J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with a Prehensile Tail

We Mourn the Death of Yegor Timurovich Gaidar

R.i.P. Yegor Timurovich Gaidar (March 19, 1956 - December 16, 2009.

I talked to him at length only once--when he came to Berkeley to give a lecture in the late 1990s, and wound up at my house for Thanksgiving dinner.

He said that in retrospect he had had only two important decisions to make:

• At the start of his tenure, whether to decontrol prices or to send the Red Army out into the country to collect the harvest for the cities at gunpoint.

• In the middle of his tenure, whether to go ahead with voucher privatization or try a more "Chinese" style system by which the private sector grew up around the still-operating state-owned sector.

He believed that he had made the right decisions. If he had sent the Red Army to collect the harvest at gunpoint, he said, people would have gotten shot and the political consequences woukd have been incalculable and could have been very bad indeed. If he had attempted ther "Chinese" approach, he said, it would have led to the nomenklatura stealing absolutely everything as they used their positions as managers of the state-owned sector to tunnel everything valuable out from the state-owned sector and into their own private businesses. The only thing that made the "Chinese" approach feasible in China, he said, was that China was so poor that there was effectively nothing for the nomenklatura to steal.

He was a friend of the people. He tried very hard.

I had never known that his father was a friend of Raul Castro's and had fought in the Bay of Pigs, or that he was the son-in-law of Russian science-fiction writer Arkady Strugatsky. I would have had him sign my copy of his father-in-law's book if I had known.

Winston Churchill Liveblogs World War II: December 13, 1939

December 13, 1939:

From the beginning of the war Commodore Harwood's special care and duty had been to cover British shipping off the River Plate and Rio de Janeiro. Hc was convinced that sooner or later the Spee would come towards the Plate, where the richest prizes were offered to her. He had carefully thought out the tactics which he would adopt in an encounter. Together, his 8-inch cruisers Cumberland and Exeter, and his 6-inch cruisers Ajax and Achilles, could not only catch but kill.

However, the needs of fuel and refit made it unlikely that all four would be present "on the day". If they were not the issue was disputable. On hearing that the Doric Star had been sunk on December 2, Harwood guessed right. Although she was over 3,000 miles away he assumed that the Spee would come towards the Plate. He estimated with luck and wisdom that she might arrive by the 13th. He ordered all his available forces to concentrate there on December 12. Alas, the Cumberland was refitting at the Falkfands; but on the morning of the 13th Exeter, Ajax, and Achilles were in company at the centre of the shipping routes °lithe mouth of the river. Sure enough, at 6.14 a.m smoke was sighted to the cast. The longed-for collision had come.

Harwood, in the Ajax, disposing his forces so as to attack the pocket-battleship from widely-divergent quarters and thus confuse hcr fire, advanced at the utmost speed of his small squadron. Captain Langsdorff thought at the first glance that he had only to deal with one light cruiser and two destroyers, and he too went full speed ahead; but a few moments later he reccignised the quality of his opponents, and knew that a mortal action impended.

The two forces were now closing at nearly fifty miles an hour. Langsdorff had but a minute to make up his mind. His right course would have been to turn away immediately so as to keep his assailants as long as possible under the superior range and weight of his 11-inch guns. to which the British could not at first have replied. He would thus have gained for his undisturbed firing the difference between adding speeds and subtracting them. He might well have crippled one of his foes before any could fire at him. He decided, on the contrary, to hold on his course and make for the Exeter. The action therefore began almost simultaneously on both sides.

Commodore Harwood's tactics' proved advantageous. The 8-inch salvoes from the Exeter struck the Spee from the earliest stages of the fight. Meanwhile the 6-inch cruisers were also hitting hard and effectively. Soon the Exeter received a hit which, besides knocking out B turret, destroyed all the communications on the bridge, killed or wounded nearly all upon it and put the ship temporarily out of control. By this time however the 6-inch cruisers could no longer be neglected by the enemy, and the Spee shifted her main armament to them, thus giving respite to the Exeter at a critical moment. The German battleship, plastered from three directions, found the British attack too hot, and soon afterwards turned away under a smoke-screen with the intention of making for the River Plate. Langsdorff had better have done this earlier.

After this turn the Spee once more engaged the Exeter, hard hit by the 11-inch shells. All her forward guns were out of action. She was burning fiercely amidships and bad a heavy list. Captain Bell, unscathed by the explosion on the bridge, gathered two or three officers round him in the after control-station, and kept his ship in action with her sole remaining turret, until at 7.30 failure of pressure put this too out of action. He could do no more. At 7.40 the Eveter turned away to effect repairs and took no further part in the fight.

The Ajax and Achilles, already in pursuit, continued the action in the most spirited manner. The Spee turned all her heavy guns upon them. By 7.25 the two after-turrets in the Ajax had been knocked out, and the Addlles had also suffered damage. These two light cruisers were no match for the enemy in gun-power, and, finding that his ammunition was running low, Harwood in the Ajax decided to break off the fight till dark, when he would have better chances of using his lighter armament effectively. and perhaps his torpedoes. He therefore turned away under cover of smoke, and the enemy did not follow. This fierce action had lasted an hour and twenty minutes. During all the rest of the day the Spee made for Montevideo, the British cruisers hanging grimly on her heels, with only occasional interchanges of fire. Shortly after midnight the Spec entered Montevideo. and lay there repairing damage, taking in stores, landing wounded, transhipping personnel to a German merchant ship, and reporting to the Fuehrer. Ajax and Achilles lay outside, determined to dog her to her doom should she venture forth. Meanwhile on the night of the 14th the Cumberland, which had bcen steaming at full speed from the Falklands, took the place of the utterly crippled Exeter. The arrival of this 8-inch-gun cruiser restored to its narrow balance a doubtful situation.

It had been most exciting to follow the drama of this brilliant action from the Admiralty War Room, where I spent a large part of the 13th. Our anxieties did not end with the day. Mr. Chamberlain was at that time in France on a visit to the Army...

The Opposite of a Pyrrhic Victory Is...

...a Laevinic defeat, according to "Benjamin." Hoisted from Comments:

Another Such Defeat and We Will Be the Winners!: Benjamin said...

a Laevinic defeat would certainly be the correct term, Publius Valerius Laevinus being on the receiving side of Pyrrhus' victory.

However, the Berkeley Classics Department inclines toward a different story.

It focuses not on the 280 BC Battle of Heraclea but rather on the 279 BC Battle of Asculum as the source of the "Pyrrhic victory" and of Pyrrhus's exclamation: "Another such victory and I am lost." The consul and commander at Asculum was Publius Decius Mus P. f. P. f. (yes, "Mus" does mean "mouse").

So now I am wondering whether "Musish defeat" or "mouseish defeat" is more appropriate as the antonym of "Pyrrhic victory."

From Peter Paul Rubens, "Death of Publius Decius Mus":

Hoisted from Archives: A Short Dialogue on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company

Stephen Bainbridge writes, apropos of (as best I can see) nothing at all:

ProfessorBainbridge.com: I don't read Kos or Brad DeLong or, for that matter, Brookings Institute position papers very often...

Let me say that in my view this is a serious mistake: reading people with whom one does not already agree is, after all, the only way one can can become smarter. Otherwise one becomes stupider every day.

As it happens, I do read Professor Bainbridge, and occasionally it provokes thoughts that I value--of which I think this is the best:

---

A Short Dialogue on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company

John of Salisbury: I see that Brad DeLong is getting smacked down from the left and from the right.

Thrasymakhos: Something that would make the world a better place if it happened more often, but about what, exactly?

John of Salisbury: Well, DeLong wrote down an off-the-cuff list of ten "constitutional moments" when American judges had changed the law. Fourth on his list is:

• The post-Civil War empowering of corporations with exorbitant privileges of citizenship and limited liability at the expense of government regulators and creditors.

Justinian: And?

Edward Coke: Nathan Newman accused him of Amnesia on the Death of Reconstruction--when the Grant administration was trying to suppress the anti-Negro terrorist insurgency in the U.S. South in the 1870s, the Supreme Court betrayed it and broke the legal tools it was using. Because the Supreme Court threw its weight onto the scales, Newman argues, the terrorists won.

Thrasymakhos: And what does DeLong say?

John of Salisbury: He wimps out. Something about the Supreme Court being a bit player--the main actors being executive and legislative.

Thrasymakhos: But the Supreme Court was active?

John of Salisbury: Very.

Thrasymakhos: Seems like Nathan has a fair point.

Justinian: And what else?

John of Salisbury: This is interesting. I can't claim to fully understand it. From the right, Stephen Bainbridge cheered on by Glenn Reynolds, takes aim at DeLong's example number 4:

I assume that DeLong's talking about the post-Civil war cases [like Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company].... Congress substituted the word "person" for the word "citizen" [in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment] precisely so that the provisions so affected would protect not just natural persons but also legal persons, such as corporations, from oppressive legislation.... (Admittedly... the legislative history is not uncontroverted.)...

The... cases establishing the corporation as a legal person with constitutional rights were (a) required by the legislative history of the 14th amendment and (b) made good policy sense. Hence, my conclusion that's you're "wrong" was intended to suggest that # 4 doesn't belong on your list. It was also intended to suggest that your rehetorical claim that the post-Civil War cases provided corporations with "exorbitant" privileges was, frankly, over the top. I should have thought that was apparent...

Justinian: I don't understand. Is Bainbridge defending the ruling of the Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company because the Court had a choice as to how to rule and chose the just result--the one that made "good policy sense"--or because the Court had no choice as to how to rule, being contrained by the plain meaning of the text?

Thrasymakhos: Neither.

Justinian: Neither?

Thrasymakhos: Neither. Notice that Bainbridge claims not that the Court was constrained by the meaning of the text, but by the legislative history of the amendment. He can't claim that the text requires his interpretation: it doesn't. And notice that Bainbridge cannot claim that justice alone--the fact that this interpretation would make "good policy sense"--is sufficient to justify his interpretation. That would mean that good judges are "activists" because they can make choices, and Bainbridge is certain that good judges aren't activists.

Edward Coke: No, that's not it at all. What good judges do is that they understand the law at a deeper level than other people. They see more clearly than others what the law always meant--but what their predecessors were too blurry-eyed to see.

Thrasymakhos: But the Fourteenth Amendment was then only sixteen years old.

Edward Coke: But the real Constitution--the Constitution that is true justice--had always included a Fourteenth Amendment. The drafters in 1787 had simply failed to see that it did. The life of the law, after all, is reason. The law that is written down is simply crystalized reason itself, to the extent that we can understand and follow it. So it had to be the case that true justice required and the properly-interpreted Fourteenth Amendment required that corporations be persons with the right to the equal protection of the laws. Anything else would be unreasonable.

John of Salisbury: Are you Edward Coke or G.F.W. Hegel?

Justinian: But this "required"? How can claims made about legislative history that are "not uncontroverted" "require" anything?

Edward Coke: Got me.

Justinian: How does this Fourteenth Amendment read?

Edward Coke: Like this:

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned... counting the whole number of persons in each State....

Justinian: So if you have more corporations in your state, you get more representatives in the legislature?

John of Salisbury: No, no, no! "Persons" in Section 2 refers only to human beings...

Edward Coke: And "persons" at the start of Section 1 refers only to human beings...

John of Salisbury: Only "persons" at the end of Section 1 refers to legal persons, i.e. corporations, as well as human beings...

Justinian: If anybody had tried to place such a strained interpretation on one of my laws...

John of Salisbury: Yes. Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas had things to say about Bainbridge's "required":

Wheeling Steel Corporation v. Glander , 337 U.S. 562 (1949): Mr. Justice DOUGLAS, with whom Mr. Justice BLACK concurs, dissenting.

It has been implicit in all of our decisions since 1886 that a corporation is a 'person' within the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara Co. v. South. Pacific R. Co.... [I]t wrote no opinion on the point.... There was no history, logic, or reason given to support that view.... The Fourteenth Amendment became a part of the Constitution in 1868. In 1871... Mr. Justice Woods (then Circuit Judge) held that 'person' as there used did not include a corporation.... [I]n 1873. Mr. Justice Miller... adverted to events 'almost too recent to be called history' to show that the purpose of the Amendment was to protect human rights--primarily the rights of a race which had just won its freedom....

[W]hat was clear to these earlier judges was apparently plain to the people who voted to make the Fourteenth Amendment a part of our Constitution.... There was no suggestion in [the amendment's] submission that it was designed to put negroes and corporations into one class and so dilute the police power of the States over corporate affairs....

[H]ow strained a construction it is of the Fourteenth Amendment so to hold.... It requires distortion to read 'person' as meaning one thing, then another within the same clause and from clause to clause....

History has gone the other way..... But now that the question is squarely presented I can only conclude that the Santa Clara case was wrong and should be overruled...

Edward Coke: And things get worse. If you look in Justice John Marshall Harlan's opinion in Santa Clara Co. v. South. Pacific R. Co. you see no holding that a corporation is a "person." The Court does not reach the question:

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company: The special grounds of defense by each of the defendants were: (1) That its road... a... franchise... derived from the United States, cannot, without their consent, be subjected to state taxation. (2) That the provisions of the constitution and laws of California... are in violation of the fourteenth amendment... denying to it the equal protection of the laws....

Mr. Justice FIELD overruled the first of the special defenses... but sustained the second.... The propositions embodied in the conclusions reached in the circuit court... belong to a class which this court should not decide unless their determination is essential.... [If not,] there will be no occasion to consider the grave questions of constitutional law....

[T]he court below might have given judgment... upon the ground that the assessment... included property... the state board was without jurisdiction to assess.... As the judgment can be sustained upon this ground, it is not necessary to consider any other questions...

Justinian: So Harlan writes explicitly that the Supreme Court is not deciding this question, and people like Bainbridge assert that the Supreme Court did decide the question?

Edward Coke: Yep.

Justinian: Wow.

[Pause]

Justinian: But Bainbridge talks about the legislative history. He says the legislative history requires his reading of the Fourteenth Amendment.

John of Salisbury: Now we get to the interesting case of Roscoe Conkling. Roscoe Conkling claimed that the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment had used the word "persons" in the equal protection clause so that subsequent courts could use it to protect corporations from legislatures--and that the drafters had kept this secret throughout the ratification process, and that he was only now in 1882 revealing the true meaning of what the states had ratified.

Justinian: Under what theory of ratification is a Court "required" to adopt a secret meaning of a law--a meaning unknown to those who adopted it?

Edward Coke: Got me.

Justinian: If Roscoe Conkling had written an extra clause on the original of the Amendment text in invisible ink, and the Amendment had then been ratified, would Bainbridge say that the invisible ink text was a valid part of the Constitution?

Edward Coke: Got me.

