Henderson and Gochenour on Presidential Greatness

David Henderson and Zac Gochenour have a new paper on the assessment of presidential "greatness" by historians. David discusses it here, and sociologist Fabio Rojas discusses it here. Zac if you have a blog and I'm missing your discussion, let me know. Since two of my favorite things to think about are American history and interpreting empirical work, I thought I'd discuss this.

Their conclusions are highly counter-intuitive (to me at least - I'm guessing many readers won't find them counter-intuitive). To use Rojas's phrase "presidents who kill people are popular". Henderson and Gochenour don't put it quite like that, but their view is very similar. They write: "Our data analysis suggests that wars in which a large percentage of the U.S. population is killed will, all other things equal, cause historians to judge as great a president on whose watch those wars occurred." They are not shy about making this a causal story. To me, this doesn't pass the smell test. All other things equal, we like presidents less when they have a lot of blood on their hands. Which of course raises the question of whether "all other things" really are equal here.

1. Military Deaths Per Capita

One of the nice things about the paper is that all the data is provided in an appendix, so you can reproduce their results and try out a few things (the formatting makes it a little hard to copy - if you want a Stata version of the data, my do-file, or my log file - since I'm not going to clutter this post with output - just email me). Their results seem to be robust to different specifications of military deaths per capita (MDPC, their explanatory variable of interest), which is always appealing. I was a little leery of a simple rank, so I did a natural log of the raw numbers and that gave me similar results. I'm going to use log MDPC going forward because it's easier for me to interpret.

The assignment of MDPC was a little troubling to me. Now, they do come out and admit that they were somewhat arbitrary in assigning MDPC when discussing the fact that they attributed all of the Revolutionary War deaths to Washington, even though that war happened years before his presidency. This decision was especially confusing to me because they do have a "war hero" variable in the regression already, which is presumably the whole reason why the Revolutionary War was significant for Washington. He was not a Lincoln or a Wilson that decided to send us to war. He simply served in a prominent position during that war. But that's what the "war hero" variable is for. This isn't a minor issue, of course. Washington happens to be the second highest ranked president and the Revolutionary War is very high on the MDPC scale. So deciding whether to treat Washington like other generals in exactly his position (Eisenhower, Grant, Jackson) or treating him uniquely can really swing the results. Making the decision in a way that makes your result stronger - if that is the only general you treated that way - is of course going to raise eyebrows.

But there's one more MDPC choice that bothered me, and that's Lincoln/Buchanan. Buchanan stood out in their scatterplot as one of the lowest ranked presidents, and the reason for Buchanan's consistently low ranking is unambiguous. I'll pass the mic to Wikipedia for this one, but anyone familiar with American history knows why: "However, his [Buchanan's] inability to impose peace on sharply divided partisans on the brink of the Civil War has led to his consistent ranking by historians as one of the worst Presidents." So here we have a guy that we regularly rank low in the scale of presidents because we lay the Civil War at his feet, and yet Civil War deaths get attributed to Lincoln who, most Americans would agree, did the right thing in a tough and inevitable situation. This seems odd to me. If we think the carnage of the Civil War matters in the ranking of presidents (and almost certainly it does) shouldn't the guy that we think holds a lot of blame for not solving the sectional strife before war have some of those deaths attributed to him?

If you reassign Washington's logged MDPC to zero and you set Buchanan's logged MDPC equal to Lincoln's (so I'm not even removing the deaths from Lincoln's count), the logged MDPC variable (which I've switched out for their ranked MDPC variable because I like variables I can interpret) goes from being significant and positive (i.e. - more death is associated with a higher presidential rank) to small and insignificant (no empirical relation).

2. Causality, endogeneity, or spurious finding?

I think the two decisions I made above are less arbitrary than the decisions made by Henderson and Gochenour, but let's say you disagree with me and we just keep their significant relationship between MDPC and rank. I'm still not sure this means what they're implying it means. A "great" president in my mind is going to be a president that does the right thing in a tough time when the stakes are really high. You could have lots of potentially great presidents out there, but of course if they never have the opportunity to do great things their presidency won't be "great". Now, when the stakes are high people are of course willing to pay a high cost, including going to their death. When the fate of the Union is at stake, when the enslavement of millions is at stake, when the freedom of Europe from fascism is at stake, when a nation or armed group attacks us unprovoked, etc. - we usually think it's appropriate to risk life to address the situation. So the very situations which are high-stakes enough for presidents to make great decisions are also situations where you're likely to see a lot of battle deaths - not because we think death is a great thing, but precisely because the stakes are so high.

This interpretation - which I think makes the most sense - suggests that the relationship between MDPC and presidential greatness is largely spurious, rather than being causal as the authors suggest.

Another interpretation is that they have the causality reversed. We consider presidents great if they step into great conflicts and make the best of a bad situation. Nobody likes the fact that we had a Civil War, but we think Lincoln did the right thing in it. Nobody likes the fact that we had a Revolution. It would have been nice if we just parted amicably with Britain. But Washington (and Jefferson and Adams for that matter) had the right approach to a bad situation, and we recognize that. The same goes for WWII and even WWI. Roosevelt didn't ask Hitler to invade Western Europe and threaten the future of Western civilization. Wilson didn't ask for that powder-keg to go off, nor did he invite Germany to attack our civilian vessels. But given the bad situation, these presidents responded appropriately.

