Quotulatiousness

July 19, 2021

Talk is cheap, as a pizza chain CEO demonstrates brilliantly

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

John Miltimore examines the claims of the CEO of the &pizza chain in the Washington DC area that his stores have no problem getting staff because he pays them a “living wage”:

As far as PR goes, Lastoria gets an A+. He was profiled by Business Insider, CBS News, and other media outlets. His economics grade, however, is another story.

First, the notion that &pizza’s wages are uniquely generous is wrong. The minimum wage in the nation’s capital, after all, is $15.20. Considering that Washington, DC has one of the highest costs of living in the US, it’s not unreasonable to assume that &pizza is paying workers what amounts to the market wage of their labor (i.e. the price they’d get in the absence of a wage floor). This is a stark contrast to other parts of the United States. Fifteen dollars in DC translates to roughly $24 in Florida, $25 in Alabama and Tennessee, $26 in New Mexico, and $27 in Louisiana.

Second, Lastoria decries the alleged “shortage of business owners willing to pay a living wage.” But it should be pointed out that &pizza is one of those businesses.

While there is no objective standard to determine what a living wage actually is, MIT has a Living Wage Calculator that allows readers to compute living wages based on the formula created by Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier.

To say that &pizza doesn’t pay its employees a “living wage” is an understatement. The living wage for a single mom with one child is $38.48 in Washington DC. For a single mother with two children, it’s $47.89. Indeed, even for a married couple with just one child, the living wage is $20.69 — nearly $5 an hour more than the average pay of Lastoria’s workers. (It’s unclear why Lastoria is having fewer problems hiring workers than other businesses, but it’s most likely attributable to local factors, such as the fact that he’s servicing nine of the twenty wealthiest counties in America.)

Finally, Lastoria’s claim that higher wages increase productivity enough to improve a company’s bottom line — the efficiency wage hypothesis — has problems logically and empirically. First, it implies that companies not currently paying an efficiency wage are willing to take less profit simply to make workers poorer. Moreover, efficiency wages have been shown to reduce employment, similar to minimum wage laws.

Lastoria might see the $16 an hour average wage as exceedingly generous — especially when he compares it to lower nominal wages paid in other parts of the country — but it’s a far cry from a “living wage”, according to the model used by living wage advocates.

I asked Lastoria how he’d respond to those who say restaurants like his should be required to pay each worker a living wage. He didn’t respond.

July 16, 2021

The lure of London and agricultural specialization in post-Black Death England

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

In the latest edition of his Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes outlines the “push” and “pull” theories to account for the vast growth of London and how that urban growth strongly encouraged specialization in English agriculture to feed the great city:

The 1677 original of this map is 8 feet 5 inches by 4 feet 7 inches, in 20 sheets. In 1894 the British Museum granted permission to the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society to make a reduced copy, of which the original of this scan is a copy. The L&M Society copy apparently did not match the dissected sheets perfectly, and the misjoins can be seen in places in this reproduction.
Scanned copy of reproduction in Maps of Old London (1908) of Ogilby & Morgan’s Map of London.

Something significant happened to the English countryside in the century before 1650. Although England’s population merely recovered to its pre-Black Death high of about 5 million, the economy was transformed. Having once been an overwhelmingly agrarian society, by 1650 a small but unprecedented proportion of the population now lived in cities, and less than half of the workforce was employed in agriculture. The country had de-agrarianised, and most remarkably of all, its food was still grown at home.

[…]

One possibly explanation is that there was some special change in England’s agricultural technology that increased its productivity, requiring fewer and fewer people, and possibly even driving them off the land, so that they were forced to find alternative employment. This thesis comes in various forms, many of which I’m still coming to grips with, but broadly speaking it implies a “push” from the fields, and into industry and the cities. Desperate, and unable to demand high wages, these cheaper workers should have stimulated industry’s growth.

The alternative, however, is that there was nothing very special or innovative about English agriculture, and that instead there was an even larger increase in the demand for workers in industry and services. The thesis implies a “pull” into industry and the cities, causing people to abandon agriculture for more profitable pursuits, and thereby making England’s agriculture de facto more productive — something that may or may not have actually been accompanied by any changes to agricultural technology, depending on how much slack there was in how the labourers or land had been employed.

