ReasonTV
Published on 6 Aug 2008Johan Norberg, author of In Defense of Global Capitalism, sits down with reason.tv’s Michael C. Moynihan to sort out the myths of the Sweden’s welfare state, health services, tax rates, and its status as the “most successful society the world has ever known.”
February 20, 2018
February 13, 2018
Tulip mania … wasn’t
Tim Harford on bubbles in general and the great seventeenth-century Tulip mania in the Netherlands in particular:
It seems all so much easier with hindsight: looking back, we can all enjoy a laugh at the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, to borrow the title of Charles Mackay’s famous 1841 book, which chuckles at the South Sea bubble and tulip mania. Yet even with hindsight things are not always clear. For example, I first became aware of the incipient dotcom bubble in the late 1990s, when a senior colleague told me that the upstart online bookseller Amazon.com was valued at more than every bookseller on the planet. A clearer instance of mania could scarcely be imagined.
But Amazon is worth much more today than at the height of the bubble, and comparing it with any number of booksellers now seems quaint. The dotcom bubble was mad and my colleague correctly diagnosed the lunacy, but he should still have bought and held Amazon stock.
Tales of the great tulip mania in 17th-century Holland seem clearer — most notoriously, the Semper Augustus bulb that sold for the price of an Amsterdam mansion. “The population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade,” sneered Mackay more than 200 years later.
But the tale grows murkier still. The economist Peter Garber, author of “Famous First Bubbles”, points out that a rare tulip bulb could serve as the breeding stock for generations of valuable flowers; as its descendants became numerous, one would expect the price of individual bulbs to fall.
Some of the most spectacular prices seem to have been empty tavern wagers by almost-penniless braggarts, ignored by serious traders but much noticed by moralists. The idea that Holland was economically convulsed is hard to support: the historian Anne Goldgar, author of Tulipmania (US) (UK), has been unable to find anyone who actually went bankrupt as a result.
It is easy to laugh at the follies of the past, especially if they have been exaggerated for the purposes of sermonising or for comic effect. Charles Mackay copied and exaggerated the juiciest reports he could find in order to get his point across.
Update, 15 February: For more detail on the lack-of-bubble in Tulip Mania, you might want to read Anne Goldgar’s post at The Conversation.
Update the second, 30 March: At the Foundation for Economic Education, Douglas French takes issue with Goldgar’s interpretation of Tulip Mania.
Sure, rare bulbs were hard to reproduce and in the greatest demand. However, this does not explain the price history of the common Witte Croonen bulb, which rose in price twenty-six times in January 1637, only to fall to one-twentieth of its peak price a week later.
Peter Garber, tulip mania historian, who, like Goldgar, doesn’t believe tulip mania was a bubble, admitted the “increase and collapse of the relative price of common bulbs is the remarkable feature of this phase of the speculation.” Garber wrote that he “would be hard-pressed to find a market fundamental explanation for these relative price movements.”
Goldgar claims in her latest article that she found no bankruptcies or suicides associated with the bust and that the Dutch economy was not affected by the crash. However, the data I discovered while writing my thesis for Murray Rothbard that is the book Early Speculative Bubbles and Increases in the Supply of Money, was that there was a doubling of bankruptcies in Amsterdam from 1635 to 1637.
Also, Ms. Goldgar must have forgotten the numerous lawsuits she mentioned in her book that were spawned by busted tulip deals. Some of the litigation lasted for years after the bulb price crash in February 1637.
[…]
Ms. Goldgar’s research indicates that only a few hundred people traded tulip bulbs. However, she writes that a few bulbs did sell for 5,000 guilders (the price of a house) and “only 37 people who spent more than 300 guilders on bulbs, around the yearly wage of a master craftsman,” as if this makes her case that this wasn’t a financial bubble.
Readers should note Ms. Goldgar is not interested in prices or market fundamentals. Her research interests are “17th- and 18th-century European social and cultural history; The Netherlands and Francophone culture; Print culture and the culture of collecting; The interaction of society, art, and science.”
In my review of Goldgar’s book in 2007 for History of Economic Ideas, I wrote,
By chronicling the extensive and intertwined network of the real buyers and sellers in the tulip trade, Goldgar puts a human face on tulipmania like no other author has done.”
However, the economics profession will always define tulip mania as Guillermo Calvo does in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics: “situations in which some prices behave in a way that appears not to be fully explainable by economic ‘fundamentals.'”
