Category: History
Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture
Forthcoming from the QJE, here is a new paper by Andrea Matanga:
The Neolithic revolution saw the independent development of agriculture among at least seven unconnected hunter-gatherer populations. I propose that the rapid spread of agricultural techniques resulted from increased climatic seasonality causing hunter-gatherers to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and store food for the season of scarcity. Their newfound sedentary lifestyle and storage habits facilitated the invention of agriculture. I present a model and support it with global climate data and Neolithic adoption dates, showing that higher seasonality increased the likelihood of agriculture’s invention and its speed of adoption by neighbors. This study suggests that seasonality patterns played a dominant role in determining our species’ transition to farming.
Here are various less gated copies. Via Nicanor Angle.
What should I ask Alan Taylor?
He is one of the greatest of living American historians, here is from Wikipedia:
Alan Shaw Taylor (born June 17, 1955) is an American historian and scholar who is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A specialist in the early history of the United States, Taylor has written extensively about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution and the early American Republic. Taylor has received two Pulitzer Prizes and the Bancroft Prize, and was also a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction.
He has a new and excellent book out, namely American Civil Wars: A Continental History 1850-1873. Among his other virtues, he is renowned for tying in American history to developments in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. So what should I ask him?
What I am nostalgic about
With a group of friends I was having a chat about the merits of the current vs. past America. Battle of the Ancients and Moderns! I generally favor current times, but not unconditionally. So I promised them a list of what I missed from the past. To be clear, these are personal judgments, not claims about net social value. I’ll also offer comments on features from the past that many miss, but I do not. Here goes:
1. Visiting Borders in its heyday. Nowadays I have to go to London to have comparable experiences.
2. That you could just show up at various venues, pay modest prices, and see incredible performers. For instance I saw Horowitz and also McCartney at his peak. Leo Kottke at his peak. Pierre Boulez. Many more. Such experiences are hardly gone, but in terms of cultural resonance the earlier times were much better. How did I fail to go see Miles Davis!?
Similarly, you could just go see Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, Derek Parfit, and many other famous figures. No current economist or philosopher is comparable in this regard.
2b. Note that in some areas, such as NBA basketball, there are more “must see” players today than in any earlier era. Or say tech titans. So I am not favoring the nostalgic perspective per se, but for music, economics, and philosophy the nostalgic perspective on live performance is correct.
3. There were more and better museum art exhibits to see before 9/11. Much of that has to do with insurance rates and the ease of international agreements.
4. Good seafood was cheap and readily available.
5. Reading the Far Eastern Economic Review in its heyday.
6. Awaiting the arrival of a new issue of the Journal of Political Economy, knowing it would have exciting new ideas.
7. Many, many locations were better to travel to and visit. Amsterdam is one obvious example. But by no means is this true for all places, India for instance is better to visit today than before.
8. Hollywood movies used to be better, though global cinema overall is doing fine.
9. Very recently there are too many parts of the world you really just can’t visit, Iran and Russia most notably.
10. Mainstream media was much better, noting I nonetheless would rather have the internet. Still, I miss the quality of cultural reviews, local news, and several other features of normal newspapers.
11. San Francisco of the 1980s and Miami Beach of the 1990s.
12. So many intellectuals could afford to live in New York City, and indeed Manhattan. The city was overall more interesting, though worse to live in or to have to deal with.
13. Parking was much easier, even in Manhattan. I used to just get parking spots, even in the Village or Midtown. Now I would never bother to look.
14. The emphasis on personal freedom in American popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s.
15. Paperback editions of the classics were so often far superior in earlier times. Nowadays most of them look and feel like crap.
A few things I have no nostalgia for:
1. I feel America today is overall a higher-trust society, admittedly with the picture being somewhat complex. American cities certainly are much safer, and most of them look much better.
2. I prefer current airport procedures to those before 9/11.
3. Young people are overall smarter, and arguably more moral.
4. Just seeing white (and sometimes black) people everywhere, except a few cities on the coasts.
5. The seafood issue aside, food in America is obviously much much better.
6. I can’t think of anything in the category of “how people interacted with each other” that I preferred in earlier times.
