Rulership and the paradox of politics

What is the state? An operating state is the monopoly-authoriser and dominant-holder of legitimate coercion in a given territory. Which makes social predation natural to it twice over – since exploitation worth the name requires coercion and lack of alternative. There is good reason why Mancur Olson started his analysis of the state on the model of the stationary bandit. But mere wealth extraction is not the only form of predation – a Rhomaioi ("Byzantine") state persecuting Jews and monophysites or (even more so) a Khmer Rouge state creating the "new society" by mass murder is being more predatory than some Eurasian potentate squeezing vast wealth out of masses of poor peasants. Predation is imposing your wishes on others to your benefit without genuine regard for theirs. Extraction of wealth is only one possible wish (though a common one, with a wide utility). Indeed, greed is a more self-limiting motivation than the search for some social perfection. (Burning heretics, gassing Jews or slaughtering "bourgeois elements" destroys exploitable social resources.)

Rulers trade-off provision of public goods for material and other returns – a certain level of social order, of roads, bridges, external defence etc. increases one’s take: both the current level and persistence of same. Rulers' coercive power makes it easier for them to make the trade-off to their own advantage. If the balance is persistently more towards provision of public goods and less towards predation than the general historical pattern, then one must look to more specific restraining factors.

Choice of ruler – by revolt against, other replacement of (such as elections), or flight from (also known as competitive jurisdictions) – are the main constraints. Representative government institutionalises ruler-replacement, and thus political competition, to the benefit of the citizens. (Though, as Paul Collier points out in his TED talk on the “bottom billion” the empirical evidence is that electoral competition is bad for poor governance resource-economies but checks and balances on power are good.) But such government is itself a product of previous constraints. Constraints including revolt (Dutch War of Independence, English Civil War, Glorious Revolution of 1688, American War of Independence, French Revolution …). A history that extends a long way (e.g. the English Peasant Revolt successfully halting aristocratic attempts to wind back peasant rights to pre Black Death arrangements). With some innovations on the way through, such as Edward I deciding that Simon de Montfort’s Parliament had social consent advantages which worked for the crown as well as against, both following on from Alfonso IX of Leon and Castile calling for merchants to elect representatives to councils of magnates to discuss taxing arrangements. But we have to ask why social consent in that form was useful: it was not a consideration than occurred to any Son of Heaven, Caliph, Sultan, Khan or Raja. Earlier, Classical city-states invented citizenship by trading political and civil rights for military effort, and so on. Processes that fluctuate back and forth (e.g. post-medieval monarchs with permanent income sources and standing armies no longer needing social consent via representative institutions until income demands exceeded income constraints, as fatally happened to both Charles I and Louis XVI).

A central long-term problem for rulers is that they must rule through agents, who have their own agendas. Early on in a new regime, identification of agents with the regime (what Ibn Khaldun calls asabiyya or common feeling) tends to be strong, with a high degree of ruler attention to what could go wrong and to instruments of agent-control. Over time, complacency sets in, the number of agents tends to grow (there are always reasons – policy, patronage, power, position – to have more bureaucrats/officials), control becomes more difficult – not least because agents collude and, in their own interests, wear away at the ruler’s instruments of control – corruption and waste becomes more widespread, so efficiency and effectiveness of rulership declines. Rulership becomes both more predatory overall (as agents extract more and more for themselves) and less effective. At some point, efficiency and effectiveness decline to the point where the old regime falls to some more competitive predator and a new system of rulership is imposed (often externally), which then goes through the same cycle.

The most recent major state to display the cycle was the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (which suffered the cycle particularly strongly for having all its social eggs in the government basket). First, a group bound by common feeling (asabiyya) seizes power (Lenin), then the ruler separates himself from the original group to entrench his own power (Stalin), then the system slowly decays as group solidarity fades (loss of commitment by agents) and corruption (loss of control of agents) erodes social resilience and regime power (Khruschev to Chernyenko), until it finally collapses (Gorbachev).

But the cycle extends back to the dawn of civilisation (such as the effectively universal Roman imperium slowly reversing the citizenship deal of rights for support – as mass military provision was no longer required – until the predation/public-good-provision balance fell below that necessary to sustain social resilience against external pressure). The history of Chinese dynasties displays this pattern, as do the waves of pastoralist conquest across Eurasia going right back to ancient Mesopotamia. Indeed, in China, the two patterns merged together, China becoming more prone to pastoralist conquest over time; of the last three dynasties who conquered all of China, two – Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu) – were of conquering pastoralists, which no previous unifying dynasty had been. (Ibn Khaldun, along with Mancur Olson, are all you need to read to understand these patterns.)

A classic example of not thinking through this dynamic is much commentary on Diocletian’s division of the Roman Empire into Western and Eastern halves in 285 AD. People say ‘the Empire became too large for one person to control’. Really? The Roman Empire had not changed in territory substantially since Augustus (r. 27 BC - 14 AD). (Trajan, r.98-117, had been the last Emperor to add any bits to the Empire, most of which was not retained; the only previous addition being Britannia under Claudius, r.41-54). It is much more likely that almost three centuries of bureaucratic metastization made the Imperial bureaucracy too unwieldy an instrument of control – particularly when Diocletian himself expanded centralised control: hence the East-West division and the attempted Augusti/Caesar structure.

The constraints (both practical and competitive), or lack thereof, on the predation/public-good-provision trade-off, and the inherent principal-agent problems of rulership, are key underlying dynamics of rulership and its patterns of waxing and waning. Nor does representative government solve the problem – it just shifts the balance, and not irrevocably. Consider, for example, wasteful and inefficient government education systems, with their inherent tendencies to declining productivity (pdf). (Or even declining quality – as far as we can tell in Australia, relying on anecdotal evidence: the regulator also being the main provider, there are no reliable, regular public indicators of year-to-year performance.) Or that the representative principle has both waxed and waned in European history – to a pretty low level, by 1770. (Or, come to that, by 1941.) The current pushes to have more matters decided by judges, by unelected international bodies (or even unelected international judges) and to have certain policy options excluded as wicked regardless of majority wishes – such as the praise of bipartisan immigration policy when it excludes majority preferences for lower immigration and the denunciation of bipartisan immigration policy when it reflects majority wishes for exclusory border policies – all represent attacks on the representative principle.

The paradox of politics – that we need the state to protect us against social predators but the state is itself the most dangerous of social predators – can never be resolved, only managed more or less well.

ADDENDA: This post has been amended to make the logic of the argument clearer.

Why Globalisation Works

I much enjoyed Martin Wolf’s Why Globalization Works.

Wolf, chief economics correspondent of the Financial Times, is keen to enlighten and explain. One of the first points he emphasises is that land and territory still matters. Transport costs may have fallen, communication costs plummeted, but that does not make where you live, and what laws and institutions you live under, irrelevant. On the contrary:

By 1980, the most important determinant of one’s prosperity was not one’s class or profession, but where one lived (p.151).

Part of what he is up against is that the knowledge class has a strong tendency to deprecate commerce: a tendency that dates back to priesthoods ancient and medieval and thinkers such as Plato and Confucius. Hence the appeal of collectivism. Werner Sombart, who started as a Marxist and ended a Nazi, wrote in 1915 that war

is necessary in order to prevent the heroic outlook from falling prey to the forces of evil, to the narrow, abject spirit of commerce (p.125).

The words change, as does which particular form of moral grandeur is appealed to, but the underlying antipathy remains. Since globalisation is largely about trans-border markets, it attracts anti-market sentiment.

Being very much a sceptical Enlightenment sort of fellow (as economists overwhelmingly are), Wolf thinks history has much to teach us. He reminds us of the period 1919-1941 and what a disaster a US unengaged with the world was (p.128).

Wolf has little time for the silly term ‘neo-liberal’ (which is abuse parading as analysis) and points out how many non-liberals have engaged in liberalising measures (p.133). Then there are the striking results, such that possession of large amounts of oil is a disaster for development (p.149). Institutions and policies are far more important than natural resources for social outcomes. Or that the top 100 transnational corporations generate 4.3% of Global GDP, up from 3.5% in 1990 (p.223) while the top 50 corporations employ 0.2% of the world's labour force and 1.6% of OECD countries' labour force (p.225).

Wolf is a very clear writer. His book is full of of course that follows things, such as productivity rising faster in manufacturing than services, with demand for manufacturing rising slower than for services, has the natural consequence of falling employment in manufacturing. As he says,

manufacturing is the new agriculture (p.179).

