Category: History
My excellent Conversation with Brian Winter
Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
It’s not just the churrasco that made him fall in love with Brazil. Brian Winter has been studying and writing about Latin America for over 20 years. He’s been tracking the struggles and triumphs of the region as it’s dealt with decades of coups, violence, and shifting economics. His work offers a nuanced perspective on Latin America’s persistent challenges and remarkable resilience.
Together Brian and Tyler discuss the politics and economics of nearly every country from the equator down. They cover the future of migration into Brazil, what it’s doing right in agriculture, the cultural shift in race politics, crime in Rio and São Paulo, the effectiveness and future consequences of Bukele’s police state in El Salvador, the economic growth of Colombia despite continued violence, the prevalence of startups and psychoanalysis in Argentina, Uruguay’s reduction in poverty levels, the beautiful ugliness of Sao Paulo, where Brian will explore next, and more.
And here is one excerpt;
COWEN: What’s the economic geography of Brazil going to look like? All the wealth near Mato Grosso and the north just very, very poor? Or the north empties out? How’s that going to work? There used to be some modest degree of balance.
WINTER: That’s true. Most of the population in Brazil and the economic center, for sure, was in the southeast. That means, really, São Paulo state, which is about a quarter of Brazil’s population but roughly a third of its GDP. Rio as well, and the state of Minas Gerais, which has a name that tells its history. That means “general mines” in Portuguese. That’s the area where a lot of the gold came out of in the 18th and 19th centuries. That’s gone now, so it’s not as much of an economic pull.
You’re right, Tyler, though, that a lot of the real boom right now, the action, is in places like Mato Grosso, which is in the region of Brazil called the Central West. That’s soy country. I’m from Texas, and Mato Grosso is virtually indistinguishable from Texas these days. It’s hot. It’s flat. The crop, like I said, is soy. There’s cattle ranching as well.
Even the music — Brazil, as others have noted, has gone from being the country of bossa nova and the samba in the 1970s to being the country of sertanejo today. Sertanejo is a Brazilian cousin of country music with accordions, but it’s sung by people — men mostly — in jeans, big belt buckles, and cowboy hats. They’re importing that — not only that economic model but that lifestyle as well.
COWEN: What is the great Brazilian music of today? MPB is dead, right? So, what should someone listen to?
Recommended, interesting throughout.
30th anniversary of the Brazilian real
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt, starting with the reality of Brazilian hyperinflation in the early 1990s:
Fortunately, economists and other reformers came to the rescue and designed an effective plan for currency stabilization. Brazil first created a virtual currency, called the URV, and switched contracts and prices to the new accounting unit. Next, a new currency, the real, was introduced as equal in value to the URV and roughly equal to the US dollar. That created the prospect of a new and more stable currency.
The crucial part of the reforms was a credible plan for fiscal stability. Brazil wasn’t experiencing hyperinflation for no reason — rather, the freshly printed money was needed to make good on promised government expenditures. So to make the numbers add up without hyperinflation, the Brazilian government carried out some budget cuts, privatized some assets, transferred some functions to state and local governments, and made some constitutional and legislative pledges in the direction of a balanced budget…
Yet the ending to this story is by no means entirely happy. For several years Brazil’s economy has been growing below 1%, though it has recently climbed above 2%. The country has bountiful natural resources, plenty of human talent, some excellent companies and universities, and no natural geopolitical enemies. Still, its economic growth has been mediocre. Brazil ought to be able to achieve annual growth of 4% to 6%.
The causes of this disappointing growth are varied and subject to dispute. Possible culprits include corruption, excess protectionism, an economy too dependent on natural resources, an unreliable education system and, perhaps, a loss of economic dynamism. In the golden years of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Brazil had very high growth rates, hitting 14% in 1973, so extremely good performance is possible.
Worth a ponder.