Maybe no chimney sweeps were trading in bulbs, but the massive price movements of simple tulip bulbs don’t lie.
February 1, 2018
Penn and Teller on Vaccinations
UltraMiraculous
Published on 20 Aug 2010
December 27, 2017
Will Hutton mansplains Blockchain … as he understands it
Tim Worstall tries to mitigate the damage caused by Will Hutton’s amazing misunderstanding of what blockchain technology is:
Will Hutton decides to tell us all how much Bitcoin and the blockchain is going to change our world:
Blockchain is a foundational digital technology that rivals the internet in its potential for transformation. To explain: essentially, “blocks” are segregated, vast bundles of data in permanent communication with each other so that each block knows what the content is in the rest of the chain. However, only the owner of a particular block has the digital key to access it.
So what? First, the blocks are created by “miners”, individual algorithm writers and companies throughout the world (with a dense concentration in China), who want to add a data block to the chain.
Will Hutton is, you will recall, one of those who insists that the world should be planned as Will Hutton thinks it ought to be. Something which would be greatly aided if Will Hutton had the first clue about the world and the technologies which make it up.
Blocks aren’t created by miners and individual algorithm writers, there is the one algo defined by the system and miners are confirming a block, not creating it. The blocks are not in communication with each other, they do not know what is in the rest of the chain – absolutely not in the case of earlier blocks knowing what is in later. It’s simply a permanent record of all transactions ever undertaken with an independent checking mechanism.
It’s entirely true that this could become very useful. But it’s really not what Hutton seems to think it is.
November 26, 2017
Fire-arrows!
Lindybeige
Published on 10 Jun 2016Fire-arrows – did archers really use them in battles? We see them in the movies, so presumably not.
This is the most-anticipated video of all for this channel, which naturally makes me a bit nervous. Will people be hideously disappointed? I mentioned two and a half years ago that I would make a video on this topic, and this video shows that I am as good as my word, and not over-hasty either.
My thanks to the three people who pointed out quite correctly that when I said ‘Francis Bacon’ (1561-1626) I meant Roger Bacon (1219-1292).
November 2, 2017
“… the United States made a collective choice to let the South have a mythology in place of independence”
Colby Cosh is cheering on the carnage of the US-Civil-War-revisionism war that appears to have broken out to our south:
As someone who is relishing the United States’s outburst of Civil War revisionism, I am a little confused by the controversy over a remark by the White House chief of staff, John Kelly. Kelly is being assailed for saying in a Fox News interview that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the (American) Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”
This was part of a familiar-sounding encomium to Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s warlord. It is the kind of thing, until recently an accepted part of the American civil religion, that is being instantly challenged in our tempestuous moral climate. And I think this is, on the whole, terrific. About time, and then some.
But I would have thought that the objectionable part of Kelly’s comment was the stuff about “men and women of good faith” — as if Southern whites had not made war for the purpose of preserving a caste’s economic advantage and its political dominance within the federation. Did “good faith” always characterize the Confederacy’s collective behaviour before and during the war? One thinks of Andersonville, or Fort Pillow, or Bleeding Kansas, or — to throw in a Canadian angle — the Confederacy’s use of British North America as a base for conspiracies and violence. We may even recall Preston Brooks beating Charles Sumner nearly to death in the United States Senate in 1856, and being lionized throughout the South for it.
“Good faith,” eh? This reflects the toxic part of the schoolhouse account of history given to Americans: faced with the problem of being bound together in a Union as a victorious nation and a vanquished one, the United States made a collective choice to let the South have a mythology in place of independence. An account of the war as a fateful collision between “ways of life” was allowed to stand — perhaps in the absence of acceptable alternatives — and the South was permitted to commemorate and celebrate war heroes without inviting odium or reprisal. Those heroes ultimately remained part of the ruling class in the South.
It is easy to recognize talk of “good faith” (or “ways of life”) as the thinking of somebody still under the cultural spell of Gone With the Wind. The puzzle is that it does not seem to be the “good faith” part of Kelly’s comment that is inviting the strongest objections. He is being vilified by the “lack of an ability to compromise” part.
Misunderstood Moments in History – The Spartan Myth
Invicta
Published on 27 Oct 2017The Spartans are immortalized in history as super soldiers bred for war. However most of what we think we know about them is a lie. Today we will unmask the truth behind the Spartan Myth.
The Great Courses Plus is currently available to watch through a web browser to almost anyone in the world and optimized for the US market. The Great Courses Plus is currently working to both optimize the product globally and accept credit card payments globally.