Wolf examines critically various complaints about globalisation under a series of great chapter headings (Incensed about Inequality, Traumatised by Trade, Cowed by Corporations, Sad about the State, Fearful of Finance) demonstrating the lapses in logic and (even more) failures of observation which motivate most of these criticisms. A quote from A Report of the International Forum on Globalisation I found particularly striking:

If people grow their own food, produce their own necessities and control the conditions of their lives, the issue of price becomes irrelevant (p.173).

The notion that people living a subsistence existence – thus with radically attenuated choices about use of time and material conditions with life expectancies to match – are "more in control" is bizarre. This represents such a radical contempt for market relations and human achievement that I am left wondering about a mentality so blind it seems incapable of even elementary observation. There was a period in European history when economic relations were of the type described – the period of the "manorial" economy. It was not a golden age of human happiness and control over one’s own life. This is status-through-critique taken to its reductio ad absurdem.

One of Wolf’s key points is that it is precisely those places which have been least touched by globalisation which tend to be worse off, though the key factor is the quality of the state one lives in. Wolf concludes with a plea:

The view that states and markets are in opposition to one another is the obverse of the truth. The world needs more globalisation, not less. But we will only have more and better globalisation if we have better states (p.320).

Quite.

The Invention of Sodomy

Gay Catholic academic Mark Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology is an intensely scholarly study of the invention and development of the term sodomia (sodomy) in medieval theology.

In fact, a little too intensely scholarly: Jordan lays on the perils of recovering the past a little thickly, especially the need to have a “real scholar” do it. And I cannot work out why he spends his fourth chapter on a close (indeed claustrophobic) examination of Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature. The passing references to it later in the book don’t seem to warrant a chapter whose only point which seems at all germane to the central argument of the book—that Alan of Lille does not use the term sodomia when his subject matter would seem to require it, yet has this inconsistent horror (p.167) of what he cannot name—could have been covered in a couple of paragraphs. But it is a terribly scholarly chapter. Though I did like his comment, late in the book, that modern scholars on medieval texts tend to be both dunce and jades—they typically know far less of the context than do the authors but are familiar with a bewildering variety of texts, notions, languages and tastes unknown to medievals (p.173).

Jordan takes us through the medieval theology of sodomia, a term he cannot find in any source (and he does seem to have read very widely in medieval and patristic theological texts) before the C11th theologian Peter Damien. Eugene Rice cites a C9th monk but it is reasonable to give Peter Damian credit for popularising the term.
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Jordan starts—A Prelude after Nietzsche—with various methodological issues and foreshadows his eventual conclusion:

If I am right, the category “Sodomy” cannot be used for serious thinking. It certainly cannot be used for rethinking what Christian theology has to say about human sex (p.9).

He then looks at the hagiography and cult of C10th martyr St Pelagius, a beautiful adolescent who was martyred for refusing the sexual advance of Cordoban Ummayad Caliph Abd al-Rahman III in 925 or 926. His interest in not in what actually happened to St Pelagius (now, probably not discoverable) but in how his story was written up and presented. Particularly in the often somewhat elliptical way the Caliph’s passion for Pelagius is described and the concern over Pelagius’s physical beauty and what it signified.

Elliptical but not unknown. Same-sex desire was a form of luxuria.

Erotic disorder is caught up in a system of causes with opulence, which is itself viewed as feminising, and with arrogance, which is at the root of all spiritual disorder (p.17).

As categorisation of sin developed, sexual sins were to gather increasing pride of place.

The term sodomia is not used, but one of St Pelagius’s hagiographers, the canoness Hrotswitha of Ganderheim (in Saxony), describes the key sin of the Caliph as being disfigured by Sodomitic vices (p.28).

Which leads into Chapter Two, The Discovery of Sodomy. Peter Damien’s alleged coinage (or at least popularising development) of the term, done in deliberate analogy to blasphemia, the most explicit sin in denying God. It is a theological term, and one of condemnation. To go against the procreative/natural form is to deny God.

Jordan describes this usage as the culmination of a processing of “thinning” (taking away details, qualifications, restrictions) and condensed various simplifications into a single category. Why invoke Sodom? Because Genesis 19 is the epitome of divine retribution. And, moreover, divine retribution for self-indulgent arrogance—this is how, for example, Jerome categorises it. Ambrose takes further the notion that it is about fleshy indulgences.

Augustine takes it further still and, though he still sees Sodom as a case of general depravity, he draws the explicit lesson that it is better that (female) daughters of Lot be violated than (male) angels be. In doing so, Augustine makes the crucial move to focus on a very narrow (indeed, bizarre) construction of the story (in flat contradiction to the references to Sodom in the Hebrew Scriptures and by Jesus) that has since become so familiar. Augustine was following in the steps of Jewish natural law philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who is the source of connecting the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to non-procreative sex. But Philo does not figure in Jordan’s work. Nor does the general anathematisation of same-sex activity by monotheist religions.

The next chapter examines Peter Damien’s Book of Gomorrah where the term sodomia is, Jordan claims, coined. Jordan examines the rhetoric, the logic and sources (or lack thereof) in Damien’s work and Peter Damien’s concern that there is a “Sodomitical Church” within the Church. (A very modern concern, though arguing that a priest who has sex with someone he is hearing confessions from is a form of incest—the priest being spiritual father—is much more about very medieval concerns about incest, defined extremely broadly.) Damien is frantically concerned with the degree of corruption of the Church, with the attraction of the sin. But it is still seen as an activity, repentance from which can redeem the Sodomite (though not make him a fit officer of the Church). Or maybe not—Damien seems in genuine doubt on this point. Jordan notes Peter Damien regularly strays into talking of Sodomite as a type of person.

The fourth chapter is the why is it there? chapter on Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature. We then move to a chapter on The Care of Sodomites, looking at medieval confession manuals, starting with Paul of Hungary’s Summa of Penance which gets a touch obsessive about the “sin against nature” (any ejaculation not into a womb), now labelled ‘sodomy’—it takes up about half his text and is denounced in the most absolute terms. Paul plays games with quotes from Augustine to get the result clearly desired. Paul thinks the sin utterly abominable—God damns it, so to do it is to deny God—but is also concerned that it so attractive that talking about it too much and too clearly may spread it. Jordan notes a pattern of silences in various manuals.

Another manual considered is William Peraldus’s Summa of the Vice and Virtues, the main work of Dominican synthesis prior to Aquinas. While not as obsessive as Paul of Hungary, Peraldus is perhaps even more concerned that speaking openly of Sodomy for fear of spreading it. Sodomy becomes a sin that cannot be mentioned, a unique category:

to hold that there is a very important sin against which the faithful cannot be warned is to make preaching and confession a game of charades (p.111).

A sin of suffocating silences. Which comes together in his image that Sodomites are mute before the Throne of God at the Last Judgement:

“They cannot speak to excuse themselves on account of ignorance since nature itself taught the law they transgress to brute animals” (p.112).

(Displaying an ignorance of nature as it actually is that, for example, hunter-gatherer societies living embedded in nature don’t.) Sodomites cannot speak before God (p.112) and Sodomy cannot be spoken of.

The sixth chapter is an examination of Albert Magnus’s writings. Albert Magnus saw sodomy as a sin against grace, reason and nature (p.126). He applies a theory of organ teleology, to the extent of arguing that since humans are the only ones whose females has vulvas to the front, proper sex has to be frontal (p.131). Jordan argues that Albert applies his understanding of medical knowledge (for which he was famed) in a quite inconsistent way. Jordan is again interested in the silence and exclusions in Albert’s works.

In the chapter on Thomas Aquinas, Jordan’s frustration with both Aquinas and the modern misuse of him is very clear:

Thomas Aquinas is not so often read as brandished. He has become more emblem than author (p.136)

and

no exegetical strategy has done more violence to Thomas’s texts than the strategy of trying to guess what he might have said to some modern dilemma. Thomas ends up saying what his readers wanted to say before turning to him. This is called “Thomism”. (pp156-7).

For Aquinas, the pleasure of the unnatural is deeply troubling (p.156). The key terms for him are sexus (anatomy/physiology), usus (right use) and delectatus (dangerous pleasure). Aquinas does not have modern concept of sexuality (which presupposes the connective role of sex). For Aquinas, divine law fills in silences and ambiguities of natural law (p.157). Sodomy is wrong in part because it is not bounded. Right sex is bounded, sin is not so. Jordan argues that this removes the realism of sin.

Jordan concludes in his A Postlude after Ambrose by examining how the theology of sodomy shows

unstable terms, unfaithful descriptions, inconsistent arguments (p.160).