Alice Evans on female labor force participation and appreciation of female talent
Abhay Aneja and colleagues reveal that daughters of civil servants who were more exposed to female co-workers during WWI were significantly more likely to work. For each standard deviation increase in exposure to female co-workers, the gender gap in labor force participation for children narrowed by over 4 percentage points. This represents a 9% decline in the average labor force participation gap. Importantly, these effects were
- Driven by increased labor force participation of daughters (sons are unaffected)
- Strongest for children who, at the time of exposure, were teenagers
- Present even for children who moved away from their parents’ original city
Here is the full post.
Large Firms in the South Korean Growth Miracle
We quantify the contribution of the largest firms to South Korea’s economic performance over the period 1972-2011. Using firm-level historical data, we document a novel fact: firm concentration rose substantially during the growth miracle period. To understand whether rising concentration contributed positively or negatively to South Korean real income, we build a quantitative heterogeneous firm small open economy model. Our framework accommodates a variety of potential causes and consequences of changing firm concentration: productivity, distortions, selection into exporting, scale economies, and oligopolistic and oligopsonistic market power in domestic goods and labor markets. The model is implemented directly on the firm-level data and inverted to recover the drivers of concentration. We find that most of the differential performance of the top firms is attributable to higher productivity growth rather than differential distortions. Exceptional performance of the top 3 firms within each sector relative to the average firms contributed 15% to the 2011 real GDP and 4% to the net present value of welfare over the period 1972-2011. Thus, the largest Korean firms were superstars rather than supervillains.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Jaedo Choi, Andrei A. Levchenko, Dimitrije Ruzic, and Younghun Shim.
How Many Workers Did It Take to Build the Great Pyramid of Giza?
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built circa 2600 BC and was the world’s tallest structure for nearly 4000 years. It consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks with a weight on the order of 6-7 million tons. How many people did it take to construct the Great Pyramid? Vaclav Smil in Numbers Don’t Lie gives an interesting method of calculation:
The Great Pyramid’s potential energy (what is required to lift the mass above ground level) is about 2.4 trillion joules. Calculating this is fairly easy: it is simply the product of the acceleration due to gravity, the pyramid’s mass, and its center of mass (a quarter of its height)…I am assuming a mean of 2.6 tons per cubic meter and hence a total mass of about 6.75 million tons.
People are able to convert about 20 percent of food energy into useful work, and for hard-working men that amounts to about 440 kilojoules a day. Lifting the stones would thus require about 5.5 million labor days (2.4 trillion/44000), or about 275,000 days a year during [a] 20 year period, and about 900 people could deliver that by working 10 hours a day for 300 days a year. A similar number might be needed to emplace the stones in the rising structure and then smooth the cladding blocks…And in order to cut 2.6 million cubic meters of stone in 20 years, the project would have required about 1,500 quarrymen working 300 days per year and producing 0.25 cubic meters of stone per capita…the grand total would then be some 3,300 workers. Even if we were to double that in order to account for designers, organizers and overseers etc. etc….the total would be still fewer than 7,000 workers.
…During the time of the pyramid’s construction, the total population of Egypt was 1.5-1.6 million people, and hence the deployed force of less than 10,000 would not have amounted to any extraordinary imposition on the country’s economy.
I was surprised at the low number and pleased at the unusual method of calculation. Archeological evidence from the nearby worker’s village suggests 4,000-5,000 on site workers, not including the quarrymen, transporters and designers and support staff. Thus, Smil’s calculation looks very good.
What other unusual calculations do you know?
*Emergency Money*
The author is Tom Wilkinson, and the subtitle is Notgeld in the Image Economy of the German Inflation, 1914-1923. Notgeld, or emergency money, typically was privately issued to make up for the deficiencies of government money during that period.
It is hard to think of a book that is more “for me.” The book covers history, monetary economics, private currency issuance, and the artistic renderings put on the private notes. You can see plenty of desperation in those visuals, and clearly the 19th century seems like a long time ago. I read this one right away upon arrival.
You can buy it here. Here is a good short piece on the art.
