Category: Political Science
My Conversation with Musa al-Gharbi
I am a big fan of Musa’s work, most of all his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. As for the podcast, here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Musa explore the rise and fall of the “Great Awokening” and more, including how elite overproduction fuels social movements, why wokeness tends to fizzle out, whether future waves of wokeness will ratchet up in intensity, why neuroticism seems to be higher on the political Left, how a great awokening would manifest in a Muslim society, Black Muslims and the Nation of Islam, why Musa left Catholicism, who the greatest sociologist of Islam is, Muslim immigration and assimilation in Europe, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Let me give you an alternate theory of the Great Awokening, and tell me what’s wrong with it. It’s not really my view, but I hear it a lot.
So on the Left, there’s some long-term investment in teaching in America’s top universities. You produce a lot of troops who could become journalists, and they’re mostly left-leaning. Then 2011, 2012 — there’s something about the interaction of social media and, say, The New York Times and other major outlets, where all of a sudden they have a much bigger incentive to have a lot of articles about race, gender, Black Lives Matter, whatever. When those two things come together, wokeness takes off based on a background in Christianity and growing feminization of society.
By the time you get to something like 2021, enough of mainstream media has broken down that it’s simply social media out there going crazy. That just gives us a lot of diversity of bizarre views rather than just sheer wokeness — and besides, Elon is owning Twitter, so wokeness ends.
What’s wrong with that account?
AL-GHARBI: For one, I do think that some of the factors that you identified are important for contextualizing the current moment. For instance, a lot of the symbolic professions, like law and consulting, academia, journalism — they are being feminized. I do talk a bit in the book about how this matters for understanding the dynamics in a lot of these institutions. Not just over the last 10 years, but over the last several decades, in part because women and men tend to engage in very different forms of status-seeking and competition and things like that. So that does matter.
Things like social media obviously do change the way interactions play out. But you can see, actually, that things like social media or changes in the media landscape after 2010 — one limitation for using those kinds of explanations to explain the current moment is that it becomes hard, then, to understand how or why it was the case that . . .
There were three previous episodes like this, one in the 1920s through the early ’30s, one in the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, and then one in the late ’80s through early ’90s. In all cases where we didn’t have social media, where the structure of media enterprises was importantly different than it is today, and before you had Gen Z “kids these days” with their idiosyncratic attitudes, or before a lot of these professions were as feminized as they were today.
I think all of those factors you said actually do matter, and they matter in the sense — because each of these episodes, there’s so much in common, an insane amount. When you read the book and I walk through some of these — I think a lot of readers will be troubled, maybe, by how similar these episodes are. But they’re also importantly different. They don’t play out identically. They are importantly different: The role that symbolic capitalists occupy in society changed immensely over the last century. The constitution of these fields has changed immensely. There are a lot more women; there are a lot more nonwhite people in these professions than there were in the past, and so on and so forth.
All of those factors you described: I think they actually do matter, especially for understanding the ways in which this period of awokening might differ from previous episodes, but I don’t think they explain why awokenings happen at all.
COWEN: If “woke” recurs, do you think there’s a ratchet effect where it comes back bigger and stronger each time, a bit like the destructiveness of war? Or is it more of a random walk? Like, the next wave of woke in 37 years might be half as strong as the one we just had. What’s your model?
AL-GHARBI: I think it’s random; that depends a little bit on . . .
What I argue in the book is that the — for instance, when we look at the last period of awokening in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was much less — that was the last time we had these struggles over what they call political correctness, or the PC culture, which we call wokeness today. As I argue in the book, it didn’t last as long, that awokening. It was shorter than most of the others, actually. Shorter than the one in the ’60s, shorter than the one after 2010. It was a little shorter, and it also wasn’t quite as dramatic.
I think there are these kind of contextual factors that significantly inform how severe it is or how long it lasts, how long it’s able to sustain itself or how long it is until the frustrated elites get — enough of them get satisfied that they disengage. My guess is that it’s more of a random walk, but I’m open to persuasion.
Definitely interesting.
Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson Win Nobel Prize for Institutions and Prosperity
The Nobel prize goes to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson for their work on institutions, prosperity, and economic growth. Here is a key piece summarizing their work: Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth.
