Quotulatiousness

September 4, 2022

Who was reading during Plague Year Two, and what format did they prefer?

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte summarizes some of the findings of the most recent Booknet survey:

H/T to Marc Adkins who shared this meme at the perfect moment for me to steal it, file off the serial number and repost it here.

A few months ago, BookNet Canada, which does a lot of valuable research into the book market, released the 2021 edition of its annual survey of Canadian leisure and reading habits. It’s always an interesting study. I was slow getting to it this year because there’s been so much else going on. Here are the ten most interesting findings.

  1. Canadians have had plenty of time on their hands: 81 per cent report having enough or more than enough leisure. Pre-COVID, about 25 per cent of respondents said they had more-than-enough; during COVID, that jumped to about 35 per cent. The pandemic wasn’t all bad.
  2. Canadians read books more than they listen to radio or play video games but less than they shop or cook; 42 per cent of us (led by 58 per cent of the 65-plus crowd) read books daily; 35 per cent of the 18-29 age group read daily and 57 per cent of that cohort read at least once a week. Young people are no more likely to read books less than once a month than any other under-65 segment, which bodes well for the future of the industry.
  3. The statement “books are for enjoyment, entertainment, or leisure” received a ‘yes’ from 62 per cent of respondents, and a ‘sometimes’ from 34 per cent; the statement “books are for learning or education” received a ‘yes’ from 41 per cent of respondents and a ‘sometimes’ from 50 per cent.
  4. The top reasons for selecting a book to read are the author (40 per cent), the book’s description (30 per cent), recommendations (25 per cent), the main character or the series (20 per cent), its bestselling status (14 per cent), and reference needs (13 per cent). “Recommendations and the impact of bestseller lists have trended down from 2019 to 2021.”
  5. The love affair with print continues with 68 per cent of readers citing hard copies as their preferred format. Ebooks came in at 16 per cent and audiobooks at 10 per cent Interestingly, readers had a marked preference for paperbacks over hardcovers. Format preferences differ from age group to age group, with some evidence that the kids might not be keen on physical books:

I was interested in that apparent rejection of physical books by the 18-29 cohort so I looked back at the last two years of the survey […] The results are quite different, suggesting a methodological shortcoming (the survey sample is 1,282 adults so the margin of error will be large when you eliminate those who don’t read a given format, those without format preferences, and break the remainder down into five age groups).

QotD: Sparta’s fatal problem – oliganthropia

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The consequence of the Spartan system – the mess contributions, the inheritance, the diminishing number of kleroi in circulation and the apparently rising numbers of mothakes and hypomeiones – was catastrophic, and once the downhill spiral started, it picked up speed very fast. From the ideal of 8,000 male spartiates in 480, the number fell to 3,500 by 418 (Thuc. 5.68) – there would be no recovery from the great earthquake. The drop continued to just 2,500 in 394 (Xen. Hell. 4.2.16). Cinadon – the leader of the above quoted conspiracy against the spartiates – supposedly brought a man to the market square in the center of the village of Sparta and asked him to count – out of a crowd of 4,000! – the number of spartiates, probably c. 390. The man counted the kings, the gerontes and ephors (that’s around 35 men) and 40 more homoioi besides (Xen. Hell. 3.3.5). The decline continued – just 1,500 in 371 (Xen. Hell. 6.1.1; 4.15.17) and finally just around 700 with only 100 families with full citizen status and a kleros, according to Plutarch by 254 B.C. (Plut. Agis. 5.4).

This is is the problem of oliganthropia (“people-shortage” – literally “too-few-people-ness”) in Sparta: the decline of the spartiate population. This is a huge and contentious area of scholarship – no surprise, since it directly concerns the decline of one of the more powerful states in Classical Greece – with a fair bit of debate to it (there’s a decent rundown by Figueira of the demography behind it available online here). What I want to note here is that a phrase like “oliganthropia” makes it sound like there was an absolute decline in population, but the evidence argues against that. At two junctures in the third century, under Agis IV and then later Cleomenes III (so around 241 and 227) attempts were made to revive Sparta by pulling thousands of members of the underclass back up into the spartiates (the first effort fails and the second effort was around a century too late to matter). That, of course, means that there were thousands of individuals – presumably mostly hypomeiones, but perhaps some mothakes or perioikoi – around to be so considered.

Xenophon says as much with Cinadon’s observation about the market at Sparta. Now obviously, we can’t take that statement as a demographic survey, but as a general sense, 40 homoioi, plus a handful of higher figures, in a crowd of 4,000 speaks volumes about the growth of Sparta’s underclass. And that is in Laconia, the region of the Spartan state (in contrast to Messenia, the other half of Sparta’s territory), where the Spartans live and where the density of helots is lowest.

