Category: History
Partisan hatred, a short history thereof
Via Hetherington and Weiler, via Jonathan Haidt.
What is a good name for a trade deal?
When I see USMCA, I also think of “United States Marine Corps,” a connection Donald Trump himself has noted. Of course the Marines have nothing to do with international trade policy, but given the public’s longstanding confidence in the military, the association is unlikely to hurt politically. Other people may confuse USMCA with USCMA, or the United States Catholic Mission Association, another positive connotation.
This next point may sound slightly cynical, but here goes: Perhaps being so easy to say and remember has been part of Nafta’s problem. The sad reality is that voters do not love the idea of free trade once it is made concrete to them, and both Barack Obama and Trump campaigned against Nafta in its current form. So maybe every time people heard the name Nafta, they were reminded of how much they disliked it.
I recall, more than a decade ago, hearing talk of a supposed “Nafta superhighway,” a series of roads that would supposedly bring the three Nafta countries under some kind of joint, conspiratorial rule, enforced by the movement of vehicles on these connector roads and sometimes in league with Satan himself. The alternative phrase — “USMCA Superhighway” — doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily, so maybe it will be harder to drum up fake news about the new deal.
Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column on the topic. And this:
Looking back, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) had a pretty good name for its time. It conveyed that there was in fact a general agreement, and that branding sold well enough in an earlier, more multilateral era. It might have sounded dull and technocratic, but that was OK for policies which were … dull and technocratic. Much worse, however, was the 1995 relabeling into the World Trade Organization, a name which to many people sounds globalist, faceless and sinister. They might as well have called it SPECTRE, the name of the criminal group in many James Bond novels and films.
I even quote a Canadian quoting Shakespeare…
That was then, this is now
Negotiations for the preliminary agreement would be conducted under a new process, which the State Department, employing classic bureaucratic jargon, called “the selective nuclear-multilateral approach.” In preliminary discussions held in July 1945, the Canadians had proposed this method of negotiations led by a small group of influential nations — which effectively became the model for multilateral trade negotiations for the remainder of the twentieth century — as a compromise between the strictly bilateral approach, which had been favored politically by FDR and Cordell Hull, and the broader multilateral approach the British insisted upon. The Americans believed they were constricted by the requirements of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act specifically, and by political realities in Congress more generally, to negotiating bilaterally on select tariffs on an item-by-item basis.
That is from the new and highly useful and still under-discussed book The Wealth of a Nation: A History of Trade Politics in America, by C. Donald Johnson, Oxford University Press. I am happy to second Doug Irwin’s blurb: “This splendid book covers the politics of American trade policy from the country’s beginnings through Trump. Johnson provides a great overview of a fascinating subject.”
*The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal*
By M. Mitchell Waldrop. Not only is the content essential, but it is one of the most beautiful books, as a physical object, I have seen in years. From Stripe Press.
Mihail Sebastian, *Journal 1935-1944*
I am surprised this work is not better known. A literary diary of a Romanian Jew, it captures the beauties of European high culture during the pre-war thirties, most of all classical music and early 20th century literature, but also the only slighter later descent into madness. It’s his friends and fellow intellectuals who turn on him the most. I don’t know a better source for capturing the sense of surprise and then foreboding that people must have felt as Hitler racked up one victory after another.
In late 1944, after the course of the war had reversed, Sebastian wrote:
I am not willing to be disappointed. I don’t accept that I have any such right. The Germans and Hitlerism have croaked. That’s enough.
I always knew deep down that I’d happily have died to bring Germany’s collapse a fraction of an inch closer. Germany has collapsed — and I am alive. What more can I ask? So many have died without seeing the beast perish with their own eyes! We who remain alive have had that immense good fortune.
Miraculously, Sebastian survived the Holocaust and was never deported to the camps. On 29 May 1945, however, he was hit and killed by a truck in downtown Bucharest, while walking on his way to teach class.
You can buy the work here, and I’ve since ordered one of Sebastian’s novels. Here is a NYT review.
My Conversation with Bruno Maçães
Here is the audio and transcript, here is the opening summary:
Political scientist Bruno Maçães has built a career out of crossing the globe teaching, advising, writing, and talking to people. His recent book, born out of a six-month journey across Eurasia, is one of Tyler’s favorites.