7. I don’t miss having more snow, quite the contrary.
8. Medical and dental care are far superior, obviously.
What else should be on these lists?
Michael Cook on Iran
Our primary concern in this chapter will be Iran, though toward the end we will shift the focus to Central Asia. We can best begin with a first-order approximation of the pattern of Iranian history across the whole period. It has four major features. The first is the survival of something called Iran, as both a cultural and a political entity; Iran is there in the eleventh century, and it is still there in the eighteenth. the second is an alternation between periods when Iran is ruled by a single imperial state and periods in which it break up intoa number of smaller states. The third feature is steppe nomad power: all imperial states based in Iran in this period are the work of Turkic or Mongol nomads. The fourth is the role of the settled Iranian population, whose lot is to pay taxes and — more rewardingly — to serve as bureaucrats and bearers of a literate culture. With this first-order approximation in mind, we can now move on to a second-order approximation in the form of an outline of the history of Iran over eight centuries that will occupy most of this chapter.
That is from his new book A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity. I had not known that in the early 16th century Iran was still predominantly Sunni. And:
There were also Persian-speaking populations to the east of Iran that remained Sunni, and within Iran there were non-Persian ethnic groups, such as the Kurds in the west and the Baluchis in the southeast, that likewise retained their Sunnism. But the core Persian-speaking population of the country was by now [1722] almost entirely Shiite. Iran thus became the first and largest country in which Shiites were both politically and demographically dominant. One effect of this was to set it apart from the Muslim world at large, a development that gave Iran a certain coherence at the cost of poisoning its relations with its neighbors.
This was also a good bit:
Yet the geography of Iran in this period was no friendlier to maritime trade than it had been in Sasanian times. To a much greater extent than appears from a glance at the map, Iran is landlocked: the core population and prime resources of the country are located deep in the interior, far from the arid coastlands of the Persian Gulf.
In my earlier short review I wrote “At the very least a good book, possibly a great book.” I have now concluded it is a great book.
*The Carnation Revolution*
The author is Alex Fernandes, and the subtitle is The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell. A very good and well-written book, here is one short excerpt:
The First Republic is sixteen years of unrelenting chaos, one that sets the scene for the fascist state that follows it. Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal goes through eight presidents and forty-five governments, all the while experiencing an economic crisis, crushing debt and the Europe-spanning threats of the First World War. Mirroring similar movements in France and Mexico, early Portuguese republicanism’s defining feature is its fierce anti-clericalism, imposing a crackdown on churches, convents and monasteries and persecuting religious leaders. The turbulent political landscape is marked by escalating acts of violence, militant strike action, periodic military uprisings and borderline civil war, the government fluctuating wildly between different republican factions.
Unfortunately, this book does not read as if it is about a niche topic. And don’t forget Salazar was an economist.
History of economic thought paper ideas
These topics seem underexplored to me:
Montesquieu
Economics in the Talmud
Rise of econometrics in the 19th century
The Irish economists, including Cairnes and Longfield
The last 50 years of economics are in general very poorly covered
Works in any foreign language you might read
Chinese economic thought
Economic thought in India
The funding of economics, and economists, through the ages (very underdone)
The institutionalization of economics
History of women in economics, especially recently
History of prizes and awards in economics
Economic ideas and fascism, in various eras
Economic thoughts on the arts, starting with Hume
History of finance and financial economics, considerably understudied
Economics and demographic thought, throughout the ages, for instance the 1920s
The very early history of law and economics
Economic thought in various religions
Economics and 19th century psychology
History of experimental economics
History of RCTs
History of economics and education, as a topic
History of what has been taught in economics classes, over the generations
History of textbooks
History of economists in government
History of economists in multi-lateral institutions
History of economists working in central banks
History of how various economic databases have been built
History of economists doing journalism (both Menger and Walras were first journalists)
Early history of “environmental economics”
Early history of economics/water supply issues
Earlier writings on the economics of slavery
History of economists holding public office, J.S. Mill, Einaudi, many others, or as central bankers
The Henry Geoge movement over the generations
Economic “dissidents” of various kinds
History of economists working with the military and national security
Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT*
An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular:
Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral of prices and wages, monetary and exchange rate policies were out of whack, multipliers operate, the quest for savings could lower incomes overall, and the influence of liquidity factors on money demand and interest rates was especially high. All at once” (p. 72, emphasis in the original). In other words, Cowen drives home the point that this “general theory” isn’t actually general, it’s about very special, very unusual circumstances.
