Thinking Aloud...

Would making Berkeley's first-year economics Ph.D. graduate students this fall read short biographies of William Gates and William Marshall as a way of getting at the idea that there are non-market societies that work very differently from our own today--would that be a teaching idea of extraordinary brilliance or of total insane lunacy?

---

Guillaime de Marechal:

The New York Review of Books: The Knight of Knights: Maurice Keen

William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry
by Georges Duby, translated by Richard Howard
Pantheon, 155 pp., $15.95

Duby opens this biography... at the deathbed of William Marshal, called "the Marshal." He died at his manor of Caversham, whither he had been carried by water from London, in March of the year 1219.... William in 1219 was a very great man: earl of Pembroke in his wife's right, and up to the spring of 1219 he had been regent for the boy-king Henry III; so his death was a great event.... We see the master of the Temple arrive to admit him to his order: this is when he bids farewell to his countess, whom afterwards, as one bound by the order's rule, he must not approach. We see him ordering h s coffers to be opened and his goods distributed. Finally, we watch the stately progress of his body from Caversham to London....

[T]he verse biography that William's heir commissioned of his father... virtually the only full-scale life story that has survived from this age of a great secular magnate who was less than a king or prince. Put together from what William's friends, and above all his faithful knight John d'Erley, could recall of what William himself had told them of his life, it is at one remove only from the memoirs of the man himself. Above all, it is exceptional in that it traces the whole story, from childhood (and the moving tale of how, as a boy hostage in the civil wars, he played games with King Stephen in the royal tent before besieged Newbury) down to the very end....

Born (somewhere about 1145) as the fourth son of a baron of distinctly middling rank, he started life without prospects; for the last two years before his death he was virtually ruler of England. He had carved the way for himself, almost literally, with his sword. In the crucial early days—-and really, indeed, down to his marriage in 1189—-he was carried forward by his knightly prowess, displayed on the battlefield and in countless tournaments that were disputed scarcely less briskly th n battles. His great chance came when, in 1170, Henry II of England singled him out to be the tutor in knighthood of his fifteen-year-old heir. Henry "the young king."...

This young Henry had been crowned in 1167, but his father granted him no share in the government of his widely flung territories (this drove the frustrated young prince into rebellion in 1173). That rebellion apart, he and his household—-and William with it—-led over the next decade an extravagant and fairly aimless life in northern France, which centered principally on a constant round of tournaments: "Almost every week, tournaments were held in one place or another." These tournaments were very rough affairs, mock battles ranging widely over the countryside; and fatalities were common. Yet both the "high barons" and the young knights-errant who formed their followings flocked to them. There were two great attractions: the glory that could be won in them and the prospect of rich pickings, since those who were taken prisoner were put to ransom.... William built a distinguished reputation, on his loyalty and on his skill and valor in combat, and also on his generosity, for of his own prizes he kept nothing, distributing largess recklessly among his companions.

These three qualities, loyalty, valor, and largess, were, as Duby stresses, the nucleus of the tough, martial, knightly ethic of the twelfth century.... In 1183 Henry the young king died at his castle of Martel on the Dordogne, and it fell to William to discharge on his behalf the vow that he had taken to go on crusade... when he returned from the Holy Land, with his fame still further enhanced, he was taken into the personal service of his late master's father, Henry II himself. In the old king's last years he served him with the same loyalty that he had shown his dead son, and this good service brought him at last reward of the kind for which every adventurer of his stamp hoped, the promise of marriage to an heiress in the king's gift... Isabella, daughter of Richard Strongbow, earl of Clare, lord of Pembroke, and lord too of wide lands in Normandy, by Aoife, daughter of Dermot, king of Leinster, who had brought to Richard his claim to the lordship of Leinster in Ireland. When William married her, just after the accession of Richard I, he exchanged overnight the status of a poor if famous knightly adventurer for that of one of the greatest lords of the Angevin dominions in England, France, and Ireland. From this point forward, he was at the center of affairs in a new way, and one that opened new problems, new tensions, and new tests of loyalty.