This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two “quasi-natural experiments” in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the world by European powers starting in the fifteenth century. We then develop the basic outline of a framework for thinking about why economic institutions differ across countries. Economic institutions determine the incentives of and the constraints on economic actors, and shape economic outcomes. As such, they are social decisions, chosen for their consequences. Because different groups and individuals typically benefit from different economic institutions, there is generally a conflict over these social choices, ultimately resolved in favor of groups with greater political power. The distribution of political power in society is in turn determined by political institutions and the distribution of resources. Political institutions allocate de jure political power, while groups with greater economic might typically possess greater de facto political power…Economic institutions encouraging economic growth emerge when political institutions allocate power to groups with interests in broad-based property rights enforcement, when they create effective constraints on power-holders, and when there are relatively few rents to be captured by power-holders.
See this great MRU video on Institutions for a quick overview! Here from an interview with Acemoglu, is a slightly more pointed perspective. Politics keeps people poor:
Why is it that certain different types of institutions stick?….it wouldn’t make sense, in terms of economic growth, to have a set of institutions that ban private property or create private property that is highly insecure, where I can encroach on your rights. But politically, it might make a lot of sense.
If I have the political power, and I’m afraid of you becoming rich and challenging me politically, then it makes a lot of sense for me to create a set of institutions that don’t give you secure property rights. If I’m afraid of you starting new businesses and attracting my workers away from me, it makes a lot of sense for me to regulate you in such a way that it totally kills your ability to grow or undertake innovations.
So, if I am really afraid of losing political power to you, that really brings me to the politics of institutions, where the logic is not so much the economic consequences, but the political consequences. This means that, say, when considering some reform, what most politicians and powerful elites in society really care about is not whether this reform will make the population at large better off, but whether it will make it easier or harder for them to cling to power.
Those are the sort of issues that become first-order if you want to understand how these things work.
One interesting aspect of this year’s Nobel is that almost all of AJRs Nobel work is accessible to the public because it has come primarily through popular books rather than papers. The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Why Nations Fail, and the The Narrow Corridor all by Acemoglu and Robinson and Power and Progress by Acemoglu and Johnson are all very readable books aimed squarely at the general public. The books are in many ways deeper and more subtle than the academic work which might have triggered the broader ideas (such as the famous Settler Mortality paper). Many of the key papers such as Reversal of Fortune are also very readable.
This is not to say that the authors have not also made many technical contributions to economics, most especially Acemoglu. I think of Daron Acemoglu (GS) as the Wilt Chamberlin of economics, an absolute monster of productivity who racks up the papers and the citations at nearly unprecedented rates. According to Google Scholar he has 247,440 citations and an H-index of 175, which means 175 papers each with more than 175 citations. Pause on that for a moment. Daron got his PhD in 1992 so that’s over 5 papers per year which would be tremendous by itself–but we are talking 5 path-breaking, highly-cited papers per year plus many others! (Of course, most written with excellent co-authors). In addition, he’s the author of a massive textbook on economic growth. More than any other economist Daron has pushed the cutting-edge of technical economics and has also written books of deep scholarship still accessible to the public. In his overview of Daron’s work for the John Bates Clark medal Robert Shimer wrote “he can write faster than I can digest his research.” I believe that is true for the profession as a whole. We are all catching-up to Daron Acemoglu.
Indeed, in reading a book like Why Nations Fail and papers like The Network Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations (one of my favorite Acemoglu papers) and The Uniqueness of Solutions for Nonlinear and Mixed Complementarity Problems it’s difficult to believe they are co-authored by the same person. Acemoglu is as comfortable talking history, politics, and political economy as he is talking about the economics of recessions and abstruse mathematics.
Here are Previous MR posts on Daron Acemoglu including this post on democracy where I find the effect of democracy on growth to be ho-hum. Here is Maxwell Tabarrok on Acemoglu on AI. Here is Conversations with Tyler with Acemoglu and a separate conversation with Simon Johnson.
As noted, one of my favorite Acemoglu papers (with Carvalho, Ozdaglar, and Tahbaz-Salehi) is The Network Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations. Conventional economics models the aggregate economy as if it were a single large firm. In fact, the economy is a network. An auto plants needs steel and oil to operate so fluctuations in the steel and oil industry will influence production in the auto industry. For a long time, the network nature of production has been ignored. In part because there are some situations in which a network can be modeled as if it were a single firm and in part because it’s just much easier to do the math that way. Acemoglu et al. show that aggregate fluctuations can be generated by sector fluctuations and that organization of the network cannot be ignored. This is a modern approach to real business cycles. See also my post on Gabaix and granular fluctuations).
