Category: History
My years in Fall River, Mass.
I lived there from ages 4 to 7, which spans 1966 to 1969. At that time, Fall River about forty years past its textiles manufacturing peak, as southern competition had deindustrialized the city. My father was invited to run the Chamber of Commerce there, with the hope that he could help revitalize things, and so the family moved.
I recall liking New England, and preferring it to my earlier Hudson County, NJ environs. All of a sudden we had a large yard and things felt nicer. The neighbors were chattier and less surly. The dog (Zero) could run around the neighborhood free, which I found both astonishing and good. I did not understand that the city had fantastic architecture. My father complained about it being provincial.
Whenever we would drive back and forth from NJ to Fall River, my sister and I would see a building in Providence, RI and for whatever reason we called it “the monkey squisher.” For trips to the shore, we would go to Cape Cod, and let the dog run on the beach.
Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were the immediate neighbors, and they treated us almost like their own kids. Their own boy was grown and in the service. Two other neighbors were Kathy and Carol Fata (sp?), who were slightly older than Holly and me, and again super-friendly. I believe they were either Lebanese or Syrian, which was common in Fall River at that time.
Most of all, I was into baseball and baseball cards in those years. I used them to learn some math and statistics, and of course to learn about the players. I watched baseball games on TV all the time, and to this day I remember some baseball stats from that era. I received an autographed baseball from Russ Gibon, Red Sox catcher at the time. Naturally I was a Red Sox fan. I had an allowance of a quarter a week, and on the way home from school would stop at a small newspaper store and buy baseball cards. The 1968 World Series was a huge thrill for me, and I was rooting for the Detroit Tigers and Mickey Lolich. I still remember the close call at the plate with Bill Freehan and Lou Brock.
Most of my reading was books on science and dinosaurs, or books on baseball. I was especially fond of a science book series called “Ask Me Why?”. I looked at maps plenty, and my favorite map was that of Italy, due to the shape of the country.
I recall watching the 1968 presidential election, and having my mother explain it to me. I also watched on TV the funeral procession for RFK, and I asked my grandmother, who then lived with us, why the police guards were not moving. “If they move an inch, they take them out and shoot them!” she snapped back loudly and decisively. In those days, people said things like that.
My kindgarten teacher we called “Mrs. Penguin,” though I doubt that was her real name. She would twist the ears of kids who made trouble, though that was not me. I had a letter box, but it bored me because my reading skills were ahead of those of my classmates. There was a girl named Stephanie in my class, and I thought she was cute. School simply did not seem like a very efficient way to learn.
In my hazy memories, I very much think of the Fall River days as good ones.
My excellent Conversation with Gregory Clark
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
How much of your life’s trajectory was set in motion centuries ago? Gregory Clark has spent decades studying social mobility, and his findings suggest that where you land in society is far more predictable than we like to think. Using historical data, surname analysis, and migration patterns, Clark argues that social mobility rates have remained largely unchanged for 300 years—even across radically different political and economic systems.
He and Tyler discuss why we should care about relative mobility vs growing the size of the pie, how physical mobility does and doesn’t matter, why England was a meritocracy by 1700, how assortative mating affects economic and social progress, why India industrialized so late, a new potential explanation why Britain’s economic performance has been lukewarm since WWI, Malthusian societies then and now, whether a “hereditarian” stance favors large-scale redistribution or a free-market approach, the dynamics of assimilation within Europe and the role of negative selection in certain migrations, the challenge of accurately measuring living standards, the neighborhood-versus-family debate over what drives mobility, whether we need datasets larger than humanity itself to decode the genetics of social outcomes, and much more.
Here is one of many interesting excerpts:
COWEN: How do you think about the social returns to more or less assortative mating? Say in the United States — do we have too much of it, too little of it? If we had more of it, you’d have, say, very smart or determined people marrying those like them, and you might end up with more innovation from their children and grandchildren. But you might also be messing with what you would call the epistemic quality of the median voter. There’s this trade-off. How do you think about that? What side of the margin are we at?