The difficulty here, as Professor Duby explains lucidly, was the crisscrossing of feudal allegiances.... The lands that William now held in Ireland he held not of Richard I, his lord in England and Normandy, but of Richard's restive and untrustworthy brother John. When John became king and lost his hold on Normandy, William's lands there came to be held of John's enemy, King Philip of France.... Loyalty, carefully, scrupulously but at the same time often schemingly maintained, had been the theme of William Marshal's life history; that and his courage. It is a splendid story, and Professor Duby tells it splendidly... he uses it as the vehicle for his perceptions about the aristocratic society of the age... his sharpest attention is concentrated on the early period of the Marshal's life, when he was a "bachelor knight" in the service of the "young" Henry... the significance of the bands of young adventurers, cadets mostly and consequently landless, who made up the martial followings of the high baronage and of its heirs—-adventurers of whom William was a prime example. The way of life and aspirations of these unsettled men at the fringes of seigneurial society were, Duby argues, important factors in promoting the contemporary craze for tournaments, in sustaining the Crusades, and in the rise of the cult of courtly (and often adulterous) love....

In his account of William Marshal's early life Professor Duby is able also to pursue another theme of social importance, the way in which, as he sees it, the knightly ethic of the late twelfth century was becoming strained in its relation with practical reali y by the chivalrous aversion to the power of money. Chivalry's tough and masculine martial spirit, its exultation over blows and gifts of weapons and horses, had be n created in a preceding age when, as Duby puts it, "gift and countergift constituted almost everything which, in the movement of wealth, did not proceed from inheritance."...

From a single source, and in a book of small compass, Professor Duby has reconstructed a living picture of a particular sector of society at a crucial moment.... The vividness, the intimacy, and the historical perception with which he presents his picture of the fascinating and eventful life of the Marshal, and of the world in which he lived, will win him readers not just among scholars, but among all who are drawn by the unending interest of the humanity of the human past.

Comments

[sm]

Maurice Keen is a great scholar of chivalry, and his praise is significant, but others of almost equal stature have really hammered Duby's bio of William Marshal. Also, I found that my undergraduate students were totally thrown by the opening of the book, stylistically, and they never got back on track thereafter.

[tom s.]

I'm all for it. At least, I know nothing of William Marshall, but my limited experience with putting things in a big historical context is that a small investment of time pays big dividends.

My PhD supervisor (RFW Bader) used to start 3rd year quantum mechanics courses by playing Stravinsky with Picasso on the walls and (I think) a brief reading from Freud, to make the point that the first two decades of last century were a time for big ideas in more ways than one.

My guess is that many students who have forgotten everything else have remembered that.

[sm]

What at teacher!

[save the rustbelt]

Good idea. Why not a biography each semester (with their reading load what's one more book).

I also repeat my idea that any candidate for a PhD in econ should spend a couple of days in Toledo reading bankruptcy case files and home foreclosure notices.

Ultimately, economics is about people, real people.

[Arun Khanna]

Add in a short biography of Adam Smith and it will make for a good compare and contrast backgrounder.

[tom s.]

Maybe Christopher Hill's "The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution", in which the Diggers, Levellers and so on challenge much of what we now treat as normal as it came into being (http://www.strecorsoc.org/docs/hill1.html).

[anne]

Well, yes, the idea is excellent, but I am in no mood for knights or knights and flowers of chivalry, and should much prefer sections of Don Quixote that sets the violent pretense of chivalry to rights in parody dark and humane.

[anne]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1105510,00.html

December 13, 2003

The Knight in the Mirror
By Harold Bloom - Guardian

What is the true object of Don Quixote's quest? I find that unanswerable. What are Hamlet's authentic motives? We are not permitted to know. Since Cervantes's magnificent knight's quest has cosmological scope and reverberation, no object seems beyond reach. Hamlet's frustration is that he is allowed only Elsinore and revenge tragedy. Shakespeare composed a poem unlimited, in which only the protagonist is beyond all limits.

Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died almost simultaneously, are the central western authors, at least since Dante, and no writer since has matched them, not Tolstoy or Goethe, Dickens, Proust, Joyce. Context cannot hold Cervantes and Shakespeare: the Spanish golden age and the Elizabethan-Jacobean era are secondary when we attempt a full appreciation of what we are given.

WH Auden found in Don Quixote a portrait of the Christian saint, as opposed to Hamlet, who "lacks faith in God and in himself". Though Auden sounds perversely ironic, he was quite serious and, I think, wrong-headed.

Herman Melville blended Don Quixote and Hamlet into Captain Ahab (with a touch of Milton's Satan added for seasoning). Ahab desires to avenge himself upon the white whale, while Satan would destroy God, if only he could. Hamlet is death's ambassador to us, according to G Wilson Knight. Don Quixote says his quest is to destroy injustice.

The final injustice is death, the ultimate bondage. To set captives free is the knight's pragmatic way of battling against death.

Though there have been many valuable English translations of Don Quixote, I would commend Edith Grossman's new version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose. The spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline can be felt throughout, thanks to the heightened quality of her diction.

Grossman might be called the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note. Reading her amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes's darkening vision is an entrance into a further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake. Like Shakespeare, Cervantes is inescapable for all writers who have come after him. Dickens and Flaubert, Joyce and Proust reflect the narrative procedures of Cervantes, and their glories of characterisation mingle strains of Shakespeare and Cervantes.

Cervantes inhabits his great book so pervasively that we need to see that it has three unique personalities: the knight, Sancho and Cervantes himself.

Yet how sly and subtle is the presence of Cervantes! At its most hilarious, Don Quixote is immensely sombre. Shakespeare again is the illuminating analogue: Hamlet at his most melancholic will not cease his punning or his gallows humour, and Falstaff's boundless wit is tormented by intimations of rejection. Just as Shakespeare wrote in no genre, Don Quixote is tragedy as well as comedy....

[anne]

There is nothing of me just now other than imagining the imaginings of a child in William Marshall, but in Edith Grossman's Quixote I am there and so are we all. The 400th anniversary of Quixote has only just passed, what a time to introduce the work however briefly.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=3252&u=178|303|...

Indigo Bunting
New York City--Central Park, The Ravine.

Imagine :)

[Bruce Webb]

Starting any graduate student out with a book by Duby or for that matter Christopher Hill is probably a mistake. To understand either you would need to understand the historical traditions they come from, the one the French Annales school, the other the British Marxist camp. Both wonderful historians but with decided points of view that permeate their work. Not that there is really anthing that actually adds up to neutral historical reporting but I would suggest either Marc Bloch's "French Rural History" or Maitland's "Domesday Book and Beyond" well before either Duby or Hill.

Both historians were taken before their time, and both in my opinion the finest historical thinkers of their respective generations and damn fine writers to boot.

[reasonable]

I don't see how this is "a way of getting at the idea that there are non-market societies that work very differently from our own today."

The extravagant entertainment life of William Marshall doesn't reveal much to me at all. What is there to be learned about the economy of the period by studying the partying habits of the rich and famous?

The wealth he squandered obviously came from somewhere. It grew out of the manorial systems he directly or indirectly extracted rents from. You won't learn much about this economy, or the extent of market or non-market activity from reading about Marshall.

A far more thought-provoking read for econ Ph.D. students, if you want to focus on that period and place in history, would be Rodney Hilton's "Bond Men made Free" which does a wonderful job of describing the organization of production in the period as well as the struggles between ordinary people and lords for the former to create and protect little pockets of market activity and escape and resist the impositions and exactions imposed from above. It makes you think of the origin of property rights, the economic logic behind market and non-market production organization, the origins and the role of a state, and the roles of military campaigns and technology in shaping all of the above. Much more interesting.

