Sam Enright works on innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent policy think tank in Dublin, and runs a publication called The Fitzwilliam. Most relevant to us, on his personal blog, he writes a popular link roundup; what follows is an abridged version of his Links for July.
Blogs and short links
1. Questions that are rarely asked: How has the average length of time that elapses per page in a novel changed over time?
2. Best of Wikipedia: Georgy Zhukov, head of the Soviet army in WWII, became enamoured with Coca-Cola after being introduced to it by Dwight Eisenhower. However, as the symbol of American capitalism, there was no way that it would have been politically possible to import Coke directly. Zhukov’s request for the drink made it all the way up to Harry Truman, whose staff contacted the Coca-Cola export board, who in turn had their chemist strip out the caramel colouring to make the drink clear, and shipped it to him in straight-sided bottles adorned with a red star. Thus, the birth of White Coke.1
3. Ben Southwood and Kara Dimitruk argue that the Glorious Revolution smashed the NIMBYs and therefore caused the Industrial Revolution. After William III became king in 1689, Parliament started passing a lot more legislation, much of which clarified and strengthened property rights.
The British aristocracy was very neurotic about inheritance: it was common for the children of a landed family to squander away mum and dad’s estate. British inheritance law was pretty complicated – you can’t follow a Jane Austen novel without knowing it. A complicated diagram here illustrates a particular mechanism for this called ‘strict settlement’, which emerged in the 1650s. (The plot of Downton Abbey is based on a different legal mechanism for inheritance called an entail.)
We’ll skip over the details, but Southwood and Dimitruk argue that a major problem with strict settlement was that it tied up land; if a plot would be vastly more economically productive if it were sold, then it would often be difficult to do so unless the entire family was unanimous. But the post-Glorious Revolution Estate Acts started to allow resale of the land and other use of resources on a case-by-case basis. Scattered strips of land were consolidated, and the open-field system was progressively dismantled by the Inclosure Acts. Road quality was also improved dramatically by turnpike trusts that were founded by landowners and merchants, which charged tolls to finance maintenance.
The link with the Industrial Revolution is that these changes strengthening of property rights (allegedly) gave capital-owners an economic incentive to invest in automation, and gave a legal status that allowed for new agricultural methods like Norfolk crop rotation.
Here is a contrary take from anonymous economic historian Pseudoerasmus. As I understand it, the counter-claim is that the reforms to land ownership and property rights that came in the wake of the Glorious Revolution did cause British agriculture to make more efficient use of a given unit of labour or capital,2 but that this process was essentially orthogonal to agriculture’s also getting more productive through technological change. As the article itself notes, some countries maintained an almost-pre-1689-Britain level of messed-up property rights until after WWII, but were still able to become advanced economies through technological improvement.
Being Irish, I have a particular sensitivity to the way that the events following the Glorious Revolution have been, uhm, selectively interpreted according to one’s preferred political persuasion. In any case, I’ll be thinking and reading a lot more about the 17th century in the next few months.
Music, podcasts, and video
1. The Partially Examined Life boys on John Locke’s epistemology, part one, two, three, four.
2. Rahul Sagar on the underrated role that Mama Parmanand played in the birth of Indian liberalism.
3. Basil Halperin on macroeconomic impacts of AI. Basil is always good on this topic, but I found this most valuable for the discussion of Calvo’s model of sticky prices. That is some clean New Keynesian theory from the 1980s in which there is an exogenous per-period probability that any given firm will be able to change its price. This provides the deep theoretical justification for stable inflation targeting, the current regime of central banking.3
Basil’s job market paper from earlier this year tries to work out the optimal monetary policy when firms can always choose to update their prices in response to inflation but face some cost in doing so (menu costs). He concludes that the best such system is our old friend nominal GDP targeting, i.e., that central banks should instead target a specific rate of increase in non-inflation-adjusted output growth. Intuitively, I am inclined to believe this, because the person most associated with the NGDP targeting idea (Scott Sumner) has incredible film taste.
4. Dwarkesh Patel and Ada Palmer on how Machiavelli is completely misunderstood. There are many claims made here, most of which I’m not qualified to evaluate. One of them is the idea that copyright historically grew out of censorship. The earliest form of copyright was first granted in the inquisition, in which the author of a book verified as not being on the index of forbidden books would receive exclusive rights to print it. Palmer’s stronger claim that England’s system of copyright was directly modelled after this system from the inquisition seems to be more of a contested minority position.
5. Herbie Hancock, Mr. Hands. An underrated gem nestled between what seems to be generally regarded as Herbie’s creative low point during the disco era, before he ventured even further from jazz into electro. My favourite track is Just Around the Corner.
6. Finally, from YouTube, we have a Mikhail Gorbachev jam session and the Rita Payés Tiny Desk Concert. There is also Che Guevara being interviewed from when he visited Ireland in 1964.
Books and Papers
1. Anton Howes, The Spread of Improvement: Why Innovation Accelerated in Britain 1547–1851. Eventually, we will get Anton’s magnum opus on the Industrial Revolution. In the meantime, I only have this working paper.
