Category: History

How Mexico built a state (that was then, this is now)

Mexico in the nineteenth century presents a dramatic example of this problem. Mexico suffered extreme political instability and strife in the nineteenth century. There were 800 revolts between 1821 and 1875. Between independence in 1821 and 1900, Mexico had 72 different chief executives, meaning that the average term was only a little more than one year long. Likewise, the country had 112 finance ministers between 1830 and 1863. In addition there were several invasions and secessionist movements.

The country also experimented with several different forms of government, including two empires (one headed by a French-backed, Austrian-born member of the Habsburg dynasty), one disputed period where there were presidents from both main parties, four republics, one provisional republic, and a long dictatorship. President Guadalupe Victoria was the first constitutionally elected president of the country, and the only one who would complete a full term in the first 30 years of independence.

Some other examples: There were four Mexican presidents in the years 1829, 1839, 1846, 1847, and 1853, while there were five in 1844 and 1855 and eight in 1833. Antonio López de Santa Anna, who was President of Mexico on ten separate occasions, was president four different times in a single year.

Mexico faced constant challenges to its sovereignty in the first 50 years of independence, from the secessions of Texas and Central America, to the secession attempts of the Yucatán, as well as numerous smaller rebellions.

Here is more from the excellent Robin Grier, from Works in Progress.  There are further points of interest in the piece.

What should I ask Rebecca F. Kuang?

I am a big fan of her latest book Yellowface, which I read straight through (and it’s much more double-edged and subversive than you might be expecting).  Here is a partial bio:

Rebecca F. Kuang is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History, as well as the forthcoming Yellowface. [TC: no longer forthcoming] She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.

Here is her Twitter.  Here is her full of facts, but somehow a bit convoluted Wikipedia page.  So what should I ask her?

My Conversation with the excellent Jerusalem Demsas

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

In this special episode, Tyler sat down with Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss three books: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, and Of Boys and Men by Richard V. Reeves.

Spanning centuries and genres and yet provoking similar questions, these books prompted Tyler and Jerusalem to wrestle with enduring questions about human nature, gender dynamics, the purpose of travel, and moral progress, including debating whether Le Guin prefers the anarchist utopia she depicts, dissecting Swift’s stance on science and slavery, questioning if travel makes us happier or helps us understand ourselves, comparing Gulliver and Shevek’s alienation and restlessness, considering Swift’s views on the difficulty of moral progress, reflecting on how feminism links to moral progress and gender equality, contemplating whether imaginative fiction or policy analysis is more likely to spur social change, and more.

An actual conversation!  This one is difficult to excerpt, and unlike many I suspect it is better to listen than to read the transcript.  Nonetheless here is one short excerpt:

DEMSAS: Yes. The only walls on the anarchist planet [in The Dispossessed] are the ones that surround the space travel, the launching pad or whatever it is. That’s something that’s said very early on, but then you discover throughout the book how much there are all of these other “invisible walls” that he’s discovering. That’s made very explicit at times, sometimes maybe too explicit. [laughs] But I think it’s also a lesson in how much you have to have an other to compare yourself to in order to even understand yourself.

He’s alone for a really long time, and when he’s doing his studies at the beginning or in the middle of the book, and he can’t get these scientific breakthroughs that he inevitably does get to — it’s when he starts interacting with other people and rebuilding those bonds with other humans that you do actually get these breakthroughs. I think that’s also another point in favor of Le Guin pointing out that communitarianism is important.

Recommended.

Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?

I’ve been reading and rereading biographies of Bach lately (for some podcast prep), and it strikes me he might count as the greatest achiever of all time.  That is distinct from say regarding him as your favorite composer or artist of all time.  I would include the following metrics as relevant for that designation:

1. Quality of work.

2. How much better he was than his contemporaries.

3. How much he stayed the very best in subsequent centuries.

4. Quantity of work.

5. Peaks.

6. Consistency of work and achievement.

7. How many other problems he had to solve to succeed with his achievement.  For Bach, this might include a) finding musical manuscripts, b) finding organs good enough to play and compose on, c) dealing with various local and church authorities, d) migrating so successfully across jurisdictions, e) composing at an impossibly high level during the four years he was widowed (with kids), before remarrying.