Justinian: Is Bainbridge serious when he writes that this claim by Conkling "requires" that judges adopt Conkling's reading of the Fourteenth Amendment?

Edward Coke: Apparently.

Thrasymakhos: It gets worse: Conkling appears to have misquoted his own diary, and to have done so deliberately: Howard Jay Graham (1938) "The 'Conspiracy Theory' of the Fourteenth Amendment," Yale Law Journal.

Justinian: Your modern jurisprudents appear to be a scurvy lot.

Edward Coke: I cannot disagree.

John of Salisbury: It's your fault.

Edward Coke: My fault?!

John of Salisbury: Yes. You started this practice of pretending that what judges wanted to do was in fact what precedent demanded that they must do. You with your "Great Charter" business--the rights of Englishmen against arbitrary arrest dating back to 1215. If anybody had shown up before Queen Elizabeth I demanding that someone she held in the Tower be released because of the "Great Charter"--well you, you as her Speaker blocked a proposed reaffirmation of it, didn't you? But you wanted to curb the power of a Scottish-born king, and pretending that Magna Carta had always been good law since 1215, and that it had always applied not just to barons with knights in the field but to all crown subjects was just the tool you needed. Modern lawyers have a nasty habit of making false claims about the past--that such and such a reading is "required" because of the past--in the hope that their claims will be true about the future. And it's your fault.

Justinian: I'm still stuck at this "required by the legislative history" business...

Thrasymakhos: It doesn't make "sense." It's not supposed to make sense. It's simply a way of avoiding admitting that the post-Civil War Supreme Court made choices about how American corporate law was to develop, and those choices could have gone different ways...

Anti-Social Darwinism, British Belle Epoque Class...

D.H. Lawrence to Blanche Jennings, October 9, 1908:

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: ...Pray do not trouble me about that paper on Art; I did not want it, I wanted your acknowledgement. I'm glad you like iut--I had much rather you found it to your taste than that your friend 'J' should. She is a Ruskinite; well, all Ruskinites are not fools. Does she herself 'make haste to see that none are in need of employment, food, or raiment', or does she spend the bulk of her time--her leisure--in reading appreciated novels and serious if not profound discourses on all manner of irrelevant subjects; in listening to lectures on Pre-Raphaelitism and the Ideal Home in attending concerts and Shaw-plays? I wrote the perp for her, not for the Bottom Dog; but because I would ask her to make up her m ind to turn her nose from the slum-stink; she is offended on behalf of poor, hungry, stinking humanity; as a matter of fact the snifs she takes are few and cautious; then, with the memory of a bad odor in her nostrils, or the report of a bad odor in her ears, she holds her head high and waxes indignant; feels virtuous on the strength of that same 'righteous indignation'. What devil was it that decreed that above all things men (and women supremely) must to themselves seem superbly virtuous? The deep damnation of self-righteousnss sticks tight to every creed, to every 'ism' and every 'ite'; but it lies thik all over the Ruskinite, like painted feathers on a skinny peacock.

As for the paper, keep it as long as you like, give it to whom you like, and to you think I could do anything with it? Where could I send short stories such as I write? Not to any magazine I know of--an you advise me? I will take to writing frivolously and whimsically if I can--if I could but write as I behave! There, I've had twenty years experience in dishing up my strong flavoured feelings in a nice smooth milk sauce with a sprinkle of nutmeg or cinnamon, but I've only had a few months of experience in making melted butter to be served with my writing.

I'm glad you're living in 'opulent idleness'. I've had three weeks of it (no mine was bourgeois idleness, that only keeps two maids) and I find it extremely suitable to me.

Concerning Daisy Lord, I am entirely in accord with you.[1] If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, adn a Cinematograph working brightly; then I'd go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the 'Hallelujah Chorus'.

I have no more time. I will send ou my new address. Write to me...

---

[1] Daisy Lord was sentenced to death in July 1908 for the murder of her illegitimate child; on August 15 the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment http://roehampton.openrepository.com/roehampton/bitstream/10142/47339/10/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20Chapter%20Eight.pdf

Buce: Short Memories: Republicans and Civil Rights

Buce writes:

Underbelly: Short Memories: Republicans and Civil Rights: Short Memories: Republicans and Civil Rights There's a curious case of memory loss that seems to be afflicting both left and right this morning over the history of civil rights legislation. Link, (link). Start with Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina:

Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the '60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle," said Fox. "They love to engage in revisionist history.

Shift now to Democratic Rep. Dennis Cardoza of North Carolina:

Today, what I’m hearing on the floor really takes the cake. The gentlelady from North Carolina, in her statement just now, indicated that the Republican GOP had passed the Civil Rights Act legislation with almost no help from the Democrats. I can’t believe my ears. It was the Kennedy and Johnson administration where we passed that Great Society legislation. It was over the objections of people like Jesse Helms from the gentlewoman’s state that we passed that civil rights legislation. John Lewis…

In response, Republicans gleefully jumped on the fact that Cardoza was wrong about Jesse Helms: he wasn't even in the Senate until 1972.

But on the larger issue--comments are still pouring in and I won't pretend to be keeping up with them; still, the fact is that Foxx actually had a kind of a point here. What she was really talking about the Civil Rights of 1957, which was passed on the initiative of the Eisenhower Administration, over the dead-body opposition of the Senate Democratic leadership--and only after the Democrats had so gutted it as to leave it largely meaningless.

How fast memories fade: recall that the pre-1960 Democratic party was a monstrous two-headed beast with liberal (sometimes radical) union members, blacks and intellectuals on one side and reactionary So;uthern whites on the other. It was the Republicans who still carried a progressive tradition on civil rights, going back to the founding of the party at the beginning of the Civil War.

Eisenhower himself, as many have observed, wasn't deeply hostile to blacks, but he just didn't get it: the real motivation came from the "northeast" wing of the party, notably Attorney General Herbert Brownell. Leading the Senate opposition was Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. As others have remarked, this created thre ironic mirroring in which the forces in fazvor of enhanced civil rights were led by a man who had no particular taste to it, while the opposition came from one southerner whose attitude towards racial minorities was one of genuine compassion.

When he signed the Civil Rights Act, Johnson famously said he figured he'd delivered the south to the Republicans for a long time to come. That was the year Rep. Foxx turned 21.

Update: I am catching offline flac for having saddled Lyndon Johnson with the onus of "leading the Senate opposition." The point is made that Johnson was in fact the person who jammed the bill through. ITechnically correct, but am unrepentant. I don't doubt the sincerity of Johnson's compassion for blacks. But he had two choices: one, let the bill fail, at the behest of the old bulls who still dominated the august body (e.g., Johnson's personal mentor, Richard Russell of Georgia). And two, strip it naked and deprive of all nourishment and push it forth into a hostile world. Johnson knew he couldn't make his bones as a Presidential candidate in 1960 without a civil rights scalp in his belt. So he chose the path of betrayal.

I am, at the end of the day, something of the Johnson fan. He certainly is the most interesting president of my lifetime (or perhaps a close second, behind Richard Nixon). But there is no point in obscuring how many grandmothers he had to pitch under how many speeding locomotives to get where he wanted to be.

Time to Reread the History of Austria's Creditanstalt in 1931...

Interesting time. In Europe, the Creditanstalt's bankruptcy and what followed was what turned the recession into the European Great Depression...

Roula Khalaf: The emirate has a lot of explaining to do: It came in a short statement about the restructuring of Dubai World, one of the emirate’s biggest and best-known companies, with the big news buried towards the end. But the decision to ask bondholders of the company and its most troubled subsidiary, Nakheel, to extend maturities from December to May 2010 was a bombshell. And the Middle East’s most glamorous and creative emirate will pay the price of its decision for a long time to come.

For months, all indications in Dubai were that the heavily indebted city-state, symbol of the rise of the region as an economic powerhouse as much as of the excesses of the pre-financial crunch days, would meet the obligations of the companies it owns, and that Nakheel’s $4bn debt due in December would be repaid. Only a few weeks ago, bankers in the region were so upbeat that some had suggested that Dubai might not even need to raise more funds to pay debts due this year. It helped of course that the emirate was showing signs of recovery, with fewer expatriates packing their bags than had been expected, retail sales on the rise and the real estate sector, devastated by the economic crisis, beginning to stabilise. The government itself looked confident too, and it went to the markets to raise funds, bringing in $2bn in Islamic bonds last month.

As always, though, the problem in Dubai is that no one had all the facts, and perhaps some in the financial community had all the wrong assumptions. The whole affair, one financial analyst told me on Thursday, was “typical of the way things work in Dubai – top down and in a vacuum, and that makes it very difficult for investors”. True, top officials had indicated repeatedly that Dubai would not default on its debt – and Nakheel, developer of the extravagant Palm real estate project, was too important for Dubai to allow it to default. What officials have not explicitly said, however, was that the repayments would be made on time.

Interestingly, moreover, the prospectus that Dubai recently issued to test market appetite for government bonds said that the government was “not legally obliged” to meet the obligations of related entities – what is commonly referred to as Dubai Inc – but might at its sole discretion decide to extend such support. Most of the funds raised in the past year – including from Abu Dhabi banks on Wednesday, the same day that Dubai said it intended to call a “standstill” until May 30 on all its Nakheel and Dubai World debt due in December – were by the government itself, rather than individual companies.

Dry Run for World Domination...

I may be teaching this semester's large undergraduate course--Twentieth Century Economic History--online next summer for Berkeley's International Studies program.

What components do people think are essential in trying to do education online? What components do people think are helpful? What components do people think are wasteful?

America Needs a New Constitutional Convention

Mark Schmitt blames Bob Dole for destroying America's system of government.

I think he is right.

Historians at Play

In the British Deborah Lipstadt-David Irving trial between the historian and the holocaust denier, an Irving victory would have meant, in Britain:

• that Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin, would have had to pay substantial damages to Irving.
• that the copies of Lipstadt's book in Britain would have been pulped and the sale oif the book in Britain would have been forbidden.

By contrast, a Lipstadt victory would have meant:

• that Irving could continue to live his life, write his books, and give his speeches unmolested by the law.

Ari Kelman comes into this story at the end, reading Richard Evans's account of life as an expert witness in the case:

The banality of book reviews: [O]n page 240 of the American edition of Evans’s book, I found this odd tidbit:

If it was depressing that a historian of Erickson’s [author's note: Professor John Erickson] standing could leap into print without having actually considered the details of the trial and the judgment, then it was, if anything, more depressing that two other historians of the older generation, Sir John Keegan and Professor David Cameron Watt, actually testified on Irving’s behalf in court.

Wait, what? Keegan testified on Irving’s behalf? Well, okay. So what did he say?

Keegan: Like many who seek to shock, he [Irving] may not really believe what he says and probably feels astounded when taken seriously. He has, in short, many of the qualities of the most creative historians. He is certainly never dull. Prof. Lipstadt, by contrast, seems as dull as only the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her again. Mr. Irving, if he will only learn from this case, has much that is interesting to tell us...

And so, Keegan concludes, Irving should win, Lipstadt's books should be pulped, and she and Penguin should have to pay David Irving a huge amount of £££££££££.

Is it wrong to say that this astonishing lapse of judgment on Keegan's part should make one reassess every word he has ever written?

And Civil War historian James MacPherson piles on, saying of Keegan:

The American Civil War - A Military History: The analytical value of Keegan’s geostrategic framework is marred by numerous errors that will leave readers confused and misinformed. I note this with regret, for I have learned a great deal from Keegan’s writings.... “The Ohio and its big tributaries, the Cumberland and the Tennessee,” he writes, “form a line of moats protecting the central Upper South, while the Mississippi, with which they connect, denies the Union any hope of penetration.” The reality was exactly the contrary. These navigable rivers were highways for Union naval and army task forces that pierced the Confederate heartland, capturing Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis and other important cities along with large parts of Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas.... He confuses the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, seems to place the Confederate forts Henry and Donelson on the wrong rivers, has the Kanawha River join the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River (it is the Allegheny River that joins the Monongahela, while the Kanawha empties into the Ohio 150 miles southwest of Pittsburgh) and shifts the state of Tennessee northward....

The Confederates did not abandon their strong point on Island No. 10 on the Mississippi River; Union forces surrounded and captured it with its 5,000 defenders. Tunnel Hill at Chattanooga is not a feature of Lookout Mountain, and the battle of Cedar Mountain did not take place in the Blue Ridge.... [W]rong dates for a half-dozen battles on the map at the beginning of the book. North Carolina did not escape Union invasion until almost “the end of the war” (it was first invaded in February 1862); the old canard that some Union soldiers were bayoneted in their blankets at Shiloh is simply not true; at least 10 percent of United States soldiers in 1865 were black, not 3 percent; the British government recognized the Confederacy’s belligerent status under international law in May 1861, not 1863; and so on....

Keegan declares that Lincoln “never learnt the importance of visiting armies in the field, from which he might have discovered a great deal,” apparently unaware that Lincoln visited armies in the field 11 times, spending 42 days in their camps.... Keegan makes the astonishing claim that at the outbreak of the conflict “almost all” of [the U.S. Navy's] “antiquated” warships were sailing vessels and that “none had been launched later than 1822.” In fact, 57 of the Navy’s ships had been launched since 1822, and 23 of them were steamships.... And what is one to make of the statement by Keegan, a native Englishman, that the British prime minister during the American Civil War was Benjamin Disraeli? (It was Viscount Henry Palmerston.)...

“The genius” of the Gettysburg Address, [Keegan] writes, “lies less in his magnificent words than in his refusing to differentiate between the sacrifice of the North and the South.” This assertion could not be more wrong. The soldiers who “gave the last full measure of devotion” at Gettysburg so that the “nation might live” were Union soldiers. No Confederates were buried in the cemetery that Lincoln dedicated; they fought to break up the nation that the “brave men” whom Lincoln honored fought to preserve. Far from refusing to differentiate between the sacrifice of the North and the South, Lincoln made the most profound differentiation.

Let me note that this is not the first time Keegan has done this:

Things That Make You Go, "Hmmm...": So I was reading a book edited by Robert Cowley, What If? The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, when I came across the first "thing that made me go, 'Hmmm...'" I was reading an essay by John Keegan, British military historian, and came across the passage: "Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister... proposed that the Soviet Union... guarantee Bulgaria's frontiers, despite already having taken a large share of Bulgarian territory..." I stopped. I reread it. Bulgaria? The Soviet Union doesn't border on Bulgaria. The Soviet Union never bordered on Bulgaria. What slice of Bulgarian territory did Stalin snatch? What could Keegan possibly mean? And then it struck me: Romania. He means Romania. He has lost track of which Balkan country is which--forgotten that it is oil-rich Romania that borders on Russia and lost its northern Moldavian province to Stalin, and Bulgaria that is to the south and borders on Turkey.

