Lebergott’s historical account – which reinforces the important findings of Robert Higgs about the postbellum economic trajectory of blacks in America – reveals the equalizing powers of economic competition. Contrary to popular myth, even racist southerners put their own economic well-being ahead of their irrational prejudices by competing with offers of higher wages for blacks’ labor and with offers of low prices for blacks’ business. This competition, in turn, increased blacks’ geographic and economic mobility and raised their incomes. The reason southerners – whether racists or rent-seekers (or both) – turned to government to get Jim Crow legislation is that market forces were undermining their racist preferences and competing away their uncompetitively high profits, rents, and wages.
Lebergott’s account also further reveals the utter implausibly of the claims of those who assert that today’s market in America for low-skilled workers is infected with monopsony power. While this market isn’t textbook perfect (no real-world market is), and while this market would be improved by making it even freer (for example, by eliminating occupational-licensing statutes and zoning restrictions), the ability of low-skilled workers today throughout the U.S. to move from job to job is surely better than was the ability of low-skilled blacks 150 years ago throughout the American south to move from job to job. And yet, as Lebergott documents, low-skilled American blacks of 150 years ago in the American south did indeed enjoy such mobility that economic competition raised their wages. Similarly, the ability today of entrepreneurs and business owners to discover and compete for under-priced labor is surely greater than was the ability of employers 150 years ago to do the same – and yet, again as Lebergott documents, such competitive initiative by employers was common 150 years ago and served to increase low-skilled workers’ mobility and wages.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-05-22.
June 28, 2017
QotD: How “Jim Crow” laws were brought in to suppress competition
June 27, 2017
Seattle sees some negative effects from their latest minimum wage hike
Ben Casselman and Kathryn Casteel report for FiveThirtyEight on initial reports from Seattle after their most recent increase in the city’s minimum wage rules:
In January 2016, Seattle’s minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13 for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington suggests the wage hike may have come at a significant cost: The increase led to steep declines in employment for low-wage workers, and a drop in hours for those who kept their jobs. Crucially, the negative impact of lost jobs and hours more than offset the benefits of higher wages — on average, low-wage workers earned $125 per month less because of the higher wage, a small but significant decline.
“The goal of this policy was to deliver higher incomes to people who were struggling to make ends meet in the city,” said Jacob Vigdor, a University of Washington economist who was one of the study’s authors. “You’ve got to watch out because at some point you run the risk of harming the people you set out to help.”
The paper’s findings are preliminary and have not yet been subjected to peer review. And the authors stressed that even if their results hold up, their research leaves important questions unanswered, particularly about how the minimum wage has affected individual workers and businesses. The paper does not, for example, address whether displaced workers might have found jobs in other cities or with companies such as Uber that are not included in their data.
Still, despite such caveats, the new research is likely to have big political implications at a time when the minimum wage has returned to the center of the economic policy debate. In recent years, cities and states across the country have passed laws and ordinances that will push their minimum wages as high as $15 over the next several years. During last year’s presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton called for the federal minimum wage to be raised to $12, and she faced pressure from activists to propose $15 instead. (The federal minimum wage is now $7.25 an hour.) Recently, however, the minimum-wage movement has faced backlash from conservatives, with legislatures in some states moving to block cities from increasing their local minimums.
Armoured Trains of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. Military History Visualized
Published on 26 Jun 2017
Check out Military History Visualized and his video on armoured trains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvHTR-5n2_E
Armoured Trains were heavily armed and armored trains operating the vast rail networks of Europe, especially on the Eastern Front of World War 1. Their tactics and design evolved considerably during the First World War and the later Russian Civil War. From rather improvised locomotives to sophisticated designs specially built for combat purposes.