8. Ending up so great that he could learn only from himself.

9. Never experiencing true defeat or setback (rules out Napoleon!).

I see Bach as ranking very, very high in all these categories.  Who else might even be a contender for greatest achiever of all time?  Shakespeare?  Maybe, but Bach seems to beat him for relentlessness and quantity (at a very high quality level).  Beethoven would be high on the list, but he doesn’t seem to quite match up to Bach in all of these categories.  Homer seems relevant, but we are not even sure who or what he was.  Archimedes?  Plato or Aristotle?  Who else?

Addendum: from Lucas, in the comments:

I’m not joking when I say I have thought about Bach in this light every week for the last 20 years.

His family died young, and his day job for much of his life was a school teacher! In addition to the daily demands on him to teach Latin and theology and supervise teenage boys and so on, there was the thousand small practical challenges of life in the eighteenth century. No electric lighting. Crappy parchment and quills. The cold, the disease, the lack of plumbing, the restricted access to information, talented players, and the manual nature of every little thing.

And, perhaps most of all, to continue such a volume of high-quality output when the world seemed not to care. Yes, he had a local reputation among those in the know, but there were never any packed concert halls or grand tours to validate his efforts. He seems to have been entirely internally driven by his genius and his commitment to the eternal and divine.

That was then, this is now, Budapest edition

Trains between the two cities [Budapest and Vienna] were fast — four and a quarter hours in 1896.  In 2022 it was three hours and thirty-five minutes.

And:

Budapest finance caught up and surpassed the growth of agricultural and industrial production.  By 1900 Budapest became the bankming centre of Central and Eastern Europe.  Between 1867, the date of the ‘Compromise’ which created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and 1914 the number of Hungarian banks grew from eleven to 160 and their capitalization increased fivefold.  A few of them — the First Hungarian Commercial Bank and the Hungarian Credit Bank — rivalled the biggest Viennese and German banks in size and prestige, as their palatial headquarter buildings in downtown Budapest, designed by the most renowned European and Hungarian architects, showed.  Their owners, such as the Wolianders, the Wahrmanns, Hatvany-Deutsch and Chorins, joined the European super-rich.

That is all from Victor Sebestyen’s interesting new book, Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West.

Proudhon: To be Governed

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century,” first published in French 1851; translated by John Beverly Robinson (1923), pp. 293-294.

Hat tip: Robert Higgs.

What should I ask Jacob Mikanowski?

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is Jacob’s self-description from his home page:

I’m a freelance journalist and writer based in Portland, OR. My academic training is in the history of Eastern Europe, but for over a decade, I worked as a critic and a science journalist. I write about art, books, movies, ancient history, anthropology, and – occasionally – food. I especially like to work on stories about the intersection of science and the humanities, photography, and people who are helplessly obsessed with whatever they’re doing.

For the past few years, I’ve been working on single project which combines all my interests: Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land – a book-length history of Eastern Europe, covering culture, politics, religion and ideology (essentially, everything which made Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe over the past 2000 years)…

I loved the book, and that led me to Jacob.  Here are some of his articles.  Here is Jacob on Twitter.  Here is a good WSJ review of Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.

That was then, this is now, concentration of notables edition

[John] Napier’s continental sojourn had embraced the years 1564 to 1571, the year of the Ridolfi Plot.  During his absence Galileo, Shakespeare, Caravaggio and Kepler had been born, Michelangelo, Calvin, Nostradamus and Stifel had died, Pope Pius V had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been forced to abdicate and was under comfortable house arrest in England, her infant son, James VI, had been made king, Edinburgh had suffered a terrible plague, his father had remarried, and Scotland had been thrown into civil war, with Merchiston playing a pivotal role.

