The taxman cometh (but only for what he can see)

There have been two great transformations in human affairs. One is the Neolithic Revolution, the transition from foraging to farming. This is a transformation which is still going on, as there are still some foraging groups around the planet (though it is a vanishing way of life). The second is the Industrial Revolution, the shift from reliance on what is produced by land (farming), a factor of production managed but not created by humans, to reliance on factors of production produced by humans, the produced means of production (capital), such that farmers change from being about 80% of the workforce to less than 5%.

Compare and contrast
Both transformations are technological and involve expanded use of energy, setting off dramatic population increases (the second much faster than the first). In the foraging-to-farming transition, humans no longer merely took food from the environment around them; they deliberately grew food. This food was typically storable, so able to cope with variations in food production across the seasons.  Farming both increased the (food) energy to humans and allowed it to be stored for later use, to be actively managed across time. (Hence the very different attitudes to time between foraging and farming cultures.)

Industrialisation used wind, water and (particularly) steam energy to produce things which produced things. Increased agricultural production allowed increased production in general, with expanding sources and use of energy, ushering the creation of, not merely mass prosperity, but increasing mass prosperity. This is in stark contrast for the foraging-farming transition, where it is likely that general standards of living actually fell and, with some exceptions, remained stagnant for thousands of years.

Another contrast is that the foraging-farming transition lead to hierarchical societies with elite-dominated rulerships--whether autocratic, monarchic (i.e. containing powerful noble elites) or deliberative. The last were polities run by elite assemblies, the most democratic of these being some Mediterranean city-states where as much as a third of the adult population got to vote--i.e. male citizens; women, slaves and resident foreigners being excluded. Outside the Mediterranean, assemblies were also important in cities in Lower Mesopotamia and in the kshatriya republics of India. Conversely, with some hiccups, the Industrial Revolution has led to much more broadly-based forms of political life. Another contrast is that the share of output taken by taxation tended to be fairly constant across farming rulerships but has been steadily increasing in modern states.

Why did farming lead to hierarchical societies dominated by controlling elites? The standard answer has been increased production of food led to a surplus above subsistence which allowed a more differentiated society. The problem with this is, why there was any such surplus? Why did not population just increase to consume the surplus? What blocked population increase sufficient to allow the creation of the food surpluses that sustained these elites?

The second problem is, even if there was a food surplus, why did that not just lead to increased specialisation? What happened such that population was blocked from rising to consume the food surplus and that surplus was largely appropriated by a narrow, controlling elite? And, moreover, elites of differing sizes, with different land tenure systems.

Expropriating what you can see
Three Israeli economists have produced a paper (pdf) which provides an elegant answer. Their argument is that the key element is transparency; both in stored food and in expected production. Food had to be stored across the seasons, which made it more vulnerable to expropriation. In their words:


[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer.]

The law tells it as it was

One of the more irritating historical memes is the preposterous notion that the American Civil War was not "really" about slavery, it was about tariffs and states rights. Fortunately, it is easy to demolish this claim for the historical canard it is.

All one has to do is to read the Constitution of the Confederate States of America. In particular, since it was an amended version of the Constitution of the United States of America, read it in clause-by-clause comparison.

There are some changes which arguably made for better governance. In the words of the commentator providing the aforementioned comparison:

The President's term limit and line-item veto, along with the various fiscal restraints, and the ability of cabinet members to answer questions on the floor of Congress are all innovative, neutral ideals whose merits may still be worth pondering today.

Then there are the shifts in the power of the states. Confederate States actually lost more powers than they gained:

At least three states rights are explicitly taken away--the freedom of states to grant voting rights to non-citizens, the freedom of states to outlaw slavery within their borders, and the freedom of states to trade freely with each other.
States only gain four minor rights under the Confederate system- the power to enter into treaties with other states to regulate waterways, the power to tax foreign and domestic ships that use their waterways, the power to impeach federally-appointed state officials, and the power to distribute "bills of credit."