Setting the wrong tone
Brendan O’Neill on the way Corbyn’s supporters seem to be harking back to Stalinist rhetoric (and belief):
I’m starting to feel a little disturbed by the Stalinist streak in the Corbynista movement. The anti-democratic sense of entitlement behind the cry of “Jeremy Corbyn is the Prime Minister”; the cult of personality growing around Corbyn, which emphasises the man and his goodness far more than his policies; the censorious branding of anyone who doesn’t have the correct Corbynista outlook as “Tory” or “far right”, which comes straight from the Stalinist handbook of denouncing everyone from Trotskyists in the Spanish Civil War to the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1956 as “fascists”; the culture war (cultural revolution?) against those generations that don’t share the worldview of the caring, meme-making, Jez-loving Glasto set…. the largely youthful bourgeoisie that make up the backbone of the Corbynista campaign look set to have a quite chilling, backward impact on political debate and public life, I think.
On the other hand, Dr. Sean Gabb seems to be softening in his attitude to Corbyn, if only due to rising disgust with Theresa May and her “conservative” government:
I’ve been thinking about Jeremy Corbyn. Is he really so awful as we are told? In particular, is he worse on things like immigration and political correctness than the Fake Conservatives have been in practice? They have kept the borders open. They haven’t shut down a single Cultural Marxist project.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not a socialist. However, the Conservatives have been in power for years now, and have hardly shown themselves to be friends of anything remotely describable as free enterprise. Privatisation and outsourcing have been a gigantic scam on ordinary people. Vast amounts of the taxpayers’ money are being poured into the hands of crony capitalists.
He is also against dropping bombs all over the Middle East, and is against a renewed Cold War with Russia.
Would be abolish a single civil liberty we currently enjoy? Would he be any worse than the present lot at negotiating our exit from the European Union?
If there were an election tomorrow, I’d have great trouble actually voting Labour. At the same time, I don’t feel I’d regard a Corbyn Government with the same visceral loathing I felt of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Is my brain softening with age? Or are my eyes beginning to open?
I look forward to enlightenment.
What Can You Do With a Jigsaw? A Lot! | WOODWORKING BASICS
Published on 21 Oct 2016
A lot of people think that they need a lot of big, expensive stationary tools for woodworking. If you don’t have a lot of space or money, a jigsaw is an amazing tool that can make almost all the cuts you need. Full article► http://bit.ly/JigsawBasics
QotD: The mistakes of the wealthy versus the mistakes of the poor
What have been the effects of progressive, centralized control of education, healthcare, and social services? It is true that the backwards practices of a few local school boards have been reformed, but the loss of a rich layer of church and private charity social services has impoverished local social capital. While today’s mass communication and the Internet removed one of the impulses to community (“I’m bored. Let’s go into town and hang out!”), a lot of the loss is due to the crowding out by a monopoly government, which had deep pockets and would use them to continue failed policies, as Microsoft in the 80s used the profits from its near-monopoly OS business to keep creating mediocre applications software until the innovators in applications were destroyed.
Very wealthy people have always been freer than others from the stifling social controls and judgments of bourgeois community standards. The elite of Paris and London in the 1800s often kept mistresses and dabbled in drug use without having their lives destroyed. The lower classes did not have the wealth to recover from errors, and those who did not hew to bourgeois social norms were isolated and damaged.
As the upper middle classes in the US grew as wealthy as the elite had been in the previous century after WWII, the sexual revolution and War on Poverty bestowed more social freedom on everyone — the middle and upper classes got birth control, sexual freedom, and women in the workplace, while the poor got programs to “uplift” them from poverty (a term which exposes the condescension involved). Social workers in vast numbers were hired to distribute assistance, free of any obligation — except for unmarried mothers, who were told their assistance would be cut if they married a working man.
Over the course of several generations, the well-off used their freedoms and came out relatively unscathed — families were still largely intact, children were still trained in the arts of civilization and followed the path of university and marriage into professional careers. But the artificial assistance to the poor, with its lack of community obligations and support and its immediate withdrawal in the event of marriage and better work, removed the social incentives that keep healthy communities healthy. Intact families grew less common. Crime and social pathologies became the norm in poor inner-city communities. As conditions worsened, the motivated and organized left for more civilized neighborhoods with better schools. The segregation of cities and even whole regions by income increased. Whole generations of children were poorly raised, poorly schooled, and left to drift without purpose or guidance from now-absent fathers, who were in prison or adrift themselves.