The push thesis implies agricultural productivity was an original cause of England’s structural transformation; the pull thesis that it was a result. The evidence, I think, is in favour of a pull — specifically one caused by the dramatic growth of London’s trade.

Even though the population eventually recovered from the massive impact of the Black Death, not all of the land that was under plough was returned to active farming and a much greater diversity of uses for rural land emerged, including more pastures for grazing livestock, and small cash crops to be sold into the cities (especially into London).

With the dramatic growth of London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the more intensive methods came to be in much higher demand. Indeed, the extraordinary pull of the city’s growth resulted in English agriculture becoming increasingly specialised. Not only were there millions of acres of pasture still left that could be returned to the plough, but despite the relative fall in the prices of livestock, some areas actually became even more devoted to pasture. Many of the villages that had been abandoned after the Black Death were, even by the 1870s, over half a millennium later, still not being farmed. With wealthy Londoners demanding more varied diets, with meat and dairy, the various regions of England discovered their comparative advantages rather than all shifting to grain. There was thus extra room for agriculture to become more productive simply by devoting the best land for pasture to pasture, and the best soils for arable to arable, then trading the produce with one another, rather than have each area try to be self-sufficient. It’s something we also see in the decline of grains like rye, especially near London, to be replaced by wheat — the switching of a crop best-suited to local subsistence, to one that could be sold elsewhere and in bulk for cash.

In general, the south and east of England became increasingly arable, while the north-west concentrated on pasture. Yet there were also exceptions to be made for London’s particular wants. Thus, county Durham converted more land to arable to feed the miners of Newcastle coal, used to heat London’s homes; and the county of Middlesex, now largely disappeared under London’s own expansion, specialised in pasture for horses, rather than feeding people, so as to feed the city’s main sources of transportation. As the writer Daniel Defoe put it in the 1720s, “this whole Kingdom, as well the people, as the land, and even the sea, in every part of it, are employed to furnish something, and I may add, the best of everything, to supply the city of London with provisions.”

July 14, 2021

Instead of economics, how about “humanomics”?

Filed under: Books, Economics, Education, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, Allison Schrager reviews Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science by Deirdre McCloskey:

I thoroughly enjoyed Deirdre McCloskey’s Bettering Humanomics, but I may be a glutton for feelings of intellectual inadequacy. Truth be told, I only understood about 60 percent of the book. It contains countless references to great works of the humanities, economics, and the history of economic thought. A casual reader cannot possibly be familiar with a fraction of them, even within his own field. But McCloskey expects you to know them.

At first this book frustrated and confused me. Then I suspected this reaction was by design. I am, after all, an economist myself: I have dedicated my life to learning my craft and benefited from many years of training at great institutions from important thinkers. But reading Humanomics, I became fully aware of how little I know. I now believe that becoming a fully formed economist requires that I stop watching trash TV in my free time and read the Theory of Moral Sentiments instead. McCloskey pulls no punches, whether on her intellectual opponents or on the reader. Here is one example, where she defends herself from a critic, philosopher Gerald Gaus:

    Aside from these textual matters, I must say I find myself repelled by Gaus’s vision of people as cynical conformists: “we are such deeply social normative creatures, in the sense that we are so attuned to the normative expectations of others, that we can achieve a stable rule-based system of cooperation even when many are not enthusiastic about the moral attitudes and virtues that the rules express.” I invite him to reread Thucydides’s dialogue between the Athenian diplomats and the Melians, and repent.

McCloskey argues that economics would be better if we listened to people — in controlled experiments, chat rooms, meetings, surveys, and at the Rotary. We need to absorb the lessons from art and culture (perhaps trash TV has value, after all). She does not believe that economists need to ditch math and data, but our overreliance on these tools encourages us to view people as abstractions and leads us astray. Such tendencies also help explain the rise of behaviorism, which assumes that humans are flawed creatures who must be nudged by a wise bureaucrat into better choices; recent flirtations with industrial policy; and the belief that, if we just get our government and laws right, growth will follow.

