Bram Stoker, Dracula, and Progress Studies
The Dracula novel is of course very famous, but it is less well known that it was, among other things, a salvo in the direction of what we now call Progress Studies. Here are a few points of relevance for understanding Bram Stoker and his writings and views:
1. Stoker was Anglo-Irish and favored the late 19th century industrialization of Belfast as a model for Ireland more generally. He also was enamored with the course of progress in the United States, and he wrote a pamphlet about his visit.
2. From Wikipedia:
He was a strong supporter of the Liberal Party and took a keen interest in Irish affairs. As a “philosophical home ruler”, he supported Home Rule for Ireland brought about by peaceful means. He remained an ardent monarchist who believed that Ireland should remain within the British Empire, an entity that he saw as a force for good. He was an admirer of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, whom he knew personally, and supported his plans for Ireland.Stoker believed in progress and took a keen interest in science and science-based medicine.
3. The novel Dracula contrasts the backward world of Transylvania with the advanced world of London, and it shows the vampire cannot survive in the latter. The Count is beaten back by Dr. Van Helsing, who uses science to defeat him and who serves as a stand-in for Stoker and is the de facto hero of the story.
4. One core message of the novel is “Ireland had better develop economically, otherwise we will end up like a bunch of feudal peasants, holding up crosses to fend off evil, rapacious landowners.” At the time, the prominent uses of crosses was associated with Irish Catholicism. And is there a more Irish villain than the absentee landlord, namely Dracula? Dracula is also the kind of warrior nobleman who, coming from England, took over Ireland.
5. In the novel, science and commerce have the potential to defeat underdevelopment. Stoker’s portrait of Transylvania, most prominent in the opening sections of the novel, also suggests that “underdevelopment is a state of mind.” And it is correlated with feuding sects and clans, again a reference to the Ireland of his time, at least as he understood Catholic Ireland. Here is more on Stoker’s views on economic development and modernization for both Ireland and the Balkans.
6. Stoker was obsessed with “rationalizing” (in the Weberian sense) the employment relation and also the bureaucracy His first non-fiction work was “The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions.” Progress was more generally a recurring theme in his non-fiction writings, for instance “The Necessity of Political Honesty.” He called for an Ireland of commerce, education, and without “warring feuds.”
7. For Stoker, sexual repression is needed to further societal progress and economic development, and in this regard Stoker anticipates Freud. Dracula abides by most laws and norms, except the sexual/cannibalistic ones. Dracula and Lucy, who give in to their individual desires, end up as the big losers. For the others, societal order is restored, and the lurid sexuality that pervades the book is dampened by the restoration of order.
8. Christ and Dracula are mirror opposites (the stake, the cross, resurrection at dawn rather than sunset, the role of blood drinking reversed, the preaching of immortality in opposite ways, the inversion of who sacrifices for whom, and more). A proper societal outcome is obtained when these two opposites end up neutralizing each other. Stoker’s vision of progress is fundamentally secular. (See Clyde Leatherdale on all this.)
9. From Hollis Robbins: “Britain’s economic prosperity in the nineteenth century was largely dependent on the adoption of international standards such as Greenwich Mean Time and the universal day, which ensured smooth coordination for trade, legal transactions, railroad travel, and mail delivery. Dracula, whose powers are governed by the sun and the moon rather than clocks and calendars, works to destabilize social coordination. His objective is not only literally to “fatten on the blood of the living,”6 but also more broadly to suck the lifeblood of a thriving commercial economy at the dawn of a global age. Under Dracula’s spell, humans forget the time, becoming listless, unproductive, and indifferent to social convention. At heart, the fundamental battle in Stoker’s Dracula is a death struggle between standard time as an institutional basis for world markets and planetary time governing a primitive, superstitious existence.”
10. In an interview Stoker once said: “I suppose that every book of the kind must contain some lesson, but I prefer that readers should find it out for themselves.” There are numerous ways to take that remark, not just what I am suggesting.
Sunday assorted links
1. Is the gene-sequencing company Illumina a monopoly? (NYT)
2. “In short: the more one’s intellectual contributions are defined by strengths, where those strengths also essentially depend on a broad base, the more your regional background is likely to shape your intellectual contributions.” More Nate Meyvis. And Nate on the value of T-shaped reading plans.