A lot happened in the 1770s as well.  That above paragraph is from Julian Havil’s quite good John Napier: Life, Logarithms, and Legacy.  Napier of course also was obsessed with the Book of Revelation, in addition to being one of the discoverers of logarithms.

Did the U.S. Really Grow Out of Its World War II Debt?

The fall in the U.S. public debt/GDP ratio from 106% in 1946 to 23% in 1974 is often attributed to high rates of economic growth. This paper examines the roles of three other factors: primary budget surpluses, surprise inflation, and pegged interest rates before the Fed-Treasury Accord of 1951. Our central result is a simulation of the path that the debt/GDP ratio would have followed with primary budget balance and without the distortions in real interest rates caused by surprise inflation and the pre-Accord peg. In this counterfactual, debt/GDP declines only to 74% in 1974, not 23% as in actual history. Moreover, the ratio starts rising again in 1980 and in 2022 it is 84%. These findings imply that, over the last 76 years, only a small amount of debt reduction has been achieved through growth rates that exceed undistorted interest rates.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Julien Acalin and Laurence M. Ball.

The Mother Church of the Common Law

The Temple Church is a small church in London built in 1185 by the Knights Templar. It’s now hidden behind Fleet Street amid the Middle and Inner Temple, two of the four “Inns of Court”the educational institutions and professional associations for common law barristers and judges. The Temple Church is known as the Mother Church of the Common Law both for its role in the creation of the Magna Carta and because of its location amid the Temple area.

King John used the Temple Church as his headquarters in 1214-1215 and it’s from here that he was forced to issue the first of the Magna Cartas. The real hero of the Magna Carta, however, was the knight William Marshal who negotiated the original agreement, reissued it again under his authority as regent to the boy King, Henry III, and then reissued it again–after, at the age of 70 personally leading troops into battle and defeating a French invasion–thereby cementing the Magna Carta and the rights it guarantees into British life.

William Marshall’s tomb can be found in the Temple Church.

Middle and Inner Temple were the heart of the common law for hundreds of years and the presence of the Temple Church meant that the idea of a bill of rights was always nearby. So much so that the Temple played a role in the American Revolution and not just as inspiration. Six members of the Inner or Middle Temple were signatories to the Declaration of Independence and seven were signatories to the US Constitution.

The Mother Church of the Common Law is well worth a visit if you are in London.

Twenty Years of Marginal Revolution!

Who would have guessed that after twenty years Tyler and I would still be writing Marginal Revolution! Thanks especially to Tyler, we have had multiple new posts every single day for twenty years! Incredible.

We had some idea when starting Marginal Revolution that it would provide the foundation for our eventual textbook, Modern Principles of Economics, but we didn’t imagine that it would also become the foundation for our online platform for economics education, Marginal Revolution University and Conversations with Tyler, Emergent Ventures and various other projects of Tyler and myself.

We never imagined that Marginal Revolution would one day be archived by the Library of Congress or become one of the world’s nexus points for debating and understanding events like the Financial Crisis and the Covid Pandemic. It was a shock when the first undergrad told us that they had been reading MR since the age of 12. Today, there are multiple PhD economists who grew up reading Marginal Revolution.  

In this conversation, with David Perell, we reflect on 20 years and talk about our process of writing and working together. Tyler is very funny. Tyrone makes an appearance or two, albeit never announced. (Apple podcast, Spotify).

We also thank our many readers and the commentators. You all make MR better (ok, most of you make MR better).

We are still excited to write about economics every day and we don’t think we have peaked! Let’s see what happens over the next 20 years. Thank you all.

Listen to Lech

WashPost: Of the giants who brought down the Iron Curtain — among them Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Vaclav Havel — only Walesa is still with us. At 79, he still looks as vigorous as the young electrician who led a workers’ uprising against the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; forced Poland’s Marxist regime to recognize the first independent trade union in the communist world; was imprisoned under martial law only to later force his former jailers at the negotiating table to allow free elections; and who, as the first president of the newly free Poland, anchored his former Warsaw Pact country in the institutions of the West.

