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.
A while back I linked to Holden Karnofsky’s argument that forthcoming times are likely to be the most important for determining the course of subsequent history, or “hingy-est” of all time. So I thought I should address the issue directly myself.
In my view the greatest danger to civilization is war, rather than AGI. Rather than rehashing that debate (see Holden’s view here), let’s just take the war view as given and see where it leads.
I see a few distinct possibilities:
1. The relatively peaceful world order since WWII will continue for the indefinite future, albeit with ongoing evolutions and modifications. If that is true then the second half of the twentieth century might be the hingy-est time because that was when we built enduring peace.
1b. But the postwar era doesn’t have to be the hingy-ist time under that view. It might be that “the finding of peace” was highly likely or inevitable, sooner or later. Maybe it was the Industrial Revolution that was more contingent, and without that we would have found ongoing peace but at much lower living standards. In that case the British seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could well be the hingy-est time.
But sadly, while I see #1 and #1b as possibly true, they are not for me the most likely scenarios. There is also:
2. Humanity will fight a very destructive war at some point. It will not kill everyone but it will slaughter a significant portion of the earth’s population and put the rest into something like “African living standards plus Balkans governance.” With no turnaround in sight, if only because it is so hard to cast off those institutions once they are in place. Protection against subsequent existential risks will be harder as well.
In that case the hingy-est time or century would be whenever that war comes, or whenever some set of preconditions made such a war inevitable.
To be clear, I think the chance of such a war is quite low in any given year. You don’t need to be shorting the market. Still, if you let the clock tick long enough, such a war is bound to come.
Now is the next 50-100 years the most likely era for such a war to arrive? I don’t see a strong argument why we should have such a definite intuition here. We’ve had some version of MAD with nuclear weapons for quite a few decades, and it has mostly worked out OK. At some point upping the firepower might shift that balance (drone assassins of political leaders? Or something that comes 137 years from now?). I don’t find it easy to have good intuitions on this question.
I am reminded of my earlier post on how long it took the NBA to truly adopt and exploit the logic of the three-point shot.
Even introducing strong AI doesn’t settle it for me. Strong AI might lengthen the reign of (relative) peace, rather than shortening it.
Many things, both positive and destructive, can take longer than you think. And as a general reminder, foreign policy outcomes are extremely difficult to predict, even across a small number of years much less decades.
So I don’t know when the hingy-est century or era is likely to be.
Rundell’s other books include The Girl Savage (2011), released in 2014 in a slightly revised form as Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms in the United States where it was the winner of the 2015 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction,The Wolf Wilder (2015), and The Explorer (2017), winner of the children’s book prize at the 2017 Costa Book Awards.
And this:
…all her books, and her play, contain a joke at Belgium’s expense…
The status quo between India and Pakistan is temporary. The world should start thinking about a future in which the two nations have a fundamentally different relationship.
Full reunification, of course, is difficult to imagine. But there are many possible options that fall short of that: a loose confederation, a NAFTA-like trade structure, a military alliance, even a broader regional reconfiguration under which each nation loses some territory but the remaining parts move closer together.
And:
What about arguments on the other side? They are mostly longer-term.
First, it’s worth noting that major changes in borders — whether through conquest, secession or unification — are the historical norm. In this respect, the post-colonial era is an anomaly. One view is that this era of relative stability will continue. Another is that it will prove temporary, and frequent border changes will become common once again — just as the border between Russia and Ukraine is being contested again.
If this second view is correct, India and Pakistan are hardly such longstanding, well-defined nations that they are natural candidates to stay exactly as they are. Both their borders and their political arrangements can quickly change.
Just think how unlikely today’s configuration in the Middle East might have seem fifty years ago. We now have Iran as the enemy of Israel and America, a democratic Iraq, a devastated Syria, a wealthy UAE friendly with Israel, a rather passive Egypt at peace with Israel, and Lebanon no longer the jewel of the region, among other major surprises. Get over your recency bias!
I suspect Ethiopians and Eritreans will have a relatively easy time digesting this argument.
The last two centuries witnessed the rise and fall of empires. We construct a model which rationalises this in terms of the changing trade gains from empires. In the model, empires are arrangements that reduce trade cost between an industrial metropole and the agricultural periphery. During early industrialisation, the value of such bilateral trade increases, and so does the value of empires. As industrialisation diffuses, and as manufactures become more differentiated, trade becomes more multilateral and intra-industry, reducing the value of empires. Our results are consistent with long-term changes in income distribution and trade patterns, and with previous historical arguments.