[Jon Fernquest]

>as a way of getting at
>the idea that there are
>non-market societies that work very >differently from our own today

For the Duby biography, Marc Bloch's Feudal Society gives essential background. Reading from the feudal period would certainly give students a sobering feeling of how contingent their own economic institutions are. Most of western property law seems to come from this period.

You might need a comparison with a region of the world where vassals didn't attain as much power, where property rights were weaker. The Burmese chronicle states very explicitly that appanages were the property of the king and could be taken away from the vassal anytime the king wanted, no magna carta.

I was looking at the new UC Berkeley press reprint of M.I. Finley's Ancient Economy last night in the bookstore.

This book was based on a series of lectures he gave at UC Berkeley many years ago and is a very careful lasting piece of scholarship. It addresses the role of warfare in ancient economies, social stratification, slavery, the key role of agriculture.

[Michael Carroll]

I'm sorry but a biography of William Marshal seems like a bad use of your students time. If you want to underline the contrast between medieval society and economy and society and economy under a market system I'd think you would want to cover either the period when the feudal rules were being written, or the periods when they were being rewritten to allow for convulsions centered around trade activity.

Instead of intrigues and court politics would it be better to underscore how differently the rules were that guided many of the processes of law and economy that we take for granted today.

William Marshall is the answer to a lot of great trivia questions but a good biography of Henry II would probably be more edifying. Willaim the Marshall lived by the rules writted during Henry II's reign. I am sure it would be easy to find work that encapuslates the inpetus for these reforms, their form and legacy.

Another good tack but probably further from your original goals would be a history of one of the families of the northern Italian citystates. This would probably force you to use articles instead of a single book, of course (...although, Genoa and the Genoese by Steven Epstein gets good reviews).

[John Bynum]

good read for macro folks

Book Review
The Philosopher Kings Of Hedging
Robert Lenzner, 07.29.06, 12:35 PM ET

Steven Drobny's inside look at hedge funds couldn't come at a more appropriate time. Everyone should know what makes these private investment partnerships tick, where they are putting their gobs of money and how they see the markets going forward. Hedge funds, after all, are believed to account for up to half of all stock trading and are the controversial focus of a debate and legal fracas over their regulation.

Drobny's Inside The House of Money ($30, John Wiley & Sons, 2006) sheds more light than ever on the minds behind the largest global macro hedge funds, those giant pools of money that see the whole world as their oyster (unless they've gone short on shellfish). They make big bets on crude oil, Eurodollars, gold, Japanese bonds, Brazilian soybeans, sugar, cotton, you name it--investments that most ordinary investors would likely avoid.

Drobny humanizes his hedge fund operators, showing them as global thinkers out to exploit any opportunity in inefficient markets, but not as a force out to destroy the financial system. It is a welcome relief from the harping of a skeptical crowd of onlookers who seem to see the forces of darkness lurking behind every one of these partnerships.

The book reveals the intricacies of thinking like a hedge fund manager. Marko Dimitrijevic of Miami's Everest Capital liked Argentinean banks, went short with Japanese government bonds when they were yielding only 0.45% (very clever, because interest rates were bound to rise and depress the bonds) and was also playing the markets in Cyprus, Mongolia and Uruguay. He also recommended YUM Brands, owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut, as the best American stock to play the growth in China.

There's some brilliant common sense here, valuable to us mere mortals. Dr. John Porter of Barclay's Capital believes that momentum trading is the flavor of the month and that "people who are indexed are going to get killed." Porter anticipated the knee-jerk response of the U.S. Federal Reserve to loosen money when tech stocks sold off in 2000. He loaded up on two-year Treasuries at 6.75%, which was a bet that interest rates were headed down and the value of the notes were headed up. It was a highly profitable play when the cost of money dropped to 1%.

Drobny also shows how managers have learned from past hedge fund failures. Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital in San Francisco refuses to become the next Long Term Capital Management. He places stop-loss orders on every trade-- a very tough discipline--but one that limits disastrous losses.