Documentary Credits:
Research: Dr Roel Konijnendijk
Script: Invicta
Artwork: Milek J
Editing: Invicta
Music: Total War OST, SoundnoteDocumentary Bibliography:
Paul Anthony Cartledge, The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-heroes of Ancient Greece
Nigel Kennell, Spartans: A New History (2010)
S. Hodkinson, Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000)
J. Ducat, Spartan Education: Youth and Society in the Classical Period (2006)
S.M. Rusch, Sparta at War: Strategy, Tactics and Campaigns, 550-362 BC (2011)
E. Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (1969)
S. Hodkinson & I.M. Morris (eds.), Sparta in Modern Thought (2012)
October 13, 2017
October 8, 2017
Limited liability isn’t magic
John Hasnas has a Princess Bride problem:
In the much-beloved movie, The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya has spent his life seeking revenge against Count Rugen, the man who murdered his father. When he finally confronts Count Rugen, he keeps repeating, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Finally, in utter frustration, Count Rugen yells, “Stop saying that!”
I know just how Count Rugen felt.
Everywhere I go, people begin arguments for a wide variety of normative conclusions with the premise, “Corporations have the special privilege of limited liability.” Thus:
- “Corporations have the special privilege of limited liability; therefore, they have social responsibilities that individuals and other businesses do not.”
- “Corporations have the special privilege of limited liability; therefore, government regulation is required to level the competitive playing field.”
- “Corporations have the special privilege of limited liability; therefore, they are obligated to manage their company in the interest of all their stakeholders.”
I encounter this statement in so many contexts, both inside and outside the academy, that, like Count Rugen, I want to yell. “Stop saying that!”
However, in my case, it is not because I fear death, but because the statement is so patently false.
Corporations Do Not Have Limited Liability
Shareholders have limited liability. If a corporation contracts a debt that it does not pay or is found liable for a tort, one hundred percent of its assets are available to satisfy the debt or judgment. If it does not have enough cash on hand to pay what it owes, its creditors may force the firm to liquidate and sell off its physical assets to discharge its debt. The corporation is fully liable for all the debts it incurs and all the torts it commits.
It is the corporation’s shareholders who have limited liability. They are liable to lose one hundred percent of their investment in the firm, but no more. The firm’s creditors may not collect the corporation’s debt or judgment out of the shareholders’ personal wealth. Thus, the shareholders’ liability for the debts of the firm is limited to the size of their investment in the firm.
October 3, 2017
Viking warrior women?
ESR posted a link to this article by Julia Dent on the much ballyhoo’d “discovery” of the grave of a Viking woman warrior:
You may have heard of L’Anse aux Meadows, the discovered Viking site in Canada (because I repeat, Vikings actually settled in North America, even if it didn’t last long), but did you know that they uncovered another Viking site only last year? If you listen to Dan Snow’s History Hit podcast (which I highly recommend), you may have heard about it, but I only saw a couple of articles about the discovery. This finding is further proof that Leif Eriksson and his fellow Vikings actually settled in North America years before Christopher Columbus was even born, so it isn’t insignificant in the least.
But Leif Eriksson was overshadowed once again—this time by an unknown woman’s grave. However, there’s more to the story than meets the eye. I’ve written about the danger of people leaping to conclusions before, and it appears that it’s happened again. While there may have been female Viking warriors, there isn’t strong evidence that this Viking woman was actually a “high-ranking officer” or even a warrior. University of Nottingham professor of Viking studies Judith Jesch burst everyone’s bubbles with an article going through the “evidence” from the grave site and contesting it all. I highly encourage you to read her analysis in full, but here’s a quick summary of some of her points about the authors who published the “evidence” that the grave site was for a female Viking military officer:
The authors listed on the article don’t include a language specialist, even though it starts with referencing “’narratives about fierce female Vikings fighting alongside men’, and concludes with a quotation from an Eddic poem in translation.” The authors even referenced one of Jesch’s books but not the book where she actually writes about women. The authors also make a lot of references to “historical records” without specifying which ones they’re talking about.
The authors pretty much decide that this Viking woman is a high-ranking officer based on what she was buried with. The grave contained “’a full set of gaming pieces’ which apparently ‘indicates knowledge of tactics and strategy’” and “’the exclusive grave goods and two horses are worthy of an individual with responsibilities concerning strategy and battle tactics.’” There isn’t even any conclusive evidence that men buried with those items were military leaders.