Obviously, a lot of ink has been spilt about why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain when it did. The structural arguments (like that Britain had unusually cheap coal and high wages) have never been particularly convincing, partially because British wages look a lot lower depending on how you choose to classify contractors, and also because the field now mostly believes that British wages were high (insofar as they were) because the workers were already genuinely more productive. And that only pushes us back a step to explain why British workers became more productive.
Anton says that the answer is culture. The default state is for humans to not be particularly interested in improving things. There was a lot of low-hanging fruit at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that seems like it could have been invented centuries earlier, like the flying shuttle. Britain was the first place to develop an “improving mindset”, which was systematically spread through a Republic of Letters and a network of clubs and societies such as the Lunar Society. This latter attribute of spreading the improving mindset was missing among earlier flowerings of invention in other countries, like during the Tang and Song Dynasties.
Part of spreading the improving mindset was discouraging innovation-destroying rent seeking. James Watt aggressively policed his patent on the steam engine, but that was a minority pursuit; it looks like it is still contested whether this in fact delayed the rollout of steam power.4
To explore this, Anton created a sample of 1,452 innovators, the largest such systematically studied sample, primarily to identify when they made their first invention.5 Your mileage may vary on how convincing you find these inherently woolly analyses compared to quantitative economic history.
2. John Stuart Mill, Civilization. It feels good to be re-reading Mill, who I didn’t enjoy as much the first time around. This is one of his lesser-known essays, but I thought it was a gem. I was also surprised to learn that spelling Civilisation with a ‘z’ is the traditional British way of doing it; the frequent use of ‘s’ is a later piece of French cultural influence.
In the essay, Mill is basically arguing that the central tendency of civilisation is to transfer power from individuals to the masses. I see Mill as arguing, throughout his career, that democracy is coming whether we like it or not, and thus that we should try to ensure that such a system promotes liberal values. I have a forthcoming piece about Mill’s role in the history of ranked choice voting electoral systems that explores this.
On page 133 of the Online Library of Liberty version, he writes about how, when competitors become too numerous to individually evaluate, reputation and merit become decoupled:
He’s also very critical of the (he argues) weak intellectual value of an Oxbridge education, and of Britain for not producing more great thinkers. In this context he approvingly cites William Whewell, a previous winner of our Victorian polymath of the month award:
There is also page 134, against the infovores:
And:
There are now in this country, we may say, but two modes left in which an individual mind can hope to produce much direct effect upon the minds and destinies of his countrymen generally; as a member of parliament, or an editor of a London newspaper.
In passing, he also mentions the fixed tax that was levied per newspaper, which was designed to be regressive in such a way as to hurt working-class readership (p. 135). On many fronts, some of the most relevant Mill for the modern day!
3. Adam Leibovitz, Dictatorship in the American Founding. Because America dominates the cultural universe to such an extent, I tend to avoid reading more about it than I have to. The Founding Fathers were steeped in the classics and the legacy of Rome. This paper argued that the idea of a dictator, to them, was a deeply republican one, meant to safeguard liberty in times of crisis,6 and didn’t necessarily have the same autocratic associations as it does today. Famously, at least one faction wanted George Washington to become dictator or king, and he voluntarily limited himself to only two terms.
During the American Revolution, there were experiments at the state and national level with emergency governance structures modelled explicitly after Roman emergency powers (for example, the Governor of South Carolina was essentially a dictator from 1780 to 1782). In Rome, there were two systems for this: the dictator, who was appointed by a consul to serve for at most six months. There was also the senatus consultum ultimum, which is when the Senate allowed a magistrate to act outside of the law (with no specific time limit). Both concepts influenced the Founding Fathers, but the significance of them was also filtered through Machiavelli and others, which is part of why this story is so tangled. Which, come to think of it, circles back to the Dwarkesh discussion about how often Machiavelli is misunderstood.
None of these provisions was included in the Constitution in 1787, after a concerted campaign by Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams. Even today, the U.S. Constitution has no concept of “emergency powers” the way that almost all parliamentary systems do.
There are different reasons why the different figures opposed dictatorship, but Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams all wanted a stronger permanent executive, and none of them opposed dictatorship for the reasons you might expect. I’m not qualified to evaluate whether Leibovitz is giving an accurate summary of their views, but it’s quite ironic that the Founding Fathers who wanted the strongest presidency were the ones who sank the possibility of America having an actual dictator.
4. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration. I read this nice edition with notes from Oxford University Press. This was my first time reading Locke; he is one of the major figures in the philosophical canon that I somehow missed as an undergrad. This experience has taught me that I’m out of practice when it comes to reading old philosophy books. But at least I’m not as bad as my friend Karina, who listened to it in the form of an AI-generated podcast.