As an inquisitive reader, books were a cherished commodity for Leopoldo López when he was a political prisoner in his home country of Venezuela. His prison guards eventually observed the strength and focus López gained from reading. In an attempt to stifle his spirit, the guards confiscated his books and locked them in a neighboring cell where he could see but not access them. But López didn’t let this stop him from writing or discourage his resolve to fight for freedom. A Venezuelan opposition leader and freedom activist, today López works to research and resist oppressive autocratic regimes globally.
López joined Tyler to discuss Venezuela’s recent political and economic history, the effectiveness of sanctions, his experiences in politics and activism, how happiness is about finding purpose, how he organized a protest from prison, the ideal daily routine of a political prisoner, how extreme sports prepared him for prison, his work to improve the lives of the Venezuelan people, and more.
And one excerpt:
COWEN: In 1970, you were richer than Spain, Greece, or Israel, which I find remarkable. But do you, today, ever look, say, at Qatar or United Arab Emirates, Dubai, and think the problem actually was democracy, and that here are oil-rich places that have stayed stable, in fact, but through autocratic rule, and that it’s the intermediate situation that doesn’t work?
LÓPEZ: Well, I think that I, personally, will always be in favor of a democratic regime, a democratic system that promotes a rule of law, the respect for human rights, the respect of freedoms. I think that’s a priority. For me it is, and I believe it’s a priority also for the large, large majority of the Venezuelan people that want to live in a democracy.
However, there has been great mismanagement due to misconceptions of the economy, to a state-led economy that did not open possibilities for a private sector to flourish independently of the state, but also with the level of corruption that we have seen, particularly over the past 22 years — it’s what has led Venezuela to the situation in which we are.
In Venezuela, you could argue that we did much, much better economically, and in terms of all of the social and economic standards, than what happened during these last 20 years of autocracy. This autocracy had the largest windfall and the largest humanitarian crisis.
During the democratic period of 40 years, Venezuela became one of the most literate countries in Latin America, with the largest amount of professionals being graduated every year, with the best in social, health, and education standards, vaccination rates, housing programs that were in Latin America. So, we did perform much better under the democratic period than has been the performance by any means in the autocratic regimes of the last 22 years.
Leadership is most vital during a period of transition from one order to another. We are certainly in such a period now — not only from the neoliberal order to something much darker but also to a new era of smart machines — yet so far leadership is lacking. We call for leaders who are equal to the times, but nobody answers.
Kissinger offers two explanations for this troubling silence. The first lies in the evolution of meritocracy. (Full disclosure: He mentions a book I have written on this subject). The six leaders were all born outside the pale of the aristocratic elite that had hitherto dominated politics, and particularly foreign policy: Adenauer and Sadat were the sons of clerks, Thatcher and Nixon were the children of storekeepers, Lee’s parents were downwardly mobile. But theirs was a meritocracy with an aristocratic flavor. They went to elite schools and universities that provided an education in human excellence rather than just passing tests. In rubbing shoulders with members of the old elite, they absorbed some of its ethic of noblesse oblige (“For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required”) as well as its distaste for populism. Hence Lee’s recurring references to “Junzi” (Confucian gentlemen) and de Gaulle’s striving to become a “man of character.” They believed in history, tradition and, in most cases, God.
The world has become much more meritocratic since Kissinger’s six made their careers, not least when it comes to women and ethnic minorities. But the dilution of the aristocratic element in the mix may also have removed some of the grit that produced the pearl of leadership: Schools have given up providing an education in human excellence — the very idea would be triggering! — and ambitious young people speak less of obligation than of self-expression or personal advancement. The bonds of character and duty that once bound leaders to their people are dissolving.
There are further arguments — much more in fact — at the link. And here is an ngram on “leadership.”
We find that cohorts younger than age five at the onset of WWII or those born during the war are in significantly worse mental health later in life when they are between ages late 50s and 70s. Specifically, an increase of one-standard deviation in the bombing intensity experienced during WWII is associated with about a 10 percent decline in an individual’s long–term standardized mental health score. This effect is equivalent to a 16.8 percent increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with clinical depression. Our analysis also reveals that this impact is most pronounced among the youngest children including those who might have been in-utero at some point during the war.