This gravesite was actually excavated over a century ago and things weren’t labeled well, so the female Viking bones may not have even been buried with all those items. Someone even commented on Jesch’s article that there was a third femur found with this woman’s bones, but the authors just ignored it. There were also no signs of harm to the bones, which means she was either one heck of a warrior who never got injured, or that she wasn’t a warrior at all.
So the authors assumed this female Viking was a military leader without any actual evidence and they ignored evidence that didn’t go along with their theory. Like many people today, they leapt to conclusions, and everyone was eager to agree that this woman was definitely a military leader because that suited a contemporary narrative, not a historical fact. This doesn’t mean that people in the future won’t find hard evidence that female Vikings could be military leaders, but you can’t “confirm” that this Viking was a military leader quite yet. Even if there weren’t female Viking warriors, women in Viking times were actually well-respected and enjoyed many rights and freedoms; they could divorce their husbands, own land, and could even have government representation. Women like Freydis and Gudrun had a significant impact on their societies, even if they didn’t lead troops into battle.
ESR also commented on the more direct physiological arguments against the “warrior woman” theory:
Accessible treatment of why to be skeptical of the recent media buzz about female Viking warriors.
My wife Cathy and I are subject-matter experts on this. We’ve trained to use period weapons and have studied both the archeological and saga evidence. And we can tell there’s a lot of PC horse exhaust being emitted on this topic.
On average, men are so much faster and stronger than women that what would happen to women using using lethal contact weapons on a pre-modern battlefield is highly predictable. They’d die. They’d die quickly.
The mean difference in physical ability (especially at burst exertion and upper-body strength) is so great that it takes a woman way over in the right tail of the Gaussian to stand against an average male. My wife is one of those exceptions, but we don’t fool ourselves that this is the typical case.
See also the U.S. Olympic women’s soccer team being defeated by a squad of 15-year-old boys. That is what’s normal for humans.
September 25, 2017
The Truth About Stonehenge – Anglophenia Ep 6
Published on 26 Jun 2014
Siobhan Thompson follows up ‘One Woman, 17 British Accents’ with a video dispelling a commonly believed myth about Stonehenge.
And by the way, Stonehenge isn’t the only stone structure worth visiting in Britain: http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2014/06/impressive-british-stone-structures-arent-stonehenge/
Photos via AP Images.
September 8, 2017
Grant Vs Lee Who Was The Better General?
Published on 17 Aug 2016
Today I break down the book: Grant And Lee: A Study In Personality And Generalship By J.F.C Fuller
Here’s a quick break down of the two personalities
Grant: common sense, logical, simple plans with incredible precise execution, the ability to bring a whole lot of moving pieces into focus, and finally the ability to think clearly under stress.
Lee: The ability to motivate his men to an incredible degree, an extremely kind man, very good at doling out troops to his commanders when in a defensive situation.This video goes into more detail on all of this, I hope you enjoyed!
September 5, 2017
Georges Guynemer – The Flying Icon of France I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
Published on 4 Sep 2017
George Guynemer was one of the top scoring flying aces of the entire First World War with 54 aerial victories. In his lifetime, he was celebrated as a hero, an icon and an inspiration in France. When he went missing 100 years ago, in September 1917, it was a great shock to the nation and to this day his death is not fully understood.
August 24, 2017
Teaching history in the South – the “Lost Cause” school of historiography
Warren Meyer gives some background on how most people in the Southern US were taught the history of the “War Between the States”:
The Lost Cause School: I want to provide some help for those not from the South to understand the southern side of the statue thing. In particular, how can good people who believe themselves not to be racist support these statues? You have to recognize that most folks of my generation in the South were raised on the lost cause school of Civil War historiography. I went to one of the great private high schools in the South and realized later I had been steeped in Lost Cause. All the public schools taught it. Here is the Wikipedia summary:
Obviously this was promoted by the white supremacists after the war, but in the 20th century many well-meaning people in the South who are not racist and by no means want to see a return of slavery or Jim Crow still retain elements of this story, particularly the vision of the Confederacy as a scrappy underdog. But everything in these two paragraphs including the downplaying of slavery in the causes of the Civil War was being taught when I grew up. It wasn’t until a civil war course in college (from James McPherson no less, boy was I a lucky dog there) that I read source material from the time and was deprogrammed.