In recent work, Acemoglu and Restrepo have created a new way of modeling production functions which divides work into tasks, some of which are better performed by capital and others by labor. Technological change is not simply about increasing the productivity of labor or capital (modeled in standard economics as making one laborer today worth two of yesterday’s) but about changing which tasks can best be done by capital and which by labor. As a task moves from labor to capital the demand for labor falls but productivity increases which generates demand for other kinds of labor. In addition, as capital replaces labor in some tasks entirely new tasks may be created for which labor has a comparative advantage. A number of interesting points come out of this including the idea that what we have to fear most is not super-robots but mediocre-robots. A super-robot replaces labor but has an immense productivity advantage which generates wealth and demand for labor elsewhere. A mediocre-robot replaces the same labor but doesn’t have a huge productivity advantage. In an empirical breakdown, Acemoglu and Restrepo suggest that what has happened in the 1990s and especially since 2000 is mediocre-robots. As a result, there has been a decline in labor on net. Thus, Acemoglu is more negative than many economists on automation, at least as it has occurred recently. Acemoglu and Restrepo is some of the best recent work going beyond the old tired debates to reformulate how we think of production and to use that reformulation to tie those reformulations to what is actually happening in the economy.
Solow thought of technical change as exogenous which is still the first-pass approach to thinking about technical change. Acemoglu in contrast focuses on price and market size. In particular, the larger the market the greater the incentive to invest in R&D to serve that market (see also my TED talk). Thus, technical change will tend to be cumulative. A sector with a productivity improvement will grow which can make that sector even more remunerative for further technical advances (depending on elasticities). This matters a lot for environmental change because it suggests that a relative small intervention today–including subsidizing research on clean technologies–can have a huge payoff in the future because by directing technical change in the right direction you make it easier to switch later on. (from this interview)
But let’s think of the logic of directed technical change with cumulative research. The less we do on green technology today, the less knowledge is accumulated in the green sector, so the bigger is the gap between fossil-fuel-based technology and energy, and the cleaner energy, so the harder it will be in the future to close that gap. With more proactive, decisive action today, we already start closing the gap, and we’re making it easier to deal with the problem in the future.
Simon Johnson has also written important books on banking and finance including and that was before the big run up in American debt! James Robinson has written widely on African development and colonialism and African development more generally.
Overall, I’d say that this is an award for political science and for popular economics in the very best sense of economics that matters. Go buy their books and read them!
That was then, this is now…
Oil companies are conveying an unlikely message to the GOP and its presidential candidate: Spare President Biden’s signature climate law. At least the parts that benefit the oil industry.
In discussions with former President Trump’s campaign and his allies in Congress, oil giants including Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66, and Occidental Petroleum have extolled the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act. Many in the fossil-fuel industry opposed the law when it passed in 2022 but have come to love provisions that earmark billions of dollars for low-carbon energy projects they are betting on.
Some executives in the largely pro-Trump oil industry are worried the former president, if re-elected, would side with conservative lawmakers who want to gut the IRA. They fear losing tax credits vital for their investments in renewable fuel, carbon capture and hydrogen, costly technologies requiring U.S. support to survive their early years.
Here is more from the WSJ.
Matt Yglesias on regulation and deregulation
…it’s notable that if you look at the major deregulator measures of the past four years, it mostly happened under Jimmy Carter (Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978, Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, Motor Carrier Act of 1980, Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980) or Bill Clinton (Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999) rather than Reagan. What Reagan did was cut taxes, staff the agencies with business-friendly appointees, and build the power of the conservative legal movement. Similarly, George W. Bush cut taxes, staffed the agencies with business-friendly appointees, and built the power of the conservative legal movement. Donald Trump, who in some ways represented a conceptual break with the Reagan-Bush political tradition, also cut taxes, staffed the agencies with business-friendly appointees, and built the power of the conservative legal movement.
That’s what Republican presidents do. Deregulatory efforts tend to happen when market-oriented thinkers persuade some prominent Democrats that they’re right about something, and then bipartisan deals get made. Also note that there’s something funny about the extent to which Carter has become retroactively famous for legalizing home brewing rather than, say, the natural gas thing, which legitimately transformed the national and global economy.
Here is the whole post (gated), with other interesting points as well.
My excellent Conversation with Tom Tugendhat
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tom Tugendhat has served as a Member of Parliament since 2015, holding roles such as Security Minister and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Before entering Parliament, Tom served in in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also worked for the Foreign Office, helped establish the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and served as military assistant and principal adviser to the Chief of the Defense Staff.
