Category: History
Hermann Goering on the American war effort
At first, however, we could not believe the speed with which your Merchant Marine was growing. Claims of eight to 10 days to launch a ship seemed fantastic. Even when we realized it referred to the assembly of prefabricated parts, a mere 10 days to put it together was still unthinkable. Our shipbuilding industry was very thorough and painstaking, but very slow, disturbingly slow, in comparison. It took nine months to build a Danube vessel.
Here is the entire (previously overlooked) interview. Via D., interesting throughout.
*Magnificent Rebels*
The author is the excellent Andrea Wulf and the subtitle is The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. The focus is on the German group of thinkers who worked together in or near Jena, including the Schlegels, Novalis, Schiller, Goethe and Schelling, with a later cameo from Hegel. This is one of my favorite books of the year, but note it focuses mostly on their personal stories and not so much on their ideas. Perfect for me, but not the ideal introduction for every reader. And their ideas are hard to explain! Their emphasis on imagination and subjectivity has been so absorbed into the modern world it can be hard to grasp their revolutionary nature at the time. Context is that which is scarce. Recommended nonetheless.
*Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain*
By Richard Vinen, do not forget that the Lunar Society (subject of the very first MR post!) was based there. Here is one excerpt:
What has come to be called the Birmingham or Midlands Enlightenment brought together an unusually curious and energetic group of men…Joseph Priestly and William Hutton epitomized the atmosphere of optimism, uninhibited enquiry and material prosperity some associated with Birmingham in the eighteenth century. The former was a minister of religion, though mainly known to posterity as a scientist; the latter was a well-to-do bookseller, though mainly known to posterity as a writer, particularly as the author of the first history of his adopted city. Both men, however, came ot have less happy memories of Birmingham than those implied by the quotations above because both their houses were burned down in the Church and King riots of 1791.
Strongly recommended to all those who care about such things, you can order here.
The new Alexander J. Field book
Field is one of the world’s greatest economic historians, and the title is The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for The Second World War. I am just starting to read it, here is some of the early material:
The initial aim of this book is to document what for many will surely be the surprisingly disappointing record of manufacturing productivity growth during the war. A second objective is to understand the effects of the war on the level and rate of growth of potential output in the postwar period. Getting a fix on that is what matters when we ask whether or to what degree the war laid the foundations for growth in the years after 1948…
The empirical sections of this book will show, inter alia, that both labor productivity and TFP in manufacturing declined during the war in comparison with 1941 and grew anemically after the war…
A principal argument can be stated succinctly: TFP in manufacturing fell during the war because the conflict forced a wrenching shift away from products and processes in which manufacturers had a great deal of experience toward the production of goods in which they had little.
Obviously an important work, I look forward to reading the rest. Due out October 18.
Newfoundland notes, St. John’s and environs
“Canada’s youngest province and Britain’s oldest colony” is what some of them say.
About 60 percent of St. John’s is Irish in background, and most people in the city above age 45 have a noticeable Irish accent, albeit with some Canadianisms thrown in. Those accents are close to those of Waterford, Ireland, and many Irish from the southeast of the country came over in the 1790-1820 period. The younger residents of St. John’s sound like other Canadians.
If you walk into the various pubs and houses of music, of which there are quite a few, you are most likely to hear offshoot forms of acoustic Celtic folk music.
The scenery of St. John’s reminds me of the suburbs of Wellington, New Zealand. On top of that, many of the homes are Victorian, as in the Wellington area. In St. John’s the row homes are called “jellybeans” because of their bright colors. They are in a uniform style because of a major fire in the city in 1892. A jellybean house near center city now runs between 300k-400k Canadian, the result of a big price hike once some offshore oil was discovered. The city is hilly and the major churches are Anglican, even though the Irish migrants were almost entirely Catholics.
Indians and Filipinos are playing some role in revitalizing the city. Not long ago about one thousand Ukrainians arrived.
In the Sheraton hotel the old mailbox is still “Royal Mail Newfoundland” and not “Royal Mail Canada.” Newfoundland of course was a dominion country of its own from 1907-1934, and a legally odd part of Britain 1934-1949, when it joined Canada through a 52% referendum result. In 1890 a NAFTA-like trade agreement was negotiated with the United States, but Canada worked Great Britain to nix the whole thing. A later agreement in 1902 was in essence vetoed by New England. Newfoundland had earlier rejected confederation with Canada in 1860.
Newfoundland ran up major debts in WWI, and tried to relieve them by selling Labrador to Canada. Canada refused.
Apart from the major museum (“The Rooms”), there are few signs of the indigenous.
Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless message on Signal Hill on December 12, 1901. In the 1950s, Gander was the world’s busiest international airport, because of all the planes that could not cross the Atlantic directly.
As you might expect to find in a small country, but not in a small province, you regularly meet people who seem too smart or too attractive for their current jobs. Many head to Calgary, but a lot of them don’t want to leave.
It has the warmest winter of any Canadian province.
Terre is the place to eat. The scallops are excellent everywhere. Fish and chips are a specialty too.
I would not say it is radically exciting here, but overall I would be long St. John’s. If nothing else, it makes for an excellent three-day weekend or nature-oriented week-long trip, and I hardly know any Americans who have tried that.
*The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left*
That is the new forthcoming book by Garett Jones (and his wisdom), I am very much looking forward to reading/rereading the final version of this one! (See the link for my blurb based on a pre-pub reading.) Here is the Amazon summary:
Over the last two decades, as economists began using big datasets and modern computing power to reveal the sources of national prosperity, their statistical results kept pointing toward the power of culture to drive the wealth of nations. In The Culture Transplant, Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands―toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government―that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth. And the cultural traits migrants bring to their new homes have enduring effects upon a nation’s economic potential.
Built upon mainstream, well-reviewed academic research that hasn’t pierced the public consciousness, this book offers a compelling refutation of an unspoken consensus that a nation’s economic and political institutions won’t be changed by immigration. Jones refutes the common view that we can discuss migration policy without considering whether migration can, over a few generations, substantially transform the economic and political institutions of a nation. And since most of the world’s technological innovations come from just a handful of nations, Jones concludes, the entire world has a stake in whether migration policy will help or hurt the quality of government and thus the quality of scientific breakthroughs in those rare innovation powerhouses.
You can pre-order here, due out November 15.
The forthcoming rate of economic growth?
With the current pace of development in AI and as demos turn into full featured products and services, I can see the overall US GDP growth rising from recent avg 2-3% to 20+% in 10 years This is a seismic shift, which is really hard to think and reason about…
That is from Mohammad Bavarian. Somehow I do not think that will be the case, even in my most technologically optimistic moments. As Brad DeLong stresses, the second Industrial Revolution starting about 1870 was the true one, and we woke up fifty years later to an entirely different world, based on electricity and consumer society and extreme physical mobility. Yet I am not aware of any extreme gdp or productivity stats during the intermediate period. In fact the numbers I have seen seem a little….mediocre. I say side with the reality, not with the numbers, but this is one of the questions I wish was studied much more. Is it simply the case that stringing together a series of qualitatively discrete changes inevitably will outrace our ability to measure it?
By the way, it seems the new malaria vaccine works pretty well.
*The Rise and Fall of the EAST*
The author is Yasheng Huang of MIT and the subtitle is Examination, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology in Chinese History and Today. Forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2023. Excerpt:
For many years, I struggled to come up with a coherent explanation for the power, the reach, and the policy discretion of the Chinese state. There is coercion, ideological indoctrination, and probably a fair amount of societal consent as well.
Keju [the civil service exam system] had a deep penetration both cross-sectionally in society and across time in history. It was all encompassing, laying claims to time, efforts and cognitive investments of a significant swath of Chinese population. It was incubatory of values, norms, and cognitions, therefore impacting ideology and epistemology of Chinese minds. It was a state institution designed to augment the power and the capabilities of the state. Directly, the state monopolized the very best human capital; indirectly, the state deprived society access to talent and preempted organized religion, commerce, and intelligentsia. The Chinese state in history and today is an imprinted version of this Keju system.
Chinese state is strong because it reigns without a society.
Among the other interesting features of this book, including many, are:
There is a very useful discussion of Sui Wendi, the man who reunified China (and is barely known in the West).
Just how much the exam system expanded in the 17th century, to support a larger and growing Chinese state.
Why Chinese bureaucrats in the provinces tend to be generalists and the ministerial officials tend to be specialists.
Oliver Williamson is applied and cited throughout.
“A state without society is a vertically integrated organization…Keju’s powerful platform effect crowded and stymied alternative mobility channels…the Keju was an anti-mobility mobility channel.”
“In the 1890s, China’s population literacy was only 18 percent, way below 95 percent of England and the Netherlands.”
Exam competition takes up so much of individual mind space. Furthermore the competition atomizes society and makes it harder to form the kinds of collective movements that might lead to democracy.
The author sees the 1980s as the truly revolutionary time in Chinese history.
“Throughout Chinese history very few emperors were toppled by their generals or senior functionaries, a sharp contrast with the Roman Empire.”