This isn’t a decline in the population of Sparta, merely a decline in the population of spartiates – the tiny, closed class of citizen-elites at the top.

So we come back to the standard assertion about Sparta: its system lasted a long time, maintaining very high cohesion – at least among the citizens class and its descendants. This is a terribly low bar – a society cohesive only among its tiny aristocracy. And yet, as low of a bar as this is, Sparta still manages to slink below it. Economic cohesion was a mirage created by the exclusion of any individual who fell below it. Sparta maintained the illusion of cohesion by systematically removing anyone who was not wealthy from the citizen body.

If we really want to gauge this society’s cohesion, we ought to track households, one generation after the next, regardless of changes in status. If we do that, what do we find? A society with an increasingly tiny elite – and a majority which, I will again quote Xenophon, “would eat them raw“. Hardly a model of social cohesion.

Moreover, this system wasn’t that stable. The core labor force – the enslaved helots – are brutally subjugated by Sparta no earlier than 680 (even this is overly generous – the consolidation process in Messenia seems to have continued into the 500s). The austerity which supposedly underlined cohesion among the spartiates by banishing overt displays of wealth is only visible archaeologically beginning in 550, which may mark the real beginning of the Spartan system as a complete unit with all of its parts functioning. And by 464 – scarcely a century later – terminal and irreversible decline had set in. Spartan power at last breaks permanently and irretrievably in 371 when Messenia is lost to them […]

This is a system that at the most generous possible reading, lasted three centuries. In practice, we are probably better in saying it lasts just 170 or so – from c. 550 (the completion of the consolidation of Messenia, and the beginning of both the Peloponnesian League and the famed Spartan austerity) to 371.

To modern ears, 170 years still sounds impressive. Compared to the remarkably unstable internal politics of Greek poleis, it probably seemed so. But we are not ancient Greeks – we have a wider frame of reference. The Roman Republic ticked on, making one compromise after another, for four centuries (509 to 133; Roman enthusiasts will note that I have cut that ending date quite early) before it even began its spiral into violence. Carthage’s republic was about as long lived as Rome. We might date constitutional monarchy in Britain as beginning in 1688 or perhaps 1721 – that system has managed around 300 years.

While we’re here – although it was interrupted briefly, the bracket dates for the notoriously unstable Athenian democracy, usually dated from the Cleisthenic reforms 508/7 to the suppresion of the fourth-century democracy in 322, are actually longer, 185 years, give or take, with just two major breaks, consisting of just four months and one year. Sparta had more years with major, active helot revolts controlling significant territory than Athens had oligarchic coups. And yet Athens – rightly, I’d argue – has a reputation for chronic instability, while Sparta has a reputation for placid regularity. Might I suggest that stable regimes do not suffer repeated, existential slave revolts?

In short, the Spartan social system ought not be described as cohesive, and while it was relatively stable by Greek standards (not a high bar!) it is hardly exceptionally stable and certainly not uniquely so. So much for cohesion and stability.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part IV: Spartan Wealth”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.

August 30, 2022

Barbarian Europe: Part 10 – The Vikings and the End of the Invasions

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 5 Sep 2021

In 400 AD, the Roman Empire covered roughly the same area as it had in 100 AD. By 500 AD, all the western provinces of the Empire had been overrun by barbarians. Between April and July 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)

June 22, 2022

QotD: Sparta without the helots could not have existed

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Burns essentially asks, “can’t we just draw a box around the spartiates and assess them on their own?” And what I hope the proceeding analysis has shown is that the answer is: no, you can’t. The helots and the brutality the Spartan state inflicts on them are integral to the system – they can’t be removed. Without helot labor, there is effectively no Spartan economy and no agricultural production to support the spartiate class’s leisure. The brutality is the vital tool of maintaining those laborers in a state of slavery, without it, the system cannot “function” in its abominable way. Without the helots, Sparta’s military power collapses – not only because of the loss to the spartiates, but also because the helots seem to make up large forces of light infantry screens.

And in sheer numerical terms, the helots were Sparta. If we want to talk about drawing boxes, the box we ought to draw is not around the spartiates, but around the helots. The helots so decisively outnumber the spartiates that any assessment of this society has to be about the quality of helot life (which is terrible). To draw boxes as Burns wants would be like putting a box around Jeff Bezos and declaring that America was the first all-billionaire society. In actual fact, American millionaires represent roughly the same percentage of America as the spartiates represent of Sparta, roughly six percent.

