The explanation of the Great Enrichment is people. Paul Romer says so, as do a few others, among whom are some students I did not teach price theory to at the University of Chicago. On the other hand, Paul sets it down to economies of scale, which mysteriously drop down on England in the 18th century and gradually on us all. Yet China had peace, science, and enormous cities when Europeans were huddled in small groups inside town walls, or isolated villae.
In particular, it is ideas that people have for commercially tested betterment that matter. Consider alternating-current electricity, cardboard boxes, the little black dress, The Pill, cheap food, literacy, antibiotics, airplanes, steam engines, screw-making machines, railways, universities, cheap steel, sewers, plate glass, forward markets, universal literacy, running water, science, reinforced concrete, secret voting, bicycles, automobiles, limited access highways, free speech, washing machines, detergents, air conditioning, containerization, free trade, computers, the cloud, smart phones, and Bob Gordon’s favorite, window screens. …
And the Great Enrichment depended on the less famous [but] crucial multitudes of free lunches prepared by the alert worker and the liberated shopkeeper rushing about, each with her own little project for profit and pleasure. Sometimes, unexpectedly, the little projects became big projects, such as John Mackey’s one Whole Foods store in Austin, Texas resulting in 479 stores in the U.S. and the U.K., or Jim Walton’s one Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas resulting in 11,718 stores worldwide.
Letting people “have a go” to implement such ideas for commercially tested betterment is the crux. It comes, in turn, from liberalism, Adam Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty”, “the liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice”. Liberalism permitted, encouraged, honored an ideology of “innovism” — a word preferable to the highly misleading word “capitalism,” with its erroneous suggestion that the modern world was and is initiated by piling up bricks and bachelors’ degrees.
Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.
July 5, 2022
QotD: The Great Enrichment
June 20, 2022
March 17, 2022
January 8, 2022
The Board of Green Cloth — the original “we investigated ourselves and found us innocent” organization
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes explains how England managed to avoid the first attempt by King James I to impose absolute monarchy — that is, putting the Stuart notions of the “divine right of kings” in place of royal powers limited by the Parliamentary control of the royal income:
The year 1610 might by the most under-rated year in British history. It was the year in which England almost became a more permanent absolutist monarchy. Had things gone only a little differently, King James I might have obtained a substantial annual income — enough to pay off his debts within just a few years, to run a substantial surplus, and perhaps even to never have to summon a Parliament ever again. Over the course of a few decades, so long as they didn’t require too many extraordinary taxes to pay for one-off wars, the Stuart kings could have ruled without challenge, issuing proclamations that would have gradually taken on the force of laws.
[…]
As we saw in the last instalment of this series, James I’s finances were desperate. His predecessor had left him substantial war debts, and he was running a large deficit, so the chances of repaying them anytime soon were slim. So in 1604 he had summoned a Parliament with the aim of making a financial deal. Parliaments were typically called in order for the monarch to raise one-off, extraordinary taxes, usually in times of rebellion or war. Rather confusingly from today’s perspective, these taxes were known as “subsidies”, because they were a subsidy to the Crown. Yet James and his ministers wanted Parliament to instead establish peacetime taxes that would be both ongoing and ordinary — what came to be known as “support”. The deal was that he would give up some of his least popular feudal prerogative rights in return.
The House of Commons did not go for the deal in 1604, as we saw. They may have hated feudal obligations like purveyance or wardship — the requisitioning of goods for the court, and the Crown’s control of noble heirs whose fathers had died before they came of age — but they also saw some major risks in trying to make a deal with the king.
When it came to the matter of purveyance, for example, many members of Parliament wanted to stamp out the abuses rather than see the institution abolished. They thought it perfectly legal for the Crown to compulsorily purchase goods, and even to requisition the carts to carry them. What they complained of was that many purveyors were failing to give compensation immediately, and that corrupt purveyors were sometimes taking more than was required, pocketing the difference for themselves. Many MPs also argued that there was no legal basis for purveyors to determine their own prices for the provisions that they seized — a privilege that the Crown adamantly insisted upon.
James’s predecessor Queen Elizabeth I had granted a concession over patent disputes — “patents” at that time were a rather different and much wider legal notion than our more product-oriented modern patents: the monarch granted patents to assign lands and titles, appoint officials, create cities or guilds, or to allow monopoly privileges over an economic resource among other purposes. The concession was that patent disputes would be litigated in common-law courts rather than by royally appointed judges.