We must consider how individuals see and experience the world around them, and we must recognize that humans are malleable in ways that we don’t account for. For example, McCloskey estimates a quarter of all income comes from “Sweet Talk” — not lies or trickery, but the ability to be persuasive and compelling, a crucial aspect of sales and advertising. It influences how we perceive the world and can be an important part of motivation.

We economists have lost our appreciation for the humanities, and that means that we underestimate the importance of human dignity. This is no small oversight. McCloskey spends about a third of her book arguing that understanding the humanity of the northwestern European population can explain why it industrialized first. Other countries around the world had wealth, strong institutions, and well-trained mathematicians and engineers (perhaps better ones), but industrialization happened in Britain first because it treated its people with dignity and empowered them with both rhetoric and knowledge.

July 10, 2021

Public libraries or public menaces?

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

In the latest edition of SHuSH, Kenneth Whyte finds a kindred-ish soul in his concerns about the influence public libraries have had in the last fifty years:

“Toronto Public Library” by Jim of JimOnLight is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It’s not easy being a crank, isolated from one’s fellow man by unpopular convictions, burdened by the certain knowledge of truths society can’t bring itself to admit.

The loneliness of crankdom can be insupportable. So I was overjoyed this month to run across an excellent book by Ed D’Angelo: Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education, and the Public Good.

D’Angelo, a Ph.D. in philosophy with a master’s of library and information sciences, was supervising librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library for more than twenty years. His politics are not altogether mine (he leans Marxist), and his prose is not what you’d call smooth, but we are in total agreement that public libraries went off the rails sometime in the 1960s and now menace much that is good in life.

If you’re new to this space, you might have missed me mentioning here and there that increasingly aggressive lending practices by public libraries are undermining the entire bookselling ecosystem; that three times as many books are borrowed as bought in the US on an annual basis (four times as many in Canada); that libraries are putting booksellers out of business by advertising how much people can save by borrowing rather than buying books; that most library borrowing is done by people who can afford to pay for books, and who are reading for entertainment, not edification; and that all of this free-and-for-pleasure borrowing is a major reason author incomes are at record lows.

[…]

An honest scholar, Ed notes that there were cracks in this foundation before the 1960s. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, none other than Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System and founding member of the American Library Association, dissented from the notion that librarians should instill their values in patrons by directing their reading. He wanted a more mechanical, frictionless distribution of books, and encouraged the hiring of women as librarians on the assumption that they would be less inclined to impose their standards on others.

(Melvil […] was a devil, according to his biographer Wayne Wiegand. He subjected female subordinates to unwanted touching and kissing, and was rumored to have asked them to put their bust sizes on application forms. Forced out of the ALA for sexual harassment, Dewey further distinguished himself as racist and anti-semite. Yet his name was attached to the ALA’s highest honor until 2019.)

Ed also notes that there were stocks of popular (i.e., unedifying) literature in most public libraries even in the early years, but these were intended as the first rung on a ladder of development that “ascended toward the classics of western civilization.”

Starting in the 1960s, writes Ed, that the distribution of popular literature became an end in itself for the public library. Librarians lost confidence or interest in their mission of encouraging enlightened citizenship. They abandoned their role as gatekeepers. It was suddenly square to impose standards or tastes on patrons.

July 4, 2021

QotD: It’s not your money … it’s the GOVERNMENT’S money

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

To the left any money earned anywhere in the country automatically belongs to the government. This confirms my suspicion that at heart, deep inside, they think of the normal form of government as feudalism. This is because I’ve seen very old land deeds and other documents from when Portugal was a monarchy and it read something like “His Majesty, graciously allows his subject so and so to exert ownership over this parcel of land” the underlying conceit being that the whole land of the whole country belonged to the king, and it was in his purview to hand it out to whomever he pleased for as long as he pleased, while it still belonged to him. (The documents I saw were for things like house plots, not fiefdoms, incidentally.)

The left seems to be going off the same book when they say things like “How will you pay for the tax cuts?” as if the government is OF COURSE entitled to all your money, and if you’re getting some back, that part must be compensated for.

