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Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Different paths of development

In discussions on this blog and elsewhere I sometimes have the impression that differences in cultural orientation might have a significant impact on the areas of focus in building up a base of knowledge relevant to the subject under discussion.   That in turn effects historical interpretations even before personality and other things influencing world view come into play.

The first excerpt is about how the history of development in early 1800s New England is different than the impression that most people have.

   Through a European lens, in fact, America looked very backward, if only because of its overwhelmingly rural demography.  In the 1820s, more than 90 percent of Americans still lived in the countryside, a pattern that had changed very little by mid-century.  In nineteenth-century Europe, rural areas were mostly peasant-ridden backwaters, but America’s agrarian patina concealed a beehive of commercial and industrial activity.  By the end of the War of 1812, Gordon Wood suggests, the northern states were possibly “the most thoroughly commercialized society in the world.”  A Rhode Island industrialist made the same point in 1829: “The manufacturing activities of the United States are carried on in little hamlets…around the water fall which serves to turn the mill wheel.” 
   American historians have suffered their own bafflements.  It is only in recent decades that a consensus of sorts has emerged on the nation’s early growth spurt.  Winifred Rothenberg did much of the groundbreaking work—twenty-five years of patient excavation of the account books, diaries, estates, mortgages, and other records of Massachusetts farmers.  What she finds is an organic, bottom-up form of modernization, originating in the increasing prosperity of ordinary farmers.  The British experience was starkly different.  The underbelly of Victorian society mapped by Charles Dickens was a rural proletariat brutally expelled from the countryside and herded into urban factories.
(Although we shouldn't exaggerate the negatives. )

Even if someone wants to point to government actions, don't be fooled - common genius was already a very significant force driving bottom-up organic growth.

Another point worth remembering was that the negative effects of slavery were obvious to visitors from  another country.

Democracy in America  pp. 344-348
   When a century had passed since the foundation of the colonies, an extraordinary fact began to strike the attention of everybody.  The population of those provinces that had practically no slaves increased in numbers, wealth, and well-being more rapidly than those that had slaves. 
   The inhabitants of the former had to cultivate the ground themselves or hire another’s services; in the latter they had laborers whom they did not need to pay.  With labor and expense on the one side and leisure and economy on the other, nonetheless the advantage lay with the former.

   The farther they went, the clearer it became that slavery, so cruel to the slave, was fatal to the master.

There is only one difference between the two states: Kentucky allows slaves, but Ohio refuses to have them. 
   So the traveler who lets the current carry him down the Ohio till it joins the Mississippi sails, so to say, between freedom and slavery; and he has only to glance around him to see instantly which is best for mankind. 
   On the left bank of the river the population is sparse; from time to time one sees a troop of slaves loitering through half-deserted fields; the primeval forest is constantly reappearing; one might say that society had gone to sleep; it is nature that seems active and alive, whereas man is idle. 
   The state of Kentucky was founded in 1775 and that of Ohio as much as twelve years later; twelve years in America counts for as much as half a century in Europe.  Now the population of Ohio is more than 250,000 greater than that of Kentucky.
   These contrasting effects of slavery and of freedom are easy to understand; they are enough to explain the differences between ancient civilization and modern. 

   Antiquity could only have a very imperfect understanding of this effect of slavery on the production of wealth.  Then slavery existed throughout the whole civilized world, only some barbarian peoples being without it.
   Christianity destroyed slavery by insisting on the slave’s rights; nowadays it can be attacked from the master’s point of view; in this respect interest and morality are in harmony.

Don Boudreaux  provides additional clarification in an article titled  What's so :

Another historical myth is that Southern slavery harmed only the blacks who were enslaved. There's no doubt that those who suffered most grievously from slavery were the slaves themselves. But slavery also inflicted great economic harm on non-slave-owning whites in the South.  
Most obviously, slavery artificially reduced the supply of workers available to work in whatever factories and businesses might have been established by non-slave-owning whites. Therefore, these whites — who outnumbered slave-owning whites, even in the South — suffered reduced opportunities to launch their own businesses. In the South, chattel slavery stymied the single greatest force for widespread and sustained economic growth: market-directed entrepreneurship.  
Also, by curbing entrepreneurship in the South, slavery reduced the rate of introduction of new goods and services that would have enriched consumers' lives.
There was yet another way that slavery kept the antebellum American South economically infantile. Here's the late economic historian Stanley Lebergott writing about the United States before the Civil War:  
“British vessels began to concentrate their voyages to New York, Boston and Philadelphia. For in these ports they could both deliver a full cargo of manufactured goods (to be consumed in the cities or sent along to the West) and also pick up return cargoes. The demand for manufactured goods and such luxuries as tea and coffee, however, grew far more slowly in such Southern centers as Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington. One reason was that much of the nearby population were slaves, consuming little in the way of manufactured goods.”  
Lebergott sensibly argues that, had slavery not existed, Southern ports such as that at Charleston, S.C., would have gotten a great deal more shipping business. But because slavery artificially kept most Southerners — unfree  and free — poor, it kept the South from being a strong market for European manufactured goods. 
These historical realities should be kept in mind by anyone attracted to the argument that capitalism was fathered by slavery. 