Also holocaust denier David Irving's other historian friend, D.C. Watt:

Things That Make You Go, "Hmmm...": Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: nd then there was D. Cameron Watt's How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War. At one point Watt writes of how the German offensive against Poland was planned to be a "... great encircling manoeuvre... on the model of a Zulu impi or the Roman armies against Carthage at Cannae..." Now I realize that the purpose of Watt's similes is not to inform the typical reader--few, very few, readers know in any detail the military organization established by Shaka Zulu, or have received a classical education. These similes are not there to help the reader by comparing what the author is describing to something the reader already knows well. These similes are there to impress readers with the breadth of Watt's mind and the depth of his scholarship. But if Watts wants us to be impressed, shouldn't his scholarship and learning be deep enough for him to get the winner of Cannae correct? Shouldn't he remember that the Romans under the command of the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Caius Terrentius Varro did not encircle and destroy the Carthaginians at Cannae, but were themselves encircled and destroyed by the Carthaginian army commanded by Hannibal?

Ari Kelman wonders if there is a connection between thes two episodes:

James McPherson savages Keegan’s efforts as terribly sloppy.... [J]ust last week Eric and I taught Richard Evans’s Lying About Hitler in our graduate seminar. As I starting reading the Evans, I kept thinking about McPherson’s review and about the responsibilities historians have when it comes time to consider deeply flawed work produced by people they admire. It seems to me that reviews often are nowhere near as harsh — with “harsh” here meaning analytically rather than personally acute — as they should be. I’ve typically assumed this arises out of misplaced professional courtesy.... [M]uch of Evans’s book is about historians who, after notorious Holocaust denier David Irving dragged Deborah Lipstadt into court for having called him a liar... were forced to take off the gloves and assess, in public and for the record, how their colleagues went about doing history: both their methods and the final products they produced. It’s a fascinating and somewhat distressing story.... [W]hat, I wondered, had caused McPherson to train his guns on Keegan?... McPherson... is renowned for his intellectual generosity and his personal decency...

Keegan is not himself a Nazi sympathizer... [rather] a proud member of an old boy’s club that has more room on its rolls for Holocaust deniers than for women who expose them.... I have no idea if McPherson knew about this episode. But I’m guessing that he did. And I have no idea if that knowledge about Sir John’s past liberated McPherson from the shackles of polite scholarly discourse. But I’m guessing that it did...

I would put it somewhat differently. Hitler and his followers liked to kill people. They liked to order people to kill people. They preferred to kill unarmed men, and women and children--killing armed men, after all, is dangerous. Hitler and his followers killed a lot of people: 35 million or so, 6 million of them Jews, about 25 million Slavs. For John Keegan and D.C. Watt, these are not terribly important or interesting features of the Nazi regime, and histories of the 1930s and 1940s should not overstress them.

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UPDATE: D.C. Watt's defense of Irving is even more loathsome than Keegan's. I talked about this before:

After Irving lost the trial, diplomatic historian Donald Cameron Watt believed that Irving's work had been subject to excessive scrutiny and held to an excessively high standard: "five historians with two research assistants... querying and checking every document cited in Irving's books." "Show me one historian," Watt demanded, "...who has not broken into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment." On the witness stand Watt asserted that "there are other senior historical figures... whose work would [not] stand up to this kind of examination" (see Evans, 2000, pp. 245-6). Watt argued that the active shaping of one's views and interpretations of the past by one's present politics did not keep one from being a historian, and even a great historian: "Edward Gibbon's caricatures of early Christianity... A.J.P. Taylor," and others clearly "allowed their political agenda... to influence their professional practice," like Irving. In Watt's view, "only those who identify with the victims of the Holocaust disagree" with the proposition that Irving is a reputable historian. And, in Watt's view, Irving's critics are not primarily concerned with pointing out flaws in his historical writings but with stoning a heretic: "[f]or them Irving's views are blasphemous and put him on the same level of sin as advocates of paedophilia" (Evans, 2000, pp. 244-6).

Cnsider the example raised by Donald Cameron Watt: A.J.P. Taylor. A.J.P. Taylor set out to write the Origins of the Second World War as if Hitler were an eighteenth-century king who aimed at reversing the (limited) results of the last (limited) war: a portrait of Hitler as, as John Lukacs phrased it, like the Empress Maria Theresa maneuvering to recover the lost province of Silesia. All evidence that Hitler was something else is thrown overboard, or ignored completely. Now Taylor's history is not history as it really happened. All you have to do is glance an inch beyond the frame of Taylor's picture--at Nazi domestic policy and the Night of Broken Glass, or at Hitler's conduct of World War II--and you find events grossly and totally inconsistent with Taylor's portrait of an opportunist looking for diplomatic victories on the cheap.

And yes, Mr. Watt. It may be the case that only historians who identify with the victims of the Holocaust believe that Irving is not a reputable historian. But all moral men and women, given a choice between Nazis and victims, identify with the victims. Those who do not and who either identify with Nazis or hold themselves in suspense between the two are as far from the moral universe of the rest of us as, well, are advocates of paedophilia.

Me, I think that all historians should to some extent identify with the victims--even if the victims are Jews.

And I think historians should not tell lies about what kinds of people their historical subjects were.

But then Keegan and Watt probably dismiss me too as "politically correct."

Proposed Class Topics: DRAFT: Econ 210a, Spring 2010, U.C. Berkeley

INTRODUCTION TO ECONOMIC HISTORY FOR FIRST-YEAR ECONOMICS GRADUATE STUDENTS

Class Topics:

Jan 20: Modes of Production

Jan 27: Malthus and the Demographic Transition

Feb 3: Industrious Revolutions

Feb 10: Trade, Law, and State

Feb 17: Industrial Revolutions

Feb 24: Globalizations

Mar 3: Differentiated and Uneven Development

Mar 10: Business Cycles

Mar 17: WWI and the Great Depression

Mar 31: WWII and the Thirty Glorious Years

Apr 7: The Great Divergence

Apr 14: The Forward March of Social Democracy Halted?

Apr 21: China Stands Up

Apr 28: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents

May 5: Conclusion

Winston Churchill Liveblogs World War II: November 13, 1939

November 13, 1939:

On Friday, November 13, my relations with Mr. Chamberlain had so far ripened that he and Mrs. Chamberlain came to dine with us at Admiralty House, where we had a comfortable fiat in the attics. We were a party of four. Although we had been colleagues under Mr. Baldwin for five years, my wife and I had never met the Chamberlains in such Circumstances before. by happy chance I turned the conversation on to his life in the bahamas, and I was delighted to find my guest expand in personal reminiscence to a degree I had not noticed before.

He told us the whole story, of which I knew only the barest outline, of his six years' struggle to grow sisal on a barren West Indian islet near Nassau. His father, the great "Joe", was firmly convinced that here was an opportunity at once to develop an Empire industry and fortify the family formes. His father and Austen had summoned him in 1890 from Birmingham to Canada, where they had long examined ! the project. About forty miles from Nassau in the Caribbean Gulf there was a small desert island, aimost uninhabited, where the soil was reported to be suitable for growing sisal. After careful reconnaissance by his two sons, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain had acquired a tract on the island of Andros, and assigned the capital required to develop it. All that remained was to grow the sisal. Austen was dedicated to the House of Commons. The task therefore fell to Neville.

Not only in filial duty but with conviction and alacrity he obeyed, and the next five years of his life were spent in trying to grow sisal in this lonely spot, swept by hurricanes from time to time, living nearly naked, struggling with labor difficulties and every other kind of obstacle, and with the town of Nassau as the only gleam of civilisation. He had insisted, he told us, on months' leave in England each year. He built a small harbour and landing-stage and a short railroad or tramway. He used all the processes of fertilisation which were judged suitable to the soil and generally led a completely primitive, open-air existence. But no sisal! Or at any rate no sisal that would face the market.

At the end of five years he was convinced that the plan could not succeed. He came home and faced his formidable parent, who was by no means contented with the result. I gathered that in the family the feeling was that though they loved him dearly they were sorry to have lost £50,000

I was fascinated by the way Mr. Chamberlain warmed as he talked, and by the talk itself, which was one of gallant endeavour. I thought to myself, "What a pity Hitler did not know when he met this sober English politician with his umbrella at Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich that he was actually talking to a hard-bitten pioneer from the outer marches of the British Empire!" This was really the only intimate social conversation that I can remember with Neville Chamberlain amid all the business we did together over nearly twenty years.

During dinner the war went on and things happened. With the soup an officer came up from the War Room below to report that a U-boat had been sunk. With the sweet he came again and reported that a second U-boat had been sunk; and just before the ladies left the dining-room he came a third time reporting that a third U-boat had been sunk. Nothing like this had ever happened before in a single day, and it was more than a year before such a record was repeated. As the ladies left us, Mrs. Chamberlain, with a naive and charming glance, said to me, "Did you arrange all this on purpose?" I assured her that if she would come again we would produce a similar result.

Econ 115: Mao Zedong, Plus Japan from Meiji to the Louvre

Econ 115: November 10 Lecture Audio

Sydney Padua Presents: An Appeal for Funding from Charles Babbage...

With a forecast for our day:

Berkeley Political Economy Major Overview Document DRAFT

Political Economy Major Rationale:

The phrase "political economy" has at least four meanings:

• the heir of Enlightenment moral philosophy, in the same sense that today's proper sciences are the heirs of Enlightenment natural philosophy.
• the rubble left of the Marxist, Marxisant, and Marxizoid project of social analysis and utopian transformation after history bombed it until the rubble bounced throughout the twentieth century.
• public choice--the largely right-wing application of the assumptions of methodological individualism and anomic psychological self-interest to the social sciences.
• things that have too much politics to be economics, too much history to be politics, too much sociology to be history, and too much economics to be sociology.

Political economy here at Berkeley as an undergraduate major is a group of four interlinked intellectual bets:

• that for undergraduates at least the separation a century ago of the social sciences into walled, warring camps was not a clear win.
• that there is, nevertheless, great value in the individual social sciences' analytical modes and tools.
• that there is even greater value in the classical social theory tradition as grappling for the first time how a modern human society--one not composed overwhelmingly of malnourished peasants living and dying early in the small villages in which they were born and one not dominated by louse-riddem thugs with spears and perfumed thugs with styluses--actually worked.
• that the nineteenth and early twentieth-century social, political, and economic history of the North Atlantic provides an essential set of benchmarks, yardsticks, and comparisons.

To that end we make them take world history (IAS 45); a historical context course on the development of industrial soceties (like Hist. 160); political science (PS 2); economics (Econ 1, IAS 106, IAS 107); statistics (Stat 2); classical social theory (PEIS 100); modern political economy (PEIS 101); two years of foreign language; and five additonal courses--four of which must be related as a "concentration" to help them become semi-experts in some particular topic or issue area.

It is, as such programs often are, massively underfunded. It also, as such programs often do, works very well indeed.

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Political Economy Major Requirements:

Admission:

Before admission, students must:

• attend a Major Declaration Workshop
• complete IAS 45 with a grade of C+ or better
• complete Econ 1 or 2 or C3 with a grade of C+ or better
• have a major and cumulative GPA of 2.0 or higher
• not be in their final semester of undergraduate work.

Lower Division Requirements:

• Economics 1 or 2 or C3 (prerequisite to declare; C+ or better)
• IAS 45 (prerequisite to declare; C+ or better)
• Political Science 2
• Statistics 2, 20 or 21

Foreign Language Requirement:

Proficiency equivalent to four college-level semesters in any single modern language other than English, achieved through coursework (C- grade or higher), AP credit, examination, and/or study abroad. Check with the major for eligible languages.

Upper Division Conceptual Tools Requirement:

• Microeconomics: IAS 106, Economics 100A, Economics 101A, or UGBA 101A
• Macroeconomics: IAS 107, Economics 100B, Economics 101b 101B, or UGBA 101B
• PEIS 100, Classical Theories of Political Economy (must be taken before PEIS 101)
• PEIS 101, Contemporary Theories of Political Economy

Upper Division Historical Context Requirement:

• One of PEIS 160, CRP 112, Econ 113, Econ 115, Hist 124a, Hist 124b, Hist 125b, Hist 131b, Hist 158c, Hist 159a, Hist 160, Hist 161, Political Science 122a, UGBA C172,

Upper Division Concentration Requirement:

The Political Economy major’s concentration requirement is an attempt to turn each student’s program into a major rather than a sprawling set of disconnected social science and history courses. The other major requirements ask students to learn a great deal of history and a great deal about the approved models, theories, and intellectual approaches of the different social sciences. The concentration requirement asks students to apply that theoretical and historical knowledge to an issue area in political economy.

The possibilities are wide open.

However, students’ concentrations tend to cluster into three groups: the political economy of "post-industrial" societies, "late industrialization and development," and "globalization" Students may--and are in fact encouraged to--simply pick courses from the recommended course list for one of these three groups in order to assemble their concentrations. Students are also strongly encouraged to take a particular flavor of the PEIS 101 course that is focused on the concentration group they have chosen.

• Post-Industrial: Anthro 139, CRP 110, 112, 113a, Econ 105, 115, 121, 136, 151, 175, EEP/IAS 175, ERG 100/PP 184, Geog 110, 159a, Hist 118, 158C/159B, Legal 140, 145, 182, PP 101, 103, Poli Sci 122a, 138e, 138g, 144b, Soc 119, 122.

• Late Development: Anthro 139, CRP 110, 112, 113a, 115, Econ 105, 115, 121, 151, 161, 162, 171, 173, 175, EEP 151, 152, 154, 175/IAS 175, ESPM 165, Geog 110, 112/DS 100, 123, 130, 159a, Hist 171c, IAS 115, Legal 140, 145, 161, PACS 135, PP 101,Poli Sci 128, 138e, 139b, 141c, 143a, 143b, 144b, 148a, 149e, Soc 172, 183, 187.

• Globalization: Anthro 139, Chicano 159, Econ 105, 115, 121, 151, 181, 182, EEP 152, 154, ESPM 165, 169, Ethnic 135ac 136, Geog 123, 159a, GWS 141, 143, IAS 115, Legal 140. 145, 154, 179, PACS 135, PP 101, Poli Sci 124a, 138e, 138g, Soc 119, 146, 172, UGBA 118, 178.

Students who wish have the freedom to choose and develop their own concentrations: write a convincing two-paragraph explanation of how taking these courses will turn the student into an expert in some question or problem area in political economy--like "dilemmas of medical care cost control and resource allocation around the globe"; "religion and the state in early modern Europe and the contemporary Middle East"; or "the interaction between economic history and the history of economic thought since 1776."