This is a fundamental flaw in how we teach Sparta – in high schools and in college. We teach Sparta like it was a free citizen society with a regrettable slave population that, while horrific, was typical for its time – something more like Rome. But it wasn’t: Sparta was a society that consisted almost entirely of slaves, with a tiny elite aristocracy. The spartiates were not the common citizens of Sparta, but rather the hereditary nobility – the knights, counts and dukes, as it were. We should as soon judge 17th century France by the first two estates as judge Sparta only by the spartiates.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part II: Spartan Equality”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-23.

May 7, 2022

“Urban conservative” has become a modern oxymoron

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on the increasingly rare creature known as the city or urban conservative (he’s primarily talking about the UK, but it applies equally well in Canada and the United States):

20 Fenchurch Street in London has been nicknamed the “Walkie-Talkie” due to its distinctive design.
Image by Toa Heftiba via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s largely forgotten now, but political polarisation is written into the very fabric of London. In the 18th century, when rivalries between Whigs and Tories were at their most intense, different West End squares were built so that the two groups could live among their own kind.

Hanover Square in Mayfair was built for Whigs to live cosily while, further south, St James’s Square was a home for Tories. This was close to the Cocoa Tree coffee house in Pall Mall, their unofficial meeting place, where in the 20th century workmen found a bolt hole so that they could make a quick escape if the authorities turned up.

At the time the Whigs were the party of London merchants, and the Tories that of the country, where they enjoyed widespread support from the rural population. They had once been seen as dangerously close to the old Jacobite dynasty, hence their fear of being arrested, but as that issue receded their popularity in the country at large become stronger. The Whigs were an out-of-touch metropolitan elite, sipping on their fancy “coffee”, but this didn’t stop them ruling the country for decades, nor shaping its political and historical narrative.

Two or three political realignments later, we have arrived to where we started again. As of today the City of Westminster, home of those fashionable West End squares as well as the seat of government itself, is no longer controlled by the Conservatives, as seismic an event in the great realignment as the loss of Kensington was in the 2017 election.

In fact the whole of London is emptying of Conservatives, the party losing Wandsworth and holding onto just three boroughs. It’s not just London: the Tories have no councillors in most large cities now.

As with many social patterns, in this we are following the United States, where Bill Bishop coined the phrase “The Big Sort” to describe how Americans were becoming more polarised by geography, and which Will Wilkinson described as the formation of “communities of psychologically/ideologically similar people”.

This has resulted in cities becoming one-party enclaves, as progressive values become the norm, and conservative-minded people leave. My own parliamentary constituency, in north London, was from its formation in 1983 a suburban Tory seat but shifted between three different parties during the 80s and 90s; at the last election Labour had a 20,000 majority. Labour has now run my borough, Haringey, for 51 years, and the last time the Tories won it, back in 1968, they also took Hackney, Lambeth, Lewisham and in total 28 of London’s 32 boroughs. Truly a different world. Today they do not even fully-field candidates in some wards.

April 2, 2022

QotD: The pre-modern farming household

Filed under: China, Economics, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Looking at our peasant household, what we generally have are large families on small farms. The households in these farms were not generally nuclear households, but extended ones. Pre-Han Chinese documents assume a household to include three generations: two elderly parents, their son, his wife, and their four children (eight individuals total). Ptolemaic and Roman census data reveal a bewildering array of composite families, including multi-generational homes, but also households composed of multiple nuclear families of siblings (so a man, his wife, his brother and then brother’s wife and their children, for instance), and so on. Normal family units tended to be around eight individuals, but with wide variation (for comparison, the average household size in the United States for a family is 3.14).

At the same time that households were large (by modern standards), the farms they tilled were, by modern standards, very small. The normal size of a Roman household small farm is generally estimated between 5 and 8 iugera (a Roman measurement of land, roughly 3 to 5 acres); in pre-Han Northern China (where wheat and millet, not rice, were the staple crops), the figure was “one hundred mu (4.764 acres)” – essentially the same. In Languedoc, a study of Saint-Thibery in 1460 showed 118 households (out of 189) on farms of less than 20 setérée (12 acres or so; the setérée appears to be an inexact unit of measurement); 96 of them were on less than 10 setérée (about 6 acres). So while there is a lot of variation, by and large it seems like the largest cluster of household farms tend to be around 3 to 8 acres or so; 5 acre farms are a good “average” small farm.

This coincidence of normal farm size and family size is not an accident, but essentially represents multi-generational family units occupying the smallest possible farms which could support them. The pressures that produce this result are not hard to grasp: families with multiple children and a farm large enough to split between them might do so, while families without enough land to split are likely to cluster around the farm they have. Pre-modern societies typically have only limited opportunities for wage labor (which are often lower status and worse in conditions than peasant farming!), so if the extended family unit can cluster on a single farm too small to split up, it will (with exception for the occasional adventurous type who sets off for high-risk occupations like soldier or bandit).