He asks why the pervasive inconsistencies (p.167)? Homophobia is not an explanation

but a placeholder for an explanation (p.167).

These failings leave a Catholic theologian (or any Christian generally) wrestling with the issue of a deeply problematic tradition (p.170). Jordan attacks the descent of many branches of Christianity into “fertility cults”, arguing that the Gospel notion of love is “deeply unbiological” (p.174).

Jordan concludes:

We might even suspect that Sodomy came into existence as a category just because of that failure. To invent Sodomy was to invent a pure essence of the erotic without connection to reproduction. It was to isolate the erotic in its pure state, where it could be described in frightening colors and condemned without concession. “Sodomy” is a name not for a kind of human behaviour, but for a failure of theologians. “Sodomy” is the nervous refusal of theologians to understand how pleasure can survive the preaching of the Gospel (p.176).

I found Jordan tended to spend so much time on detail that he was much less successful at drawing points together. He also very much assumed that the reader had at least some theological background. He was certainly less than apt at conveying classical natural law thinking but whether that was a failure of conception or execution I am less certain of. Still, there are useful nuggets to be found.

The Return to Camelot

I borrowed from a former housemate The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman by Mark Girouard. It read like a much older book than something originally published in 1981. It was an amusing and informative passage through the various forms of medievalist and chivalric revivals in Britain from the C18th on. It makes quite clear that folk at all points of the political compass became quite taken by medievalism and chivalry: from neo-feudalists, through conservative revivalists to Imperialists, working men’s associations and Christian socialists. From school reformers to the founding of the Scouting movement.

A couple of the chapters seem to wander off into areas of rather thin connection to direct interest in medievalism and chivalry. But, generally, the book kept to its theme well. It was informative rather than profound. That said, it was almost as useful on the rise of the concept of the gentleman as it was on neo-medievalism. The author is alive to the inherent absurdity of a society that had risen on trade and commerce producing an elite who (at least in their rhetoric and often more) looked down on trade and commerce.

Indeed, though Girouard is not enough of a medievalist to realise this was a very post- medieval affectation. The C18th, and especially C19th gentlemen, had far distaste for trade than actual English medieval knights and magnates did. Being deeply practical folk, medieval lords and knights were very alive to the revenue benefits of trade and industry.

Though that in England only the actual holder of the title was noble, all the rest of the family being legally commoners, produced quite different dynamics from continental Europe where all members of a noble family were legally noble.

The rise of what has been called ornamentalism (particularly in the administration of India), the shift from the East India Company’s use of an expanding urban middle class to the Raj’s reliance and shoring up of the Indian Princes, is seen as being deeply influenced by the chivalric revival.

The romanticised vision of medieval society that still influences contemporary attitudes clearly flows from this prolonged neo-medieval revival. (Late last year, a quite eminent conservative Australian historian patently found my suggestion that knightly society was based on an exchange of labour for protection an excessively functional view of medieval society. He seemed to have some notion of it being an ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ society.) A neo-medieval revival that essentially came crashing down as the effects of the mass slaughter on the Western Front rippled through society.

Still, the book is a fun read. (For entirely personal reasons, finding out that Sir Walter Scott’s estate on which he lavished so much neo-medieval attention was called Abbotsford was amusing at lots of levels.)

Pandering parading as analysis

Economist John Cochrane has been taking on himself to speak up for mainstream economics against various reactions to the global financial crisis and consequent recession as can be seen from various papers and contributions. Notable among these is his paper on fiscal stimulus. In a recent paper, he critiques Paul Krugman's piece on what went wrong with (macro)economics in the NYT.

Krugman-the-columnist is a notoriously partisan pundit, as can be seen from his partisanship rankings from 2002 and 2003, having been the most partisan-Democrat top commentator from 2002 to 2005, though he has dropped back in recent times due to being underwhelmed by Barack Obama. But Paul Krugman is also a prominent economist: Nobel Laureate indeed. So, if he is writing about economics-as-such in a newspaper is he being serious economist or partisan pundit?

Cochrane's answer is clearly the latter:

Most of all, it’s sad. ... It’s a disservice to New York Times readers. They depend on Krugman to read real academic literature and digest it, and they get this attack instead. And it’s ineffective. Any astute reader knows that personal attacks and innuendo mean the author has run out of ideas.

In part, what Cochrane does in his response to Krugman is explain and defend what economists have developed, particularly the efficient market hypothesis.

The efficient market hypothesis is very easily misconstrued. In particular, that it is some sort of claim that markets are perfect, which is nonsense. No human institution can be perfect, because no human institution can have all desirable qualities. In Cochrane's words:

There is nothing about “efficiency” that promises “stability.” “Stable” growth would in fact be a major violation of efficiency.

All the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) says is that markets use all available information. Which does not sound like much until one works through the implications. One of which is, as William Easterly states, economists correctly predicted that they could not correctly predict.
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In Cochrane's words:

It’s fun to say we didn’t see the crisis coming, but the central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going – neither benevolent government bureaucrats, nor crafty hedge-fund managers, nor ivory-tower academics. This is probably the best-tested proposition in all the social sciences. Krugman knows this, so all he can do is huff and puff about his dislike for a theory whose central prediction is that nobody can be a reliable soothsayer.

Given that there are a lot of predictors out there, it is always possible to find someone who apparently got it right. The trick is then to go back and check what their general success in prediction is. The EMH does not bar someone doing better than the market on any given occasion, or even several occasions: just doing it persistently and reliably as other than chance (unless they have information persistently not available to other participants, such as this study of US Senator's share holdings doing unusually well [pdf], remembering that such people's actions also transmit information to the market).

On the stability point:

It is true and very well documented that asset prices move more than reasonable expectations of future cashflows. This might be because people are prey to bursts of irrational optimism and pessimism. It might also be because people’s willingness to take on risk varies over time, and is lower in bad economic times. As Gene Fama pointed out in 1970, these are observationally equivalent explanations. ... Crying “bubble” is empty unless you have an operational procedure for identifying bubbles, distinguishing them from rationally low risk premiums, and not crying wolf too many years in a row.

I must confess, that while I take the point about identifying such things at the time, nevertheless, it seems clear enough that there is such a phenomena as asset price bubbles.

Information and the limitations thereof is crucial:

It’s the central prediction of free-market economics, as crystallized by Hayek, that no academic, bureaucrat or regulator will ever be able to fully explain market price movements. Nobody knows what “fundamental” value is. If anyone could tell what the price of tomatoes should be, let alone the price of Microsoft stock, communism would have worked. ... The case for free markets never was that markets are perfect. The case for free markets is that government control of markets, especially asset markets, has always been much worse.

There is nothing about being a regulator or political decision-maker which improves matters. On the contrary:

Remember, the SEC couldn’t even find Bernie Madoff when he was handed to them on a silver platter. Think of the great job Fannie, Freddie, and Congress did in the mortgage market. Is this system going to regulate Citigroup, guide financial markets to the right price, replace the stock market, and tell our society which new products are worth investment? As David Wessel’s excellent In Fed We Trust makes perfectly clear, government regulators failed just as abysmally as private investors and economists to see the storm coming. And not from any lack of smarts.
In fact, the behavioral view gives us a new and stronger argument against regulation and control. Regulators are just as human and irrational as market participants. If bankers are, in Krugman’s words, “idiots,” then so must be the typical treasury secretary, fed chairman, and regulatory staff. They act alone or in committees, where behavioral biases are much better documented than in market settings. They are still easily captured by industries, and face politically distorted incentives.
Careful behavioralists know this, and do not quickly run from “the market got it wrong” to “the government can put it all right.”

A lot of what has been going on is wishful thinking. Of not wanting to look into the implications of congenial framings:

If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you should think Bernie Madoff is a hero. He took money from people who were saving it, and gave it to people who most assuredly were going to spend it. Each dollar so transferred, in Krugman’s world, generates an additional dollar and a half of national income. The analogy is even closer. Madoff didn’t just take money from his savers, he essentially borrowed it from them, giving them phony accounts with promises of great profits to come. This looks a lot like government debt.
If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you don’t care how the money is spent. All this puffery about “infrastructure,” monitoring, wise investment, jobs “created” and so on is pointless. Keynes thought the government should pay people to dig ditches and fill them up.
If you believe in Keynesian stimulus, you don’t even care if the government spending money is stolen. Actually, that would be better. Thieves have notoriously high propensities to consume.