Tyler and Tom examine the evolving landscape of governance and leadership in the UK today, touching on the challenges of managing London under the UK’s centralized system, why England remains economically unbalanced, his most controversial view on London’s architecture, whether YIMBYism in England can succeed, the unique politics and history of Kent, whether the system of private schools needs reform, his pick for the greatest unselected prime minister, whether Brexit revealed a defect in the parliamentary system, whether the House of Lords should be abolished, why the British monarchy continues to captivate the world, devolution in Scotland and Northern Ireland, how learning Arabic in Yemen affected his life trajectory, his read on the Middle East and Russia, the Tom Tugendhat production function, his pitch for why a talented young person should work in the British Civil Service, and more.
And here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Okay. First question, what is your favorite walk around London, and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand?
TUGENDHAT: Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. A lot of people walk down the river. One of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. Very often, even in the middle of the day, there’s nobody there. You walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. It’s not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past, obviously, the Tower of London. You walk past Tower Bridge. You walk past many things like that.
Actually, you’re walking past a lot of modern London as well, and you see the reality of London, which is — the truth is, London isn’t a single city. It’s many, many different villages, all cobbled together in various different ways. I think outsiders miss the fact that there’s a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you’re doing is you’re going on the Tube, or if you’re going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see real communities and real smaller communities.
And:
COWEN: Can the British system of government in its current parliamentary form — how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion?
TUGENDHAT: I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truly liberal foundations are maintained. I mean that not in the American sense; I mean in a genuine, the old liberal tradition that emerges from the UK in the 1700s, 1800s, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property, and all those principles that then became embedded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own. I think it does very well at doing that because it forces you, our system forces you, into partnership. There are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in Parliament over the next four or five years.
And there’s four of us currently going for leadership at the Conservative Party. There’s one reason why, despite the fact that we’re competing almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we’re all going to have to work together for the next four years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other three, and the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn’t true. There’s only 121 of us Conservative MPs in Parliament, and what this system forces on us is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with somebody if you’re going to deal with them tomorrow. I think that’s one of the reasons why the British political system has endured because it forces you to remember that there’s a long-term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short-term one.
Recommended, highly intelligent throughout, including on China, Russia, and Yemen.
Northern Ireland fact of the day
The NHS in Northern Ireland is the worst in the UK. During the quarter April/June 2021, over 349,000 people were waiting for a first appointment, 53 percent for over a year, an increase of 39,000 for the same period in 2020. Adjusted for population size, waiting lists in Northern Ireland are 100 times greater than those in England, a country 50 times its size.
That is from the truly excellent Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland, by Padraig O’Malley. Imagine a detailed, thoughtful 500 pp. book on political issues you probably don’t care all that much about — is there any better way to study politics and political reasoning? Every page of this book offers substance.
Elsewhere, of course, we are told that reluctance to give up their health care system is a major reason why Irish reunification is not more popular in the North, and that holds for Catholics too.
This one will make the best non-fiction of the year list.
The value of books on tractors
In addition, there were no textbooks to be found, except in libraries, where the numbers who tried to get in were so immense that readers could only access the building for one hour, according to surname. An enterprising Shanghai publisher began reprinting textbooks from the early 1960s, which soon were worth their weight in gold. Young people in faraway places were pleading to relatives to send the books to them. Soon there was a black market. Printers sold imperfect copies outside the printworks. Textbooks were resold at phenomenal prices. In one part of the country, manuals on tractor repairs, normally in high demand, were exchanged twenty to one for physics textbooks. When the doors to the examination halls were finally opened, few prospective students were surprised that one topic set for Chinese composition was “An unforgettable day.” In the end, 278,000 students were admitted for college starting in the fall of 1978. One student, enrolled at Yan’an University in Shaanxi, wrote home to his family about how surprised he was that people in the city were nearly as poor as those in his village. But his admission to college opened a new world for him, with new kinds of people.
That is from the new and interesting Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, The Great Transformation: China’s Road to Reform.
A country run by schoolteachers?