CLARK: Assortative mating turns out to be a fascinating phenomenon, and in this new book, we actually have records of 1.7 million marriages in England from 1837 until now. What is astonishing in England is the degree to which people end up assorting in marriage so that basically, they’re matching with people that are as close to them, essentially genetically, as their siblings in marriage. It’s really interesting because people could mate in any way.
You could think I want the tallest person, the handsomest person, the youngest person, but for some reason, consistently, people seem to want to match to people who are close in social status. Now that doesn’t affect anything about the average level of ability in a society, but if it’s consistently followed over generations, it will widen the distribution of ability.
COWEN: Yes, and are we doing too much of that or too little of it in the United States?
CLARK: It depends what your view is. If you think that the engine of high-tech society now, like the United States, is the top 1 percent or 5 percent of the ability distribution, then you would say the more assortative is mating, the more people will be in that extreme and the greater will be economic growth.
In the new book, I actually speculate about, was assortative mating in Northern Europe a discovery of the late Middle Ages that actually then helped propel things like the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, because as I say, it’s a remarkably constant feature of British society.
We can only trace it back to about 1750, the actual degree of assortativeness. So, in that sense, you can’t have too much if that’s your view about how society operates.
COWEN: At least we could have more of it. There might be some margin where you’d have too much.
CLARK: But it does produce more inequality, so if you’re worried about inequality in society, you don’t want assortative mating. The one way to correct a lot of inequality would just be to have much more random matching.
One of the remarkable things about Denmark is, education is essentially free until you’re age 24. They give you subsidies for your living expenses, for childcare provision — it’s all available. They’ve compressed the income distribution quite sharply.
There is this periodic survey of how well students do, the PISA measures. Nordic countries have not reduced the inequality of PISA measures compared to much more unequal societies like the United States. Again, it’s just interesting that a high degree of inequality is still found within these societies. It turns out that in Nordic societies, people are mating again very strongly assortatively even now. That is the thing that you would worry more about, that there is going to be this trade-off between assortative mating and the degree of inequality in a society.
Stimulating throughout, with lots of debate.
*Steven Weinberg: A Life in Physics*
A fun book, I enjoyed the read. Here is one bit:
There is another contribution to my productivity. While sitting at my desk at home doing physics or preparing classes, or doing some science writing, I picked up the habit of watching classic movies or the History Channel on television. My TV is always turned on in its corner of my desk. Doing the two things at once doubles the value of my time. And the movie keeps ne gnawing at a problem in physics when I might otherwise have knocked back my chair and decamped in frustration.
And:
At this time, Louise [his wife] literally saved my life. Through my friendship with Bernie Feld, I found myself welcome at, and attending, international meetings of various experts on the problems of the international order. Louise understood the situation better than I did. She advised me to have nothing further to do with Bernie’s world, if I wanted to get anything done in physics. She made me see that this was a world of disheartened older men giving themselves something important-looking to do, but that I was an optimistic young man with real work to do. I do not exaggerate when I confess that she saved my life.
You can order it here.
The Effect of European Monarchs on State Performance
We create a novel reign-level data set for European monarchs, covering all major European states between the 10th and 18th centuries. We first document a strong positive relationship between rulers’ cognitive ability and state performance. To address endogeneity issues, we exploit the facts that (i) rulers were appointed according to hereditary succession, independent of their ability, and (ii) the widespread inbreeding among the ruling dynasties of Europe led over centuries to quasirandom variation in ruler ability. We code the degree of blood relationship between the parents of rulers, which also reflects “hidden” layers of inbreeding from previous generations. The coefficient of inbreeding is a strong predictor of ruler ability, and the corresponding instrumental variable results imply that ruler ability had a sizeable effect on the performance of states and their borders. This supports the view that “leaders made history,” shaping the European map until its consolidation into nation states. We also show that rulers mattered only where their power was largely unconstrained. In reigns where parliaments checked the power of monarchs, ruler ability no longer affected their state’s performance.