Then there is the question of what ideas policy makers are actually using:

The sad fact is that few in Washington pay the slightest attention to modern macroeconomic research, in particular anything with a serious intertemporal dimension. Paul’s simple Keynesianism has dominated policy analysis for decades and continues to do so. From the CEA to the Fed to the OMB and CBO, everyone just adds up consumer, investment and government “demand” to forecast output and uses simple Phillips curves to think about inflation. If a failure of ideas caused bad policy, it’s a simpleminded Keynesianism that failed.

There are lots of ways our thinking can go wrong and the more abstract, or the more emotional, or both, the more ways it can go wrong. Which is why external tests and sources of rigour are so useful:

No, the problem is that we don’t have enough math. Math in economics serves to keep the logic straight, to make sure that the “then” really does follow the “if,” which it so frequently does not if you just write prose. The challenge is how hard it is to write down explicit artificial economies with these ingredients, actually solve them, in order to see what makes them tick. Frictions are just bloody hard with the mathematical tools we have now.

The problem is, it is very congenial to think you just know what other people should do. Particularly if it gives jobs, influence and power to people like you and takes such away from people not like you. Ideas which get in the way of that are deeply irritating.

It is made worse by the sheer difficulty of some of the issues, particularly monetary economics. The power of a simple narrative, of simple framings, is not to be underestimated. Fiscal stimulus is a very simple idea. Monetary policy is much more complex to get one's head around.

That all problems in markets are "market failures" is another simple idea. That regulations and interventions have market effects is a more complex idea.

That good people believe X and bad people believe Y is another simple idea. Krugman is pandering to a lot of powerful simple ideas. Which are made even more powerful if one can pass them off as showing how clever and knowledgeable one is. I understand John Cochrane's irritation.

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.

Eight years on

I am not good at anniversaries of things I have been around for, so the 9/11 anniversary rather passed me by until I began to read lots of online anniversary posts. (Such as this one, which has good amateur footage with comments-as-it-happened.)

That Sep. 1 was the 70th anniversary of the German attack on Poland and Sep. 3 was the anniversary of the Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany I remembered, but not 9/11.

The war the Nazi (and then Soviet) attack on Poland initiated a World War that last six years. It was a "conventional" attack in the sense of 950,000 Polish defenders were overwhelmed by 1.5m German and 467,000 Soviet attackers seizing Poland's territory and dividing it between them. But it was also an ideological war, in that the ensuing World War became a three-way contest between Nazism, Leninism and liberal democratic capitalism for dominion over the human future. The war, in six years of struggle, eliminated Nazism as a contender leading to the Cold War between Leninism and liberal democratic capitalism that resulted in the defeat, through its own internal collapse, of Leninism. Which now exists only as pathetic states of hereditary rule (Cuba and North Korea) or a system of increasingly anachronistic rule over reborn-as-capitalist states (China, Vietnam, Laos).

Since Japan officially surrendered on Sep. 2 1945, the War known as World War II lasted almost precisely six years. Eight years after 9/11, NATO forces are still fighting in Afghanistan, Coalition forces are still providing security in Iraq.

By the end of World War II, Mussolini had been killed by partisans, Hitler had committed suicide and Hideki Tojo, after a failed suicide bid, was, like the other surviving Axis leaders, in custody awaiting trial and eventual execution. Osama bin Laden is notoriously still alive, almost certainly somewhere in the tribal areas of NW Pakistan.

On the other hand, the struggle against the jihadis is much smaller in scope of operations, in resources, in just about all ways, than World War II.
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The term World War II is not very accurate. The Seven Years War was also a global war, in many ways more so than World War I in terms of where serious fighting took place, though not in the proportion of the World controlled by combatants.

The jihadi war is global in a way, in that the jihadis acknowledge no neutral territory, though attacks are concentrated where there are significant numbers of Muslims. Given the declared jihadi aim is to struggle for a world where the sovereignty of Allah is acknowledged everywhere, the concept of "neutrality", except as a temporary truce, is not part of their lexicon.

The jihadis resemble both of liberal democratic capitalism's great C20th opponents. The similarity because Islam and Bolshevism was noted by Bertrand Russell back in 1920:

Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam. ... Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind not unlike that of the early successors of Mahommet. ... Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world".

Both Islamism and Leninism share what Francois Furet called the revolutionary illusion:

Modern society … is characterised by a lack of politics in relation to the private, individual existence. It is blind to the idea of the common good, since the members of society, consumed with relativism, have their own individual ideas of the common good and modern society can conceive of it only in terms of a taste for well-being, which divides its members rather than unifying them and thus destroys the community supposedly constructed in its name. The revolutionary idea is the impossible attempt to circumvent that calamity.

They are also morally instrumentalist, universalist doctrines.

Still, the jihadis, despite being universalist when Nazism was explicitly not, more resemble Nazism than Leninism. They are atavistic, as any doctrine that says the peak of understanding of how to organise human social order was achieved in C7th Arabia must be. Nazism, with its blood-and-soil mystic militarism, was also atavistic: seeking to reverse the entire direction of Western civilisation, which was for land-and-violence as bases for wealth and power to retreat.

The jihadis, including Hamas and Hezbollah, are the contemporary analogues of fascism and Nazism: modernising revolts against modernity (seen as alien, anti-religious and Western), preaching an atavistic (and anti-traditionalist) form of Islam, promoting a cult of death and violence, engaged in brutality and murder; the rhetoric of violence backed up by deeds of violence—in Hezbollah’s case with a uniformed paramilitary, straight-armed salute and all. (Osama bin Laden even has the war veteran mystique working for him that both Mussolini and Hitler did.)

The consequences of the Nazi-Soviet attack on Poland are still unfolding: Russo-Polish relations and American-Polish relations are still profoundly influenced by it, for example.

Eight years after 9/11, the struggle with the jihadis still goes on. But, of course, that struggle well predated 9/11. Well before Sep. 9 2001 there was the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, the 1998 US Embassy bombings in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. 9/11 did not start the conflict, it is just when the US and its allies really took notice.

Since it was the 1991 Gulf War which led to the al-Qaeda declaration of jihad against the US and Americans, there were many senses in which Iraq was "unfinished business", intertwined with the anti-jihadi struggle. One of the most obvious consequences of the consequences of 9/11 (the NATO attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Coalition attack on Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq) is that the jihadis went back to doing what they do most—killing fellow Muslims. The first jihadi aim is to get control of the ummah, of Islam. If one wants to understand the conflict in Iraq after the Coalition occupation, the Algerian Civil War provides a revealing comparison about the jihadis. Just as the jihadi aim of universal acknowledgment of the sovereignty of Allah admits to no neutral nations, the jihadi way of prosecuting their war admits to no distinctions between military and civilians as targets.

The jihadis (with the very partial exception of Sudan) control no state. They do have "statelets": Gaza, Hezbollah, the tribal areas of NW Pakistan. They use modern technology but their technology (as is that of Islam-the-civilisation generally) is entirely derivative. They have reach within the ummah—given that the only part of their package not sanctioned by Islamic orthodoxy is suicide bombing (and even that appeals to the warrior-martyrdom element in Islam). It is precisely because rejection of liberal democracy (with its sovereignty of people, female-equality, gay-equality, religious freedom and equality) offers Islamic clerics a rejectionist "gatekeeping" role in Islamic communities that jihadi and jihadi-friendly thinking continues to have institutional support within Muslim communities.

The jihadi program is profoundly unappealing to most folk, including most Muslims: in Afghanistan, polls suggest the Taliban only has about 6% support. In Iraq, al-Qaeda was defeated when Sunnis defected, appalled by its homicidal oppressiveness. What the jihadis have going for them is homicidally intense belief and the divisions of their enemies. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, finding a reasonably decent way of self-governance that can cope with modernity remains deeply problematic, though currently more so in Afghanistan. (As, of course, it is across Middle-Eastern Islam.)

In the West, domestic politics are more important in all senses. First, because the jihadis are just not that big a threat, (though an Iranian nuclear weapon could change that) and secondly because the jihadi phenomenon is so often understood through domestic framings. Whether the "anti-imperialist" Left insisting on its broken-record of Blame The West First or crass anti-Muslim/"anything goes to defend our own" tribal patriotism. The collapse of fertility in many European countries provides a longer-term factor which probably encourages jihadi confidence and both reflects and reinforces a lack of European self-confidence.

This is certainly not anything like the Crisis of the Third Century, let alone the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But the struggle against the jihadis will go on, part of the larger issues of how does Islam cope with modernity and what happens if Europe continues to have significant areas of demographic collapse. (Though the collapse in fertility in Iran suggests that the issue may be even more complicated.)