The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply Lost Cause, is a set of revisionist beliefs that describes the Confederate cause as a heroic one against great odds despite its defeat. The beliefs endorse the virtues of the antebellum South, viewing the American Civil War as an honorable struggle for the Southern way of life, while minimizing or denying the central role of slavery. While it was not taught in the North, aspects of it did win acceptance there and helped the process of reunifying American whites.
The Lost Cause belief system synthesized numerous ideas into a coherent package. Lost Cause supporters argue that slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War, and claim that few scholars saw it as such before the 1950s. In order to reach this conclusion, they often deny or minimize the writings and speeches of Confederate leaders of the time in favor of later-written revisionist documents. Supporters often stressed the idea of secession as a defense against a Northern threat to their way of life and say that threat violated the states’ rights guaranteed by the Union. They believed any state had the right to secede, a point strongly denied by the North. The Lost Cause portrayed the South as more profoundly Christian than the greedy North. It portrayed the slavery system as more benevolent than cruel, emphasizing that it taught Christianity and civilization. In explaining Confederate defeat, the Lost Cause said the main factor was not qualitative inferiority in leadership or fighting ability but the massive quantitative superiority of the Yankee industrial machine.
The comparisons of the current statue removal to Protestant reformation iconoclasm seem particularly apt to me. You see, growing up in the South, Confederate generals were our saints. And the word “generals” is important. No one I knew growing up would think to revere, say, Jefferson Davis. Only the hard-core white supremacists revered Jefferson Davis. Real lost cause non-racist southerners revered Robert E. Lee. He was our Jesus (see: Dukes of Hazard). Every town in the south still has a Robert E Lee High School. Had I not gone to private school, I would have gone to Houston’s Lee High (I had a friend who went to college at Lehigh in New Jersey. Whenever he told folks in the South he went there, they would inevitably answer “yes, but where did you go to college.”) So Lee was by far and away at the top of the pantheon. Then you had folks like Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart who were probably our Peter and Paul. Then all the rest of the generals trailing off through the equivalents of St. Bartholomew or whoever. We even had a Judas, General James Longstreet, who for a variety of reasons was reviled by the Lost Cause school and was blamed for many of Lee’s, and the South’s, losses.
If you want to see the Southern generals the way much of the South sees them, watch the movie Gettysburg, which I like quite a bit (based on the book Killer Angels, I believe, also a good read). The Southern Generals are good, talented men trying to make the best of a losing cause. Slavery is, in this movie, irrelevant to them. They are fighting for their beloved homes in the South, not for slavery. The movie even has Longstreet saying something like “we should have freed the slaves and then fired on Fort Sumter.”
The movie Gettysburg is excellent, but if you don’t know much about the actual battle, you might end up thinking the entire conflict revolved around the 20th Maine…
July 17, 2017
Debunking some myths about sulfites in wine
By way of Scientific American, here’s a bit of clarity from Monica Reinagel about the issue of sulfites in both red and white wine and what relationship it has to wine headaches:
Myth #1: Organic or bio-dynamic wines are sulfite free.
In order to be certified organic, a wine must not contain added sulfites. However, sulfites are produced naturally during the fermentation process as a by-product of yeast metabolism. Even though no sulfites are added, organic wine may contain between 10-40 ppm sulfites.
You may also see wines labeled as being made from organic grapes, which is not the same as organic wine. Wine made from organic grapes may contain up to 100 ppm sulfites.
If you do get a hold of wine made without sulfites, I don’t suggest keeping it in the cellar very long. Wine made without sulfites—especially white wine — is much more prone to oxidation and spoilage.
Myth #2: Red wine is higher in sulfites than white wine
Ironically, the exact opposite is likely to be true. Red wines tend to be higher in tannins than white wines. Tannins are polyphenols found in the skins, seeds, and stems of the grapes. They also act as antioxidants and preservatives so less sulfite is needed.
In fact, while European regulations allow up to 210 ppm sulfites in white wine, the limit for red wine is only 160 ppm.
Other factors that affect how much sulfite is needed are the residual sugar and the acidity of the wine. Dryer wines with more acid will tend to be lower in sulfites. Sweet wines and dessert wines, on the other hand, tend to be quite high in sulfites.
Myth #3: Sulfites in wine cause headaches
The so-called “red wine headache” is definitely a real thing. But it’s probably not due to sulfites. For one thing, white wine is higher in sulfites than red wine but less likely to cause a headache. That suggests that it’s probably something else in red wine that’s responsible for the notorious red wine headache. Other candidates include histamines, tyramine, tannins, not to mention the alcohol itself!