Category: History
*Virtue Politics*
The author is James Hankins, and the subtitle is Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy. Here is one excerpt:
I have sought to present the political ideas of the humanists as the expression of a movement of thought and action, similar in its physiognomy if not in its content to the movement of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. It was a movement that was stimulated by a crisis of legitimacy in late medieval Italy and by widespread disgust with its political and religious leadership. Its adherents were men who had wide experience — often bitter, personal experience — with tyranny. They knew that oligarchs and even popular governments could be as tyrannical as princes. Their movement was largely in agreement about its goals: to rebuild Europe’s depleted reserves of good character, true piety, and practical wisdom. They also agreed widely about means: the revival of classical antiquity, which the humanists presented as an inspiring pageant, rich in examples of noble conduct, eloquent speech, selfless dedication to country, and inner moral strength, nourished by philosophy and uncorrupt Christianity. The humanist movement yearned after greatness, moral and political. Its most pressing historical questions were how ancient Rome had achieved her vast and enduring empire, and whether it was possible to bring that greatness to life again under modern conditions. This led to the question of whether it was the Roman Republic or the Principate that should be emulated; and, once the humanists had learned Greek, it provoked the further question of whether Rome was the only possible ancient model to emulate, or whether Athens or Sparta, or even the Persia of Xenophon’s Cyrus, held lessons for contemporary statesmen.
An excellent book, you can order it here.
*Sontag: Her Life and Work*
That is the new biography by Benjamin Moser, along with Ingmar Bergman bios you can call this topic my soap opera equivalent. Here are a few scattered bits:
“I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation,” Susan wrote in 1971…she read about the University of Chicago, “which didn’t have a football team, where all people did was study, and where they talked about Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas day and night. I thought, that’s for me.”
And:
The connection between sex and pain was so natural for her — “All relationships are essentially masochistic,” she told Burch — that she could never imagine the loving partnership of equals that Freud had posited. Her “profoundest experience,” of her mother’s giving and then withdrawing her love, was perpetually renewed. Harriet dribbled out her affection by the scant thimbleful, which Susan gratefully slurped down: “I suppose, with my sore heart + unused body, it doesn’t take much to make me happy.” A couple of weeks later, she described the “total collapse” of their relationship and “blindly walking through a forest of pain.”
And:
Brodsky, after all, was the friend she dreamed of…the teacher she hoped to find in Philip Rieff; the companion she had sought all her life, an intellectual and artistic equal, and even a superior. She never found another friend as congenial, and it was in these terms that she mourned his premature death, at fifty-five. I’m all alone,” she told a friend. There’s nobody with whom I can share my ideas, my thoughts.”
Recommended, for those who care.
Karachi, and the greater violence of New World cities
I like to ask some CWT guests (Charles Mann, Juan Pablo Villarino, and Alain Bertaud) why New World cities are so often so much more violent than Old World cities, including in Europe and Asia. In the case of Asia, wartime episodes aside, it does seem that so many Asian cities are remarkably safe, especially for men but often for women too.
Recall one of the key principles of reasoning: look for the cross-sectional variation.
While Karachi is relatively safe now, before 2013 it had at least two decades of fairly extreme violence.
And what are some special features of Karachi history, relative to many other Old World and Asian cities?
The city had a very large “new” population, with Hindus (formerly the majority inhabitants) having left and migrants having come from many other parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Myanmar too.
The city was hit by a major wave of drug trafficking, heroin in particular.
The city was hit by a major wave of arms trafficking, run by thugs and mafias, often related to the wars in Afghanistan.
This is only one data point, but it supports hypotheses that higher levels of New World violence stem from relatively recent population shifts, drug trafficking, and arms trafficking. When Old World cities have that blend, they too become quite violent.
Philip K. Dick predicts the future
From 1981:
1995: Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts
2010: Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to alter the past with scientific information.
That is from The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin.
My Conversation with Alain Bertaud
Excellent throughout, Alain put on an amazing performance for the live audience at the top floor of the Observatory at the old World Trade Center site. Here is the audio and transcript, most of all we talked about cities. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Will America create any new cities in the next century? Or are we just done?
BERTAUD: Cities need a good location. This is a debate I had with Paul Romer when he was interested in charter cities. He had decided that he could create 50 charter cities around the world. And my reaction — maybe I’m wrong — but my reaction is that there are not 50 very good locations for cities around the world. There are not many left. Maybe with Belt and Road, maybe the opening of Central Asia. Maybe the opening of the ocean route on the northern, following the pole, will create the potential for new cities.