Additional Course:

• One additional course in the social sciences, ideally PEIS 194: "Capstone" Senior Seminar: Interdisciplinary research seminar in political economy for seniors. Intensive writing on interesting research questions in social science and public policy best approached from an interdisciplinary perspective. To provide seniors not writing honors theses with a "capstone" experience here at Berkeley...

Honors:

• Students with minimum GPAs of 3.5 cumulative and 3.6 in the major are eligible to join the honors program. Honors students write a prospectus in the fall IAS H102 honors methodology class, and then a thesis in the spring PEIS H195 seminar.

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Recommendations:

We also draw your attention to:

• History 7b: History of the United States since 1865
• IAS 102/C118: Scope and Methods of Research in International and Area Studies
• IAS 120: Contemporary Mexico
• IAS C175: The Economics of Climate Change
• PEIS 150: Topics in Political Economy
• PEIS 155: Developments in Approaches to Modern Political Economy
• PEIS 192: Senior (Non-Honors) Thesis

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Minor: European Studies Political Economy

• PEIS 100, Classical Theories of Political Economy (must be taken before PEIS 101)
• PEIS 101, Contemporary Theories of Political Economy
• A concentration in the political economy of Europe approved by the advising staff. For approval, submit a convincing two-paragraph explanation of how taking these courses will turn the student into an expert in some question or problem area in the political economy of Europe--like "dilemmas of medical care cost control and resource allocation in western Europe since WWII"; "religion and the state in early modern Europe and the contemporary Middle East"; or "why did the western European economic growth miracle end in 1973?".

Why don't we have other regional studies political economy minors? As I understand it, purely for historical reasons.

Reed College Public Policy Lecture: Today's Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror (November 7, 2009)

Audio: Reed Public Policy Lecture (11.07.2009 03-14-36 PM)

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Econ 115: Really Existing Socialism (November 5, 2009)

pdf: Econ 115: Really Existing Socialism (November 5, 2009)

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Audio: Econ 115- Communism in Power (11.05.2009 01-47-34 PM).aac

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November...

Richard Byrne:

Reading the Plot Forward: December 9, 2005: An interdisciplinary seminar at the Folger Institute examines terrorism — historical and contemporary — on the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot

When scholars gathered in the basement of the Folger Shakespeare Library on November 4 for a workshop examining the Gunpowder Plot, many of them were alert to the ironies of the occasion.

Earlier that same day, the Folger had hosted the Prince of Wales and his wife, Camilla. That the heir to the British throne was perusing the library's collection as scholars prepared to talk about a foiled plot to blow up King James I and his entire government in London 400 years ago was not lost on anyone. Nor did it escape notice that more than 40 scholars were packed tightly in a basement conference room, much like the 36 barrels of gunpowder placed in a cellar under the House of Lords by the Gunpowder conspirators and discovered there on the eve of the opening of Parliament on November 5, 1605.

The workshop was organized by Chris R. Kyle, an associate professor of history at Syracuse University, as part of a continuing series of such events hosted by the Folger Institute, a center for humanities research sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library and a consortium of 40 universities.

Eminent scholars specializing in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, including David Cressy, a professor of history at Ohio State University at Columbus, and Ian W. Archer, a fellow in modern history at Keble College, University of Oxford, gave detailed talks on the history of the plot's commemoration and on what London was like in 1605. Historians and literary scholars batted around questions about the era's political and religious discord and about how the Gunpowder Plot may have affected the staging of William Shakespeare's Macbeth.

But Mr. Kyle and Kathleen Lynch, executive director of the Folger Institute, had bigger ambitions. The organizers asked presenters to offer brief informal papers to spur discussion and brainstorming across disciplines about new approaches to the texts being studied.

"We want to intervene in people's research projects at a point when it matters," said Ms. Lynch. "We didn't want to hear polished papers."

And then there was the ambition to have the workshop push past history and into the present. The event was provocatively titled "Early Modern Terrorism?," and in an introductory e-mail message to participants, Mr. Kyle noted that "without delving into the minefield of drawing direct and ahistorical parallels between the notion of early modern terrorism, the actuality of the Plot, and the world in which we inhabit, we are presented with an opportunity to discuss the impact of religious violence on society, its reaction to this event, and what happened/happens next."

It is those discussions that pique the interests of a broader public fixated on issues such as terrorism, torture, and religious violence. But scholars often fear that making such connections sacrifices academic rigor.

So if the plotters of 400 years ago who piled gunpowder in a basement failed, would Mr. Kyle and Ms. Lynch's plot to widen the scholarly discussion into combustible contemporaneity succeed?...

Econ 115: The Great Divergence (November 3, 2009)

The Great Divergence:

Download 20091103-115

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Audio: Econ 115- The Great Divergence (11.03.2009 01-44-00 PM)

Econ 115; Thirty Glorious Years, 1945-1975 (October 29, 2009)

Thirty Glorious Years:

Download 20091029-115

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Audio: Econ 115- Post-WWII Social Democracy 10.29.2009 12-54-39 PM

Econ 115 Slides: Thirty Glorious and Not so Glorious Years

October 29 and November 3

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Dictatorships and Double Standards: Jeet Heer Has a Ludwig Von Mises Quote...

An example of classical liberalism's elective affinity with authoritarian politics?

Ludwig:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error...

So now I have to add Ludwig Von Mises, Liberalism to the pile...

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UPDATE: Yes, Ludwig von Mises does indeed do it: he does claim that the reason Mussolini's thugs murdered Giacomo Matteotti was that they were driven to do it out of horror at the crimes committed by the Russian Bolsheviks. It's an old line: they are the monsters, and it's only because they are the monsters that they force us into a situation in which we must act monstrously:

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, 1.10: The Argument of Fascism: Only when the Marxist Social Democrats had gained the upper hand and taken power in the belief that the age of liberalism and capitalism had passed forever did the last concessions disappear that [social democracy] had still been thought necessary to make to the liberal ideology. The parties of the Third International consider any means as permissible.... The frank espousal of a policy of annihilating opponents and the murders committed in the pursuance of it have given rise to an opposition movement.... The militaristic and nationalistic enemies of the Third International felt themselves cheated by liberalism. Liberalism, they thought, stayed their hand when they desired to strike a blow against the revolutionary parties while it was still possible to do so....

The fundamental idea of these movements—which, from the name of the most grandiose and tightly disciplined among them, the Italian, may, in general, be designated as Fascist—consists in the proposal to make use of the same unscrupulous methods in the struggle against the Third International as the latter employs against its opponents. The Third International seeks to exterminate its adversaries and their ideas in the same way that the hygienist strives to exterminate a pestilential bacillus.... The Fascists, at least in principle, profess the same intentions.... Only under the fresh impression of the murders and atrocities perpetrated by the supporters of the Soviets were Germans and Italians able to block out the remembrance of the traditional restraints of justice and morality and find the impulse to bloody counteraction. The deeds of the Fascists and of other parties corresponding to them were emotional reflex actions evoked by indignation at the deeds of the Bolsheviks and Communists. As soon as the first flush of anger had passed, their policy took a more moderate course and will probably become even more so with the passage of time....

Now it cannot be denied that the only way one can offer effective resistance to violent assaults is by violence. Against the weapons of the Bolsheviks, weapons must be used in reprisal, and it would be a mistake to display weakness before murderers. No liberal has ever called this into question.... The great danger threatening domestic policy from the side of Fascism lies in its complete faith in the decisive power of violence.... What happens, however, when one's opponent... acts just as violently? The result must be a battle, a civil war. The ultimate victor to emerge from such conflicts will be the faction strongest in number.... The decisive question, therefore, always remains: How does one obtain a majority for one's own party? This, however, is a purely intellectual matter. It is a victory that can be won only with the weapons of the intellect, never by force. The suppression of all opposition by sheer violence is a most unsuitable way to win adherents to one's cause. Resort to naked force—that is, without justification in terms of intellectual arguments accepted by public opinion—merely gains new friends for those whom one is thereby trying to combat. In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails. Fascism can triumph today because universal indignation at the infamies committed by the socialists and communists has obtained for it the sympathies of wide circles. But when the fresh impression of the crimes of the Bolsheviks has paled, the socialist program will once again exercise its power of attraction on the masses.... There is... only one idea that can be effectively opposed to socialism, viz., that of liberalism....

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.

The kindest thing that can possibly be said, I think, is that Ludwig von Mises here demonstrates as little clue to what fascism is all about as he elsewhere demonstrates he understands about capitalism, social democracy, or--indeed-liberalsim.

Hoisted from the Archives: Burkean Conservatism and the Burden of the Past on White America

Andrew Sullivan Is Wrong Again!!: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: On this issue the arguments that convince me are not liberal but conservative ones--Burkean ones, to be exact.

A liberal sees society as a result of a social contract implicitly made between all of us alive today: we agree to live by rules and laws that we then have a chance to rethink, remake, and reform. It's important that this social contract be fair to us. From this perspective, the questions "Why should recent Korean immigrants bear any responsibility for repairing the damage left by the marks of slavery and Jim Crow?" and "Why should African-Americans find their own capabilities and potential accomplishments still limited by the marks of slavery and Jim Crow?" are both very good ones. (Somehow Andrew Sullivan only asks the first, and never thinks to ask the second. But thinking about why would take us far afield.)

I begin from a different point, from the observations that we Americans alive today are all the recipients of an extraordinary and unmerited gift, an inheritance of institutions, principles, and organizations that is without peer anywhere on the world today and that is of inestimable value. We aren't independent liberal individuals making a social contract in the rational light of Enlightenment Reason. Instead, we are heirs who have received an enormous inheritance from our predecessors. As Burke wrote, we "claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity--as an estate specially belonging to the people." It's not a contract, or if it is a contract it is not one just between those alive today. Again, as Burke puts it, if you are to think of a social contract you have to recognize that it is not "a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

But estates that are inherited come not only with assets, they also come encumbered with debts. If we are to be Americans--if we are to take up the wonderul unmerited gift, accept the marvelous entailed inheritance that is offered to us--we must take up not just the benefits and advantages, but also the debts that America owes from its past actions as well. To do otherwise--to ignore the debts while grabbing the goodies with both hands--is to show that we are not the true heirs of Benjamin Franklin and company. And chief among the debts that America owes from its past actions is the obligation to erase the marks left by slavery and Jim Crow.

Now Andrew Sullivan wants Americans to welsh on the debts and responsibilities that are attached to our marvelous, unmerited inheritance of institutions, principles, and organizations. He wants us to grab the good parts of the inheritance with both hands, and to say that the bad parts are none of our concern--that the slaveholders are dead, the lynchers are dead, and those who fought hard to protect lynchers from the law are dead (although not all of them, and Strom Thurmond only very recently).

Edmund Burke would disagree. He would say, "Are you crazy? There's a history here!" He would reach back to Montesquieu, and say that if the ruling principle of despotism is fear (it collapses if the subjects no longer fear the despot), and if the ruling principle of monarchy is honor (it collapse if the nobles no longer seek to outdo each other in deeds to win honor, nobility, and the favor of the king), so the ruling principle of a republic must be virtue. What is virtue? Well, linguistically, virtue comes from the Latin "virtus": "vir" = man, "tus" = -liness: "virtue" = "manliness" [in a proper modern and gender-indeterminate way, of course]*. Practically, a republic requires virtuous citizens: citizens who will take up their responsibilities and shoulder their share of the obligations neecessary for the common good. People who won't shirk their responsibilities. "If you wish to be part of this great more than two-century partnership that is America," Burke would say, "you need to recognize that your inheritance is an entailed inheritance. First, it comes with an obligation not to waste it--an obligation to in your turn pass down to those not yet born a better nation than the one you live in. Second, it comes with debts attached: past deeds of America that were cruel and criminal, the memory of which is still shameful. Just because the particular members of the great partnership who incurred the debts (the three-fifths clause, the legality of the slave trade, the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, et cetera) are dead doesn't mean that that the debts aren't still owed by the great partnership."

So Andrew Sullivan is wrong again. On many issues I am an arrogant liberal. But not this one. On this issue, I'm an arrogant conservative.

Yet Another Note on Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand": What It Is and What It Is Not

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" argument: the sole occurrence of the phrase "invisible hand" in the Wealth of Nations:

An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth Of Nations: Every individual['s]... study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society.

First, every individual endeavours to employ his capital as near home as he can, and consequently as much as he can in the support of domestic industry, provided always that he can thereby obtain the ordinary, or not a great deal less than the ordinary profits.... In the home trade, his capital is never so long out of his sight as it frequently is in the foreign trade of consumption. He can know better the character and situation of the persons whom he trusts; and if he should happen to be deceived, he knows better the laws of the country from which he must seek redress.... The capital which an Amsterdam merchant employs in carrying corn from Koningsberg to Lisbon.... The uneasiness, however, which he feels at being separated so far from his capital, generally determines him to bring part both of the Koningsberg goods which he destines for the market of Lisbon, and of the Lisbon goods which he destines for that of Koningsberg, to Amsterdam; and though this necessarily subjects him to a double charge of loading and unloading as well as to the payment of some duties and customs, yet, for the sake of having some part of his capital always under his own view and command, he willingly submits to this extraordinary charge; and it is in this manner that every country which has any considerable share of the carrying trade, becomes always the emporium, or general market, for the goods of all the different countries whose trade it carries on....

[A] capital employed in the home trade, it has already been shown, necessarily puts into motion a greater quantity of domestic industry, and gives revenue and employment to a greater number of the inhabitants of the country, than an equal capital employed in the foreign trade.... Upon equal, or only nearly equal profits, therefore, every individual naturally inclines to employ his capital in the manner in which it is likely to afford the greatest support to domestic industry, and to give revenue and employment to the greatest number of people of his own country.

Secondly, every individual who employs his capital in the support of domestic industry, necessarily endeavours so to direct that industry, that its produce may be of the greatest possible value.... As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can, both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce maybe of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it...

Note that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" argument is not the argument economists make today. Adam Smith argues that there are:

• political failures--uncertainty about how to access and indeed the prevalence of the rule of law in other countries.
• psychological failures--people are so anxious to have some of their wealth around them where they can touch it that they pay longshoremen to unload and reload goods at Amsterdam rather than drop-shipping them straight from Konigsburg to Lisbon.

And he argues that, as a result, merchants are good patriots--that they deploy their capital to "render the annual revenue of the [national] society as great as he can."

Adam Smith's purpose here in Book IV, Chapter II is to argue against mercantilism, against the idea that you can make your country wealthier by imposing tariffs and other restrictions on imports. The problem with his argument is that mercantilism is correct (unless you are a very small country), at least in the absence of retailiation.

