Category: Political Science
Rawls Killed Marx
I found this Joseph Heath post very informative. In essence, Marx was about exploitation but when no theory of exploitation without gaping holes could be developed, the analytical Marxists shifted to egalitarianism ala Rawls.
Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world. Most of this work was being done under the banner of “analytical Marxism” (aka “no-bullshit Marxism”), following the publication of Gerald Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (and his subsequent elevation to the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Philosophy at Oxford). Meanwhile in Germany, Jürgen Habermas’s incredibly compact Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus promised to reinvigorate Marx’s analysis of capitalist crises in the language of contemporary systems theory. It was an exciting time to be a young radical. One could say, without exaggeration, that many of the smartest and most important people working in political philosophy were Marxists of some description.
So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.
If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.
That’s the opening. Read the whole thing.
Why massive deregulation is very difficult
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, just to clarify context for the newbies I think more than half of all current regulations are a net negative. Anywhere, here are some of the problems:
Consider the relatively straightforward idea, popular in some Republican circles, of firing large numbers of federal bureaucrats. There would be immediate objections, not only from the employees themselves but also from US businesses.
Businesses need to make plans, and they frequently consult with regulatory agencies as to what might be permissible. The Food and Drug Administration needs to approve new drug offerings. The Federal Aviation Administration needs to approve new airline routes. The Federal Communications Commission needs to approve new versions of mobile phones. The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice need to give green lights for significant mergers. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. needs to approve plans for winding down failed banks. And so on.
If those and other agencies were stripped of their staffs, a lot of US businesses would be paralyzed. You might argue that this fact is itself proof that there is too much regulation, but the fact remains. Shutting down a large chunk of the federal regulatory apparatus would make it harder, not easier, for the private sector. Furthermore, regulation would give way to litigation, and the judiciary is not obviously more efficient than the bureaucracy.
And this:
The basic paradox is this: Government regulations are embedded in a large, unwieldy and complex set of institutions. Dismantling it, or paring it back significantly, would require a lot of state capacity — that is, state competence. Yet deregulators are suspicious of greater state capacity, as it carries the potential for more state regulatory action. Think of it this way: If someone told a libertarian-leaning government efficiency expert that, in order to pare back the state, it first must be granted more power, he would probably run away screaming.
Recommended, the piece has numerous good points of interest.
What should I ask Musa al-Gharbi?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.
Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He is a columnist for The Guardian and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications.
I am a big fan of his forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke, which I have blurbed. Here is Musa’s home page, do read his bio. Here is Musa on Twitter.
So what should I ask?
How do musical artists end up getting cancelled?
There is a new paper on that topic by Daniel Winkler, Nils Wlömert, and Jura Liaukonyte. Here is the abstract:
This paper investigates how the consumption of an artist’s creative work is impacted when there’s a movement to “cancel” the artist on social media due to their misconduct. Unlike product brands, human brands are particularly vulnerable to reputation risks, yet how misconduct affects their consumption remains poorly understood. Using R. Kelly’s case, we examine the demand for his music following interrelated publicity and platform sanction shocks-specifically, the removal of his songs from major playlists on the largest global streaming platform. A cursory examination of music consumption after these scandals would lead to the erroneous conclusion that consumers are intentionally boycotting the disgraced artist. We propose an identification strategy to disentangle platform curation and intentional listening effects, leveraging variation in song removal status and geographic demand. Our findings show that the decrease in music consumption is primarily driven by supply-side factors due to playlist removals rather than changes in intentional listening. Media coverage and calls for boycott have promotional effects, suggesting that social media boycotts can inadvertently increase music demand. The analysis of other cancellation cases involving Morgan Wallen and Rammstein shows no long-term decline in music demand, reinforcing the potential promotional effects of scandals in the absence of supply-side sanctions.
My excellent Conversation with Nate Silver
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
In his second appearance, Nate Silver joins the show to cover the intersections of predictions, politics, and poker with Tyler. They tackle how coin flips solve status quo bias, gambling’s origins in divination, what kinds of betting Nate would ban, why he’s been limited on several of the New York sports betting sites, how game theory changed poker tournaments, whether poker players make for good employees, running and leaving FiveThirtyEight, why funky batting stances have disappeared, AI’s impact on sports analytics, the most underrated NBA statistic, Sam Bankman-Fried’s place in “the River,” the trait effective altruists need to develop, the stupidest risks Tyler and Nate would take, prediction markets, how many monumental political decisions have been done under the influence of drugs, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why shouldn’t people gamble only in the positive sum game? Take the US stock market — that certainly seems to be one of them — and manufacture all the suspense you want. Learn about the companies, the CEO. Get your thrill that way and don’t do any other gambling. Why isn’t that just better for everyone?