Now to be clear that doesn’t mean the farm sizes are uniform, because they aren’t. There is tremendous variation and obviously the difference between a 10 acre small farm and a 5 acre small farm is half of the farm. Moreover, in most of the communities you will have significant gaps between the poor peasants (whose farms are often very small, even by these measures), the average peasant farmer, and “rich peasants” who might have a somewhat (but often not massively so) larger farm and access to more farming capital (particularly draft animals). […] Nevertheless, what I want to stress is that these fairly small – 3-8 acres of so – farms with an extended family unit on it make up the vast majority of farming households and most of the rural population, even if they do not control most of the land (for instance in that Languedoc village, more than half of the land was held by households with more than 20 setérée a piece, so a handful of those “rich peasants” with larger accumulations effectively dominated the village’s landholding […]).

This is our workforce and we’re going to spend this entire essay talking about them. Why? Because these folks – these farmers – make up the majority of the population of basically all agrarian societies in the pre-modern period. And when I say “the majority” I mean the vast majority, on the order of 80-90% in many cases.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.

March 30, 2022

“It was as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in cringe …”

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on recent events concerning the fighting in Ukraine:

Emperor PALPUTIN
Image by “usernameau” at funnyjunk.com

“Let me make this perfectly clear. Putin is Emperor Palpatine. The Ukrainian people and all those who stand up for democracy around the world and here in America are Rey Skywalker, Jyn Erso, and the Rebel alliance. Pick your side.”

Put like that, I think I’m with Putin.

This tweet, by former George Bush strategist Matthew Dowd, attracted much amusing scorn at the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine. It was as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in cringe …

American political commentary has for some time been dominated by pop culture references, in particular those two great modern fables, Star Wars and Harry Potter, which have replaced the classics as the source of communal knowledge. I’m not convinced that children’s books or films aimed at selling toys, enjoyable though they are, have that much to offer in the way of deep wisdom, compared to more ancient texts; I may be a declinist, but it is not commented on enough that America’s most-praised public intellectual didn’t know who St Augustine was.

These epic children’s stories serve as modern-day myths for a reason, drawing so heavily on older narratives and archetypes. Star Wars creator George Lucas studied anthropology and borrowed heroic narratives from around the world for his story; it also drew on historical folk memories of recent and ancient conflicts, in particular the Second World War, which has become the modern West’s origin story, its epic struggle between God and the Devil.

The most recent Lucas trilogy featured a plucky band of rebels in an existential struggle with a great empire (a story that drew heavily on … previous Star Wars films). In this tale of good and evil there was on one side a band of allies from every race on earth, and on the other a group joined by ethnic descent, a dynamic true to life and seen in countless wars and conquests since the Bronze Age. It’s the story of the Old Testament, the Persian Wars, and of such modern conflicts as the Vietnam War.

Yet of course Star Wars performed a role reversal to suit the sympathies of modern American audiences. For in reality, it is empires which are multi-cultural, and plucky rebels who tend to be linked by blood — whether it was ancient Greeks fighting off a Persian army of Medes, Babylonians, Egyptians and Sumerians, or Vietnamese nationalists in combat with French, Senegalese and North African troops.

So it is today in Ukraine, a rebel nation fighting off conquest by a neighbour 50 times its size. Ukraine’s position on the cultural fault lines of Europe has left it a multicultural inheritance, even after the depredations of Hitler and Stalin. Its heroic president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a member of a 40,000-strong Jewish population, vastly reduced by the horrors of the early 20th century, but still surviving; indeed for three months in 2019 Ukraine had a Jewish president and prime minister, a first outside of Israel and quite an achievement for a supposedly “Nazi” state. There are also Tartars, although many were cut off by Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, having only been allowed back from their central Asian exile in the 1980s. There are Romanians, and, of course, a substantial Russian minority.

Yet these groups are relatively small in number, and Ukraine still has the composition of a typical European nation-state, built around a dominant ethnic group enjoying a super-majority.

Russia, in contrast, is home to around 50 ethnic groups, including — just the European ethnicities with more than half a million people — the Tatars, Bashkir, Chuvash, Mordvins and Udmurts, the latter known for having the reddest hair in the world (their homeland is an eastern outpost in this red hair map of Europe.)

March 17, 2022

Irish Stew From 1900 & The Irish Potato Famine

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
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January 16, 2022

QotD: Once “discovered”, colonization of the Americas was inevitable

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Another major structural issue is this: what precisely would our pious anthropology professors have had Europeans do with the New World once they found it?

