Category: History
The Spanish Inquisition and the learning curve
Empirical evidence on contemporary torture is sparse. The archives of the Spanish Inquisition provide a detailed historical source of quantitative and qualitative information about interrogational torture. The inquisition tortured brutally and systematically, willing to torment all who it deemed as withholding evidence. This torture yielded information that was often reliable: witnesses in the torture chamber and witnesses that were not tortured provided corresponding information about collaborators, locations, events, and practices. Nonetheless, inquisitors treated the results of interrogations in the torture chamber with skepticism. This bureaucratized torture stands in stark contrast to the “ticking bomb” philosophy that has motivated US torture policy in the aftermath of 9/11. Evidence from the archives of the Spanish Inquisition suggests torture affords no middle ground: one cannot improvise quick, amateurish, and half-hearted torture sessions, motivated by anger and fear, and hope to extract reliable intelligence.
Here is the full piece by Ron E. Hassner, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What should I ask Melissa Dell?
She is a professor of economics at Harvard, and winner of the most recent John Bates Clark medal. I would describe her as a both a rising star and an already-risen star. From Wikipedia:
Melissa Dell’s research interests include development economics, economic history and political economy. Her work has mainly focused on explaining economic development through the persistence of historical institutions and climate. She has also investigated the effect of conflict on labor market and political outcomes and vice versa. Much of her research has focused on Latin America and Southeast Asia. She was one of the first economists to use a spatial regression discontinuity design, in her paper on the long-term effects of Peru’s Mining Mita.
Her broader biography is interesting as well (see Wikipedia). Here is previous MR coverage of Melissa Dell, and here is the very good Clark medal summary of her research.
So what should I ask her?
Rewatching *Serpico*
When I was 12 it was one of my favorite books (by Peter Maas), and shortly thereafter I saw and liked the movie as well. On this viewing I was struck by the excellent understanding of the culture of corruption, the notion that the mayor is beholden to the police who can threaten to shirk, the performance of Al Pacino, and the wonderful scenes of early 1970s New York City (yes that is Soho you are seeing).
The last quarter of the film should have been shortened. And for all of its attempts to be a politically correct film, the degree of casual racism and sexism still is astonishing to the modern eye, specifically how either black criminals or attractive women are shown on screen.
Nonetheless recommended, and in particular as historical backdrop for understanding 2020. Here is a John Arnold thread on the primary of culture in police departments. And here is the police response to the recent protests.
Here is the Wikipedia page of the actual Frank Serpico, still speaking out against police abuses at age 84.
That was then, this is now — police brutality and race edition
Here is a 1971 debate on police brutality against blacks in America, with an initial focus on Detroit, and later a shift to Newark:
Via Ilya Novak.
*The Address Book*
The author is Deirdre Mask and the subtitle is What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power. The opening bit would have fit under “New York City fact of the day”:
In some years, more than 40 percent of all local laws passed by the New York City Council have been street name changes.
I guess that is because garbage collection, education, and policing are running so smoothly. Does any other fact so well sum up the pathology of our time?
In Paris, only 2.6 percent of the street names commemorate women, and this is expected to be a “growth sector,” as they say. I liked this sentence:
Tantner is perhaps the world’s leading expert on house numbers.
House numbers were in fact one of the more important results of the 18th century Enlightenment. For all their benefits in enabling mail, or finding your way, there was a dark side because they also made it easier to tax or imprison you, sometimes a good thing but not always.
Number streets are an especially American phenomenon, and today “every American city with more than a half million people has numerical street names. Second Street is the most common street name in America…”
Recommended, you can order it here.
That was then, this is now, *Mayday 1971* edition
That forthcoming book is authored by Lawrence Roberts, and the subtitle is A White House at War, A Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest. Here is one excerpt:
The president had made his wishes clear. That was why Kleindienst was pushing a military solution. The police chief made one last attempt to dissuade him. Let’s just suppose the crowd is big enough to shut down the government, Jerry said. Wouldn’t it be better for us, he gently suggested, if the militants could crow only that they had defeated the police, rather than the mighty U.S. military? An army official chimed in on Jerry’s side. Why not wait a day, see if the troops were really necessary?
Recommended.
