Matt Yglesias

17th Century Industrial Policy

Mark Kishlansky’s A Monarchy Transformed offers the following on Stuart England’s efforts to move up the value chain:

In truth, schemes like the Cockayne Project, in which a syndicate of London merchants was given the right to export coloured cloth while the export of undyed cloth was inhibited, were unmitigated disasters.

What’s more, at the time there was no special legal distinction between a patent and the king’s general power to create monopolies.

We also learn this about occupational licensing:

He would rather ‘his child were baptized by an ape as by a woman’ he concluded in dismissing the custom of allowing midwives to baptize dying infants, which many, including the King, believed was a cover for witches to steal babies for satanic rituals.

Any time you read a well-written history of any subject you don’t know much about, you wind up learning surprising things and getting some interesting ideas.

Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System

As a book, Barry Eichengreen’s Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System perhaps suffers from an excess of sober-minded sensibility. He argues that the dollar almost certainly will lose its status as the global currency, but that it probably won’t happen too quickly, and it won’t necessarily be that big of a deal.

The key point here is that you need to get cause and effect straight. Growth in China, India, and Brazil are bad for the dollar’s unique status, but not in a way that’s bad for America. Similarly with Europe working its issues out. Alternatively, the dollar could use its unique status as the consequence of a catastrophic economic or budgetary collapse. That would be bad. And it would be bad for the dollar. But it’s the catastrophic collapse here that’s bad, not the dollar stuff, the dollar stuff is an effect. The basic thesis is well summed-up by this history lesson on the pound: “Sterling lost its position as an international currency because Britain lost its great-power status, not the other way around. And Britain lost its great-power status as a result of homegrown economic problems.”

1688: The First Modern Revolution

Given that use of the term “revolution” to describe a political regime change dates from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it’s ironic that the conventional wisdom has come around to the view that it wasn’t a “real” revolution at all. In his 2009 book, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, Yale historian Steve Pincus tries to put the “revolution” back in the “Glorious Revolution.”

As if often the case when an amateur dips into a historiographical controversy, at times Pincus seems to me to be reaching with his interpretation. But his point—which I think is well-taken—is that we should see the events of 1688 as one but one episode in a years-long process that really did constitute a Whig Revolution complete with revolutionary wars and a major change in the basic orientation of English economic policy. The parts of the book dedicated to arguing with other historians about how we should understand James II’s agenda are kind of dull, and unfortunately this is where Pincus starts. But the latter parts about the Whig agenda and early liberal politics are fascinating. The Tory view that real wealth is based in land and hence is finite and merely shifted around rather than increased through exchanges isn’t something anyone would admit to believing today, but I think it’s fair to say that a kind of folk Toryism on this point animates a lot of thinking at all points in time. The fact that modern banking is really a kind of invention of statecraft and not a natural part of the exchange economy is important to understand even today and learning about its specific historical origins drives that home.

The Great Stagnation

Tyler Cowen’s new ebook How The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better is a bravura performance by one of the most interesting thinkers out there. I also think it’s a great innovation in current affairs publishing—much shorter and cheaper than a conventional book in a way that actually leaves you wanting to read more once you finish it. My guess is that this is the future of books.

The argument is in many ways a continuation and expansion of Paul Krugman’s themes from The Age of Diminished Expectations, Third Edition: U.S. Economic Policy in the 1990s. Specifically, the argument is that growth has been slow for the past 30-40 years for fairly fundamental reasons related to a slowing rate of increase in basic science and that our politics has become dysfunctional insofar as it’s failed to adapt to those realities. He also argues in parallel (and with, I think, less hard evidence) that a growing share of innovative energy is going into rent-seeking or otherwise unproductive activities. Cowen says we shouldn’t let rapid growth in China confuse us. What the Chinese are doing is seizing the low-hanging fruit of copying ideas from the US, Europe, and Japan whereas what the rich world needs is brand new ideas. Over the course of the book you get about one insightful point per page across a whole range of subjects. One key lefty-sounding insight is that we need to think higher about ways to improve quality of life that aren’t just about money and materialism.