4. People on Twitter are using more political identifiers than before. And more yet if you count pronouns.
How to negotiate your assistant professor salary
Jennifer Doleac writes:
I’ve discovered a new passion for helping junior women in econ negotiate better job offers. It’s easier to see what you deserve from the outside (always: more than they are offering…)
Great! Here are a few tips from me, not just for women, noting that I am going to skip over the super-important “make sure you are in high demand” kind of advice. I am assuming you already have an offer in hand, and wish to make the most of it.
1. Make sure they have made you the full offer before responding in any way, other than with polite enthusiasm. That means salary, teaching load, moving expenses, faculty housing options, length of contract, research and travel fund, and anything else you might care about, such as a joint appointment. Don’t respond to any one bit of it until you have drawn out all the blood from the source.
2. You don’t have anything until it is in writing. Duh.
3. It is fine to ask the departmental chair what else you might ask for. In such matters the chair is usually (but not always) on your side. In any case, this is not a faux pas.
4. Very often the components of your offer come from distinct pools of money or resources, controlled by different agents. You want to “tap” on each and every part of the offer, to see if it might be flexible. Inflexibility on one part of the offer does not have to mean inflexibility on all the other parts. Different pots of money! So ask for more along all margins, but do so politely. Rudeness doesn’t help with these kinds of bureaucracies.
5. In most situations you can get a small amount extra by bargaining over the salary, and indeed you should. But you cannot get much more unless you have a written offer in hand from another place for a higher salary. Recognize your limitations. And a higher salary offer from a non-academic source often means zero in this bargaining game. You can’t expect anything close to a match. At best it will be an excuse for them to bump you up a few more thousand dollars.
6. It is fine to ask for a semi-formal commitment on what you might teach, but do not expect this to be put in writing. Odds are it will be honored, but not 100% for sure. “I would like to teach in your honors sequence” is a perfectly legitimate ask, if appropriate to the situation.
7. Always ask for a course off for your first year, at the very least. And learn what will be the future rate for buying out of courses.
8. Most generally, while you should always be polite, “them liking you” is not an outcome you are looking to achieve at this stage of the game. They can like you plenty later. Probably you should feel just a little uneasy that perhaps you are asking for too much.
9. As for women in particular, there is a literature suggesting that possibly women do not bargain hard enough in the workplace. Whatever stance you take on this broader question, if you are a women at least ask — and check with some mentors — as to whether you are making this mistake. Actually men should do this too.
10. You do have a limited ability to ask for an extension on your offer and when you must say yes or no. But do not think you can stretch this too far, and it is often not in the interests of the school, or for that matter the department and chair, to give you much leeway here. Basically you want to do this to drum up a better offer from elsewhere, and they know this.
What else? Here is my earlier post on exploding offers.
The Room
Has to be seen not to be believed.
Hat tip: Kottke via Joel Selanikio.
The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession
That is a new JEP piece by Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine, and Luke Pardue. The piece, while not easily summarized, is interesting throughout. Here is one bit:
The decline in birth rates has been widespread across the country. Birth rates fell in every state over this period, except for North Dakota. One possible explanation for the increase in North Dakota birth rates is the fracking boom that occurred in this state over those years, which has been shown in other research to increase the birth rate (Kearney and Wilson 2018). But as can be readily seen in the map, there is substantial variation in the extent of the decline across places.
Births fell the most in the South, in the West, and in the Southwestern and Mountain states. However, the set of states that experienced larger declines is varied, also including some Midwestern and New England states, notably Connecticut, Illinois, and Massachusetts. Births fell the most in the Southwestern and Western states. The sizable Hispanic population in much of this region is consistent with the particularly large decline in births among Hispanic women, driven by a decline in births among both native and foreign-born Mexicans. The fact that other states with smaller shares of Hispanic residents (like Georgia and Oregon) also experienced large declines, though, further clarifies the broad-based nature of the decline.