Yet by extending the jurisdiction of the common-law courts to monopolies, Elizabeth opened the floodgates of complaints against all prerogative courts — especially against the court of royal household officials responsible for commissioning the purveyors, known as the Board of Green Cloth.
To Hyde and his followers, this court was especially corrupt. Whereas the trying of monopoly patents had at least been done in the more general prerogative courts, anyone hauled before the Green Cloth for denying the purveyors was effectively being tried, judged, fined, and even imprisoned, by the very organisation that was accusing them. Even if purveyors really were acting illegally by naming their own prices, as opponents maintained, there would be no justice so long as the purveyors effectively judged themselves. For Hyde and his allies then, they wished to do to purveyance what they had done to monopolies — to subject them to the common law.
December 3, 2021
QotD: Questionable legal tactics
This is what I like to call a “reverse insanity defense”. You raise the defense in the hope that the judge is certifiably out of his friggin’ mind and grants it. Sadly, it rarely gets clients off the hook. It is, however, an excellent method of destroying your credibility with the court.
Conrad, “The Reverse Insanity Defense”, The Gweilo Diaries, 2004-09-28.
November 29, 2021
QotD: The law
Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in “the law” as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like “They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong”, or “They can’t do that; it’s against the law”, are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of Conscientious Objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a “miscarriage of British justice”. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
August 19, 2021
QotD: Judges
Judges often ignore the law in order to deliver decisions that make them happy. I recall my Con. Law professor talking about this. He called it the “TTWILI” rationale: “That’s The Way I Like It.” A judge will look at the law, find that it directs a result he finds objectionable, and then come up with a way to defy the law. He’ll pretend to misinterpret it, or he’ll turn a blind eye to inconvenient facts, or whatever it takes. It happens every day. It’s the judicial equivalent of jury nullification. And like jury nullification, it is perfectly legal, and there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do about it once it’s done. Like my father says, “A federal judge is the closest thing to God you will ever see on this earth.”
Steve H. “About Injunctive Relief: Read Before You Criticize”, Hog On Ice, 2005-03-23.
October 15, 2020
This is what happens when politicians delegate too much of their powers to the courts
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed recounts the stunning injustice of Soviet “justice”, in the person of Nikolai Krylenko:
As I watched the first day of hearings on Judge Barrett’s nomination, I was reminded of a largely forgotten Soviet legal theoretician from decades ago. His name was Nikolai Krylenko. Judge Barrett is being given the Krylenko treatment by Democrat senators like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, meaning this: The only thing that matters is whether she will vote their party line in future cases.
Under the communist dictatorship of Lenin and then Stalin, Krylenko (1885-1938) rose through the Soviet Union’s legal system to become People’s Commissar for Justice and a Prosecutor General. He was a leading practitioner of the theory of “socialist legality,” which held that an accused person’s innocence or guilt depended on that person’s politics (real or imagined). It sounds nuts and indeed, it was. It was the stuff of Orwell’s nightmare, and one of the reasons the Soviet Union thankfully perished of its own poison.
In The Gulag Archipelago, the famous Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounted an episode involving Krylenko. Shortly after Lenin’s Bolsheviks assumed power in 1917, an admiral named Shchastny was sentenced by one of the regime’s judges “to be shot within 24 hours.” When some in the courtroom expressed shock, it was Krylenko who responded thusly: “What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot.”
To Krylenko, the only morality was what served the Party and the State, which of course in the Soviet Union were one and the same. If your politics were not correct, you would be “corrected,” one way or the other. In Richard Pipes’ authoritative book, The Russian Revolution, Krylenko is quoted as exclaiming, “We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”
At the Senate hearings for the Barrett nomination, it was apparent the first day that the Judge was being Krylenkoed. Hostile senators pronounced their verdicts before she had uttered a word, and those verdicts had nothing to do with Barrett’s stellar qualifications or keen legal mind. Legal analyst and George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley commented,
What they were suggesting is that they will be voting against her because of what they expected her vote would be in a pending case, and that is a conditional confirmation … Here, the senators seem to be saying, “I’m not even going to listen; I’m going to vote against you because I don’t think you’re going to vote the right way …”
Judge Barrett clearly articulated her judicial philosophy, borne out by the way she has ruled at the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit: She believes the role of a judge or justice is to follow the Constitution and the law as written, not make stuff up in the service of a political agenda. How ironic that this is a point of fiery contention. Senators who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and the law hate the guts of a judge who does just that!