The prescription is less persuasive than the diagnosis. In particular I think that for a book that talks so much about ideas, innovation, the internet, and rent-seeking it says remarkably little (indeed almost nothing) about intellectual property law. I also think the book goes awry near the end in doing too much to link the stagnation hypothesis to the present-day recession. Rich countries have experienced very divergent fates over the past 36 months when the key evidence for the technological stagnation thesis is that rich countries have experienced a broadly similar fate over the past 36 years. I wanted to hear more about the implications of a world in which catch-up growth by poor countries accounts for the vast majority of increased output. It seems to me that this is going to invert the results of the Simon-Ehrlich Wager in a problematic way.

The Confusion

I didn’t find The Confusion, Book Two of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, nearly as enjoyable as volume one. That’s largely because the picaresque “Bonanza” sections of the novel don’t seem to me to really add anything thematically to what we’ve previously seen of the adventures of Jack Shaftoe. I think this character simply isn’t as fascinating as Stephenson thinks he is and it gets tedious at a certain point.

But the “Juncto” plotline dealing with the politics and economics of late 17th century Britain and Europe is great. Among other things, it contains an excellent narrative account of the seemingly mysterious fact that a shortage of money can lead to declining output of real goods and services. This is an idea people find highly counterintuitive for the very good reason that in your personal life you get more money by increasing your output of goods and services, so it seems clear that a national shortfall of money must be caused by insufficient production rather than vice versa. As Stephenson highlights, particularly at a time when people were walking around using little pieces of commodity metal as the medium of exchange this could easily become a very acute problem even in an otherwise advanced society. Given our current economic situation, for this reason alone I wish more people would read it.

The Causes of the English Civil War

Reading the Baroque Cycle made me want to know more about the real history of 17th Century England, so I asked for recommendations on the English Civil War and a couple of trusted folks told me I should get Conrad Russell’s The Causes of the English Civil War. This is a pretty fantastic work of scholarly argumentation that really makes you feel like you understand the issue it’s addressing. Did they really fight a civil war over whether you should kneel when you pray and what kind of windows churches should have? Well, they sort of did, and that is a weird thing to happen, and Russell helps you understand how and why something like that could come to pass.

This is, however, not much of an introductory work. It’s clearly an argument pitched at people who are already familiar with the basic timeline of the period, the names of the key figures and groups, etc. I didn’t really fit the bill personally. But it turns out to be the case that Wikipedia is a wonderful force multiplier in terms of which books one is able to understand. I needed to repeatedly look up proper names and consult a timeline, but that was actually really easy to do.

Quicksilver

I’m not sure it made a ton of sense to launch my “read more books” resolution by reading something as long as Quicksilver, but it certainly did turn out to have the extension treatment of monetary policy themes I was looking for.

As is often the case with the later work of successful “genre” writers, I thought this got a bit annoyingly self-indulgent at times, with Stephenson sometimes eager to show off some bit of 17th Century trivia (like that to “realize” your investment comes from the name of the Spanish currency, the real) in a distracting way. But at other times it’s quite engaging and brilliant.

The message is that it’s wrong to think of modern liberal capitalist democracy as a natural state of things from which bad deviations occur due to blundering or malfeasance. Rather, the world we know is a deliberate, contingent, human creation whose key elements had to be thought up by particular people for particular reasons. People think of things like telescopes as invented, but forget that banking and religious tolerance and nation-states are also inventions.

Adapting The Great Gatsby

The idea of Baz Luhrmann doing The Great Gastsby in 3D is pretty groan inducing, but Ta-Nehisi Coates is right that the adapting the story to film is inherently a bit of a mess:

As in so many of the books I love, I found the plot in Gatsby to almost be beside the point. Whenever I see it translated to cinema, the film-maker inevitably crafts a story of doomed romance between Daisy and Gatsby. It’s obviously true that Gatsby holds some sort of flame for Daisy, but what makes the book run (for me) is the ambiguity of that flame. Does he really love her? Or is she just another possession signaling the climb up? I always felt that last point—the climb up—was much more important than the romance. What I remember about Gatsby is the unread books. His alleged love for Daisy barely registers for me.

I think it might be interesting to see a movie very loosely inspired by Gatsby, much like it’s interesting to see poems inspired by paintings. But every poem shouldn’t be made a painting. Art is not necessarily made better by literalization. I’m not convinced that The Great Gatsby works without those pockets of imagination which make the written word, still, a unique experience.