The Constitution did not even change those sections which were particularly controversial regarding the powers of the States at the time:

the CSA constitution does not modify many of the most controversial (from a states' rights perspective) clauses of the American constitution, including the "Supremacy" clause (6-1-3), the "Commerce" clause (1-8-3) and the "Necessary and Proper" clause (1-8-18). Nor does the CSA take away the federal government's right to suspend habeus corpus or "suppress insurrections."

As for tariffs and trade policy mattering so much, not only did the Confederate government retain all its powers to tax foreign trade, the Confederate States were given more power over trade, including trade with other Confederate States. So, free trade hardly seems a cause dear to the hearts of the Confederate Founding Fathers.

What was very dear to their hearts, however, was slavery:

As far as slave-owning rights go, however, the document is much more effective. Indeed, CSA constitution seems to barely stop short of making owning slaves mandatory. Four different clauses entrench the legality of slavery in a number of different ways, and together they virtually guarantee that any sort of future anti-slave law or policy will be unconstitutional. People can claim the Civil War was "not about slavery" until the cows come home, but the fact remains that anyone who fought for the Confederacy was fighting for a country in which a universal right to own slaves was one of the most entrenched laws of the land.

The suggestion that tariffs mattered so much that they were worth fighting to break the country up over is frankly risible. It being nonsense is particularly obvious to an historically aware Australian, because Free Trade versus Protection was THE great political divide in the late C19th and early C20th in the Australiancolonies. And what did those same colonies do while being bitterly divided in the aforementioned way? They federated together to form the Commonwealth of Australia.

In the antebellum years, the South had dominated the Presidency essentially until the election of Lincoln in 1860. The South had lost control of the House of Representatives years before and had recently lost control of the Senate. Their own political domination the Southern political class regarded as acceptable, Northern political domination not so.

Why this mattered is because there was a strong Northern push to abolish slavery: part humanitarian, part political calculation to redirect Northern worker anti-immigration angst away from the political dead-end of nativism, and part claim over Western resources. Slaves represented about one-third of the total capital of the South. Anything that put that at risk was worth fighting over. Especially as the abolition of slavery would have also massively devalued the votes of white Southerners generally and undermined their incomes (due to direct labour and other competition). In other words, slavery was also deeply in the political and economic interests of Southern whites who were not slaveowners. That was also worth fighting over. The go-to book on this is Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel's Without Consent of Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery.

Trade policy merely represented a point of argument over much larger differences.

Fighting and losing the Civil War did devastate the South: even apart from direct war damage. First, because a third of its capital was liquidated overnight, in the only mass property confiscation from whites in US history. Second, it was forced to pay for Northern war pensions. Third, because keeping the whites on top meant resources were expended keeping the blacks down and use or development of their skills was minimised. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, it hardly seems accidental that the economic renaissance of the South took off just as the Civil Rights Acts were passed and resources were no longer being doubly wasted in that way.

Slavery had been the great contradiction in the United States, a country created in a Revolution which supported both property rights and general liberty but incorporating property rights based on the most absolute denial of liberty. (Hence anti-slave Tory Dr Johnson’s comment “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”)

The American Revolution was also a reaction to the British Crown’s insistence on keeping its treaties with the Amerindians (much to the frustration of land-hungry settlers). While Somersett’s Case—declaring slavery to be unrecognised by common law—was another sharp reminder that Americans had no say in British decisions.

One of the revealing questions for American history is: why did the Canadian colonies not revolt? After all, they also suffered the problem of "taxation without representation". What we now call "Canada" was originally just those British North American colonies which did not revolt against the British Crown. (Just like what we now call "Belgium" was the bit of the Low Countries that the Habsburgs managed to hold onto.)

