Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong

Jo Walton on Linguistic Subcreation

Patrick Nielsen Hayden sends us to Jo Walton. She writes:

papersky: Fast and Dirty Fantasy Names: You don't have to make up languages the way Tolkien did, you have to make up words and names and the illusion of languages. But those names and words have to be right, because names are threads in the tapestry, names need to work with the picture, or at least be neutral....

There is a simple way of getting round this... the random fantasy name generating program.... First vowels -- eliminate one, and decide which of the others is the favourite. Then consonants -- decide between: B-V V-W W-R M-N B-M C-K C-G C-S S-Sh Ch-Sh TT-Th. When you've decided, write down the alphabet without the ones you don't want, with the favourite vowel twice and with "Ch" or "Sh" or "Th" if you want them.... Then randomly (roll dice?) select consonants (no more than two together) and vowels, stopping when you have stuff that feels nice....

[I]f you want to have two fantasy countries that are different from each other, make all the different choices for the other language... their names and words sound different from each other, even if the reader can't tell exactly how.... The Gonovians and the Camavese really will seem like different people....

carandol and I once made an alien language.... The aliens were called Xanfd, and they rocked.... But I defined so many of their words that eventually when I ran the [word-generating] program it was as if I was getting messages from them, full of words I knew, or half-knew, and other words I didn't. The screen would fill up with things like "Human attack /something/ spaceship /something-plural/ size-comparative something-highstatus FTL communications /something/ broken /something/ /something/ light something something-plural survivors".

I could therefore use this for plot generation.

I do not actually recommend this, as my memory of sitting in a darkening room reading yellow text on a blue screen that told me of battles far away and alien secrets is a little too realistic for comfort.

On David Brin's "The Transparent Society"

Michael Froomkin writes:

Discourse.net: CFP '08 Accepts Our Panel on 'The Transparent Society': I’m delighted to report that my proposal for a panel on “‘The Transparent Society’ — Ten Years Later” has been accepted for CFP’08, thanks no doubt to the sterling panelists I was able to assemble. Our panel is now scheduled to take place on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 3:30-5:00(PM) in the George room at the Omni Hotel in New Haven.

Computers, Freedom and Privacy is the most fun conference I go to; the program can be variable, I admit, but the hallway conversations are always fantastic. Come - it’s fun.

Here’s the panel description:

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of David Brin’s controversial book, “The Transparent Society”. The book argues that in the face of the explosion of sensors, cheap storage, and cheap data processing we should adopt strategies of vision over concealment. A world in which not just transactional information, but essentially all information about us will be collected, stored, and sorted is, Brin says, inevitable. The only issue left to be decided is who will have access to this information; he argues that freedom, and even some privacy, are more likely to flourish if everybody - not just elites - has access to this flood of data.

Brin proposes a stark choice: either the information will be “secret” and “private”—in which case only governments, always potentially repressive, will have access. Or, the information will be “open” and “public” and we will all be transparent to each other. Given this choice, Brin argues, better to be naked to each other than to empower a few with unique access to information about the many. The attempt to protect privacy as we know it carries too great a risk, as it leads if not inevitably than at least all too easily to a world of enormous information-driven tyranny in which the powers — primarily governments — with access to our ‘private’ information will abuse it. In contrast, a high-transparency world with very little privacy is one in which citizens have tools that allow them to monitor their governments.

Brin proposed a paradox which infuriated a good segment of the privacy community. It is normally an article of faith for privacy advocates that privacy empowers, and the removal of privacy is at least disempowering and at worst oppressive. Brin counters that privacy advocates have it exactly backwards: trying to maintain traditional ideas of information privacy in the face of technological changes he sees as (now) inevitable is what will disempower and perhaps oppress; only a program of radical information openness, nakedness even, stands a chance of leveling a playing field on which information is truly power.

The reception of “The Transparent Society” reflected the audacity of its claims. Some dismissed it; some attacked it; a few embraced it. What is striking, however, is that the ideas have had staying power: the book remains in print, it is regularly footnoted, and it comes up in discussion. Right or wrong, “The Transparent Society” has become more than a polar case trotted out as a good or bad example, but an as-yet unproved but also un-falsified challenge to how we think about privacy — one that demands continuing reflection (or, some would say, refutation).

The tenth anniversary of publication is an appropriate time to do that reflection at CFP.

About the presenters:

David Brin (remote participation): David Brin is the author of “The Transparent Society,” the inspiration for this panel. He is a noted futurist and science fiction writer.

Alan Davidson: Alan is the head of Google’s Washington, DC, government affairs office. Previously he was Associate Director of the Center for Democracy & Technology. Alan is a frequent speaker and presence in national privacy debates, and a frequent CFP participant.

J. Bradford DeLong: Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley: In addition to his work as a macro and economic historian, Brad has written extensively about the economics of information and the Internet. He runs a very popular economics and culture blog, “Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Economist Brad DeLong’s Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based Semi-Daily Journal” at http://delong.typepad.com/. Brad served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in the Clinton administration, 1993-95. He is also a founder-member of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill.

A. Michael Froomkin (Moderator): Professor of Law, University of Miami: Michael has been writing about privacy, encryption, and anonymity for almost fifteen years. His writings include “The Death of Privacy?” 2 Stan L. Rev. 1461 (2000). He is a founder-editor of ICANNWatch, and serves on the Editorial Board of Information, Communication & Society and of I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society. He is on the Advisory Boards of several organizations including the Electronic Freedom Foundation and BNA Electronic Information Policy & Law Report. He is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. He is also active in several technology related projects in the greater Miami area.

Stephanie Perrin: Stephanie is the Acting Director General of Risk Management, Integrity Branch, Service Canada. She is the former Director of Research and Policy at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and was prior to this a consultant in privacy and information policy issues, president of her own company Digital Discretion Inc., and a Senior Fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in Washington. She is the former Chief Privacy Officer of Zero-Knowledge, and has been active in a number of CPO associations, working with those responsible for implementing privacy in their organizations. Formerly the Director of Privacy Policy for Industry Canada’s Electronic Commerce Task Force, she led the legislative initiative at Industry Canada that resulted in the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, privacy legislation that came into force in 2001 and has set the standard for private sector compliance. She is the principal author of a text on the Act, published by Irwin Law.

Zephyr Teachout: Visiting Asst. Prof. of Law, Duke University: Zephyr is one of the leading practitioners and theoreticians of online political organizing. She directed Internet organizing for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. Zephyr is noted for advocating the Internet as a tool for creating local offline groups. publications include “Mousepads, Shoeleather and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics”(Editor) (forthcoming August 2007, Paradigm Publishers); “How Politicians can use Distributive Networks” (New Assignment, November 2006); “Youtube? It’s so Yesterday,” (with Tim Wu) (Washington Post, November 2006), and “Powering Up Internet Campaigns,” book chapter in Lets Get This Party Started (Rowan and Littlefield, 2005.) She is currently writing about the meaning of corruption in the American constitutional tradition.

Jeff Madrick on Peter Gosselin on Risk and Uncertainty

Jeff Madrick writes:

Jeff Madrick on ‘High Wire,’ Peter Gosselin’s Look at the Economic Meltdown: Peter Gosselin... has done the most convincing job I’ve seen in capturing the failures of America to deal with a changing, complex and far less generous economy than it has known in the past....

Peter Gosselin’s admirable objective is to show how many people of all income levels are now insecure and afraid in an economy that Americans are constantly told, by Republicans and Democrats alike, has long been back on track.... But, in truth, the American economy has not been on track for a generation now....

The main theme of Gosselin, a veteran reporter for the Los Angeles Times, is the rise of deep-seated financial, health and material risk. He gathers the many pieces of the new economic America together quite beautifully, even elegantly, and brings them alive with interesting and not the usually predictable individual examples....

[T]here are the 401(k)s. Gosselin says the major shift in America toward a riskier society regards retirement. Three out of five employees who are fortunate enough to have a private retirement plan now don’t have a pension at all but rather a defined contribution plan like a 401(k).... Many and probably most will save too little and invest unwisely.... But what makes Gosselin so interesting is that he digs further for the pertinent government failures. For example, the Employee Retirement Security Act (ERISA), passed in 1974 originally to protect workers, now, as he writes, protects big companies.... A former insurance consultant told me recently that some employees are paid at insurance companies according to how many claims they can deny. I was shocked. Naive me, and after all these years. Of course, that is how the companies operate. Create incentives to maximize profits.