The traditional view was that The Second Treatise is (among other things) a justification for the Glorious Revolution. But the Peter Laslett critical edition in 1960 took a flamethrower to the world of Locke scholarship by arguing that it was actually written around 1680, and that (more controversially) it was defending the Whig position during the Exclusion Crisis.7
In America, Locke has a reputation as the father of liberalism, which is honestly hard to believe, given that Chapter IV literally defends slavery. Granted, he only defends slavery of captives from a “just war”, and disavows slavery as it was then practised.8 Locke was also not a democrat, although belief in democracy was lukewarm among early liberals.
The idea that Locke’s political theory was the major influence on the Founding Fathers is a Cold War post hoc construction that didn’t stand up to closer inspection. There is now a doubly revisionist take that Locke actually was important. I don’t know where the egghead intellectual historians have landed with that, but I do think Locke almost became more of an #aesthetic among patriotic Americans than a serious claim.
Locke certainly is influential, just arguably more so through his epistemology than his political philosophy.9 The epistemology and the theology blend together, e.g., with his argument (p.130 in my edition) that children are not born into a certain religion.
Chapter V (‘Of Property’), in which Locke is trying to ground property rights, is the most famous one. Indeed, it’s perhaps the most famous chapter in all of political philosophy. As with so many old books, you get more out of it if you know the Biblical references – Psalm 115:16, “the earth hath he given to the children of men” is one of Locke’s premises for arguing that private property is justified.
You might wonder: if this is the second treatise, what was the first treatise?10 Answer: It was an excruciatingly detailed response to the arguments made by Robert Filmer in a largely forgotten book called Patriarcha, which argues in favour of absolute monarchy.
The Letter was written later, when Locke was living in exile in the Netherlands.11 For a book literally called the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke spends a surprising amount of time talking about all the people that you shouldn’t tolerate. These include Catholics, atheists, and antinomians (but Muslims, Jews and pagans are ok).
But still, baby steps, and even tolerating different types of Protestants was a big step forward historically.
One of the strongest arguments against the Letter from a Christian perspective is that God himself created a state that was based on religion, namely “the commonwealth of Israel”. If I understood correctly, Locke’s counter-move (p.128) is that having God be your head of state is something of a special case. States run by mere mortals do not have jurisdiction over the “care of soul”.
It’s also interesting that Locke believes we have a general moral duty to evangelise. He’s definitely not secular, which is how some of his arguments were later used. While the Second Treatise has a small number of important Biblical references, the Letter is explicitly theological. It also has a postscript, which I enjoyed, dealing with schisms and heresies.
Locke was also a policymaker and economist, who served as a commissioner on England’s Board of Trade. He subscribed to ‘metalism’, the belief that the value of money derives from the purchasing power of the commodity it’s based on. His economic thought appears as a foil to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
One of the most famous quotes from the Second Treatise was “in the beginning all the World was America”. Lacking a medium of exchange, the native population did not have an incentive to accumulate resources beyond food that could be stored, or to improve their standard of living.12 Locke’s understanding of money and coinage ends up being surprisingly important to the political theory.
After the “America” passage, he comes pretty close to saying that land is valuable insofar as it can be cultivated for agriculture. Given that the natives were foragers, there is a literature about the extent to which Locke was the intellectual basis of manifest destiny and American colonialism—another reason why it’s an anachronism to call him a liberal.
You can read the full version of Sam’s July links here.
Footnotes:
[1] I’m surprised this didn’t get a cameo in The Death of Stalin.
[2] That is, it came closer to the production possibilities frontier.
[3] Beginning in New Zealand in 1989, the rest of the world gradually adopted inflation targeting. Although note that the Federal Reserve quietly shifted to asymmetric average inflation targeting in 2020. So, if inflation has recently been consistently under 2%, then they would set a target for somewhat less than 2%, before going back again in 2025. The Mr Psmith review somewhat overstates the extent to which absolutely nobody in central banking has any idea what they are doing, but that’s also definitely not not the case either.
[4] James Watt’s case reminded me of the old Applied Divinity Studies post on the Murder of Wilbur Wright.
[5] Notably, only 15 of these were women.
[6] This, like so many things, makes me think of Charles de Gaulle.
[7] Reminder: The Whigs believed that James should be barred from succeeding his brother Charles II because he was a Catholic.
[8] It’s debated how sincere his opposition to slavery-as-practiced was, given that Locke seems to have been ok enough with it to let it be included in the Carolina constitution.
[9] For a contrary perspective, see Rebecca Lowe.
[10] There is also a Second Letter Concerning Toleration, which is, again, less tolerant than the first. In the Second Letter he shifted toward defending tolerance as being instrumentally useful for Christian evangelising, more so than a goal in itself.
[11] While the Treatise was written in English, the Letter was in Latin, and was translated by William Popple, who was secretary of the Board of Trade, on which Locke later served.
[12] One of the things I found amusing reading Locke for the first time was all the references he makes to the travel writing genre (the sort of stuff satirised in Gulliver’s Travels), in order to make a point about ideas and practices not being innate. I gather that some of the references to the Native American population sometimes serve a similar role.
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