By Sebastian Ottinger and Nico Voigtländer, from Econometrica. Here are less gated versions. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
New York City fact and poetic passage of the day
If the coastline of the New York Harbor region were stretched out, it would be longer than the state of California. New York City’s waterfront is bigger than those of Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston combined. As vast as it is, the area that is officially known as the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary is even more staggering in its complexity, encompassing such a concatenation of inlets, margins, banks, strands, runnels, rivers, reefs, rivulets, coves, creeks, and kills; of brooks, basins, bays, shoals, shores, islands, islets, and peninsulas, of jetties, bluffs, heights, scallops, spits, crags, beaches, reaches, bends, bights, channels, sandbars, sounds, and points, as to be virtually unmatched in the United States.
That is from the new and fun book by Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America.
*Atlantic Cataclysm*
The author is David Eltis and the subtitle is Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades. Here is one summary passage:
While Europe’s role in the slave trade may have been secondary it can scarcely be described as minor. The traffic was broadly based, with ninety-six European ports dispatching at least one voyage to Africa. Almost every port large enough to initiate transoceanic trade participated in the business. Owners, their employees and, most important, the public had unquestioning support for the business until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The Portuguese and Spanish created the Atlantic slave-trading system, and they were the last to abandon it. They dispatched more voyages and carried off far more enslaved women and men than did the British throughout the era.
Eltis also writes:
Generally, the new data reveals a sense of equality between buyer and seller on the African littoral, at least until late in the slave trade era…Africanists have yet to take on board new population estimates for African regions in 1850 and match these with new estimates of the exodus of people that are now available. It now seems unlikely that outside influences transformed the nature of slavery in Africa.
And note:
…only four other jurisdictions in the Americas received more African captives than Barbados.
A very useful and important book on what is (yes) still a topic underrated in import.
“By your culture, we shall know ye”
From President Trump:
At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN. I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture. We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP! Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP. The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!
Here is the link, and I will keep an eye on what happens there and report back.
What should I ask Sheilagh Ogilvie?
She is a Canadian economic historian at Oxford, here is from her home page:
I am an economic historian. I explore the lives of ordinary people in the past and try to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. I’m interested in how social institutions – the formal and informal constraints on economic activity – shaped economic development between the Middle Ages and the present day.
And:
My current research focusses on serfdom, human capital, state capacity, and epidemic disease. Past projects analysed guilds, merchants, communities, the family, gender, consumption, finance, proto-industry, historical demography, childhood, and social capital. I have a particular interest in the economic and social history of Central and Eastern Europe.
Here is her Wikipedia page. Her book on guilds is well known, and her latest is Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid. Here are her main research papers.
So what should I ask her?
Letting China into the WTO was not the key decision
We study China’s export growth to the United States from 1950–2008, using a structural model to disentangle the effects of past tariff changes from the effects of changes in expectations of future tariffs. We find that the effects of China’s 1980 Normal Trade Relations (NTR) grant lasted past its 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the likelihood of losing NTR status decreased significantly during 1986–92 but changed little thereafter. US manufacturing employment trends support our findings: industries more exposed to the 1980 reform have shed workers steadily since then without acceleration around China’s WTO accession.
That is from a new and forthcoming JPE article by George Alessandria, Shafaat Yar KhanArmen KhederlarianKim J. RuhlJoseph B. Steinberg.
U.S. Infrastructure: 1929-2023
By Ray C. Fair, an important contribution:
This paper examines the history of U.S. infrastructure since 1929 and in the process reports an interesting fact about the U.S. economy.Infrastructure stock as a percent of GDP began a steady decline around 1970, and thegovernment budget deficit became positive and large at roughly the same time. The infrastructure pattern in other countries does not mirror that in the United States, so the United States appears to be a special case. The overallresults suggest that the United States became less future oriented beginning around 1970, an increase in the social discount rate. This change has persisted. This is the interestingfact. The paper contains speculation on possible causes.