Jeb Kinnison, “Real-life ‘Hunger Games'”, According to Hoyt, 2015-09-25.
June 26, 2017
Human Capital & Conditional Convergence
Published on 26 Apr 2016
In our previous macroeconomics video, we said that the accumulation of physical capital only provides a temporary boost to economic growth. Does the same apply to human capital?
To answer that, consider this: what happens to all new graduates, in the end?
For a while, they’re productive members of the economy. Then age takes its toll, retirement rolls around, and eventually, the old workforce is replaced with a new infusion of people. But then, the cycle restarts. You get a new workforce, everyone’s productive for a while, and then they too retire.
Does this ring a bell?
It should, because this is similar to the depreciation faced by physical capital.
Similarly, are there diminishing returns to education? It likely wouldn’t pay off for everyone to have a PhD, or for everyone to master Einstein’s great theories.
That means the logic of diminishing returns, and the idea of a steady state, also applies to human capital.
So, now we can revise our earlier statement.
Now we can say that the accumulation of any kind of capital, only provides a temporary boost in economic growth. This is because all kinds of capital rust. So, one way or another, we’ll reach a point where new investments can only offset depreciation.
It’s the steady state, all over again.
However, what does the journey to steady state look like?
The Solow model predicts that poor countries should eventually catch up to rich countries, especially since they’re growing from a lower base. And given their quicker accumulation of capital, poorer nations should also grow faster, than their more developed neighbors.
And eventually, every country should reach similar steady states.
In other words, we would see growth tracks that all eventually converge.
So, why isn’t this always the case? Why, in some cases, are we seeing “Divergence, Big time,” as coined by economist Lant Pritchett?
The answer to these questions, lies in the institutions of different countries and the incentives they create.
Assuming that a certain set of countries do have similar institutions, that’s where we see the convergence predicted by the Solow model. We see that poorer countries do grow faster than their richer counterparts. And conditional on having similar institutions, eventually, even poorer countries will reach a similar steady state of output as more developed nations. We call this phenomenon conditional convergence.
You can think of it as a national game of catch-up, with catch-up only happening if institutions don’t differ.
What happens though, once all this catching up is done?
Let’s not forget that there’s still another variable in the Solow model. This is variable A: ideas — the subject of our next video.
There, we’ll show you how ideas can keep a country moving along the cutting edge of growth.
What Latin Sounded Like – and how we know
Published on 12 Aug 2016
Classical Latin went extinct, yet we still know how to pronounce it. Proof!
Take a trip with me back to Catholic school, then back even further to old Rome. We’ll see what Latin pronunciation did – and did NOT – sound like in the mouths of the Romans. Thanks to ancient authors and modern Romance languages, we’ll even glimpse a range of evidence for the speech of Caesar and pauper alike!
SERMO VULGARIS ALL DAY LONG, am I right? 😉
“Ah, the Comeau case. Schwisberg says it could change everything – knock down all the barriers”
It’s ridiculous that 150 years into Confederation, and we still don’t have free trade within Canada:
If you’re on vacation abroad somewhere this summer and find yourself explaining to people over dinner what makes Canada so unique and special, use the story about Gerard Comeau and his beer run back in 2012. There is no more Canadian story than that.
Comeau is a Canadian who, looking for the best bargain he could, drove to a Canadian town a few miles from his home in Canada, bought 14 cases of beer and three bottles of liquor from Canadian beer and liquor stores, then returned to his home. In Canada.
A squad of plainclothes Mounties with binoculars, it turned out, had him under surveillance, according to his lawyer. On his way home from the Canadian town to his Canadian home, he was intercepted and handed a ticket for $292.50 by uniformed Canadian officers who then seized all the alcohol he’d purchased.
His Canadian crime: his beer run had crossed one of Canada’s internal borders. He’d driven from New Brunswick into Quebec. As far as New Brunswick was concerned, that made him a smuggler.