Gosselin’s central claim is based on some research he did to show that the proportion of American families whose incomes are likely to fall substantially has risen sharply since the 1970s....

Gosselin, however, puts his finger on it. Poverty is not about black-and-white deprivations in the contemporary world. The poor in America live in total chaos... “pay cuts and eviction notices, car troubles and medical crises, hirings and firings--that keeps reversing their families’ advances, rattling their finances, nudging them toward the economic brink.”... What do the poor borrow for? A good restaurant meal? A pair of impossibly expensive sneakers? Maybe, once in a while. But Gosselin looks into a case or two: $170 to fix the steering on the car, a $300 cash advance for the rent, another $1,000 to bring a wife to the U.S. from Central America....

The costs of education, health care, drugs and public investment have gone up much faster than incomes. So people can buy clothes, food or electronics more easily, but they can’t buy health care, or they have to move into an expensive house to get a good k-12 education for the kids.... This is why Barack Obama is right when he talks about bitterness and anger, and why claims that the political attitudes are only about culture shifts is wrong.

Now the experience of the 2000s has brought the message home. Wages haven’t gone up at all in the 2000s, despite record profits and decent productivity growth. Family incomes are down. These are unprecedented in the modern economy.

And all this follows a generation of rising insecurity, uncertainty, unrewarded effort and for many a treadmill of growing despair, cynicism and occasional chaos that this author describes so clearly, even elegantly. Gosselin’s gotten the new American condition better than anyone else I’ve read.

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Paul Krugman Is "Startled at My Ignorance"

Paul writes:

Economic science fiction: I’m startled at Brad DeLong’s ignorance: he thinks there’s something new about science fiction novels where the science in question is economics.

This theme actually goes back a long way. I once stumbled across Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, a very early novel that’s actually inspired by the then-popular doctrine of secular stagnation, which argued that rising savings and declining investment opportunities would lead to persistent problems in getting people to spend enough.

Oh, by the way — it’s a terrible novel, though not as bad a novel as The Internecine Project is a movie. Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes novels, on the other hand, are economic science fiction worth reading.

Admittedly my memory of Beyond This Horizon is hazy. But I recall it as being much more about scientific research into life after death, ennui, dueling customs, eugenics--I don't recall secular stagnation and the consequent danger that too much savings would produce chronic high unemployment as playing much of a role, although I do recall a powerful government able and eager to finance all kinds of expensive blue-sky research. I also recall a "social credit" government that finances itself and pays citizens a basic income, all out of seigniorage...

I agree that Charles Stross's Miriam Beckstein "Merchant Princes" novels are much better than Beyond This Horizon.

And I still maintain that Daniel Abraham's "Lord Iron and the Cambist" is worth a Hugo...

A New Kind of Science Fiction...

John Scalzi sends us to a new kind of science fiction--for this time the science is economics:

Daniel Abraham, "The Cambist and Lord Iron".

Nominated for the Hugo award. Vote early and often. Shows a deep understanding of the concept of opportunity cost.

Globalization 1.0

Paul Krugman reads books on his Kindle:

Fruits of globalization: [A] book recommendation: I’m reading Dan Koeppel’s Banana at Bedtime (yes, on my Kindle), and it’s great. Right now I’m in the midst of the rise of the modern banana trade, and of United Fruit.

One message from this story is that globalization as a profound source of change is nothing new. In fact, the combination of things that made the widespread consumption of bananas in America possible — railroads, steamships, refrigeration, and, not least, regime change often backed by American military might — where do you think banana republics came from? — makes containerization and the Washington Consensus look low-key by comparison...

Doug Henwood on Naomi Klein

Doug writes, apropos of Naomi Klein:

History, but not exactly a secret: As is often the case with arguments organized around a conceit, Klein works hard to squeeze events into her model’s form. There’s the problem mentioned above—that Cameron and Pinochet cannot explain Ronald Reagan’s 59-41 victory over Walter Mondale in 1984. But there are also problems with many of Klein’s case studies.

In her chapter on post-apartheid South Africa, Klein notes how the hope generated by the ANC’s taking power was dashed by the orthodox economic policy the party pursued once in power. She explains that the country was “outnegotiated” by the World Bank and IMF. That is not how many on the South African left see the problem. Their analysis is that the ANC was never anti-capitalist, and was quite eager to join the world system and get its own piece of the action. As no less than Mandela himself put it: “The ANC has never...advocated a revolutionary change in the economic structure of the country, nor has it...ever condemned capitalist society.”

She also asserts that Israel is in the midst of a Chinese-style boom, which has been occurring because, not in spite of, the country’s constant state of war. The boom, she asserts, is being driven by the production and export of military and surveillance equipment. But in fact Israel’s economy isn’t booming, the military share of GDP is way down from its 1970s peaks and has been flat in recent years, and arms represent only a fraction of Israeli exports. Israel’s per capita GDP has been growing at about a quarter of the Chinese rate over the last couple of years; over the last seven years, it’s more like a tenth the Chinese rate. Electronics, including military–surveillance goods, have been declining as a share of Israeli exports, while that of drugs and chemicals has been rising. Israel’s share of the world’s arms trade is just over 1%, behind Sweden’s.

For Klein, the invasion of Iraq wasn’t a geopolitical adventure so much as an economically rational attempt to complete the Chicago-school counterrevolution that began in Chile in 1973: to bring the “Friedmanite” model to the Middle East. “The ‘fiasco’ of Iraq is one created by a careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology.” It was, in a phrase she likes, “Friedmanite to the core.” Among the problems with this reading are that things haven’t worked out as planned—Iraq barely has an economy to impose any policy on, though privatization decrees were certainly issued—and that Friedman himself opposed the invasion of Iraq. He told the Wall Street Journal’s Tunku Varadarajan in July 2006: “What's really killed the Republican Party isn't spending, it's Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.”

Miltie

Klein’s use of a one-dimensional caricature of Friedman as an all-purpose whipping boy may play to the choir, but he deserves more serious attention than this. His economics was in many ways wrong and vile, but over the course of a fifty-year career, he helped reshape not only his discipline, but the way politicians and regular people think and talk about the economy. He was an extremely effective popular writer; if only the left could have produced a book as persuasive as Capitalism and Freedom, the world might be a better place. (Yes, yes, his argument was nicely aligned with the needs of capital in the 1970s, but on the other hand, capital also needed some degree of popular assent, which Friedman helped produce—and, on the third hand, polemic doesn’t count for nothing, and material interest isn’t everything.)

One reason that Friedman became popular both within his own profession and in the larger world was that there were real economic problems in the 1970s. In the richer countries, Keynesian/welfare-state capitalism was in crisis because of stagflation. According to the economic consensus of the time, weak growth was supposed to mean low inflation—but weak growth coexisted with persistently high inflation throughout the 1970s. Friedman offered an explanation for that: monetary stimulus beyond a certain point results in inflation, not additional growth. Growth was being held back by unions and regulations, which were interfering with the magic self-adjusting powers of the market. The solution was tight money and deregulation. It worked, at least for a while, on its own terms, though at great human cost.

But there’s a radical way of expressing the insights of Friedman and the others who came to power and influence in the late 1970s. Capitalism simply cannot live with low unemployment rates. Workers gain confidence, resist the direction of the boss, and wages are forced up. Add to that a welfare state, which cushions workers against the risk of job loss, and things are even worse from the bosses’ point of view. Their plight was evident in the depressed profit rates of the leisure-suit decade.

Sure enough, the application of the Friedman agenda raised profit rates and ended the great inflation—though it put the working class into a semipermanent state of anxiety, which was part of the point. That does suggest a permanent shock strategy is part of the system’s normal operating procedure, not an extraordinary event.

Limits and beyond

An honest evaluation of this history would have to recognize that the Keynesian model in the northern hemisphere had reached an impasse in the 1970s. Either things had to break in the Friedmanite direction or a more anticapitalist direction. And in the southern hemisphere, import substitution was running into similar problems: rising inflation and low levels of productivity. Many governments borrowed heavily abroad in an attempt to keep things going, laying the groundwork for the debt crisis of the 1980s. Obviously Friedman, Pinochet, and Reagan do not represent the full range of possibilities, but something had to give, and the left worldwide was too weak to win the battle.

Though the analysis may be problematic, Klein’s closing chapter does inspire hope even in a skeptical reader. Shocks wear off, and some of the most inspiring agitation is coming from the region that suffered some of the worst abuses of the 1970s and 1980s, Latin America. The word “socialism” is even being dusted off in Venezuela and Bolivia. But the emphasis on shock as the organizing principle of the book even constrains the inspiration. Those recovering from shock, whether in the Southern Cone or in New Orleans, see themselves as “repair people, taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resistance—for when the next shock hits.” These are the concluding words of the book. Is this really all we can do? Tinker while the weather’s fair, and get ready to duck and cover on a moment’s notice?