Here is the link. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The culture that is German (Roman)
We compare present-day regions that were advanced by Roman culture with those that remained outside of Roman influence. Even when accounting for more recent historical factors, we find that regions developed by Roman civilization show more adaptive personality patterns (Big Five) and better health and psychological well-being today. Results from a spatial regression discontinuity design indicate a significant effect of the Roman border on present-day regional variation in these outcomes. Additional analyses suggest that Roman investments in economic institutions (e.g., trade infrastructure such as Roman roads, markets, and mines) were crucial in creating this long-term effect. Together, these results demonstrate how ancient cultures can imprint a macro-psychological legacy that contributes to present-day regional inequalities.
That is from a recent paper by Obschonka, et.al., via Alexander Le Roy. Also on the German front:
The German parliament will debate on Thursday, January 30th whether to ban the opposition right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.
A group of lawmakers, 113 MPs, have called for parliament to discuss a motion which would invite the constitutional court to decide whether the party is unconstitutional.The motion is supported by MPs from the centre-right CDU/CSU alliance, the far-left Die Linke, as well as the two governing parties, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens.
The signatories claim that the AfD “opposes central basic principles of the free democratic basic order,” questions human dignity, and strives for the “ethno-nationalist strengthening” of the German identity.
Of course the strongest support for AfD is not to be found in Trier. I would not myself support AfD, for both policy and cultural reasons. But I find it strange that Europeans so often see the United States as the locale where democracy is in danger. Right now AfD polls as the second most popular party in Germany — beat them at the ballot box!
Keynes on the Soviet Union
I had not known of this passage, which I am packaging with its introduction from Gavan Tredoux:
John Maynard Keynes has the undeserved reputation of a critic of the USSR. Few know that he reviewed Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s mendacious tome The Soviet Union: a New Civilization (1935/1937/1943) fawningly. Perhaps the most embarrassing thing Keynes ever wrote. From his Complete Works 28:
“One book there is … which every serious citizen will do well to look into—the extensive description of Soviet Communism by Mr and Mrs Sidney Webb. It is on much too large a scale to be called a popular book, but the reader should have no difficulty in comprehending the picture it conveys. Until recently events in Russia were moving too fast and the gap between paper professions and actual achievements was too wide for a proper account to be possible . But the new system is now sufficiently crystallised to be reviewed. The result is impressive. The Russian innovators have passed, not only from the revolutionary stage, but also from the doctrinaire stage. There is little or nothing left which bears any special relation to Marx and Marxism as distinguished from other systems of socialism. They are engaged in the vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully over a territory so extensive that it covers one sixth of the land surface of the world. Methods are still changing rapidly in response to experience. The largest scale empiricism and experimentalism which has ever been attempted by disinterested administrators is in operation. Meanwhile the Webbs have enabled us to see the direction in which things appear to be moving and how far they have got. It is an enthralling work, because it contains a mass of extraordinarily important and interesting information concerning the evolution of the contemporary world. It leaves me with a strong desire and hope that we in this country may discover how to combine an unlimited readiness to experiment with changes in political and economic methods and institutions, whilst preserving traditionalism and a sort of careful conservatism, thrifty of everything which has human experience behind it, in every branch of feeling and of action.”
So no, sorry, Keynes cannot be GOAT.
Why northern England is poor
In at least six Conversations with Tyler, Tyler Cowen asks his interviewee why they think North England is poor. I don’t think he gets good enough answers, which is why I guess he keeps asking.
So here is a better explanation of why North England is poor with a bonus explanation of why so many Britons think much less of Margaret Thatcher’s Premiership than he and his guests do. It is a heavily simplified and selective story, but I think it tells the key parts of how North England fell from being the birthplace of the industrial revolution and among the richest places in the world two centuries ago to being an economy substantially lagging everywhere else in Northern Europe today.
The North’s economic decline is made even clearer when it is compared to two near neighbours and far more prosperous counterfactuals. Scotland and Ireland, who have achieved greater independence within and from the United Kingdom, and whose success is awkwardly ignored and denied by the people responsible for the North’s decline, are today far stronger economies than North England.