And this:
The percentage of sexually active women who report using long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) increased from 5.5 percent in 2004 to 10.7 in 2017 and could have contributed to declining birth rates. The simple correlation, though, between the percentage point change in LARC usage in a state and the change in birth rates is wrong-signed (that is, positive), albeit close to zero. This suggests that take-up of LARCs has likely not played an important role in explaining the decline in the aggregate birth rate over this period.
Overall it is interesting how many factors do not seem to matter much.
From the comments, on Putin and Russia
Saturday assorted links
1. Kelsey Piper on Progress Studies.
2. Was public health misinformation less of a problem in the past? (Bloomberg)
3. The Octopus plan.
4. Update on Slate (NYT).
5. The FDA still is not getting this stuff right. And Emily Oster on the same. And some game-theoretic analysis.
Short Terms Cause Short-Term Thinking
The excellent Garett Jones argues that looming elections are bad news for good economics. See the playlists for more in this series.
What does the Truckers Convoy want?
Freedom? Well, it depends what you mean by that concept. Here is one relevant bit from from The National Post, hardly a left-wing rag:
“Freedom convoy” supporters convinced that the Governor General can dissolve Parliament on a whim have “absolutely inundated” Rideau Hall with calls over the past week, National Post has learned…
The callers are participants and supporters of the so-called “freedom convoy” that has been occupying the streets around Parliament for a week, demanding that the Trudeau government put an end to all public heath measures (even though the majority of them are under the provincial government’s purview.)
Last week, organizers also published a manifesto billed a “memorandum of understanding” demanding that the Governor General and the Senate unite to force all levels of government to end any COVID-19 measures and vaccine passports, and re-instate all workers laid off due to vaccine requirements.
That has seemingly pushed protesters and their supporters to flood Rideau Hall’s phone and email lines demanding that Mary Simon act, going as far as demanding that she dissolve government and remove Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from power…
It’s useless for protesters to be “calling Rideau Hall or pressuring senators to do something, that’s not how things work,” he added. “It’s a democratic system, and neither the senate nor the Governor General are elected, so they don’t have the democratic legitimacy” to dissolve government.
Originally those memorandum demands came from a group called Canada Unity, a major force behind the Convoy. Canada Unity has since withdrawn their proposals for a non-democratic transfer of power. Good for them! Still, “we withdraw the demands for an anti-democratic coup d’etat that we were promoting a few days ago” is hardly a reason for enthusiastic affiliation.
By the way, here are the responsibilities of the Canadian Governor General.
I’m not suggesting that all of the Convoy members have this particular political vision (though 320,000 signatures on the memorandum were reported), or even that those promoting this idea necessarily “mean it.” Maybe for many of them it is just a way to stir up trouble. Still, you can take this as another sign of “incipient knuckleheadism” in the movement.
By the way, I am myself opposed to the idea of governmental mandates for Covid-19 vaccines. (In part because I feared exactly this kind of backlash, but for liberty reasons too.) But it is very far from the worst governmental mandate the Canadians have!
Do you know what those people in the trucks actually should do? Go get vaccinated.
A related group for a while shut down the Ambassador Bridge, which carries 30% of the U.S.-Canada trade. The Convoy and associated movements are doing a great deal to restrict the free movement of goods and of people, hardly my idea of freedom either.
So I am happy to double down on my previous post.
Friday assorted links
1. How engineers will resurrect Tonga’s broken cable.
3. Nate Meyvis on context and scarcity. It is also worth thinking about how scarce context ties into efforts to understand people as “regoinal thinkers,” I would add.
4. What happens if a cryptocurrency exchange files for bankruptcy?
What should I ask Chris Blattman?
I will be having a Conversation with him, rooted in his forthcoming book Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. Though not only!
Chris is a political scientist at University of Chicago, but with training in other fields as well and indeed he is also an economist. He has done extensive fieldwork in Colombia and East Africa, both on conflict and also on cash transfers. He is active blogging and tweeting, and is a Canadian too.
Here is my previous Conversation with Chris. So what should I ask him this time around?