Sarah Hoyt, “The Tragedy of the Squid Farms on Mars”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-12-05.

July 3, 2021

Taiwan, 2021

Filed under: China, Economics, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Admiral Gary Roughead considers the regional situation of Taiwan in 2021:

Taiwan relief map.
Library of Congress Geography & Map Division via Wikimedia Commons.

There has been a spate of recent articles proffering when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will likely be capable of invading Taiwan. The prognostications are interesting but unhelpful as they distract from the reality of the range of coercive actions the PRC may impose on Taiwan and what could happen now as a result of the PRC increasing pressure and a related military accident or misstep in the vicinity of Taiwan.

The current American penchant to jump to military options to address thorny global problems often casts the Taiwan dilemma in a superficial bilateral or trilateral military context. That aperture must be opened more fully to consider the realities, attributes, and interests of Taiwan, and how those factors will influence the methods and timing of Beijing’s reunification objective. Moreover, those realities, some inconvenient, must underpin new and broader thinking about how to ensure Taiwan’s existence as a vibrant democracy.

[…]

Changing defense strategy to adjust to new circumstances can’t simply discount the realities of today. The interaction of the Air Forces of Taiwan and the PRC in 2020 was extraordinarily high and costly for Taiwan, and maritime and naval considerations will also continue to loom large for Taiwan’s security.

PRC naval force structure both in terms of capacity (numbers) and capability (effectiveness and quality) has grown impressively in the past two decades and some comparisons are worth noting. There are over 330 ships in the PLA Navy and construction continues at an impressive pace. The Chinese Coast Guard numbers 255 ships. The PLA Navy, except for short episodic out of area deployments of small numbers of ships, is concentrated within the First Island Chain. Taiwan’s navy has 86 ships in service, more than half are coastal patrol craft. Its small Coast Guard of 23 ships is not close to being on par in numbers, ship size, or capability as that of the PRC. The U.S Navy stands at 296 ships. The American fleet enjoys a qualitative advantage, but only approximately 60 percent of the U.S. Fleet is assigned to the Pacific, with 11 of those forward deployed to Japan. The remainder are thousands of miles away.

PLA Air Force and Taiwan Air Force aircraft inventories are similarly imbalanced with fighter numbers 600 (Eastern Theater) and 400 respectively. The PLA Air Force’s fighter total is 1,500 and would inevitably backfill shortages and combat losses. The U.S. Air Force combat coded fighters number 1,011. The PRC’s Air Force and Navy regional concentration is reinforced by a Rocket Force of nearly 1,000 intermediate and lesser range ballistic missiles and 300 ground launched cruise missiles.

China’s focus on “informationized” warfare integrates cyber operations into the PRC’s anti-access area denial strategy and architecture. The BeiDou satellite network enables full autonomy in positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) information for PLA ground, sea, and air forces and is the essential factor in precision weapon employment. Another contributor to precision engagements and overall situational awareness is China’s 120 reconnaissance and remote sensing satellites. A robust People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia also provides close-in maritime locating information and has and will interfere with U.S., Taiwanese, and other nations’ naval and maritime operations.

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.

July 1, 2021

John McWhorter reviews Facing Reality by Charles Murray

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

In the latest installment from It Bears Mentioning, John McWhorter considers Murray’s latest book to be his weakest:

… Facing Reality is seriously disturbing. Murray gives a great deal of evidence for two points. One is that black people aren’t, on the average, as intelligent as other people. The other is that black people in America are more violent than others.

Those who on some level celebrate the latter as black people getting back at the white man in the only way they can, should know that the facts don’t lend themselves to that vigilante justice analysis. More specifically, black people kill each other more than members of other groups kill each other.