So Smith, ingeniously, argues that the biases toward home production that mercantilist goals would suggest should be incorporated into economic decision-making are already present in the market because of what modern economists would call political failures and psychological failures. Smith does not argue that the market maximizes wealth because there are no external benefits to home production and merchants are rational. Instead, Smith argues that the market maximizes national wealth because merchants' psychological propensities plus the inability of foreign governments to commit to the rule of law together match the external benefits to others in the national community of merchants' committing their capital at home.

Winston Churchill Liveblogs World War II: October 29, 1939

October 29, 1939:

German Supplies of Iron Ore from Narvik

1. At the end of November the Gulf of Bothnia normally freezes. so that Swedish iron ore can be sent to Germany only through Oxelosund, in the Baltic, or from Narvik, at the north of Norway. Oxelosund can export only about one-fifth of the weight of ore Germany requires from Sweden. In winter normally the main trade is from Narvik, whence ships can pass down the west coast of Norway, and make the whole voyage to Gerrtnany without leaving territorial waters until inside the Skagerrak.

It must be understood that an adequate supply of Swedish iron ore is vital to Germany, and the interception or prevention of these Narvik supplies during the winter months, i.e., from October to the end of April, will greatly reduce her power of resistance. For the first three weeks of the war no iron ore ships left Narvik owing to the reluctance of crews to sail and other causes outside our control. Should this satisfactory state of affairs continue, no special action would be de- manded from the Admiralty. Furthermore, negotiations are proceeding with the Swedish Government which in themselves may effectively reduce the supplies of Scandinavian ore to Germany.

Should however the supplies from Narvik to Germany start moving again, more drastic action will be needed....

Ought we not to secure the control, by charter or otherwise, of all the free neutral shipping we can obtain, as well as the Norwegian, and thus give the allies power to regulate the greater part of the sea transport of the world and recharter it, profitably, to those who act as we wish?

And ought we not to extend to neutral shipping not under our direct control the benefit of our convoy system?

The results so far achieved by the Royal Navy against the U-boat attack seem, in the opinion of the Admiralty, to justify the adoption of this latter course. This would mean that we should offer safe convoy to all vessels of all countries traversing our sea routes, provided they conform to our rules of contraband and pay the necessary premiums in foreign devisen. They would therefore be able to contract themselves out of the war risk, and with the success of our anti-U-boat campaign we may well hope to make a profit to offset its heavy expense

Thus not only vessels owned by us or controlled by us, but independent neutral ships, would all come to enjoy the British protection on the high seas, or be indemnified in case of accidents. it is not believed at the Admiralty that this is beyond our strength. Had some such scheme for the chartcring and insurance of neutral shipping been in force from the early days of the last war, there is little doubt that it would have proved a highly profitable speculation....

Almost at this very moment... German eyes were turned in the same direction. On October 3 Admiral Raeder, Chief of the Naval Staff, submitted a proposal to Hitler headed "Gaining of Bases in Norway." He asked, "That the Fuehrer be informed as soon as possible of the opinions of the Naval War Staff on the possibilities of extending the operational base to the north.... "In these notes," he wrote, "I stressed the disadvantages which an occupation of Norway by the British would have for us: the control of the approaches to the Baltic, the outflanking of our naval operations and of our air attacks on Britain, the end of our pressure on Sweden. I also stressed the advantages for us of the occupation of the Norwegian coast: outlet to the North Atlantic, no possibility of a British mine barrier, as in the ycar 1917-18.... The Fuehrer saw at once the significance of the Norwegian problem; he asked me to leave the notes, and stated that he wished to consider the question himself...."

[Alfred] Rosenberg, the foreign affairs expert of the Nazi Party... had discovered an instrument in the extreme Nationalist Party in Norway, which was led by a former Norwegian Minister of War named Vidkun Quisling. Contacts were established...

Life and Hunger in North Korea

This week's must read: Barbara Demick in the New Yorker:

The Good Cook: A Battle Against Famine in North Korea:

Econ 115 Lecture Notes: October 22, 2009: Outside the North Atlantic, 1910-1950 I

Lecture Audio:

Econ 115-15--Outside the North Atlantic, 1919-1950 I (10.22.2009 12-40-36 PM)

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Liveblogging World War II: The Economist: September 3, 1939

The editors:

For the Right: The answer is, of course, that a war does no good; but it has become the only way of preventing infinitely greater harm.

And why has it become the only way? That is a question that only history can finally answer. But one moral can be drawn now which history will not upset. We have had many chances of strangling in their infancy the forces of aggression and brutality which have now engulfed the world in war. As each issue has arisen, we have refused to meet the risks attached to the suppression of brute force. And, as issue has followed issue, we have seen the price of security rise, in a steady Sibylline progress, until now it has reached the most awful height that a nation ever had to face. Before we plunge into war, this lesson must be drawn from twenty-one years of uneasy peace: security cannot be attained by avoiding risks; a policy of limited commitments leads inevitably to the unlimited commitment of war; safety cannot be found without courage. Let us never again make the mistake of being involved in the maintenance of peace without being committed to its enforcement.

These considerations provide two of the pillars of the eventual peace settlement: it must bring the end of armed dictatorship; and it must provide for a world-wide system of enforcing peace. A third pillar must, of course, be the restoration of their independence to those people who have lost it, primarily the Czechs. But these three aims achieved, the fourth must be an avoidance of any merely vengeful or repressive provisions against Germany, which would provide genuine grievances for a new Hitler. If she is democratic, if she cooperates in the new international order, if she restores her unjust conquests, it will be to our interests at the end of this war (as we can now see that it was to our interest in 1918) to help her to unity, equality, wealth and self-respect. The only alternative policy would be one of permanent partition and garrisoning of a defeated Germany, for which the democracies have neither the strength nor the moral mandate.

These, then, are the four principles of peace: Democracy, an International Order, Restitution and Generosity. Their translation into precise details is a matter which cannot now be undertaken. But there are certain points to which it is essential that we should all now commit ourselves as publicly as we can, while our visions are still unclouded. There must be no annexations of German territory and no indemnities. There must be disarmament, but no expectation that Germany will remain disarmed while other nations are armed. There must be a genuine sharing of colonial benefits and responsibilities through the widest extension of the mandatory principle. There must be a new League of Nations, with the hesitations and half-commitments of the old removed. There must be an end of the more senseless forms of economic nationalism.

In the madness and the agony that is to come, we must cling fast to these principles. Only so can we be quite sure that, in defending democracy, we shall not betray it, and that the freedom for which we fight is that freedom for all men on which alone permanent peace can be built.

I Just May Have to Readmit Andrew Sullivan into Polite Society

For this, which covers a great multitude of sins--perhaps even the sin against the Holy Ghost:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: One does not quite know what to say about Pat Buchanan's latest. Is it too predictable to note? Or too ugly to record? Or too stupid to ignore? Upon reflection, I'll go with stupid. Take one simple point. Notice that for Buchanan in this column, it is axiomatic that America was once defined by its whiteness. This is what he means by "tradition." America - once uniformly white - is now, for him and those he speaks for, bewilderingly multicultural and multi-confessional. Hence the anxiety. Hence the panic. Hence, in some ways, the confluence of fear and paranoia among the 20 percent of Americans who seem to feel this way and see the federal government in some way as the enabler of this destruction.

But this axiom, while useful as a myth, has a problem. It is untrue. And this "country" that white Americans are allegedly losing is not, in fact, a country. It is merely a self-serving and solipsistic illusion of a country that some white Americans feel they are losing.

From its very beginning, after all, America was a profoundly black country as well.

This took a while for an Englishman to grasp upon arriving here, because it's so easy to carry with you all the subconscious cultural baggage you grew up with. England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon. It makes some sense to refer to England's roots and ethnic identity as white, its language as English, its inheritance as a deep mixture of Northern European peoples - the Angles and the Saxons and the Normans and the Celts. And superficially, English-speaking white Americans might seem in the same cultural boat as white English people, dealing with a relatively new multiculturalism in an increasingly diverse and multi-racial society. And at first blush, you almost sink into that lazy and stupid assumption, especially if you arrive in Boston, as I did, and carried all the usual European prejudices, as I did.

The English, lulled by their marination in American pop culture from infancy, and beguiled by the same language, can live out their days in this country never actually noting that it is an alien land - stranger than you might have ever imagined, crueler than you realized, but somehow also more inspiring than you ever thought possible. This is the America I am trying to make my home, after 25 years. It is not the America of Pat Buchanan's or John Derbyshire's fantasies.

It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me - and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of - and attraction to - its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you've never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)

From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that's why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity - the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient - or as ancient as America can be. The very names - Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?

That some cannot see Buchanan's cartoon as a travesty of history remains America's tragedy of self-forgetting. It reminds me of the way in which Britain always defined itself as a Protestant country, even while, of course, it was deeply, deeply Catholic before it was ever Protestant - and for a much longer period of time. As a Catholic growing up in England, and having genealogical roots in both Catholic Ireland and in Domesday Book England, it took a while for me to appreciate the pied beauty of this identity. Tribalism is a powerful thing, especially for the Irish. I remember one day, as I was herded into the local Anglican church for my high school assembly, thinking: "This ancient building was once mine, ours." But that was before I realized that Anglicanism itself could not be understood without the profound inheritance of English Catholicism - and that Anglicanism was actually a hybrid of Protestant and Catholic Englishness. And that this was England - all of it. And to be truly English was to own it all.

Buchanan, of all people, should know better than these tedious recurring explosions of racial panic. And, of course, he does know better. He has read more history than most pundits. He is personally a civil and decent man. But he feels these things in such a profound and tribal way that what he knows is submerged by tribal fear and expressed as hateful hackery. But this much is true and deserves restating:

Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today's legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets. And frankly, the time of people who think otherwise is passing. If that's the country Buchanan wants to hold onto, well, he's right, he is losing it.

And about time too.

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But I am sure that Daniel Davies will have something to say about the claim that "England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon..."

De Laudibus Economic History

Paul Kedrosky comments:

Newsflash: Economic History Matters: Gosh, here is a surprise: Economist history matters. From an interview in The Atlantic with Paul Samuelson

And sends us to:

Q: Very last thing. What would you say to someone starting graduate study in economics? Where do you think the big developments in modern macro are going to be, or in the micro foundations of modern macro? Where does it go from here and how does the current crisis change it?

A: Well, I’d say, and this is probably a change from what I would have said when I was younger: Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that’s the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings will come. And I think the recent period has illustrated that.

Very nice to see...

Liveblogging World War II, by Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill

70 years ago:

An account... by a German report... may be recorded:

At 01:30 on October 14, 1939, H.M.A. Royal Oak lying at anchor in Scapa Flow was torpedoed by U-47 (Lieutenant Prien). The operation had been carefully planned by Admiral Doenitz himself, the Flag Officer (Submarines). Prien left Kiel on October 8, a clear, bright autumn day, and passed through Kiel Canal--course N.N.W., Scapa Flow. On October 13, at 4 AM, the boat was lying off the Orkneys. At 7 PM--surface; a fresh breeze blowing, nothing in sight; looming in the half-darkness the line of the distant coast; long streamers of northern lights flashing blue wisps across the sky. Course west. The boat crept steadily closer to Holm Sound, the eastern approach to Scapa Flow. Unfortunate it was taht these channels had not been completely blocked. A narrow passage lay open between two sunken ships. With grteat skill Prien steered through the swirling waters. The shore was close. A man on a bicycle could be seen going home along the coast road. Then suddenly tehwhole bay opened out. Kirk Sound was passed. They were in. There under the land to the north could be seen the great shadow of a battleship lying on the water, with the great mast rising above it like a piece of filligree on a black cloth. Near, nearer--all tubes clear--no alarm, no sound but the lay of the water, the low hiss of air pressure and the sharp click of a tube lever. Fire!--five seconds--ten seconds--twenty seconds. Then came a shattering explosion, and a great pillar of water rose in the darkness. Prien waited some minutes to fire another salvo. Tubes ready. Fire! The torpedoes hit amidshipsi, and there followed a series of crashing explosions. H.M.S. Royal Oak sank, with the loss of 786 officers and men, including Rear Admiral H.E.C. Blagrove (Second Battle Squadron). U-47 crept quietly away back through the gap. A blockship arrived twenty-four hours later.

This episode, which must be regarded as a feat of arms on teh part of the German U-boat commander, gave a shock to public opinion...

From The Gathering Storm...

Econ 115 Lecture Notes: October 13, 2009: Tyrannies

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20091015 slouch 18.pdf

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Lecture Audio: Econ 115-13--Tyrannies (10.13.2009 12-51-22 PM)

Econ 115 Lecture Notes: October 15, 2009: World War II Powerpoints

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Lecture Audio: Econ 115-14--World War II (10.15.2009 12-42-37 PM).aac

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Marx, Engels, Lenin, Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya

Hoisted from Comments: Kaleidescope writes:

It's Like Rain...: Typhoon Melor. During the Thirties, scores of Soviet citizens named their children Melsor, which stood for Marx, Engels, Stalin, October Revolution. After Khruschev's 1956 speech to the 20th Party Conference, the Melsors changed their names to Melor.

The Gotha Program of 1875

Full text of "Gotha Programme":

I. Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture, and since universal productive labor is possible only through society, therefore to society, that is to all its members, belongs the collective product of labor. With the universal obligation to labor, according to equal justice, each should have in proportion to his reasonable needs.

In the present society the means of labor are the monopoly of the capitalist class; the servitude of the laboring class, which is the outgrowth of this, is the cause of misery and of slavery in all forms.

The liberation of labor demands the transformation of the means of production into the common property of society and the associative regulation of the collective labor with general employment and just distribution of the proceeds of labor.

The emancipation of labor must be the work of the laboring class, opposed to which all other classes are only a reactionary body.

II. Proceeding from this principle the Socialist Labor party of Germany seeks through all legal means the free state and the socialist society, the destruction of the iron law of wages, the overthrow of exploitation in all forms and the abolition of all social and political inequality. The Socialist Labor party of Germany, though working chiefly in national boundaries, is conscious of the international character of the labor movement and is resolved to fulfill every duty which is laid on the workers in order to realize the brotherhood of humanity.

The Socialist Labor party of Germany demands as a step to the solution of the social question the erection, with the help of the state, of socialistic productive establishments under the democratic control of the laboring people. These productive establishments are to place industry and agriculture in such relations that out of them the socialist organization of the whole may arise.

The Socialist Labor party of Germany demands as the foundation of the state:

1. Universal, equal and direct suffrage, with secret, obligatory voting by all citizens at all elections in state or community.
2. Direct legislation by the people. Decision as to peace or war by the people.
3. Common right to bear arms. Militia instead of the standing army.
4. Abolition of all laws of exception, especially all laws restricting the freedom of the press, of association and assemblage; above all, all laws restricting the freedom of public opinion, thought and investigation.
5. Legal judgment through the people. Free administration of law.
6. Universal and equal popular education by the state. Universal compulsory education. Free instruction in all forms of art. Declaration that religion is a private matter.