SILVER: Look, I’m not necessarily a fan of gambling for gambling’s sake. Twice a year, I’ll be in casinos and in Las Vegas a lot. Twice a year, I’ll have a friend who is like, “Let’s just go play blackjack for an hour and have a couple of free drinks,” and things like that. But I like to make bets where I think, at least in principle, I have an edge, or at least can fool myself into thinking I have an edge.
Sometimes, with the sports stuff, you probably know deep down you’re roughly break-even or something like that. You’re doing some smart things, like looking at five different sites and finding a line that’s best, which wipes out some but not all of the house edge. But no, I’m not a huge fan of slot machines, certainly. I think they are very gnarly and addictive in various ways.
COWEN: They limit your sports betting, don’t they?
SILVER: Yes, I’ve been limited by six or seven of the nine New York retail sites.
COWEN: What’s the potential edge they think you might have?
SILVER: It’s just that. If you’re betting $2,000 on the Wizards-Hornets game the moment the line comes out on DraftKings, you’re clearly not a recreational bettor. Just the hallmarks of trying to be a winning player, meaning betting lines early because the line’s early and you don’t have price discovery yet. The early lines are often very beatable. Betting on obscure stuff like “Will this player get X number of rebounds?” or things like that. If you have a knack for — if DraftKings has a line at -3.5 and it’s -4 elsewhere, then it can be called steam chasing, where you bet before a line moves in other places. If you have injury information . . .
It’s a very weird game. One thing I hope people are more aware of is that a lot of the sites — and some are better than others — but they really don’t want winning players. Their advertising has actually changed. It used to be, they would say for Daily Fantasy Sports, which was the predecessor, “Hey, you’re a smart guy” — the ads are very cynical — “You’re a smart guy in a cubicle. Why don’t you go do all your spreadsheet stuff and actually draft this team and make a lot of money, and literally, you’ll be sleeping with supermodels in two months. You win the million-dollar prize from DraftKings.”
And:
COWEN: If we could enforce just an outright ban, what’s the cost-benefit analysis on banning all sports gambling?
SILVER: I’m more of a libertarian than a strict utilitarian, I think.
COWEN: Sure, but what’s the utilitarian price of being a libertarian?
Recommended, interesting and engaging throughout. And yes, we talk about Luka too. Here is my first 2016 CWT with Nate, full of predictions I might add, and here is Nate’s very good new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.
I would love to see this natural experiment, Isaac Asimov edition
Before the sparse audience, he vowed to run the city of Cheyenne exclusively with an AI bot he calls “VIC” for “Virtual Integrated Citizen.”
…Standing behind a lectern with a sign that read “AI FOR MAYOR,” he gave a brief PowerPoint presentation on the history of AI. Then he stepped aside to give the floor to his Mac mini and iPad — which were propped on a table and connected to a hanging speaker at the front of the room — and told attendees to direct questions toward the screen.
“Is the computer system in city hall sufficient to handle AI?” one attendee, holding a wireless microphone at his seat, asked VIC.
“If elected, would you take a pay cut?” another wanted to know…
Midway through an interview with The Post, Miller offered to let the bot respond. VIC, in its robotic tone, correctly answered questions about trash day in Cheyenne, registering to vote and the current president of the United States.
VIC said it would argue against banning books — which some Cheyenne schools have done — citing their “educational value.” “But,” the bot added, “let’s create a process ensuring a balanced approach.”