Indeed. So much of the joy exists in the layers of unreliable narration, and the details of the prose. You can put the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckelburg on the big screen, but you can’t capture the detail of Nick invariably referring to him with is formal title. Or consider: “some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away.” How is it that Nick know for certain that Eckelburg isn’t practicing in Queens any longer but is unsure as to whether he’s moved or died?

Anyways, there’s no point complaining about hypothetical adaptations, but my New Year’s Resolution is to read more books so I’ve got the books I’ve loved on the mind and this is definitely on the list.

Monetary Policy Literature

Given that You Shall Know Our Velocity is not, in fact, about the velocity of money, Ezra Klein asks for recommendations of literary treatments of monetary issues.

I haven’t actually kept up with his more recent work, but I think the earlier fiction of Neal Stephenson is intriguing in this regard. The key thematic elements are preoccupation with debt and hyperinflation in a way that I think is misguided in the present day but made sense in the early 1990s milieu. Interface, originally published under a pen name, is basically about the effort of a shadowy cabal to stage a coup aimed at preventing the US from defaulting on the national debt. Snow Crash gives the initial impression of a standard postapocalyptic “cyberpunk” scenario, but it swiftly becomes clear that there’s been no war here. Instead the back story has to be an effort by the US government to cope with a deficit crisis by printing money. His “Great Simoleon Caper” short story offers an alternative path to currency anarchy in which encryption and the digitization of money lead to a breakdown of the tax system.

Anyways, this is reminding me that I really liked these books and should probably read Anathem or the Baroque Cycle.

Country Driving

Everyone’s reading and writing about China these days, and the best book I’ve read on the subject is Peter Hessler’s Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory.

This is really three short books, one about driving the route of the Great Wall, one about life in a rapidly changing small town vaguely in the vicinity of Beijing, and one about a sweatshop boomtown. In an ideal world, there’d be a publication medium for novella-length nonfiction. But the second-best alternative would be for every writer with one great novella-length nonfiction book in him to do what Hessler did and turn out to have three such books, write them all in a row, and slap ‘em together. Hessler’s a New Yorker writer and it shows in the incredibly quality of the prose, the narrative structure, and the storytelling power. This is interesting, readable material. I laughed out loud. I felt suspense. I won’t say I cried, but the term “heartbreaking” comes to mind at several points. Even better, Hessler’s lived in China for a long time and speaks Chinese quite well so he can really operate like a proper reporter and not need to see things through a screen of mistranslation and interpretation.

But best of all from the point of view of this cold-hearted rationalist, is that while this is a book of reportage rather than analysis, there is real anecdotal punch here. I feel like you really do learn something about the small-scale foundations of China’s economic transformation and you get a sense of where the limits might be. Recommended without preconditions, even if you’re not particularly interested in the subject but just looking for a good read.

Zombie Economics

Over the weekend I finished John Quiggin’s entertaining and accessible Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us. To switch undead metaphors a bit, the conceit of the book is that the Panic of 2008 ought to be the stake through the heart of what Quiggin calls the “market liberal” paradigm that’s prevailed since stagflation killed the postwar Keynesian consensus.

To me the most interesting thing about the book is that even though the rhetoric, tone, and ideological self-positioning are 180 degrees away from Amar Bhidé’s book the proposals on bank regulation are literally identical. The same in every way. So hopefully people who enjoy valorizing businessmen and talking about how capitalism is awesome will read Bhidé’s book while people who enjoy afflicting the comfortable and talking about the need to tame markets will read Quiggin’s book. I’ll cross my fingers and hope that Dodd-Frank and Basle III will be all we need to prevent a new financial panic, but realistically I think more far-reaching reforms will be needed and these books point the way.

On the other side of the spectrum, the most provocative argument Quiggin offers is that the contemporary world massively overrates the case for privatization of “natural monopolies” and underrates the case for new public investments. I wish this chapter had been a whole book of its own, since it’s extremely thought-provoking but I have a lot of questions about the argument. For example, instead of a case for a small number of state-owned enterprises coexisting alongside private ones, is this possibly a case for sovereign wealth funds and the state acting as a passive investor in a wide range of firms?

Big picture, when the crisis first hit I know a lot of people on the left were excited about the prospect of it discrediting the right. Now heading into the midterms, the momentum has shifted to the idea that somehow the recession may discredit the welfare state. I think if you look back to the prolonged crisis of the seventies you see that this kind of interpretative pendulum can swing around quite a bit, and Quiggin’s argument is an important intervention in recapturing the narrative.