The answer is--the Canadian colonies were not populous enough that land-hunger was serious issue, slavery was unimportant and they still needed the British Crown to arbitrate between English and French settlers. In other words, the Imperial trade-off still worked for them. It was not merely the lack of say in British decisions which was important to the colonies that did revolt--an issue which was brilliantly expressed in the slogan "no taxation without representation". It was that there were key issues which really mattered to them: in the Northern colonies, expanding into Amerindian land. In the Southern colonies, keeping slavery.

And those same issues mattered in the Civil War. The Northern States wanted to elbow out Southern interests in seizing Amerindian land (a key reason why Amerindians supported the Confederate cause, just as they had supported the Crown cause in the American Revolution, and ended up big losers yet again from the Northern victory) and the South wanted to preserve slavery. But now those issues drove them to war with each other, rather than a shared war against the British Crown.

There is a great deal to admire in American political history. But that is way not the same as not being realistic about it.

The American Civil War was about slavery (and seizing Amerindian land). But so was the American Revolution. The saving grace for both that was not all they were, or came to be, about.

The rhetoric used to inspire and persuade for the first Revolt and against the Second had much greater resonances. The US Declaration of Independence, the writings of Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry's Give me liberty or give me death speech, the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, are all key documents in the formulation of modern political democracy. As are The Federalist Papers and the effort to create an enduring republican order. That the American Republic was able to fight a long and bitter civil war and survive as an electoral republic rebutted the common C19th view that history proved that democracies were unstable and short-lived, unable to survive great crises.

Nevertheless, the American Civil War was triggered by secession which itself was motivated by the defence of slavery. The American Civil War simply would not have happened without slavery. It was the Confederate cause, and the Southern political class expressed their attachment to it (but not free trade) in the Constitution they wrote for their new country.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer and at Critical Thinking Applied.]

The Horse the Wheel and Language 2

This continues my review of archaeologist David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World begun in my previous post and which will conclude in my next post.


Part Two The Opening of the Eurasian Steppe begins with explaining Anthony’s approach to archaeology in the chapter “How to Reconstruct a Dead Culture”. The division of prehistoric time into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages began with a C19th Dane (Christian Thomsen) hired at aged 27, with no degree but noted for practicality and industry, to arrange Danish Museum items for display (p.123). The Bronze Age began when bronze made of an alloy of copper with a bit of arsenic began to be used; later tin replaced arsenic. It starts in Europe in the Caucasus around 3700-3500BC, appears in the Pontic-Caspian steppesand the lower Danube around 3300-3200BC but not in Western Europe until around 2400-2200BC. Before the Bronze Age in the steppes was the Eneolithic period—the Copper Age—a stage Western Europe did not go through, moving straight from the Neolithic (New Stone Age) to the Bronze Age (p.125).

In Western archaeology, Neolithic is defined by the means of production—the arrival of farming or herding—while the Mesolithic is defined by the arrival of pottery. In Soviet and post-Soviet archaeology, Neolithic is defined by the arrival of pottery: the usage Anthony follows (Pp125-6).

Then comes the vexed notion of culture: due to internal variety hard to define except in contrast to some neighbouring culture. Culture involves shared patterns of life and a sense of a common past (however invented). Archaeologists have to define culture by material leavings, so it is networks and clumpings of similar material leavings they use to identify distinct cultures. This includes the notion of horizon, a small clumping of traits that spreads quickly and widely without presaging basic cultural changes (Pp130-2).

Domestication
Cattle and sheep were probably introduced into the Pontic-Caspian steppes from the Danube valley and Balkans, where a network of farming settlements were “the most technologically advanced and aesthetically sophisticated culture” in Europe from about 4000-2000BC, creating a frontier between native foragers and immigrant farmers that lasted for about 2,000 years (p.132). The introduction of cattle to the steppes was crucial, as cattle promote social differentiation that created the chiefly culture central to Indo-European history (p.133).

There is no evidence of domesticated animals in the steppes before 5200-5000BC. The great limiting factor for human habitation is the bitter cold of winter, which can get down to -37oC. The dominant steppe mammals were various forms of equids (wild horses and onagers), which were hunted (typically by driving them into ravines) (Pp135-6).