Deep roots, the persistent legacy of slavery on free labor markets
To engage with the large literature on the economic effects of slavery, we use antebellum census data to test for statistical differences at the 1860 free-slave border. We find evidence of lower population density, less intensive land use, and lower farm values on the slave side. Half of the border region was half underutilized. This does not support the view that abolition was a costly constraint for landowners. Indeed, the lower demand for similar, yet cheaper, land presents a different puzzle: why wouldn’t the yeomen farmers cross the border to fill up empty land in slave states, as was happening in the free states of the Old Northwest? On this point, we find evidence of higher wages on the slave side, indicating an aversion of free labor to working in a slave society. This evidence of systemically lower economic performance in slavery-legal areas suggests that the earlier literature on the profitability of plantations was misplaced, or at least incomplete.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Hoyt Bleakley and Paul Rhode.
The Gary Becker Papers
The Gary Becker Papers (117.42 linear feet, 223 boxes) are now open at the University of Chicago:
The collection documents much of Gary Becker’s intellectual history. One of his autobiographical essays, “A Personal Statement About My Intellectual Development” (see Box 120, Folder 10 and Box 189, Folder 1), traces his academic career from his youth to his origins as a student at Princeton University, to his graduate student years and professorship at the University of Chicago, and his extra collegial engagement on corporate advisory boards, political participation, and governmental councils. The essay could have been written based on some of the records collected here. The collection documents an intellectual trajectory primarily through intellectual productions, research files, and communications. His approach to the research and writing, his publishing history, his engagement with others in the field of economics and other individuals in public service and global politics are contained here. Though the collection primarily concerns his professional life, there is also mention of his relationship with Guity Nashat, his wife, as they traveled together to the many conferences and events in the United States and abroad, and other incidents of his life for a minor study or treatment of his biography.
The collection materials include Becker’s handwritten and printed copies of his scholarship, including notes (and bibliographic cards), papers (and drafts), diagrams and charts, data sheets, correspondence, periodical reprints, magazines, newspapers and clippings, grant documents, reports, referee files, course and instructional materials, photographs, VHS tapes, DVD’s, and related ephemera.
Hat tip: Peter Istzin.
*The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War*
That is the new book by Nick Lloyd, it will be making my best non-fiction of the year list. Reviews are very strong, and you can either pre-order and wait, or order it from the UK, or buy it in the excellent Hedengrens bookshop in Stockholm. Here is one short bit:
As always with the Russian army, squabbles between the generals quickly surfaced.
A bit later:
This lack of cooperation within the Russian high command would seriously undermine its operations throughout the war, preventing Russia from bringing all her strength to bear and forcing her commanders to spend precious time bickering amongst themselves.
About one-third of the way through the text of the book:
Tsar Nicholas II had come to a momentous decision: to take direct command of Russia’s armies.
How it started….how it’s going…
The Pentagon’s Anti-Vax Campaign
During the pandemic it was common for many Americans to discount or even disparage the Chinese vaccines. In fact, the Chinese vaccines such as Coronavac/Sinovac were made quickly and in large quantities and they were effective. The Chinese vaccines saved millions of lives. The vaccine portfolio model that the AHT team produced, as well as common sense, suggested the value of having a diversified portfolio. That’s why we recommended and I advocated for including a deactivated vaccine in the Operation Warp Speed mix or barring that for making an advance deal on vaccine capacity with China. At the time, I assumed that the disparaging of Chinese vaccines was simply an issue of national pride or bravado during a time of fear. But it turns out that in other countries, the Pentagon ran a disinformation campaign against the Chinese vaccines.
Reuters: At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign.
… Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.
…To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.
“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
Frankly, this is sickening. The Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign has undermined U.S. credibility on the global stage and eroded trust in American institutions, and it will complicate future public health efforts. US intelligence agencies should be banned from interfering with or using public health as a front.
Moreover, there was a better model. It’s often forgotten but the elimination of smallpox from the planet, one of humanities greatest feats, was a global effort spearheaded by the United States and….the Soviet Union.
…even while engaged in a pitched battle for influence across the globe, the Soviet Union and the United States were able to harness their domestic and geopolitical self-interests and their mutual interest in using science and technology to advance human development and produce a remarkable public health achievement.
We could have taken a similar approach with China during the COVID pandemic.