This is not a joke. Political reality has a way of crashing in on the pipe dreams of liberal academics. The reality is, if the English had not colonised, then the French or the Dutch would have. If the Spanish had not colonised, the Portuguese would have. This would have shifted the balance of power at home, and any European country which had not colonised, would have been relegated to secondary status. And it is easy to overestimate the amount of control that European governments actually had. As soon as the New World was discovered, many fisherman and traders sailed across the Atlantic on their own, in hopes of circumventing tax authorities and scoring a fortune. Long before colonies were established in most regions, the New World was crawling with Europeans whose superior technology gave them an edge in combat. Nonetheless, it was extremely dangerous for Europeans to provoke fights with Native Americans, and most of them tried to avoid this when possible. In retrospect, one could in theory be impressed that so many European governments showed a genuine concern to rein in the worst excesses of their subjects, with an express eye to protecting the Indians from depredation. The logic was simple: they attempted to protect their subjects at home, in order to secure good order and a better tax base. So they would do the same to their subjects in the New World. For a long time, few Europeans harboured any master plan of pushing the Native Americans out of their own lands. In more densely populated regions such as Mexico, such an idea must have seemed an absurdity. Reality tends to occur ad hoc. Boundaries often took generations to move, and would have seemed fixed at the time. For several centuries, many Europeans assumed that they would long be a minority on the North American continent. In Mexico and Peru, they always have been.

Population density mattered, a lot, when it came to pre-modern global migrations. China and India were “safe” from excessive European colonisation because they had the densest populations in the world, and they were likewise largely immune to any diseases brought by Europeans. SubSaharan Africa had a lower population density depleted by slave raiding, but they still outnumbered European colonists by a large margin throughout the colonial era — again because European contact did not decimate their numbers through disease the way it did in the Americas. It is worth noting that no one claims that Europeans committed genocide in India, Asia or even Africa, although their technological advantages gave them every opportunity had they actually been of a genocidal mindset (as were for example the Mongols). In fact, the European track record shows them to be almost shockingly un-genocidal, given their clear technological advantages over the rest of the world for a period of several centuries. Few other civilisations, given similar power over so much of the world’s people, would have behaved in a less reprehensible manner. This is not to give Europeans a pat on the back. Rather it is to point out that Europeans are regularly painted as the very worst society on Earth, when in fact they had the power to do far, far more evil than they actually did. Let us at least acknowledge this fact.

Jeff Fynn-Paul, “The myth of the ‘stolen century'”, Spectator Magazine, 2020-09-26.

October 27, 2021

QotD: China’s single child policy

Filed under: China, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

China’s “single-child policy” is a world-class example of unintended consequences. Initiated by the Communist Party in September 1980 to control population, the policy forbade more than one child outside exceptional circumstances. It immediately ran up against cultural preconditions – in China, as in most of Asia, male children are prized for both economic and religious reasons. Females marry out of the family, which means they are not available to care for elderly parents. It is also up to the male child to maintain religious observances regarding ancestors to assure a worthy and stable afterlife. (This is still taken quite seriously even with China’s policy of national atheism.) The result was a wholesale massacre of females by both abortion and infanticide measuring in the millions. Today China has a surplus of males, officially acknowledged as being around 4% but probably much higher. This means that millions of Chinese men will never marry and, in many cases, will never have a girlfriend. This will inevitably lead to frustration, anger, and acting out. The Chinese version of Fight Club will be no joking matter.

Another effect is legions of older people with not enough of a younger population to support them, a social security problem that dwarfs any such in the West.

The Chinese solution is likely to be simplicity itself: shoot the punks and let the geezers starve. Either way, it means social upheaval.

J.R. Dunn, “The Myth of China as Superpower”, American Thinker, 2019-01-09.

August 5, 2021

QotD: September 1939 was pretty much the optimal moment for Germany to go to war

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The German economy was already in poor condition, and it was the looting of Austrian gold and Czech armaments that gave it a temporary boost in what was effectively still peacetime. (The later looting of the Polish and French economies never made up for the costs of a full world war being in progress.)

Demographically German military manpower was at a height in 1940/41 that gave it an advantage over the allies and potentially the Russians, that would quickly evaporate within a few years. (Demographics was an important science between the wars, and many leaders – like Hitler and Stalin – made frequent references to it. The Russians in particular would start having more manpower available starting in 1942 … perhaps not a coincidence that Germany invaded in 1941?)