So how does it feel to face Tyler’s rat-a-tat curiosity about your life’s work? For Bruno, the experience was “like you are a politician under attack and your portfolio is the whole of physical and metaphysical reality.”
Read on to discover how well Bruno defended that expansive portfolio, including what’s missing from liberalism, Obama’s conceptual foreign policy mistake, what economists are most wrong about, how to fall in love with Djibouti, stagnation in Europe, the diversity of Central Asia, Hitchcock’s perfect movie, China as an ever-growing global force, the book everyone under 25 should read, the creativity of Washington, D.C versus Silicon Valley, and more.
Here is one bit:
MAÇÃES: This raises deep philosophical questions and political questions. If you want Turkey to become like Europe, then you have to project European power across Turkey. If Europe no longer has that ability, then you shouldn’t be surprised that Turkey looks elsewhere.
It’s very simple. I think I say in the book that in order to be loved, you also have to be feared. This idea that you find in Europe now, that without projecting any kind of power, other countries will be attracted to the European model, that’s a form of utopianism. I just cannot see that happen.
COWEN: So Europe lacks the spirit of adventure.
MAÇÃES: That is certainly the case. I think you see that. One of the areas where the spirit of adventure today is more relevant and important is technology. You see in Europe the idea that technology’s against us, and we should resist this rather than embrace it. A very negative spirit, which I think is a good example of how adventure has disappeared from the European psyche.
And:
COWEN: Russia. Why is Russia as a world power currently underrated?
MAÇÃES: The most impressive thing about Russia is, in fact, something that you might not think at first: the power of organization. We have this image of Russia as a failed state in many respects.
But in order to keep that empire, in order to keep it together throughout the centuries, in order to develop it to some extent, in order to bring together so many ethnicities, so many religions . . . it’s fair to say that Russia has done a better job of integrating its Muslim population, which is close to 15 percent, than any other country, I would argue — certainly any other major country.
The power of the Russian state, the ability to organize, to dispose, to connect, is one of the great political stories of mankind — to see how the Russian state was able to grow and to extend itself. And that’s still there.
Original and highly recommended. Again, here is Bruno’s book The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order.
World War II and African American Socioeconomic Progress
Here is a job market paper from Andreas Ferrara, University of Warwick:
This paper argues that the unprecedented socioeconomic rise of African Americans at mid-century is causally related to the labor shortages induced by WWII. Results from combining novel military and Census data in a difference-in-differences setting show that counties with an average casualty rate among semi-skilled whites experienced a 13 to 16% increase in the share of blacks in semi-skilled jobs. The casualty rate also has a significant reduced form effect on cross-state migration, wages, home ownership, house value, and education for blacks. Using survey data from 1961, IV regression results indicate that the economic upgrade, which is instrumented with the semi-skilled white casualty rate, is also associated with an increase in social status. Both black and white individuals living in treated counties are more likely to have an interracial friendship, live in mixed-race neighborhoods, and to have reduced preferences for segregation.
Via John Holbein.
The three kinds of charter cities
First, there is the minimal charter city. During a cruise ship vacation, everyone lives under cruise ship law. This works fine, and is easy to start up, but it also has limited applicability. No one has to make a big cultural shift, as long as they don’t get too drunk while playing shuffleboard out on the deck.
Second, there is hegemon-backed charter city. The British empire ran Hong Kong, and the mainland United States (partially) has run Puerto Rico and earlier managed the Panama Canal Zone. By definition, a hegemon is required to enforce the law in the external jurisdiction, and of course such hegemons may be scarce, unwilling, or their rule may be oppressive or counterproductive. Portuguese rule over Goa was not a major success, nor was British rule over India more generally. European extraterritoriality in China proper was an imperialist disaster. One problem is that exporting legal systems without exporting their cultural preconditions can lead to failure.
Third, some charter cities are based on the idea of a complementary exported culture. Singapore did in fact absorb many parts of British culture and law, and some parts of Western mores; it now feels like the most Western part of Asia. The partial export of Western law and culture has been extremely successful, and the role of culture here means there is strong indigenous support, within Singapore, for Singapore being the Singapore we all know and love. These are the charter cities that work best, but they are also the hardest to pull off.