Now I Have an Irresistible Desire to Go Read "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"...

Gary Farber sends us to Samuel Delany, who reads:

Samuel R. Delany: About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words: Now let's atomize the correction process itself. A story begins:

The

What is the image thrown on your mind? Whatever it is, it is going to be changed many, many times before the tale is over. My own, unmodified, rather whimsical The is a grey­ish ellipsoid about four feet high that balances on the floor perhaps a yard away. Yours is no doubt different. But it is there, has a specific size, shape, color, and bears a particular relation to you. My a for example, differs from my the in that it is about the same shape and color—a bit paler, per­haps — but it is either much farther away, or much smaller and nearer. In either case, I am going to be either much less, or much more, interested in it than I am in The. Now we come to the second word in the story and the first correction:

The red

My four-foot ellipsoid just changed color. It is still about the same distance away. It has become more interest­ing. In fact, even at this point I feel vaguely that the in­creased interest may be outside the leeway I allowed for The. I feel a strain here that would be absent if the first two words had been A red … My eye goes on to the third word while my mind prepares for the second correction:

The red sun

My original The has now been replaced by a luminous disk. The color has lightened considerably. The disk is above me. An indistinct landscape has formed about me. And I am even more aware, now that the object has been placed at such a distance, of the tension between my own interest level in red sun and the ordinary attention I accord a the: for the in­tensity of interest is all that is left with me of the original image.

Less clearly, in terms of future corrections, is a feeling that in this landscape it is either dawn, sunset, or, if it is another time, smog of some sort must be hazing the air (… red sun …); but I hold all for the next correction:

The red sun is

A sudden sense of intimacy. I am being asked to pay even greater attention, in a way that was would not demand, as was in the form of the traditional historical narrative. but is…? There is a speaker here! That focus in attention I felt between the first two words is not my attention, but the at­tention of the speaker. It resolves into a tone of voice: “The red sun is …” And I listen to this voice, in the midst of this still vague landscape, registering its concerns for the red sun. Between the and red information was generated that between sun and is resolved into a meaningful correction in my vision.

This is my first aesthetic pleasure from the tale—a small one, as we have only progressed four words into the story. Never­theless, it becomes one drop in the total enjoyment to come from the telling. Watching and listening to my speaker, I proceed to the next corrections:

The red sun is high,

Noon and slightly overcast; this is merely a confirma­tion of something previously suspected, nowhere near as major a correction as the one before. It allows a slight sense of warmth into the landscape, and the light has been fixed at a specific point. I attempt to visualize that landscape more clearly, but no object, including the speaker, has been cleared enough to resolve. The comma tells me that a thought group is complete. In the pause it occurs to me that the redness of the sun may not be a clue to smog at all, but merely the speaker falling into literary-ism; for at best, the redness is a projection of his consciousness, which as yet I don't under­stand. And for a moment I notice that from where I'm stand­ing the sun indeed appears its customary, blind-white gold. Next correction

The red sun is high, the

In this strange landscape (lit by its somewhat untrust­worthily described sun) the speaker has turned his attention to another grey, four-foot ellipsoid, equidistant from himself and me. Again, it is too indistinct to take highlighting. But there have been two corrections with not much tension, and the reality of the speaker himself is beginning to slip. What will this become?

The red sun is high, the blue

The ellipsoid has changed hue. But the repetition in the syntatic arrangement of the description momentarily threatens to dissolve all reality, landscape, speaker, and sun, into a mannered listing of bucolica. The whole scene dims. And the final correction?

The red sun is high, the blue low.

Look! We are world and worlds away. The first sun is huge; and how accurate the description of its color turns out to have been. The repetition that predicted mannerism how fixes both big and little sun to the sky. The landscape crawls with long red shadows and stubby blue ones, joined by pur­ple triangles. Look at the speaker himself. Can you see him? You have seen his doubled shadow …

Though it ordinarily takes only a quarter of a second and is largely unconscious, this is the process.

When the corrections as we move from word to word produce a muddy picture, when unclear bits of information do not resolve to even greater clarity as we progress, we call the writer a poor stylist. As the story goes on, and the pic­tures become more complicated as they develop through time, if even greater anomalies appear as we continue correcting, we say he can't plot. But it is the same quality error com­mitted on a grosser level, even though a reader must be a third on three-quarters of the way through the book to spot one, while the first may glare out from the opening sentence.

In any commercial field of writing, like s-f, the argument of writers and editors who feel content can be opposed to style runs, at its most articular:

“Basically we are writing adventure fiction. We are writ­ing it very fast. We do not have time to be concerned about any but the grosser errors. More importantly, you are talking about subtleties too refined for the vast majority of our readers who are basically neither literary nor sophisticated.”

The internal contradictions here could make a book. Let me outline two.

The basis of any adventure novel, s-f or otherwise, what gives it its entertainment value—escape value if you will—what sets it apart from the psychological novel, what names it an adventure, is the intensity with which the real actions of the story impinge on the protagonist's conscious­ness. The simplest way to generate that sense of adventure is to increase the intensity with which the real actions im­pinge on the reader's. And fictional intensity is almost en­tirely the province of those refinements of which I have been speaking.

The story of an infant's first toddle across the kitchen floor will be an adventure if the writer can generate the infantile wonder at new muscles, new efforts, obstacles, and detours. I would like to read such a story.

We have all read, many too many times, the heroic attempts of John Smith to save the lives of seven orphans in the face of fire, flood, and avalanche.

I am sure it was an adventure of Smith.

For the reader it was dull as dull could be.

"The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" by Roger Zelazny has been described as “…all speed and adventure…” by Theodore Sturgeon, and indeed it is one of the most exciting adventure tales s-f has produced. Let me change one word in every grammatical unit of every sentence, replacing it with a word that “…means more or less the same thing …” and i can diminish the excite­ment by half and expunge every trace of wit. Let me change one word and add one word, and I can make it so dull as to be practically unreadable. Yet a paragraph by paragraph synopsis of the “content” will be the same.

An experience I find painful (though it happens with increasing frequency) occurs when I must listen to a literate person who has just become enchanted by some hacked-out space-boiler begin to rhapsodise about the way the blunt, imprecise, leaden language reflects the hairy-chested hero's alienation from reality. He usually goes on to explain how th “…s-f content…” itself reflects our whole society's divorce from the real. The experience is painful because he is right as far as he goes. Badly-written adventure fic­tion is our true anti-literature. Its protagonists are our real anti-heroes. They move through un-real worlds amidst all sorts of noise and manage to preceive nothing meaningful or meaningfully.

Author's intention or no, that is what badly written s-f is about. But anyone who reads or writes s-f seriously knows that its particular excellence is in another area altogether: in all the brouhaha clinging about these unreal worlds, chords are sounded in total sympathy with the real.

“ … You are talking about subtleties too refined for the vast majority of our readers who are basically neither literary nor sophisticated.”

This part of the argument always throws me back to an incident from the summer I taught a remedial English class at my Neighborhood Community Center. The voluntary nature of the class automatically restricted enrollment to people who wanted to learn; still, I had sixteen and seventeen-year-olds who had never had any formal education in either Span­ish or English continually joining my lessons. Regardless, after a student had been in the class six months, I would throw him a full five hundred and fifty page novel to read: Dmitri Merezhkovsky's The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci. The book is full of Renaissance history, as well as sword play, magic, and dissertation on art and science. It is an ex­tremely literary novel with several levels of interpretation. It was a favorite of Sigmund Freud (Rilke, in a letter, found it loathesome) and inspired him to write his own Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality. My students loved it, and with it, lost a good deal of their fear of Literature and Long Books.

Shortly before I had to leave the class, Leonardo ap­peared in paperback, translated by Hubert Trench. Till then it had only been available in a Modern Library edition translated by Bernard Gilbert Gurney. To save my last two students a trip to the Barnes and Nobel basement, as well as a dollar fifty, I suggested they buy the paperback. Two days later one had struggled through forty pages and the other had given up after ten. Both through the book dull, had no idea what it was about, and begged me for something shorter and more exciting.

Bewildered, I bought a copy of the Trench translation myself that afternoon. I do not have either book at hand as I write, so I'm sure a comparison with the actual texts will prove me an exaggerator. But I recall one description of a little house in Florence:

Gurney: “Grey smoke rose and curled from the slate chimney.”