That was then, this is now, Minneapolis racial animus edition
Are you familiar with the earlier history of Minneapolis, say from the 1960s and 1970s? From an article by Jeffrey T. Manuel and Andrew Urban, here is one passage about two mayors:
In 1969, four-term Democratic-Farmer Labor (DFL) mayor and former University of Minnesota political science professor Arthur Naftalin declined to run for a fifth two-year term as the mayor of Minneapolis, leaving the contest open amid the social turbulence of the late 1960s. Naftalin was a close associate of former Minneapolis mayor Hubert H. Humphrey and a practitioner of Humphrey’s brand of liberalism. They believed that government’s role was to manage and coordinate different interest groups within society, such as business leaders, members of organized labor, and racial minorities, so that the city would function efficiently and social conflict could be avoided. By allocating money to various social programs, they believed urban problems such as crime and poverty could be solved. In an unexpected move, Charles Stenvig, a 41-year-old detective in the Minneapolis police department and president of the police federation, threw his hat into the ring as an independent candidate for mayor. Running an unconventional campaign that spent little money and relied on volunteer labor, Stenvig won the 1 969 election by pledging to “take the handcuffs off the police” and to crack down on “racial militants,” criminals, and student protesters. Capturing 62 percent of the vote against a moderate Republican opponent, Stenvig shocked the city’s political establishment with his convincing victory. Running again as an independent in 1971, Stenvig defeated Harry Davis, Minneapolis ‘s first black mayoral candidate, receiving a remarkable 71 percent of the vote.
And:
Naftalin’s connection with academia was a sharp contrast to Stenvig’s open animosity toward higher education.
And:
Naftalin argued that with “proper computers,” a single executive authority could easily – and rationally – control a widely- scattered metropolitan area. For Naftalin, a rational executive would have to make unpopular decisions based on his or her expert knowledge of what was best…
And:
Thus, at several points during his career Stenvig tried to censor what he believed were immoral publications…
And this:
At the national level, many observers were surprised that race could even be a political issue in Minneapolis given the city’s numerically small minority population… Although the city’s African American population was relatively small it was concentrated in several neighborhoods, which led to frequent incidents of alleged police harassment and the belief that residents of black neighborhoods were treated unfairly by the overwhelmingly white police force.
And:
When a 12-year-old African-American boy was attacked by a police dog and dragged down the street by two policemen, many saw it as confirmation of Stenvig’s attitude toward blacks.
Finally:
Far from a naïve reactionary, Stenvig presented a political ideology that was sharply critical of liberalism and rejected social scientific knowledge and abstractions as useful guides for governance.
The article is interesting throughout, and is likely to remain so. And you can read here about the 1967 race riots in northern Minneapolis.
Richard Davis requests
Here are some answers, I put his questions — from Request for Requests – in bold:
Melancholy among academics.
We’re a pretty sorry bunch, and many of us don’t have so much professionally to live for, at least not at the relevant margin — it is easy to lose forward momentum and never recover it, given the constraints and incentives in the profession and broader pressures toward conformity. Rates of depression in academia, and especially in graduate school, are fairly high. Many of the core processes are demoralizing rather than inspiring. It is remarkable to me how much other people simply have accepted that is how things ought to be and perhaps they believe matters cannot be that different. I view the high rates of depression in academic life as a “canary in the coal mine” that doesn’t get enough attention as an indicator of bigger, more systemic problems in the entire enterprise. What are you doing with your lifetime sinecure?
Your favorite things Soviet.
Shostakovich. And the Romantic pianists, most of all Richter and Gilels. Constructivist art and ballet up through the late 1920s. The early chess games of Tal. Magnitogorsk. War memorials, most of all in Leningrad. Tarkovsky. I admire the “great” Soviet novels, but I don’t love them, except for Solzhenitsyn, whom I would rather read then Dostoyevsky. Probably the poetry is amazing, but my Russian is too limited to appreciate it.
The optimal number of math PhDs worldwide.
I would think fairly few. I am happy having lots of mathematicians, with independent tests of quality. But is the Ph.D such a great test or marker of quality? Did Euclid have one? Euler? Does it show you will be a great teacher? Maybe we should work toward abolishing the math PhD concept, but out of respect for the profession, not out of hostility toward math.
What historical works of art were anticipated to be great prior to creation, were immediately declared to be great at creation and have continued to be judged great ever since?
Overall it is striking how popular how many of the great revolutionaries have been. Michelangelo was a major figure of renown. Mozart was quite popular, though not fully appreciated. Beethoven was a legend in his time, and every Wagner opera was an event. Goethe ruled his time as a titan. A significant percentage of the very best writers were well known and loved during their careers, though of course there was uncertainty how well they would stand up to the test of time.
The future of Northern New Jersey.