May 1, 2020
The Scottish Sentencing Council recommends that no under-25s be sent to prison
Theodore Dalrymple isn’t impressed with this proposal:
Just as one begins to imagine that the liberal pseudo-conscience can go no further in foolishness, it comes up with new schemes to make the world a little worse. Its inventiveness, in fact, is infinite, and no victory over it by common sense is ever more than temporary. The price of sanity, at least in the modern world, is eternal vigilance.
This is not to say, of course, that no liberal reform in the past was ever justified or did no good, or that none will ever do any good in the future. It is simply that, as a matter of contingent sociological fact, many liberals seem to have lost their minds.
The Scottish Sentencing Council, an advisory body with no legislative powers but whose recommendations judges disregard at their peril, put forward a proposal earlier this year that those under the age of 25 should not be sent to prison because research shows that their brains have not yet fully matured. It is difficult to know where to begin in arguing with this fatuity.
Let us then start with the notion that no man under 25 is sufficiently mature to know that it is wrong to strangle old ladies in their beds and the further proposition that, until that age, they are unable to control their impulse to do so.
[…]
The idea that a man’s brain is so immature before age 25 that he does not know that all manner of crimes are wrong would suggest a revision of our electoral laws, for if a man can neither distinguish right from wrong nor control his impulses, should he have the vote? Should he, in fact, be considered of legal age? Should he be allowed even to choose his own career? I doubt that the Sentencing Council would preen itself on the corollaries of its proposal.
There is, of course, an element of truth in what the Sentencing Council says. Our characters are not fully formed by the age of 25 — mine certainly wasn’t. It is true also that there is a biological component to crime, inasmuch as the vast majority of criminals in all societies in which crime is a category of behaviour are young and male. The rate at which even recidivist criminals commit crimes declines with age and most often reaches zero. Time is the great therapist.
But punishment is not therapy. It is a very good thing, of course, if punishment (such as imprisonment) reforms the criminal, and I think that it is a moral obligation of the state, if it is to lock up people, to try to give them something purposeful and worthwhile to do. But that is not the primary purpose of punishment. If it could be shown that rewarding criminals with large fortunes would change their behaviour — as almost certainly it would in most cases — we should not advocate such a course, even if it were a better way of reforming them in the sense of reducing their recidivism rate.
April 23, 2020
Trial by jury
Peter Hitchens recounts the essential role of the jury system in the evolution of the English (and, by inheritance, the Australian, Canadian, and even American) constitutional rights of the individual, which today seems to be in peril:
Am I going to have to fall out of love with juries? For decades I have defended these curious committees, which can ruin a man’s life in an afternoon. It has been a romance as much as it has been a reasoned position. Most people get their best lesson in jury trials from the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men. In that version, a single determined juror, played by Henry Fonda, gradually wins the rest of the panel round to an acquittal, at great cost in emotion and patience. But what really won my heart was Thomas Macaulay’s account of the Trial of the Seven Bishops, in which a London jury defied the wishes of the would-be autocrat King James II in 1688. It was an astonishing event, a monarch’s authority challenged by — of all unlikely things — a collection of Anglican prelates. Their acquittal, perhaps more than anything else, led to James’s fall a few months later. It was the beginning of true constitutional monarchy in Europe, the genesis of the English Bill of Rights and the forerunner of the very similar American document of the same name. It could not have happened without a jury.
For without a jury, any trial is simply a process by which the state reassures itself that it has got the right man. A group of state employees, none of them especially distinguished, are asked to confirm the views of other state employees. With a jury, the government cannot know the outcome and must prove its case. And so the faint, phantasmal ideal of the presumption of innocence takes on actual flesh and bones and stands in the path of power. Juries grew up in England almost entirely by happy accident, and no government would nowadays willingly create them where they do not already operate. A brief fashion for them in 19th-century Europe was swiftly stamped out by governments that understood all too well how much they limited their power. I believe the last true Continental juries, sitting in the absence of a judge, were abolished in France in 1940 by the German occupation authorities. People in Anglosphere countries, unaware that true independent juries rarely exist outside the English-speaking world, have no idea what a precious possession they are.