Fractional Dosing Trials
My paper Testing fractional doses of COVID-19 Vaccines, co-authored with Kremer et al., has now been published at PNAS. I covered the paper in A Half Dose of Moderna is More Effective than A Full Dose of Astra Zeneca and other posts so I won’t belabor the basic ideas. One new point is that thanks to the indefatigable Michael Kremer and the brilliant Witold Wiecek, clinical trials on fractional dosing on a large scale have begun in Nigeria. Here are a few key points:
WHO SAGE Outreach: The authors have met and presented their work to the World Health Organization (WHO) Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE), with follow-up meetings to present evidence coming from new studies.
DIL Workshop and Updates: In the fall of 2021, the Development Innovation Lab (DIL) at UChicago, led by Professor Kremer, hosted a workshop on fractional dosing, collecting updates from clinical researchers from multiple countries conducting fractional dosing trials for COVID-19 vaccines. The workshop also covered issues relating to trial design and included participants from Belgium, Brazil, Ghana, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Thailand, South Africa, UK and the US.
CEPI Outreach: Professor Kremer has also presented this research to The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which is now pursuing a platform trial of fractional dosing.
Country Trials – Nigeria: With the support of DIL and the research team and generous support and advice from WAM Foundation, the charitable arm of Weiss Asset Management and Open Philanthropy, a trial is being conducted in Nigeria by the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research, National Institute of Pharmaceutical Research and Development, National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, and the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, in coordination with the Federal Ministry of Health.
A comprehensive list of all the trials on fractional dosing conducted to date is at the link. Fractional dosing may come too late for COVID-19 vaccines but perhaps next time a shortage of a vaccine looms we will be more quick to consider policies to stretch supplies.
You want to have strong analytical abilities on your side
No, you don’t always have to agree with the majority of the educated people, but I would say this. For whatever set of views you think is justified, try to stick to the versions of those views held by well-educated, reasonable, analytically-inclined people. You will end up smarter over time, and in better places. Peer effects are strong, including across your ideological partners.
When I hear that a particular group defends liberty, such as the Ottawa truckers’ convoy, while this is partially true it makes me nervous. As a whole, they also seem to believe a lot of nonsense and to be, in procedural terms, not exactly where I would want them on scientific method and the like. Fair numbers of them seem to hold offensive beliefs as well. Whine about The Guardian if you like, but I haven’t seen any rebuttal of this portrait of the views of their leaders. Ugh.
I recall taking a lot of heat for my 2007 critique of Ron Paul and his movement, but that example illustrates my points perfectly. Those people did defend liberty in a variety of relevant ways, but so many of them have ended up in worse spaces. And that is exactly what I predicted way back when.
Look for strong analytical abilities, and if you don’t see it, run the other way.
Here is a defense of the Freedom Convoy. You can read it for yourself, but it doesn’t change my mind. Here is I think a wiser account. I’ll say it again: “Look for strong analytical abilities, and if you don’t see it, run the other way.” I’m running.
TheZvi on Long Covid
Here is a long and characteristically thoughtful post, from his Substack. Here is the opening part of his summary (no double indentation):
“My core model of Long Covid after writing this post:
- Long Covid is real, but less common than many worry it is.
- Reports of Long Covid are often people who have symptoms, then blame them on Long Covid whether or not they even had Covid. The exception is loss of taste and smell.
- Long Covid severity and risk is proportional to Covid severity and risk.
- If you didn’t notice you had Covid, you’re at very very low risk for developing Long Covid.
- Vaccination is thus highly but incompletely protective against Long Covid.
- Children are thus at minimal risk.
- Omicron is thus less likely to cause serious Long Covid than Delta.”
Recommended. Whether or not you agree with every point, I would say that Zvi has enough context to effectively reason across multiple domains — you can’t say the same for everyone!
From my email, on Putin and nuclear war
I just visited the front page of the NYT, WaPo, Der Spiegel’s International section, and FT and there is not a single story about Putin casually inserting the threat of nuclear war in yesterday’s press conference. However, if you scroll down on Daily Mail’s front page Putin’s threat of nuclear war is mentioned.
I think post-Cold War we have irresponsibly decreased our fear of nuclear war than is wise.
That is from Naveen K. Here is news.google.com on the threat, as I am reading the Colorado Springs Gazette is the leading entry.
That is from J. Barkley Rosser, who has longstanding connections with Russia and the USSR.