Trench: “Billows of smoke, grey and gloomy, ele­vated and contorted up from the slates of the chimney.”

By the same process that differentiated the four ex­amples of putting books on a desk, these two sentences do not refer to the same smoke, chimney, house, time of day; nor do any of the other houses within sight remain the same; nor do any possible inhabitants. One sentence has nine words, the other fifteen. But atomize both as a series of corrected images and you will find the mental energy expended on the latter is greater by a factor of six or seven! And over seven­eights of it leaves that uncomfortable feeling of loose-end­edness, unutilized and unresolved. Sadly, it is the less skilled, less sophisticated reader who is most injured by bad writing. Bad prose requires more of your mental energy to correct your image word to word, and the corrections them­selves are less rewarding. That is what makes it bad. The sophisticated, literary reader may give the words the benefit of the doubt and question whether a seeming clumsiness is more fruitfully interpreted as an intentional ambiguity...

Opera Branches Out: La Boheme

Opera branches out:

The Metropolitan Opera: La Boheme - NCM Event (2008): Fathom presents the excitement of The Metropolitan Opera Saturday Matinees - in HD on the Big Screen! The LIVE broadcast of Puccini's La Bohème will be shown for one day only on Saturday, April 5 at 1:30PM ET / 10:30AM PT in select theatres nationwide. A magnificent cast comes together for Franco Zeffirelli's iconic production of the Puccini favorite. The exciting young conductor Nicola Luisotti presides over a glorious vocal ensemble led by the mesmerizing Angela Gheorghiu, who sings Mimì at the Met for the first time in twelve years, opposite golden-toned tenor Ramón Vargas as her lover, Rodolfo...

This is not Mimi-the-ingenue we have here...

$20 a ticket x 325,000 tickets is $6M a year:

On Air & OnLine: The Met's experiment of merging film with live performance has created a new art form," said the Los Angeles Times of the groundbreaking series of live, high-definition performance transmissions to movie theaters around the world. The series enjoyed box office success, reaching an estimated audience of more than 325,000 viewers. In 2007-08, the Met offers its second season of international HD transmissions—this time with eight broadcasts, up from last year's six. Don't miss the chance to enjoy thrilling, world-class opera at your neighborhood theater!...

Henry Murger (1851), Bohemians of the Latin Quarter:

Today, as of old, every man who enters on an artistic career, without any other means of livelihood than his art itself, will be forced to walk in the paths of Bohemia. The greater number of our contemporaries who display the noblest blazonry of art have been Bohemians, and amidst their calm and prosperous glory they often recall, perhaps with regret, the time when, climbing the verdant slope of youth, they had no other fortune in the sunshine of their twenty years than courage, which is the virtue of the young, and hope, which is the wealth of the poor. For the uneasy reader, for the timorous citizen, for all those for whom an "i" can never be too plainly dotted in definition, we repeat as an axiom: "Bohemia is a stage in artistic life; it is the preface to the Academy, the Hôtel Dieu, or the Morgue."

We will add that Bohemia only exists and is only possible in Paris.

We will begin with unknown Bohemians, the largest class. It is made up of the great family of poor artists, fatally condemned to the law of incognito, because they cannot or do not know how to obtain a scrap of publicity, to attest their existence in art, and by showing what they are already prove what they may some day become. They are the race of obstinate dreamers for whom art has remained a faith and not a profession; enthusiastic folk of strong convictions, whom the sight of a masterpiece is enough to throw into a fever, and whose loyal heart beats high in presence of all that is beautiful, without asking the name of the master and the school. This Bohemian is recruited from amongst those young fellows of whom it is said that they give great hopes, and from amongst those who realize the hopes given, but who, from carelessness, timidity, or ignorance of practical life, imagine that everything is done that can be when the work is completed, and wait for public admiration and fortune to break in on them by escalade and burglary. They live, so to say, on the outskirts of life, in isolation and inertia. Petrified in art, they accept to the very letter the symbolism of the academical dithyrambic, which places an aureola about the heads of poets, and, persuaded that they are gleaming in their obscurity, wait for others to come and seek them out. We used to know a small school composed of men of this type, so strange, that one finds it hard to believe in their existence; they styled themselves the disciples of art for art's sake. According to these simpletons, art for art's sake consisted of deifying one another, in abstaining from helping chance, who did not even know their address, and in waiting for pedestals to come of their own accord and place themselves under them.

It is, as one sees, the ridiculousness of stoicism. Well, then we again affirm, there exist in the heart of unknown Bohemia, similar beings whose poverty excites a sympathetic pity which common sense obliges you to go back on, for if you quietly remark to them that we live in the nineteenth century, that the five-franc piece is the empress of humanity, and that boots do not drop already blacked from heaven, they turn their backs on you and call you a tradesman.

For the rest, they are logical in their mad heroism, they utter neither cries nor complainings, and passively undergo the obscure and rigorous fate they make for themselves. They die for the most part, decimated by that disease to which science does not dare give its real name, want. If they would, however, many could escape from this fatal denouement which suddenly terminates their life at an age when ordinary life is only beginning. It would suffice for that for them to make a few concessions to the stern laws of necessity; for them to know how to duplicate their being, to have within themselves two natures, the poet ever dreaming on the lofty summits where the choir of inspired voices are warbling, and the man, worker-out of his life, able to knead his daily bread, but this duality which almost always exists among strongly tempered natures, of whom it is one of the distinctive characteristics, is not met with amongst the greater number of these young fellows, whom pride, a bastard pride, has rendered invulnerable to all the advice of reason. Thus they die young, leaving sometimes behind them a work which the world admires later on and which it would no doubt have applauded sooner if it had not remained invisible.

In artistic struggles it is almost the same as in war, the whole of the glory acquired falls to the leaders; the army shares as its reward the few lines in a dispatch. As to the soldiers struck down in battle, they are buried where they fall, and one epitaph serves for twenty thousand dead. So, too, the crowd, which always has its eyes fixed on the rising sun, never lowers its glance towards that underground world where the obscure workers are struggling; their existence finishes unknown and without sometimes even having had the consolation of smiling at an accomplished task, they depart from this life, enwrapped in a shroud of indifference...

Jeremy Waldron on Cass Sunstein

I've never understood the enthusiasm some people I talk to fairly regularly have for Cass Sunstein. Jeremy Waldron seems to share my puzzlement:

Jeremy Waldron: A lot of Sunstein's recent work has had this quality: scolding us for our self-righteousness.... In Worst-Case Scenarios, the scolding tone becomes more unpleasant when Sunstein confronts the critics of the US refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Many of the critics, he says, come from countries where the likely effects of climate change will be very grave and where the costs of subscribing to the Kyoto carbon caps are quite low... in the United States: the costs... of lowering the very significant level of carbon emissions is unacceptably high, and the bad effects of climate change will not be felt in the US so much as in other parts of the world. So Sunstein devotes a long second chapter to a defence of the American position. He acknowledges that it's a self-interested calculation: only costs, benefits and catastrophes for Americans are considered. Sunstein understands that this sort of calculation may be morally inappropriate:

...The emission of greenhouse gases could even be viewed as a kind of tort, producing damage for which emitters, and those who gained from their actions, ought to pay. For example, energy and gasoline prices in the United States have been far lower than they would have been if those prices had included an amount attributable to the increased risks from climate change -- risks that threaten to impose devastating harm on people in other countries.

One would have thought that this dimension of worst-case analysis is all-important, and that Sunstein is just the person to explore systematically the difference that attention to the moral aspects of the distribution of costs and harms would make to the modes of analysis that he considers.... He concedes that Americans may have a special obligation to mitigate the harm they have caused. He points out several times, however, that poor people suffer too as a result of over-regulation. And he is reluctant to abandon a method of measuring losses by how much people would pay to avoid them, even though it is hopelessly flawed by the fact that poor people would pay less simply because they have less.... Sunstein asks:

Why should people be forced to pay an amount for regulation that exceeds their willingness to pay? People are making their own judgments about how much to spend to avoid various risks -- and those judgments should be respected.... To be sure, we might believe that a measure of redistribution is appropriate.... But... regulation need not, and often does not, amount to a subsidy to those who benefit.... When the government eliminates carcinogenic substances from the water supply, water companies do not bear the cost; it is passed on to consumers in the form of higher water bills.