I find the violence point relatively unsurprising. Murray stays agnostic as to what the cause of it is; he proposes no genetic analysis, for example. And really, let’s try this. In the 1960s, a new and powerful fashion in black thought, inherited from the general countercultural mood, rejects championing assimilation to proposing that opposition to whiteness is the soul of blackness. Meanwhile, white leftists encourage as many poor black women as possible to go on welfare, hoping to bankrupt the government and inaugurate a fairer America. Soon, being on welfare in poor black communities is a new normal – hardly the usual, but so common that people grow up seeing not working for a living as ordinary. Then at this same time, a new War on Drugs gave poor black men a way of making half of a living by selling drugs on the black market, amidst a violent culture of gangland turf-policing. This feels more natural to them than it would have to their fathers because 1) the new mood sanctions dismissing traditional values as those of a “chump”, 2) it no longer feels alien to eschew legal employment, and 3) the Drug War helps make it that most boys in such neighborhoods grow up without fathers anyway.

The question might be just how black men amidst these changes would not have embraced violence in a new way.

* * *

The point about intelligence, however, is tough reading. Many will try the usual arguments – that race is a fiction (but while there are gray zones, humans do divide into delineable races genetically), that all races have a range from genuises on down (but the issue is that some races have more geniuses than others), that intelligence tests are “biased” somehow (but no one will specify just how, and this sort of bias is decades gone now).

The data, unless Murray is holding back reams of data with opposite results, cut brutally through all of this. It isn’t that black people are on the bottom on one big test in one big study, but that a certain order of achievement manifests itself in one study after another with relentless and depressing regularity. Asians on top, then come the whites, then Latinos, and then black people.

People will insist that none of this has anything to do with intelligence, but one thing cannot be denied – whatever it signifies, black people have a big problem performing on intelligence tests. The consistency of the results, if it is unconnected to intelligence, is clearly connected to something, or the results wouldn’t be so damnedly consistent.

June 28, 2021

Pounds, shillings, and pence: a history of English coinage

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lindybeige
Published 18 Dec 2020

I talk for a bit the history of English coinage, and the problems of maintaining a good currency. Once or twice I might stray off topic, but I end with an explanation of why the system worked so well.

Picture credits:
40 librae weight
Martinvl, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons

Sceat K series, and others
By Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…

William I penny, and Charles II crown
The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons

Bust of Charlemagne
By Beckstet – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…

Edward VI crown
By CNG – http://www.cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?Coi…, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…

Charles II guinea
Gregory Edmund, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons

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QotD: Urbanization

Filed under: Economics, Education, India, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history.

Stewart Brand, “Environmental Heresies”, Technology Review, 2005-05

June 18, 2021

Innovation was minimal in the Roman Empire, because slave societies think they don’t need new inventions

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Koyama writes for the Foundation for Economic Education on the similarities and differences of the economy of the Roman Empire at its second-century peak and the booming European economies of the 17th and early 18th centuries:

“The Consummation of Empire” from the painting series “The Course of the Empire” by Thomas Cole (1801-1848).
New York HIstorical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

The most obvious institutional difference between the ancient world and the modern was slavery. Recently historians have tried to elevate slavery and labor coercion as a crucial causal mechanism in explaining the industrial revolution. These attempts are unconvincing […] but slavery certainly did dominate the ancient economy.

In its attempt to draw together the various strands through which slavery permeated the ancient economy, [Aldo] Schiavone’s chapter “Slaves, Nature, Machines” [in The End of the Past] is a tour de force. At once he captures the ubiquity of slavery in the ancient economy, its unremitting brutality — for instance, private firms that specialized in branding, retrieving, and punishing runaway slaves — and, at the same time, touches the central economic questions raised by ancient slavery: to what extent was slavery crucial to the economic expansion of the period between 200 BCE and 150 AD? And did the prevalence of slavery impede innovation?

It is impossible to do justice to the argument in a single post. Suffice to say that after much discussion, and many fascinating interludes, Schiavone suggests that ultimately the economic stagnation of the ancient world was due to a peculiar equilibrium that centered around slavery.

One can think of this equilibrium as resting on two legs. The first is the observation that the apparent modernity of the ancient economy — its manufacturing, trade, and commerce rested largely on slave labor. The expansion of trade and commerce in the Mediterranean after 200 BC both rested on and drove the expansion of slavery. Here Schiavone notes that the ancient reliance on slaves as human automatons — machines with souls — removed or at least weakened, the incentive to develop machines for productive purposes.

