Category: History
Jamaica fact of the day
Jamaica experienced no economic growth in exports per capita from the Napoleonic Wars to the end of the Second World Wars. Since there is a high correlation between exports per capita and GDP per capita, at least after 1850, Bulmer-Thomas argues that there are solid grounds for concluding that the Jamaican economy on a per capita basis experienced no growth at all for more than a century after the end of slavery.
The news is not good:
Data compiled by Bulmer-Thomas shows that Jamaica’s GDP per capita is actually around the same level it was at independence.
And:
The country ranks #2 on the Human Flight and Brain Drain Index.
Here is more from Rasheed Griffith, mostly on the economic history and economic problems of Jamaica.
My science remarks at the AEI metascience forum
Jim Pethokoukis has transcribed some of them, here is one bit:
There’s a commonly noted productivity slowdown in the Western world starting in 1973 that I and some other people here have written about. I think one neglected factor behind this slowdown is just the destruction of the German-language speaking and central European scientific world, which starts in the 1930s and culminates in World War II. On top of that, you have the Holocaust. The fruits of science take a long time. So if you’re entranced with AI, that is ultimately the result of someone earlier having come up with electricity — Tesla, Edison, others. So before the 1930s, central Europe and Germany is by far the world’s most productive scientific area. And which factors organizationally were behind those successes? To me, that feels dramatically understudied. But you have a 10-, 15-year period where essentially all of that goes poof. Some of it comes over here to the US, a bit to Great Britain, but that’s really a central event in the 20th century. You can’t understand 20th century science without thinking very hard and long about that event.
But in terms of more approximately and more recently, here’s how I would put the importance of metascience or how science is done. It’s how science is done better that will get us out of the Great Stagnation. I don’t think that doing it worse is what got us into the Great Stagnation. So when it comes to what got us into the Great Stagnation, I think the number one culprit is simply we exhausted a lot of low-hanging fruit from combining fossil fuels with powerful machines. At some point, enough people have cars and you get the side airbag. Your CD player has better sound, now you hook in your smartphone or whatever. Those are nice advances, but they’re not really fundamental to the act of driving. So there’s just an exhaustion that happens.
There are other factors, there’s an increase in the level of regulation in a number of ways, some good, some bad, but it’s still going to slow down some amount of progress. And then the energy price shock in 1973 combined with our unwillingness to really go large with nuclear power, right? So all that happening more or less at the same time. And then a few decades earlier, the world took this huge, you know, wrenching gut blow. Now this all means actually, you should be quite optimistic about the future. Here’s the trick to the whole hypothesis, the counterintuitive part. So let’s say the Great Stagnation is not caused by science being done worse. As we’re probably now coming out of the Great Stagnation, we have mRNA vaccines, right? We have ChatGPT, a lot of advances in green energy. Maybe they’re not all sure things yet. Other areas like quantum computing, not a sure thing yet, but you can see that a lot might be coming all based in this new fundamental technology. You could call it computing.
So the hurdle that science has to clear to get us out of those accumulated institutional and low-hanging fruit barriers, that’s a higher hurdle than it used to be. So if the current scientific advances are clearing that higher hurdle, you should actually be quite optimistic about them because they’ve passed through these filters. So you have these other developments. Oh, ‘90s internet becomes more of a thing. Well, that was nice for a few years, you know, Walmart managed its inventory better. 1995 to 1998 productivity goes up, wonderful. That dwindles away. It’s then all worse again. If we really are now clearing all the hurdles, you should be especially optimistic. But it also means science policy, how science is done, how it’s organized, how it’s funded is way more important than during all those years. Those years when we were stuck, you were reshuffling the deck chairs. Not on the Titanic, but what’s like a mediocre company that just keeps on going. I don’t want any name names, but there’s a bunch of them. You were reshuffling the deck chairs there, and now we’re reshuffling the hall enterprise. It’s a very exciting time, but science matters more than ever.
There is more at the link, good throughout.
A new and possibly important paper
The title is the somewhat awkward: “A Macroscope of English Print Culture, 1530-1700, Applied to the Coevolution of Ideas on Religion, Science, and Institutions.” The abstract is informative:
We combine unsupervised machine-learning and econometric methods to examine cultural change in 16th- and 17th-century England. A machine-learning digest synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. The topics include the expected, such as Natural Philosophy, and the unexpected, such as Baconian Theology. Using the data generated via machine-learning we then study facets of England’s cultural history. Timelines suggest that religious and political discourse gradually became more scholarly over time and economic topics more prominent. The epistemology associated with Bacon was present in theological debates already in the 16th century. Estimating a VAR, we explore the coevolution of ideas on religion, science, and institutions. Innovations in religious ideas induced strong responses in the other two domains. Revolutions did not spur debates on institutions nor did the founding of the Royal Society markedly elevate attention to science.