Sunstein knows that matters are not as straightforward as this, and that the distributive issues that occasionally trouble him indicate deeper and more structural difficulties with the kinds of analysis he favours. Mostly he just observes that these questions are all very complicated and that he prefers to "return to simpler matters", i.e. rational choice calculations uncontaminated by distributive complexities....

[T]here is a considerable opportunity-cost to the rest of us in his failure to devote more sustained attention to issues of rich and poor, advantaged and disadvantaged. Justice is out of fashion among rational choice theorists, and it is a pity that Worst-Case Scenarios does not fly in the face of fashion in a more determined way. It would have been a better book had it spent more time on the issues of distributive and corrective justice that attend the prevention of catastrophic harm.

W. Arthur Lewis: Evolution of the International Economic Order

W. Arthur Lewis (1978), Evolution of the International Economic Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Perenially out of print, and perhaps the finest work of economic history ever.

http://j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/Lewis_Evolution_A.pdf http://j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/Lewis_Evolution_B.pdf

Walter Jon Williams's Implied Spaces

S.M. Stirling tells me that I must buy this book:

Night Shade Books: Williams, Walter Jon - Implied Spaces: Implied Spaces pioneers a new genre of SF--the 'Sword & Singularity' novel. Williams combines fantasy tropes believably with nanotech, bleeding-edge infotech speculation, classic smashing-planets space opera and intriguingly human, or possibly post-human characters along with a fast-moving plot and a quirky sense of humor in a melange that's cosmological, theological, ontological, comic, and thoroughly entertaining.

Market Forces

Andrew Samwick directs us to:

PoET: Prices of Economics Textbooks: The goal of this site is to encourage instructors to take price into account when shopping for texts. Like doctors prescribing drugs for their patients, college instructors selecting textbooks for their classes have little incentive to pay attention to prices that they themselves do not pay. Textbook publishers do not advertise their prices. Often it is even difficult to find prices on their websites. Nowhere have we been able to find current price lists for a full selection of competing texts.

Introductory Economics and Intermediate Micro and Macro texts commonly retail for more than $150. Over the past twenty years, despite reduced production costs, real prices have climbed by about three percent per year.[1] By all reasonable estimates, publishers' net revenue per sale is several times larger than marginal cost. While it is true that publishers' revenues must cover fixed as well as variable costs, there is little doubt that successful textbooks are enormously profitable and would be so even at much lower prices.

As economists, we are not surprised that publishers seek to maximize profits. Economic theory predicts that the ratio of a seller's price to marginal cost will be high if demand is inelastic. While publishers are unlikely to respond to moral suasion, they are likely to respond to increased price elasticity. Thus we hope that this website will have two beneficial effects. The direct effect is that it may help you find a better deal for your students. An indirect effect is that the more attention that consumers pay to prices, the more elastic will be demand, and hence the lower will be the profit-maximizing prices.

John Scalzi Is too Good a Book Salesman

He must be stopped. Or I will be brokie:

The "I'm Writing This to Totally Make You Jealous" Post: In which I tell you about some of the ARCs I’ve received recently that mean I get to read all the books you want to read before you do. Bwa ha ha ha hah ha! Hi, I’m evil. Let’s see what we got:

• Saturn’s Children, by Charlie Stross — It’s Stross does late-period Heinlein! Now there’s an image that will haunt your sleep for decades. Charlie actually gave me a peak at this a while ago, and I immensely enjoyed what I read, but then a computer implosion basically took that file away from me. Yes, we pause to shed a tear here. But now I have it! In ARC form! And lo, there was much happiness. It comes out in July, friends. Suffer until then.

• Ink and Steel, by Elizabeth Bear – “Queen Elizabeth rules by wit and by will, but magic keeps her on the throne...” reads the cutline. Well, yeah. I thought everyone knew that. Bear’s output makes me feel like a slacker, and there aren’t that many writers who can make me feel like that. The next time I see Bear, I’ll have to tell her that: “You make me feel like no other writer!” And then, the tasering will commence, I suppose. This also hits in July.

• The Edge of Reason, by Melissa Snodgrass — Patrick Nielsen Hayden described to me thusly: “a contemporary metaphysical thriller about the secret battle between the forces of rationality and the Old Ones From Beyond Time, the latter of whom are using superstition and religion as the means by which to knock over the barriers that prevent them from breaking through and eating our brains.” Really, he and Snodgrass had me at the brain-eating. I’m very excited about this one, and for the rest of you, you have until May to put your brains under lock and key.

• The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds – This book was already nominated for the BSFA Best Novel award this year, so you could say it comes with a recommendation to you from all of British fandom. Which, you know. Is nice. And it’s set in Reynold’s Revelation Space universe, so fans of that have something to look forward to. In June. Which is when you’ll read it. After me. Ha!

• Lonely Werewolf Girl, by Martin Millar – As Publishers Weekly blithely summarizes: “Young werewolf skulks around London and struggles with anxiety and eating disorders while scores of subplots merrily explode around her.” Well, and isn’t that always the way, when you’re a young werewolf? That’s the way it was for me. Hmmm. I suspect I may have said too much right there. The publication date here is April 20, but Amazon says it has it in stock. So I can’t hold my ability to read it before you over you this time. Curse you, Amazon, for denying my cheap and tawdy attempts at literary superiority! We hates Amazonzes, Precious! We hates them forever!

Go on, admit you’re jealous. I’ll still respect you. Really.

Odysseus: Grace Under Pressure

From Underbelly:

Underbelly: "Excuse Me, Are You the Child of Circus People?": this is a good time an Underbelly golden oldy: my all-time favorite literary teaser. It's from Homer's Odyssey:, and a little scene-setting will add to the flavor:

Odysseus, the hero, is asleep exhausted in the bushes just off shore. Meanwhile Athena, his protector, has gone in a vision before Nausikaa, the princess, and said:

Yo, princess! It's getting on time for you to be married-- Don't you think you ought to catch up on the laundry?

Nausikaa thinks this is a cool idea so she loads her buddies and a bunch of dirty clothes into the wagon and sets the mules off to the waterside. After the girls have finished with their domestic chores, they are disporting themselves with a game of catch, when by mischance the ball rolls off into the bushes, awakening Odysseus.

Recall that our hero has the bad grace to be naked at the moment; but mindful of the strict sex-offender laws, he yanks off a juniper branch and deploys it for modesty. He approaches the princess and drops to his knees (gymnos per eon, we are reminded) and utters the immortal words:

At Delos once, at the shrine of Apollo,
I saw a slender young date palm that reminded me of you.

Now I ask any woman who has ever been approached by a guy in a juniper bush--is there any line in any language more calculated to reduce you to butter? Certainly not for Nausikaa. She responds:

Stranger, you seem neither hostile nor stupid...

She invites him to come home with her. But at the city's edge, she suggests he get out of the wagon and walk, so as not to create too much attention. You'll be able to find me again, she says. Just ask for the king's house. They'll know where to send you.

Fn.: Translation is my own and, okay, somewhat free. But I defy anyone to show that I have failed to capture the spirit of the greatest pickup scene ever written. For comparison, go here.

The Chapter on the Fall of the Rupee You May Omit...

It is a line that always gets a laugh:

Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest": MISS PRISM: ...Cecily, you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side.

It's from Act 2. The audience always laughs at the idea that there is anything in economics that could even possibly be non-boring enough to give a proper young Edwardian lady the vapours.

But there are always a few who are laughing out of a second-order effect--who are laughing at, not with, the audience because they are laughing at the fact that the audience is laughing.

You see, Miss Prism is telling nothing but the unvarnished truth: these metallic problems do have their melodramatic side. A good mania or a good crash causes as much reorientation of economic activity, as much redirection of people and their lives, as much elevation of groups that acquire power and as much degradation of groups that lose it as--well, as would normally require a good solid war (albeit, we hope, without the bloodshed).

Alas! There is no sign that Oscar Wilde understood that he was not just making but was the butt of the joke...

Thinking about Mark J. Roe

Mark Roe (2002), Political Determinants of Corporate Governance.

Tor Books Enters the 21st Century: Step I

This threatens to be, in the words of Jo "Authoress of the Damnedest Versions of Both the Tale of Sir Lancelot and Jane Austen (Actually Anthony Trollope) I Have Ever Read" Walton:

more fun than a barrel of Arcturan spider-puppies!

From Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Making Light: Phase one: collect underpants: Yes, we're building a new web site, separate from our perfectly good corporate site.... [A]s I told at least one web reporter, if we knew exactly how it's going to work, we'd be done. We don't, entirely, so we're not, entirely.