The Next Boom

Patrick Doherty and Christopher Leinberger have a great piece in the Washington Monthly about the potentially bright future for walkable urban real estate development. They observe that population growth plus the declining proportion of Americans who have kids at home plus shifting preferences among young people (driven in part by declining crime rates, etc.) are creating a boom in demand for walkable transit-accessible neighborhoods:

Ten years ago, the highest property values per square foot in the Washington, D.C., metro area were in car-dependent suburbs like Great Falls, Virginia. Today, walkable city neighborhoods like Dupont Circle command the highest per-square-foot prices, followed by dense suburban neighborhoods near subway stops in places like Bethesda, Maryland, and Arlington, Virginia. Similarly, in Denver, property values in the high-end car-dependent suburb of Highland Ranch are now lower than those in the redeveloped LoDo neighborhood near downtown. These trend lines have been evident in many cities for a number of years; at some point during the last decade, the lines crossed. The last time the lines crossed was in the 1960s—and they were heading the opposite direction.

In principle, these shifts in demand should lead to a large quantity of economic activity in the field of “retrofitting” existing neighborhoods with more robust transit links and more intensive development. But:

Today, even though consumer preferences have changed, most of the old rules and subsidies remain in place. For instance, federal transportation funding formulas, combined with the old-school thinking of many state departments of transportation, continue to favor the building of new roads and widening of highways—infrastructure that supports low-density, car-dependent development—over public transit systems that are the foundation for most compact, walkable neighborhoods. When developers do propose to build denser projects, with narrower streets and apartments above retail space, they often run up against zoning codes that make such building illegal. Consequently, few compact, walkable neighborhoods have been built relative to demand, and real estate prices in them have often been bid up to astronomical heights. This gives the impression that such neighborhoods are only popular with the affluent, when in fact millions of middle-class Americans would likely jump at the opportunity to live in them.

As an analyst of public policy issues, I certainly hope this turns around and anyone who reads this blog will know I’m doing my best to persuade people to rethink this. As a condo owner in a very new building in a newly developing dense walkable neighborhood (as in it was literally vacant lots, rather than a classic gentrification scenario) who reads his building email list, I’m a bit skeptical that change is going to happen. Even people who are eager to move to denser urban neighborhoods are almost shockingly hostile to the idea of anything in the existing neighborhood being redeveloped in a denser way. So it seems to me that any change that happens, if it does happen, will have to take place on a longer time horizon than Doherty and Leinberger seem to have in mind since there’s a lot of persuasion work that has to be done.

But speaking of persuasion, Leinberger’s short book The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream did a lot to change my thinking about this topic and it’s highly recommended.

The Man in the High Castle

Hendrik Herzberg brings us the excellent news that Philip K Dick’s best book, The Man in the High Castle, is getting a screen adaptation. As he says, it’s very exciting to find out this is being done as a miniseries by the BBC rather than as a Hollywood movie. And I think it’s telling that these days it actually makes me sad when I hear about a book I love being adapted for the big screen—television as done by HBO, Showtime, and the BBC is where it’s at in terms of drama nowadays.

The book, if you haven’t read it, is an alternate history set in the then-present of the 1960s. North America is a continent divided between Japanese and German spheres of interest and Cold War tensions are heating up, and outside the German sphere there’s growing interest in an alternate history novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, about a world in which FDR escaped assassination and the Allies won the war.

As a pure exercise in counterfactual history it doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense (think about the logistics of a German invasion and conquest of North America), but the characters and the metafictional elements are fantastic and the effort to envision a world in which evil triumphs is quite successful.

Where Good Ideas Come From

Looks like while I was gone Ezra Klein built a column around Steven Johnson’s very readable new book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, so he probably doesn’t need more progressive blogger press. Nevertheless, I read it on the trip back from Israel and it’s good.

The core argument is that the “lone genius thinks for a while and comes up with brilliant breakthrough” model of innovation is really quite rare. In practice, innovation is a collaborative process and the most innovative environments are networked environments.