More generally, we face global challenges, from pandemics to climate change to artificial intelligence. Addressing these challenges will require strategic international cooperation. This isn’t about idealism; it’s about escaping the prisoner’s dilemma. We can’t let small groups with narrow agendas and parochial visions undermine collaborations essential for our interests and security in an interconnected world.
*The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned*
By John Strausbaugh, an excellent book. Here is one good passage of many:
Putting dogs on top of rockets was nothing new. Since so little was known about the effects that blasting off in a rocket might have on th ehuman body and brain — the g-force of acceleration, the disorientation of weightlessness, the impact of radiation, the g-force of deceleration — the Soviets and the Americans both had been using various species of animals to test conditions since the 1940s. The Americans started sending up fruit flies aboard their White Sands V-2s in 1947. An anesthetized rhesus monkey they named Albert II…went up eighty-three miles in a V-2 in 1949. Unfortunately, his parachute failed to oepn on reentry and he was smashed to death on impact with the ground. The Americans continued to send up primates in the 1940s and 1950s. Something like two-thirds of them died. They used many other species as well, maybe the oddest of which was black bears, who were strapped into a rocket-powered sled at a facility with the deceptively sweet name the Daisy Track to test the physical effects of ultra-rapid acceleration and deceleration.
Recommended.
Where are the female composers?
Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Frederic Chopin are household names, but few will recognize Francesca Caccini, Elisabeth Lutyens or Amy M. Beach, who are among the top-10 female composers of all time. Why are female composers overshadowed by their male counterparts? Using novel data on over 17,000 composers who lived from the sixth to the twentieth centuries, we conduct the first quantitative exploration of the gender gap among classical composers. We use the length of a composer’s biographical entry in Grove Music Online to measure composer prominence, and shed light on the determinants of the gender gap with a focus on the development of composers’ human capital through families, teachers, and institutionalized music education. The evidence suggests that parental musical background matters for composers’ prominence, that the effects of teachers vary by the gender of the composer but the effects of parents do not, and while musician mothers and female teachers are important, they do not narrow the gender gap in composer prominence. We also find that the institutionalization of music education in conservatories increases the relative prominence of female composers.
That is from a new research paper by Karol Jan Borowiecki, Martin Hørlyk Kristensen, and Marc T. Law, via K.
My Conversation with Velina Tchakarova
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Founder of the consultancy FACE, Velina is a geopolitical strategist guiding businesses and organizations to anticipate the outcomes of global conflicts, shifting alliances, and bleeding edge technologies on the world stage.
In a globe-trotting conversation, Tyler and Velina start in the Balkans and then head to Russia, China, North Korea, and finally circle back to Putin’s interest in the Baltics. She gives her take on whether the Balkan Wars still matter today, the future of Bulgarian nationalism, what predicts which Eastern European countries will remain closer to Russia, why China will not attack Taiwan, Putin’s next move after Ukraine, where a nuclear weapon is most likely to be used next, how she sources intel, her unique approach to scenario-planning, and more.
Here is one excerpt on a matter of great importance:
COWEN: Maybe we’ll come back to Bulgaria, but let me try some questions about the broader world. Why is it you think China will not attack Taiwan? They claim it as theirs, and arguably, in five to ten years, they’ll be able to neutralize our submarine advantage from the US with underwater drones and surveillance of our submarine presence. At that point, why don’t they just move on Taiwan and try to take it?
TCHAKAROVA: Well, I do understand that there is a lot of analysis coming out right now, especially on behalf of the military experts, not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world, pointing to this realistic scenario that we may see a military attack by China on Taiwan not later than 2027. And why 2027? Because it is being anticipated as the year when China will be able to catch up militarily with the United States.
I do not share this assessment. I just don’t see why China will have to take such a big risk in achieving something that it can achieve in a much smarter and more efficient way. What do I mean by that? I call this approach “death by a thousand cuts.” That would mean that China could spend a little bit longer in a slow but steady political, social, economic, and societal penetration of Taiwan. We could argue it’s the old Soviet playbook. It could be done in a more subtle way, using plausible deniability.