But we know several things. We know that the site will use a blog-like architecture to present an ongoing stream of news, opinion, and observation from various Tor people, myself included, about the SF and fantasy events of the day--and about perhaps less-current things that are nonetheless of interest to SF and fantasy readers, such as medieval siege engines, the Van Allen Belt, hoisin sauce, XKCD, and the novels of Georgette Heyer. We know that there will be non-Tor bloggers.... We know that the site will also feature new original fiction... free of DRM... lightweight "social networking."... Most of all, we know that the real point of the exercise isn't to create yet another blog, but rather, a place and a context for the lively, ongoing, wide-ranging, and profoundly self-organizing discussions that have characterized the science fiction subculture since its earliest days. In other words, it'll be a lot like Making Light, except with original fiction and art, more front-page bloggers, a more direct connection to SF and fantasy, and run out of the middle of Tor Books.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So this is, like, a big Tor promotional exercise, right?

PNH: Only in the sense that Tor is a pretty good brand to put on something associated with science fiction....

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So what about the free e-books?

PNH: I'm glad I made you up so that you could ask that question! As you know, Bob... we are, For A Limited Time, sending... links through which they can download free, un-DRMed digital editions of various recent Tor books in a variety of formats.... However, the munificence of this offer (Slashdotted twice on its first weekend), combined with our vagueness in describing the actual site for which the offer is merely a build-up, has caused a lot of people to jump to the conclusion that the new site will be all about selling and/or giving away digital books. This isn't the case....

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: Is to be a Focal Point Fanzine, meyer.

PNH: So very busted.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: We thought so. We recognized the signs. The sensitive fannish faces. The faint but unmistakable aroma of mimeo ink. Exactly whose idea was this?

PNH: Well, er, Fritz Foy, former Holtzbrinck CTO and incorrigible ubergeek... and the aforementioned Irene Gallo...and, er, well yes, both Nielsen Haydens. Not long after the project's initial phase, Teresa was promoted to the Vingean Beyond, from whence she sends occasional messages of encouragement to those of us back in the Slow Zone where FTL and true AI are impossible.... And of course we'd be nowhere without the energy, enthusiasm, focus, and endless Outlook-calendar meeting notices of professional Web producer Larry Hewitt, hired by our corporate management to turn our gauzy ideas into a properly flowcharted plan. (Look! He has a plan! We must eat his brain!) We cope.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So when do you launch? Do you have a beta phase? Are you looking for early volunteers?

PNH: Again you anticipate me with the slan-like acuteness of your fine minds!... Act now! Act without thinking! WORK LIKE YOU WERE LIVING IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION. Anyway, that's our plan.

Reading Books Online

Adam Engst writes:

an Open Letter to Steve Jobs: In Support of an iPod reader: Reading habits have undoubtedly changed, since we have more entertainment and research options available to us than ever before... the prime mover... is that Americans are now spending 32.7 hours per week online, almost twice as much as they spend watching TV (16.4 hours per week) and more than eight times as much as they spend reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours). If you want to point to an industry in trouble, look no further than newspapers, where circulation is in a steep decline.

The key point is that time spent online is largely time spent reading (and writing), whether email (57 billion messages sent in 2007 by IDC's estimate), blogs (over 70 million, with 1.5 million posts per day, according to Technorati), or more traditional online news and entertainment sources. People read more than they ever have, thanks to the Internet, and new forms of reading are appearing all the time. Witness the Japanese "cell phone novel," meant to be read in serialized form on the ubiquitous mobile phone. The Economist reports that since appearing in 2001, the genre has grown to become an $82 million business in 2006, with some ebooks receiving over a hundred thousand downloads per day.

I've called out all these numbers in order to encourage Apple to acknowledge that people read vast quantities of text and to focus hardware and software design efforts on making it easier to read on the iPod, iPhone, and future devices. The iPod and iPhone can be used to read some online content now, along with small bits of text synced from a Mac, but the experience could be significantly improved with native support for PDF, better user interface support for stored text documents, and more.

But I, speaking as a reader and a publisher, would really like to see Apple create a larger version of the iPod touch optimized not just for a better video experience, but also for a best-of-breed reading experience. Apple has the hardware design and user interface chops that Amazon lacked when creating the Kindle.... Equally important is the iTunes Store....

Such a device would make good business sense for Apple too....

John Markoff has speculated that your dismissal of American reading habits is actually a calculated setting of the stage for just such a device. You didn't have kind words for cell phones or the MP3 players that predated the iPod, with justification - they were (and for the most part remain) utterly awful. So Steve, here's hoping that an upcoming special event will feature an iPod reader, designed to do all the great things we've become accustomed to from an iPod, but with the addition of native support for downloading, managing, and displaying textual documents of all sorts....

The iPod already gives us access to Beethoven and Bob Dylan, to snapshots of our children, and to The Incredibles and episodes of Lost. Let's add to that The Hobbit and Harry Potter, 1984 and Catch-22, and the complete works of Dr. Seuss. Book publishers have been waiting for a mass-market ebook reader for years, the newspaper companies are dying for a new online business model, and normal people just want to read on the train to work...

Yet More Sunny-Afternoon-Lying-in-Bed-with-Bronchitis-Trade-and-Power Blogging

Finally digging deep into Ron Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium:

Ron Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press): A feature of the book that may strike some economists as odd or surprising, but will seem entirely commonplace to historians, is its sustained emphasis on conflict, violence, and geopolitics. When economics students are first exposed to the study of international trade, they are asked to contemplate two countries, A and B, who have each been endowed with a certain amount of the various factors of production—land, labor, capital, and so on—as well as with a given technology which translates those endowments into consumption goods, together with a set of preferences over these goods. The two countries then trade with each other, or not as the case may be, and the consequences of trade are derived for consumers and producers alike.... The summit of unpleasantness attainable in such models is the use of tariffs, quotas, and other trade policy instruments that will benefit some individuals or groups (and possibly nations) but lower the utility of other domestic or foreign residents.

If only life were like this. As we point out below, the greatest expansions of world trade have tended to come not from the bloodless tâtonnement of some fictional Walrasian auctioneer but from the barrel of a Maxim gun, the edge of a scimitar, or the ferocity of nomadic horsemen. When trade required more workers, parental choices regarding quality/quantity trade-offs could often safely be ignored, since workers could always be enslaved. When trade required more profits, these could be earned via plunder or violently imposed monopolies. For much of our period the pattern of trade can only be understood as being the outcome of some military or political equilibrium between contending powers. The dependence of trade on war and peace eventually became so obvious to us that it is reflected in the title of this volume.

Politics thus determined trade, but trade also helped to determine politics, by influencing the capacities and the incentives facing states. The mutual dependence of “Power” and “Plenty,” so well evoked by Jacob Viner (1948), will thus be a key feature of this book. The phrase itself comes from the first lines of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, first published in 1612... the frontispiece to that volume... Albion, or Britannia, here appears to be “prosperous and triumphant and for the only time in her long career, notably young and beautiful.” Bedecked in pearls, secure on her island stronghold, and holding both a cornucopia and a scepter, she appears to be serenely contemplating not just her enjoyment of Plenty, but her exercise of Power as well.

As we shall see, this nymph-like creature would soon become the battle-hardened ruler not just of the English Channel but of the oceans of the world, and no history of international trade can ignore the causes or the implications of military exploits such as these... the use of force involves the allocation of scarce resources as well, and imposes costs and benefits both on those who use it and on those against whom it is used, as well as on third parties....

If all this may appear to have been less true over the course of the last two centuries, this is because of the overwhelming influence of the Industrial Revolution on all subsequent economic history. The nineteenth-century globalization that followed this breakthrough was unprecedented in many ways, and as we will see perhaps its most clearly distinguishing feature was its largely technological underpinnings (although even in this period imperialism still had an important role to play, and was itself facilitated in many ways by the new technology). The new technologies not only brought markets closer together than ever before, but opened up enormous income gaps between regions that remain with us today, and produced a stark division of labor between a manufacturing core and a primary-producing periphery. The big questions ever since then have been: How can developing countries catch up with the core? Should they do so by exploiting their natural resource advantages, as was successfully tried in the nineteenth century, or does this leave them excessively vulnerable to fickle international markets, as the interwar experience might suggest? Should they decouple themselves from international markets, as many did after 1945, or reintegrate with them, as they have done over the past two decades? These questions, and related ones such as how the West should adapt to the rise of India and China, have only arisen because of the asymmetries created by the Industrial Revolution, and are thus fundamentally historical in nature...