One shortcoming of the book is that since hedge fund operators are so nimble, they may well be long out of the positions they revealed to Drobny in 2005. That's the nature of hedge funds; they don't have investment committees and can dump a position in five minutes and get back in it the next day. What's compelling among these money managers is their intensity in educating themselves about nations and bottom-up individual investment opportunities.

Many years ago, Dwight Anderson, then with Tiger Management, now with Ospraie Management in New York, explored palladium mines in Siberia to ascertain the true world shortage of that precious metal. Tiger made a killing when Palladium soared from $120 an ounce to more than $1,000 an ounce.

An underlying theme of the work is that macro traders "thrive on dislocation and economic upsets. Macro traders always do better when the world economy is tanking," says one of the managers. So, unlike the proverbial market optimists, macro operators like disasters such as currency crises or political upheaval, because they produce the panic selling and market bottoms that provide the biggest upsides.

Running through these interviews is an uneasy sense that we're on the cusp of dangerous times. Scott Bessent of Bessent Capital says, "At some point we will have had The Big One. It's out there. I don't know if it's a financial asset depression or a real depression."

Dr. Sushil Wadhwani, of Wadhwani Asset Management in London, says, "What you've got now is huge asset-market distortions, and one of these days, the chickens will come home to roost, and when they do, there'll be huge opportunity."

So, for the wealthy investors in hedge funds, these are prospective opportunities. For the ordinary investors, these are warning signals to be prudent and protect your assets.

Want to buy The House of Money at a Forbes.com members' discount? Click here.

[derek]

" . . . I am in no mood for knights and flowers of chivalry, and should much prefer sections of Don Quixote that sets the violent pretense of chivalry to rights in parody dark and humane."

Well, of course you would, but then you're missing the whole point of Brad's exercise. In preferring Don Quixote you are doing no more than repeating the prejudices of every other twenty-first century American. Brad's point was to shock his students with the range of human mind-sets available outside their narrow mental world. He certainly seems to have succeeded with one or two of the commenters.

[Lars Smith]

I have tried using Iris Origo's wonderful The Merchant of Prato : Francesco Di Marco Datini - Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City, but students didn't really relate to it. I think the period was too remote.

The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge worked well in class. The authors also admire Iris Origo's book, so hopefully reading The Company will get some students to read The Merchant of Prato.

[otto]

Taking a different track: a chapter or two of "Magnetic Mountain" by Stephen Kotkin about everyday Stalinism in Magnitogorsk.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520208234/sr=8-1/qid=1154262260/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-4694962-0748722?ie=UTF8

[jim]

Moses Finley sounds like a good idea. If not The Ancient Economy, why not The World of Odysseus?

Couple it with a study of Silicon Valley during the boom.

You'd lose the William/William resonance, but I wouldn't think biographies necessarily useful for illustrating economics. You need some sort of documentation of transactions, which tend to occur below the radar of biographers.

[sm]

Using Moses Finley would be useful in opening up the whole debate about economic motivation -- was it the same in the past. Then you could look at the question of "is it the same in the present?"

[Graydon]

It would in some ways be better still to assign "Gawain and the Green Knight", but then you'd have to have students who could read it.

There are good books on Anglo-Saxon land tenure, which would (in effect) cover the origins of taxation in English law, which might also do what you want in terms of mind expansion, but I'd say "go for it". The substantially arbitrary nature of money is a great thing to impart to an economics class.

[Matt]

The broader, general question is whether it makes sense to try to ameriorate the cultural narrowness and lack of historical perspective most new Ph.D. students will bring to the table. There will always be a few who are technically so proficient that they will make large contributions despite that narrowness and lack of historical grounding. But very large contributions flow from those things. But by graduate school, deficiencies are more often chosen than inherited. And graduate school doesn't last that long. By then it may simply be too late to make a political economist.