Here is the full story. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Democratic favor channel
A large body of literature in economics and political science examines the impact of democracy and political freedoms on various outcomes using cross-country comparisons. This paper explores the possibility that any positive impact of democracy observed in these studies might be attributed to powerful democratic nations, their allies, and international organizations treating democracies more favorably than nondemocracies, a concept I refer to as democratic favor channel. Firstly, after I control for being targeted by sanctions from G7 or the United Nations and having military confrontations and cooperation with the West, most of the positive effects of democracy on growth in cross-country panel regressions become insignificant or negatively significant. Secondly, using the same empirical specification as this literature for demonstrating intermediating forces, I show that getting sanctioned, militarily attacked, and not having defense cooperation with the West are plausible channels through which democracy causes growth. Lastly, in the pre-Soviet-collapse period, which coincides with the time when democracy promotion was less often used as a justification for sanctions, the impact of democracy on GDP per capita is already weak or negative without any additional controls, and it becomes further negative once democratic favor is controlled. These findings support the democratic favor channel and challenge the idea that the institutional qualities of democracy per se lead to desirable outcomes. The critique provided in this paper applies to the broader comparative institutions literature in social sciences and political philosophy.
That is from a new paper by Ziho Park, hat tip to Bryan Caplan.
The pay of Presidents (from my email)
Adjusting for inflation, President Biden is one of the lowest-paid Presidents in American history. See the first and last figures in this analysis from 2012.
This source’s figures are all in 2012 dollars, and there’s been 39% cumulative inflation since then, while the President’s nominal salary has stayed fixed at $400,000/year (nominal). So Bill Clinton’s average real salary over his presidency – the lowest real historical pay as of the time of this source’s analysis – would be worth $403,100 today, just barely edging out Biden’s current salary of $400,000. (But Clinton’s average real salary was probably lower than Biden’s average salary over the course of Biden’s presidency. There have been a few years when the President’s real annual salary was below its current level, including during most of Clinton’s presidency.)
The last time the President’s real salary dropped down below its current level, Congress voted to double it.
That is from TP.
What to think about ranked choice voting?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one key segment:
Game theory can help explain how ranked choice voting changes the behavior of candidates, as well as the elites who support them. Consider a ranked choice election that has five or six candidates. To win the election, you can’t just appeal to your base. You also can’t alienate your opponent’s base. You want supporters of other candidates to regard you as “not too bad,” because if they hate you, they could rank you very low and get you tossed out of the running quickly.
Candidates are thus encouraged to moderate their positions and their behavior — that is, not to call each other too many names. If the favorite candidate of one voter calls the favorite of another “weird,” for example — to choose an example not quite at random — the latter voter might respond by voting down the name-caller to the very bottom.
The result? Negative campaigning diminishes, and politics moderates. The effect can be especially pronounced in party primaries, which sometimes are dominated by the most extreme voters.
The candidates also compete in different ways. In particular, they try to outdo each other when it comes to constituency service, which is a way of being popular without offending anybody.
The broader evidence on ranked choice voting shows that, when used, it has made US politics more moderate. Alaska’s ranked choice voting helped moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski beat her more ideological opponents in 2022. In Idaho, some conservatives regard ranked choice voting with suspicion, fearing it is a plot to neutralize their influence.
In Ireland, politics is fairly non-ideological on most matters of policy, and elections are not typically seen as major, course-altering events. After more than a century with this system, the Irish seem happy to keep it.
The lesson here is that it is not possible to evaluate ranked choice voting in the abstract. It usually makes politics less extreme and less ideological, but those are descriptive terms, not normative ones. I would prefer California’s politics to be less ideological, for example, but that is because it embodies an ideology distinct from mine. And sometimes the more extreme and ideological positions are entirely correct, as for instance John Stuart Mill’s advocacy of women’s suffrage and birth control in the 19th century.
In general, ranked choice voting is best for places where voters feel things are already on the right track and ought to stay there. It is a voting system for the self-satisfied. Which parts of contemporary America might that describe? No voting method yet devised can settle that question.
High and low decoupling, and other matters (from my email)
This is all from an anonymous reader, not by me, but I will not indent:
“Hi Tyler,
I enjoyed your post – I’m kind of tired of this – and wanted to respond to it as I think what you wrote gets at two important trends happening in politics today.