The Nazi air forces had a temporary superiority over the Allies in 1939 that was already being rapidly undercut as both the British and the French finally started mass production of newer aircraft. (By mid-1940 British aircraft production had overtaken the Germans, even without the French. If the war had not started in 1939, by 1941 the Luftwaffe would have been numerically quite inferior to the combined British and French air forces, even without the surprisingly effective new fighters being brought on line by the Dutch and others.)

German ground forces, while not really ready for war in September 1939 (half of their divisions were still pretty much immobile, and they had only 120,000 vehicles all up compared to 300,000 for the French army alone), were nonetheless in a peak of efficiency considering the Czechs and Poles had been knocked out, and the British and French were struggling to get new equipment into service. The Soviet short-term decision to ally with the Germans to carve up Eastern Europe (Stalin knew this was only a temporary delay to inevitable conflict), also allowed the Germans an easy victory and much greater freedom of action. Again, by 1941 British conscription and production, and French (and Belgian, and Dutch, etc.) upgrades and increases in fortifications, would have come a lot closer to making the German task next to impossible. (Even then it was the collapse of French morale after the loss of Finland — leading to the collapse of the French government – and Norway, that really defeated France, not vastly inferior divisions or equipment.)

A byproduct of an Allied ramp up might also have seen Belgium rejoin the allied camp in 1941, or at least make significant planning preparations to properly add its 22 divisions and strong border fortifications to allied defences if Germany attacked. (Rather than the hopeless mess that happened in 1940 when the allies rushed to rescue the temporary non-ally that had undermined the whole interwar defensive project …) Again, the Germans managed to find a sweet spot in 1939-40 that temporarily undermined long-standing interwar co-operation, and one that was not likely to last very long.

Similarly a delay of war would have allowed allied negotiations with the Balkan states to advance. The same guarantee that was given to Poland had been given to Yugoslavia, Rumania and Greece. (It is usually forgotten that Greece – attacked by Italy – and Yugoslavia – voluntarily – joined the British side at the worst possible moment in 1941. (Only to be crushed by the Germans … but with the interesting by-product of effectively undermining Germany’s chances of defeating the Soviets and occupying Moscow in the same year …)

Nigel Davies, “If the War hadn’t started until December 1941, would it?”, rethinking history, 2021-05-01.

July 2, 2021

Britain’s “agricultural revolution”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes wonders about the almost-forgotten revolution that pre-dated the much better known Industrial Revolution:

Illustration of a seed drill from Horse-hoeing husbandry, 4th edition by Jethro Tull, 1762 (original work 1731).
Wikimedia Commons.

Whatever happened to “the Agricultural Revolution” of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain? In recent years I’ve hardly seen the term used at all, and the last major book on the subject was seemingly published twenty-five years ago. It has become almost totally eclipsed by its more famous sibling “the Industrial Revolution”, with its vivid associations of cotton, coal, and exponential hockey-stick graphs.

Yet for all that popularity, nearly every book investigating the causes of modern economic growth complains about the use of The Industrial Revolution. Even one of the pioneers of economic history, T. S. Ashton, who actually wrote the book The Industrial Revolution, complained on the very second page about the term’s inaccuracy. Much like “Holy Roman Empire”, there’s an error in every word. It involved too many series of changes to really be a The, was about so much more than just industry, and was too gradual a process to properly call a revolution. Yet Ashton had to concede that the term had “become so firmly embedded in common speech that it would be pedantic to offer a substitute.” And this was in 1948. In the intervening three quarters of a century, the term has become all the more difficult to dislodge.

I am, like everyone else, guilty of perpetuating the term Industrial Revolution. It’s a useful shorthand for people to at least get a rough idea of what I’m talking about, for me to then refine. Best to start with what people know, or at least what they think they know, and go from there. You may think of the Industrial Revolution as being about cotton, coal, and steam, but the period also saw major developments in every other industry, from agriculture to watch-making, and everything in-between. And so on. My preferred terms, like “acceleration of innovation”, always require at least a paragraph or two of explanation first.

With the term Agricultural Revolution, however, there’s just no need to reference it. Nobody really talks about it, or has anything more than a very vague conception of what it may mean. At best, people recall a few things from decades-old textbooks: names like “Turnip” Townshend or Jethro Tull, and perhaps a smattering of jargon like selective breeding, crop rotation, or enclosures. Even these are widely misunderstood. See last week’s post, for patrons, on how we get almost everything about the enclosure movement wrong. As for the Agricultural Revolution’s timing, who knows? When, over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and maybe even nineteenth centuries is it supposed to have occurred? With the Industrial Revolution, there’s at least a “classic” period of 1760-1830, with a few decades of leeway. That is of course up for debate, and I’m especially keen on pushing it back much earlier, but it’s at least a half-decent starting point. With the Agricultural Revolution, there’s just no baseline at all. The experts themselves can’t agree.