And:

Ron Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press): The Industrial Revolution... can only be understood as the outcome of a historical process with multiple causes stretching well back into the medieval period, and in which international movements of commodities, warriors, microbes, and technologies all played a leading role. Purely domestic accounts of the “Rise of the West,” emphasizing Western institutions, cultural attributes, or endowments, are hopelessly inadequate, since they ignore the vast web of interrelationships between Western Europe and the rest of the world that had been spun over the course of many centuries, and was crucially important for the breakthrough to modern economic growth....

Like most mainstream economists, we view inventiveness and incentives, rather than sheer accumulation, “primitive” or otherwise, as being at the heart of growth, but this does not imply that European overseas expansion should be written off as irrelevant. Plunder may not have directly fueled the Industrial Revolution, but mercantilism and imperialism were an important part of the global context within which it originated.... Violence thus undoubtedly mattered in shaping the environment within which the conventional economic forces of supply and demand operated....

When we say geography, we mean geography: mountains, rivers, and all. If Genghis Khan had been born in New Zealand, he would have left no traces on world history. The Irish might have enjoyed holding the rest of Europe to ransom by controlling access to Southeast Asian spices, but never had the opportunities which geography afforded the rulers of Egypt. A European seeking direct access to India might well head westward and stumble across the Americas, but no Chinese sailor would have been foolish enough to seek an eastern passage to Arabia....

The three great world-historical events of the second millennium, in our account, are the Black Death of the fourteenth century and the differing responses to it, the “discovery” and incorporation of the New World into that of the Old at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the nineteenth... no single region was solely responsible for any one of these three transformational episodes, let alone all three. The first resulted from the Pax Mongolica, established by the nomads of Central Asia but consolidated and actively participated in by all of the other six regions. Western Europeans were the first Eurasians to sail to the New World, but it was Africans, against their will, who produced many of the commodities that it exported to the Old. The Industrial Revolution occurred within Western Europe, and more specifically in Britain, but the essential raw material that its leading sector required was produced by Africans in the Americas, and the final products were sold in markets around the entire world....

Before asking the reader to plunge into one thousand years of history, it behooves us to provide a brief guide to the terrain that lies ahead. We begin in the first chapter with a consideration of basic methodological issues, and the delineation of the seven “world regions”... Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Islamic World of the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.... The second chapter analyzes the trading and other relationships between these seven regions and an eighth, sub-Saharan Africa, at the turn of the second millennium... the only region in sustained direct contact with all the others at this time was the Islamic World, then undergoing its “Golden Age” under the Abbasid, Fatimid, and Umayyad caliphates based in Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba, while the one with the least contact with the others was Western Europe. The third chapter is a broad analytical survey of the evolution of the world economy from 1000 to 1500... the forging of the Pax Mongolica... stimulated long-distance trade from the Atlantic to the Sea of Japan; the devastating consequences of the Black Death... the subsequent expansion of population, output, and prices across the world, particularly in Western Europe and Southeast Asia.

This sets the stage for the launching of the Iberian voyages of discovery... the worldwide trade in silver... the long struggle for hegemony in the emerging world economy between the Dutch Republic, Great Britain, and France... the hardly less momentous overland expansions, from opposite ends of Central Asia, of the Czarist empire of the Romanovs and the Chinese empire of the Manchu Qing dynasty. One major theme of this chapter is the extent to which Asians were not just passive actors during this period, but adopted new military technologies, with similar political effects to those experienced in Europe; another is the mercantilist economic policies pursued by the leading states of the day.

The sixth chapter... the breakthrough to modern economic growth... Great Britain, at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution... is the fulcrum around which the rest of the book turns.... [W]e do not see the Industrial Revolution as springing up suddenly, like “Athena fully armed from the brow of Zeus,” purely as a result of the creative imaginations of a group of inventors... we see it instead as the culmination of a long historical process involving the interaction of all the world’s regions.... This is not to deny the vital contribution of Great Britain, and more broadly Western Europe, but to provide a consistent and coherent explanation of why this event was so transformational in nature, rather than evanescent, as had been all the earlier “efflorescences” (Goldstone 2002) in the history of the world economy that we describe.

On one level, the economic history of the past two centuries can, as already noted, be viewed as the working out of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution: a “Great Divergence” in income levels between regions, as the new technologies diffused only gradually across the globe; a “Great Specialization” between an industrial core and a primary-producing periphery; consequent pressures to protect agriculture in the core, and manufacturing in the periphery; and, finally, a gradual unwinding of these trends as the Industrial Revolution spread to encompass an ever-increasing proportion of the globe... the evolution of these trends was not smooth, but was profoundly marked by the political consequences of three major world wars: the French and Napoleonic Wars that ended the age of mercantilism, World War I, and World War II....

Chapter 7... focuses on the “nineteenth century” from 1815 to 1914... Pax Britannica and European imperialism... the railroad and the steamship... a new sort of globalization, manifested by a significant narrowing of intercontinental price gaps for bulk commodities... the “Great Specialization”... the industrialized countries of Western Europe, eventually to be joined by the United States and Japan, exported manufactured goods to Asia, Africa, Australasia, and Latin America in exchange for primary foodstuffs and raw materials, with Europe also exporting capital to all these regions, and people to the Americas and Australasia. The end of this period was marked by the beginnings of a “backlash” against globalization.... This first “golden age of globalization” was of course brought to a tragic and abrupt end by the outbreak of World War I.

The interwar years from 1918 to 1939, covered in chapter 8, were dominated politically and economically by the aftermath of this catastrophe....

World War II and its aftermath are the subject of chapter 9... the Pax Americana and the associated framework of multilateral international institutions... the spread of Communism and then by its collapse... decolonization of areas in the Third World that had become imperial possessions of the European powers. We stress that the combined effect of these trends was to further disintegrate the world economy, with OECD liberalization constituting a regional exception to this general rule, until some time in the 1970s or 1980s. It was only then that Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where the bulk of humanity reside, started to open up to trade and investment with the rest of the world.

Economically, the late twentieth century was to a large extent dominated by the attempt of newly independent countries to industrialize through policies of “import substitution.” However, the period also saw the unprecedented expansion of world output and trade as a result of trade liberalization and growth in the industrial countries, and technological diffusion to “newly industrializing countries.” This eventually led to the rapid growth of manufactured exports from these countries, particularly China and India, and to the beginnings of a narrowing of the huge per capita income gaps that have separated these once prosperous regions from Western Europe since the Industrial Revolution....

The reader will have noticed that our successive eras... have been demarcated mostly by the outbreaks of major wars or imperial expansions. Each era can be seen as one in which trade is conducted within a geopolitical framework established by the previous major war or conflict...

Next up: Woytinsky and Woytinsky...

The European Seaborne Empires I: "To Serve God, to Win Glory for the King, and to Become Rich"

The European Seaborne Empires I: "To Serve God, to Win Glory for the King, and to Become Rich"

From David Abernethy (2000), The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 1415-19890 (New Haven: Yale), p. 242 ff:

The multifaceted nature of Europe's assaults is highlighted when contrasted with the overseas activities of the Chinese and the Arabs. The ideal site for comparison would be a place distant from Europe, China, and Arabia, hence unlikely to be controlled by any of them, where people arriving by sea from all three areas were present at about the same time. That such stringent conditions could be met seems highly unlikely. But in fact they do apply to one case: Malacca during roughly the first century of [European imperalism] phase 1. This city, located on the Malayan side of the narrow strait named after it, was founded in the late fourteenth century and rapidly became the principal center for maritime trade among Indian Ocean emporia, the Spice Islands, and China. Malacca benefited from the weather as well as from its location. Because of monsoonal winds, vessels sailing from the Indian Ocean to China (and vice versa) had to lay over for a few months before continuing the journey. An alternative was for ships to unload their wares in Malacca, returning to their respective home ports with goods from the others' ships as well as gold, spices, and precious woods from the offshore islands.

The city and strait of Malacca were extraordinarily cosmopolitan places several centuries ago. A well-placed Portuguese observer wrote in the 1570s: "One may well and truly say that Malacca, in point of fact, and merchant trade, is the most extensive place in the world." The city was visited by Cheng Ho [pinyin Zheng He] on at least two of his voyages and thereafter by many Chinese sailors and traders. The great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta passed through the strait in 1345-6, and several thousand Muslims, including some from Arabia, resided in the city in the early 1500s. Ibn Battuta's Italian conterpart, Marco Polo, passed through the Malacca Strait in 1292 on his return to Europe from China. As noted in chaptert 3, the Portuguese captured Malacca in 1511, holding it until the Dutch replaced them in 1641. Thus people from all three regions converged around the start of [European imperalism] phase 1 on the same small area.