1 – High and Low Decoupling
First of all the examples of idiotic tribal behaviour you cited remind me of an idea I was first introduced to by Tom Chivers about the difference between high decouplers – individuals comfortable separating and isolating ideas from actions, and low decouplers – individuals who see ideas as inextricable from their wider contexts. – https://unherd.com/2020/02/eugenics-is-possible-is-not-the-same-as-eugenics-is-good/
I would argue that up until today low decoupling (along with the everpresent sin of motivated reasoning) has been the cultural norm in politics for over a century, if not longer, and so much of the bollocks we see in political rhetoric and in corporate news coverage across the western world can be explained by everyone having to conform to the norm if they want to succeed.
hat I would argue we are seeing now thanks to Twitter (and especially its inspired Community Notes feature) is the first proper challenge to the low decoupling cultural norm and the vacuum that is developing thanks to more and more people seeing (and criticising) politicians conforming to it. Indeed whilst the internet may not forget anything, up until Elon’s takeover of twitter the internet has been something of a toothless old dog.
How will this shift away from low decoupling change political discourse? I suspect it will make debate more elitist and less accessible for ordinary people because arguments will have to become more sophisticated and require a certain level of engagement to understand. This will probably make political discussions seem duller to many people due to a more analytical and rigorous style as opposed to the quick trite phrases of the present moment. because political actors will know that they can be “owned” or discredited as “fake news” if they are shown to be using spin or overly simplistic arguments. Counter intuitively (for those not paying attention) I also then think the decline of low decoupling will see the death of “fact checkers” because of the growing cynicism towards this movement and the growing appreciation of the fact that there are inherent biases underlying those checking the facts and that they often present their responses in emotive and low decoupling ways.
It’s important to say I don’t think this change will necessarily change everyone’s behaviour but then it doesn’t need to. If it just changes the behaviour of the 10-20% of the population who take a moderate to high interest in politics (and are more important for changes within politics) then this will change the discussion even if the remaining 80% are still by and large low decouplers on political matters. But this change will itself play into the wider changes we are seeing in politics and which is the other point I want to highlight.
2 – The political realignment
Now going back to your post, what is arguably more interesting is the subtext of what you said, specifically your (low decoupling) defence of the new right. It could be argued that a Straussian reading of what you are saying is that despite where you thought you would be in the political new realignment you keep finding yourself in a different position and you find this fact unsettling. I think it shouldn’t be. It’s just that the present framing of the realignment is wrong and based on outdated understandings of the forces involved.
Now in the established narrative the new realigned politics should pit socially conservative economic nationalists against cosmopolitan socially liberal centrists (and leftists). And for libertarians/classical liberals the argument by many has been that the best position for the libertarian/classical liberal right is towards the cosmopolitan liberal end of the spectrum due to alleged shared norms for open societies. However, I actually disagree with this interpretation as whilst it’s a good theory it does not fit the reality of what has happened or indeed is happening in western politics.
The cosmopolitan liberal tribe could be about a commitment to open societies and broad liberal values but the reality has been and I would argue continue to be (because of the need to include radical leftists in this divide) a commitment to egalitarianism and the social democratic (left liberal) norms of political conduct which are poorly designed for our very online, wealthy multiracial Western nations.
These norms have led to the toleration of state corruption and inefficiency “how dare you criticise the teachers”, “how dare you criticise the NHS”, “how are you criticise the EU/Federal government” and the promotion of cancellation against those who go against the established narrative on issues such as the speed/scope/direction of Net Zero, stand up for women’s rights against the trans ideology or who critique the current model of immigration/integration.
The cosmopolitan liberals are on a hiding to nothing with all of these issues. And why? Because they as a political wing represent the status quo, and what we are seeing now is the beginning of the end for the dominant post 1945 social democratic settlement. 2020-21 I would argue, with the twin pillars of massive state control through the excuse of COVID and the cultural dominance of the BLM/Woke movement, was Western social democracy at its apex and the longer that model to hold the more it will corrode and wither into either a Robespierre-esque focus on equity, or else a degeneration into deep green anti growth nihilism, either of which will kill it as a force anyway. This is why Emmanuel Macron now seems out of his depth, why Trudeau keeps failing, and why the European Union continues to stagnate – they are the status quo establishment and they’ve run out of ideas.
So what then do I think will take its place. Well inevitably one wing of politics seeks to preserve the status quo and one wing seeks to overturn it and looking at the ideas floating around the populist/rightist/nationalist camp we can already see trends emerging. Now I will caveat that it will take a while for these to develop as intellectually there is no fertile “home” for this wing (being excluded from academia and more generally all sympathetic intellectual figures being shunned/condemned/cancelled but substack seems to be developing into a way “rightist” intellectuals can work and be paid to be intellectuals. And those intellectuals will not be drinking from a barren pool and when we look at the expected intellectual influencers it gets hard for classical liberals/libertarians to pretend they have no sympathy with this movement.