I will publish my expansion of these points in detail as soon as I can, but for now I offer this summary,
1. The Norman conquest.
Since at least 1066, England has been ruled from the South East for the benefit of those who rule it and the places where they live and work.
2. Ban on Northern universities.
In the 1600’s, and for two centuries after, England and then Britain’s overwhelmingly and disproportionately Southern Parliament in Westminster rejected North English requests to establish universities in the North. The outsized influence of members representing Oxford and Cambridge and graduates of their universities played a big role in this. The Parliamentarian victory in the English civil war was working on the problem but the Monarchy was restored before Northern universities were established.
3. The industrial revolution.
The lack of universities in North England meant that the industrial revolution was heavily powered by Scottish science and largely occurred at a distance, both geographically and culturally, from London and Westminster. It was this distance that allowed North England to prosper through industry, despite constant effort by British national institutions in South East England to constrain their success. And it was the competition of ideas across that distance that led to great Northern social ideas such as Manchester Liberalism, an end to the Corn Laws and more free trade, professional sports, and a fairer democracy eventually triumphing nationally.
4. Universities were allowed too late.
North English universities, although quickly successful once they existed, were permitted too late (1880 for Manchester). They could not quickly enough achieve a critical mass of high-skill and elite institutions in North England that would help the economy to retain a technological advantage or transition to higher productivity service activities when Britain’s industrial advantage started to decline.
5. Grouping, nationalisation, and privatisation destroyed the North’s institutions.
North England’s strongest local institutions were born of the industrial revolution and included the railways and the municipal corporations. Alongside wealthy local industrialists municipal corporations built and municipalised gas, electricity, and water networks, healthcare, education, and social housing systems and much more. These service and assets were taken out of local control and run overwhelmingly from Westminster as they were grouped, nationalised, and privatised by UK governments of both left and right from the 1920s onward.
6. Thatcher and the end of competition of power.
The process of transferring assets and power from local government to central government or to the private sector (regulated by central government) was substantially completed under Thatcher. Major changes included the abolition of metropolitan county councils in the North’s great cities, the removal of most remaining local taxation powers, the removal from local control of the Mechanics’ Institutes and Polytechnics (the North’s locally-created alternative to the Universities they were denied during the early industrial revolution), the privatisation and deregulation of local bus services, and the introduction of right-to-buy forcing local governments to sell their largest asset base and source of income at well below market rates and give a portion of the proceeds to the central government.
Absent any of the protections against it that exist in the US constitution, Thatcher moved the British state past the French state into being the most centralised in the developed world. “You can just do things” is an emerging meme in the pro-growth community, but since Thatcher that has been largely untrue in North Engalnd. Most of the time, someone from central government will block you, if you succeed they will try and stop you, and if you continue succeeding they will subsidise your competitors.
7. Ultra-centralisation of the state.
Since Thatcher there has been no effective local counterbalance within England to the UK government’s power held in Westminster, no right for cities or regions within England to raise taxes to fund investment in growth, and no limit on the power of the UK central government to constrain growth in the North. The UK central government, backed by Britain’s national institutions, has intensified its preference for South East England. Britain’s government and institutions have moved Britain’s science and innovation from the rest of the country to the South East, focused on London, Oxford and Cambridge.
The central government, holding the monopoly power on such investment, has invested heavily in transport infrastructure in, around, and to London and almost nowhere else in England. The development of a competitive agglomeration to London in North England has been deliberately constrained almost continually. These patterns have deepened even while central governments claim to be focusing on regional investment. In the last fifteen years, while the UK government has claimed to be moving power out of Westminster it has centralised its civil service, centralised its investments in R&D and transport infrastructure, and moved an extra million employees from local government control to central government control.
8. A new generation of policy thinkers.
A new generation of British national policy thinkers, policy advisors, politicians, and custodians of Britain’s national institutions now live almost none of their lives outside of South East England. They rarely have a memory of, or interest in, an England that is not ruled overwhelmingly from the centre.