Much like the present, plus defaults on the pension obligations and over time the Indian food may get worse, due to acculturation. The Sopranos will fade into distant memory, I am sorry to say, as will Bruce Springsteen. So many young people already don’t know them or care. I feel lucky to have grown up during the region’s cultural peak.
Who are the greats that still walk among us (other than McCartney)?
The major tech founders and CEOs, Stephan Wolfram, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella and Richard Serra and Gerhardt Richter and Robert Gober, a number of other classic rock stars (Dylan, Brian Wilson, Jagger, Eno, etc.), Philip Glass, Richard D. James, and note most of the greatest classical musicians who have ever lived are alive and playing today (Uchida anyone?), at least once Covid goes away. Many of the major architects. Ferrante and Knausgaard and Alice Munro. Many of the figures who built up East Asia and Singapore. Perelman. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. Magnus Carlsen and all sorts of figures in sports. A bunch of other people whom Eric Weinstein would list.
Why
Why not?
Rewatching *Dirty Harry* (no real spoilers)
Released in 1971, as usual with San Francisco movies one can see the reach of NIMBY — the city doesn’t look much larger or busier today. The subtext of the film is that law and order is collapsing, yet San Francisco was far cleaner back then and street harassment never is presented as a risk. Even the red light district of 1971 seemed better kept than many of the nicer parts circa 2020.
You can see how much the debate has shifted from “how the police treat the guilty” to “how the police treat the innocent.”
It is startling to see actual San Francisco children in the movie — they did not seem to be hired extras.
Yana was shocked that Clint Eastwood did not direct the movie, I was amazed when he started directing.
Overall it held up remarkably well I thought. Virtually every scene is good, and its ability to offend both sides (and indeed other sides too) remains evident.
That was then, this is now
Ali Akbar was two years younger than Robu [later named Ravi Shankar], but a couple of years ahead in his musical training. He has been through a brutal regime: Baba had even tied him to a tree and beaten him when his progress was unsatisfactory. Although Baba had arranged for Ali Akbar to marry at the age of fifteen, he still expected him to remain celibate — married to music. Twice Ali Akbar ran away. Ultimately the harsh discipline brought out his talent and made him into a master of the sarod, although one wonders about the emotional cost.
That is from Oliver Craske’s Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, which I am quite enjoying.
My (second) Conversation with Paul Romer
Interesting throughout, here is the audio and transcript. Here is the summary:
Paul Romer makes his second appearance to discuss the failings of economics, how his mass testing plan for COVID-19 would work, what aspect of epidemiology concern him, how the FDA is slowing a better response, his ideas for reopening schools and Major League Baseball, where he agrees with Weyl’s test plan, why charter cities need a new name, what went wrong with Honduras, the development trajectory for sub-Saharan Africa, how he’d reform the World Bank, the underrated benefits of a culture of science, his heartening takeaway about human nature from his experience at Burning Man, and more.
I liked the parts about charter cities and the World Bank the best, here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How optimistic are you more generally about the developmental trajectory for sub-Saharan Africa?
ROMER: There’s a saying I picked up from Gordon Brown, that in establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest. I think some parts of this development process are just very slow. If you look around the world, all the efforts since World War II that’s gone into trying to build strong, effective states, to establish the rule of law in a functioning state, I think the external investments in building states have yielded very little.
So we need to think about ways to transfer the functioning of existing states rather than just build them from scratch in existing places. That’s a lot of the impetus behind this charter cities idea. It’s both — you select people coming in who have a particular set of norms that then become the dominant norms in this new place, but you also protect those norms by certain kinds of administrative structures, state functions that reinforce them.
And this:
COWEN: If you could reform the World Bank, what would you do?
ROMER: Oh, that’s an interesting question. I think the Bank is trying to serve two missions, and it can’t do both. One is a diplomatic function, which I think is very important. The World Bank is a place where somebody who represents the government of China and somebody who represents the government of the United States sit in a conference room and argue, “Should we do A or B?” Not just argue, but discuss, negotiate. On a regular basis, they make decisions.
And it isn’t just China and the US. It’s a bunch of countries. I think it’s very good for personal relationships, for the careers of people who will go on to have other positions in these governments, to have that kind of experience of, basically, diplomatic negotiation over a bunch of relatively small items because it’s a confidence-building measure that makes it possible for countries to make bigger diplomatic decisions when they have to.
That, I think, is the value of the World Bank right now. The problem is that that diplomatic function is inconsistent with the function of being a provider of scientific insight. The scientific endeavor has to be committed to truth, no matter whose feathers get ruffled. There’s certain convenient fictions that are required for diplomacy to work. You start accepting convenient fictions in science, and science is just dead.