One thing we can be sure of, NATO abandoning Afghanistan would not end the struggle, though it would embolden the jihadis enormously and greatly weaken the West’s ability to attract allies within the Muslim world. Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt provides an excellent illustrative example of the pressures in current circumstances (via Michael J Totten): how much worse would they be if the West simply abandoned Afghanistan?

In many ways, this is a battle of revolutions. The jihadis want their own versions of the Iranian Revolution, again and again and again. The US is, in effect, trying to export its Revolution to Iraq and Afghanistan, just as the British previously attempted to export the Glorious Revolution to both places.

Lebanon, the venue of so many people’s proxy wars, is where this dynamic is played out:

but the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon has yet to defeat the Iranian Revolution in Lebanon.

All part of the biggest curse of all in the Middle East, the perennial lack of stable rulership that is anything other than a form of predatory autocracy and the strategies that go with that:

The essence of Syria’s strategy is the destabilization of its surroundings to increase its own regional leverage. Yet this cuts in many contradictory ways. Iran cannot be happy with the prospect of a sectarian war in Iraq; Syria’s efforts in Iraq are also alienating the United States at a time when the Obama administration has engaged Bashar Assad to bring about a change in his regime’s behavior; Egypt is fed up with Syria’s and Iran’s encouragement of Hamas’ intransigence, which has neutralized Egypt’s role in inter-Palestinian reconciliation talks; Saudi Arabia and Egypt are unhappy with Syria’s obstructionism in Lebanon; and both Syria and Iran are eying each other with quiet suspicion to see which of them might open a full-scale dialogue with the United States before the other does.

Around and around we go. This is a struggle we cannot walk away from, it will just follow us home. As it did on September 11 2001.

Tournaments: the display of a martial elite

Juliet Barker’s The Tournament in England: 1100 - 1400 is a highly informative, well-written book marred by a dubious conclusion.

After starting with a chapter on Early Beginnings, the book treats the tournament thematically, dealing successively with The Tournament and War, The Tournament and Politics, The Tournament and the Church, The Tournament as Spectacle, The Tourneying Society, The Forms of Combat, Tournament Armour before coming to a brief Conclusion. As Barker notes, since English knights and squires travelled extensively to tourney, the book includes lots of references to continental tournaments.

I spotted one error – Barker claims that mail was lighter than plate armour (p.168), which anyone who has held both knows is simply not true. Mail was technologically simpler, easier to get on and off and highly flexible. It was also typically heavier, ran the risk of being embedded in the flesh if hit hard enough and did not encourage blows to glance off.

Barker is at pains to point out the seriousness and practicality of tournaments. Which, given the effort and expense involved, not to mention danger, makes perfect sense. The followed were all killed in tourneys: Prince Geoffrey of Brittany, fourth son of Henry II (1186); Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex (1216); Gilbert Marshal, earl of Pembroke (1241); William, son and heir of John Warenne, earl of Surrey and Sussex (1286), John Hastings, earl of Pembroke (1390), at least four members of the Mortimer family – and that is just the most prominent (p.162).
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We are told that the estate of Roger Mortimer included three helms for jousting, one for war and six for tournament (p.165). There are moments of humour, such as John of Gaunt, as tournament judge, ruling a particular tactic not illegal, merely unchivalric (p.164). Or William Marshal having resort to a blacksmith so his battered helm can be removed from his head (p.164). The more like actual war a form of tournament combat, the more honour accrued to it. Thus jousting – one-on-one charging with lance – had the lowest status (though barriers were not added until the C15th [p.175]). a plaisance (with blunted weapons) had less status than a outrance (full weapons).

The Church severely disapproved of tournaments, regarding them as spectacles of sin, regularly excommunicating those who participated and denying church burials to those killed during them. But the knightly addiction to them wore the Church down, Pope John XXII finally withdrew the remaining prohibitions in 1316 (p.83) after which tournaments flowered even more strongly.

Barker’s book provides much useful context. It is a hardy perennial of historical comment to blame French defeats at the hands of the English on the arrogance and over-confidence of the French knights. Yet the evidence Barker adduces suggests that, based on tourney experience, French knights did tend to be the best trained and equipped – as individual and small group warriors. Since tournaments were relatively common, and large set-piece battles comparatively rare, the English advantage in army command-and-control and combined arms was somewhat obscured until the one of those rare set-piece battles happened.

Familiar features of medieval life show up: the difficulties of organisation (taking 3 years to organise a particular challenge tourney [p.158]), long-running court cases, intrigue and rebellion (troubled English kings such as Henry III, Edward II and Richard II regularly prohibited tournaments for fear of the plotting that might take place at them).

But tournaments trained knights for war – a major reason why Richard I decided to licence them in 1194 (p.17). They provided opportunities for patronage (which Edward I and Edward III particularly took advantage of). They provided opportunities for knights and squires to demonstrate their skill – whether to each other, great lords, or the opposite sex. They demonstrated the effectiveness of knights, they embodied their social role and conception of themselves.

Both Classical Rome and medieval Latin Christendom had as their greatest spectacle people fighting each other. Yet the differences were profound. With gladiatorial combat, death and dominance was the point. It was slaves and condemned criminals fighting and dying (or just dying) for the pleasure of the Roman citizenry. It was about the ultimate in brutal, public subordination.

With tournaments, it was the elite (up to and including Kings and Emperors) fighting to display their prowess – to each other and, increasingly, to the general populace. Death was demonstrably a risk (the last significant personage to die in a tournament was King Henri II of France in 1559), but it wasn’t the point except as a risk. Skill and honour were the point. And money: a successful tourneyer could make considerable sums through ransoms and prizes, though an unsuccessful one could lose considerable sums.

The ruling elite of medieval Latin Christendom was a warrior elite. That it was a Christian society complicated this, but the knights basically won in the end. They dominated the peasantry, the peasantry was the mass of society, so the social surplus was largely directed to knightly ends (with lots of tussles with the Church). Tournaments rose from the C11th with the rise of the knightly class and disappeared in the C16th with their military eclipse. The sheer resources put into tournaments show how important they were to the ruling elite. That the knightly romance was the dominant literary form – outside the direct products of the Church – expressed this further. Indeed, medieval histories often read like medieval romances because the doings of the same group were central to each and because they, or people who aspired to be as they (in the Low Countries, the urban merchants ran their own tourneying societies, some of whom were consequently knighted), were the audience for the same.

The medieval period of Latin Christendom is, ultimately, the knightly period. They are what make it most distinctive from what came before, what came after and what was elsewhere. (As did the samurai of Japan: both societies stop being medieval when the warrior class loses its distinctive role and transmutes into an officer class.)

None of this is surprising: how and what coercive force is wielded is a fundamental feature of any society. A life-and-death matter. The first basis of power.

Which is why Barker’s lame conclusion is so irritating: Tournament’s

survival must, to a large extent, be attributable to the powerful ideology of the romances as typified in romances. Without it, the tournament must have been suppressed, despite its value as military training. With it, the tournament becomes not simply a military exercise but rather a celebration of all the values that chivalrous society held dear (p.190).

It reflects well on The Tournament in England: 1100 - 1400 that it provides such a mass of intelligent evidence that one can see this does not work. I know intellectuals are always inclined to spruik the value of ideas – it’s what they deal in. But medieval society was, in many ways, a deeply practical society. It was mostly too poor and too competitive to be much else (even the investment in prayer was a form of practicality: with such limited ability to control their environment, of course it looked like a reasonable investment).

Yes, medieval society is also marked by the amazing power of belief. But great lords went to great expense and considerable personal risk for tournaments even before the flowering of romances. As Barker herself points out, the English crown was just about the only one powerful enough to make any prohibition stick, and even it had problems (pp7ff). And Richard I gave in, because tournaments seemed to be giving French knights a military edge (p.17). Which is how medieval society worked – the proliferation of polities forced authority into competition which meant greater provision of public goods to buttress authority and a slow motion constraint on their ability to restrict freedoms.

Yes, of course, medieval romances encouraged the tournament. But they also reflected outlooks grounded in the very social role and sense of identity of the knightly class. Something so useful to and for the key military figures of any realm hardly needed romances to keep it alive. Even with Church disapproval – though it might well be that the Christian gloss (and more than gloss) of the romances helped the Church get over its opposition.

Still, that's ultimately a quibble. The Tournament in England: 1100 - 1400 remains a very useful and informative work.

The Book of the Tournament
The Book of the Tournament has become a classic SCA text. I have the first edition (no pictures). As the author says, it is:

done in elements of style of from several 13th to 15th century sources, inspired by King Rene’s "La Forms et Devise d’ung Tournay," Geoffrey de Charnay’s "Libre de Chevalerie,’ and Raymond Lull’s "Book of Chivalry and Knighthood."