Domesticated cattle and sheep began a transformation of how humans used and lived in the steppes. They were identified and used as currency and gifts and covered in poetry, songs, tales and art. (Anthony starts the chapter with two archetypal Indo-European myths that connect cattle to life, warrior culture and the gods [p.134].) Herd animals are “grass processors”: they turn grass into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk, yoghurt, cheese, meat, marrow and bone. Herds can grow rapidly but are threatened by disease, bad weather or theft, creating a boom-and-bust economy encouraging flexible social organisation. That herd animals are easy to steal encouraged brothers to stay together; hence the patrilocal and patrilineal family systems of herding cultures (p.137).

The replacement of foraging by farming culture (and peoples) is a long historical pattern, which continues to this day:

Forager languages were more apt to decline in the face of agricultural immigration. Farmers had a higher birth rate; their settlements were larger, and were occupied permanently. They produced food surpluses that were easier to store over winter. Owning and feeding “cultured” animals has always been seen as an utterly different ethos from hunting wild ones (p.146).

It is likely the Danubian-Balkan settlement culture spoke an Afro-Asiatic language (p.147). Anthony describes in loving detail the archaeological evidence from the farming and adjacent forager cultures (Pp147ff).

Chiefs first appear in the archaeological record of the Pontic-Caspian steppes with the domestication of animals in 5200-5000BC; marked by sacrificial feasts, ornaments and stone maces (p.160). Pottery is required for metallurgy but the strangeness (and value) of what metalsmiths produce encourages magical status for what they do (p.163). Anthony covers, in more loving detail, the archaeological evidence for the Danubian-Balkan farming culture interaction with the steppes of cows, chiefs and copper; the latter a pattern of life still largely confined to river valleys (Pp164ff).

There is evidence of trade networks of impressive geographical reach. Trade, gift exchange and new cults of sacrifice and feasting provided means of social power. Herding, being a volatile pattern of production, requires and creates networks of herd animals lending; encouraging networks of hospitality and clientage while creating increasingly divergent societies depending on whether they adopted herding or not (Pp190-1).

About horses
The classic animal of pastoralist power is the horse: but when and where the horse was first domesticated is still not well understood (p.192). So Anthony takes us through the evidence, including teeth evidence concerning the use of bits (Pp193ff).
Read More...
In particular, the genetic evidence is compatible with horse domestication being based on a single domesticated wild stallion (p.196). Wild stallions are headstrong, violent and instinctively declined to challenge by biting and kicking. Docile mares could be found at edges of herds: a docile stallion was rare and unlikely to reproduce in the wild:

Horse domestication might have depended on a lucky coincidence: the appearance of a relatively manageable and docile male in a place where humans could use him as the breeder of a domesticated bloodline. From the horse’s perspective, humans were the only way he could get a girl. From the human perspective, he was the only sire they wanted (p.197).

The true horse, Equus caballus ranged across the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Domestication probably started by controlling lead mares, using horses as good source of winter meat, around 4800BC; long after sheep, goats, pigs and cattle had been domesticated in various parts of the globe (Pp200-1). A range of evidence suggests both domestication and horse-riding (Pp219ff).

Horse riding makes herding far more efficient—a man on foot can herd about 200 sheep with a good herding dog: put the man on horseback with the same dog and they can herd about 500. Horse-riding greatly increased the efficiency, so greatly intensified the patterns of, herding economy and culture: larger herds meant more social differentiation while easier stealing and expanded hunger for pastures increased warrior status (p.222).

The invention of the short, recurved compound bow (more power with less length) around 1000BC meant bows were powerful yet compact enough to shoot over the horse’s rear. Socketed bronze arrowheads replaced the previous split-shaft arrowheads, and could deliver far more power. The possibilities of horse-based power were greatly increased. Technology was not sufficient on its own, however:

The technical advances in bows, arrows, and casting were meaningless without a matching change in mentality, in the identity of the fighter from a heroic single warrior to a nameless soldier (p.224).