I find the book persuasive, but it’s a difficult thesis to really prove if only because it’s hard to assemble a really rigorous definition of “innovation” or a clear standard for which innovations are the important ones. The book, for example, ends up tending to focus on a certain kind of technical innovation—air conditioning, the Internet, the printing press, the iPad—but this is hardly the only kind of innovation. Artistic and cultural innovation get mentioned. But probably the hardest kind of innovation to pin down is organizational innovation. As I understand it, Ikea didn’t really invent anything in the Thomas Edison sense. Certainly they didn’t invent the idea of sofas or particleboard. Nor did they come up with an original aesthetic—their brand of Scandinavian modernism is a straight ripoff. But the overall store concept is both quite innovative and quite distinctive. Similarly, Barnes & Noble didn’t invent the bookstore, the idea of a chain, the idea of a big box store, the idea of discounting, or the idea of selling coffee. But “let’s sell books in a chain of big box stores that heavily discount a select set of privileged new releases and also sell coffee” transformed the book industry until Amazon came along and transformed it again.

I think these kind of innovations actually provide tons of really strong examples for Johnson’s case so it’s too bad he didn’t discuss them. At the end of the day, technical innovations don’t do all that much to drive improvements in human welfare unless they’re matched with organizational innovations. How do we apply this new technology to do things better? Many of our pressing problems in health care and education ultimately amount to asking why there’s so little organizational innovation in these fields, creating a situation where technical innovation doesn’t increase productivity.

Shorter Books

Via Henry Farrell, some excellent news from the publishing industry:

Amazon is rolling out a separate section of its Kindle store meant for shorter content—meatier than long-form journalism, but shorter than a typical book. Called “Kindle Singles,” the content will be distributed like other Kindle books but will likely fall between 10,000 and 30,000 words, or the equivalent of a few chapters from a novel. The company believes that some of the best ideas don’t need to be stretched to more than 50,000 words in order to get in front of readers, nor do they need to be chopped down to the length of a magazine article. “Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” Amazon’s VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti said in a statement.

I think that’s a great idea. Particular in the kind of political/policy space I work in, I think we see a ton of good magazine articles that outline ideas worth expanding on that get turned into books that are really quite a bit longer than they need to be. But conventions about content-length—the column, the magazine article, the book—are driven by the economics of printing and distributing bundles of ink-covered paper rather than considerations about the content itself. One of the great things about blogging is that it’s let people become more flexible about item-length when it comes to shorter kinds of things. Now it looks like the rise of e-reader technology will drive a similar trend toward flexibility at the longer end, which I think will be a big win for non-fiction writers and readers.

The Problem With Great Books

Jumping off my discussion of reading about Hayek rather than reading Hayek, Jonathan Bernstein inquires into the larger genre of “terribly written great books.”

My favorite is probably Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power. Just awful. The lowlight? The concepts are terrific, but he gives them nonintuitive, confused names (e.g. “vantage points”). Neustadt says that presidential power is about persuasion, but he doesn’t mean the kind of persuasion in which you start out thinking X and, through clever arguments, Barack Obama gets you to think Y; he means either that or bargaining or threats or bringing pressure of various kinds. But he doesn’t really explain that. Even worse, in each of the updates he published over the years, he added in new terminologies, ignoring the old ones. The ideas are hard enough for people to accept, since they clash so strongly with the way high schools and reporters teach about the presidency, but getting through the murky prose makes it even worse.

Other nominations?

I actually think this is a pretty general problem with “great books,” for reasons that are explained in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which is, itself, a great book that suffers from the very same problem. Obviously part of the issue is simply that there’s no guarantee that conceptual innovators will be good writers. But the deeper Kuhnian issue is that great game-changing thinkers end up altering the conceptual terrain in a way that renders their original works obsolete-sounding and confusing. Meanwhile, a whole discipline grows up in the shadow of the great book and its practitioners develop a nice clear reconstruction of the framework.

But the availability of these clear reconstructions only makes the original look even worse. If that‘s what he meant, then we didn’t he just say that!

This winds up being very convenient for the college professors of the world. It’s much easier to understand Kuhn’s theory by having Michael Rescorla explain it to you (or as the case may be, to me) than to just read the book on your own. And now thanks to the glories of the Internet, I’ve gotten Brad DeLong’s explanation of the Keynesian account of the Great Depression which was much, much clearer to me than trying to read Keynes. And over the past year I think Jonathan Bernstein has done enough to explain Neustadt’s account of presidential power that I’m not even slightly tempted to read his book.