As if this troubled history didn't present enough problems, there were further obstacles to escaping the impediments to progress even long after the botched or neglected Reconstruction.  Earlier in the same article other impediments to Southern development are highlighted:

Everyone knows, for example, that minimum-wage legislation is meant to help the working poor. A study of history, however, shows that this just ain't so.  
What  is so is that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 — the legislation that created the national minimum wage in America — was designed to protect the higher wages of Northern textile workers, and the profits of Northern mill owners, from the intensifying competition unleashed by Southern textile mills in the Carolinas and Georgia.  
The competitive advantage enjoyed by Southern mills over their Northern rivals was access to lower-wage labor. Even at 15 cents per hour, these jobs were attractive to poor Southern workers, many of whom would otherwise have earned even less as sharecroppers. 
But being insensitive to the plight of poor Southern workers, Congress and FDR in 1938 outlawed jobs that paid less than 25 cents per hour. The purpose was to stifle competition and protect the profits of politically powerful producer groups in the North.

These obstacles, self imposed and otherwise, have delayed and slowed the economic convergence of the South.  Improvements in transportation, communication and infrastructure, combined with lower cost of living and cultural changes are improving circumstances.  Lee Habeeb is both a participant in and an observer of these changes:

When I told my friends in New Jersey nearly ten years ago that I was packing my bags and heading south, they thought I’d lost my mind. Why, they wondered, would I give up the food, shopping, and close proximity to New York City to live anywhere else, especially a place like Oxford, Miss.? I might as well have told them I was moving to Mogadishu. 
I tried to lighten things up by explaining that we had running water in Mississippi. And cable TV. Heck, we even had dentists. The planes coming and going in nearby Memphis got me most places in quick order, too. I then described the quality of life in Oxford and how far a dollar stretches. When I showed them pictures of my house and shared with them the cost of that house — and the low property-tax bill that came along with it — they got depressed.
And it isn’t just millions of American citizens packing their bags and heading south. Last month, in a move that shocked residents of northern New Jersey, Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz USA announced it was moving its headquarters from Montvale (just miles from where I grew up) to Sandy Springs, Ga. And it’s bringing nearly 1,000 people along with it, at an average salary of nearly $80,000 per worker. 
“We think the infrastructure in the States has changed,” Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of Mercedes, told reporters. “The South is much more relevant than it used to be. We think it is a new start, a rejuvenation of our company to make the move.”
And there’s another angle to the southern-migration story that hasn’t received enough media attention, though it’s perhaps more profound: The past 30 years have seen an epic migration of black people to the South. Indeed, the percentage of the nation’s African-American population living in the South hit its highest point in half a century, as more and more black people moved out of declining cities in the Midwest and Northeast. 
A great many books have been written about the migration of rural black people from the South to the big cities of Chicago and Detroit during the 1940s and ’50s. Nicholas Lemann, former dean of Columbia University’s journalism school and a professor there, wrote one of them: The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. 
Why, a curious student might want to ask Professor Lemann, hasn’t he written about the reverse migration, and about the economic and cultural forces behind it? 
I think we know why he won’t. The ideological prejudices of so many journalists and media elites — and the academic elite, too, even in the South — won’t permit it. They’re so invested in the old narrative of the South, so busy reminding Americans about the tragic history of the region, they can’t bear the thought that it’s changed, let alone that black people are fleeing blue northern cities to live in red southern states.

But this much is self-evident: If the South is so backward, why are some of the most sophisticated foreign companies moving here? For decades, American policymakers have been worried that we would lose our manufacturing base to the world, but over the past few decades, the South has become a hub of manufacturing for the world. 
This much, too, is self-evident: If the South is so racist, why are so many black people moving back here?

You won’t ever see or hear any of the above stories covered in any depth in the media. They’re too busy recounting negative stories about the South’s past — stories that no doubt need telling — to notice the progress.

An appreciation for the differing perspectives that people have of the material presented here provides some understanding of how they might have divergent ideas about economic development in America.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015


A recent post on Bookworm Room blog  pointed to post elsewhere and raised the reparations question. The real gem was an additional link to a truly outstanding post on the Wolf Howling blog titled: The Roots of Slavery & The Race Hustlers' Holy Grail - Reparations.  The three primary topics addressed are the race hustling industry and reparations, the history of slavery, and how this reflects on human nature and power.  It's worth reading the whole post.  (Video on the post as well.)