Now in a previous comment you’ve stated you think that religious intellectual figures will be at the core of intellectual developments going forward but what I see is that the core figures will actually be 5 irreligious figures namely; Roger Scruton, Elinor Ostrom, Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell and Lee Kuan Yew. Together these five offer a philosophical basis, an economic analysis and a political roadmap from which western rightist parties can seek direction. I struggle to think of 5 other intellectuals who could have more relevant ideas for the current moment. If I could term the ideology brewed from this pool of thought I would not call it populism or even national conservatism but State Capacity Localism (wink), or as a slogan, Politics for improving the oikos.
And looking at the current trends and discussions already happening within politics you can clearly see the influence of the 5 in the way the discussions on the right are beginning to articulate possible policies;
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Improving state capacity through slewing the deadwood of the bureaucratic state with a burn it down/drain the swamp mentality.
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Nationalisation offset by deregulation – probably a better compromise than what we have today.
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Local/community decision making on contentious topics with a focus on finding solutions over the current model of finding problems (forced by national government with the threat of national decision if a local solution is not found)
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The binning of multiculturalism as an idea and assimilation as the core of all arguments on immigration and racial/cultural integration. Combine this with increasing discussions on what countries have achieved high trust multiracial societies (spoiler – Singapore) I expect we will see a reflowering of support for secularism, the absolute necessity of learning the national language for access to employment and state services, and a zero tolerance for ethnic or religious based politics.
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Tough law and order policies focused on objective outcomes over cultural contexts. President Bukele (and Gavin Newsom when Xi came to visit) prove it can work.
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The return of aesthetics as a mode of political analysis – beautiful houses and pleasant neighbourhoods and with that an attempt to improve everywhere in a country, most especially rust belts/flyover country.
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The introduction of land value taxes – which as an idea is literally the opposite of a transnational globalist politics in how it encourages rootedness by design.
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A focus on high standards, individual responsibility and the veneration and promotion of outstanding individuals regardless of wider factors. Alongside which there will be a focus on repealing “hate” speech laws and the enshrining of free speech, a la first amendment, into multiple countries statutes.
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Finally I also expect as a response to overkill from the woke movement we will see (over time) the return of shame as a cultural norm.
And finally coming specifically to the core of social democracy – the bureaucratic welfare state we know the current model is unsustainable and yet the cosmopolitan liberals at best tinker or at worst do nothing to it – because their leftist element don’t want change just higher salaries. And we know as a certainty it will need to change but what are the practical solutions I think each welfare state could go one of two ways; a) to one based on mutual aid (maybe seeing the return of friendly societies?) and community ownership, or b) a new great bargain of a Hayekian welfare state as originally thought up by Sam Bowman back in 2015. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/philosophy/lets-have-a-hayekian-welfare-state/. Neither of this fits neatly into the cosmopolitan liberal box as they require are particularist, require thinking domestically not internationally and would necessarily require a conversation about who and what is and isn’t included in welfare coverage – a conversation about the degree to which a society is closed off from others.
And just thinking about these bullet points isn’t it clear there are ample opportunities for classical liberals/libertarians to get involved with the rightist end and influence the discussion and direction of debate. What does the cosmopolitan liberal politics offer – net zero by 2045 or 2050? DEI officers in every workplace?
A soft warm feeling because the New York Times tolerates your existence.
Looking to the future I think we as western societies face a choice, but it is not between Heaven or Hell (as the corporate press on both sides would have it) or as some classical liberals/libertarians would see it as between a sort of hipster Reaganism and a reactionary Corbynism. I think the choice western societies face is between becoming new Argentinas or new Singapores (and as of last December Argentina have chosen Singapore) and this is why so many (such as yourself Tyler) find themselves on a different political side than they expected. The establishment has failed across the West; it’s just that we keep forgetting the establishment is the cosmopolitan left.”
Venezuela under “Brutal Capitalism”
Jeffrey Clemens points us to some bonkers editorializing in the NYTimes coverage of the likely stolen election in Venezuela. The piece starts out reasonably enough:
Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, was declared the winner of the country’s tumultuous presidential election early Monday, despite enormous momentum from an opposition movement that had been convinced this was the year it would oust Mr. Maduro’s socialist-inspired party.