If this is the right interpretation (and I think this interpretation makes sense too), then Henderson and Gochenour have an endogeneity problem. It's analogous to simple regressions of GDP on fiscal stimulus. If you just do a simple regression (like they do here) with no attempt to identify your model, you're going to get a negative relationship between fiscal stimulus and GDP. Why? Because we only do fiscal stimulus when the economy is bad! These presidents only make tough decisions when they are handed a rotten situation!

We can argue about whether WWI was a war of choice for Wilson, or whether German submarines firing on American ships and revealed plans to invade the country from the south provided a good reason to declare war on a country that was already ravaging our allies. If plans to invade you and actual attacks on your ship aren't cause for war, I'm not personally sure what is.

But the point is, I think both of these explanations - for spuriousness and bias due to endogeneity - make a lot more sense than the idea that we like presidents that preside over lots of war deaths. You would think with such a counter-intuitive conclusion Henderson and Gochenour would provide some explanation of why they think people love war death so much. I'm not sure what an explanation would be.

3. Other variables

I ran some other variables that I thought you all might be interested in. First, what struck me about the high-ranking presidents is that the reason why I thought we loved Lincoln and Washington so much is because they expanded the scope of liberty for the American people. Washington was instrumental in freeing America from the British, and Lincoln was instrumental in freeing millions of enslaved black Americans. If you had to pick one reason why we like those two, "liberty" would be that reason, right? Since Johnson played a major role in expanding civil rights for blacks in the 20th century too, I added a dummy variable for Washington, Lincoln, and Johnson called "liberty". When you add that to the regression with my revised (insignificant) logged MDPC variable, "liberty" is barely insignificant at the 10% level (worth reporting I think - since we only have 40 observations!). When you drop the log MDPC variable, "liberty" is significant at the 10% level and is associated with a 147 point increase in the C-Span ranking.

Then I thought about why we like the other guys, and the reasons are quite similar to why we like Lincoln and Washington. We like Franklin Roosevelt and Wilson, for example, because they advocated and fought for liberty abroad. Reagan is also associated with the end of the Cold War, so I added those three to Lincoln, Washington, and Johnson for a "liberty, broad" variable. This one was not significant.

I also tried a dummy variable for whether the president was a "founding father" (I identified that as Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison). I was surprised that wasn't significant. I also added a dummy for whether the president was a Virginian. Unfortunately, that doesn't matter either.

4. You can't measure a singularity with a regression

In my third section where I was adding other variables, I was really trying to think about what it is we look for in a president. We like presidents that are instrumental in freeing people who weren't previously free, for example. But when you think about the determinants of presidential greatness, you very quickly get into very specific reasons. Why do we like Johnson despite Vietnam? Civil Rights. Why do we not like Nixon despite ending Vietnam and a fair amount of other good policies? Watergate and general creepiness. Why do we like FDR besides WWII? The New Deal. Why do we like Jefferson? We could list things like the Louisiana Purchase, but really its because Jefferson crystallized the American idea - and he did it throughout his life, not just (and perhaps not even primarily) through his presidency. If we really want to measure why we like certain presidents and why we don't like others, the exercise would degenerate into a cross-section with forty fixed effects. Needless to say, that's a non-starter.

Does anybody else do this?

Kate and I were musing on something this weekend that perhaps you all could help me out with.

One of the big events in the area was the re-enactment of the Battle of Manassas on the 150th anniversary of the event. It got us thinking - Civil War re-enactments are a big deal in the U.S., particularly in Virginia where a lot of it happened. To a lesser extent, we re-enact the Revolutionary War too (you see a lot of this down where I went to college, in Williamsburg and Yorktown).

Does anybody else do this? Do any other cultures re-enact their bloodiest wars, not in some vague ceremonial way but with a high premium placed on authenticity and detail? It's kind of strange, if you think about it, but it seems so natural that I personally have never thought about why we do it before.

Thoughts?

Libertarian arguments against federal programs to help integrate blacks in 1968 were relatively rare

I was looking at the codebook of a survey done in fifteen cities in 1968 on attitudes toward racial integration as well as the riots. I've plotted out the results of a follow up question in the survey on the reasons why people opposed federal programs that would spend money on black social and economic integration. The percentages add up to more than 100%, because people could provide multiple answers:

Only a little over 10% of the respondents who opposed these programs opposed it because they thought it was inappropriate for government to do that sort of thing. More thought it was unnecessary, too costly, bound to fail, etc. By far the most common response was that blacks shouldn't turn to the government and instead help themselves.

With all this talk about Rand Paul and what he thought of the Civil Rights Act, it's important to keep in mind that he's joining a crowd that is motivated for decidedly non-libertarian reasons. We don't have large surveys, but the same is likely to be true of the Civil War. If there were genuine advocates of libertarianism using that argument to justify the Confederacy at the time, they were probably in the minority.