Prof. Henry L. Gates, a Prof. of African American Studies at Harvard and late of Beer Summit fame, is chasing the Holy Grail of the race-hustling industry – reparations for slavery.Prof. Gates has no problem “parcelling out the blame” for slavery on this side of the Atlantic. It is, he tells us, the “whites.” So under Gates's theory, if you are a white American, you are born with the sin of slavery hung about your neck. What troubles Gates is the fact that the historical record shows that the people on the supply side of the African slave trade – the people selling African slaves into bondage - were not the evil white skinned devils, but rather black Africans themselves.  
The issue is not divisive at all. It's ludicrous. Those who took part in slavery in America are long dead. It is a fundamental aspect of our legal system that people are held responsible for the wrongs they personally commit; responsibility for those wrongs does not follow down blood lines. But, as Prof. Gates would have us, let us leave that fundamental issue aside. Even so, over 145 years having past since the end of slavery in America, there are a host of issues associated with who should owe what to whom such that every aspect of Gate's call for reparations passes into the surreal. Obama himself perfectly encapsulates some of this. 
Slavery didn't begin with the African slave trade. To the contrary, slavery, as an accepted practice in the world, ended with the African slave trade. Slavery began with the dawn of civilization and it has involved virtually every race. Indeed, unless Gates is historically illiterate, he must know that slave based agrarian economies have been the norm throughout much of the world's history.

And of then there are the world's most prolific slavers of history – the Arabs. Indeed,the Arabs in Saudi Arabia still teach today that it is permissible to make slaves of non-Muslims. And indeed, they still practice what they preach - enslaving blacks in Mali when it fell under al Qaeda rule. Under the Gates theory, we should all be getting reparation checks from Ridyah. 
The bottom line, if slavery is, as Gates posits, an original sin that passes not only through the generations, but also among entire races, then it hangs around the necks of most people in the world today - including President Obama and Prof. Gates. Obviously that can't be right. That doesn't fit the Gate's narrative at all. 
The only way Prof. Gates call for reparations can have even a patina of legitimacy is if it holds culpable only the descendants of those who actually owned slaves and supported the institution of slavery. Fortunately, they are identifiable. The slave owning class in pre-Civil War America and the supporters of slavery as an institution were all to be found in the Democrat Party. It is beyond perverse for Gates, on this historic record, to also seek to hold culpable the Republicans who never supported slavery and whose ancestor's gave their very lives to end slavery. Do you think an Executive Order condemning the Democrat Party for slavery in America and ordering them to pay the reparations per a special levy would satisfy Dr. Gates? I for one could be persuaded to accept that as a reasonable settlement of the problem. 
Gates's push for reparations has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. If he wanted to actually do something constructive for blacks in America, then Gates would be shouting to the rafters about the call of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for a color blind society. That is certainly in the best interests of both blacks and our nation. Yet instead of focusing on furthering that cause, Gates is pursuing an issue that is sure to, by its very nature, drive whites and blacks apart. 
I am sure Dr. Gates is not so dumb as to be ignorant of any of the above. Nor can he be ignorant of the fact that the descendants of slaves in this country have, today, all of the opportunities of America open to them. No one, Prof. Gates included, could possibly believe that the call for reparations will add anything to that. 
Actually, given that Prof. Gates's wants to apportion blame to all "whites" in America for slavery, it would seem self-evident that the purpose of Dr. Gate's push for reparations is to foster a permanent sense of guilt in the white population of America on one hand and, on the other hand, to separate blacks from whites in society by keeping blacks focused on past sins. That has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with politics. It is naught but a variant on the sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, damning America and calling for blacks to eschew the values of "white" America. 
More specifically, this is the “sins and grievances” approach to politics about which Thomas Sowell recently wrote in his brilliant four-part essay, Race and Politics. It directs blacks and other members of 'victim classes' to “nurse their resentments, instead of advancing their skills and their prospects.” As Dr. Sowell notes, the only beneficiaries of this type of grievance politics “are politicians and race hustlers.” The losers in this equation are those blacks ignoring their opportunities and the reality of America in 2010 and instead, following the ilk of Prof. Gates on the hunt for the race hustlers' holy grail.

The post then continues with an update that draws upon a different article by Dr. Sowell:

. . . Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read — not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species — because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion, and nationality. 
If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history. 
But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilizations, it is in that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery — including, in some cases, by armed resistance. 
Only the fact that the West had more firepower put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment. 
It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who mine history in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire, or similar atrocities in other times and places.
The politics of grievance and division and a grossly distorted version of history are meant to undermine a free society, not to promote incremental improvement.

I think this is a terrific example of how the internet allows people to share their efforts to be more knowledgeable and aware.