By studying Malacca in 1511 one comes as close as possible to a historical laboratory experiment. Are sectoral features of European countries present as well in China nad in Arab (and, more generally, Muslim) societies? If so, for reasons given in chapter 2 my argument about the importance of sectors is weakened. If not, the argument is strengthened.

The Chinese government's impact on Malacca was far more limited in scope and duration than might be expected given the country's wealth and size. Cheng Ho's armada of hugh junks, with thousands of well-armed soldiers aboard, was designed to ensure attention and respectful deference to China's rulers from elites elsewhere. Presumably Admiral Ho was instructed to urge monarchs to establish symbolic tributary relaions with the Celestial Court. But the admiral was unwilling to use the military might at his disposal to conquer Malacca, there being no plans to administer distant lands as integral parts of the emperor's domains. Moreover, as noted earlier, the impressive voyages undertaken by Cheng Ho ended abruptly in 1433. The emperor politely received the king of Malacca when the king later journeyed to Beijing, bearing tribute. But assertion of China's superior political status was made by the inferior party visiting the Celestial Court, not by the latter reaching out aggressively beyond its borders. The contrast with the European pattern is obvious.

China's private sector had a more substantial and long-lasting impact on Malacca. One indicator was the existence, as of the early 1500s, of a separate section of the city reserved for Chinese merchants. These traders were on their own when residing overseas. This was manifestly the case after 1433 when they could not count on even an intermittent visit of ships to demonstrate the home government's power. If anything, Malacca's Chinese merchants carried on their business despite the imperial court, which launched periodic efforts to restrict economic ties with the outside world. The court controlled government-to-government trade, expressed through the tributary system. Nonofficial trade, which it was unable to regulate, was perceived as an unwelcome challenge to its power and authority. That many Chinese merchants in Malacca were long-term residents did not signify that they were overseas agents of Chinese power. On the contrary, it reflected recognition of obstacles that bureaucrats would have placed in theiur way had they based their international operations on the Chinese mainland. A common pattern for th Chinese in sixteenth-century Malacca and elsewhere in southeast Asia was to conduct clandestine commerce with the home country. Alternatively, they concentrated on trade among ports scattered about the Nanyang (Southern Seas). In both cases they tried to avoid contact with Chinese officials rather than to work with them.

The imperial court disapproved of Chinese settling elsewhere because this meant abandoning the graves of their ancestors. The court took this view to its logical conclusion in 1712 with an edict forbidding its subjects to live or trade in Southeast Asia. Though poorly and inconsistently enforced, the edict nonetheless expressed an attitude toward overseas settlers diametrically opposed to that of western Europe's rulers.

China's public and private profit sectors thus had minimal contact with each other in dealing with Malacca. When cross-sectoral contact did occur it tended to be competitive and conflictual rather than cooperative. The profit-sharing and chartered-company options were ruled out. This stands in sharp contrast to the European pattern of linking the two sectors in mutually beneficial ways.

The Chinese did not carry a missionary religion to Malacca because they had none. As noted in chapter 8, the imperial court's Confucian creed was a civil religion, not available for export or readily separable institutionally from the public sector. Cheng Ho was dispatched as a diplomatic emissary of the court. But he could not have served as a Confucian missionary, had this unlikely possibility ever been considered, because he was Muslim. Chinese merchants in Malacca practiced their own religious faiths but kept to themselves when oing so. No basis existed for an outeward-looking coalition between leading practitioners of China's religions and its rulers or merchants.

Arabs visited Malacca as long-distance merchants, staying in a quarter of the town set aside for Muslims. Unlike the Chinese they did bring a missionary religion. They used their wealth and their external connections to persuade Southeast Asia's political elites to let them build mosques and invite mullahs to lead the Islamic community's religious life. In many instances Muslim merchants pressured local rulers to convert. Malacca's rulers had been Muslim for about a century before the Portuguese arrived. One may thus speak of an alliance between Arab mercantile and religious interests resembling the European pattern.

But Arabs in teh Indian Ocean basin were not like Europeans. First, they were not agents of a polity eager to assert itself overseas. Home bases for the Arab seafareres were port cities--Jiddah, Adan, Muscat--along the periphery of a vast, thinly-populated desert peninsula not effectively governed by anyone. These cities faced outward to the sea. But they were not linked to a densely-populated, economically-productive, politically-controlled hinterland in the way that western Europe's port cities were. They were urban areas on their own, not urban areas embedded in states. Their prospects for profitable trade were most favorable if none of them advanced political calims beyond its immediate domain. Traders and sailors moved on monsoonal winds from one trading center to another, intermediaries among several autonomous units rather than agents of any particular one.

Second, Arabs were not the only--or even the principal--propagators of Islam in southeast Asia. The central role they played in the religion's formation and explosive early spread into the Fertile Crescent and across North Africa was diluted in later centuries. Islam's steady advance eastward by land and sea was due mainly to initiatives by non-Arabs. Its increasingly cosmopolitan character can be seen in Malacca. The Portuguese chronicler Tome Pires reports that shortly aftert the city was founded "some rich Moorish merchants moved from Pase [in Sumatra] to Malacca, Parees, as well as Bengalese and Arabian Moors, for at that time there were a large number of merchants belonging to these three nations.

The successes of traders as proselytizers meant that diffusion of Islam in southeast Asia did not depend on soldiers and administrators brought in from outside. If public-sector support was deemed necessary it was provided on site: once Malacca's ruler converted, Islam become in effect the kingdom's official faith. Further, the spread of Islam did not depend on full-time specialists in conversion recruited, dispatched, and reporting to an institution headquartered in Arabia or any other Muslim country. Islam indigenized itself as it expanded, rather than serving the ambitious designs of a distant state or missionary agency.

To summarize, the Chinese public sector had only a fleeting interst in reaching out to Malacca, no interest in conquering the city, and competitive rather than cooperative relations between itself and private profit sectors; the religious sector had no will or autonomous institutional capacity to assert itself overseas. China's impact on Malacca as of the early sixteenth century was confined to the activities of a single sector functioning on its own. Arabs had two sectors interested in influencing the outside world, hence the potential for a sectoral coalition. But Islam's spread to Malacca and elsewhere in Southeast Asia was not essentially an Arab activity. Neither was it directed by religous agents accountable to their own sectoral institutions, as in the European pattern. Most importantly, the Arabs' mercantile and religious interests were not backed by a state able or anxious to expand overseas. What initially appears as a two-sector alliance turns out to be a phantom alliance because it lacked institutions stretching outward from a territorial base.

The limited, functionally diffuse character of Chinese and Arab/Muslim relations with Malacca posed an isoluble dilemma for the city's sultan when he encountered Europeans. Teh first ship sent out in 1509 from Goa, capital of Portugal's Estada da India, consisted of traders. But Muslim merchants resident in Malacca who came from Gujarat and other Indian ports knew from experience that the Portugese flag accompanied trade and that the Portuguese were Christians implacably hostile to Islam. Warned in effect that the Portuguese constituted a triple threat to his regime, the sultan imprisoned and mistreated serveral members of the trade mission. His actions precipitated the very attack by Portuguese soldiers two years later than he hoped to forestall. But the Muslim merchants could offer only warnings. None of the cities from which they came was in any position to supply military aid, even to coreligionists threatened by Christian infidels.

The only powerful polity to which the sultan could turn was China. But if he was able to contact the Chinese emperor his efforts were in vain. The tributary system binding Malacca to the Celestial Kingdom symbolized superior/inferior relations and did not contain a mutual defense clause. Help was not forthcoming. At a critical moment in world historoyk wehn Europeans first intervened in Southeast Asian affairs, the Chinese court was unwilling to assert its stake in a nearby region. The sultan faced toward Mecca when praying and toward Beijing when oferring tribute. But for quite different reasons he could count on neither to help counter the new foe.

Beijing, in other words, was the capital city of a powerful state lacking both an expansionist foreign policy and an expansionist religion. Mecca was the central city of an expansionist religion but not of a state. Lisbon was the capital city of a state with an expansionist foreign policy and a strong commitment to spread an expansionist religion.

As Muslim merchants predicted, the Portuguese launched a tripole assault on Malacca. The city was captured in 1511 by an armada of ships carrying fifteen hundred soldiers whose commander, Vicery Afons