The Socialist Labor party of Germany demands within the present society:

1. The widest possible expansion of political rights and freedom according to the foregoing demands.
2. A progressive income tax for state and municipality instead of all those existing, especially in place of the indirect tax which burdens the people.
3. Unrestrained right of combination.
4. Shortening of the working day according to the needs of society. Abolition of Sunday labor.
5. Abolition of child labor and all female labor injurious to health and morality.
6. Protective laws for the life and health of the worker. Sanitary control of the homes of the workers. Supervision of the mines, factories, workshops and hand industries by an officer elected by the people. An effectual law of enforcement.
7. Regulation of prison labor.
8. Full autonomy in the management of all laborers' fraternal and mutual benefit funds.

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Source of English translation: Theodore S. Hamerow, ed., The Age of Bismarck: Documents and Interpretations. New York: Harper & Row, 1973, pp. 230-32.

Original German text printed in Protokoll des Vereinigungs-Kongresses der Sozialdemokraten Deutschlands, abgehalten zu Gotha vom 22. bis 27. Mai 1875 [Protocol of the Consolidation Congress of German Social Democrats, held at Gotha from May 22-27, 1875. Leipzig, 1875, pp. 78-79. Original German text reprinted in Hans Fenske, ed., Im Bismarckschen Reich 1871- 1890[ln the Bismarckian Reich 1871-1890]. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978, pp. 141-42.

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The first workers' association in Germany, the General German Workers' Association [Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, or ADAV], was founded in 1863 by Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864). His idea of defeating capitalism through the establishment of producers' cooperatives was strongly opposed by several socialists who supported the teachings of Karl Marx (1818-1883). In August 1869, Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900) and August Bebel (1840-1913) founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party [Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP], sometimes referred to as the Eisenach wing of German Social Democracy. Together with their followers, they endorsed Marx's teachings and his commitment to class struggle and revolution. The ADAV and the SDAP differed markedly in their views on socialist theory, the First International, the role of the state, trade unions, and universal suffrage--and on Bismarck.

Despite these differences, members of both parties knew that unity meant strength. At the socialist congress held in the central German city of Gotha from May 22-27, 1875, the Lassallean and Marxist wings debated a new program and founded the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany [Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, SAPD], which was renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD] in 1890. The program contained some of Lassalle's controversial ideas, whereas socialist commitment to revolution did not appear in the text.

Two Chapters from the Best Book of Literary Criticism Ever

Erich Auerbach: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature:

• "The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres": Download 20091012 ammianus
• "Sicharius and Cramnesindus": Download 20091012 gregory

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Econ 115 Lecture Notes: October 8, 2009: Great Depression III

20091008 115 climb out.pdf

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Great Depression Problem Set: Econ 115: Fall 2009

Due Friday October 16, 5 PM, in GSI mailboxes:

Download .pdf: 20091008 115 gd.pdf

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Econ 115 Lecture Notes: October 6, 2009: The Great Depression II

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Lecture Audio: Econ 115-11--Great Depression II (10.06.2009 12-47-45 PM)

Econ 115 Lecture Notes: October 1, 2009: Great Depression I

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Audio:

Econ 115-10--The Great Depression I (10.01.2009)

Econ 115 Lecture Notes: September 29, 2009: John Maynard Keynes: Trying to Rebuild the Globe

http://delong.typepad.com/files/20090929-115-lecture-9.pdf

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Econ 115-9--John Maynard Keynes Trying to Rebuild the Globe (09.29.2009)

Econ 115 Lecture Notes: September 24, 2009: World War I and After

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Econ 115-8--WWI (09.24.2009 12-40-51 PM)

On the End of Roman Agricultural Slavery and the Coming of the Barbarians...

Jonathan Jarrett:

I should have read this the moment I bought it, II « A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe: The second article in this book I’m reading, not counting the introduction and the mises-au-point that Michael McCormick supplies for each section, is as I said by Joachim Henning and it’s a bit less limpid. The argument is basically that finds of slave-chains match up with settlement patterns to suggest that:

1. The Romans didn’t allow Germanic-style village farmstead sort of affairs with individual enclosures, but the barbarians on their borders farmed like that normally

2. Once the Germans are on the inside Merovingian Francia is full of that sort of settlement, agricultural slavery inside the old imperial limes is basically over and slavery becomes something you only see on the military frontier

3. Under the Carolingians however some of the Roman unification of settlements into grand estates resumes and this is bad for the economy

What we have here is basically two patterns, of slave-chain finds and of settlement nucleation, on which is being hung an awful lot, as well as some problematic stuff about the spread of the heavy plough that I thought we’d got over by now. An awful lot is hanging from those chains but they self-evidently don’t reliably index the whole slavery complex; they only show that someone had to be constrained. These could be military captives, their absence still wouldn’t prove that the people who worked an estate weren’t bound to it by fear, threat and the law.

Then, an awful lot hangs from the belief that the evidence shows that bipartite estates were less efficient agriculturally than decentralised farming because of the need for coercion. Philosophically this seems likely to be right, and one could cite the collective farms of the Soviet Union as well as studies of plantation slavery in the USA to show that people work harder when they work for themselves (and Henning has a nice example to counter Chris Wickham’s belief that where there are no lords the peasants eat more and work less).2 All the same, there is an issue here: we are asked to believe that the Carolingian nobility, or the US planters, must have been status-hungry megalomaniacs, otherwise they’d have realised that ’slavery does not pay’.3 But think about it: the question is not about how much their estates produced, at least in the Frankish case, it’s about how much of that production they could appropriate. If labour on your estate is 10% less effective for being combined and worked as a demesne compared to hutted coloni working their own plots, but you can get 5% more labour out of the slaves for having them right there and that also means you can impose renders with 7% greater efficiency (or other made-up figures that would work, if these don’t), then you as lord are in profit and it does make economic sense. But Henning has a basic ’slavery is bad mkay’ assumption here that makes it difficult for him to see this. I mean, I agree with that statement, but the estate managers in any of those periods obviously didn’t hold that conviction, that doesn’t make them stupid. And then it doesn’t help that, as Angeliki Laiou points out in the response at the end of the section, that the slave-chain finds for the Carolingian period don’t occur in the areas where there were bipartite estates.4 That is, unlike the Roman slave estates apparently the Carolingian ones didn’t use chain-gangs but got their labour more willingly. So, er, hang on, where did that paradigm go? There are some points here but they aren’t all the ones the author feels that he’s made.

On the whole what I take from this is that being part of the Roman fiscal complex tended to produce a different kind of estate organisation, and that the Carolingians also did some of that. I take with more salt the idea that the Carolingian period might have been less well off than the Merovingian period, and if I accept it I would again want to blame the weather for most of that and wonder if the conversion to bipartite estates in places where that can be done isn’t more of a response, both to diminishing yields and also to newly huge scales of estate ownership.5 (In other words, Chris’s ‘aristocrats make complexity’ argument tied up with my own macro-economic ones.) I don’t think slave-chains prove what Henning thinks they do, though the distribution is interesting (if, as he admits, potentially faulty).6 But most of all I wonder whether the horse of cause is not before the cart of effect here. Even if we accept the correlations Henning proposes, correlation is not causation, and the causation is still to be sorted out I think.

Econ 115: Fall 2009: .mp3 Lecture Audio Files

http://delong.typepad.com/slouching/2009/09/econ-115-fall-2009-mp3-lecture-audio-files.html

Economics 115: Fall 2009: First Midterm Exam

Answers to no more than two significant figures. No calculators allowed.

PART 1 (25 MINUTES): Identifications

For each of the ten events, tell us (a) when it happened (within a ten year window) and (b) what its relevance is to a course in twentieth century economic history:

1. Launching of first Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union
2. Wall Street stock market crash; start of the Great Depression
3. Gandhi's “Salt March”
4. “The End of the Beginning”: Battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, “Operation Torch”, and—most of all--”Operation Uranus”: Stalingrad
5. George Marshall proposes the “Marshall Plan”
6. Treaty of Rome creates the European Economic Community of “the six”
7. The “Southern Expedition” of Deng Xiaoping
8. Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain
9. William Jennings Bryan [D] loses U.S. election to William McKinley [R]
10. Start of Mexican Revolution

---

PART 2 (25 MINUTES): Short Answers

Write a paragraph or two about the importance of each of the following five economic forces in understanding the economic history of the world before 1914:

1. Malthusian population pressure
2. Falling trans-oceanic transportation costs
3. The abundance of very cheap easily mined coal near navigable waterways in Great Britain
4. European nationalism
5. Increasing income inequality

---

No calculators allowed, You won’t need them. All you will need is simple arithmetic (the ability to multiply things by two, and to divide) and the rule of 72—the fact that a quantity growing at 1% per year doubles in 72 years, a quantity growing at 2% per year doubles in 36 years, a quantity growing at 0.5% per year doubles in 144 years, et cetera, a quantity growing at 1% per year grows by 41.41% in 36 years, etc…

PART 3 (25 MINUTES): Calculations

Consider the 144 years between 1866 and 2010…

1. World population grew from about 1.1 billion to 6.4 billion. About how many doublings did population undergo? What is the average growth rate of world population over those 144 years?
2. World total real GDP (on one somewhat arbitrary set of assumptions, at least) grew from $875 billion of today’s dollars in 1866 to $56 trillion of today’s dollars today. What was the average growth rate of world total real GDP over those 144 years?
3. If world total real GDP growth continues to grow at its average 1866-2010 rate, what will world total real GDP (in today’s dollars) be in 2155? Do you think this is possible? Reasonable? Absurd? Why?
4. By contrast, total world GDP (on one somewhat arbitrary set of assumptions, at least) grew from $437.5 billion of today’s dollars in 1794 to $875 billion of today’s dollars in 1866. Suppose total world real GDP growth had continued at its 1794-1866 pace from 1866-2010. What would total world real GDP be today?

Econ 115 Lecture Nores: September 17, 2009: Lecture 7: Empire, 1870-1914

20090920 115 lecture 7.pdf

Open publication - Free publishing

Econ 115 Lecture Notes: September 15, 2009: Lecture 6: Democracy

20090920 115 lecture 6.pdf

Open publication - Free publishing

Hoisted from Comments: Notre Dame's Economics and Policy Analysis Department, Mont Pelerin, etc.

Hoisted from Comments: John Emerson writes:

Department of "Huh?": Those of us who want to believe the worst of the economics profession get a new gift almost every day.

[Re:]

Ideologically, the neoliberal position is understandable as anti-statist. Certainly, this was Hayek's intent...

Mirowski's (with othrs) book "The Road From Mont Pelerin" argues that this is not true. He defines neoliberalism in terms of its differences from classical liberalism, one of which is a belief that an authoritarian state might be necessary at times to foster liberalism, as in Chile.

Let me agree with Emerson and Mirowski. The way I read Hayek, it is quite clear that (a) liberal democracy and (b) respect for private property are both good things, but it is also clear that (b) is by far the most important.

Hayek would much rather have a government that respected private property and ruled with an iron fist as a dictatorship than have a government that was a vibrant democracy but interfered with and regulated private property. And he would make his choice with a clear conscience--the second, after all, was on the "road to serfdom"...

Background in World History for Econ 115: 101 Events and 101 Videos/Pictures

You should know all about these *before* you start taking this course--but if you don't, take a look...