One disgruntled veteran at a FF annual meeting in 2016 was heard to complain, ‘They’re all fucking schoolteachers now.’ He was partly right. In the thirtieth Dáil in 2007 there were 3 university lecturers, 14 primary school teachers and 14 secondary school teachers; there were also 16 lawyers, 5 doctors, 3 nurses and 14 farmers; 22 TDs described themselves as business people and 26 ‘now qualify for the bus pass’; 31 were the children of former TDs. By 2011, the number of TDs from a business background had only increased from 22 to 25, while the number of primary and secondary teachers was 30, making teaching still the largest profession represented in the Dáil, although the number of TDs who were offspring of former TDs was reduced to 15.
That is from the new and highly useful Diarmaid Ferriter book The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020.
How different are Trump judges?
Donald J. Trump’s presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about judicial appointments. Unlike other recent presidents, Trump was open about how “his” judges could be depended on to rule in particular ways on key issues important to voters he was courting (e.g., on issues such as guns, religion, and abortion). Other factors such as age and personal loyalty to Trump seemed important criteria. With selection criteria such as these, one might expect that Trump would select from a smaller pool of candidates than other presidents. Given the smaller pool and deviation from traditional norms of picking “good” judges, we were curious about how the Trump judges performed on a basic set of measures of judging. One prediction is that Trumpian constraints on judicial selection produced a different set of judges. Specifically, one that would underperform compared to sets of judges appointed by other presidents. Using data on active federal appeals court judges from January 1, 2020 to June 30, 2023, we examine data on judges across three different measures: opinion production, influence (measured by citations), and independence or what we refer to as “maverick” behavior. Contrary to the prediction of underperformance, Trump judges outperform other judges, with the very top rankings of judges predominantly filled by Trump judges.
That new paper is by Stephen J. Choi and Mitu Gulati, who seem to be academic “normies” (NYU and UVA, respectively), not MAGAland crazies.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Tariffs Hurt Manufacturing
In Disentangling the Effects of the 2018-2019 Tariffs on a Globally Connected U.S. Manufacturing Sector (forthcoming) Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board write:
The unprecedented increase in tariffs imposed by the United States against its major trading partners in 2018-2019 has brought renewed attention to the economic effects of tariffs. While vast theoretical and empirical literatures document the effects of changes in trade policy, it is not clear how prior estimates apply when there are virtually no modern episodes of a large, advanced economy raising tariffs in a way comparable to the U.S. during this period. Further complicating estimation of the effects of tariffs is the rapid expansion of globally interconnected supply chains, in which tariffs can have impacts through channels beyond their traditional effect of limiting import competition.
Another important feature of these tariffs is that they were imposed, in part, to boost the U.S. manufacturing sector by protecting against what were deemed to be the unfair trade practices of trading partners, principally China. Thus, understanding the impact of tariffs on manufacturing is vitally important, as some may view the negative consequences of tariff increases documented in existing research—including higher prices, lower consumption, and reduced business investment—as an acceptable cost for boosting manufacturing activity in the United States.
…On the one hand, U.S. import tariffs may protect some U.S.-based manufacturers from import competition in the domestic market, allowing them to gain market share at the expense of foreign competitors. On the other hand, U.S. tariffs have also been imposed on intermediate inputs, and the associated increase in costs may hurt U.S. firms’ competitiveness in producing for both the export and domestic markets. Moreover, U.S. trade partners have imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports of certain goods, which could again put U.S. firms at a disadvantage in those markets, relative to their foreign competitors. Disentangling the effects of these three channels and determining which effect dominates is an empirical question of critical importance.
…Our results suggest that the traditional use of trade policy as a tool for the protection and promotion of domestic manufacturing is complicated by the presence of globally interconnnected supply chains and the retaliatory actions of trade partners. Indeed, we find the impact from the traditional import protection channel is completely offset in the short-run by reduced competitiveness from retaliation and especially by higher costs in downstream industries…[the] net effect is a relative reduction in manufacturing employment.
Most famously, Whirlpool predicted that tariffs on washing machines would be great for Whirlpool profits, but their pleasure turned to dismay when they realized that steel and aluminum tariffs would raise their input prices.
Hat tip: The excellent Kevin Lewis.
Predicting future promotions from police cadets’ facial traits
From the results:
Facial traits are the primary driver of subject perceptions of leadership ability, and those perceptions successfully predict promotional success later in the cadets’ careers. When selecting for leadership potential based on police cadet photographs, respondents predict correct promotional choices at levels well above chance as measured by an AUC score of .70. Further, respondents’ evaluations successfully discriminate both between no promotion and lieutenant promotion, and sergeant versus lieutenant promotions.
