Category: History

Data on the effects of censorship in early modern England

by  Tyler Cowen in

We use a panel-data framework to study the effects of print censorship on early-modern England’s cultural production. Doing so requires distilling dispersed qualitative information into quantitative data. Integrating the historical record implicit in a large language model (LLM) with facts from secondary sources, we generate an annual index of print censorship. Applying a machine-learning (ML) algorithm to a major corpus, we construct document-level measures of the innovativeness (quality) and volume (quantity) of cultural production. We use pre-existing topic-model estimates to apportion each document among distinct cultural themes-three affected by censorship and five unaffected. We thereby assemble a yearly theme-level panel for 1525-1700. We use local projections to estimate censorship’s dynamic effects. Paradoxically, censorship raises the level of innovativeness in censorship-affected themes relative to non-affected themes. Censorship has a temporary chilling effect on the quantity of cultural production, with output recovering within a decade. Our findings are robust to the use of an instrumental-variable approach addressing the endogeneity of censorship. Our findings are unchanged when using three alternative LLMs to produce the censorship index. Using LLMs and ML to measure hard-to-quantify phenomena like censorship and cultural production, we provide new insights into the drivers of cultural evolution.

Here is the full paper by Peter Murrell and Peter Grajzl.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

*Capitalism: A Global History*, by Sven Beckert

by  Tyler Cowen in

This 1103 pp. book reflects a great deal of learning, and it is often interesting to read.  It is well-written.  So virtually everyone can absorb interesting things from it.  In that sense I am happy to recommend it.

The book has two major problems however.

First, is “capitalism” the right way of centering a book topic across centuries and 1103 pages?  What exactly ties all the different discussions together?  And how many of them succeed in making original contributions to the areas they cover?  There is a kind of “replacement level” left-wing series of cliches running throughout the narrative, but what else is unifying this story?  I would rather read a book on any single one of the covered topics.  And in too many cases the coverage seems only OK.  For instance, the discussions of Pinochet’s Chile, and neoliberalism, in the book’s final chapter are not above the quality of basic media coverage, as you might find in the NYT.

Second, the author does not know what “capitalism” is.  I am not going to insist on my pet definition, but consider a simple example.

Birkerts (p.180) is keen to describe mid-17th century Barbados as capitalism, indeed as a kind of extreme or ideal capitalism.  Well, in some regards.  Yes there were markets.  But King Charles I gave all the land to the Earl of Carlisle to distribute, and of course land was a centrally important asset back then.  Might that be called…heaven forbid…statism?  There was slavery too, at various stages of development, depending which years one is looking at.  Is that really “an almost perfectly Smithian economy”?  Smith hated slavery, and also considered it economically inefficient.  The Navigation Act of 1651 limited trade with the Dutch, and could be considered a further deviation from Barbadian capitalism.  The whole system was mercantilism built on land theft and slavery, and none of that is synonymous with capitalism.  Nor are these distinctions clearly unpacked in the discussion.

Or look to the book’s epilogue.  Cambodia is held up as the embodiment of current capitalism.  Really?  Not Poland or Ireland or Singapore?  Or even the Dominican Republic?  Better yet, how about multiple contrasting examples to conclude the book?  Cambodia was ruled by vicious communists, suffered under a major murderous holocaust, still has an absolute dictator, ranks 98th in the Heritage index of economic freedom (“mostly unfree“), and lies in the thrall of Chinese domination, economic, political, and otherwise.  I do understand there is now more FDI there, but this is hardly the proper representation of contemporary capitalism or its future, as the title of the final chapter seems to indicate.

The main problem is that the author has very little sense of what he does not understand.  Above all else, it is an example of just how insular our institutions of elite higher education have become.

The Danger from Japan

by  Alex Tabarrok in

ImageAnswer: America won.

Every generation launches a new competitor to America and the people who don’t like capitalism and America’s individualist, free market economy trumpet that now the American way is being left in the dust. In the progressive era it was the Germans (how did that work out?), then it was the Russians (remember Sputnik?), then it was the Japanese (buying up Rockefeller center! the horror!), then it was the Chinese (look at those high speed rail lines!). My message to Americans is to double down on America. Double down on immigration, entrepreneurship, innovation, building for tomorrow, free markets, free speech and individualism and America will take all new competitors as it has taken all comers in the past. The world should be more like America not the other way around.

Hat tip: Mike Bird.