The ideology of personal glory was no longer enough. Once someone on the edge of the civilised world organised the new horse archers into disciplined units (apparently around 1000-900BC), cavalry swept chariots from the battlefield (Pp222-4).

Decline and fade
Around 4300-4200BC, the settled farming culture of the Danubian valley and Balkans was at its peak, with thousands of permanent settlements. Then, around 4200-4100BC, the climate got colder and floods became more frequent. From about 3960-3820BC, there was a bitterly cold period. Between 4200-3900 over 600 settlements were burnt and abandoned. The milder weather then returned, but the Danubian-Balkan culture did not: female figurines stopped being used regularly while metallurgy, mining and ceramic technology declined sharply. At least part of the story of what happened includes warfare (Pp227-8).

In the Balkans, in what had been a well-cultivated, densely settled landscape, no permanent settlements can be dated between 3800-3300BC. The culture declined elsewhere, with the exception of a late-blooming expansion towards the Dneiper, in contact with the steppe cultures. Anthony takes us through the archaeological evidence (Pp229ff).

This is a frontier interaction, and frontiers:

can be envisioned as peaceful trade zones where valuables are exchanged for the mutual benefit of both sides, with economic need preventing overt hostilities, or as places where distrust is magnified by cultural misunderstandings, negative stereotypes, and the absence of bridging institutions (p.236).

The rampaging nomad on horseback being the archetypal “dangerous frontier warrior”, yet prior to the technology and mentality of horse archers developing, any raiding on horse-back was at most a matter of small tribal bands. Evidence strongly suggests that some steppe people rode horses by about 3700-3500BC: horse-riding may have begun before 4500BC (p.237).

This frames discussion of the archaeological evidence on the end of the Danubian-Balkan culture (Pp238ff). Then it is the beginnings of contact with the urban civilisations of the Middle East and the final period of the steppe Copper Age (Pp263ff).


This review concludes in my next post.

Preconditions of democracy

Came across this 2006 essay by Charles Boix on democracy and inequality of fixed assets.

The essay is an inquiry into the preconditions of democracy, and a very useful and informative one too. Boix holds, as I do, that oil, not Islam, is the great curse of Middle Eastern government and politics:

it is not nationalism or even religious animosities that explain the current violence in Iraq — but rather oil, its geographical distribution, and the loss of its political control by the Sunni minority that monopolized the state until two years ago.

Boix is sceptical of religious (and thus, by implication, cultural) explanations of failure to achieve democracy:

It is worth remembering that not many years ago Catholicism was (wrongly) believed to thwart liberal institutions in Southern Europe and Latin America

and

if we take into account the large Muslim populations of countries such as India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Turkey, the majority of the world’s Muslims live now under democratic regimes.

Which is hopeful in its way.

Refuting any Weberian assumptions about religion and politics, Catholic countries are not any more likely to be authoritarian. A growing proportion of Muslims does not jeopardize democracy either, once we take into account the structure of the economy and the weight of fixed natural resources. Democratic instability grows only with more ethnic fragmentation, but this result takes place only in middle income economies.

Because the number of examinable cases is building up, it has become more possible to do serious statistical analysis in political science.

A classic example of this is Paul Collier’s work on the “feasibility” thesis regarding civil conflict. As a recent paper co-authored by him (pdf) concludes:

The three new variables point to the primacy of feasibility over motivation, a result which is consistent with the feasibility hypothesis. The feasibility hypothesis proposes that where rebellion is feasible it will occur: motivation is indeterminate, being supplied by whatever agenda happens to be adopted by the first social entrepreneur to occupy the viable niche, or itself endogenous to the opportunities thereby opened for illegal income.

