for the use of mathematical economics (why doesn’t he write down a simple model?). Still the early work on the growth of the public sphere in the eighteenth century is impressive. As a work of intellectual history, it offers enviable clarity, range and depth.
4. Ferdinand Braudel. OK, he didn’t have to be a Marxist to write those wonderful books on the Mediterranean and the rise of modern Europe. Still, the emphases on material forces and the long sweep of history are derived unmistakeably from Marx’s writings.
The summary picture is exactly what you would expect. On the whole Marx had a seriously pernicious influence on both the humanities and social sciences. Still, he inspired some significant thinkers and generated important nuggets of insight.
OK, now here is a challenge for real men. Can you tell me, standing on one foot, what exactly is both important and valid in the writings of Martin Heidegger? I’ll assume I can use your name unless you tell me otherwise; a blogged answer is best of all.
Jeffersonians vs Hamiltonians
Entering Monticello,Thomas Jefferson’s home, you are flanked by two busts, Jefferson on one side and Alexander Hamilton on the other. Since the two were political foes it’s a surprising choice. But the busts were placed there by Jefferson himself who said, “we were ever-opposed in life and now we shall be ever-opposed in death.” The Jefferson-Hamilton battle continues to this day (read the link for more and don’t miss the many interesting comments.)
Addendum: Brad was perhaps fooled by the name of this blog but then there are two of us.
Mexico’s lost century?
Mexico is slated to grow at somewhat over four percent this year (this popped up in the Mexican edition of the Miami Herald last week, no link handy). It has responded to the Chinese challenge by retooling its export base toward higher quality and quicker response times; the maquiladoras are once again growing. Higher oil prices do not hurt either. Of course four percent is a rate that most countries in the world would envy.
In the twentieth century Mexico grew at a rate above what the U.S. did (sorry, my exact figures are at home!). Mexican performance would be even better if we take out the disastrous 1980s. And in early colonial times, at least once Mexico recovered from various plagues, Mexico was arguably richer than the British colonies to the north. As late as 1820, Mexican GDP per-capita was in the same ballpark as that of the United States ($1287 U.S., $893 Canada, $760 Mexico, in 1990 dollars as estimated by Angus Maddison). So what went wrong?
The nineteenth century was an absolute, complete disaster for Mexico. By 1870, US per-capita had just about doubled but Mexican per-capita GDP had fallen to $710. Crime was rampant and the so-called infrastructure was a disaster. Many goods were carried on foot across rocky paths, not fit to be called roads. At the same time North Americans were building railroads, canals, and factories. Only late in the nineteenth century, under the regime of Portfirio Diaz, did Mexico start constructing a usable transportation network.
I can think of a few ways of interpreting these facts:
1. Mexico had one very unlucky century. In reality Mexico is better suited to grow than is the U.S.. Mexican government is low in quality, but in many ways it is very small. And perhaps you need big government more in some centuries than others.
2. The superior Mexican performance of the twentieth century represents “catching up,” sometimes called “growth convergence.” This sounds the most intuitive, although it implies that one bad century has kept Mexico captive in poverty for a long, long time. How long did it take Germany and Japan to recover from Allied bombing and losing the War? You can claim that these countries had superior institutions, but Mexican institutions have allowed for rapid growth for a long time. Note also that the evidence in general does not favor growth convergence, although you can come up with something if you leave Africa out of the growth equation.
3. Something about the Mexican economy is not robust to very bad times. Mexico has a higher variance economy than does the U.S., and the distribution of these growth rates is not normal. The Mexicans (implicitly) accept this high variance to enjoy a higher mean growth rate. But every now and then they pay a very steep price for this tradeoff.
4. We do not understand something fundamental about growth. We like to think of growth rates and income levels as conceptually separate to a greater degree than they are. The Solow model in particular shows us how to decompose changes into “once-and-for-all” and “growth-affecting” perturbations in growth. Perhaps this distinction can mislead us into looking for separate “causes of growth,” as distinct from our analyses of levels.
Am I allowed to vote for all four hypotheses? Even if they contradict each other to some extent?
Plus ca change…
There is a widespread prejudice against the newspapers, based on the belief that they cannot be trusted to report truly the current events in the world’s life on account of incompetence or venality. But in spite of this distrust we are almost altogether dependent on them for our knowledge of widely interesting events….The function of the newspaper in a well-ordered society is to control the state through the authority of facts, not to drive nations and social classes headlong into war through the power of passion and prejudice.
The source? The American Newspaper: A Study in Social Psychology (JSTOR) by one Delos Wilcox writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science…. July 1900.
My favorite things Mexican
I am in Mexico, and you will be hearing more about this. Here are a few of my favorite things.
1. Favorite Mexican novel: Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rolfo. A hilarious and moving tale of visiting rural Mexico and encountering the dead. The true heir to Dante. I remain surprised by how many people do not know this marvelous work, though the English translation does not capture the humor well. Will you be turned off if I tell you this is a favorite of Susan Sontag’s?
2. Favorite Mexican music: Mexican rap is extraordinarily eclectic and creative. I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite group, but Control Machete is one place to start.
3. Favorite Mexican artist: Marcial Camilo Ayala, whom I am currently visiting in Cuernavaca. Here is one of my favorite pieces of his; here is one in black and white. If you pay in advance (less than you think), I am happy to help you get one.
4. Favorite Mexican food: Chicken with mole sauce, a’ la Puebla or Oaxaca. For real authenticity, make sure you crumble in the stale tortilla.
5. Favorite Mexican movie: You probably already know Y Tu Mama Tambien, Amores Perros, and El Mariachi. So I’ll recommend Luis Bunuel’s old version of Wuthering Heights, a truly strange adaptation that captures the spirit of the original novel remarkably well. You do not have to buy into Bunuel’s later, more pretentious work to like this one.