You can think of the original charter city idea as postulating law as a non-rival public good. Why not just spread the best laws to more jurisdictions? But does spreading the law without the underlying culture suffice? You can think of the three kinds of charter cities, as mentioned above, as varying responses to this problem.
And spreading culture does not seem to be a public good at all, rather it involves a lot of hard work and it often fails or backfires.
This blog post is drawn from a talk I gave in San Francisco at an inaugural conference for Mark Lutter’s new Center for Innovative Governance.
America does pretty well at public health
Michael S. Sparer and Anne-Laure Beaussier has a new and interesting piece on this topic, here is part of the abstract:
First, the United States outperforms its European peers on several public health metrics. Second, the United States spends a comparable proportion of its health dollar on prevention. Third, these results are due partly to a federalism twist (while all three nations delegate significant responsibility for public health to local governments, federal officials are more engaged in the United States) and partly to the American version of public health moralism. We also consider the renewed interest in population health, noting why, against expectations, this trend might grow more quickly in the United States than in its European counterparts.
I also learned (or relearned) from this paper the following:
1. For per capita prevention, the U.S. is a clear first in the world. (I wonder, by the way, to what extent this contributes to higher health care costs in the United States, since preventive care also can drive doctor and hospital visits.)
2. The UK and France made a deliberate decision to switch away from public health to curative medicine, after the end of World War II, when they were building out their universal coverage systems.
3. The American history with public health programs is a pretty good one, with advances coming from the anti-smoking campaign, lower speed limits, anti-drunk driving initiatives, fluoridated water, and mandatory vaccination programs.
4. The British fare poorly on various public health metrics.
5. “The US system of public health fares rather well compared to other Western nations.” On net, our population is not as anti-science as it may seem, at least not if we look at final policy results, as compared to some of our peer countries.
All in all, an interesting read.
Are generational or cohort-level changes strong?
Here is the view of Kali H. Trzesniewski and M. Brent Donnellan, in their piece “Rethinking “Generation Me”: A Study of Cohort Effects from 1976-2006”:
Social commentators have argued that changes over the last decades have coalesced to create a relatively unique generation of young people. However, using large samples of U.S. high-school seniors from 1976 to 2006 (Total N = 477,380), we found little evidence of meaningful change in egotism, self-enhancement, individualism, self-esteem, locus of control, hopelessness, happiness, life satisfaction, loneliness, antisocial behavior, time spent working or watching television, political activity, the importance of religion, and the importance of social status over the last 30 years. Today’s youth are less fearful of social problems than previous generations and they are also more cynical and less trusting. In addition, today’s youth have higher educational expectations than previous generations. However, an inspection of effect sizes provided little evidence for strong or widespread cohort-linked changes.
The pointer is from @hardsci. As he (Sanjay) notes on Twitter: “Researchers these days just don’t make cohort arguments like they used to” And here are some related results on narcissism.
Who has led the most interesting life?
In recent times, that is. Devon Zuegel asks:
Who would you name as a contender for having led the most interesting life in the last 100 years?
Keynes pops to mind as one contender. He was a top-tier intellect and economist, he was closely connected to the arts, had plenty of brilliant Bloomsbury people to chat with, married a ballerina, played a major role in politics several times, and he participated in several critical and indeed formative moments of history (Treaty of Versailles, fiscal policy, Bretton Woods). He experienced both world wars (no one said “interesting” has to be good!). Still, he didn’t travel enough to be a slam dunk (I can’t quite bring myself to write “nor did he have the internet.”)
How about Bill Clinton? He was president twice, oversaw the 1990s, has indeed traveled the world, and known many of the most interesting people of his lifespan. He also has had rather, um…diverse…experiences in one realm of life. And he married Hillary.
Paul McCartney was a Beatle, wrote amazing songs and hung out with John Lennon, had domestic bliss with Linda for a few decades, raised lots of kids, was successful as a businessman, and also has a history of…um…diverse experiences. But did he smoke too much pot?