The book is beautifully put together, nicely written, very considered, I find it a quietly inspirational text. That the honour-system of SCA fighting – the self-judging of blows received – is ultimately a point of courtesy to your opponent as much as honour to yourself is a telling point. That the true victory is not winning but upholding the virtues of tournament, is even more so. Prowess is only one chivalric virtue, and not the greatest. It is a book I would heartily recommend to any SCA fighter, anyone interested in chivalry and to martial artists generally.

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.
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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.

Emotional Vampires

Albert J. Bernstein’s Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry, which a friend put me onto, is the best extended use of an analytical metaphor I have come across.

Bernstein is a clinical psychologist and business consultant—the illustrative vignettes in the book are based on both family and business scenarios clearly derived from his years of experience. The prose is clear and direct and the book is clearly structured to be as accessible to as wide an audience as possible. It is also extremely practical and unsentimental. One of the repeated lines is

always remember that attempting psychotherapy on someone you know you will make you both sicker.

The analytical conceit is to characterize manipulative people as vampires. So he lists (in Chapter 3: The Way of Vampires) the various characteristics of emotional vampires: Vampires are Different; Vampires Prey on Humans, Vampires Can Change Their Shapes, Vampires are More Powerful in the Dark, A Vampire’s Bite Can Turn You Into A Vampire and my favourite: Vampires Can’t See Themselves In The Mirror.

The book is based on a basic distinction:

When people are driving themselves crazy, they have neuroses or psychoses. When they drive other people crazy, they have personality disorders (p.3).

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He examines the five most likely types of emotional vampires to trouble one’s life—Antisocial, Histrionic, Narcissistic, Obsessive-Compulsive, Paranoid. Each is briefly described in Chapter 1 (The Children of the Night) and the bulk of the book is divided into a section on each, though he notes early (p.14) that most difficult people are blends of two or more types. The first line that leapt out at me was at the end of the initial brief description of Obsessive-Compulsives:

The second-longest wait in the world is for Obsessive-Compulsive to make a decision. The longest is for them to utter even a single word of praise (p.8).

Bernstein says that emotional vampires—particularly when acting up—are emotional two-year olds and the ways of dealing with them are the same:

setting limits, arranging contingencies, being consistent, keeping lectures to a minimum, rewarding good behaviour and ignoring bad, and occasionally putting them in time-out (p.14).

One of his big lessons is, actually, they don’t think like you:

If you interpret what they say and do and according to what you would feel if you said or did the same thing, you’ll be wrong almost every time. And you’ll end up drained dry (p.17).

He lists the basic social rules of emotional vampires as:

My needs are more important than yours; the rules apply to other people, not me; It’s not my fault, ever*; I want it now; If I don’t get my way, I throw a tantrum (p.18).

In Chapter 4 (Dark Powers) Bernstein explains how hypnosis works, starting with a killer first impression (p.23) and then working via misdirection, identification, isolation, control, alternative reality, false choices (pp24-26). The danger signs of hypnosis are:

deviating from standard procedure, thinking in superlatives, instant rapport, seeing the person or situation as special, lack of concern with objective information, confusion (pp27-29).

The final warning:

if you think you can’t be hypnotized, you probably already are (p.32).

Each Type then gets its own Part. These follow a standard pattern of description, checklist of likely symptoms, analysis, mechanisms for dealing with, therapy for. Part I deals with Loveable Rogues—the Antisocials. As Bernstein points out, a bad label since they are highly social, it is other people they don’t care about.

Antisocials are the simplest of vampires, also the most dangerous. All they want out of life is a good time, a little action, and immediate gratification of their every desire (p.33).

Bernstein divides Antisocials into Daredevils, Used Car Salesmen, Bullies.

Part 2 is Show Business, Vampire Style—the Histrionics, seekers of approval and attention. Part 3 is Passive-Aggressive Vampires (deliver us from ghoulies and ghosties and people who are only trying to help p.109). They are pathological givers who submerge part of their personality—from themselves. Bernstein criticises the self-esteem push:

the same thing that is missing in all Histrionic creations—namely, an attempt to go below the surface and deal with the self in all its complexity (p.117).

I was a bit worried by this section, because I have long been aware of passive-aggressive patterns in my behaviour (which is, of course, a sign of not being an emotional vampire: that I have long been well aware of it). The Therapy For ... section was enlightening. Indeed, I had a cheering experience the other day. Something annoyed me, I expressed anger and moved on. I didn’t repress nor angst afterwards. I just did. Yay! (Of course, learning to operate your emotions in a different way can lead to some adjustment wobbles**: but you note any such and continue to learn.) But my issues come from a pathological upbringing where expression of emotion (any affection from my parents, any anger or other negative emotion from me) was profoundly suppressed (of course, they were permitted to express anger and I was permitted to express agreement and acceptance).

Part 3 is Big Egos, Small Everywhere Else—the Narcissists.

More than loving themselves, Narcissists are absorbed with themselves. They feel their own desires so acutely they can’t pay attention to anything else.

One of the book’s strengths is Bernstein points out the positive aspects of the various Types:

There may be narcissism without greatness, but there is no greatness without narcissism (p.130).

The description of what it is like to be a Narcissist is fairly scary:

They can’t feel connected to anything larger than themselves, because in their universe there is nothing larger than themselves (p.131).

As Bernstein puts it,

emotional Vampires are people who have for one reason or another abandoned the struggle with the Narcissistic dilemma. Antisocials ignore it because it’s no fun. Histrionics pretend they never act in their own self-interest, and Narcissists believe that what’s good for them is all that exists. Vampires are forced to prey on other people for the answer that the rest of us must struggle to find within ourselves.
What’s the answer? Another great rabbi summed that up:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Narcissistic vampires break the Golden Rule, without so much as a thought. Does that make them evil or oblivious? Your answer will depend on how much damage they do to you.
The easiest way to get drained is to take Narcissists’ inconsideration personally, to get upset over what they must be thinking to treat you the way they do. The most important thing to remember is that Narcissistic vampires are not thinking of you at all (p.132).

In a nutshell,

to a Narcissistic vampire, other people are either prospective purveyors of Narcissistic supplies or invisible (p.136).

Bernstein divides Narcissists into Legends (with talent like theirs, who needs performance? and Superstars (You’ve got to love these guys! Worship them actually). The former are often highly creative and Bernstein is particularly unsentimentally practical about what creative really means (pp.146-7). He reminds us that

Narcissists are condemned to live in a world where nothing is bigger than their own egos (p.150).

Someone who deeply traumatised me seems a mixture of Loveable Rogue Anti-Social (Daredevil sub-variety) and Narcissist (Legend sub-variety). So I found the Narcissist section particularly striking.

The next Part is Too Much of a Good Thing—Obsessive-Compulsives. This where it got really scary. As soon as I finished reading the general description of the class I immediately rang the friend who put me onto the book to tell her I had been reading about my mother (and to thank her for putting me onto the book). The recognition bells started ringing with the first line

Can you imagine a vampire who drains you by working hard, being conscientious, and always doing the right thing? (p.179)

and just builds from there.

Obsessive-Compulsive vampires are deathly afraid of doing anything wrong. To them the smallest crack in their perfect facade leaves them open and vulnerable to all the seeping horrors of the universe.
Obsessive-Compulsive vampires see their existence as a battle against the forces of chaos. Their weapons are hard work, adherence to rules, scrupulous attention to details, and the capacity to delay gratification into the next life if need be. …
Obsessive-Compulsive vampires want to create a secure world by making everybody Obsessive-Compulsive. Only then can they be safe from themselves.
Here’s their secret: Inside every Obsessive-Compulsive is an Antisocial trying to claw its way out … The internal battle is too terrifying for them to face, so they force their gaze outward. At you. As long as Obsessive-Compulsives vampires are safely protecting you from your base impulses, they never have to look at their own (p.180).

What’s it like to be a Obsessive-Compulsive vampire?

Can you imagine how lonely you’d feel being the only competent person the planet? (p.181).

What are they like to be around?

Obsessive-Compulsive vampires believe punishment is synonymous with justice. Punishment is the only strategy that Obsessive-Compulsives know for controlling their own behaviour or that of other people. It is the only one they want to know.

Why punishment?

Punishment is clever device which allows good people to do bad things without seeing themselves as evil (p.182).