By Peter Grazjl and Peter Murrell, here is the paper itself. Via the excellent and ever-aware Kevin Lewis.
What should I ask Anna Keay?
I will be doing a Conversation with her, here is from Wikipedia:
Anna Julia Keay, OBE… is a British architectural historian, author and television personality and director of The Landmark Trust since 2012.
Born in the Scottish Highlands, and yes she is also the daughter of historian John Keay. I am a fan of her books, many on British architectural history or for that matter the crown jewels, but most recently The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (or this link) about the 17th century interregnum. Here is her home page. Here is Anna on Twitter. And this:
The Landmark Trust is a British building conservation charity, founded in 1965 by Sir John and Lady Smith, that rescues buildings of historic interest or architectural merit and then makes them available for holiday rental. The Trust’s headquarters is at Shottesbrooke in Berkshire.
Five of those properties are in Vermont, it turns out. She lives (part-time) in what is perhaps the finest surviving merchant’s house in England.
So what should I ask her?
Will Chinese LLMs be much worse?
Presumably these are being built right now. But which texts will they be trained upon? Let’s say you can keep out any talk of T. Square. What about broader Chinese history? Do you allow English-language sources? Japanese-language accounts of the war with Japan? Do you allow economics blogs in English? JStor? Discussions of John Stuart Mill on free speech?
Just how good is the Chinese-language, censorship-passed body of training data? Does China end up with a much worse set of LLMs? Or do they in essence anglicize most of what they learn and in time know?
Pre-LLM news censorship was an easier problem, because you could let the stock sit in a library somewhere, mostly neglected, while regulating the flow. But when the new flow is so directly derived from the stock, statistically speaking that is? What then?
Much hangs in the balance here. What was it that Paul Samuelson said about writing a nation’s textbooks?
*Power Failure: The rise and fall of General Electric*
That is the new book by William D. Cohan, which I just reviewed for Times Literary Supplement. Gated, but here is the opening bit:
The individual stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average typically fall from grace with some regularity. Of the thirty Dow stocks listed in 1990, for instance, only seven were still in the Dow as of November 2022, mostly because the companies have ceased to be important. Stripped down to its basic fundamentals, that is the tale of General Electric (GE): one of rise and fall. But it had an exceptionally long time at the top. GE has its roots in the 1890s, and by 1993 it was the most valuable company in the United States, with a market value of more than $80 billion. It was removed from the Dow in 2018 – the last original stock from 1896 to leave the index. Its core business had shrunk, with no offsetting growth in another area. Today, the company is no longer a significant object of public attention.
This story can be told in many different ways, and the most impressive feature of William D. Cohan’sPower Failure is that he succeeds with multiple approaches.
You can buy the book here, note the American title is slightly different.
The major revolutions I have seen in my lifetime
The nature, size of impact, and time horizons on all these vary greatly, but here is my list:
1. Moon landing, 1969. Most of the impact still not felt, except for satellites. My parents did let me stay up late at night to watch it.
2. The collapse of communism (1989-????). Poland is a lovely country to visit, Shanghai is amazing. I flew to eastern Europe once I could in 1989.
3. The rise of Asia. Japan and South Korea starting around the time of my birth. The rise of China for sure, and currently the rise of India is a likely addition.
4. Feminization, ongoing, no firm date. Impact plenty.
5. The realization of the internet. Hard to date, but I’ll say the 1990s and ongoing.
6. The smartphone — 2007. Impact in your face. Bought an iPhone the first day, was mocked by MR readers as an “Apple fan boy.”
7. Effective Large Language Models/AI. Impact still to be seen.
The “African population explosion” is perhaps next in line…
Sprouting Cities: How Rural America Industrialized
We study the joint process of urbanization and industrialization in the US economy between 1880 and 1940. We show that only a small share of aggregate industrialization is accounted for by the relocation of workers from remote rural areas to industrial hubs like Chicago or New York City. Instead, most sectoral shifts occurred within rural counties, dramatically transforming their sectoral structure. Most industrialization within counties occurred through the emergence of new ”factory” cities with notably higher manufacturing shares rather than the expansion of incumbent cities. In contrast, today’s shift towards services seems to benefit large incumbent cities the most.