I could say much more. This is by far the best book on Chinese bureaucracy I have read, and probably one of the best books on China period. I am sure many of the claims will be contested, but the author tries in a very serious way to be explanatory and to actually answer the questions about China you care about. So few books even attempt that!
Addendum: Note that the author also wrote Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, another of my favorite books about China.
Firearms and Lynching
I love this paper by Mike Makowsky and Patrick Warren because it pokes so many bears. Makowsky and Warren find that greater access to firearms in the Black community reduced the rate of lynching in the Jim Crow South.
We assess firearms as a means of Black self-defense in the Jim Crow South. We infer firearm access by race and place by measuring the fraction of suicides committed with a firearm. Corroborating anecdotal accounts and historical claims, state bans on pistols and increases in White law enforcement personnel served as mechanisms to disarm the Black community, while having no comparable effect on White firearms. The interaction of these mechanisms with changing national market prices for firearms provides us with a credible identification strategy for Black firearm access. Rates of Black lynching decreased with greater Black firearm access.
Lots of black civil rights leaders were heavily armed but this is rarely mentioned let alone emphasized.
The Return of Privateering?
TexasSignal: Rep. Lance Gooden, a Republican who represents Texas’ 5th District, has introduced legislation that would allow U.S. citizens to seize the yachts, jets, and other property belonging to Russian oligarchs who have been sanctioned in response to the invasion of Ukraine. In other words, privateering.
…In the age of sail, it was common for nations to issue letters of marque licensing private citizens to raid the shipping of enemy nations. The practice died down in the 19th Century with the Paris Declaration of 1856 outlawing privateers. However, the United States never signed the Paris Declaration, and Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to issue letters of marque.
Gooden’s bill would require President Biden to issue letters of marque to seize yachts and other assets belonging to sanctioned Russian citizens. Gooden’s office even says that letters of marque could be issued to hackers to go after Russia in cyberspace.
There are three questions. First, should some Russian citizens be sanctioned? Second, should assets belonging to sanctioned Russian citizens be seized? Third, should privateers be able to do the seizing under a legal regime? There is a lot of room for debate on the first two questions but oddly these questions aren’t debated. Sanctions of this kind are common and broadly regarded as legitimate although likely overused in my view. The latter question arouses the most debate but is to me the easiest to answer. Sure, why not? Privateering worked well in the wars of the 19th century and we could likely have saved trillions by using bounties in the war in Afghanistan.
Here’s my paper on privateering and my story about the time I went bounty hunting in Baltimore.
That was then, this is now
Poland’s top politician said Thursday that the government will seek equivalent of some $1.3 trillion in reparations from Germany for the Nazis’ World War II invasion and occupation of his country…
“We will turn to Germany to open negotiations on the reparations,” Kaczynski said, adding it will be a “long and not an easy path” but “one day will bring success.”
He insisted the move would serve “true Polish-German reconciliation” that would be based on “truth.”
That is an article from today!
Kin-based institutions and economic development
Though many theories have been advanced to account for global differences in economic prosperity, little attention has been paid to the oldest and most fundamental of human institutions: kin-based institutions—the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, clan membership, post-marital residence and family organization. Here, focusing on an anthropologically well established dimension of kinship, we establish a robust and economically significant negative association between the tightness and breadth of kin-based institutions—their kinship intensity—and economic development. To measure kinship intensity and economic development, we deploy both quantified ethnographic observations on kinship and genotypic measures (which proxy endogamous marriage patterns) with data on satellite nighttime luminosity and regional GDP. Our results are robust to controlling for a suite of geographic and cultural variables and hold across countries, within countries at both the regional and ethnolinguistic levels, and within countries in a spatial regression discontinuity analysis. Considering potential mechanisms, we discuss evidence consistent with kinship intensity indirectly impacting economic development via its effects on the division of labor, cultural psychology, institutions, and innovation.
That is a new and very important paper by Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, Joseph Henrich, and Jonathan Schulz, the two Jonathans being my colleagues at GMU.
My Conversation with Cynthia L. Haven
Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the summary:
…those two interests converged as they led her to interview and write books about three writers and thinkers whom she also came to call mentors: René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky.
Cynthia joined Tyler to discuss what she’s gleaned from each of the three, including what traits they have in common, why her biography of Girard had to come from outside academia, Milosz’s reaction to the Berkley Free Speech Movement, Girard’s greatest talent — and flaw — as a thinker, whether Brodsky will fall down the memory hole, why he was so terrible on Ukraine, why Cynthia’s early career was much like The Devil Wears Prada, the failings of Twitter, and more.
And one excerpt:
COWEN: What is your philosophy of what is missing in most other people’s interviews?
HAVEN: I don’t know that it’s a philosophy.
COWEN: You must think you’re adding something, right?