That’s not to say you should never read books. I like books (here’s my influential books list). And lots of very good books just aren’t “great books” in that same conceptual innovator sense. Some books are mind-blowingly powerful narratives. And I think it’s worth wrestling with some major works on your own for character-building reasons. And a few great thinkers are also really good prose stylists. But in many ways, I think the “poorly written great book” is the rule rather than the exception.

Fairness, Opportunity, and Redistribution

Jon Chait’s review of Arthur Brooks’ The Battle is focused elsewhere, but contains an interesting digression into the question of equality of opportunity:

In opposition to the punitive leveling agenda of the 30 percent coalition, Brooks puts forward what he calls the “moral case” for free enterprise. This case rests upon “equality of opportunity.” Brooks is unequivocal about the centrality of equality of opportunity to his argument. “As long as everyone has the same opportunities,” he argues, “the free enterprise movement should have no qualms about trumpeting our values as deeply American and profoundly fair.”

As Chait observes, if you take the idea of equality of opportunity really seriously you end up with an incredibly radical agenda:

Equality of opportunity is an extremely radical, even utopian proposition. The Battle betrays no signs whatsoever of having considered what equality of opportunity would mean. It is, alas, a nearly impossible ideal to fulfill, since one of the most valued ways for parents to spend their wealth is to impart greater opportunity to their children. Affluent parents can pass on money or assets to their children. They can finance private education; subsidize internships, travel, or other valuable opportunities; raise their children in safe communities that help impart middle-class values; or simply offer them stable two-parent families. All these things create massive inequality of opportunity.

Indeed, it’s been generally acknowledged by everyone from Robert Nozick to John Rawls that achieving this kind of robust form of equality of opportunity would be incompatible with any kind of recognizable form of liberty. By contrast, I think Plato seriously entertained the idea of abolishing the family and raising children in giant collective houses, a notion that I believe also blossomed a bit in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In other words, this is a goofy kind of intellectual trap that less-thoughtful rightwingers fall into. In an attempt to block the legitimacy of redistributive tax-and-transfer schemes they end up authorizing massively more intrusive government.

For whatever it’s worth, my view is that the best argument for redistribution and the best argument for free enterprise are both grounded in basic utilitarian thinking. If there’s a guy on the sidewalk dying of Anaphylactic shock and you’re standing next to him with an epi pen talking about your right to hang onto it, then the right thing for me to do is punch you in the face, take the pen, and save the guy’s life. That’s a welfare-enhancing transfer of resources from someone who doesn’t really need it to someone who needs it much more. Redistribution!

But in general more welfare-enhancing resources exist if we have a system of well-defined property rights and free market exchange. So we have a basically capitalist system full of private businesses and private property not because of the metaphysics of “fairness” but because it works well. And then you also have a certain amount of regulation of externalities, provision of public goods, and welfare-enhancing redistribution. All because the system works better with that stuff, too. And people argument about how much of that stuff we need and how it should be organized. Of course not everyone agrees with me. Indeed, probably most people would disagree if you asked them. But this is the direction the world is heading in and we’re better off for it.

Prohibition and Progressive Reform

I didn’t fall in love with Boardwalk Empire, but it did persuade me to start reading Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. So far, I’m still in the “rise” part where his narrative makes the point that even though we know Prohibition was doomed to fail, its proponents were in many ways on the right side of history:

[Frances] Willard’s second principle, which blossomed as her fame and influence grew, was “Do Everything.” Perceiving that the energies of the [Women's Christian Temperance Union] could be harnessed for broader purposes, Willard urged her followers to agitate for a set of goals that stretched far beyond the liquor issue but harmonized with the effort to improve the lives of others. Her “Protestant nuns” (as Willard sometimes called her followers) campaigned for suffrage, of course, but also for prison reform, free kindergartens, and vocational schools. After reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards in 1899, Willard declared herself a “Christian socialist” and broadened the WCTU’s agenda once again, agitating for the eight-hour day, workers’ rights, and government ownership of utilities, railroads, factories and (she was nothing if not eclectic) theaters. Along the way she took up the causes of vegetarianism, cremation, less restrictive women’s clothing, and something she called “the White Life for Two”—a program “cloaked in euphemism,” wrote Catherine Gilbert Murdock in Domesticating Drink, that “endorsed alcohol-free, tobacco-free, lust-free marriages.”