The existence of slavery, however, was not the only reason for the neglect of productive innovation. There was also a specific cultural attitude that formed the second leg of the equilibrium:

    None of the great engineers and architects, none of the incomparable builders of bridges, roads, and aqueducts, none of the experts in the employment of the apparatus of war, and none of their customers, either in the public administration or in the large landowning families, understood that the most advantageous arena for the use and improvement of machines — devices that were either already in use or easily created by association, or that could be designed to meet existing needs — would have been farms and workshops

The relevance of slavery colored ancient attitudes towards almost all forms of manual work or craftsmanship. The dominant cultural meme was as follows: since such work was usually done by the unfree, it must be lowly, dirty and demeaning:

    technology, cooperative production, the various kinds of manual labor that were different from the solitary exertion of the peasants on his land — could not but end up socially and intellectually abandoned to the lowliest members of the community, in direct contact with the exploitation of the slaves, for whom the necessity and demand increased out of all proportion … the labor of slaves was in symmetry with and concealed behind (so to speak) the freedom of the aristocratic thought, while this in turn was in symmetry with the flight from a mechanical and quantitative vision of nature

Thus this attitude also manifests itself in the disdain the ancients had for practical mechanics:

    Similar condescension was shown to small businessmen and to most trade (only truly large-scale trade was free from this taint). The ancient world does not seem to have produced self-reproducing mercantile elites. Plausible this was in part because of the cultural dominance of the landowning aristocracy.

The phenomenon coined by Fernand Braudel, the “Betrayal of the Bourgeois”, was particularly powerful in ancient Rome. Great merchants flourished, but “in order to be truly valued, they eventually had to become rentiers, as Cicero affirmed without hesitation: ‘Nay, it even seems to deserve the highest respect, if those who are engaged in it [trade], satiated, or rather, I should say, satisfied with the fortunes they have made, make their way from port to a country estate, as they have often made it from the sea into port. But of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman'” (Schiavone, 2000, 103).

Such a cultural argument fits perfectly with Deirdre McCloskey’s claim in her recent trilogy that it was the adoption of bourgeois cultural norms and specifically bourgeois rhetoric that distinguished and caused the rise of north-western Europe after 1650.

Feeding “the masses”

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt looked at the perennial question “Dude, where’s my (flying) car?” and the even more relevant to most women “Where’s my automated house?”:

The cry of my generation, for years now, has been: “Dude, where’s my flying car?”

My friend Jeff Greason is fond of explaining that as an engineering problem, a flying car is no issue at all. It is as a legal problem that flying cars get interesting, because of course the FAA won’t let such a thing exist without clutching it madly and distorting it with its hands made of bureaucracy and crazy. (Okay, he doesn’t put it that way, but I do.)

[…]

But in all this, I have to say: Dude, where’s my automated house?

It was fifteen years ago or so, while out at lunch with an older writer friend, that she said “We always thought that when it came to this time, there would be communal lunch rooms and cafeterias that would do all the cooking so women would be free to work.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew our politics weren’t congruent, but really the only societies that managed that “Cafeterias, where everyone eats” were the most totalitarian ones, and that food was nothing you wanted to eat. If there was food. Because the only way to feed everyone industrial style is to take away their right to choose how to feed themselves and what to eat. And that, over an entire nation, would be a nightmare. Consider the eighties, when the funny critters decided that we should all live on a Russian Peasant diet of carbs, carbs and more carbs. Potatoes were healthy and good for you, and you should live on them.

It will surprise you to know – not — that just as with the mask idiocy, no study of any kind supports feeding the population on mostly vegetables, much less starches. What those whole “recommendations” were based on was “diet for a small planet” and the bureaucrats invincible ignorance, stupidity and assumption of their own intelligence and superiority. I.e. most of what they knew — that population was exploding, that people would soon be starving, that growing vegetables is less taxing on the environment and produces more calories than growing animals to eat — just wasn’t so. But they “knew” and by gum were going to force everyone to follow “the plan”. (BTW one of the ways you know that Q-Anon is in fact a black ops operation from the other side; no one on the right in this country trusts a plan, much less one that can’t be shared or discussed.) Then the complete idiots were shocked, surprised, nay, astonished when their proposed diet led to an “epidemic of obesity” and diabetes. Even though anyone who suffered through the peasant diet in communist countries, could have told the that’s where it would lead, and to both obesity and Mal-nutrition at once.