Sixteen other people were charged that day in the same sting operation, but Comeau had more spine than most and fought the ticket. Some smart lawyers from Ontario and Western Canada got involved, and – my god, I love it when things like this happen – he won.
A New Brunswick judge ruled that the province’s law against importing alcohol from other provinces violated the Constitution Act, Sec. 121, which states: All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.
The ruling shocked New Brunswick and most of the other provinces, which consider Sec. 121 to be one of the most horrible and un-Canadian sentences in the Canadian Constitution, something that should be ignored at all costs.
Tank Chats #11 Valentine
Published on 24 Nov 2015
The eleventh in a series of short films about some of the vehicles in our collection presented by The Tank Museum’s historian David Fletcher MBE.
The Valentine – A popular and reliable British tank. It was designed and built by Vickers-Armstrongs Ltd., in 1938 and offered to the Army who accepted it for production shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939.
It made quite a name for itself in the North African campaign and also served with New Zealand forces in the Pacific and with Soviet troops on the Russian front.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1949-344
QotD: Psychiatric hospitals
It’s interesting that psychiatric hospitals are used as a cliche for “a situation of total chaos” – I think I’ve already mentioned the time when the director of a psych hospital I worked at told us, apparently without conscious awareness or irony, that if Obamacare passed our hospital would have too many patients and “the place would turn into a madhouse”. There’s a similar idiom around “Bedlam”, which comes from London’s old Bethlehem psychiatric hospital.
In fact, psych hospitals are much more orderly than you would think. Maybe 80% of the patients are pretty ‘with it’ – depressed people, very anxious people, people with anger issues who aren’t angry at the moment, people coming off of heroin or something. The remaining 20% of people who are very psychotic mostly just stay in their rooms or pace back and forth talking to themselves and not bothering anyone else. The only people you really have to worry about most of the time are the manic ones and occasionally severe autistics, and even they’re usually okay.
For a place where two dozen not-very-stable people are locked up in a small area against their will, violence is impressively rare. The nurses have to deal with some of it, since they’re the front-line people who have to forcibly inject patients with medication, and they have gotten burned a couple of times. And we doctors are certainly trained to assess for it, defuse it, and if worst comes to worst hold our own until someone can get help.
Yet in the two years I’ve worked at Our Lady Of An Undisclosed Location, years when each doctor has talked to each of their patients at least once a day, usually alone in an office, usually telling them things they really don’t want to hear like “No, you can’t go home today” – during all that time, not one doctor has been attacked. Not so much as a slap or a poke.
I am constantly impressed with how deeply the civilizing instinct has penetrated. When I go out of the workroom and tell Bob, “I’m sorry, but you’re disturbing people, you’re going to have to stop banging on the window and shouting threats, let’s go back to your room,” then as long as I use a calm, quiet, and authoritative voice, that is what he does. With very few exceptions, there is nobody so mentally ill that calmness + authority + the implied threat of burly security guards won’t get them to grumble under their breath but generally comply with your requests, reasonable or otherwise.
Scott Alexander, “Reflections From The Halfway Point”, Slate Star Codex, 2015-06-29.
June 25, 2017
South Africa’s new hate speech laws may carry Apartheid-era legacies
Martin van Staden reports on post-Apartheid South Africa’s drift back toward repressive rules, veiled by political correctness:
After the end of Apartheid in 1994, nobody would have guessed that South Africa would be making many of the same mistakes as the Apartheid regime only two decades later, from censoring speech to violating agricultural property rights.
In our process of transformation, we were supposed to move away from the Apartheid mentality. Instead, we have doubled down on many of the same policies: the so-called Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill of 2016 is perhaps the gravest threat to freedom of expression which South Africans have ever faced; at least since the Suppression of Communism Act was repealed.
The Hate Speech Bill of 2016
The bill, which is still being debated in Parliament, provides that someone guilty of hate speech can be imprisoned for up to three years, and, if they are convicted of it again, up to 10 years. Given the serious punitive nature of this sanction, you would imagine the bill has a strict definition of “hate speech.” But you would be wrong.