Thanks GW at Wolf Howling.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Grasping the essence

It has been my experience that in studying the literature on complex subjects in social science such as economics,  many of the people with significant insights could be considered polymaths.  Some time in the past year I was discussing some ideas espoused by George Gilder with  my coblogger.  He asked if I considered Mr. Gilder to be a polymath.  I've read many articles and most of the books authored by Mr. Gilder but had not thought about that question.  After a pause to think about the matter, the reply was a clear "yes."  A few weeks later while watching a video of Deirdre McCloskey, George Gilder and his ideas came up in discussion.  It was clear that McCloskey, herself an obvious polymath, considers Gilder to be a polymath.  With that introduction, here are some excerpts from  Unleash the Mind by George Gilder:






These are not the conventional ideas that enter most discussions about economics, growth and wealth creation, but they are part of much deeper insight than most people will ever acquire.

Wednesday, April 08, 2015

a little is better than none

In a recent article  Jonah Goldberg provided useful guidance and clarification for conservative students:
In this exclusive Q&A with The College Fix, Goldberg explains how American progressivism was born of the same intellectual and political climate that gave rise to various European collectivist, statist and nationalistic movements – and how those mindsets are currently in control of higher education discourse today.
“Political correctness, speech codes, hate-crime hoaxes: these are all efforts by a very small number of people to control what is said and how it is said,” Goldberg explains. 
While you rightly point out that the word “fascist” is exhausted in its use, do you think the fascist connections with American progressivism carry on in any of the clichés (i.e. those buzz phrases that stop an argument) you find when you speak at different campuses? 
Goldberg: A big point of my book was an attempt to “deflate” the idea of fascism. It wasn’t an outlier in the earlier 20th century; it was a very mainstream movement (particularly before the rise of Nazism) that was part of the fad for “experimental” social engineers. The key issue is power. 
Today, the power of fascism is in using the label to silence your opponents. No one gets called a fascist for wanting more “public-private partnerships” between the feds and big business, even though that sort of thing is central to fascist economics. No, people get called “fascist” for disagreeing with feminist radicals or supporting free speech or refusing to conform. The most fascistic things routinely said on college campuses today is “if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem” or “the time for debate is over.” 
There’s no safe-harbor for disagreement. You have to get with the program or you’re a “problem” that needs to be fixed. The best working definition of fascist for the left is simply a “conservative who’s winning an argument.” Because all you have to do to get called a fascist is to disagree with a leftist. Rightwing on college campuses is just another word for “non-compliant.” 
Orwell noticed this a long time ago, which is why he said that fascism had simply come to mean “anything not desirable” or something like that.

You write in your latest book, The Tyranny of Clichés, that clichés are tyrannical in that they are “the use of allegedly non-ideological insights to advance starkly ideological understandings of the world.” Is academic freedom now a tyrannical cliché, and how so? 
Goldberg: Sure. Let’s start with the word ideology. Few words have a worse reputation these days. It has become synonymous with “closed-minded” and “dogmatic,” even “brainwashed.” This is nonsense. An ideology is merely a checklist of your principles. Hopefully your principles are derived from empiricism and experience, though they needn’t always be. (I have never murdered anyone, never committed incest etc., yet I am ideologically, even dogmatically, opposed to them.) 
There’s nothing wrong with being ideological or dogmatic. When people tell me they hate dogma or certainty and brag about how open-minded they are, I tell them that I am dogmatically opposed to setting orphanages on fire. I am also dogmatically opposed to slavery, genocide and the consumption of flan. Save for that last bit, does that make me more or less enlightened? 
Again, it all comes back to power. The Progressives borrowed this neat trick from Napoleon and Marx (which sounds like a fine haberdashery). They unilaterally declared all competing ideologies to be closed-mindedly “ideological” while claiming for themselves an open-minded pragmatism. So liberalism doesn’t have to defend itself as an ideology while it can accuse all of its competing ideologies of being cult-like and other-worldly. We hear this in Obama all of the time. His opponents are “ideologues” who put their “ideology” ahead of the American people, while he is merely a “problem-solver” who only wants to do “what works.” I’m sure he believes it. 
Which points to one of the big problems with liberalism; its staggering lack of self-awareness.  Liberals simply take it as a given that they are open-minded, morally superior free thinkers. At least conservatives acknowledge our dogma. Liberals have become so dogmatic they can’t even see theirs.
So some ideology is probably better than none or pretending to have none.  I believe that Peter has made this point before.  (We could call this post applying the lesson: episode 2.)  Later in the interview:
Conservatives need to get better at convincing people that we believe what we believe not just because it is good for us but because it’s good for everybody. Capitalism is the greatest anti-poverty program in human history. Yet conservatives rarely emphasize that. Why? 
More to the point of your question, the ultimate goal must never be ridicule but persuasion.
Nothing wrong with some ideology provided one avoids being blinded by it.