[Darren]

I'm with Matt. The rest of their graduate economics education will be so relentlessly dry and sterile (and irrelevant IMHO) that there is no point at all in trying to broaden their horizons... two books will not make generalists out of anyone who would willingly subject themselves to the arid pointlessness of a PhD Econ program. (I just finished a terminal MA at a "top school" and I know exactly what I'm talking about unfortunately).

[Tracy]

OK. You want to expose the kids to a non-market society that was a tremendous success for an extended period? Quit screwing around with the middle ages and expose them to Sparta.

I do this in my Introduction to Political Science class. The first two classes are taken up by watching the first two episodes of The Spartans, the terrific PBS series. It comes with an equally good book on what has to be the most successful experiment in communal social engineering in human history.

Why do I do this? Because with every other historic society I can think of there's an out. "But they had markets in the middle ages! They just didn't give them full expression!" "But they did have an idea of individual rights in (whatever society)! They just weren't for everyone!" "Why should we learn about societies that simply weren't as advanced as our own? We've just fulfilled the promise they stiffled!"

Try an argument like that about the Spartans during the 300 years or so of their ascendancy. Sorry, Charlie! They broke every rule of their own time and ours and still were a raging success. After we see the film, I appoint a weekly team of students to be "Lycurgus" and have them critique the theories and findings we study. Works pretty well, especially when the stus begin to get into how a real contrarian argument goes.

Ah, I hear you say, but they're undergrads! But obviously you think your grad stus are as clueless about the true scope of human social arrangements as mine are. If you want some more details, let me know.

[Jon Fernquest]

Quoting from above: "The rest of their graduate economics education will be so relentlessly dry and sterile (and irrelevant IMHO) that there is no point at all in trying to broaden their horizons... two books will not make generalists out of anyone who would willingly subject themselves to the arid pointlessness of a PhD Econ program. (I just finished a terminal MA at a "top school" and I know exactly what I'm talking about unfortunately)."

Maybe they should study economic history in the history department. It probably wouldn't be so "arid".

I finished a terminal MS program in applied econ 22 years ago (43 now) and I'm still waiting for economists to apply the mathematical concepts of information economics (assymetry, moral hazard, adverse selection, agent problem) to human behaviour in historical narratives. Maybe another 20 years and something will happen.

So, not being a whiner, I'm trying to do it now in the history of the Tai-Yunnan frontier. The Ming dynasty annals are saturated by information gaps and accusations that the local Tai indigenous chieftains in Yunnan were deceiving the Ming emperor in far away Beijing, but given that it took three months for a message to be transmitted from Yunnan to Beijing, there definitely was an informational assymetry. Translations of the classical Chinese primary sources are now online (http://www.epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/), which should allow a little more time for theory or maybe information economics.

I do feel for those first year PhD students, but a discipline ain't no discipline, without discipline.

BTW for philanthropy M.I. Finley's "World of Odysseus" has lots of good stuff about gift giving and reciprocity, cross-culturally applicable unlike Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth.

[kharris]

I take it that it is not a given that these students will get their dose of Moses Finley? Finley might serve the purpose Brad has in mind, but don't economist types, especially economist types who've fallen into the hands of a historian of economics, routinely get some Finley?

[andres]

Hmm. I'm late for the debate, but before people get too idealized a picture about William Marshal, it should be remembered that he was one of the ringleaders in the baronial coup d'etat known today as the Magna Carta, which purported to grant sovereign rights to most (non-serf) individuals in the kingdom but whose real purpose was to substitute baronial rule for King John's rule.

Of course, John was no model of justice or fairness, but the conflict between him and the Norman barons gives a clue why modern nation-states eventually coalesced around the monarch supported by a base of urban middle-classes and yeoman farmers, eclipsing the nobility for the rest of history.

[Elizabeth Chadwick]

As the author of a new novel on William Marshal - The Greatest Knight, I have to say that Duby's biography is pretty bad with some execrable interpretations of the Marshal's life and character. Far better to go for David Crouch's recent biography of The Marshal or the Anglo Norman Text Society's translation of the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal, written shortly after The Marshal's death.