While arguing for growth today these people and their organisations repeat the mistakes that Thatcher cemented in British political economy thinking that a well-managed central monopoly on power is better than a competitive dispersal of power. They celebrate new scientific institutions in London such as ARIA that repeat — against strong evidence that it will not deliver greater returns in doing so — the centralisation in the South East of England of our national research capacity.
We are repeating today previous disasters for the North’s economy such as the relocation of Britain’s synchrotron to Oxford, the relocation of AstraZeneca to Cambridge and London, and the centralisation of biomedical research in South East England with the construction of The Crick Institute. Our institutions celebrate the creation of new organisations such as The Open Data Institute, Nesta, GDS, Tech City, and the AI Safety Institute that employ large numbers of well-paid people in the capital. At best these organisations allocate their money with preference to South East England and represent local interests as national objectives. At worst they actively oppose and shut down success elsewhere in the country.
This all happens largely without malice, though prejudice against people from “the regions”, while greatly reduced, remains rife within British high society. It is the result of England having forgotten, and — embarrassed by the comparative success of Ireland and Scotland having rejected this centralisation — not having taken the opportunity to remind themselves of the power of competition and markets in government.
There you go. Agree? No mention of behavioral factors? How would social indicators compare to the much poorer Kerala or Sri Lanka? And is Scotland, especially without subsidies, such an economic success?
My Conversation with the excellent Joe Boyd
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Joe Boyd was there when Dylan went electric, when Pink Floyd was born, and when Paul Simon brought Graceland to the world. But far from being just another music industry insider, Boyd has spent decades exploring how the world’s musical traditions connect and transform each other. His new book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, is seventeen years in the making, and is in Tyler’s words “the most substantive, complete, thorough, and well-informed book on world music ever written.” From producing Albanian folk recordings to discovering the hidden links between Mississippi Delta blues and Indian classical music, Boyd’s journey reveals how musical innovation often emerges when traditions collide.
He joins Tyler to discuss why Zulu music became politically charged in South Africa, what makes Albanian choral music distinct from Bulgarian polyphony, what it was like producing Toots and the Maytals, his role in the famous “Dueling Banjos” scene in Deliverance, his work with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, his experiences with Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, how he shaped R.E.M.’s sound on Fables of the Reconstruction, what really happened when Dylan went electric at Newport, how the Beatles integrated Indian music, what makes the Kinshasa guitar sound impossible to replicate, and how he maintains his collection of 6,000 vinyl LPs and 30,000 CDs, what he’ll do next, and more.
There are many, many segments of interest, here is the discussion of Dylan at Newport 1965:
COWEN: Now, as I’m sure you know, there’s a new Bob Dylan movie out called A Complete Unknown. The climactic scene in the movie is all about the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 where “Dylan goes electric.” You were the sound producer there, right?
BOYD: No, I was a production manager. There’s a character in the film who is credited with playing the part of Joe Boyd, the sound engineer. I think the actor who’s supposed to be playing me is at the sound controls. I haven’t seen the picture yet. But I was the production manager.
I was very concerned with the sound because I had been to the ’63 Newport Festival, and I thought it was a fantastic event. It was a never-to-be-forgotten, seeing Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson through the fog coming in off Narragansett Bay and Dylan linking arms with Joni and Pete and singing “We Shall Overcome.” But the sound was terrible. All through this festival of ’63, I felt the sound was really crap. You’d have a bluegrass band with a guy playing the fiddle, and you couldn’t hear the fiddle!
The first thing I did when I got behind my desk in June of ’65 in New York at George Wayne’s office was call up Paul Rothchild, the great producer, the guy who produced The Doors and Janis Joplin and so many things. I said, “Hey, Paul, why don’t you come up to Newport and mix the sound?” He said, “Okay, can I have three kin passes?” Meaning for his family: places to stay, passes to every event. I said, “Deal. You got it.”