That is from a new paper by Fabian Eckert, John Juneau, and Michael Peters. A Jeffersonian might think that was a big part of what made America so great earlier in the 20th century? Whereas today, at least for the Jeffersonian…?
My excellent Conversation with Katherine Rundell
One of my favorite CWTs, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
She joined Tyler to discuss how she became obsessed with John Donne, the power of memorizing poetry, the political implications of suicide in the 17th century, the new evidence of Donne’s faith, the contagious intensity of thought in 17th century British life, the effect of the plague on national consciousness, the brutality of boys’ schooling, the thrills and dangers of rooftop walking, why children should be more mischievous, why she’d like to lower the voting age to 16, her favorite UK bookshop, the wonderful weirdness of Diana Wynne Jones, why she has at least one joke about Belgium in every book, what T.S. Eliot missed about John Donne, what it’s like to eat tarantula, the Kafka book she gives to toddlers, why The Book of Common Prayer is underrated, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, you have two books, Rooftoppers and Skysteppers, about rooftop walking. Some might call them children’s books. I’m not sure that’s exactly the right description, but what is the greatest danger with rooftop walking?
RUNDELL: Oh, it’s falling off.
COWEN: What leads you to fall off? If you’re rooftop walking, if you were to fall off, what would be the proximate cause of that event?
RUNDELL: Philippe Petit, who is, of course, one of the great roof walkers of the world and the man who strung the wire between the Twin Towers in 1977, talks about vertigo as a beast that has to be tamed piece by piece, that can never be overcome all at once.
Vertigo, he says, is not the fear that you will fall. It is the fear that you will jump. That, of course, is the thing that, when you are roof walking, you are taming. You are trying to unmoor your sense of danger and of not being able to trust yourself not to jump from your sense of beauty and the vision of a city that you get up high.
I roof-walk for very practical reasons: to see views that would otherwise be not really available to me in an increasingly privatized City of London.
And:
COWEN: For you, what is most interesting in Donne’s sermons?
RUNDELL: The thing I find most interesting would be the radical honesty that he has — that you will find in so few other sermons of the time — about the difficulty of finding God. He is a man who writes often with certainty about the idea of reaching the infinite, the divine. But he also writes this famous passage where he says, “I summon God and my angels, and when God and the angels are there, I neglect them for . . .” I forget what it is. “The sound of a carriage, a straw under my knee, a thought, a chimera, and nothing and everything.”
That sense that, even though he had a brain that could control incredibly rigorous poetry, he did not have a brain that would control itself in prayer. He offered that to his congregation as a vulnerability and a piece of honesty that so few sermoners of the time — who thought of themselves more as a regulatory ideal that should never admit vulnerability — would offer.
Definitely recommended. And Katherine’s recent book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne was perhaps my favorite book of last year.
How long does a Roman emperor last for?
Of the 69 rulers of the unified Roman Empire, from Augustus (d. 14 CE) to Theodosius (d. 395 CE), 62% suffered violent death. This has been known for a while, if not quantitatively at least qualitatively. What is not known, however, and has never been examined is the time-to-violent-death of Roman emperors. This work adopts the statistical tools of survival data analysis to an unlikely population, Roman emperors, and it examines a particular event in their rule, not unlike the focus of reliability engineering, but instead of their time-to-failure, their time-to-violent-death. We investigate the temporal signature of this seemingly haphazardous stochastic process that is the violent death of a Roman emperor, and we examine whether there is some structure underlying the randomness in this process or not. Nonparametric and parametric results show that: (i) emperors faced a significantly high risk of violent death in the first year of their rule, which is reminiscent of infant mortality in reliability engineering; (ii) their risk of violent death further increased after 12 years, which is reminiscent of wear-out period in reliability engineering; (iii) their failure rate displayed a bathtub-like curve, similar to that of a host of mechanical engineering items and electronic components. Results also showed that the stochastic process underlying the violent deaths of emperors is remarkably well captured by a (mixture) Weibull distribution.
That is from a new paper by Joseph Homer Saleh. Via Patrick Moloney. And here are new results on why Roman concrete was so much more durable than the emperors.
ChatGPT and the revenge of history
I have been posing it many questions about Jonathan Swift, Adam Smith, and the Bible. Chat does very well in all those areas, and rarely hallucinates. Is it because those are settled, well-established texts, with none of the drama “still in action”?