For all that the term Agricultural Revolution has lost its salience, however, early modern changes to the productivity of agriculture were perhaps the most important of all. The ability to support a much larger population is itself a major economic achievement. For all that we obsess over historical measures of GDP per person, we often forget the much earlier and extraordinary increase in just the sheer number of people. In the early seventeenth century England’s population not only recovered to its pre-Black Death peak of about 5 million, but then from 1700 onwards it began to exceed it. By 1800, after just another century, the population of Britain had doubled to 10 million. And this in a period throughout which the country was a net exporter of grain.

April 17, 2021

Considering the costs and benefits of extreme specialization

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest post on Matt Gurney’s Code 47 Substack blog, he considers the trade-off between population density and the range of specialization that can be supported at various densities:

“Model A Ford in front of Gilmore’s historic Shell gas station” by Corvair Owner is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

I wish I remembered where I read this. It was a book I was blowing through for a university paper; only one chapter was really of interest to me when I was trawling for footnotes but I stumbled upon an interesting section that talked about services and specialization in a modern economy. The author offered a simple explanation of service specialization that I’ve never forgotten. Imagine a village with 100 people, the author said. Now imagine what services are available there. There’s probably a gas station, and maybe you can get a few services done to your car there, too. Basic repairs. Tire rotations. Oil changes. Things like that. There’s probably also a convenience store, and the store might also have a place to send or receive mail, or maybe even to rent a movie. (Back when that was a thing we did.) You might have a coffee shop of some kind, maybe a diner. But that’s marginal. You almost certainly don’t have a school, full post office, bank branch or medical centre of any kind. Not in a village of 100 people.

When you itemize out all the services you can get, it’s probably about five or maybe 10 — gas pumped, tires changed, oil changed, basic engine repairs, store clerk, movie rental, mail sent and received. Maybe someone to pour you a cup of coffee and get you a sandwich — but only maybe. The point isn’t to be precise in our list or count, but just to contemplate the relationship between the population and the number and type of available services.

Now scale that village up 10 fold, the author said. Now it’s a town of 1,000. The number of services explodes. You still have everything you did before. But now you’ve also got specialized shops, restaurants, a bank or two (and all the services they provide), probably a house of worship, medical services of various kinds (including eye care, dentistry, etc), personal-care services, better access to home and lawn care, various repair and maintenance service, technical services, a post office … the list goes on. You also start to see competition and the efficiency that brings — our village of 100 would have a gas station and a convenience store (quite possibly at the same location!). But our town of 1,000 would have a few of each. You’d get more services, and start to see prices dropping for the commonly available offerings.

You get the idea — the more you scale up a population, the more specialized services that are available and the more accessible they become. And this includes not just categories of service, but also increasing degrees of specialization. Our village of 100 probably has no full-time doctor. Our town of 1,000 probably has a family physician. But after we bump things up to 10,000, 100,000 and then a million people, we’re getting not just doctors, but highly trained, specialized physicians, surgeons and diagnosticians. Our town of 1,000 has a dentist, but our city of a million has dental surgeons who’ve specialized in repairing specific kinds of trauma and injury.

Anyway. I don’t remember what book this was from. But I do remember this short section. I think about it a lot. We Canadians of 2021 are, for the most part, hyper-specialized. I’ve written columns about this before, including this one from 2019, which I’m going to quote liberally below:

    Human history is, in one simplified viewing, the story of specialization. As our technology advanced, a smaller and smaller share of the labour pool was required just to keep everyone alive. Perhaps the easiest way to summarize this is to note that 150 years ago, even in the most advanced industrial countries, something close to 50 per cent of the population was directly engaged in agriculture — half the people tilled fields so the other half could eat. Today, in both Canada and the United States, it’s closer to two per cent — one person’s efforts feed 49 others. Those 49 can pursue any of the thousands of specialized jobs that allow our technological civilization to exist. … Those 49 people are our artists and doctors and scientists and teachers. Human advancement depends on this — a civilization that’s scrambling to feed itself doesn’t build particle colliders or invent new neonatal surgeries and cancer-stopping wonderdrugs.

I stand by those remarks. But I’ve been pondering them of late with a different perspective. I’ve spent much of this week talking with doctors and medical experts in Ontario, where the third wave of COVID-19 is threatening to overwhelm the health-care system, with tragic results. And one recurring theme that comes up in these conversations is how this disaster is going to take place almost entirely out of public view. There won’t be any general mobilizations or widespread damage. People are going to die, behind closed doors or tent flaps, and other people will be forever scarred by their inability to save those people. But for most of us — those who aren’t sick, or highly specialized medical professionals — life is going to be something reasonably close to normal.