That is from a new paper by Ian T. Adams, Scott M. Mourtgos, Christopher A. Simon, and Nicholas P. Lovrich. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The culture that is Washington, D.C.
Campaign-finance reports reveal that Republicans overwhelmingly outspend Democrats at every major steakhouse in the city… At the Capital Grille, Republicans have outspent Democrats nearly 13 to 1 so far this election cycle.
That is from Jessica Sidman. Here is the full and interesting article., and an excerpt:
Longtime Capital Grille regular David Safavian remembers the same. But things changed, says the American Conservative Union’s general counsel, as the District became more of a dining destination—and politics became more divisive. “Conservatives tend not to really care about the ‘foodie’ culture as much as Democrats do—we would rather just go have a good steak and a glass of wine,” Safavian says. “Back when the city was more bipartisan, Capital Grille reflected that. As the city has become more polarized, I think Republicans go to more traditional establishments.”
Perhaps in the 1980s and 1990s there was somewhat of a Republican connection to Chinese food, but now that seems to be gone…?
*Emancipation*
The author is Peter Kolchin, and the subtitle is The Abolition and Aftermath of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Here is one interesting excerpt of many:
Despite the surge in schools and teachers after 1880, Russian peasant children were considerably less likely to receive schooling than were African American children, especially if they were girls. As the statement about not needing literacy in order to make cabbage soup indicated, the subordination of females that characterized Russian society in general was as evident in peasant education as in any other sphere of life. Statistics on school attendance by sex indicates that, in contrast to former slaves in the Southern United States, for whom serfs in Russia rarely sent their daughters to school during the 1860s and 1870s, regarding it as a waste of time that would fill their heads with needless knowledge and make them less fit for their feminine duties. The evidence is consistent and overwhelming. Among African Americans in the Southern United States, girls were at least as likely as boys to attend school: the Freedmen’s Bureau Consolidated Monthly School Report for June 1867, for example, listed 45,855 male and 52,981 female pupils in the schools that it monitored throughout the South; in almost every state, female pupils outnumbered male pupils and there were slightly more males than females. The decennial census returns showed a similar pattern between 1870 and 1910: school enrollment rates in the United States for Black children aged five to nineteen (the great majority of whom lived in the South) were fairly evenly balanced between the sexes, with female rates slightly higher than male in four of the five census years. (The male rate was slightly higher than the female in 1880.)
You can buy the book here.
Ian Leslie on Olivier Roy and culture
Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another – say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.
We still need shared norms of behaviour in order to function as societies, however. So in place of implicit culture, he says, we have introduced explicit “norms”: rules of behaviour and speech which aren’t felt or intuited but articulated, coded for, and argued over endlessly. Without instinctive standards for behaviour we have to thrash everything out, from the correct use of pronouns to how to behave on public transport or dress for work. “Culture war” implies some kind of profound division between people, but in truth, suggests Roy, our differences are shallow and petty and all the more bad-tempered for it. Scrape away culture and what you’re left with is negotiation. Everything is politics.
Complex, evolved, layered social identities are being replaced by a series of boxes, with freedom consisting of the right to choose your box at any one time (think about the way that sexual identity is coded into an endlessly multiplying series of letters). The oddly shaped flora and fauna of culture have been reduced a series of “tokens” which we buy and display in order to position ourselves versus others. National cuisines, musical genres, styles of dress: these are all just tokens for us to collect and artfully assemble into a personal brand.
Here is the full essay. Here is my earlier post on Roy’s book.
Mexico political challenge of the day
When Mexicans arrive at voting booths next year to elect their judges for the first time, they face a unique and daunting task.
In the capital Mexico City, voters will have to choose judges for more than 150 positions, including on the Supreme Court, from a list of 1,000 candidates that most people have never heard of. For each of the 150 posts, space will be allotted for voters to write out individually the names of up to 10 preferred candidates.
Without makeshift solutions such as dividing up the judges into subdistricts, it could take 45 minutes just to fill in the ballot papers, one analyst estimated. Even with such fixes, voters will still have to choose from many dozens of unfamiliar names.
“It’s impossible,” said Jaime Olaiz-González, a constitutional theory professor at Mexico’s Universidad Panamericana. “In no country, not even the most backward, have they proposed a system like this.” The vote will be the culmination of a drive by the country’s leftwing nationalist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to radically overhaul a branch of the state that has frequently angered him by blocking his plans.
Here is more from Christine Murray from the FT. Garett Jones…telephone!