So the Bank’s got to decide: is it engaged in diplomacy or science? I think the diplomacy is its unique comparative advantage. Therefore, I think it’s got to get out of the scientific business. It should just outsource its research. It shouldn’t try and be a research organization, and it should just be transparent about what it can be good at and is good at.
And toward the end:
COWEN: Last question thread, what did you learn at Burning Man?
ROMER: Sometimes physical presence is necessary to appreciate something like scale. The scale of everything at Burning Man was just totally unexpected, a total surprise for me, even having looked at all of these pictures and so forth. That was one.
Another thing that really stood out, which is not exactly a surprise, but maybe it was the surprise in that group — if you ask, what do people do if you put them in a setting where there’s supposed to be no compensation, no quid pro quo, and you just give them a chance to be there for a week. What do they do?
They work.
For purposes of contrast, here is my first Conversation with Paul Romer.
*The WEIRDest People in the World*
That is the new 655 pp. book by Joseph Henrich, due out September 8, and yes it is “an event.” The subtitle is “How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous,” and that is indeed one of the very most important questions in all of social science.
“WEIRD” of course refers to “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.” And is it not weird that we (some of us, at least) are WEIRD?
Here is an excerpt from the opening segment:
Let’s close by returning to the core questions of this book:
1. How can we explain the global psychological variation highlighted above?
2. Why are WEIRD societies particularly unusual, so often occupying the extreme ends of global distributions of psychology and behavior?
3. What role did these psychological differences play in the Industrial Revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries?
If you are wondering how this material might differ from Henrich’s previous output, there is above all much more on marriage customs and monogamy, for instance:
…I’ll make the case that monogamous marriage norms — which push upstream against our polygynous biases and the strong preferences of elite men — create a range of social and psychological effects that give the societies that possess them a big edge in competition against other groups.
Obviously recommended, and you will be hearing more about this both from me and from others. You can pre-order here.
What sports I’ve been watching
Game 2, Celtics vs. Bulls, 1986, the one where Michael Jordan scored 63 points. Watching it over a number of days on the exercise bike, I was struck by the following:
1. The Chicago Bulls, to a remarkable degree, decided to run their offense through Orlando Woolridge, and not for the better.
2. The camera did not follow MJ around obsessively, nor do the announcers seem to realize how great he will become — this was his second season, and he spent much of it injured and not playing. And he was not yet able to make his teammates better (see #1).
3. One announcer remarks that Charles Oakley is not big and strong enough to play center. Admittedly Robert Parrish was taller, but Oakley was one of the strongest men ever to play in the NBA.
4. The game comes across as remarkably slow, and the Celtics as molasses slow and bad at defense. A swarming contemporary defense would shut down Kevin McHale. Ainge and Dennis Johnson are heralded as one of the best backcourts ever, but I believe Damian Lillard or a few other current peers would cut them to ribbons. Note that the Celtics were 40-1 at home that season, still a record, so they were a remarkable team for their time.
5. Michael Jordan scores most of his points on shots — the long 2 — that coaches strongly discourage players from taking these days because of their low expected value.
6. Few of them look good taking a three-pointer.
7. MJ aside, Bill Walton is the one who comes across as the world-class player on the court, despite his age of 33, a long history of foot and other injuries, and limited mobility.
8. 63 points is a lot, but the Bulls lost the game and Jordan was far from his later peak. It is nonetheless striking how much better was his conditioning than that of any other player on the court, and that is why he was able to score so much in the fourth quarter and take over the game.
My Conversation with Adam Tooze
Tinges of Covid-19, doses on financial crises, but mostly about economic history. Here is the audio and transcript. Here is the summary:
Adam joined Tyler to discuss the historically unusual decision to have a high-cost lockdown during a pandemic, why he believes in a swoosh-shaped recovery, portents of financial crises in China and the West, which emerging economies are currently most at risk, what Keynes got wrong about the Treaty of Versailles, why the Weimar Republic failed, whether Hitler was a Keynesian, the political and economic prospects of various EU members, his trick to writing a lot, how Twitter encourages him to read more, what he taught executives at BP, his advice for visiting Germany, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Was Keynes right about the Treaty of Versailles? Was it as bad as Keynes said?