My entertaining Conversation with Annie Jacobsen

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Annie explore whether we should be more afraid of nuclear weapons or if fear itself raises the risks, who should advise presidents during the six-minute decision window, whether moving toward disarmament makes us safer or more vulnerable, what Thomas Schelling really meant about nuclear war and rational actors, the probability that America would retaliate after a nuclear attack, the chances of intercepting a single incoming ICBM, why missile defense systems can’t replicate Israel’s Iron Dome success, how Pakistan-India nuclear tensions could escalate, why she’s surprised domestic drone attacks haven’t happened yet, her reporting on JFK assassination mysteries and deathbed phone calls, her views on UFOs and the dark human experiments at Area 51, what motivates intelligence community operators, her encounters with Uri Geller and CIA psychic research, what she’s working on next, and more.

Excerpt:

JACOBSEN: I quote him in the notes of my book, and this is perhaps the only regret I have in the entire book, that I put this quote from Schelling in the notes rather than in the text. Maybe it’s more interesting for your listeners if we drill down on this than the big platitudes of, “Do more nuclear weapons make us more safe?” It goes like this. This was Schelling in an interview with WGBH Radio in 1986 in Boston.

He says, “The problem with applying game theory to nuclear war is that nuclear war, by its very nature, does not involve rational men. It can’t. What sane person would be willing to kill hundreds of millions of people, ruin the earth, and end modern civilization in order to make somebody called the enemy doesn’t win first?”

COWEN: But Schelling did favor nuclear weapons. That was his dark sense of humor, I would say.

JACOBSEN: You think what I just read was his sense of humor?

COWEN: Absolutely.

JACOBSEN: I believe it was a man in his elder years coming to the conclusion that nuclear war is insane, which is the fundamental premise that I make in the book.

COWEN: You can hold both views. It is insane, but it might be the better insanity of the ones available to us.

JACOBSEN: Yes. From my take, he, like so many others that I have interviewed, because, for some reason — call it fate and circumstance — I have spent my career interviewing men in their 80s and 90s, who are defense officials who spent their entire life making war or preventing war. I watch them share with me their reflections in that third act of their life, which are decidedly different — in their own words — than those that they would have made as a younger man.

I find that fascinating, and that’s my takeaway from the Schelling quote, that he came to terms with the fact that intellectualizing game theory — like von Neumann, who never got to his old age — is madness.

COWEN: Let’s say that Russia or China, by mistake, did a full-scale launch toward the United States, and they couldn’t call the things back, and we’re in that six-minute window, or whatever it would be with hypersonics. What do you think is the probability that we would do a full-scale launch back?

…COWEN: The word madness doesn’t have much force with me. My life is a lot of different kinds of madness. I’ve heard people say marriage is madness. A lot of social conventions seem to me to be madness.

The question is getting the least harmful form of madness out there. Then, I’m not convinced that those who wish to disarm have really made their case. Certainly, saying nuclear war is madness doesn’t persuade me. If anything, if enough people think it’s madness, we won’t get it, and it’s fine to have the nuclear weapons.

A different and quite stimulating episode.

The Indian Wedding

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Another great piece by Samir Varma on Indian marriages—where deep traditions endure, even as subtle revolutions unfold around the edges.. It starts with this kicker:

When I told my mother I was marrying my girlfriend, an Italian Jew, she called all my friends in the US asking them to break us up.

When that failed, she faxed my future father-in-law threatening to disinherit me and never speak to me again. When that failed, she tried to get my PhD advisor to “tell us to break up.” (Luckily, he was relaxed enough to laugh about it with me, though it was embarrassing and deeply unpleasant.) Then she invited my girlfriend to India to “meet the family,” where my girlfriend paid a significant fraction of her yearly income as a starting engineer to fly over.

The pièce de résistance? My mother threw a party to “introduce her to everyone” — and spent the entire time complaining about her to all the guests. About 100 of those guests came to talk to me afterward, apologizing profusely, saying Indians aren’t like this and I should explain so she doesn’t think all Indians are nuts.

At my wedding, I had exactly zero relatives present. We didn’t speak for three years.

The economics of the U.S. auto industry, a brief history

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Adam Ozimek:

The economic value of the cars being made has climbed substantially through the years. As a result, real value added and industrial production — two different ways of measuring actual output — are now at all-time highs.

And this:

What about jobs? The auto industry today employs 1 million workers. Between 1950 and the signing of NAFTA in 1993, it averaged 1.1 million workers, just slightly higher.

And this:

The deindustrialization of Detroit is typically understood as a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, and it is therefore blamed on the growth of trade during this period. But the fact is that auto investment and employment had started moving out of Detroit decades earlier.

I pieced together data from a variety of sources, which shows that auto manufacturing employment in the City of Detroit had already peaked in 1950, at just over 220,000 workers.

By 1970 the biggest declines had already occurred, with employment falling by more than half, to fewer than 100,000 jobs.

An important nuance is that many of these lost jobs migrated to other parts of Michigan, at least for a while. So while auto employment was collapsing in Detroit, the rest of Michigan managed to hold auto employment stable for another five decades until the 2000s, when it started falling everywhere in the state.