101 Events in Background World History

Year	Key Events
1896	William Jennings Bryan [D] loses U.S. election to William McKinley [R] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeTkT5-w5RA
1896	Large-scale gold mining in South Africa's Witwatersrand http://www.mindat.org/photo-158996.html
1899	Start of the Boer War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rvz6O1vPWU
1901	Assassination of McKinley; Theodore Roosevelt becomes President of the United States http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cph/3a00000/3a08000/3a08600/3a08686r.jpg
1905	U.S. Supreme Court decides Lochner case: Constitution held to enact Herbert Spencers's “social statics” http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/capitalism/landmark_lochner.html
1910	Start of Mexican Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbUw_GCskog&feature=PlayList&p=BF8C75DD02E5CE25&index=0&playnext=1
1911	Overthrow of the Qing Dynasty; declaration of the Chinese Republic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Xh1.jpg
1912	Theodore Roosevelt splits Republican Party; Woodrow Wilson [D] elected President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb30L-NmKjo
1914	Start of World War I: France, Britain, Italy (from 1915), Russia (until 1917), and America (from 1917) vs. Germany, Austria, Turkey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZPiaSYmj_4&feature=related
1917	Kerensky's Russian Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMGrIwLj7gU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdpEaPxNW0g&feature=related
1917	Lenin's Russian Revolution in October (really November) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGE6T3SRNAs
1918	End of World War I; overthrow of the German Emperor (“Kaiser”); establishment of the “Weimar Republic” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABZcclM38jo&feature=PlayList&p=240BAFEB607EFFE1&index=27 http://www.history.stir.ac.uk/img/site-images/flagofweimar.jpg
1919	Communist uprising in Germany: “Spartikist Rebellion” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00540A,_Berlin,_Revolutionskämpfe.jpg
1919	Treaty of Versailles to settle affairs after World War I http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/11/13/VersaillesLeaders460.jpg
1919	Jallianwala Bagh Massacre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-wKcDkpqHE
1921	Lenin adopts the “New Economic Policy”: a small-scale return to the market http://faculty.unlv.edu/pwerth/NEP-Lenin.jpg
1922	Mussolini marches on Rome; establishes first fascist regime http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mF4ZjJ88wU
1923	French and Belgian troops occupy Germany's Ruhr Valley to try to force reparations payments http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUa5h6C4-j4
1923	End of German hyperinflation: $1 = 4,000,000,000,000 RM http://dakiniland.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/inflation-1923.jpg
1923	German World War I General Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler attempt coup--”Beer Hall Putsch” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-BjUFV-aPs&feature=PlayList&p=7C19E39CBB61FAE2&index=8
1924	Death of Lenin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJU5H7sqQTc
1925	Death of Sun Yatsen http://nhs.needham.k12.ma.us/cur/Baker_00/2001_p6/baker_js_p6/Intro.jpg
1925	Great Britain returns to the gold standard http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wmz32xeNKtU/SpldujLl5vI/AAAAAAAABJE/FP0tn7TdKkg/s400/British+Pound+1900-1939+chart.PNG
1926	General Strike in Great Britain http://unionbadges.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/british_worker.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOal1HYlRag
1927	Chiang Kaishek's Kuomintang double-crosses his Communist allies; massacres in Shanghai http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sa3qY4m1Ps
1927	Stalin expels Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev from the Communist Party http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfmSPYDb0FQ
1928	Chiang Kaishek launches “Northern Expedition” http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/time/563-1.jpg
1928	Launching of first Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union
1929	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXGThPeOJu4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S69s8YyJMlM Drive to “collectivize” agriculture in the Soviet Union: start of terror-famine in the Ukraine http://pmeyer.web.wesleyan.edu/206/Derevnia.jpg http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/RM3.S.FACE.OF.FAM.JPG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2sugMM9y3Q&feature=related
1929	The Wall Street stock market crash; start of the Great Depression http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWrX6kC9Nhs
1930	Gandhi's “Salt March” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsBHeBXt5Qk
1931	German Social Democratic Party rejects proposals to plan a “New Deal” for Germany http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERhilferding.JPG
1932	Election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oblTN1ojsAA&feature=PlayList&p=89F9180242B853AD&index=2
1933	Adolf Hitler becomes the last Chancellor of Germany's Weimar Republic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-6H4xOUrs
1933	Worst year of the Great Depression http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZHEkU__Ijw
1934	Start of Mao Zedong's “Long March” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_civil_way_map_03.jpg
1935	Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes and congress passes the Social Security Act http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVZijG4WSOw
1935	Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes and congress passes the National Labor Relations Act http://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=4594
1936	Francisco Franco attempts to overthrow Spanish Republic: start of Spanish Civil War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atynzDwSbuo&feature=related http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/74/PicassoGuernica.jpg
1937	U.S. Supreme Court surprisingly declares NLRA constitutional: “the switch in time that saved nine” http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/12/04/supreme_switch/
1937	Marco Polo Bridge “incident”; start of World War II in Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lugou_battle.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB2qDwAlxw4
1939	Final victory by Franco in Spanish Civil War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBhejsi9Z1c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX_-faiNTVU
1939	Start of World War II in Europe; Nazi Soviet pact; Nazi invasion of Poland http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CmFT0YA2nY
1940	Fall of Denmark, Norway, France to Nazis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq4RwuWnK_k
1941	Nazi invasion of Soviet Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BNucqbm_ZY
1941	Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VqQAf74fsE
1942	“The End of the Beginning”: Battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, “Operation Torch”, and—most of all--”Operation Uranus”: Stalingrad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhdHZIj76WE&feature=related http://econc10.bu.edu/economic_systems/NatIdentity/images/stalingrad_5.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXNrYoO-7qU&feature=related
1944	Bretton Woods conference: agreement to found the IMF and World Bank http://www.imf.org/external/np/arc/eng/fa/BWC/s5.htm
1945	Yalta and Potsdam Conferences shape post-World War II world; Germany partitioned http://students.umf.maine.edu/~devkota/Yalta%20Conference.jpg
1945	Labour Party first wins majority in British House of Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Attlee_BW_cropped.jpg
1945	Death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Harry S Truman becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kQZQAAEBFU&feature=PlayList&p=F4FA9C7B6C60E4DA&index=16&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL
1945	U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/47/91847-004-669368AC.jpg
1947	Harry S Truman begins the Cold War with the “Truman Doctrine” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmQD_W8Pcxg
1947	Britain grants independence to India and Pakistan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5X7LzTrLYU
1947	George Marshall proposes the “Marshall Plan” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUd2W6aMng4
1948	Stalinist coup in Czechoslovakia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edvard_Beneš.jpg
1948 1948	Israel founded. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNWgfei6wO8 Stalin expels Yugoslavia from the Cominform http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1955/1101550606_400.jpg
1949	Proclamation of the People's Republic of China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PRCFounding.jpg
1950	Stalin slips Kim Il Sung's leash: the Korean War begins http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4hkUFriyFU http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Korean_War_bombing_Wonsan.jpg
1951	Treaty of Paris creates the European Coal and Steel Community http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/download/photo_download_en.cfm?id=13630&type=4
1954	U.S. Supreme Court decides Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTGHLdr-iak&feature=related
1956	Khruschchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Joseph Stalin http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/22/85222-004-B1564EDD.jpg
1956	Israel, France, and Britain attack Egypt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_N6gv_CWU
1956	Hungarian revolt against the Soviet Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKcm4OqzpwU
1957	Treaty of Rome creates the European Economic Community of “the six” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptJqwWqKq4M
1958	Mao Zedong launches Great Leap forward http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efBQKHOfW60
1959	Lushan Plenum in China: “Disgrace” of Marshal Peng Dehuai http://www.paulnoll.com/Korea/War/Marshal-Peng-Dehuai.jpg
1961	Construction of Berlin Wall http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nch5MbnvTqY
1962	Cuban Missile Crisis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W50RNAbmy3M
1963	Assassination of John F. Kennedy; Lyndon Johnson becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpicOfFajNE&feature=related
1964	Civil Rights Act in the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q11kvbJy0cs
1964	Overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev; replacement by Leonid Brezhnev http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfpKYWY_zg8
1964	Gulf of Tonkin “incident” off coast of Vietnam http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd6zKqGcaOM
1964	Barry Goldwater runs for President on a non-RINO platform: destruction of Republican congressional power http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7kdLEjb9gM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-MEdAPhYA&feature=related
1965	Lyndon Johnson uses overwhelming congressional majorities for Medicare, Medicaid, Voting Rights Act http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opFYzLnC9hs
1965	Overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia; massacres of Indonesian Communists (and many others); rise of Suharto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-07wttSEx4
1966	Mao Zedong launches Cultural Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_44Q_k2WxvE
1973	First “Oil Shock”: Syria and Egypt attack Israel on Yom Kippur http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-66seomf2K4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M22osf0vzrI http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/12/oil_price_1945_2005.png
1974	Resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7dtRDQrV6c
1975	Fall of South Vietnam http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVDF2aQpYZc
1975	Indira Gandhi declares “emergency” http://www.indianexpress.com/ie/daily/20000713/e1.htm
1975	Death of Mao Zedong http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XeegyVkGm0
1978	The “Southern Expedition” of Deng Xiaoping http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0lwKlMFmZY
1979	Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK3eP9rh4So http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEPTjLl2Af8&feature=related
1979	Khomeini's Iranian Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlVOLSVS8yI
1981	Ronald Reagan becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpPt7xGx4Xo
1982	The “Volcker Deflation”: deepest post-World War II global recession (until now) http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/002736.html http://dailycandor.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/paul-volcker.jpg
1985	Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union: “glasnost” and “perestroika” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=595W4JJHa2U
1985	Rajiv Gandhi takes first steps toward dismantling the License Raj http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2007/may/09/india?picture=329818396
1989	Fall of the Berlin Wall http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnYXbJ_bcLc
1989	Tien an Men Square massacre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJBnHMpHGRY&feature=PlayList&p=9EB1A4E767FD73C7&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5
1991	End of the Soviet Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-2kx549Mf0
1993	William J. Clinton becomes President of the United States—only the second Democratic president since 1968 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SWjIPwm954
1993	U.S., Canada, and Mexico ratify NAFTA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8An-jSfFU
1994	Mexican peso crisis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWLEhlq1cQ
1998 1999	East Asian financial crisis http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/images2/2002-09-26-Asia_cap_flows.gif Vladimir Putin becomes Acting President of the Russian Federation http://www.topnews.in/files/putin_0.jpg
2000	Collapse of the dot-com bubble http://www.stock-market-crash.net/images/nasdaq-bubble.gif
2001	George W. Bush becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXzgMdj5urs
2008	Failures of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG; start of largest post-World War II economic recession http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNUILhofHNA

Author: Josh Hausman.

You should know all about these *before* you start taking this course--but if you don't, take a look...

101 Events in Background World History

Year	Key Events
1896	William Jennings Bryan [D] loses U.S. election to William McKinley [R] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeTkT5-w5RA
1896	Large-scale gold mining in South Africa's Witwatersrand http://www.mindat.org/photo-158996.html
1899	Start of the Boer War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rvz6O1vPWU
1901	Assassination of McKinley; Theodore Roosevelt becomes President of the United States http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cph/3a00000/3a08000/3a08600/3a08686r.jpg
1905	U.S. Supreme Court decides Lochner case: Constitution held to enact Herbert Spencers's “social statics” http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/capitalism/landmark_lochner.html
1910	Start of Mexican Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbUw_GCskog&feature=PlayList&p=BF8C75DD02E5CE25&index=0&playnext=1
1911	Overthrow of the Qing Dynasty; declaration of the Chinese Republic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Xh1.jpg
1912	Theodore Roosevelt splits Republican Party; Woodrow Wilson [D] elected President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb30L-NmKjo
1914	Start of World War I: France, Britain, Italy (from 1915), Russia (until 1917), and America (from 1917) vs. Germany, Austria, Turkey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZPiaSYmj_4&feature=related
1917	Kerensky's Russian Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMGrIwLj7gU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdpEaPxNW0g&feature=related
1917	Lenin's Russian Revolution in October (really November) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGE6T3SRNAs
1918	End of World War I; overthrow of the German Emperor (“Kaiser”); establishment of the “Weimar Republic” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABZcclM38jo&feature=PlayList&p=240BAFEB607EFFE1&index=27 http://www.history.stir.ac.uk/img/site-images/flagofweimar.jpg
1919	Communist uprising in Germany: “Spartikist Rebellion” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00540A,_Berlin,_Revolutionskämpfe.jpg
1919	Treaty of Versailles to settle affairs after World War I http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/11/13/VersaillesLeaders460.jpg
1919	Jallianwala Bagh Massacre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-wKcDkpqHE
1921	Lenin adopts the “New Economic Policy”: a small-scale return to the market http://faculty.unlv.edu/pwerth/NEP-Lenin.jpg
1922	Mussolini marches on Rome; establishes first fascist regime http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mF4ZjJ88wU
1923	French and Belgian troops occupy Germany's Ruhr Valley to try to force reparations payments http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUa5h6C4-j4
1923	End of German hyperinflation: $1 = 4,000,000,000,000 RM http://dakiniland.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/inflation-1923.jpg
1923	German World War I General Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler attempt coup--”Beer Hall Putsch” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-BjUFV-aPs&feature=PlayList&p=7C19E39CBB61FAE2&index=8
1924	Death of Lenin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJU5H7sqQTc
1925	Death of Sun Yatsen http://nhs.needham.k12.ma.us/cur/Baker_00/2001_p6/baker_js_p6/Intro.jpg
1925	Great Britain returns to the gold standard http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wmz32xeNKtU/SpldujLl5vI/AAAAAAAABJE/FP0tn7TdKkg/s400/British+Pound+1900-1939+chart.PNG
1926	General Strike in Great Britain http://unionbadges.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/british_worker.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOal1HYlRag
1927	Chiang Kaishek's Kuomintang double-crosses his Communist allies; massacres in Shanghai http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sa3qY4m1Ps
1927	Stalin expels Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev from the Communist Party http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfmSPYDb0FQ
1928	Chiang Kaishek launches “Northern Expedition” http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/time/563-1.jpg
1928	Launching of first Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union
1929	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXGThPeOJu4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S69s8YyJMlM Drive to “collectivize” agriculture in the Soviet Union: start of terror-famine in the Ukraine http://pmeyer.web.wesleyan.edu/206/Derevnia.jpg http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/RM3.S.FACE.OF.FAM.JPG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2sugMM9y3Q&feature=related
1929	The Wall Street stock market crash; start of the Great Depression http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWrX6kC9Nhs
1930	Gandhi's “Salt March” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsBHeBXt5Qk
1931	German Social Democratic Party rejects proposals to plan a “New Deal” for Germany http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERhilferding.JPG
1932	Election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oblTN1ojsAA&feature=PlayList&p=89F9180242B853AD&index=2
1933	Adolf Hitler becomes the last Chancellor of Germany's Weimar Republic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-6H4xOUrs
1933	Worst year of the Great Depression http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZHEkU__Ijw
1934	Start of Mao Zedong's “Long March” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_civil_way_map_03.jpg
1935	Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes and congress passes the Social Security Act http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVZijG4WSOw
1935	Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes and congress passes the National Labor Relations Act http://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=4594
1936	Francisco Franco attempts to overthrow Spanish Republic: start of Spanish Civil War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atynzDwSbuo&feature=related http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/74/PicassoGuernica.jpg
1937	U.S. Supreme Court surprisingly declares NLRA constitutional: “the switch in time that saved nine” http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/12/04/supreme_switch/
1937	Marco Polo Bridge “incident”; start of World War II in Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lugou_battle.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB2qDwAlxw4
1939	Final victory by Franco in Spanish Civil War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBhejsi9Z1c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX_-faiNTVU
1939	Start of World War II in Europe; Nazi Soviet pact; Nazi invasion of Poland http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CmFT0YA2nY
1940	Fall of Denmark, Norway, France to Nazis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq4RwuWnK_k
1941	Nazi invasion of Soviet Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BNucqbm_ZY
1941	Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VqQAf74fsE
1942	“The End of the Beginning”: Battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, “Operation Torch”, and—most of all--”Operation Uranus”: Stalingrad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhdHZIj76WE&feature=related http://econc10.bu.edu/economic_systems/NatIdentity/images/stalingrad_5.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXNrYoO-7qU&feature=related
1944	Bretton Woods conference: agreement to found the IMF and World Bank http://www.imf.org/external/np/arc/eng/fa/BWC/s5.htm
1945	Yalta and Potsdam Conferences shape post-World War II world; Germany partitioned http://students.umf.maine.edu/~devkota/Yalta%20Conference.jpg
1945	Labour Party first wins majority in British House of Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Attlee_BW_cropped.jpg
1945	Death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Harry S Truman becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kQZQAAEBFU&feature=PlayList&p=F4FA9C7B6C60E4DA&index=16&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL
1945	U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/47/91847-004-669368AC.jpg
1947	Harry S Truman begins the Cold War with the “Truman Doctrine” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmQD_W8Pcxg
1947	Britain grants independence to India and Pakistan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5X7LzTrLYU
1947	George Marshall proposes the “Marshall Plan” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUd2W6aMng4
1948	Stalinist coup in Czechoslovakia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edvard_Beneš.jpg
1948 1948	Israel founded. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNWgfei6wO8 Stalin expels Yugoslavia from the Cominform http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1955/1101550606_400.jpg
1949	Proclamation of the People's Republic of China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PRCFounding.jpg
1950	Stalin slips Kim Il Sung's leash: the Korean War begins http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4hkUFriyFU http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Korean_War_bombing_Wonsan.jpg
1951	Treaty of Paris creates the European Coal and Steel Community http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/download/photo_download_en.cfm?id=13630&type=4
1954	U.S. Supreme Court decides Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTGHLdr-iak&feature=related
1956	Khruschchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Joseph Stalin http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/22/85222-004-B1564EDD.jpg
1956	Israel, France, and Britain attack Egypt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_N6gv_CWU
1956	Hungarian revolt against the Soviet Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKcm4OqzpwU
1957	Treaty of Rome creates the European Economic Community of “the six” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptJqwWqKq4M
1958	Mao Zedong launches Great Leap forward http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efBQKHOfW60
1959	Lushan Plenum in China: “Disgrace” of Marshal Peng Dehuai http://www.paulnoll.com/Korea/War/Marshal-Peng-Dehuai.jpg
1961	Construction of Berlin Wall http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nch5MbnvTqY
1962	Cuban Missile Crisis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W50RNAbmy3M
1963	Assassination of John F. Kennedy; Lyndon Johnson becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpicOfFajNE&feature=related
1964	Civil Rights Act in the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q11kvbJy0cs
1964	Overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev; replacement by Leonid Brezhnev http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfpKYWY_zg8
1964	Gulf of Tonkin “incident” off coast of Vietnam http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd6zKqGcaOM
1964	Barry Goldwater runs for President on a non-RINO platform: destruction of Republican congressional power http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7kdLEjb9gM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-MEdAPhYA&feature=related
1965	Lyndon Johnson uses overwhelming congressional majorities for Medicare, Medicaid, Voting Rights Act http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opFYzLnC9hs
1965	Overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia; massacres of Indonesian Communists (and many others); rise of Suharto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-07wttSEx4
1966	Mao Zedong launches Cultural Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_44Q_k2WxvE
1973	First “Oil Shock”: Syria and Egypt attack Israel on Yom Kippur http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-66seomf2K4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M22osf0vzrI http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/12/oil_price_1945_2005.png
1974	Resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7dtRDQrV6c
1975	Fall of South Vietnam http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVDF2aQpYZc
1975	Indira Gandhi declares “emergency” http://www.indianexpress.com/ie/daily/20000713/e1.htm
1975	Death of Mao Zedong http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XeegyVkGm0
1978	The “Southern Expedition” of Deng Xiaoping http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0lwKlMFmZY
1979	Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK3eP9rh4So http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEPTjLl2Af8&feature=related
1979	Khomeini's Iranian Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlVOLSVS8yI
1981	Ronald Reagan becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpPt7xGx4Xo
1982	The “Volcker Deflation”: deepest post-World War II global recession (until now) http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/002736.html http://dailycandor.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/paul-volcker.jpg
1985	Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union: “glasnost” and “perestroika” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=595W4JJHa2U
1985	Rajiv Gandhi takes first steps toward dismantling the License Raj http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2007/may/09/india?picture=329818396
1989	Fall of the Berlin Wall http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnYXbJ_bcLc
1989	Tien an Men Square massacre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJBnHMpHGRY&feature=PlayList&p=9EB1A4E767FD73C7&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5
1991	End of the Soviet Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-2kx549Mf0
1993	William J. Clinton becomes President of the United States—only the second Democratic president since 1968 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SWjIPwm954
1993	U.S., Canada, and Mexico ratify NAFTA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8An-jSfFU
1994	Mexican peso crisis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWLEhlq1cQ
1998 1999	East Asian financial crisis http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/images2/2002-09-26-Asia_cap_flows.gif Vladimir Putin becomes Acting President of the Russian Federation http://www.topnews.in/files/putin_0.jpg
2000	Collapse of the dot-com bubble http://www.stock-market-crash.net/images/nasdaq-bubble.gif
2001	George W. Bush becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXzgMdj5urs
2008	Failures of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG; start of largest post-World War II economic recession http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNUILhofHNA

Year	Key Events
1896	William Jennings Bryan [D] loses U.S. election to William McKinley [R] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeTkT5-w5RA
1896	Large-scale gold mining in South Africa's Witwatersrand http://www.mindat.org/photo-158996.html
1899	Start of the Boer War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rvz6O1vPWU
1901	Assassination of McKinley; Theodore Roosevelt becomes President of the United States http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cph/3a00000/3a08000/3a08600/3a08686r.jpg
1905	U.S. Supreme Court decides Lochner case: Constitution held to enact Herbert Spencers's “social statics” http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/capitalism/landmark_lochner.html
1910	Start of Mexican Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbUw_GCskog&feature=PlayList&p=BF8C75DD02E5CE25&index=0&playnext=1
1911	Overthrow of the Qing Dynasty; declaration of the Chinese Republic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Xh1.jpg
1912	Theodore Roosevelt splits Republican Party; Woodrow Wilson [D] elected President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb30L-NmKjo
1914	Start of World War I: France, Britain, Italy (from 1915), Russia (until 1917), and America (from 1917) vs. Germany, Austria, Turkey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZPiaSYmj_4&feature=related
1917	Kerensky's Russian Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMGrIwLj7gU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdpEaPxNW0g&feature=related
1917	Lenin's Russian Revolution in October (really November) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGE6T3SRNAs
1918	End of World War I; overthrow of the German Emperor (“Kaiser”); establishment of the “Weimar Republic” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABZcclM38jo&feature=PlayList&p=240BAFEB607EFFE1&index=27 http://www.history.stir.ac.uk/img/site-images/flagofweimar.jpg
1919	Communist uprising in Germany: “Spartikist Rebellion” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00540A,_Berlin,_Revolutionskämpfe.jpg
1919	Treaty of Versailles to settle affairs after World War I http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/11/13/VersaillesLeaders460.jpg
1919	Jallianwala Bagh Massacre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-wKcDkpqHE
1921	Lenin adopts the “New Economic Policy”: a small-scale return to the market http://faculty.unlv.edu/pwerth/NEP-Lenin.jpg
1922	Mussolini marches on Rome; establishes first fascist regime http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mF4ZjJ88wU
1923	French and Belgian troops occupy Germany's Ruhr Valley to try to force reparations payments http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUa5h6C4-j4
1923	End of German hyperinflation: $1 = 4,000,000,000,000 RM http://dakiniland.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/inflation-1923.jpg
1923	German World War I General Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler attempt coup--”Beer Hall Putsch” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-BjUFV-aPs&feature=PlayList&p=7C19E39CBB61FAE2&index=8
1924	Death of Lenin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJU5H7sqQTc
1925	Death of Sun Yatsen http://nhs.needham.k12.ma.us/cur/Baker_00/2001_p6/baker_js_p6/Intro.jpg
1925	Great Britain returns to the gold standard http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wmz32xeNKtU/SpldujLl5vI/AAAAAAAABJE/FP0tn7TdKkg/s400/British+Pound+1900-1939+chart.PNG
1926	General Strike in Great Britain http://unionbadges.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/british_worker.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOal1HYlRag
1927	Chiang Kaishek's Kuomintang double-crosses his Communist allies; massacres in Shanghai http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sa3qY4m1Ps
1927	Stalin expels Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev from the Communist Party http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfmSPYDb0FQ
1928	Chiang Kaishek launches “Northern Expedition” http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/time/563-1.jpg
1928	Launching of first Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union
1929	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXGThPeOJu4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S69s8YyJMlM Drive to “collectivize” agriculture in the Soviet Union: start of terror-famine in the Ukraine http://pmeyer.web.wesleyan.edu/206/Derevnia.jpg http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/RM3.S.FACE.OF.FAM.JPG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2sugMM9y3Q&feature=related
1929	The Wall Street stock market crash; start of the Great Depression http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWrX6kC9Nhs
1930	Gandhi's “Salt March” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsBHeBXt5Qk
1931	German Social Democratic Party rejects proposals to plan a “New Deal” for Germany http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERhilferding.JPG
1932	Election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oblTN1ojsAA&feature=PlayList&p=89F9180242B853AD&index=2
1933	Adolf Hitler becomes the last Chancellor of Germany's Weimar Republic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-6H4xOUrs
1933	Worst year of the Great Depression http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZHEkU__Ijw
1934	Start of Mao Zedong's “Long March” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_civil_way_map_03.jpg
1935	Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes and congress passes the Social Security Act http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVZijG4WSOw
1935	Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes and congress passes the National Labor Relations Act http://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=4594
1936	Francisco Franco attempts to overthrow Spanish Republic: start of Spanish Civil War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atynzDwSbuo&feature=related http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/74/PicassoGuernica.jpg
1937	U.S. Supreme Court surprisingly declares NLRA constitutional: “the switch in time that saved nine” http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/12/04/supreme_switch/
1937	Marco Polo Bridge “incident”; start of World War II in Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lugou_battle.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB2qDwAlxw4
1939	Final victory by Franco in Spanish Civil War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBhejsi9Z1c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX_-faiNTVU
1939	Start of World War II in Europe; Nazi Soviet pact; Nazi invasion of Poland http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CmFT0YA2nY
1940	Fall of Denmark, Norway, France to Nazis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq4RwuWnK_k
1941	Nazi invasion of Soviet Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BNucqbm_ZY
1941	Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VqQAf74fsE
1942	“The End of the Beginning”: Battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, “Operation Torch”, and—most of all--”Operation Uranus”: Stalingrad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhdHZIj76WE&feature=related http://econc10.bu.edu/economic_systems/NatIdentity/images/stalingrad_5.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXNrYoO-7qU&feature=related
1944	Bretton Woods conference: agreement to found the IMF and World Bank http://www.imf.org/external/np/arc/eng/fa/BWC/s5.htm
1945	Yalta and Potsdam Conferences shape post-World War II world; Germany partitioned http://students.umf.maine.edu/~devkota/Yalta%20Conference.jpg
1945	Labour Party first wins majority in British House of Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Attlee_BW_cropped.jpg
1945	Death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Harry S Truman becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kQZQAAEBFU&feature=PlayList&p=F4FA9C7B6C60E4DA&index=16&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL
1945	U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/47/91847-004-669368AC.jpg
1947	Harry S Truman begins the Cold War with the “Truman Doctrine” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmQD_W8Pcxg
1947	Britain grants independence to India and Pakistan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5X7LzTrLYU
1947	George Marshall proposes the “Marshall Plan” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUd2W6aMng4
1948	Stalinist coup in Czechoslovakia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edvard_Beneš.jpg
1948 1948	Israel founded. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNWgfei6wO8 Stalin expels Yugoslavia from the Cominform http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1955/1101550606_400.jpg
1949	Proclamation of the People's Republic of China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PRCFounding.jpg
1950	Stalin slips Kim Il Sung's leash: the Korean War begins http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4hkUFriyFU http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Korean_War_bombing_Wonsan.jpg
1951	Treaty of Paris creates the European Coal and Steel Community http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/download/photo_download_en.cfm?id=13630&type=4
1954	U.S. Supreme Court decides Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTGHLdr-iak&feature=related
1956	Khruschchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Joseph Stalin http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/22/85222-004-B1564EDD.jpg
1956	Israel, France, and Britain attack Egypt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_N6gv_CWU
1956	Hungarian revolt against the Soviet Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKcm4OqzpwU
1957	Treaty of Rome creates the European Economic Community of “the six” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptJqwWqKq4M
1958	Mao Zedong launches Great Leap forward http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efBQKHOfW60
1959	Lushan Plenum in China: “Disgrace” of Marshal Peng Dehuai http://www.paulnoll.com/Korea/War/Marshal-Peng-Dehuai.jpg
1961	Construction of Berlin Wall http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nch5MbnvTqY
1962	Cuban Missile Crisis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W50RNAbmy3M
1963	Assassination of John F. Kennedy; Lyndon Johnson becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpicOfFajNE&feature=related
1964	Civil Rights Act in the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q11kvbJy0cs
1964	Overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev; replacement by Leonid Brezhnev http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfpKYWY_zg8
1964	Gulf of Tonkin “incident” off coast of Vietnam http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd6zKqGcaOM
1964	Barry Goldwater runs for President on a non-RINO platform: destruction of Republican congressional power http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7kdLEjb9gM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-MEdAPhYA&feature=related
1965	Lyndon Johnson uses overwhelming congressional majorities for Medicare, Medicaid, Voting Rights Act http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opFYzLnC9hs
1965	Overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia; massacres of Indonesian Communists (and many others); rise of Suharto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-07wttSEx4
1966	Mao Zedong launches Cultural Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_44Q_k2WxvE
1973	First “Oil Shock”: Syria and Egypt attack Israel on Yom Kippur http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-66seomf2K4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M22osf0vzrI http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/12/oil_price_1945_2005.png
1974	Resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7dtRDQrV6c
1975	Fall of South Vietnam http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVDF2aQpYZc
1975	Indira Gandhi declares “emergency” http://www.indianexpress.com/ie/daily/20000713/e1.htm
1975	Death of Mao Zedong http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XeegyVkGm0
1978	The “Southern Expedition” of Deng Xiaoping http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0lwKlMFmZY
1979	Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK3eP9rh4So http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEPTjLl2Af8&feature=related
1979	Khomeini's Iranian Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlVOLSVS8yI
1981	Ronald Reagan becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpPt7xGx4Xo
1982	The “Volcker Deflation”: deepest post-World War II global recession (until now) http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/002736.html http://dailycandor.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/paul-volcker.jpg
1985	Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union: “glasnost” and “perestroika” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=595W4JJHa2U
1985	Rajiv Gandhi takes first steps toward dismantling the License Raj http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2007/may/09/india?picture=329818396
1989	Fall of the Berlin Wall http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnYXbJ_bcLc
1989	Tien an Men Square massacre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJBnHMpHGRY&feature=PlayList&p=9EB1A4E767FD73C7&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5
1991	End of the Soviet Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-2kx549Mf0
1993	William J. Clinton becomes President of the United States—only the second Democratic president since 1968 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SWjIPwm954
1993	U.S., Canada, and Mexico ratify NAFTA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8An-jSfFU
1994	Mexican peso crisis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWLEhlq1cQ
1998 1999	East Asian financial crisis http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/images2/2002-09-26-Asia_cap_flows.gif Vladimir Putin becomes Acting President of the Russian Federation http://www.topnews.in/files/putin_0.jpg
2000	Collapse of the dot-com bubble http://www.stock-market-crash.net/images/nasdaq-bubble.gif
2001	George W. Bush becomes President of the United States http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXzgMdj5urs
2008	Failures of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG; start of largest post-World War II economic recession http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNUILhofHNA

Econ 115: Fall 2009: Lecture Audio Files: Before World War I

Lecture Audio Files: Before WWI:

• Download Econ 115-1--Overview
• Download Econ 115-2--The North Atlantic in 1870
• Download Econ 115-3--The Poverty of the Globe in 1870
• Download Econ 115-4--The Invention of Invention
• Download Econ 115-5--The First Global Economy
• Download Econ 115-6--Democracy
• Download Econ 115-7--Empire