Their obsessive and compulsive desire for order is at war with the disorderly nature of the human. (And the emotional chaos they cause is, of course, “proof” of how much their control is “needed”.)

Mother was an almost text-book case. As was my boss at the job where it all went bad for me. I had never worked out how to deal with my parents except by moving cities, so I was pre-programmed to not handle (in fact, to revert to childhood patterns) when I ran into an Obsessive-Compulsive vampire boss.

(I told my friend that it was no wonder I had such trouble dealing with "emotional vampires" since I was pre-drained. She responded that I was already anaemic. Quite.)

Bernstein doesn’t deal with the issue of what it is like to have one of these emotional vampires as a parent—that is, someone with authority over you and considerable power to affect your own emotional development. But the book is aimed at adults having to deal with other adults.

Bernstein divides Obsessive-Compulsive vampires into two versions, Puritans and Perfectionists, but regards how to deal with them as imposing very similar problems and responding to very similar techniques.

Part 5 Seeing Things That Others Can’t (Paranoids) I read mainly for completeness, since I have not had significant dealings with any such. But then he made a comment about the strong Paranoid tendencies in Science Fiction, Paranoids and Narcissists being the two great sources of creativity (p.210), and it struck me that elements of the Paranoid mindset he was describing—the intolerance of ambiguity, the need to put everything in a vindicating pattern, the vacillation between naivety and cynicism—are not exactly absent from the Group Mind aspects of contemporary Progressivism, or political movements generally.

Bernstein divides Paranoids into Visionaires and Green-Eyed Monsters but regards the strategies for dealing with them to be very similar.

He concludes with a brief summing up of the varieties, their effects and most important elements in coping strategy—control, connection, facing your fears

the path to safety always goes through fear rather than away from it.

So

when you are dealing with vampires, there is always another choice, even if it’s only walking away ... the things that you’re most embarrassed to discuss are the things you most need to share ... when you’re dealing with vampires, the choice that seems most frightening is usually the right one (p234).

The key feature is understanding and counteracting the mechanics. There is no point speculating about how they got like that. Particularly not in seeing them as suffering some sort of sickness, because that leads one to accommodate them and their behaviours should never be accommodated (p.234). The only very partial caveat I would make is that identifying the patterns and so how it affected you can be—if allied to ways of dealing—empowering.

Bernstein’s concluding section for each Type on how that type of emotional vampires can get better I found particularly helpful since he makes it clear how difficult it is, a long term project. And never (assuming you are not one yourself) your project.

I found the book particularly helpful because, while I had identified many of the patterns of behaviour and outlook, I did not have an analytical framework in which to place them. I now do.

An extremely enlightening, accessible and helpful book.

* If it is not their fault ever, then it must be yours. Something that is never a conclusion for them, but an “obvious” premise built into the structure of the universe.
** The day I really got over anxiety patterns, I was late to the school because I was too relaxed—having squashed a dysfunctional mechanism and not yet fully developed the replacement. Getting over not expressing anger, I became harder on students. It is just a matter of being aware and adjusting accordingly.

Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age

Given the level of social transformation and the extent of European rule at the time, anyone theorising about historical patterns from about 1840 to about 1970 was likely to be very impressed by the rise of the West. The subsequent retreat from Empire and Asian economic surge is likely to make one more sanguine. There is quite a scholarly debate currently going on about the ‘rise of the West’. From the C19th onwards, it was largely taken as read that the West rose and that this was a result of internal, and distinctive, features of Western/European society. What these features are might have been debated, but the general framework was largely accepted.

In more recent times, two overlapping lines of criticism have arisen, both seeking to dispute claims of Western distinctiveness. One is that the West/Europe was actually much more dependent on external influences than has been previously acknowledged. The other is that such rise that did occur was (mostly or entirely) a temporary epiphenomenon. The second line of criticism extends the first.

Andre Gunder Frank’s Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age strongly argues for both lines of criticism. He starts early, with a discussion of whether regarding Europe as even a genuine continent is a bit of overblown Eurocentrism (p.2), in passing endorsing that any claim of European superiority was ultimately based on race (p.4, also p.324).

I find two things revealing about the debate. First, it does force one to think more carefully and precisely about the success of Europe and Western civilisation. Second, it is quite revealing about the current sociology of Western academe.
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It is, for example, probably no accident that Frank, R. Bin Wong, Janet Abu Lughod, Kenneth Pomeranz (John M. Hobson is an exception) are all Americans or resident in the US. No matter how politically progressivist one’s outlook, it is easier to think of Europe as declined and peripheral from an American perspective. Since the participants are all very impressed by the success and capacities of Asian societies (they are sometimes known as the “Californian” school), they somewhat reflect patterns within the US, of West Coast folk tending to look to Asia, East Coast folk to Europe (and, perhaps, Texans looking towards the developing world).

More particularly, there is a distinct “running down” of Europe, which Frank does at length. Europhobia replaces Eurocentrism. Frank goes on and on about the backwardness and economic incapacity of Europe. Talk of Europe being “backward” or “underdeveloped” evokes modern differences between, say the US and Chad. But one of the result of the great transformation we call “the Industrial Revolution” was to enormously increase the differences between the standard of living of countries. Prior to it, differences in average standards of living were much lower than they currently are. According to Angus Maddison’s estimates, the ratio of per capita GDP between the poorest area in the year 1500 (Africa) and the richest (Western Europe, which Frank would dispute) was 1:1.9. In 1998, it was 1:19 (Africa to US/Canada/Australia/NZ). Talk of European “backwardness” provides striking rhetoric, but it gets in the way of the analysis.

Frank displays that irritating habit common in modern academe whereby non-Westerners happily get allocated “hurrah” words but “boo” words are put in shudder-quotes while Westerners happily get allocated “boo” words but “hurrah” words are put in shudder-quotes. Claims of European superiority are allegedly based on race, but Frank’s own repeated claims of Asian superiority are apparently not. Frank also complains at length about the Eurocentrism of Western-created social science without considering why it was largely Western-created (or at least came to be Western-dominated) in the first place.

I find the wider debate, which Frank discusses, about “world-systems” tedious. It encourages unhelpful reifications. (Such as Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt’s prolonged wail about the evil capitalist world system frustrating the politics they like. A frustration that has nothing to do with any evil world system and everything to do with the politics they like not working due to humans not being as they want them to be, there being no reliable cognitive elite able to lead the way to social nirvana, the required information processing being beyond any centralised system, which also suffer deep problems of suppressing preferences and conflicts of interest.)

Such reifications Frank mostly avoids, since he is very interested in practical issues such as flow of money, trade, ideas. He is particularly critical of notions of “mode of production” as getting in the way of empirical analysis (Pp 322-3, 330ff). But even his talk of a world economy I find a little overstated—I would prefer to talk of (expanding) networks of trade interaction.

Frank argues at length, with much extremely useful information, that we need to think in terms of a world economy, and one in which Asia (India and particularly China) were at the centre of. He is deeply interested in interactions between the parts of the economy and the possibilities of long-run cycles across the entire Afro-Eurasia (and, after 1500) world economy. (He is a strong supporter of the notion of long, Kondratieff-style cycles across said economy.) He is largely persuasive about the former and at least intriguingly suggestive about the latter.

His geographical categories are rather problematic (“Europe”, “Asia”) while his tendency to shift boundaries of consideration as convenient mar his analysis. For example, he lumps Europe in with Africa and Americas and suggests they were less productive than Asia (P.156): almost certainly, but what about Europe alone?

Despite his deep concern for trade patterns, Frank is mainly struck by the scale of economic phenomena. Asia’s “dominance” turns out to be a strangely passive thing. Which allows him to acknowledge but downplay the increasing ambit of European trading activity. Yet scale is not enough on its own—Russia, for example, was perennially at a lower level of economic development (and was seen as such), no matter how large the scale of its activities.

The section I found most informative and fascinating was his discussion of money flows, mainly silver (Pp 133ff). This is where Frank’s Europhobia is most striking. Frank claims at length that the “lucky” discovery of American silver was the only thing that allowed “backward” Europe to participate in the global economy with any seriousness. He acknowledges that a major effect of the influx of silver into the economy was to improve China’s ability to export (since its goods were silver-cheap), so that Western export of silver from Americas stimulated production and population growth in Asia (Pp 157-158).

Yet nowhere in the book does he consider the necessary corollary: that the influx of silver from the Americas in Europe made European goods silver-dear. The inability of Europe to export manufactures to Asia was not a sign of European “backwardness” or “incompetence”, it was a natural effect of the massive flood of silver. Frank is so blinded by his Europhobia he actually quotes Adam Smith (Frank is fond of quoting Smith at length) in which Smith cites the lower price of silver (which means higher price of goods) in Europe (P. 173) and yet fails to draw the obvious corollary. Frank is happy to cite Smith against Europe, but not for.