In an earlier paper (pdf), Paul Collier writes:

When the main grievances - inequality, political repression, and ethnic and religious divisions - are measured objectively, they provide little or no explanatory power in predicting rebellion. In most low-income societies there are many reasons for grievance, but usually these do not give rise to rebellion. Objective grievances and hatreds simply cannot usually be the cause of such a distinctive phenomenon as violent conflict. They may well generate intense political conflict, but such conflict does not usually escalate to violent conflict.
By contrast, economic characteristics dependence on primary commodity exports, low average incomes, slow growth, and large diasporas are all significant and powerful predictors of civil war. These characteristics all make rebellion more materially feasible: they enable rebel leaders to buy the guns and feed the soldiers, and furthermore to perpetrate large scale killing without themselves being killed in the process. A viable private army, which is the distinguishing feature of a civil war, is extremely expensive to maintain over the long periods that such wars typically last. Where a private army is viable, the agenda of its leadership could potentially be anything.

Always, look to incentives and capacity.

Noting that the evidence about economic development favouring democracy is firmer when viewed at a given time ("cross-section" as statisticians would say) than over time ("longitudinally"), Boix argues very persuasively that inequality in fixed assets is hostile to democracy, because it means that a wealthy minority has much to fear from democracy. Mobile assets do not have the same effect, because they can run away from expropriation. So, the more an economy is dominated by fixed assets (land, natural resources) and the more unequal such holdings are (fairly inevitable with oil and other such natural resources), the more likely authoritarian government is. Unless, such as in the case of Norway, democratic institutions and norms are already firmly established.

With democracy:

If too much is at stake — that is, if bets are too large — the incentives to cheat become irresistible. Similarly, the participants in elections will assent only to the rules of the democratic game if the effects of the electoral outcome do not fall on any of them too heavily. The losers will submit to the electoral result if what they forsake at the moment of defeat is not too excessive, that is, if it does not threaten their living standards or political survival. Likewise, the winners will not exploit their preeminence to redraw the electoral mechanisms (to diminish the uncertainty of future elections) only if the value of the offices they hold and the political decisions they make is not too large.

Which is why the advent of Leninism was so bad for democracy. Leninism raised the stakes of the political game so high, that the serious prospect of a Leninist victory made the abandonment of democracy as too risky much more likely. If—as was the case in Germany, Italy and Spain—expropriation of landed property is widely supported on the political left, then, in fear and desperation, landowners (large and small) are much more likely to turn to a Mussolini, Franco or Hitler to save them. Where such expropriation is not widely supported on the left—as in France, Northern Europe and the Anglosphere—then fascist, authoritarian conservative or national socialist politics never broke out of the political fringe.

Of course, there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here, as the expropriation policies may be a response to large inequalities in the first place. As Boix notes:

Big landowners have always opposed democracy, whether in Prussia, Russia, the American South of the nineteenth century, or Central America in the twentieth. By contrast, for democratic institutions to prevail, at least before industrialization, there had to be a radical equality of conditions. The Alpine cantons of Switzerland in the Middle and Modern Ages or the Northeastern states of the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are cases in point.

On the other hand, it was small peasant landowners that gave Mussolini, Franco and Hitler break-through mass support.

The difference between fixed assets (vulnerable to expropriation because they cannot run away) and mobile assets (less so because they can) in explaining outcome is very important. As Boix illustrates nicely from the case of South Africa:

While opposition to democracy ran high among the Afrikaner farming communities, it hardly existed among the English-speaking financial and industrial elites, who could easily (and actually did) move their capital abroad. In fact, over the postwar period, South African prospects for democratization improved as part of the Afrikaner community gradually moved from farming to industrial and financial activities — that is, from holding fixed assets to investing in mobile capital.