So, yeah, communal cafeterias are not a solution to anything.

My concern about the “automated house of the future” is nicely prefigured by the “wonders” of Big Tech surveillance devices we’ve voluntarily imported into our homes for the convenience, while awarding untold volumes of free data for the tech firms to market. Plus, the mindset that “you must be online at all times” that many/most of these devices require means you’re out of luck if your internet connection is a bit wobbly (looking at you, Rogers).

June 9, 2021

QotD: Failing to account for mere “women’s work”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Oh, certainly, you could produce quantities of infants­ although it would take enormous resources to do so. Highly trained techs, as well as equipment and supplies. But don’t you see, that’s just the beginning. It’s nothing, compared to what it takes to raise a child. Why, on Athos it absorbs most of the planet’s economic resources. Food of course ­housing, ­education, clothing, medical care­ it takes nearly all our efforts just to maintain population replacement, let alone to increase. No government could possibly afford to raise such a specialized, non-productive army.”

Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. “How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they’re not necessarily impoverished, either.”

Ethan, diverted, said, “Really? I don’t see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.”

Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. “Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren’t added in. They’re counted as free.”

Ethan stared. “What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don’t the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?”

“I believe,” her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness, “they call it women’s work.”

Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos, 1986.

June 8, 2021

If you were trying to destroy American cities from within … what would you be doing differently?

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt’s latest Libertarian Enterprise post considers the state of US urban areas after more than a year of Wuhan Coronavirus lockdowns, social controls, and medically “justified” repression:

“Homeless encampment above the 101 @ Spring” by Steve Devol is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Look, I’m sure this was suggested by China, and the dunderheads are totally buying it under their Compleate Illusions system.

Sure climate change. Climate change can justify anything. If we told them they needed to burn people alive to prevent climate change, they’d already been building the pyres.

But that’s just sort of a reflexive thing, like a Moslem saying “Insh Allah“. It’s not actually involved in their thinking as such. Or their thinking is not involved in it. whichever.

The truth is that they realized that the Covidiocy has destroyed the cities.

You see they had everything planned. They were going to force more and more of us into the city, because they were going to make running an internal combustion engine so hard. So if you had a job, you’d live in the city. Where you’re more easily controlled. And where they could make you believe bullshit like overpopulation and that — look at all the homeless — we needed more and more welfare. Their idea of their perfect world is the 1930s version of the future. Just megalopolisis, isolated, with people completely controlled. It has the bonus of leaving pristine wilderness outside that, for the elites to build their dachas.

And part of the problem is that they never understand other people have agency and respond to circumstances.

I don’t know what they expected when they went full fashboots and — in the case of Polis, and I bet not the only one — gave homeless the right to camp in every public land, and defecate in public as well as freeing a bunch of felons.

Did they expect this would just scare people more, and they’d lock themselves in, in fear and trembling, allowing the idiots to design society.

Instead, people left. Americans are on the move. I swear half of my friends are moving from more locked to less locked, from bluer to redder. Some demographers have caught on, seeing through the smoke and mirrors, and are confused — most of them being leftist — because Americans are in the middle of a full migration. As full and as all pervading as the movement west. Or after the civil war the movement of black people North.

Some of this must have penetrated the granite-like heads of the ruling left. Or at least the planning left.

They somehow didn’t expect—possibly because they don’t really get technology. I mean, I have my moments, but I swear most democrats were disappointed when laptops started being made with no “cup holders”. They’re at that level of stupid — that a tech that hasn’t been fully implemented, giving us the ability to work from home, would be kicked into high gear from the covidiocy.

I guess they expected people who work mostly from their computers to sit at home watching panic porn on TV and not work?

More importantly, I don’t think they expected people who have to work in person to follow that migration because, well … if you owned a restaurant that the covidiocy killed, you might, for instance, pay heed to the fact people are driving everywhere because, duh, masks on planes, and therefore build a roadside diner or perhaps find a small town that’s underserved and start anew there.