He considers Lord Keynes the GOAT contender whom he would most “want to hang around with” (p. 54). I had exactly the opposite reaction. The Keynes he portrays is virtually an egotistical monster. One who, for example, “kept an extended spreadsheet of his lovers and sexual encounters … each one rated by number” (p. 58). Anyone who treats other human beings this way—let alone writing it down—isn’t the kind of person I want to hang around with.
Recommended.
The $20 bill gets picked up, body parts markets in everything
At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t explain the loss here. How did so many bones up and vanish?
In a new book, an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond.
Here is the full article, via William Meller. And, as Alex has stressed in the past, never underestimate the elasticity of supply!
Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of Rice versus Wheat Farming
It’s long been argued that the means of production influence social, cultural and psychological processes. Rice farming, for example, requires complex irrigation systems under communal management and intense, coordinated labor. Thus, it has been argued that successful rice farming communities tend to develop people with collectivist orientations, and cultural ways of thinking that emphasize group harmony and interdependence. In contrast, wheat farming, which requires less labor and coordination is associated with more individualistic cultures that value independence and personal autonomy. Implicit in Turner’s Frontier hypothesis, for example, is the idea that not only could a young man say ‘take this job and shove it’ and go west but once there they could establish a small, viable wheat farm (or other dry crop).
There is plenty of evidence for these theories. Rice cultures around the world do tend to exhibit similar cultural characteristics, including less focus on self, more relational or holistic thinking and greater in-group favoritism than wheat cultures. Similar differences exist between the rice and dry crop areas of China. The differences exist but is the explanation rice and wheat farming or are there are other genetic, historical or random factors at play?
A new paper by Talhelm and Dong in Nature Communications uses the craziness of China’s Cultural Revolution to provide causal evidence in favor of the rice and wheat farming theory of culture. After World War II ended, the communist government in China turned soldiers into farmers arbitrarily assigning them to newly created farms around the country–including two farms in Northern Ningxia province that were nearly identical in temperature, rainfall and acreage but one of the firms lay slightly above the river and one slightly below the river making the latter more suitable for rice farming and the former for wheat. During the Cultural Revolution, youth were shipped off to the farms “with very little preparation or forethought”. Thus, the two farms ended up in similar environments with similar people but different modes of production.
Talhelm and Dong measure thought style with a variety of simple experiments which have been shown in earlier work to be associated with collectivist and individualist thinking. When asked to draw circles representing themselves and friends or family, for example, people tend to self-inflate their own circle but they self-inflate more in individualist cultures.
The authors find that consistent with the differences across East and West and across rice and wheat areas in China, the people on the rice farm in Ningxia are more collectivistic in their thinking than the people on the wheat farm.
The differences are all in the same direction but somewhat moderated suggesting that the effects can be created quite quickly (a few generations) but become stronger the longer and more embedded they are in the wider culture.
I am reminded of an another great paper, this one by Leibbrandt, Gneezy, and List (LGL) that I wrote about in Learning to Compete and Cooperate. LGL look at two types of fishing villages in Brazil. The villages are close to one another but some of them are on the lake and some of them are on the sea coast. Lake fishing is individualistic but sea fishing requires a collective effort. LGL find that the lake fishermen are much more willing to engage in competition–perhaps having seen that individual effort pays off–than the sea fishermen for whom individual effort is much less efficacious. Unlike Talhelm and Dong, LGL don’t have random assignment, although I see no reason why the lake and sea fishermen should otherwise be different, but they do find that women, who neither lake nor sea fish, do not show the same differences. Thus, the differences seem to be tied quite closely to production learning rather than to broader culture.