This analytical failure then deeply flaws his entire analysis. For example, Frank sees the American silver boom as the lucky break from which European success followed. It permitted them to participate in the world economy “for free” and lowered the price of money making capital much cheaper (Pp 295-60). European export uncompetitiveness was “counterbalanced” by silver (P.292). No, it was caused by silver. Frank also fails to grapple with the huge question of differential performance within Europe. If silver was so central, why was it the Dutch and then the English who were in the forefront of European commercial expansion from 1550 onwards, not Spain or Portugal? Even with Spain and Portugal, the early period of Portugese success (Manuel the Golden) was not based on access to the Americas or American silver (though one takes Frank’s point they were still bit players even in the Indian Ocean).

But Frank suffers the problem that bedevils the “California school”. Yes, China was biggest single actor in economic system for centuries, probably millennia. Which makes its failure to continue to be so even more startling. The more peripheral Europe is painted as, the more startling its triumph becomes. The danger in critiques such as Frank’s is that they don’t “explain away” Europe’s startling success so much as not explain it at all. Even where one concedes luck, the question arises why Europe was able to exploit the opportunities that came it way to such a stunning degree.

I have previously discussed the curse of American silver. There is nothing like a huge natural resource bonanza to distort your economy and institutional development (a problem Australia suffered a mild version of when it picked the demonstrably inferior—given that protectionist Victoria had had a much worse 1890s recession than free trade NSW—Deakinite policy package over the free trade alternative).

The pattern as I see it is that the wealth of Iberia, however deleterious to its long-run development, generated various responses in European states. The French crown responded primarily by continuing the typical grand strategy of agrarian polities of trying to expand the territory under its control and directly attacking Spanish power. Lacking suitable contiguous territories permitting them to do that, the Netherlands and Britain responded by maritime attacks and investing in capital, particularly suitable institutions. This proved to be the long-term winner. That Europe had a range of states in continuous and relatively stable (but intense) competition helped drive both expansion and transformation. That it had a greater diversity of political institutions gave social selection more to work with.

What Europe had been developing since early in the medieval period was the habit of adapting other people’s ideas. Frank is aware of Europe being first civilisation to trade with (and thus interact with) entire globe (P.177). But he fails to grapple with the significance of this. A civilisation with a long history of adapting other people’s ideas that becomes the first to interact with the entire globe has achieved a huge advantage.

But Frank has an excellent point in suggesting that history has been read too much backwards. That is, European global dominance in the C19th was so dramatic and so broadly-based that scholars read too much into it and did so too far back. Marx, Weber and so forth were too “chrono-centric”, too impressed with current circumstances. Europe’s advantage accrued slowly, but then with increasing speed. Thus, as Frank notes, military technology does spread so that European military advantages before 1600 were minor. Even up to 1700 they are not striking within the Asian context. But Europe came to dominate military innovation to an extent that other civilisations (with the revealing exception of Japan) were unable to match.

Frank notes that Chinese economic growth was largely expressed in a rising population (P.156). Europe much less so (P.164). This suggests that European growth may have been more intensive (i.e. China produced kids, Europeans produced capital: presumably children in Europe were “dearer” and comparatively less produced. Though European population growth then took off after 1750.)

Frank’s argument is that prior to 1800 Europe is peripheral—yet its silver flows are central to the world economy (thus Frank argues that the Ming’s dynasty’s fatal crisis was ultimately due to a drop in American silver production). Europe is peripheral—yet by 1700 dominates three continents (Europe and the Americas) and by 1800 also dominates India is about to dominate a fourth continent (Australia). Europe is peripheral—yet its Atlantic economy is about to catapult it into global dominance. It is one thing to say European dominance was much slower than people acknowledge. It is another to bunch it all up to some sudden 1800 take-off (Frank is very emphatic that there is no sort of European hegemony before 1800 [P.332]). If Europe was so “lucky” to have its American conquests, but so “backward”, how come Asia was doing so well (as Frank keeps telling us) with only one continent? (Gee, they must have been really, really clever.)

It is, after all, somewhat plausible that having three, soon to be four, continents to play with somewhat important to European success. But why did they end up with those continents to play with? And why not Spain & Portugal as the leaders of European development? (As they got the most extra-European land first and so had it longest.)

Frank points to population/land-resource ratio as a cause for Europe being a high wage economy. Correct in general. Yet there are clear problems. England and Holland were the most densely populated, so should have had lowest wages, yet had the highest wages. Moreover, wages in Ireland were much lower than in Britain. Europe’s population was going up, so wages should have been going down (as they did in the late C13th). But it is not at all clear that this was happening. The compensating factor was increased capital (including the social capital of improving institutions). And this before the industrial revolution began to seriously affect the British economy. Institutional change was a striking European strategy: outside Europe it was engaged in much less and much later.

Frank wants to turn institutions into responses to underlying economic forces (P.325 et al). At one level, yes. Hunter-gatherer societies do not have institutions in the sense that industrial societies do. Nevertheless, he dramatically underestimates the key importance of institutions. Latin America is about a century older than Anglo North America as a European settlement yet the latter is much richer. The difference was Latin America was lumbered with Iberia-derived institutions, Anglo North America with British-derived ones.

Frank wants to equate Europe’s “free good” of silver with contemporary US’s “free good” of printing dollars other folk want, though he concedes that American productivity has a role in that (P.356-6). But why is the US so productive compared to, say, Brazil? Why do folk “over-invest” in American dollars? Because they want the security of its institutions which they judge stronger than their own.

Frank discusses how Asian labour was cheap, European labour was dear. (Europe the “backward” economy with expensive labour!) Frank notes the argument that, in agrarian societies, increased population leads to increased inequality (p.305). Frank argues that Europe had more equal and dearer wages, which encouraged capital substitution. But again, why the Netherlands and Britain specifically?

Frank argues that the Industrial Revolution (which he concedes was very much a new phenomenon) was a result of European interaction with the global economy (P.345). To a large degree, I agree. Apart from anything else, the way out of the “Gregory effect” of uncompetitive manufacturing exports due to their goods being silver-dear was mass production to drive their unit costs right down. Yet European actions still have to be understood in terms of actions within the European system, not least because that is where their trade and military activity was concentrated. (Perhaps the most striking thing about the European colonial empires is that they were acquired while the bulk of European forces remained in Europe deployed against other European powers and even those forces deployed overseas were often largely deployed against other Europeans.)

There is a hint of this when Frank tries to grapple with why Europe seems to be in a prolonged up phase while Asia is in a prolonged down phase in the last two centuries (Pp 349-50). But not enough. It is, however, surely a striking question why all the large non-European states who dominated Eurasia in 1600 (the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, Mughal India, Ming China) either collapsed or went into decline between 1640 and 1740.

While I have spent a lot of time criticising Frank (and the “California school” literature), I do not want to leave the impression they are completely wrong. Frank’s immensely readable and informative book has been one of the most fun and enlightening books about global history I have read. The work of Frank and other “California school” scholars are very useful correctives. I agree with the following:

There were fluctuating but extensive Afro-Eurasian trade networks: the role of Europe was largely peripheral in these before 1500.
Europe learnt a lot from other civilisations and was not notably inventive (as distinct from adaptive) before at least 1500.
Europe’s expansion into Americas and creation of an Atlantic economy was important.
The Industrial Revolution was essentially a C19th affair.
Europe’s economic dominance took a long time to arrive.
Being ruled by someone else is not naturally conducive to development.
Analysis should start with the evidence, not presuppose it.
History needs a global framework to be most useful.

So they provide important and useful corrections. But, as is often the way with scholarly corrections, they overstate their case.

Consider the strange emphasis on the way Europeans treated non-Europeans in the “it was racism really” critiques. By far the worst slaughter for purely racial reasons was perpetrated by Europeans against fellow Europeans. Europeans practised maritime predation on each other (and Islam, as Islam did back) before they did so further afield. If one wanted to see how disastrous European rule could be for local inhabitants, one need go no further than Ireland. For the brutality of war, the Wars of Religion. The notion that Europeans treated non-Europeans systematically worse than they treated fellow Europeans is nonsense. (Though probably has extra plausibility in settler and former imperial societies, particularly ones with a history of slavery.) What is needed is genuinely universal analysis, not an inversion that replaces European virtue with European vice, Eurocentrism with Europhobia.