As exceptional as Willard was, her determination to connect Prohibition to other reforms was neither original with her nor uncommon. In its first national campaign, in 1872, the Prohibition Party endorsed universal suffrage, public education, and the elimination of the electoral college, and would soon take up a range of issues reaching from federal control of interstate commerce to forest conservation. Dio Lewis was a harvesting machine of causes and campaigns. At the moment he took the abstinence pledge in 1845, Frederick Douglass had said, “we could but make the world sober, we would have no slavery,” partly because “all great reforms go together.”

I think this is a great illustration of what’s wrong with ideological moderation as conventionally implemented. It’s tempting to look at the agitators for reform and their opponents and sort of heuristically reason that the truth must be somewhere in between. But a 21st century person looking back on the 19th century reform agenda sees a hodge-podge of things they were totally right about, things that look totally eccentric in retrospect, and ideas that would come to be discredited.

Winner Take All Politics

I’ve been meaning all week to write something up about Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class but I’ve had difficulty knowing what to say. It’s received a level of praise from people I respect like Kevin Drum, Bob Kuttner, James Fallows, and E.J. Dionne that strikes me as wildly overstated but it’s also not by any means a bad book or something worthy of a “takedown.” But even though I think it’s not as great as its biggest fans say, it is recommended to those interested in the debate over U.S. economic policy and especially to anyone who hasn’t already read Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal or Larry Bartels’ excellent Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.

Either way, it’s a great review of the state-of-the-art thinking on the scope of the inequality explosion and I think it correctly frames this as a non-inevitable consequence of policy decisions where “don’t do anything” counts as a policy decision.

But I think the book has a crucial flaw. The implicit argument of the book is that stagnating middle class wages are in some sense causally linked to skyrocketing high-end inequality. But in order to demonstrate the political origins of skyrocketing high-end inequality, they rely on international comparative data which shows it hasn’t really happened in non-Anglophone countries. But when discussing wage stagnation in the United States, they fail to attend to the fact that this has happened outside the Anglosphere. This suggests the conclusion that these are, in fact, separate phenomena. On the one hand, across the developed world there was a slowdown in growth and wages. On the other hand, there was an explosion in the earnings of finance types in the more deregulated Anglophone countries. This means that if there’s a policy problem to which super-inequality is tightly linked it’s probably the problem of macroeconomic stability—financial crises and panics—rather than the problem of middle-class wage stagnation.

Last, Hacker & Pierson diagnose the political problem as in part driven by a waning level of interest among leftwingers in income inequality as the central political problem. I am, in that case, part of the problem. In broad terms, I’m more much more worried about the interrelated issues of peace, trade, migration, climate change, third world economic development, and the international spread of liberalism than about the problems Hacker & Pierson are writing about.

Or to look at it in historical terms, I think if you looked at the United States in 1970 and said “raising the relative social status of women and the range of opportunities available to them is a higher priority than increasing the quantity of consumer goods available to the typical middle class family” I don’t think that would be an erroneous judgment. And guess what? Since 1970 the range of opportunities available to women, and their social status relative to men, has gone way up. Between feminism in the developed world over the past 40 years, the enormous economic progress in the developing world over the past 30 years, and the massive reduction in the risk of global nuclear annihilation I have a difficult time with the idea of recent history as a big political sob story. That’s not to say this isn’t a good book, or that these aren’t interesting and important issues, but I think progressives should resist the idea that the rise of postmaterial politics is a right-wing triumph rather than a correct response to changing conditions.

The Honor Code

Kwame Anthony Appiah taught the introduction to philosophy class I took the fall of my freshman year, and it was sufficiently impressive that I signed on to major in it. I followed that up with a seminar he taught, and he remains one of the most brilliant and learned people I’ve ever encountered. So his work is always recommended here, and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen is no exception. This is a book not about how people win ethical arguments, but about how people cause ethical practice to change. He observes that it was generally acknowledged that all the good arguments were on the side of anti-dueling in England quite a bit before dueling died out and asks how it that a practice can persist under those circumstances and what brings it to an end.

His answer, which has to do with honor, entails sort of throwing caution (and social scientific validity to the wind) but is monstrously interesting and the exact reverse of all the stereotypes of academic overspecialization and who-cares-ism.

Excerpt here, NPR segment here. This is not a work of “real” philosophy, but if you want an introduction to the disciplined as practiced in the contemporary United States Appiah’s Thinking It Through is your best bet and he also does work of the “this is boring and weird” variety.