But cities like Singapore, Malacca, Mumbai are there for a good reason. And I don’t think there’s that many very good locations.
COWEN: Or Greenland, right?
[laughter]
BERTAUD: Yes. Yes, yes.
COWEN: What is your favorite movie about a city? You mentioned a work of fiction. Movie — I’ll nominate Escape from New York.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: Casablanca.
Here is more:
COWEN: Your own background, coming from Marseille rather than from Paris —
BERTAUD: I would not brag about it normally.
[laughter]
COWEN: But no, maybe you should brag about it. How has that changed how you understand cities?
BERTAUD: I’m very tolerant of messy cities.
COWEN: Messy cities.
BERTAUD: Yes.
COWEN: Why might that be, coming from Marseille?
BERTAUD: When we were schoolchildren in Marseille, we were used to a city which has a . . . There’s only one big avenue. The rest are streets which were created locally. You know, the vernacular architecture.
In our geography book, we had this map of Manhattan. Our first reaction was, the people in Manhattan must have a hard time finding their way because all the streets are exactly the same.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: In Marseille we oriented ourselves by the angle that a street made with another. Some were very narrow, some very, very wide. One not so wide. But some were curved, some were . . . And that’s the way we oriented ourselves. We thought Manhattan must be a terrible place. We must be lost all the time.
Finally:
COWEN: And what’s your best Le Corbusier story?
BERTAUD: I met Le Corbusier at a conference in Paris twice. Two conferences. At the time, he was at the top of his fame, and he started the conference by saying, “People ask me all the time, what do you think? How do you feel being the most well-known architect in the world?” He was not a very modest man.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: And he said, “You know what it feels? It feels that my ass has been kicked all my life.” That’s the way he started this. He was a very bitter man in spite of his success, and I think that his bitterness is shown in his planning and some of his architecture.
COWEN: Port-au-Prince, Haiti — overrated or underrated?
Strongly recommended, and note that Bertaud is eighty years old and just coming off a major course of chemotherapy, a remarkable performance.
Again, I am very happy to recommend Alain’s superb book Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.
From the comments, on the Coase theorem
#1 on prefiguring of the so-called Coase theorem, consider also p. 396-7 of W.H. Hutt, “Co-ordination and the Size of the Firm,” South African Journal of Economics 2(4), December 1934:
“Now, under one ownership, their relations would, given competitive institutions, be exactly the same, provided that both methods were equally efficient from the social standpoint. There is no reason why the spreading of the lines of responsibility back to several sources should lead to less effective planning than subordinacy to an authority emanating from one source, given the equal availability of relevant knowledge to the managers who devise the plans…The most important significant difference between the two cases is that, in practice, in the one case there may not be the availability of relevant knowledge that there is in the other.”
That is from Daniel B. Klein. And:
For a still earlier ‘discovery’ with transaction costs and all see my former colleague Yehoshua Liebermann’s “The Coase Theorem in Jewish Law,” Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1981), pp. 293-303
That is from Moshe Syrquin, link for both here.
What should I ask Henry Farrell?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, no associated public event. As you read blogs, you might know Henry’s longstanding work over at CrookedTimber, and also his role in Monkey Cage. Henry is also professor of political science at George Washington University, has with Abraham L. Newman recently published a path-breaking book on the increasingly important concept of weaponized interdependence, is an expert on comparative labor relations, and is an all-around polymath, including on fiction, science fiction, and the politics of Ireland, his home country. Here is his home page.
So what should I ask Henry?
We had Nash and Schelling — who did the Soviets have?
The bi-polar confrontation between the Soviet Union and the USA involved many leading game theorists from both sides of the Iron Curtain: Oskar Morgenstern, John von Neumann, Michael Intriligator, John Nash, Thomas Schelling and Steven Brams from the United States and Nikolay Vorob’ev, Leon A. Petrosyan, Elena B. Yanovskaya and Olga N. Bondareva from the Soviet Union. The formalization of game theory (GT) took place prior to the Cold War but the geopolitical confrontation hastened and shaped its evolution. In our article we outline four similarities and differences between Western GT and Soviet GT: 1) the Iron Curtain resulted in a lagged evolution of GT in the Soviet Union; 2) Soviet GT focused more on operations research and issues of centralized planning; 3) the contemporary Western view on Soviet GT was biased and Soviet contributions, including works on dynamic stability, non-emptiness of the core and many refinements, suggest that Soviet GT was able to catch up to the Western level relatively fast; 4) international conferences, including Vilnius, 1971, fostered interaction between Soviet game theorists and their Western colleagues. In general, we consider the Cold War to be a positive environment for GT in the West and in the Soviet Union.