Boix’s analysis is not comforting regarding East Timor, with its natural gas and oil “bonanza”:

the discovery of natural resources is fatal in already authoritarian or weakly democratic societies. Unconstrained by any domestic mechanism of control, the existing political and economic elites alone benefit from those natural riches. The new wealth reinforces their political muscle. It reduces, too, any incentives to follow economic policies that may foster growth and industrialization. Were the latter to succeed, new social and economic strata might arise that could in turn challenge the existing political status. In short, illiberal countries that suddenly strike oil or any other mineral wealth become trapped in authoritarianism. This is the standard story of many oil- and gas-rich Middle Eastern and North African countries. It is the tale of all the former Soviet Union states in Central Asia. It partially explains the fragile nature of liberal institutions in Russia. It fits the pattern of violence and dictatorship that devastates many African nations. And, in combination with appalling levels of inequality, it is behind the turmoil of several Latin American economies, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

Understanding the preconditions for democracy is obviously worthy and useful. It is not necessarily all that cheering, however. Revolutions based on expropriation do not lead to good places and the substitute of foreign intervention has its own pitfalls and preconditions. The Middle East may not get much better until the oil doesn't matter.

Urbanisation and health

A recent paper Urbanization — An Emerging Humanitarian Disaster warns that the health of people in fringe urban slums is poor and subject to various risks. Since most of future global population growth is likely to be in cities, this massive increase in a very at-risk group has serious health implications.

One of the vast changes from the industrial revolution has been urban life becoming safer than rural life. Until the development of modern sewerage, understanding of hygiene, vaccinations, etc, cities typically had death rates higher than their birth rates and could only maintain or increase their populations via regular influx from rural areas. If such influx stopped for any reason, cities would shrink.

The paper uses infant mortality rates for Kenya (one of the better-run sub-Saharan African states) as an example of risk factors. The rates (in deaths per 1000 infants) are:

Rural: 113
Urban (excluding Nairobi): 84
Nairobi: 62

Clearly, in general, Kenyan cities are safer for new-born infants than country life. This, of course, constitutes a powerful reason to move to the cities.

But the grim statistics contrast the infant mortality rate in high-income areas of Nairobi with the informal settlements:

High income: <10
Informal settlements: 151

The “informal settlements” have infant mortality rates 15 times those of the high-income parts of Nairobi and about a third higher than rural Kenya.
Read More...
The term informal settlements flags a key issue. The tendency of those with power to discriminate against newcomers is a major problem in urban policy around the world. In developed countries, such as Australia, it is regulatory control of land supply creating increased house prices. In developing countries, it is a failure to provide useful property rights at all.

This can be due to excessively complex and poorly adjudicated land laws, as in Bangalore in India where the Indian state is so incompetent in its administration of land law that there is effectively a black market in establishing and adjudicating land ownership. Or it can be because the state cannot be bothered to provide any useful avenue at all for allocating property rights. Either way, the settlements are “informal” because they have no formal status and so cannot enter into arrangement that require formal status, whether market arrangements or political arrangements. In the words of the urban health paper:

These slums, which are making up an increasing proportion of growing cities, lack not only most basic government services but also political recognition; as a result, so do their inhabitants. These residents are usually tolerated and their presence tacitly accepted, but the local government generally ignores them, accepting no responsibility for accounting for them in planning or the provision of services.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, and his Institute Liberty and Democracy, has pushed this issue of formal recognition and clear property rights for many years. (He has some striking comments on financial derivatives as a property rights failure.)

People in these informal settlements have economic property rights. But, without legal sanction, they cannot use any service or transaction that requires legal support and cannot legally protect what they have. This not only denies them access to basic services, it also denies them access to financing or any transactions other than of a “bazaar” (immediate swap) variety. Their assets become trapped as things they control but do not own. They are left with their labour as their sole income source in a situation where there is a huge supply of similar labour and they are highly vulnerable to coercion or other forms of predation. The lack of clear and enforced property rights is not a trivial issue.

Moreover, they live without the typical support networks they have left behind in moving from rural living to urban slum life. In the words of the urban health paper:

Though in most countries health care is more limited in rural than in urban areas, the urban environment may lack health support often provided in rural settings while also posing new risks. For example, for women and children, the rural environment provides a community of kinship that often ensures physical safety, food security, and the availability of child care. Without these safeguards, many women’s mobility is limited in urban areas. Mobility and child care assistance from more experienced women allow mothers to perform two of the three steps that are theoretically fundamental to health care utilization: identifying illness and seeking care (the third being delivering care).