The vote was riddled with irregularities, and citizens were angrily protesting the government’s actions at voting centers even as the results were announced.
The term “socialist-inspired party” is peculiar. The party in question is the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela) and it’s founding principles state, “The party is constituted as a socialist party, and affirms that a socialist society is the only alternative to overcome the capitalist system.” So, I would have gone with ‘Mr. Maduro’s socialist party’. No matter, that’s not the big blunder. Later the piece says:
If the election decision holds and Mr. Maduro remains in power, he will carry Chavismo, the country’s socialist-inspired movement, into its third decade in Venezuela. Founded by former President Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro’s mentor, the movement initially promised to lift millions out of poverty.
For a time it did. But in recent years, the socialist model has given way to brutal capitalism, economists say, with a small state-connected minority controlling much of the nation’s wealth.
Venezuela is now governed by “brutal capitalism” under Maduro’s United Socialist Party!??? The NYTimes has lost touch with reality. From the link we find that what they mean is that some price and wage controls were lifted, including allowing dollars to be used because the bolívar, was “made worthless by hyperinflation,” and remittances from the United States were legalized:
NYTimes: With the country’s economy derailed by years of mismanagement and corruption, then pushed to the brink of collapse by American sanctions, Mr. Maduro was forced to relax the economic restraints that once defined his socialist government and provided the foundation for his political legitimacy.
Lifting some controls does not make Venezuela a capitalist country. Moreover, the lifting of controls led to improvements:
…Seeing shelves stocked again has also helped ease tensions in the capital, where anger over the lack of basic necessities has, over the years, helped fuel mass protests.
…The transformation also brought some relief to the millions of Venezuelans who have family abroad and can now receive, and spend, their dollar remittances on imported food.
Of course, the improvements were not equally shared. If you want to call unequal improvements, “brutal capitalism”. Well, I don’t think that’s useful but if you do so be sure to note that “under Maduro’s administration, more than 20,000 people have been subject to extrajudicial killings and seven million Venezuelans have been forced to flee the country.” (Wikipedia.) That’s brutal socialism.
Lastly, I don’t expect, the NYTimes to keep up on the latest counter-factual estimation techniques so I won’t ding them too much, but it’s clear that the Chavismo regime never lifted millions out of poverty. At best, poverty fell during the good years at the rate one would have expected from looking at similar countries. It’s the later rise in poverty which is unprecedented, as the NYTimes previously acknowledged.
My excellent Conversation with Alan Taylor, on American history
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Taylor take a walking tour of early history through North America covering the decisions, and ripples of those decisions, that shaped revolution and independence, including why Canada didn’t join the American revolution, why America in turn never conquered Canada, American’s early obsession with the collapse of the Republic, how democratic the Jacksonians were, Texas/Mexico tensions over escaped African American slaves, America’s refusal to recognize Cuban independence, how many American Tories went north post-revolution, Napoleon III’s war with Mexico, why the US Government considered attacking Canada after the Civil War, and much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, here’s a quotation from your writings, page 37: “One of the great ironies of the American Revolution was that it led to virtually free land for settlers in British Canada while rendering land more expensive in the United States.” Could you explain that, please?
TAYLOR: Sure. The war was very expensive. All the states and the United States also incurred immense debts. How are you going to pay for that? This is the time when there’s no income tax, and the chief ways in which governments could raise money were on import duties and then on selling land. There was a lot of land, provided you could take it away from native peoples. All of the states and the United States were in the business of trying to sell land, but also they’re reliant within the states on these land taxes. All of these go up, then, to try to finance the war debt.
Whereas in British Canada, the British government is subsidizing the local government. They’re paying the full freight of it, which means that local taxes were much lower there. It also meant that they could afford to basically give away land to attract settlers. They had this notion that if we offer free land to Americans, they will want to leave that new American republic, move back into the British Empire, strengthen Canada, and provide a militia to defend it.
Substantive and interesting throughout. And can you guess what in his answers surprised me most?
Kamala Harris economic record
As a presidential candidate, Ms. Harris proposed replacing Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts with a monthly refundable tax credit worth up to $500 for people earning less than $100,000. The policy, known as the LIFT the Middle Class Act, was unveiled in 2018 and aimed to address the rising cost of living by providing middle-class and working families with money to help pay for everyday expenses. She framed it as a way to close the wealth gap in the United States.