HAVEN: I’m interested in big questions. I think a lot of people aren’t. A lot of interviewers aren’t. It’s not an era for big questions, is it?
COWEN: 2022? I’m not sure.
HAVEN: Really?
COWEN: Maybe the questions are either too big or too small and not enough in between.
HAVEN: That’s an interesting point of view.
COWEN: There’s plenty of ideology in the world and in this country. It doesn’t have to be a good thing, but —
HAVEN: Ideology is different than big questions, I think.
Interesting throughout.
As Goes India, so Goes Democracy
We lost China. It is imperative that we not lose India.
By we, I mean the West and liberal democracy broadly speaking. Many of us thought that China would liberalize naturally as the Chinese people grew rich and demand followed Maslow’s hierarchy. Many other countries had followed this path. But China doesn’t have a liberal history, technology provided irresitible tools for social control, and democracy no longer looks to be as important for riches as it once did. With China lost and the United States in relative decline, the liberal world very much needs India as a large, multi-ethnic, and free democracy. Liberal democracy is also India’s best hope and bulwark against being ripped apart by internal divisions. But much remains in the balance. Suketu Mehta has a very good essay on this issue:
…Indian democracy is one of the 20th century’s greatest achievements. Over 75 years, we built, against great odds, a nation that for the first time in its 5,000-year history empowered women and the Dalits, people formerly known as untouchables. We largely abolished famine. We kept the army out of politics. After independence, many people predicted that we would become Balkanised. Yugoslavia became Balkanised, but India stayed together. No small feat.
But I write this today to tell you: things in India are more dire than you realise. India is a country that is majority Hindu, but it is not officially a Hindu state. The people who are in power in India today want to change this. They want India to be a Hindu ethnocratic state, where all other religions live by Hindu sufferance.
This has practical consequences: people of other religions are actively harassed, even lynched on the streets; their freedom to practice their religion in their own way is circumscribed. And when they protest, they are jailed and their houses bulldozed. Most worrying, much of the judiciary seems to be sympathetic to the Hindu nationalist agenda, and issues its verdicts accordingly.
There is also sustained and systematic harassment of writers, journalists, artists, activists, religious figures – anyone who questions the official narrative. We who have attached our names here are taking great personal risk in writing this: our citizenship of India could be revoked, we could be banned from the country, our property in India seized, our relatives harassed.
There are many others who think like we do but have told us they cannot speak out, for fear of the consequences. I never thought I’d use the word “dissident” in describing myself and my friends who have compiled this document. I thought that word only applied to the Soviet Union, North Korea, China.
It is crucial that India remains a democracy for all its citizens. India is not Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan. Not yet. A lot of India’s standing in the world – the reason we are included in the respectable nations, the reason our people and our tech companies are welcome all over the world – is that we are seen, unlike, say, China, as being a multi-ethnic democracy that protects its minorities.
With over 200 million Indian Muslims, India is the third largest Muslim country in the world. There are 30 million Indian Christians. There are Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians, Atheists. They are as Indian as I am – a Hindu who’s proud of being a Hindu, but not a Hindu as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party seek to define me.
…The alienation of Indian Muslims would be catastrophic, for India and the world. They are being told: you are invaders, this is not your country, go back to where you came from. But Indian Muslims did not come from elsewhere; they were in the country all along, and chose which God to worship. After the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, they voted with their feet; they chose to stay, and build a nation.
…The country also has an enormous, restive, and largely unemployed youth population – half of its population is under 25. But only 36% of the working-age population has a job. To meet these challenges, it is crucial that the country stay united, and not fracture along religious lines, spend its energies building a brighter future instead of darkly contemplating past invasions.
In this time when country after country is turning its back on democracy, India has to be an example to countries around the world, this beautiful dream of nationhood expressed in the Hindu scriptures as “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” – the whole earth is a family. We should all be rooting for this incredible experiment in multiplicity to work. As goes India, so goes democracy.
Does government spending boost patriotism?
We demonstrate an important complementarity between patriotism and public-good provision. After 1933, the New Deal led to an unprecedented expansion of the US federal government’s role. Those who benefited from social spending were markedly more patriotic during WWII: they bought more war bonds, volunteered more, and, as soldiers, won more medals. This pattern was new – WWI volunteering did not show the same geography of patriotism. We match military service records with the 1940 census to show that this pattern holds at the individual level. Using geographical variation, we exploit two instruments to suggest that the effect is causal: droughts and congressional committee representation predict more New Deal agricultural support, as well as bond buying, volunteering, and medals.
That is by Bruno Caprettini & Hans-Joachim Voth, forthcoming in the QJE.