Hate speech is defined as any communication which is insulting toward any person or group, and which demonstrates a clear intention to bring contempt or ridicule based on 17 protected grounds. Such grounds include race, gender, sex, belief, culture, language, gender identity, and occupation or trade. But insult is an extremely low threshold of offense, especially if it is considered with protected characteristics like belief and occupation. In other words, someone can theoretically be imprisoned for saying, “Politicians are thieving liars!”
Recently, the former leader of the opposition tweeted that “not all” of the legacies of colonialism have had detrimental results in South Africa. The ruling party subsequently called on Parliament to fast-track the Hate Speech Bill so instances like that can be dealt with. This signifies that political persecution is not off the table, and that the ruling party has shown its interest in using the proposed law against opponents.
[…]
Apartheid was fundamentally an anti-property rights system masquerading as a Western democracy fighting against Soviet communism. American economist Walter Williams wrote in 1990 that “South Africa’s history has been a centuries-long war on capitalism, private property, and individual rights.”
Duncan Reekie of the University of the Witwatersrand agreed that “Protestations from Pretoria notwithstanding, the South African regime has been one of national socialism.” Indeed, wage boards, price control boards, and spatial planning boards were commonplace in the effort to suppress black South Africans’ desire to engage in the economy on the same terms as whites.
The Suppression of Communism Act was used exclusively for political persecution by the previous regime. Anyone of significance who opposed racist policies in public could be branded as “communists” who wanted to overthrow the government. The Hate Speech Bill will have the same effect, but it will be shielded by the veneer of political correctness. With the new Bill, the government claims to give effect to a democratic mandate – a privilege the Apartheid regime did not enjoy – but the consequences will be substantially the same: a chilling effect throughout the country for anyone who dares to oppose the political class.
Spain and the Spanish Arms Industry in WW1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal
Published on 24 Jun 2017
Spain was one of the neutral nations of World War 1. A deep social divide and a decline from world power meant that they stayed out of the global conflict. Still, the war affected Spain in many ways. One of the consequences was the establishment of a huge arms industry that supported France and other fighting nations.
Sometimes, the workman is right to blame his tools
Paul Sellers recently bought and tested a new Two Cherries brand “Gent’s saw” and was very unhappy with the tool:
This week I picked up a brand new gent’s saw straight from the pack made by the famous German tool makers Two Cherries. I noticed the unusual tooth shape, which strangely resembled the edge of a tin can when we used to open it with a multipurpose survival knife. I wondered how it would work and whether it was just a miscut. I examined several others and realised it was actually intentional as they were indeed manufactured that way. I offered the saw to the wood and the very middle cut with the dovetailed angle and the broken off section was the results of ten strokes.
“The long saw cut on the left is how the saw cuts by a man who has used such saws every day, six days a week for 53 years. The two to the right are how it cuts after sharpening and redefining the teeth.”
Could this truly be the end product of the once highly acclaimed Two Cherries of German tool manufacturing? I looked at the packet and, well, there it was; Made in Germany. So here is my perspective on the saw. Nice beechwood handle–nicely shaped (but it is unfinished), nice brass back, good quality steel plate, not too soft, not too hard. Two Cherries, the materials leave you no excuse for making such a poor grade product. YOU should be very ASHAMED of your product and yourselves. It is the very worst saw of any and all saws ever, ever, ever manufactured. I have never seen anything worse.
[…]
If you bought this saw and you thought the outcome was a result of your inexperience. It’s not. Blame the tool maker. It’s his pure arrogance to think he can pass something off to you like this and call it a dovetail saw. Shame on you Two Cherries, shame on you!
Fort Drum – America’s concrete battleship
Published on 15 Sep 2016
After the United States acquired the Philippines from Spain, the U.S. Board of Fortifications recommended that important harbors be fortified. This led to the development of defenses on several islands at the mouth of Manila and Subic Bays. One of these was El Fraile Island which would later become Fort Drum, America’s concrete battleship.
Read more about America’s concrete battleship, Fort Drum, here: http://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/americas-concrete-battleship-defended-manila-bay-until-the-very-end