I remember actually pounding the arm of my chair with delight as I read Macaulay’s account of the response of the bishops’ attorney, Francis Pemberton, when threatened by the chief Crown prosecutor, the solicitor general: “Record what you will. I am not afraid of you, Mister Solicitor!” So this was England after all, and even the majesty of the Stuart Crown could not overawe the defense. This was wholly thanks to the fact that the trial took place before a jury — which duly acquitted the bishops of “seditious libel,” the ludicrous charge by which James had hoped to crush opposition to his plans to reverse the Reformation. Without a jury, the king would of course have won his case, and England would have gone down the road to absolutism (already followed in France, Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg dominions) with incalculable consequences for the whole world. Instead we had what came to be called the Glorious (or Bloodless) Revolution.
And my blood still runs faster when I recall this and other moments at which the mere existence of juries has made us all more free. Yet I also have terrible doubts. Is the independence of juries possible in the modern world, in which the English Bill of Rights is all but forgotten and a new dispensation reigns? All too often, I read reports of trials in my own country that fill me with doubt. I did my fair share of court reporting as an apprentice journalist many years ago, and I have a good understanding of how these things used to work and ought to work. Something has changed. There is a worrying number of sex cases now coming before the courts in which clear forensic proof of guilt is often unobtainable.
The alleged crimes themselves are repulsive, and the mere accusation is enough to nurture prejudice. The defendants have often been arrested in the scorching light of total publicity, in spectacular dawn raids totally unjustified by any immediate danger they present. Pre-trial media reporting has further undermined the presumption of innocence. In England there is still officially a strong rule against the media taking sides before the jury delivers its verdict. But this is not enforced as it once was. The prosecutions are frequently as emotional as they are unforensic, the opposite of the proper arrangement. Yet the defendants are often convicted even so (sometimes by majority verdicts, which in my view violate the whole jury principle). The state seems somehow to have turned the jury — often swayed by emotion — into its own weapon. And it is worse than the alternative. A wrongfully-convicted defendant, pronounced culpable by a jury of his peers, must feel a far deeper despair than one cast into prison by a mere panel of judges.
March 14, 2020
QotD: Apartheid
To anyone who was exposed to its machinations — let alone directly affected by it, as most South African Blacks were — apartheid was truly evil: only the absence of extermination camps differentiated it from the Nazism of the 1940s. In actuality, Blacks couldn’t live or work in “White” areas except by permit, couldn’t own businesses in White areas, couldn’t be promoted past a certain point when they did work outside the “Black” areas, and were forcibly resettled into Black “homelands” without legal redress or the ability to resist. Social intercourse between Blacks and Whites were restricted, by law, to business interactions only — any kind of interracial sexual activity was legally classified as “immorality” and summarily banned, carrying appallingly-high penalties in the breach thereof. Crimes by Whites against Blacks carried penalties far more lenient — to the extent of semi-official toleration — than those by Blacks against Whites, which were severely punished. The education system favored White children over Black children and continued throughout life — to where “White” universities were ubiquitous but “Black” universities could be counted on one hand, with a couple fingers left over. (Lest anyone is offended by the comparison to Nazism, simply substitute “Jews” for “Blacks” and “Aryans” for “Whites”. That would have been Germany, from 1933 to 1945.)
So the disappearance of apartheid cannot be seen as anything other than a Good Thing.
Kim du Toit, “Tough Question, Simple Answer”, Splendid Isolation, 2019-12-05.
March 7, 2020
QotD: “Jim Crow” laws
Everyone raised in the Unites States over the last fifty years has been required to memorize the official dogma regarding Jim Crow laws. These were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. The official version preached to this day is that they were draconian restrictions on blacks preventing them from having a normal life. Modern blacks are told that their condition is the direct result of white discrimination against blacks via these laws.
Now, there is a debate as to the intent and the effect of these laws, mostly because the Left has re-imagined that period in American history. The official version of the Civil Rights era is a fantasy with little connection to reality. What is not under dispute is that these laws existed and they had a negative impact on blacks. Black institutions did not receive public support. Blacks were denied access to the legal system, which often denied them justice when the victims of white malfeasance.