That is from a new paper by Harald Hagemann, Vadim Kufenko, and Danila Raskov, via Ilya Novak and Beatrice Cherrier. And via Kevin Vallier, here is a new paper on how Schelling’s game-theoretic notion of stability may have come from his very early work on macroeconomics.
Frequency of conflict initiation worldwide
That is from the new and interesting Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age, by Bear F. Braumoeller, which is largely a critique of Pinker on trends toward peacefulness (Pinker gives only the more optimistic data on Europe). And from the text:
…there is variation in the rate of conflict and war initiation over time, and it’s pretty substantial. Leaving aside the two jumps during the World Wars, the median rate of conflict initiation quadruples in the period between 1815 and the end of the Cold War, after which it abruptly drops by more than half.
The “falling rate of conflict” is thus not entirely reassuring.
How about the deadliness of occurring conflicts?:
Analyzing the two most commonly used measures of the deadliness of war, I find no significant change in war’s lethality. If anything, the data indicate a very modest increase in lethality, but that increase could very easily be due to chance…Worse still, the data are consistent with a process by which only random chance prevents small wars from escalating into very, very big ones.
Overall, the arguments in this book are strong, and the discussion of data issues is subtle throughout. You can buy the book here, its arguments seem fundamentally correct to me.
What should I ask Salman Rushdie?
I will be doing a Conversations with Tyler with him, no associated public event, so what should I ask him?
What kind of industrial policy does America need?
That idea is making a big comeback, but let’s make sure we understand the status quo first. So runs my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Perhaps most important, it should be recognized that the U.S. already has an industrial policy — and has for some time. It is a collection of programs and policies at the federal and state level, many of which are highly imperfect, and so the focus should be on fixing what is already in place.
The first and perhaps most significant component of U.S. industrial policy is a high level of defense spending, much higher than that of any other country. The spinoffs of this spending famously include the internet of course, but also early advances in computers and some later advances in aviation. Today’s orbiting network of satellites is in part a spinoff from the space program, which was partially motivated by military concerns.
It’s not yet clear whether current defense spinoffs will prove as innovative and as potent as those of the past, but there are some reasons to be skeptical. Procurement cycles for weapons can stretch to a dozen years or more, yet technologies are changing far more quickly.
So if I were designing an “industrial policy” for America, my first priority would be to improve and “unstick” its procurement cycles. There may well be bureaucratic reasons that this is difficult to do. But if it can’t be done, then perhaps the U.S. shouldn’t be setting its sights on a more ambitious industrial policy.
I also consider the NIH and the biomedical establishment, and America’s extensive system of state colleges and universities, as part of what is already a quite ambitious “industrial policy,” even if we don’t always call it that.
My Conversation with Samantha Power
Samantha Power has a new and excellent book out, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir, which I very much enjoyed. And so a Conversation with Tyler was in order, here is the audio and transcript, here is one bit:
COWEN: For a final closing segment, I just have some super simple questions about foreign policy again. Over the course of the last summer, Iran apparently seized two British tankers. There’ve been other incidents in the Strait of Hormuz in some way connected with Iran. From a game-theoretic point of view, why would they do this? Why does this make sense?
POWER: Well, the one thing that they would know that would give them some point of leverage is the extreme war fatigue within the United States, and really within the Western world. So, by upping the stakes, arguably — I mean, who knows why the hell they’re doing what they’re doing?
But by upping the stakes, they arguably could be sending a signal like, “You want to get in this game? It’s not as if we’re an island and you can just break the deal, penalize us gratuitously, penalize the people who are still trying to maintain the terms of the deal, and that there won’t be collateral consequences outside the nuclear space.”
Because the nuclear consequences, as they begin to enrich and violate the terms of the deal — having legitimately argued that we had violated the terms of the deal — the effects of those are not day-to-day effects in the news world. It’s a bit abstract for the public and even for policymakers. It’s an incremental abrogation.
But acts like this show that they have leverage, that they are active militarily in parts of the world where we have a vested interest in maintaining freedom of navigation. So I think they’re showing that they can hit in domains outside the nuclear domain. I think that is probably what they’re doing.