How long does it take to imprint these styles of thinking? How long does it last? Is imprinting during child or young adulthood more effective than later imprinting? Can one find the same sorts of differences between athletes of different sports–e.g. rowing versus running? It’s telling, for example, that the only famous rowers I can think are the Winklevoss twins. Are attempts to inculcate these types of thinking successful on a more than surface level. I have difficulty believing that “you didn’t build that,” changes say relational versus holistic thinking but would styles of thinking change during a war?
What should I ask Brian Winter?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is his bio:
Brian Winter is the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and a seasoned analyst of Latin American politics, with more than 20 years following the region’s ups and downs. He lived in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico as a correspondent for Reuters before taking on his current role in New York, where he is also the vice president of policy for the Americas Society and Council of the Americas. He has been called “the best foreign expert on Brazil of this moment” by GloboNews. Brian is the author of several books including Why Soccer Matters, a New York Times bestseller he wrote with the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé; The Accidental President of Brazil, co-authored with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso; and Long After Midnight, a memoir about trying (and failing) to learn to tango in Argentina. He is a regular contributor to television and radio, the host of the Americas Quarterly Podcast and a prolific barbecuer and chef. Proficient in Spanish and Portuguese, Brian speaks frequently about Latin America’s past, present and future to investors and general-interest audiences. Follow him on Twitter @BrazilBrian
So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Fareed Zakaria
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. You can tell he knows what an interview is! At the same time, he understands this differs from many of his other venues and he responds with flying colors. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as a boy, what made his father lean towards socialism, why the Bengali intelligentsia is so left-wing, what’s stuck with him from his time at an Anglican school, what’s so special about visiting Amritsar, why he misses a more syncretic India, how his time at the Yale Political Union dissuaded him from politics, what he learned from Walter Isaacson and Sam Huntington, what put him off academia, how well some of his earlier writing as held up, why he’s become focused on classical liberal values, whether he had reservations about becoming a TV journalist, how he’s maintained a rich personal life, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why couldn’t you talk Singh out of his Nehruvian socialism? He was a great liberal. He loved free speech, very broad-minded, as you know much better than I do. But he, on economics, was weak. Or no?
ZAKARIA: Oh, no, you’re entirely right. By the way, I would say the same is true of my father, with whom I had many, many such conversations. You’d find this interesting, Tyler. My father was a young Indian nationalist who — as he once put it to me — made the most important decision in his life, politically, when he was 13 or 14 years old, which was, as a young Indian Muslim, he chose Nehru’s vision of secular democracy as the foundation of a nation rather than Jinnah’s view of religious nationalism. He chose India rather than Pakistan as an Indian Muslim.
He was politically so interesting and forward-leaning, but he was a hopeless social — a sort of social democrat, but veering towards socialism. Both these guys were. Here’s why, I think. For that whole generation of people — by the way, my father got a scholarship to London University and went to study with Harold Laski, the great British socialist economist. Laski told him, “You are actually not an economist; you are a historian.” So, my father went on and got a PhD at London University in Indian history.
That whole generation of Indians who wanted independence were imbued with . . . There were two things going on. One, the only people in Britain who supported Indian independence were the Labour Party and the Fabian Socialists. All their allies were all socialists. There was a common cause and there was a symbiosis because these were your friends, these were your allies, these were the only people supporting you, the cause that mattered the most to you in your life.
The second part was, a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.
My own view was, that was a big mistake, though I do think there are elements of what the state was able to do that perhaps were better done in a place like South Korea than in India, but that really explains it.
My father was in Britain in ’45 as a student. As a British subject then, you got to vote in the election if you were in London, if you were in Britain. I said to him, “Who did you vote for in the 1945 election?” Remember, this is the famous election right after World War II, in which Churchill gets defeated, and he gets up the next morning and looks at the papers, and his wife says to him, “Darling, it’s a blessing in disguise.” He says, “Well, at the moment it seems very effectively disguised.”