The best argument against these sorts of laws is that they created a second class of citizens, as a legal construct. You cannot have democracy if you have second class citizens, as democracy assumes all men being equal before the law. If the effect of Jim Crow was separate and equal, then maybe they would fit into democracy. In reality, they were separate and unequal, even accounting for the differences in the races. Therefore, as a legal construct, they violated the ideal of equality before the law.
The Z Man, “The Jim Snow Laws”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-01.
February 15, 2020
Theodore Dalrymple on the death penalty
From the New English Review:
I happened to read a book published in 1965, the year Britain legislated to end the death penalty, titled Murder Followed by Suicide, by the distinguished criminologist, D.J. West. For forty years up to that date, about a third of homicides had been followed by the suicide of those who committed them.
Most people who committed homicide followed by suicide were highly disturbed psychologically, if not outright mad. For example, in killing their families they imagined that they were saving them from a worse fate. They were not the kind of people who would be deterred by anything, including the death penalty.
Here was a natural experiment. I hypothesized that if the death penalty acted as a deterrent, the homicide rate would increase but the proportion of homicide followed by suicide, which in absolute numbers would remain more or less the same, would decrease. My friend, the criminologist David Fraser, looked at the actual figures and found that this was indeed the case. Some sane people who might otherwise be inclined to kill managed to control themselves knowing that they might be executed if they did.
For the death penalty to deter, it was not necessary for it to be applied in every case. Although the death penalty for murder was mandatory in Britain, it was commuted in nine cases out of ten. All that was necessary for it to deter was that execution was a real possibility. We shall never know whether the death penalty would have deterred even more if it had been applied more rigorously.
Does its deterrent effect, then, establish the case for the death penalty, at least in Britain? No, for two reasons. First, effectiveness of a punishment is not a sufficient justification for it. For example, it might well be that the death penalty would deter people from parking in the wrong place, but we would not therefore advocate it. Second, the fact is that in all jurisdictions, no matter how scrupulously fair they try to be, errors are sometime made, and innocent people have been put to death. This seems to me the strongest, and perhaps decisive, argument against the death penalty.
Against this might be urged the undoubted fact that some convicted murderers who have been spared death have gone on to kill again, and this will continue to be so. Victims of those who murder a second time are probably more numerous than those executed in error. Therefore, utilitarians might argue, even if mistakes are sometimes made, that the death penalty overall would save lives. (Let us disregard the fact that those murderers who go on to murder a second time would not necessarily have been executed after their first murder, for nowhere are all murderers executed.)
The argument holds only if utilitarianism is accepted as a true ground of ethics. But few of us would accept that it is. It might be that hanging the wrong person after the commission of a terrible crime would have a better social outcome than hanging no one at all, provided only that it was never publicly known that the wrong person had been hanged: but we would still be horrified at the prospect. Moreover, in practice, the execution of the innocent, once it is known, serves disproportionately to undermine faith in the justice system. And surely it is true that for the state to kill an innocent man is peculiarly horrific.
January 25, 2020
Cursus honorum – Praetors
Historia Civilis
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July 13, 2019
Piling on the charges to encourage plea bargaining – modern policing at work
A recent local crime story included the following laundry list of charges for one of the accused:
Shaquille Lovell, 21, of Ritson Road South in Oshawa is charged with careless carry of a prohibited firearm, contravention of storage regulations, unauthorized possession of a firearm, possession of a firearm knowing its possession is unauthorized, possession of a loaded prohibited firearm, and possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking (cocaine).
He was found to be carrying a prohibited weapon (a handgun) and a controlled substance (cocaine). Those two offences should be more than enough to prosecute with strong chance of conviction. All the rest of the bafflegab charges appear to be piled on to encourage plea bargaining, because they’re literally peripheral to the main criminal activity the accused has been charged with.
Lawyers, especially legal aid lawyers, will encourage the accused to “bargain down” the charges — one of the reasons for so many separate charges being applied — to avoid the cost and delay of a full trial … and the risk of facing the full potential sentence. Even relatively well-to-do middle class people will be more likely to want to avoid a long, drawn-out legal battle because it might well cost them everything they own. Poor people don’t even have that much of an option.
Canadian law enforcement is continuing to follow down the path of the United States, where a 90% conviction rate is considered low. According to Statistics Canada, “In 2013/2014, 63% of all cases completed in adult criminal court resulted in a finding of guilt”, but also “The extent to which plea negotiations are utilized in Canada currently remains unknown.”