And:

Michigan now has about 280,000 fewer auto jobs than it did in the 1950s, a decline of roughly 60 percent.  For the United States as a whole, auto employment is only down 4.7 percent — further showing that the struggles of Detroit and Michigan are less about the decline of the American auto industry and more about its relocation elsewhere.

Another way of understanding the trend: If Michigan had simply maintained the same share of American auto jobs as it had in the 1950s, meaning it did not lose any production to other states, then it would only have lost 21,000 auto jobs since then, not the 280,000 it actually did lose.

An excellent piece, recommended.

Berthold and Emanuel Lasker

by  Tyler Cowen in

A fun rabbit hole!  Berthold was world chess champion Emanuel Lasker’s older brother, and also his first wife was Elsa Lasker-Schüler, the avant-garde German Jewish poet and playwright.

In the 1880s (!) he developed what later was called “Fischer Random” chess, Chess960, or now “freestyle chess,” as Magnus Carlsen has dubbed it.  The opening arrangement of the pieces is randomized on the back rank, to make the game more interesting and also avoid the risks of excessive opening preparation and too many draws.  He was prescient in this regard, though at the time chess was very far from having exhausted the possiblities for interesting openings that were not played out.

For a while he was one of the top ten chess players in the world, and he served as mentor to his brother Emanuel.  Emanuel, in due time, became world chess champion, was an avid and excellent bridge and go player, invented a variant of checkers called “Lasca,” made significant contributions to mathematics, and was known for his work in Kantian philosophy.

Of all world chess champions, he is perhaps the one whose peers failed to give him much of a serious challenge.  Until of course Capablanca beat him in 1921.

The British Navy snapped up so many of the good personnel

by  Tyler Cowen in

Circa WWI:

Before the War Office had awoken to the demands of modern war, the Admiralty had. Put in its orders, protected its workers from conscription and claimed a large share of national steel production.  Of the 480,000 protected industrial workers in July 1915, 400,000 belonged to the Admiralty, which controlled three-quarters of the maritime industrial labor force and virtually all its skilled men.  The Ministry of Munitions never succeeded in laying claim to any of them and had to rely heavily on unskilled women throughout the war…This generated much resentment among less fortunate, or less provident, ministries and ministers.

That is from the truly excellent The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945, by N.A.M. Rodger.  Reading Rodger you get a sense of how frequently and how well he thinks about “how institutions actually work,” and how rarely so many other historians actually do that.

Red Flags for Waymo in Boston

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The British Locomotives Act of 1865 contained a red flag provision for cars:

…while any Locomotive is in Motion, [one of the three required attendants] shall precede such Locomotive on Foot by not less than Sixty Yards, and shall carry a Red Flag constantly displayed, and shall warn the Riders and Drivers of Horses of the Approach of such Locomotives, and shall signal the Driver thereof when it shall be necessary to stop, and shall assist Horses, and Carriages drawn by Horses, passing the same.

Not to be outdone the Boston City Council is debating a law on self-driving cars that includes:

Section 6. Human Safety Operator

Any permit process must include the following requirements: (a) an Autonomous Vehicle operating in the City of Boston shall not transport passengers or goods unless a human safety operator is physically present in the vehicle and has the ability to monitor the performance of the vehicle and intervene if necessary, including but not limited to taking over immediate manual control of the vehicle or shutting off the vehicle; and (b) that Autonomous Vehicles and human safety operators must meet all applicable local, state and federal requirements.

*The Price of Victory*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is N.A.M. Rodger, and the subtitle is A Naval History of Britain, 1815-1945.  An excellent book, volume three in a longer series.  Here is one excerpt:

…the most significant of all material innovations of the nineteenth century was virtually invisible.  It took twenty-five years of investment and some heavy losses, but the completion of the first reliable transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 may be taken to mark the moment when intercontinental communication times fell instantaneously from months to hours.  Contemporaries talked enthusiastically of the ‘practical annihilation of time and space,’ and for an imperial and naval power with more time and space to handle than anyone else, the submarine cable was truly revolutionary.  This different and expensive technology offered secure communications almost invulnerable to interference (except in shallow water).  Britain possessed most of the world’s capacity to manufacture underwater cables, had an effective monopoly of Gutta percha, the only good insulator, trained the majority of the world’s cable operators, owned (in 1904) more than twice as many cable-laying ships as the rest of the world put together, and alone had mastered the difficult art of recovering and repairing cables in deep water.  The high fixed costs, advanced technology and very long life (seventy-five years on average) of undersea cables made it extremely difficult for foreigners to break into this monopoly.

I will be buying and reading other books by this author, as this is one of the very best books of this year.