Taiwan is still the most successful democracy in the Indo-Pacific. That means, also, it is vulnerable to this kind of penetration, where you can practically use agents provocateurs on the ground. You can buy up a lot of institutional or individual players. You can start doing all this subversion process in a longer timeframe, but it could bring about bigger success than actually risking military intervention, which is not giving you, I would say, even a 50–50 chance of success.
The terrain of Taiwan, if we compare it with the most sophisticated war that’s going on right now, is much more difficult. You have a very, very limited window to attack. In the case of Taiwan, this window of opportunity is probably limited only to two periods in the whole year, which, of course, is also known by everyone in the region. That particularly means the defense of Taiwan. You have a window of opportunity in April and then in October, so you cannot attack at any time in the year.
It is a sophisticated military attack that cannot be conducted on the whole of the island. Even though China is catching up militarily right now, I think that the mindset of this Chinese leadership — the way the Chinese leadership is actually conducting strategy — does contradict such risky endeavor, again because time is on China’s side. China only needs to really prepare this sum of minor actions in a longer period of time. At least, this is what I would actually do as a strategist, which would promise a much better percentage of success than, like I said, an adventurous military attack.
Now, we may argue that under unanticipated circumstances for the political leadership — think of a situation where the political stability in China is shaken, where the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, is somehow put into a corner to take a very, let’s say, ad hoc decision on the matter because of certain circles of the hawks, of the military hawks. Of course, we have this possibility as well. It could be a black swan event, something that has happened in China, and this makes him take this decision in order to draw the attention away from internal problems.
Foreign policy adventures are always gathering public support. It’s not 100 percent to be excluded, but in my scenario, I would actually point to, as I explained, this death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach rather than a military attack on Taiwan.
COWEN: Are we now in a world where the laws of war are basically obsolete?
It is worth repeating that issues of foreign policy are very much the most important issues. And here is Velina on Twitter.
South Africa and its history
Almost three years earlier, a sombre Paul Kruger had warned that Britain would find conquering the Boer states no easy matter. In the sense that they were certainly not gained on the cheap, this was an accurate judgment. By the end of the war, the British had been obliged to mobilise almost 450 000 imperial solders to defeat Boer forces, which had been able to field roughly 80 000 combatants at most. Their extended resistance turned London’s South African campaign into the largest and most costly war fought by the British between 1815 and 1914. This was a colonial war which Britain’s Treasury estimated in September 1899 would require the despatch of at most 75 000 troops and funding of about £10 million for a campaign of two to three months. By the time the conflict finally ended, that cost had risen to £217 million. What this balance sheet reflected was the enormous military investment that the British Empire required to defeat two of the world’s smallest agrarian states.
That is from New History of South Africa, by Hermann Giliomee, Bernard Mbenga, and Bill Nasson, a very excellent book. I found it to be one of the best single-volume histories of any country I have read. The other South Africa book I found especially helpful was Understanding South Africa, by Carien du Plessis and Martin Plaut. One of the best things about travel is you understand a country — through books — much better than before you went there. Everything is more vivid, and you retain much more of it.
*Cosmic Connections*
The author is Charles Taylor (yes, the Charles Taylor) and the subtitle is Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. This book is a very good introduction to romanticism, and also to the poetry of romanticism, noting that its degree of originality may depend on how much you already know. I liked the chapters on Rilke and Mallarme best, here is one excerpt:
It follows that for Rilke, our full capacity to Praise can only be realized if we take account of the standpoint of the dead. The medium of Preisen is Gesang [song]. thus the voice which most fully carries this song would have to be that of the gold Orpheus, who moves in both realms, that of the living and that of the dead.
And the sonnet is the medium. As its name suggests, it is a poetic form which asks to be heard, and not only read on the page. These two modes of reception are essential to all poetry, but in the sonnet the musical dimension becomes the most important avenue to the message.
So a praise-song from both sides, that of the dead, as well as the living. They call on Orpheus, the singer-god who moves between the two realms. Hence the Sonnets to Orpheus.
I am very glad to see that Taylor is still at it, and 640 pp. at that. Furthermore, this book is (unintentionally?) a good means for thinking about just how much deculturation has taken place.