This list of “best lives” includes Hugh Hefner, Tyra Banks, and Elon Musk. Here is one Quora answer for “most interesting”:
Personally, I find the following people intriguing: Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Marie Curie, Diego Maradona, Michael Jordan, Socrates/Aristotle/Plato, Samori Toure, Nelson Mandela, Michel de Nostredame. It’s a long list. There are even some historical figures that I do not admire, but would like to know more about – people such as Joseph Stalin, Napoleon Bonaparte, Judas Isacriot, among so many others.
I hope you are not offended if I rule some of those lives out on grounds of insufficient length, or too much time spent in prison. Here is a list of interesting writers’ lives, topped by Ernest Hemingway.
Contrarian but not crazy answers would cite the person who raised the greatest number of children, the person who lived the longest in decent health, “whoever you are,” and the person who has traveled the most, at least adjusting for the quality of the trips (working on an oil tanker may not count).
Is it possible for a very famous person to win this designation? Their very fame limits the possible range of experiences they have, and perhaps at some margin the consumption of additional status and adulation, however fun (?) it may be, just isn’t all that interesting. Can Paul McCartney or Bill Clinton go out in public much? Is the real answer someone most people never have heard of?
Who is your nominee?
Texas likely is removing Helen Keller from the curriculum
Here is the story, note that Hillary Clinton was removed as well and Billy Graham was added, at least on a preliminary vote. Various historical figures were assessed for their relevance, and Helen Keller did not receive a high enough score. Barbara Jordan, Sam Houston, Stephen F. Austin and Henry B. González — all figures from Texas history — made it through easily. Dolores Huerta was added.
On Keller, here is some additional background:
In 1929 and again in 1938 she published books that both contained extended sections defending the Soviet Union—which she maintained was still a more or less democratic workers’ state—and praised the late Vladimir Lenin, whose great legacy rested on how he had helped to sow in Russia “the unshatterable seed of a new life for mankind.”
There is some chance the Texas decision will influence textbooks on a nationwide basis, because Texas is such a large market and publishers wish to market the same book nationally.
Keller should be kept because she is an impressive, focal, and easy to explain example of an individual who overcame disabilities and became prominent and influential. At the margin, her radicalism is a reason to include her, not to exclude her. Students should be encouraged to think of America as having had a diverse intellectual history, including radicalism. That said, the same should hold for a variety of now-disgraced figures on the Right, provided of course that they have meritorious achievements worthy of note, and no this is not by definition impossible.
The first linked article claims that cutting Keller from the curriculum will save forty minutes. Even if you don’t think Keller is worth exactly forty minutes, surely she is worth more than zero minutes, and besides the teacher simply can talk faster if need be (don’t most teachers talk too slowly?).
I don’t mind keeping the relatively obscure Texas figures in the social studies course of study. If nothing else, it encourages young Texans to think of themselves as special and to resist assimilation into broader America, again to the benefit of diversity.
Addendum: Keller is a very good choice if you are playing Twenty Questions. It is unlikely if someone will ask whether you are a famous person connected to the idea of disabilities. And that reflects exactly why she should be kept in the curriculum.
Second addendum: Here are some other changes:
The board also voted to add back into the curriculum a reference to the “heroism” of the defenders of the Alamo, which had been recommended for elimination, as well as Moses’ influence on the writing of the founding documents, multiple references to “Judeo-Christian” values and a requirement that students explain how the “Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict” in the Middle East.
Barry Goldwater was removed as well, with Moses replacing Thomas Hobbes. There will be a chance to overturn these decisions by a final vote in November.
The seventeenth century was a special time in Britain
The apprentice dataset, which is richest and most reliable from 1580 to 1680, tells much the same story for the seventeenth century. As we expected, the underlying shares of apprentices’ parents in industry and services are higher than in the probate dataset, but the trends move in parallel. Agriculture declines consistently over this period. Industry and services both grow substantially, with services outstripping industry. Compared to the probate data, the share of the workforce in agriculture declines more quickly, while the rate of expansion in industry is somewhat slower in the first half of the seventeenth century, although it reaches a similar level by 1660–1679. The growth in services is similar to the probate dataset. This coherence between the results from two independent sources offers a first test of the validity of our findings.