Sitting in his office at the European Solidarity Center, the museum built on the grounds of the old Lenin Shipyard where Solidarity was born, I asked about polls showing that half of young Americans have a positive view of socialism. What is his message for young people who have no living memory of communism? “Many young people are actually fooled to accept communism as an idea,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “There are beautiful sentences talking about equality, about justice. … But as soon as you start putting that system into practice, all sorts of serious disasters come about. But young people quite often don’t know it. We have experience [with socialism], so we really know something about it. So, I strongly recommend rejecting it.”

When does the quality premium disappear?

I have been pondering the world of classical music once again, mostly because of two new releases.  One is the late Beethoven string quartets by the Calidore Quartet, and the other is a six-CD Chopin box by Jean-Marc Luisada.

The most striking feature of these recordings is that they are as good as any in the case of the Beethoven, and top tier for the Chopin (yes I have heard Rubinstein, Horowitz playing Chopin live, Cortot, Dinu Lipatti, Bolet playing Chopin live, I know how to spell Krystian Zimerman, as for the Beethoven the Busch Quartet, Quartett Italiano, Alban Berg, Gewandhaus, Danish Quartet, and much more!)

A second striking feature of the status quo is that hardly anyone seems to have heard of these performers.  Luisada has a Wikipedia article, but there don’t seem to be full-length profiles of him.  The Calidore Quartet has a slightly longer Wikipedia article, but again there is no serious coverage of him on line.  Hardly anyone has heard of them, and their releases will at best sell a few hundred copies.

I don’t think any people deny the quality of these offerings, though they may disagree on the exact nature of the superlatives to offer.  The point is that few people care.  Furthermore, few people care that few people care.

Still, I wonder…can there be other markets where there is so much quality available that the quality premium goes away?  Note that in these equilibria, most customers are not listening to the very highest quality products, rather they may choose the products associated with greater celebrity (which typically are still very good though not the very best).

If all goes well in the world (ha), is this where ideas markets end up?

How about markets for Sichuan food?  How many people really care about the very very best ma la?

Clearly the 18th century was very different.  Adam Smith and David Hume were much, much better than virtually all of their contemporaries, and they reaped a high quality premium, at least in terms of fame, influence, and longevity.

What exactly makes the quality premium go away or dwindle?

Do we prefer a world with a lower quality premium, yet is such a world also bound to disappoint us morally?

Don’t Doubt: Saint Thomas in India

Christianity in India has roots at least as old as in Italy. Millions of Christians in Kerala today believe that their tradition traces back directly to Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, who traveled to India in the first century AD. According to the Acts of Thomas, the apostles divided the world and drew lots to decide their respective regions for spreading the gospel. Thomas, drew India but, ever the doubter, he demurred. “It’s too hot and the food isn’t kosher”, he said, more or less. Jesus appeared to Thomas, however, and bade him “go to India!” Amazingly, he still demurred–what a doubter!–but by a minor miracle just as this was happening an Indian merchant arrived in Jerusalem calling for a master architect and builder to return with him to India. Finally, with this sign, Thomas’s doubts were allayed and his India adventures began.

For a long time, The Acts of Thomas were considered to be more of an unreliable fantasy novel than a historical account and of course the Acts does contain fantastical stories. Nevertheless, the Acts of Thomas have gained credence over time as certain names and places mentioned in the Acts and once thought to be purely imaginary, turned out to be accurate historical references. As William Dalrymple writes in an excellent piece:

…a series of remarkable discoveries have gone a long way to prove that the story contained in the Acts seems to be built on surprisingly solid historical foundations. First, British archaeologists working in late 19th-century India began to find hoards of coins belonging to a previously unknown Indian king: the Rajah Gondophares, who ruled from AD19 to AD45. If St Thomas had ever been summoned to India, it would have been Rajah Gondophares who would have done it, just as the Acts had always maintained.