My father voted in that election. I said to him, “You’re a huge fan of Churchill,” because I’d grown up around all the Churchill books, and my father could quote the speeches. I said, “Did you vote for Churchill?” He said, “Oh good lord, no.” I said, “Why? I thought you were a great admirer of his.” He said, “Look, on the issue that mattered most to me in life, he was an unreconstructed imperialist. A vote for Labour was a vote for Indian independence. A vote for Churchill was a vote for the continuation of the empire.” That, again, is why their friends were all socialists.
Excellent throughout. And don’t forget Fareed’s new book — discussed in the podcast — Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.
Strong AI and the O-Ring model
Let’s say the Sumerians were gifted strong AI, simply as an exogenous shock to a historical model. Could they put it to much use? Electricity would be one immediate problem, but not the only problem.
Or give strong AI to a caveman.
Thomas Edison had electricity, but how much could he do with strong AI? Lord Asquith? Adlai Stevenson?
Where exactly are we in this historical sequence?
Opening Borders
Open borders hasn’t been getting a lot of good press recently but next week Bulgaria and Romania will join the Schengen Area for air and sea travel (road travel will likely follow). No more passports or visa necessary! The Schengen Area is a remarkable achievement for a part of the world once riven by violence and rivalry. Recall:
Created in 1995 with 10 countries, the Schengen Area has since grown to cover more than 1.5 million square miles, allowing almost 420 million people to move freely between 27 countries, currently. It’s important not to confuse the Schengen Area with the European Union—the former is a travel zone where citizens can cross country borders without a passport or visa, whereas the latter is an economic and political union of countries. The Schengen Area currently includes Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
According to the Council of the European Union, “Each day around 3.5 million people cross internal borders for work or study or to visit families and friends, and almost 1.7 million people reside in one Schengen country while working in another.” Being a part of the zone saves citizens time and hassle from passport checks. It also helps travelers from 59 countries outside the EU, including the United States, as they can travel without visas for up to 90 days within the Schengen Area for tourism and business.
Unfortunately, the European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS) means that US citizens will require a visa to travel to Europe next year–this is a step in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, the entry of Bulgaria and Romania to the Schengen Area is something to celebrate.
It would be great to see a Schengen Area for say the United States, Canada, Australia, the U.K and New Zealand (the US plus the CANZUK countries).
*Star Maker*, by Olaf Stapledon
Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago. To most men, if course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more civilized than any earlier age. In their view civilization and mechanization were almost identical, and never before had there been such a triumph of mechanization. The benefits of a scientific civilization were obvious. For the fortunate class there was more comfort, better health, increased stature, a prolongation of youth, and a system of technical knowledge so vast and intricate that no man coul dknow more than its outline or some tiny corner of its detail. Moreoever, increased communications had brought all the peoples into contact. Local idiosyncrasies were fading out before the radio, the cinema, and the gramophone. In comparison with these hopeful signs it was easily overlooked that the human constitution, through strengthened by improved conditions, was intrinsically less stable than formerly. Certain disintegrative diseases were slowly but surely increasing. In particular, diseases of the nervous system were becoming more common and more pernicious. Cynics used to say that the mental hospitals would soon outnumber even the churches.
Here is a recent short essay on Starmaker, first published in 1937.
*Revolusi*
The subtitle is Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, and the author is David van Reybrouck. An excellent book, and I found two points of particular interest in it. First, just how weak and incomplete was the Dutch colonization of Indonesia for centuries. Second, just how complicated and rapidly changing was the postwar transition from Japanese rule to independence. Excerpt:
In total no fewer than 120,000 Dutch conscripts would depart between 1946 and 1949, an enormous number that approached the general mobilization before World War II (150,000). Six thousand recruits who were examined and judged ‘fit for the tropics’ refused to embark. Many of these were tracked down and hauled out of beds to the military police. This hunt for deserters went on until 1958! Strict sentences were passed on 2,565 war resisters. Almost three-quarters received custodial sentences of up to two years, the rest remain in jail even longer. Altogether a total of fifteen centuries of prison sentences were pronounced, a remarkably large amount compared to the complete immunity granted to later war criminals. The conclusion was clear: those who refused to kill were locked up, those who murdered without reason went free.
Recommended, there should of course be more such books on Indonesia.