The higher infant mortality rates of informal settlements make, alas, perfect sense.

This property rights non-coverage persists because power-holders are not sufficiently motivated to do anything about it. Formal recognition would require foregoing the opportunities for corruption high levels of official discretions create, they would reduce the advantage of the incumbent elite in access to decision-makers and formal recognition of their assets, they would require a much higher level of genuine service by the state and resiling from some of the grander pretensions of government.

Which is not so far from why regulation-induced constraint of supply persists in developed countries such as Australia: incumbent homeowners like the higher values for their houses, it induces a higher level of political donations (licit or illicit) by developers to gain access to decision-makers, it reduces infrastructure demands on government and protects pretensions to be able to "fairly" control urban growth in an “environmentally sound” fashion.

There is, however, a very big difference between official discretion over land use compared to lack of effective property rights and any formal recognition. A difference measured in infant mortality rates of 151 per 1000—in one of the better-run developing countries. But that dramatic difference is also a point Hernando de Soto has been making for quite a while.

Inequality, family life and religiosity

In my post on Stephanie Cootz’s Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage I noted the results that tertiary educated women are now more likely to be married—and more likely to have happy marriages—than low-income low-skill women (Coontz pp 286ff). The pool of potential husbands for the latter being of higher risk and lower benefit (Coontz pp 288ff).

This is one of the several ways that increased higher education increases inequality—by increasing skill differentiation, by compounding household differentiation (high-income women tend to marry high-income men) and by increasing life cycle inequality (low-income students in their 20s becoming high-income professionals in their 40s).
Read More...
One of the great ironies of contemporary politics is that many progressivist policies—increased investment in higher education, encouraging women to work, high migration intakes, high refugee intakes—all tend to increase inequality by increasing skill differentiation and/or putting downward pressure on wages. Yet the same progressivists have often opposed the economic liberalisation reforms that have allowed capital growth to increase to a level that has ameliorated these effects (given that the ratio of labour to land+capital determines average wages). Hence the centre-left of politics often being the keenest economic reformers—they want the welfare state to work and support the aforementioned policies.

Hence also income equality being a much bigger issue in “Blue State” cosmopolitan America and inner urban Australia/Canada/New Zealand … where such effects are particularly strong and much less of an issue in “Red State” parochial America and provincial/outer urban Australia/Canada/New Zealand … where such effects are much less powerful.

In “cosmopolitan-land”, the higher level of migrants leads to restrictive land-use policies that favour housing-land incumbents, since housing market entrants are disproportionately people with little or no connection to the political-regulatory process. This in turn makes inequality worse and, in the US, encourages young marrieds with children to head to “parochial-land”, which breeds faster due to internal migration, greater child affordability and greater social reinforcement. Hence the baby gap.

It also leads to other forms of differentiation. In Virginia Postrel’s words:

The unintended consequence of these land-use policies is that Americans are sorting themselves geographically by income and lifestyle—not across neighborhoods, as they used to, but across regions. People are more likely to live surrounded by others like themselves, creating a more-polarized cultural map.

Including more religiosity—since that both resonates with, and reinforces, the family-based networking and economic life—in “parochial land” and more secularisation—since folk live more fragmented lives—in “cosmopolitan land”. Which in turn encourages more environmentalism in “cosmopolitan land” since their economic activity is much less connected to the pointy-end of resource-based industries (the things green campaigns want to close down are wildly disproportionately in rural/provincial areas) and conventional religion is less competitive as a source of meaning.

Hence the socio-economic-political clumpings across which political battles are fought. Different experiences of life leading to different outlooks. Which is only difficult to understand if one is committed to belief that your experience of life, or your outlook, or both, is some how morally and intellectually privileged. Then the world will keep surprising you.