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. I am ultimately optimistic, but let me present the case for the negative:
Yet those positives have been in place for a while, and the results are less than earth-shattering. By World Bank estimates, Colombia has a per capita income of slightly more than $16,000, using purchasing power parity standards. For purposes of comparison, Mexico comes in at slightly over $20,000. Argentina is considered to have been an economic failure since the Peronist years, but still has a per capita income exceeding $22,000.
Also troubling is the country’s export profile. After fossil fuels, which have a limited future, the country’s leading exports are coffee, gems and precious metals. None of these is large enough or sophisticated enough or training enough quality labor to push the nation over the top. When it comes to complex manufacturing, the country is lagging well behind Mexico and Brazil, much less South Korea.
A pessimistic view of Colombia would cite the country’s very different geographic regions that have never seen full economic or even political unification. The lack of a fully developed nation-state has been reflected in the country’s ongoing troubles with guerrillas and drug lords. The major urban centers of Bogotá and Medellín are both deep in the interior, surrounded by mountains, and unable to take advantage of major navigable rivers. There is no world-class port or harbor, and except for its connection to the US, the country is inward-looking and has attracted relatively few immigrants, recent Venezuelan refugees aside. The Amazon cuts off Colombia from much of the rest of South America. De facto Colombia has no richer neighbor to pull it up by its bootstraps, Panama being much too small and most of Brazil being too distant. Colombia’s problems also include a recent uptick in troubles with former guerrillas.
Drone airspace resembles spectrum in the 1980s, an appreciating asset that could be bought, subleased, traded, and borrowed against – if it were only permitted.
Much like legacy spectrum policy, there is immense technocratic inertia towards rationing airspace use to a few lucky drone companies. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has begun drafting long-distance drone rules for services like home delivery, business-to-business delivery, and surveying. In the next decade, drone services companies will deploy mass-market parcel delivery and medical deliveries in urban and suburban areas to make deliveries and logistics faster, cheaper, and greener.
…Federal officials recognize that the current centralized system of air traffic management won’t work for drones: at peak times today, US air traffic controllers actively manage only about 5,400 en route aircraft.
Red flags abound, however. FAA’s current plans for drone traffic management, while vague and preliminary, are clear about what happens once local congestion occurs: the agency will step in to ration airspace and routes how it sees fit. Further, the agency says it will closely oversee the development of airspace management technologies. This is a recipe for technology lock-in and intractable regulatory battles.
US aviation history offers the alarming precedent of expert planning for a new industry. In 1930 President Hoover’s Postmaster General, who regulated airmail routes, and a handpicked group of business executives teamed up to “rationalize” the nascent airline marketplace. In private meetings, they eliminated the established practice of competitive bidding for air routes, divided routes amongst themselves, and reduced the number of startup airlines from around forty to three.
“Universal” and “interoperable” air traffic management are popular concepts in the drone industry, but these principles have destroyed innovation and efficiency in traditional airspace management. The costly US air traffic management system still relies on voice communications and manual writing and passing of paper slips. Large, legacy users and vendors dominate upgrade efforts, and “update by consensus” means the injection of innumerable veto points. Drone traffic management will be “clean sheet,” but interoperable systems are incredibly difficult to build and, once built, to upgrade with new technology and processes. More than 16,000 FAA employees worked on the over-budget, pared-down, years-delayed air traffic management upgrades for traditional aviation.
…To avoid anticompetitive “route-squatting” and sclerotic bureaucratic control of a new industry, aviation regulators should announce a national policy of “airspace markets” – government sales of high-demand drone routes, resembling present-day government spectrum auctions.
I gave a keynote address in Bogotá to the International Adam Smith Society, here is my talk. Why is Adam Smith still relevant to Colombia of all places? It’s not just the market economics, rather my remarks focused on Book V (the best and most interesting part of WoN!) and Smith’s take on standing armies and why they are conducive to liberty.
According to Boustan and Abramitzky, the secret weapon deployed by immigrant parents wasn’t education. It wasn’t a demanding parenting style like the one described in Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” either.
It was geographic mobility.
Immigrant kids tended to outperform their peers from similar economic backgrounds because, unencumbered by deep hometown roots, their parents were willing to move to where the jobs were. If you compare immigrants to similar native kids born in the same place, they succeed at similar rates. It’s just that immigrant kids are much more likely to have grown up in one of those high-opportunity places.