That is from a newly published and important paper by Patrick Wallis, Justin Colson, and David Chilosi, “Structural Change and Economic Growth in the British Economy before the Industrial Revolution, 1500–1800.”
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My Conversation with Michele Gelfand
Here is the audio and transcript, and here is the summary:
Michele Gelfand is professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and author of the just-released Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. In her conversation with Tyler, Michele unpacks the concept of tight and loose cultures and more, including which variable best explains tightness, the problem with norms, whether Silicon Valley has an honor culture, the importance of theory and history in guiding research, what Donald Trump gets wrong about negotiation, why MBAs underrate management, the need to develop cultural IQ, and why mentorship should last a lifetime.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: As you know, it’s a common distinction in cross-cultural analysis to call some cultures individualistic and others collectivistic. How does tightness and looseness differ from that distinction? What do you pick up that, say, the work of Triandis does not?
GELFAND: Actually, Triandis is my mentor. I went to Champaign to work with him. I did a lot of research on collectivism and individualism. For a long time, that was the one dimension that we looked at in cross-cultural psychology.
It’s almost akin to, in personality psychology, only studying extroversion to the neglect of other dimensions, like neuroticism. In cross-cultural psychology, we got a little bit narrow in what we were studying. Collectivism-individualism is related to tightness but distinct.
Part of the problem we’ve had is, we’ve confounded cultures in our research. We’ve been studying East Asia, which is both tight and collectivistic, with the United States and other Western cultures, which tend to be loose and individualistic. So they have been confounded.
But when you think about the off-diagonals of that two-by-two, you can imagine cultures like Germany, Switzerland, Austria that tend to be pretty individualistic. They emphasize privacy. They’re not hugely group and family oriented, but they’re relatively tight. They have strong rules and punishments for deviance.
On the flip side, you can think about Latin American cultures — in our data, that’s Brazil or Spain — that tend to be pretty family oriented and pretty collectivistic, but they’re rather loose.
In a lot of ways, you can disentangle that variation, even if they’re related. They tend to be related about 0.4. That’s found both in modern nations and also traditional societies. At the state level, they also tend to be related but again distinct. Only in that case, it’s about 0.2 or 0.3, the correlation between tightness and collectivism.
And:
COWEN: Overrated or underrated, Staten Island?
GELFAND: [laughs] I would say probably underrated. That’s because I actually am familiar with Staten Island. We have relatives that live there. It’s probably the last undiscovered place around the city. Brooklyn has become a chichi place to live, but Staten Island has not. There’s great delis there. I’ve spent some time there.
And:
COWEN: Putting aside your political views, but just if you observe Donald Trump as a negotiator — as a psychologist, what strikes you?
GELFAND: Donald Trump has a very classic negotiation style. It’s a distributive negotiation style. It’s a win-lose style. It works in certain contexts, especially contexts where there’s one issue or when there’s very little expected future interaction.
What Donald Trump does is, he takes that style to international [laughs] politics where these contexts, the structure of these situations is very different. There’s usually many issues at the table. There’s expected future interaction…His style is really mismatched with the context that he’s in.
Many of the best parts are at or near the end, so do read or listen all the way through. And you can buy Michele’s book here.
Does the “extractive institutions” hypothesis fail the empirical test?
The title of this paper is “Colonial Revenue Extraction and Modern Day Government Quality in the British Empire,” and it is by Rasmus Broms. Here goes:
The relationship between the extent of government revenue a government collects, primarily in the form of taxation, and its overall quality has increasingly been identified as a key factor for successful state building, good institutions, and—by extension—general development. Initially deriving from historical research on Western Europe, this process is expected to unfold slowly over time. This study tests the claim that more extensive revenue collection has long-lasting and positive consequences for government quality in a developmental setting. Using fiscal records from British colonies, results from cross-colony/country regression analyses reveal that higher colonial income-adjusted revenue levels during the early twentieth century can be linked to higher government quality today. This relationship is substantial and robust to several specifications of both colonial revenue and modern day government quality, and remains significant under control for a range of rivaling explanations. The results support the notion that the current institutional success of former colonies can be traced back to the extent of historical revenue extraction.
For the pointer I thank an MR reader.