Addendum: My favorite Mexican dish might be Chiles Nogada.
The Olympics and Greek History
Here are two free 30 minute lectures from the Teaching Company.
The Olympics: From Ancient Greece to Athens, Parts 1 and 2.
From 776 BC onwards, the greatest champions among the Greeks began assembling every four years at Olympia in western Greece to assert their strength and physical prowess. Who were the most charismatic of the ancient Greek Olympic heroes? To truly understand the origins of the Olympics, why do we really need to begin with Homer? In these specially commissioned lectures, Professor McInerney takes you on a journey back to the Olympics of the ancient Greek world.
Henry Thoreau revisited
Henry Thoreau is perhaps the best-known anti-materialist thinker from the American tradition. But his life belied his formal doctrines:
The popular image of Thoreau is of the lone eccentric contemplating nature at Walden Pond. In fact, he spent only two years and two months there, and while he always preferred to be thinking and writing, he spent much of his life improving his father’s pencil business, surveying land, and otherwise earning money.
Here is the longer account, which is focused more on American attitudes toward materialism than Thoreau. Here are some of Thoreau’s passages on economy, read here also. Here is some biographical information. Alexander Pope was another author who damned commercial incentives while proving a master of them.
The glory of Athens
Politicians often refer to our Judeo-Christian heritage but in math, science, philosophy, and especially politics we owe much more to our Greco-Roman heritage. Consider; democracy, republicanism, and the rights of citizenship, these idea owe virtually nothing to the Judeo-Christian tradition and everything to Greece and Rome.
I am reminded of this by rereading Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Here, from nearly 2500 years ago, is Pericles, in the midst of war in a ceremony to honor the dead he speaks to Athens, and also perhaps to us, about liberty and war.
If we turn to our military policy, there also we differ from our antagonists. We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger.
Royal Purple
Why was purple considered the royal color? The answer lies in economics not in aesthetics. Purple is rare in nature. A Toga’s worth of Tyrian purple die, about 1.5 grams, required the beating, drying and extracting of mucus from the hypobranchial gland of some twelve thousand Murex mollusks.
Legend credits its discovery to Herakles, or rather to his dog, whose mouth was stained purple from chewing on snails along the Levantine coast. King Phoenix received a purple-dyed robe from Herakles and decreed the rulers of Phoenicia should wear this color as a royal symbol.
The practice was later adopted by the Romans; to wear purple, therefore, was to show off your great wealth. Purple is an interesting example of a snob or Veblen good because it is clear that if purple had not been expensive it would not have been greatly desired. Indeed, do we see any great demand for purple today? If purple paint were say 25 or 50% more expensive then people would switch to substitutes but make it 500 or 1000 times as expensive and it becomes a fashion statement.
The quote is from here, more information than you would ever want to know about Tyrian purple is here.
My first mentor starts blogging
Walter Grinder is a new blogger over at the libertarian Liberty & Power blog.
Meeting Walter at the age of thirteen was a formative moment in my life. Walter had been a friend of my father’s, and one night we had dinner together. Walter was (and remains) a polymath to top all polymaths. Meeting him hooked me on the world of ideas. I looked forward to each meeting with Walter more than anything else (hey, I was a nerd). I spent the whole time asking him what I should read and why. Walter is a longstanding friend of liberty and one of the world’s great teachers and role models.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere there is a new economics blog, www.divisionoflabour.com, just remember that is the British spelling. And Jane Galt has started a second blog, right now she is drawing on Mark Twain for content. Here is her explanation.
Cyclopaedia of Political Economy
Have you ever wondered what nineteenth century, classical liberal political economy looked like? No, not the classic writers but rather ordinary political economy?
A new web resource answers your question. John J. Lalor’s Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy collected classical liberal writings on the economic issues of the day, circa 1881. You can now access and read the work in its entirety. Here is information about the book and author.
For one sample, here is the brief article on the political economy of debt. Or try this entry on the balance of trade, still relevant today. The item on the division of labor remains eloquent and insightful. Gustav de Molinari writes passionately on the link between freedom, prosperity, and the arts, a favorite topic of mine. I’ve spent a good bit of time browsing through the book (both recently and much earlier), and it offers surprisingly few clunkers. On social issues it is consistently liberal and progressive.
Kudos to the ever-excellent Liberty Fund for putting the work on-line. Until their efforts, you could buy the book for a mere $675.
Addendum: The links to the previous version of this post have now been fixed.
Facts about Orkney
Sorry, no links in this post, but I am sticking to the local sources that sound credible:
1. The richest man in Orkney is (was?) a fisherman. His large net turned out to violate EU regulations, so he received $20 million from the British government to stop fishing. He is now building a house that overlooks the entire town of Stromness from above. The townspeople are not happy.
2. One-third of the employment in Orkney stems from an NHS hospital on the main island. Waiting times are significantly lower here than elsewhere in Britain and the service is correspondingly better.
3. Much of the labor force switches jobs over the course of the year. They serve tourists for three months in the summer, and pick up odd jobs the rest of the year. Work is easy to come by, careers are almost impossible to develop.
4. There have been only two murders in Orkney in the last two hundred years. One happened about two hundred years ago. The other is about ten years old; a waiter was shot and killed in Kirkwall’s Indian restaurant. Neither crime has been solved yet.
5. Orcadians eat pickled herring in oatmeal, smoked fish with scrambled eggs, and fried haddock with chips. For dessert they have Orkney fudge or Orkney ice cream. Haggis is nowhere to be found.
Here is a a tourist introduction to Orkney. Here is historical information. The islands are among the most beautiful spots in Europe and remain largely unspoilt, go if you can.