World War Two
Published 3 Aug 2021Well, we all know by know that the Wehrmacht is driving into the Caucasus to try and take the Soviet oilfields, but how bad is their oil situation, actually? And how will they get it out of the ground if the Soviets sabotage the fields and wells? What exactly is the plan? Let’s find out.
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August 4, 2021
Oil – Hitler’s Only Chance to Win the War? – WW2 Special
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Canadian tourist dollars are helping keep Cuba’s struggling economy afloat
In Tuesday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh praises a CBC News (!!!) article on the massive impact of purely Canadian tourist income on Cuba:
A billboard in Havana, showing Camilo Cienfuegos, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Fidel Castro, 4 November 2014.
Photo attributed to Tumpatemcla~commonswiki via Wikimedia Commons.
NP Platformed returns today with that rarest of things in the National Post: an absolutely unironic recommendation to read a CBC News report. The article in question comes from Evan Dyer, and it’s headlined: “How Canadian Tourism Sustains Cuba’s Army And One-Party State“. And it is, we have to confess, a masterpiece of precision. We appreciate the small, uncomfortable barb, for example, concealed in this phrase: “in normal years far more Canadians enter and leave Cuba than citizens of any other country — including Cuba itself.”
Why is Canada a quintessential source of the tourism dollars that flow directly to the Cuban army, or in some cases to partnerships between foreign hospitality providers (like Toronto’s Sunwing Travel Group) and the Cuban army? Last month the world was reminded by Cuban protesters how fragile and miserable the communist island’s economy really is. As people stormed into the streets pleading for food and medicine, sympathizers abroad continued to sing from their moth-eaten hymnal and blame America’s long-standing trade embargo (which allows even American citizens and companies to sell, wait for it, food and medicine to Cuba).
And yet, within Canada, there is no sign of any social stigma attaching to Cuban travel. Perhaps it’s because Latin America is one huge undifferentiated wad in our minds, and if we began to get fussy about the governments of various Caribbean countries (most of which let people leave if they like), we might be forced to … we dunno, winter in Costa Rica or Bermuda or someplace weird like that. Cuba can’t find the cash to keep a fresh coat of paint on a hospital, but the empire of affordable resorts and jineterismo continues to expand. Some of you helped build it.
There is nothing new about this — except the obvious willingness of ordinary Cubans to risk wounds and death to protest against their communist rulers, as Michael Totten reported more than seven years ago:
Cubans in the hotel industry see how foreigners live. The government can’t hide it without shutting the hotels down entirely, and it can’t do that because it needs the money. I changed a few hundred American dollars into convertible pesos at the front desk. The woman at the counter didn’t blink when I handed over my cash — she does this all day — but when she first got the job, it must have been shattering to make such an exchange. That’s why the regime wants to keep foreigners and locals apart.
Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they’re “rich” compared with everyone else. In fact, they’re an elite class enjoying privileges — enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while — that ordinary Cubans can’t even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a month — 30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba.
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July 30, 2021
The British government reaches deep into the bag of “nudge” tricks yet again
Britain’s public health boffins have got the government agitated enough to try major incentives to encourage British shoppers to buy healthier, lower-calorie foods. Tim Worstall explains that, because those shoppers are human beings, this suite of incentives won’t do at all what Nanny expects them to do:
Now consider how it has to work. You go shopping, you present your DimbleCard and gain points for the healthiness of that shopping basket. Lettuce and carrots galore, super, free ticket to London on the choo choo.
So, where are the chocco biccies? If you buy them when presenting your card then no choo choo for you. What happens?
The lettuce and the carrots are bought on the card, the chocco biccies are not. Everyone simply does two transactions, with DimbleCard and sans. Lots of free choo choo and no change, whatsoever, in diet.
Yes, of course people will do this. For that’s what people do. Survey the landscape of incentives in front of them then maximise their utility, the outcome, in the face of them. It’s a restricted rationality, restricted by knowledge, but it is there. Everyone will fiddle the system because that’s what it is to be human. Collecting the fire from the lightning strike is fiddling the universe, that’s just what we do.
This being why so many clever schemes to encourage or deter this or that just don’t work. This being why those detailed plans for men, if not mice, gang aft into idiocy. Because we out here, hom sap, will play whatever system there is to our benefit.
No, this will not work out like supermarket loyalty cards. Yes, it’s true, most of us do use them. But the incentive is for us to do so. The more we do use them then the more discounts we gain, the better off we are, even at the cost of that data. How does this new government one work? The less we buy of certain things the better off we are. So, less of those things will be bought using the cards.
It is not possible to insist that people must use the card to buy things. Well, not unless we’re about to descend into the dystopia desired by Caroline Lucas it’s not. There might be a card reader at the point of purchase but the supermarkets will not demand that a sale can only happen when a card is read.
Therefore there will be those sales which gain points which make prizes. There will also be those DimbleCardless sales which do not gain points, or even demerits, and are done without their being registered in the system.
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July 19, 2021
Talk is cheap, as a pizza chain CEO demonstrates brilliantly
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.
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July 16, 2021
The lure of London and agricultural specialization in post-Black Death England
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.”
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July 14, 2021
Instead of economics, how about “humanomics”?
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.
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July 10, 2021
Public libraries or public menaces?
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.
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July 4, 2021
QotD: It’s not your money … it’s the GOVERNMENT’S money
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.
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July 3, 2021
Taiwan, 2021
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.
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July 2, 2021
Britain’s “agricultural revolution”
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.
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July 1, 2021
John McWhorter reviews Facing Reality by Charles Murray
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.
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June 28, 2021
Pounds, shillings, and pence: a history of English coinage
Lindybeige
Published 18 Dec 2020I 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 CommonsSceat 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 CommonsBust 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 CommonsSupport me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige
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QotD: Urbanization
Stewart Brand, “Environmental Heresies”, Technology Review, 2005-05
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June 18, 2021
Innovation was minimal in the Roman Empire, because slave societies think they don’t need new inventions
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.
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Feeding “the masses”
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).
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