TOOZE: No. I’m a confirmed liberal Keynesian in my broad politics, and my understanding of politics and the way expertise ought to relate to it, and the operations of modern democracy. I think his political writings in Essays in Persuasion are brilliant. But I regard The Economic Consequences of the Peace as disastrous because, essentially, it enhanced and gave arguments to the German nationalists who —
COWEN: But that doesn’t mean Keynes was wrong, right? It may have had that effect, but he’s writing at a time where the wealth-to-income ratio is especially low, so a given measure of debt burden is much worse for an economy than what we might be used to.
TOOZE: Absolutely, but the evidence of the 1920s is that, with the right framework, the Weimar Republic was, in fact, perfectly capable of bearing a reasonable burden of reparations — 2 percent to 3 percent were doable. The fact of the matter is the German political class had no interest in accepting that responsibility and was quite determined to do a variety of different things to escape that burden.
And there is no doubt at all that the front-loading of the demands, which is very understandable from the point of view of the financial needs of the French in particular, caused a huge bottleneck, if you like, early on in the history of the Weimar Republic when it was most fragile. And that’s, as it were, the moment when I think the critique is most valid.
And that’s why, for me, really, the hidden agenda of the economic consequences of the peace is an appeal, to the Brits but above all to the Americans, for large-scale debt concessions, on which one could only agree with Keynes that this was, in fact, absolutely critical, that market economies have unspoken fundamental political preconditions, which, in the aftermath of the massive war, have been disrupted.
And:
COWEN: Speaking of Hitler, was Hitler, in fact, the Keynesian?
TOOZE: No. Hitler personally — absolutely not. Hitler’s personal monetary ideas are very, very conservative. He’s an anti-inflation hawk. He has to be persuaded to engage in large-scale monetary financing.
Somebody like Schacht is a contemporary of Keynes, and that’s Hitler central banker and an adventurous monetary thinker. He’d learned to think outside the monetary box, if you like, in the efforts to stabilize Weimar’s currency in 1923–24. And he’s certainly an expansionary. He’s not afraid of monetary finance and of using off-balance-sheet vehicles to provide liquidity and to provide credit for an underemployed economy.
And quite reasonably, no one’s worried about inflation in 1933 because Germany has massive unemployment. So, in that sense, they are adventurous, macroeconomic, monetary economists.
They’re not Keynesians for the simple reasons that Keynesianism, classically, of course, is a liberal economic politics. It believes in a multiplier, and the multiplier’s the be-all and end-all really of Keynesian economics because what it suggests is that small, intermittent, discretionary interventions by the state — relatively small — will generate outside reactions from the economy, which will enable the state to serve a very positive role in stabilizing the economy but doesn’t require the state to permanently intrude and take over the economy.
That’s a post-1945 kind of vision of a mixed economy. Keynes himself — that’s why he wants the multiplier to be three because if the multiplier is three, then $1 by government spending generates $3 of private economic activity.
You can think of government intervention as sporadic. It’s emergency medicine. It’s not chronic care. That, of course, is the antithesis of what the Nazis are doing because they are ramping up government spending, not across the board, but highly focused on rearmament because what they’re doing is not just creating jobs, though they do create jobs as a side effect. What they’re doing is restructuring the economy towards building the foundation for rearmament in a war economy.
What they’re actually trying to do is systematically repress the multiplier because they do not want people employed in armaments factories to go out and buy clothing and fancy food, which requires imports. They want the money to be circled straight back into the armaments effort. Saving various types of financial oppression is the order of the day. They’re macroeconomists, the Nazis. They’re adventurous macroeconomists. They’re doing massive intervention, but they’re not Keynesian.
Tooze’s discussion of his own career and interests, toward the end, is hard to excerpt but for me the highlight of the conversation. He also provided the best defense of Twitter I have heard.
Definitely recommended.
Did non-pharmaceutical interventions actually help against the Spanish flu?
From three economics Ph.D students at Harvard, namely Andrew Lilley, Matthew Lilley, and Gianluca Rinaldi:
Using data from 43 US cities, Correia, Luck, and Verner (2020) find that the 1918 Flu pandemic had strong negative effects on economic growth, but that Non Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) mitigated these adverse economic effects. Their starting point is a striking positive correlation between 1914-1919 economic growth and the extent of NPIs adopted at the city level. We collect additional data which shows that those results are driven by population growth between 1910 to 1917, before the pandemic. We also extend their difference in differences analysis to earlier periods, and find that once we account for pre-existing differential trends, the estimated effect of NPIs on economic growth are a noisy zero; we can neither rule out substantial positive nor negative effects of NPIs on employment growth.
I am very willing to publish a response from the original authors on this one.