Oh … a lot of people are changing jobs too, and the jobs are no longer binding them to big cities.

Honestly, the only way for big cities to save themselves is to become touristic centers. NYC was halfway there when the covidiocy hit. Only not fully there because lefty governance sucks at making a city safe.

If I were a lefty governor or mayor right now, I’d aim the fashboots at crime and disorder, get rid of the homeless, spruce up the place, and go all out in courting tourism. Then people would move in to cater to the tourists, and eventually other businesses would move in, because that’s where people are.

But leftists don’t think that way. Carrot and incentive is beneath them (of course.) Their idea is rather that they will force those unwashed peasants to do what they want.

June 7, 2021

Dude, where’s my (flying) car?

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The latest of the reader-contributed book reviews at Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten looks at Where is my Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall:

What went wrong in the 1970s? Since then, growth and productivity have slowed, average wages are stagnant, visible progress in the world of “atoms” has practically stopped — the Great Stagnation. About the only thing that has gone well are computers. How is it that we went from the typewriter to the smartphone, but we’re still using practically the same cars and airplanes?

Where is my Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall, is an attempt to answer that question. His answer is: the Great Stagnation was caused by energy usage flatlining, which was caused by our failure to switch to nuclear energy, which was caused by excessive regulation, which was caused by “green fundamentalism”.

Three hundred years ago, we burned wood for energy. Then there was coal and the steam engine, which gave us the Industrial Revolution. Then there was oil and gas, giving us cars and airplanes. Then there should have been nuclear fission and nanotech, letting you fit a lifetime’s worth of energy in your pocket. Instead, we still drive much the same cars and airplanes, and climate change threatens to boil the Earth.

I initially thought the title was a metaphor — the “flying car” as a standin for all the missing technological progress in the world of “atoms” — but in fact much of the book is devoted to the particular question of flying cars. So look at the issue from the lens of transportation:

    Hans Rosling was a world health economist and an indefatigable campaigner for a deeper understanding of the world’s state of development. He is famous for his TED talks and the Gapminder web site. He classifies the wealthiness of the world’s population into four levels:

    1. Barefoot. Unable even to afford shoes, they must walk everywhere they go. Income $1 per day. One billion people are at Level 1.

    2. Bicycle (and shoes). The $4 per day they make doesn’t sound like much to you and me but it is a huge step up from Level 1. There are three billion people at level 2.

    3. The two billion people at Level 3 make $16 a day; a motorbike is within their reach.

    4. At $64 per day, the one billion people at Level 4 own a car.

    The miracle of the Industrial Revolution is now easily stated: In 1800, 85% of the world’s population was at Level 1. Today, only 9% is. Over the past half century, the bulk of humanity moved up out of Level 1 to erase the rich-poor gap and make the world wealth distribution roughly bell-shaped. The average American moved from Level 2 in 1800, to level 3 in 1900, to Level 4 in 2000. We can state the Great Stagnation story nearly as simply: There is no level 5.

Level 5, in transportation, is a flying car. Flying cars are to airplanes as cars are to trains. Airplanes are fast, but getting to the airport, waiting for your flight, and getting to your final destination is a big hassle. Imagine if you had to bike to a train station to get anywhere (not such a leap of imagination for me in New York City! But it wouldn’t work in the suburbs). What if you had one vehicle that could drive on the road and fly in the sky at hundreds of miles an hour?

Before reading this book, I thought flying cars were just technologically infeasible, because flying takes too much energy. But Hall says we can and have built them ever since the 1930s. They got interrupted by the Great Depression (people were too poor to buy private airplanes), then WWII (airplanes were directed towards the war effort, not the market), then regulation mostly killed the private aviation industry. But technical feasibility was never the problem.

Hall spends a huge fraction of the book on pretty detailed technical discussion of flying cars. For example: the key technical issue is takeoff and landing, and there is a tough tradeoff between convenient takeoff/landing and airspeed (and cost, and ease of operation). It’s interesting reading. But let’s return to the larger issue of nuclear power.

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