The fact that the Acts had accurately preserved the name of an obscure Indian rajah, whose name and lineage had disappeared, implied that it must contain at least a nucleus of genuine historical information. Archaeological discoveries have since confirmed many other details of the story, revealing that maritime contacts between the Roman world and India were much more extensive than anyone had realised.

Aside from the Acts, a considerable amount of oral history and circumstantial evidence suggests that by AD 50-52, Thomas arrived on the Malabar coast of what is today Kerala and he began converting an older Jewish population as well as Hindus to Christianity. Indeed, the evidence is strong that the followers of Thomas in India have preserved one of the oldest versions of Christianity. Dalrymple again:

If St Thomas had carried Christianity to India, it is likely that he would have taken a distinctly more Jewish form than the Gentile-friendly version developed for the Greeks of Antioch by St Paul and later exported to Europe. Hence the importance of the fact that some of the St Thomas Christian churches to this day retain Judeo-Christian practices long dropped in the west – such as the celebration of the solemn Passover feast.

Hence also the significance of the St Thomas Christians still using the two earliest Christian liturgies in existence: the Mass of Addai and Mari, and the Liturgy of St James, once used by the early Church of Jerusalem. More remarkable still, these ancient services are still partly sung in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus and St Thomas.

The more you investigate the evidence, the more irresistible is the conclusion that whether or not St Thomas himself came to India, he certainly could have. And if he didn’t make the journey, it seems certain that some other very early Christian missionary did, for there is certainly evidence for a substantial Christian population in India by at least the third century.

Not only is there is a substantial presence of Christians in India from at least the third century, many early Western and Eastern Christian sources attest that it was Thomas who was sent to India. Kurikilamkatt writes:

From the third century onwards it had become an undeniable and incontrovertible tradition and belief in the Christian world that Thomas preached in India. And these Fathers and early writers had no doubt that the Thomas they speak about was the apostle who declared for the first time in history that his master was the Lord and God.

Historians tend not to trust oral history but to me it’s the oral histories, the genealogies of Indians who trace their lineage back to someone who was personally converted by Saint Thomas, and the songs that are most convincing. Indians have orally preserved the vedas for some four thousand years so I trust them on Saint Thomas. In the 4th or early 5th century, Saint Jerome wrote that “Christ lives everywhere. With Thomas in India and Peter in Rome.” And of the two, I’d put more money on Thomas.

After founding seven churches in Kerala, Thomas journeyed to the eastern region of the Indian peninsula, near present-day Chennai. Here Thomas’s mission was ended when he refused to bow down to Kali and was killed. Even so he was held in such reverence that his place of death was marked and his body kept and entombed. Fifteen hundred years later the Portuguese built a cathedral over his tomb, both of which you can still visit today as I did recently. Even for those not of Christian faith or any religious affiliation, connecting with 2,000 years of history and considering the distances Thomas traveled is quite moving, especially when it happens in a place which stills seems far from the Christian world.

That was then, this is now — the culture that is Swiss edition

Tocqueville’s notes on the Swiss constitution confirm the poor impression he had quickly formed.  There were cantons, he remarked, but no Switzerland.  In most of these, he continued, the majority of people lacked any sense of “self-government”; the Swiss habitually abused freedom of the press; they saw associations much as the French did, as a revolutionary means rather than as “a slow and quiet way to arrive at the rectification of wrongs”; they had no sense of the benefits derived from “the peaceful and legal introduction of the judge into the domain of politics”; and, finally, “at the bottom of their souls the Swiss show no deep respect for law, no love of legality, no abhorrence of the use of force, without which there cannot be a free country.”

That is from Jeremy Jennings, Travels with Tocqueville: Beyond America, a new and excellent book that I will be covering again soon.