In 2019, Ms. Harris proposed increasing estate taxes on the wealthy to pay for a $300 billion plan to raise teacher salaries. In what was billed as the “largest federal investment in teacher pay in U.S. history,” the plan would have given the average teacher in America a $13,500 pay increase.
…Ms. Harris wanted to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 35 percent, which is higher than the 28 percent that Mr. Biden had proposed.
And:
Ms. Harris made affordable housing a priority during her tenure in the Senate and her presidential campaign, but took a different approach. She proposed the Rent Relief Act, which would have provided refundable tax credits allowing renters who earn less than $100,000 to recoup housing costs in excess of 30 percent of their incomes.
To help the poorest, Ms. Harris also called for providing emergency relief funding for the homeless and for spending $100 billion in communities where people have traditionally been unable to get home loans because of discrimination.
And:
Ms. Harris, who served as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017, has also focused heavily on consumer protection. In 2016, she threatened Uber with legal action if the company did not remove driverless cars from the state’s roads.
After the 2008 financial crisis, she pulled California out of a national settlement with big banks, leveraging her power to wrest more money from major mortgage lenders. She later announced that California homeowners would receive $12 billion in mortgage relief under the settlement.
Here is the full NYT piece by Alan Rappeport.
Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revoluton
Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.
After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.
In a remarkable new paper, Juhász, Sakabe, and Weinstein show how the key to this transformation was a massive effort to translate and codify technical information in the Japanese language. This state-led initiative made cutting-edge industrial knowledge accessible to Japanese entrepreneurs and workers in a way that was unparalleled among non-Western countries at the time.
Here’s an amazing graph which tells much of the story. In both 1870 and 1910 most of the technical knowledge of the world is in French, English, Italian and German but look at what happens in Japan–basically no technical books in 1870 to on par with English in 1910. Moreover, no other country did this.
Translating a technical document today is much easier than in the past because the words already exist. Translating technical documents in the late 19th century, however, required the creation and standardization of entirely new words.
…the Institute of Barbarian Books (Bansho Torishirabesho)…was tasked with developing English-Japanese dictionaries to facilitate technical translations. This project was the first step in what would become a massive government effort to codify and absorb Western science. Linguists and lexicographers have written extensively on the difficulty of scientific translation, which explains why little codification of knowledge happened in languages other than English and its close cognates: French and German (c.f. Kokawa et al. 1994; Lippert 2001; Clark 2009). The linguistic problem was two-fold. First, no words existed in Japanese for canonical Industrial Revolution products such as the railroad, steam engine, or telegraph, and using phonetic representations of all untranslatable jargon in a technical book resulted in transliteration of the text, not translation. Second, translations needed to be standardized so that all translators would translate a given foreign word into the same Japanese one.
Solving these two problems became one of the Institute’s main objectives.
Here’s a graph showing the creation of new words in Japan by year. You can see the explosion in new words in the late 19th century. Note that this happened well after the Perry Mission. The words didn’t simply evolve, the authors argue new words were created as a form of industrial policy.
By the way, AstralCodexTen points us to an interesting biography of a translator at the time who works on economics books:
[Fukuzawa] makes great progress on a number of translations. Among them is the first Western economics book translated into Japanese. In the course of this work, he encounters difficulties with the concept of “competition.” He decides to coin a new Japanese word, kyoso, derived from the words for “race and fight.” His patron, a Confucian, is unimpressed with this translation. He suggests other renderings. Why not “love of the nation shown in connection with trade”? Or “open generosity from a merchant in times of national stress”? But Fukuzawa insists on kyoso, and now the word is the first result on Google Translate.
There is a lot more in this paper. In particular, showing how the translation of documents lead to productivity growth on an industry by industry basis and a demonstration of the importance of this mechanism for economic growth across the world.
The bottom line for me is this: What caused the industrial revolution is a perennial question–was it coal, freedom, literacy?–but this is the first paper which gives what I think is a truly compelling answer for one particular case. Japan’s rapid industrialization under the Meiji Restoration was driven by its unprecedented effort to translate, codify, and disseminate Western technical knowledge in the Japanese language.