February 25, 2021

Malthusian cheerleaders

Filed under: Books, Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barry Brownstein looks at some of the claims from Malthus onward about the imminent demise of humanity due to overpopulation and how that same concern keeps popping up again and again:

Thomas Malthus.
Portrait by John Linnell, 1834, via Wikimedia Commons

… James Lovelock advanced the Gaia hypothesis that Earth is one “self-regulating organism.” Lovelock forecasts the population of the Earth will fall to one billion from its current total of over seven billion people. Given Lovelock’s cheerfulness about such carnage, it is easy to see why Alan Hall, a senior analyst at The Socionomist, wonders whether “today’s drives to limit consumption and population” are ideologically related to the eugenics movement from the past century. In his essay “A Socionomic Study of Eugenics,” Hall writes in The Socionomist:

    Circa 1900, influential intellectuals in Europe and the U.S. voiced concerns about uncontrolled procreation causing a supposed decline in the quality of human beings. Today, similar groups voice concerns about uncontrolled population growth and resource consumption causing a decline in the quality of the environment … Today’s green advocates brandish images of an overrun, dying planet.

Today, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working to aid the lives of children living “in extreme poverty.” In his book, Factfulness, the late professor of international health Hans Rosling, reports on critics of the Gates Foundation who reject such efforts. “The argument goes like this,” Rosling writes. “If you keep saving poor children, you’ll kill the planet by causing overpopulation.”

In the face of advocates for such beliefs, no wonder Hall asks us to reflect on whether we “will make the cut” if those seeking to cull humanity are successful.

Malthusian Doom

We’ve all heard the SparkNotes version of Malthusian predictions of doom caused by overpopulation. Malthus thought food production could not keep pace with population growth. In his 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,” Malthus anticipated the suffering that awaited humanity.

    The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

Unlike Ehrlich and others, Malthus had reason to be a pessimist in his lifetime. If Malthus had been writing history or predicting the near future, he would not have been far from the mark.

Many of the predictions of overpopulation were based on estimates of population growth (especially in sub-Saharan Africa) which were far from accurate, and in every case we know of, increased economic well-being directly impacts population growth so as a country begins to get richer its population growth begins to slow down significantly (most first-world nations are already at or below population-replacement birthrates).

In their book, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson have startling facts for those who believe the population will continue to explode.

    No, we are not going to keep adding bodies until the world is groaning at the weight of eleven billion of us and more; nine billion is probably closer to the truth, before the population starts to decline. No, fertility rates are not astronomically high in developing countries; many of them are at or below replacement rate. No, Africa is not a chronically impoverished continent doomed to forever grow its population while lacking the resources to sustain it; the continent is dynamic, its economies are in flux, and birth rates are falling rapidly. No, African Americans and Latino Americans are not overwhelming white America with their higher fertility rates. The fertility rates of all three groups have essentially converged.

Looking at current trends and expecting them to continue is what Hans Rosling calls “the straight line instinct.” That instinct often leads to false conclusions.

February 15, 2021

QotD: Tail-end boomers aren’t really Baby Boomers at all

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was born in late ’62. I never considered myself a boomer. And before you scream that boomers go to ’64, let me explain: I swear to you they didn’t use to. My brother, born in early ’54 was considered one of the youngest boomers. And if you look at the ethos of the generation and what formed it, and how its public image was created and also when they came of age, you’ll understand that makes a ton more sense.

The boomers were the baby boom after WWII. By the time I hit school, the classrooms were half empty, the trailers that they’d added the decade before were being used for craft classes or gym or something that required tons of space.

It would take a long time to come home if you were still being born in ’62. (And I’d been due in ’63.)

This is important simply because I want to make it clear when I came of age it wasn’t with the boomer ethos of “each generation is going to be bigger than the last and we’re going to remake the world in our image.” That expectation is still obvious in books of the fifties and sixties, as well as the attached Malthusian panic.

The boomers, like now the millenials, are a much maligned generation. The public image is almost not at all that of the people in the generation I actually know, with a very few exceptions.

The people the media chose to highlight were the ones they wanted the boomers to be, not who they were.

But something about the boomers is true — ironically the reason that caused them to hate my generation before they decided to aggregate us, because it gave them more power to still be considered young and marketable-to — and that is that they were raised in the expectation they would make the world a better place, and that they could because of sheer numbers, and because they’d been brought up to be better than their parents.

Sarah Hoyt, “Business From The Wrong End”, According to Hoyt, 2018-09-27.

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