So, Paul and I together sound checked everybody. Every single artist that appeared at Newport was sound checked in the morning by me and Paul except for Dylan, who we sound checked in the evening, six o’clock, between the afternoon show and the evening show, because Dylan wouldn’t get up in the morning to be sound checked. The guy on the board, the guy whose hands were on those mixers was Paul Rothchild, not me. I’ve never been a sound engineer. I don’t have any technical qualification to be a sound engineer. Neither did Paul for that matter, but he was better at it than I was.
COWEN: The controversy at the time — was it really about Dylan playing electric? Was it just about the poor quality of the sound? Was it about Pete Seeger being upset? What actually happened at that time?
BOYD: I think the controversy — you could see it coming for a month, if not more. To me, you can see it. Have you seen that film, The Other Side of the Mirror?
COWEN: I don’t think so.
BOYD: It’s basically Murray Lerner who shot that film festival, which is about the Newport Festival, has all the footage from ’63, ’64, ’65, ’66. The Other Side of the Mirror is all the Dylan footage from ’63, ’64, and ’65, and it’s fascinating. In ’63, he’s the idealistic singing about a coal miner, and Pete, everybody looking at him like he’s Woody Guthrie.
Then in the ’64, he does a workshop, and Pete Seeger introduces him as the voice of a generation, and he gets up to the microphone, and he sings “Mr. Tambourine Man.” You look at Seeger, who looks puzzled, slightly shocked. What is this? This isn’t a protest song. This isn’t a song you could sing at the barricades. This isn’t a song that’s going to move the youth to revolution. What is this?
That is the beginning of what happened in ’65, is Dylan moving away in a different direction, and he’d already recorded half an album with an electric band in the studio. Just before, in the weeks leading up to the festival, we had The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” electric version, on the Top 40 radio. We had Dylan, “Like A Rolling Stone” with an electric band on the radio.
It was Top 40 big business, mainstream popular culture moving into this delicate little idealistic corner called the Newport Folk Festival, which was based on mostly all-acoustic music and very pure, traditional, or idealistic. Everybody — Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel and Alan Lomax, and a lot of people in the audience — sensed that this was a bull in a china shop, that this was big-time something moving into this delicate little world.
I was totally on Dylan’s side. Paul Rothchild and I were like, “Yes.” But in retrospect, I see Pete Seeger’s point, absolutely. I would contest — of course, I would, wouldn’t I — contest that the sound was awful. It was just very loud. Nobody had ever heard sound that loud. I think Rothchild pushed up the faders, but it had to be because it was the first moment of rock.
Nobody ever used the word “rock” before 1965. There was rock and roll, there was pop, there was rhythm and blues, but there wasn’t rock. This was rock because you had a drummer, Sam Lay, who was hitting the drums very hard. Mike Bloomfield — this was his moment. He cranked up the level on his guitar. You didn’t have direct connections from amps to the PA system in those days. You just had the sound coming straight out of the amp. So, with the sound of the drums, the sound of the bass, the sound of Bloomfield’s guitar, you had to turn the vocal up so that it would be heard over the guitar.
That escalation of volume is what shaped or defined the future of rock. It became really loud music. That was the first time anybody heard it. It was really shocking. There was probably a little distortion because the speakers weren’t used to it, but it was the kind of sound that would be normal two years later. But that night it wasn’t, and I think Newport and folk music and jazz never really recovered. Every young person who used to become a folk or a jazz fan became a rock fan.
Joe has an encyclopedic knowledge of so many areas of music, and I was honored to do this episode with him. Interesting throughout. Again I will recommend Joe’s new and extraordinarily thorough book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music.
The 1920s immigration restrictions
The 1920s immigration restrictions in the US did not affect manufacturing wages.
The US immigration restrictions of the 1920s lowered the occupational standings of whites and incumbent immigrants.
US counties with more immigrants excluded by the quotas of the 1920s saw increased in-migration.
During the Great Black Migration of the US, black southerners moved to northern counties, filling roles left by excluded immigrants.
During the Great Black Migration, blacks who migrated to counties with more excluded immigrants experienced greater economic gains.
That is from a new piece by Bin Xie in the Journal of Comparative Economics. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.