I suspect Chat is a boon for the historian and the historian of ideas. You can ask Chat about obscure Swift pamphlets and it knows more about them than Google does, or Wikipedia does, by a long mile. Presumably it “reads” them for you?
When I ask about current economists or public intellectuals, however, more errors creep in. Hallucinations become common rather than rare. The most common hallucination I find is that Chat invents co-authorships and conference co-sponsorships like crazy. If you ask it about two living people, and whether they have worked together, the fantasy life version will be rather active, maybe fifty percent of the time?
Presumably that bug will be fixed, but still it seems that for the time being Chat has shifted some real intellectual heft back in antiquarian directions. Perhaps it is harder for statistical estimation to predict words about events that are still going on?
Here are some tips for using ChatGPT.
Of course Chat is already a part of my regular research and learning routine. Woe be unto those who cannot or do not use it effectively! I feel sorry for them, get with the program people…
Are scientific breakthroughs less fundamental?
From Max Kozlov, do note the data do not cover the very latest events:
The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature.
Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.
“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had.”
The authors reasoned that if a study was highly disruptive, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study’s references, and instead cite the study itself. Using the citation data from 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents, the researchers calculated a measure of disruptiveness, called the ‘CD index’, in which values ranged from –1 for the least disruptive work to 1 for the most disruptive.
The average CD index declined by more than 90% between 1945 and 2010 for research manuscripts (see ‘Disruptive science dwindles’), and by more than 78% from 1980 to 2010 for patents. Disruptiveness declined in all of the analysed research fields and patent types, even when factoring in potential differences in factors such as citation practices…
The authors also analysed the most common verbs used in manuscripts and found that whereas research in the 1950s was more likely to use words evoking creation or discovery such as, ‘produce’ or ‘determine’, that done in the 2010s was more likely to refer to incremental progress, using terms such as ‘improve’ or ‘enhance’.
Here is the piece, and here is the original research by Michael Park Erin Leahey, and Russell J. funk.
A new paper on the Industrial Revolution
I have not yet read it, but surely it seems of importance:
Although there are many competing explanations for the Industrial Revolution, there has been no effort to evaluate them econometrically. This paper analyzes how the very different patterns of growth across the counties of England between the 1760s and 1830s can be explained by a wide range of potential variables. We find that industrialization occurred in areas that began with low wages but high mechanical skills, whereas other variables, such as literacy, banks, and proximity to coal, have little explanatory power. Against the view that living standards were stagnant during the Industrial Revolution, we find that real wages rose sharply in the industrializing north and declined in the previously prosperous south.
That is by Morgan Kelly, Joel Mokyr, and Cormac Ó Gráda, forthcoming in the JPE. Here are earlier versions of the paper.
Top MR Posts of 2022
Here are the top MR posts by views from 2022. Biggest post was Tyler’s
1. Classical liberalism vs. The New Right
followed up by two posts by me on Biden’s student loan plan
2. The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think
3. Taxing Mechanical Engineers and Subsidizing Drama Majors
and further posts by me on FTX and the probability of a nuclear war.
5. What is the Probability of a Nuclear War, Redux
I said ProPublica was putting their reputation on the line with the lab-leak report but nevertheless I was too credulous. Much of the factual reporting remains correct, however. Lab leak is very much in play.
6. A “Safety Emergency” Happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November of 2019
Tyler comes in next with a post on criticizing other people in private.
7. How much should you criticize other people?
and two posts on the Russian-Ukraine conflict.
9. How did the IR community get Russia/Ukraine so wrong?
Finally Tyler offers some advice:
Rounding out the top were Best Books of 2022, What Caused the 2020 Spike in Murders and How to Elect Republicans.
What were your favorite MR posts of 2022. What should we revisit?
(Dutch) *Pioneers of Capitalism*
The subtitle is The Netherlands 1000-1800, and the authors are Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden. An excellent book, here is one excerpt:
…between 1454 and 1500 the Netherlands appears to have printed more than double the European average number of books, with the Hanseatic town of Deventer as the most important center of this new industry. In the sixteenth century, book printing in the Low Countries was originally concentrated in Antwerp, but after 1585 production in the northern Netherlands skyrocketed, reaching an average per capita output that was consistently three to more than four times that of Europe as a whole. During the seventeenth century, Holland became the “bookshop of the world.” Exports of books were important, but the domestic demand for print was equally large.
You can buy it here.