“Immigrants are living in locations that provide upward mobility for everyone,” Boustan said.
Here is the full article, which also argues that recent immigrants have been climbing the economic ladder no slower than in the days of Ellis Island. By Andrew Van Dam, based on the work of Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky.
The author is James Belich, and the subtitle is The Black Death and the Rise of Europe. This is a fascinating but not entirely persuasive book. In any case it is one of the books to read this year. Here is a summary sentence:
This book has argued that plague’s dire crucible triggered the Fourth Divergence.
My main worry is simple, namely that the author does not demonstrate his main proposition that the Black Death significantly boosted living standards where it hit. That might be true, and I would say I don’t have a view of my own view on the matter one way or the other. (Here is a recent and very useful survey indicating the positive effects were mostly short-run.) But I would need to see a more careful presentation of wage data, and the author too frequently invokes a) massive literature citations, and b) a pat “half the people, so twice the per capita wealth” argument. Losing up to half the people is highly disruptive, including for the ability to exploit material resources. And is it per capita wealth that matters, or income? Matters for what and for which income classes? I needed to see much more on this.
Anyway, if you buy into the main premise (or even if you don’t) what follows is interesting throughout. Belich takes on exactly when and why various plagues stopped circulating, and whether insufficiency of rats was a major reason. Here is one interesting passage:
The rise of rat resistance — and the decline of it — seems like to have played a major role in the decline of plague — and the exceptions to it — throughout West Eurasia. But as we saw in the last chapter, plague history increasingly diverged regionally from 1500. Epidemics ended in Western Europe by 1720 and Eastern Europe by 1780. Major strikes continued to afflict the Muslim South until about 1840. the end of plague is conventionally attributed to human agency, notably the growing power of states to run effective quarantine measures, public health regulations, and border controls. Other factors include a shift from wood to brick and tile, which was less rat-friendly , and to cheaper arsenic in the 1720s, which was not rat-friendly at all. The decline of wooden houses and thatched roofs, ideal black rat environments, and their replacement by brick and tile varied by class, which may account for the trend toward higher casualties among common folk after 1500.
Belich then sheds some doubt on the public health measures argument, noting that Italy had bad plague outcomes in the 17th century, even though it had the best public health measures at the time. No simple answer, but plenty of interesting discussion.
Another of my favorite sections of the book covered the difficulties at the time in persuading women to emigrate, and how that shaped colonial policies. You also get the author’s take on the Persianate nature of the Mughal invasions, a lengthy account of how the plague shaped the settlement of Siberia, an optimistic take on the capabilities of peak Ottoman empire, how the fiscal state was Britain’s main innovation, how Britain manned its sea fleets from the Nordic countries, and much more. You might say this is all too much, but who am I to complain? I did find every page of the book substantive and interesting, even if I often felt the author was biting off more than he could chew.
So definitely recommended, though with caveats on the side of some of the actual conclusions.
I am saddened and disturbed by the destruction of the Georgia Guidestones. The Guidestones, “America’s stonehenge,” were a set of six large, granite slabs, erected in 1980 and paid for by a mysterious group of unknown benefactors. The slabs were arranged precisely for astronomical reasons and contain inscriptions in multiple languages. On July 6, 2022 the Guidestones were blown up and then, what remained, was completely destroyed for apparent safety reasons.
The Guidestones were not a significant marker of cultural heritage, unlike the 1400 year old massive Buddhas of Bamiyan which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Nevertheless, it is hard not to see the parallels between the destruction of the Guidestones and the Bamiyan Buddhas. Earlier this year Kandiss Taylor, a minor candidate for the 2022 Republican nomination for Governor of Georgia, made the destruction of the Guidestones one of her campaign pledges, claiming they were a Satanic evil. Thus, the destruction of the Guidestones was likely motivated by fears and hatred similar to those that motivated the destruction of the Buddhas. At the very least, an interesting art work, created at considerably expense by a group of public benefactors, was maliciously destroyed.
The Guidestones were meant to last for a thousand years and to offer guidance to humanity after a castrophe such as a nuclear war. The Guidestones lasted 42 years. It doesn’t bode well.
The Georgia Guidestones, Quentin Melson, Wikipedia.