Here is another segment:
COWEN: In which ways do you feel your thought is in some manner still Irish in orientation in a way that would distinguish you from, say, American-born individuals?
POWER: It’s hard to know because I can’t run the counterfactual, so I don’t know what’s just because my mother is a physician and very empathetic toward her patients, and do I learn from that? Or am I moved by having come from a small country, at that time a poor country, that was sending —
COWEN: With a history of oppression, right?
POWER: With a history of oppression, with a history of the dignity of its people being trampled. Is that why I care so much about individual dignity? Again, I can’t run the history a different way.
And finally:
COWEN: Very simple — are baseball games too long? Why not make it 7 innings?
POWER: Why not make it 12?
COWEN: It’s boring, right?
POWER: For you and, as it turns out, for others.
COWEN: For me. So many games are over 3 hours. Shouldn’t the game be 2 hours, 17 minutes?
We also cover her first impressions of America, being a wartime correspondent, China and Iraq, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, van Morrison vs. Bob Dylan, robot empires vs. robot umpires, her favorite novel, how personal one should get in a memoir and why, and German defense spending, among other topics.
Definitely recommended.
Stable Money Implies an Inverted Yield Curve
Suppose we had stable money. It’s then obvious that long-term savers would prefer long-bonds to rolling over short bonds. If held to maturity, the long-bond guarantees a known rate of return and payout at the time it is bought while the rolling of short-term bonds exposes you to risk. Thus, in a regime of stable money, long-term savers should prefer long-bonds and the yield curve should normally be inverted. That’s the essence of an excellent post by John Cochrane:
If inflation is steady, long-term bonds are a safer way to save money for the long run. If you roll over short-term bonds, then you do better when interest rates rise, and do worse when interest rates fall, adding risk to your eventual wealth. The long-term bond has more mark-to-market gains and losses, but you don’t care about that. You care about the long term payout, which is less risky. (Throw out the statements and stop worrying.) So, in an environment with varying real rates and steady inflation, we expect long rates to be less than short rates, because short rates have to compensate investors for extra risk.
If, by contrast, inflation is volatile and real rates are steady, then long-term bonds are riskier. When inflation goes up, the short term rate will go up too, and preserve the real value of the investment, and vice versa. The long-term bond just suffers the cumulative inflation uncertainty. In that environment we expect a rising yield curve, to compensate long bond holders for the risk of inflation.
So, another possible reason for the emergence of a downward sloping yield curve is that the 1970s and early 1980s were a period of large inflation volatility. Now we are in a period of much less inflation volatility, so most interest rate variation is variation in real rates. Markets are figuring that out.
Most of the late 19th century had an inverted yield curve. UK perpetuities were the “safe asset,” and short term lending was risky. It also lived under the gold standard which gave very long-run price stability.
Existential risk and growth
Here is the abstract of a new paper by Leopold Aschenbrenner:
Technological innovation can create or mitigate risks of catastrophes—such as nuclear war, extreme climate change, or powerful artificial intelligence run amok—that could imperil human civilization. What is the relationship between economic growth and these existential risks? In a model of endogenous and directed technical change, with moderate parameters, existential risk follows a Kuznets-style inverted Ushape. This suggests we could be living in a unique “time of perils,” having developed technologies advanced enough to threaten our permanent destruction, but not having grown wealthy enough yet to be willing to spend much on safety. Accelerating growth during this “time of perils” initially increases risk, but improves the chances of humanity’s survival in the long run. Conversely, even short-term stagnation could substantially curtail the future of humanity. Nevertheless, if the scale effect of existential risk is large and the returns to research diminish rapidly, it may be impossible to avert an eventual existential catastrophe.
Bravo! 44 pp. of brilliant text, another 40 pp. of proofs and derivations, and rumor has it that Leopold is only 17 years old, give or take.
If you happen to know Leopold, please do ask him to drop me a line.
For the pointer I thank Pablo Stafforini.
*Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries*
That is the new and excellent book out by David Sorkin. I feel I have read many good books on Jewish history, and I don’t always see the marginal value of adding to that pile, but this one really delivered. Plenty more detail without losing any conceptual overview. Ever wonder what exactly happened to Jewish emancipation, and why, as the Napoleonic conquest of Europe was reversed? This is the place to go. By the way, in the middle of the eighteenth century there were more Jews in Curacao, Suriname and Jamaica than in all of the North American colonies combined.
You can order it here, worthy of my year-end “best non-fiction of the year” list.