1937, the Fed, the stock market, and the Treasury

Sitting on cash when people want cash drives up interest rates. High interest rates discourage investment. They discourage investment even more when investors are already predisposed against expanding operations to provide for future demand that they're uncertain about. They discourage investment even more if there are arithmetic barriers to relief on interest rates (like a nominal price floor and weak inflation).

As far as the economy is concerned, it doesn't matter who does it: households increasing savings, businesses demanding and retaining higher profits, central bankers mandating higher reserves, or fiscal authorities sitting on money. As far as history is concerned, of course, sometimes one entity is more to blame than another.

Paul Krugman recently wrote a post on the "recession within a depression" of 1937, which he says eerily parallels the discourse we see today. He says (citing Friedman and Schwartz) that in 1936-1937 the Federal Reserve started getting concerned about the inflationary potential of the large growth in excess reserves. These concerns are not unlike those we are hearing today. They responded by raising reserve requirements, a decision which Friedman and Schwartz consider to be the source of the 1937 downturn. Krugman raises doubts about how important this policy really was, citing the Romers. Recent research looking at Federal Reserve member banks by Calamoris, Mason, and Wheelock (2011) confirms Krugman and the Romers' suspicion that Friedman and Schwartz were too quick to blame the Fed. They demonstrate that the reserve requirement rules were non-binding. This is all in the spirit of Krugman's own mentor, James Tobin, who said of the 1936-37 Fed policy that "raising reserve requirements may have been a mistake but it was probably a relatively harmless one."

Jonathan Catalan presents a response that ties Krugman to Friedman and Schwartz (which seems a little odd to me). Aside from the question of what Krugman thinks fo the Friedman and Schwartz argument, Jonathan does identify the common thread between the three economists, that "the point Krugman is trying to make is that tight monetary policy will definitely set a recovery back". Jonathan, of course, disagrees - a position which he has staked out earlier in his Mises Daily article on the 1937 recession. He blames the stock market crash for the contraction of the money supply. Falling stock prices increased precautionary demand for money, leading to a contraction in the money supply.

This is a little confusing to me. As I understand it, the stock market crashed in August of 1937, the monetary base started falling at the beginning of 1937, and output started falling earlier in the spring. How does Jonathan get the causality going from the stock market to the monetary base? I don't entirely understand the argument.

So barring an explanation from Jonathan, he seems to be wrong in pointing to the stock market (and thus businesses and households) as the source of the reduction in the money supply. Friedman and Schwartz are wrong that the Fed is to blame (according to Jonathan, Krugman, Calamoris, Mason, Wheelock, Tobin, Romer, and Romer). So what happened in 1937?

Well once again we can look to Calamoris, Mason, and Wheelock (2011), who suggest that the real culprit may have been the U.S. Treasury. In 1936 the Secretary Morgenthau decided to play central banker and sterilize billions of dollars of incoming gold by stock-piling it and paying for it by selling government securities (rather than by depositing it at the Federal Reserve). This is just as contractionary as it would be if the Federal Reserve had engaged in open market sales.

Of course taxes were raised and the deficit was cut too - that doesn't help. But the gold sterilization point is interesting because you don't hear people talking about it as much.

Does this history make sense? I'm no expert on the depression, but the literature seems to point to this explanation. Perhaps Friedman and Schwartz defenders can reinvigorate the case for the impact of reserve requirements or Jonathan could explain how the stock market is causal here.

The Economics of Dr. King

From Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1968), by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

...There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it... Today, therefore, the question on the agenda must read: why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life?... There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will.

...All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast treasure of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed. Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally "in the red." We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women.

...Economic expansion cannot alone do the job of improving the employment situation of the Negroes. It provides the base for improvement but other things must be constructed upon it, especially if the tragic situation of youth is to be solved. In a booming economy Negro youth are afflicted with unemployment as though in an economic crisis. They are the explosive outsiders of the American expansion.

The insistence on educational credentials and certificates for skilled and semi-skilled jobs is keeping Negroes out of both the private business sector and government employment. Negro exclusion is not the purpose of the insistence upon credentials, but it is its inevitable consequence today. The orientation of personnel offices should be "Jobs First, Training Later." Unfortunately, the job policy of the federal programs has largely been the reverse, with the result that people are being trained for nonexistent jobs.

"Training" becomes a way of avoiding the issue of employment, for it does not ask the employer to change his policies and job structures. Instead of training for uncertain jobs, the policy of the government should be to subsidize American business to employ individuals whose education is limited. This policy may be considered a bribe by some, but it is a step consonant with reality. We require a vast expansion of present programs of on-the-job training in which training costs are absorbed by the government; at another level, employers could be granted reduced taxes if they employed difficult to place workers.

...The Freedom Budget of A.P. Randolph is important because it provides a basis for common action with labor and other groups in utilizing the economic growth of this nation to benefit the poor as well as the rich. It raises the possibility of rebuilding America so that private affluence is not accompanied by public squalor of slums and distress.

UPDATE: I apologize for closing comments. I just wanted to share a little of Martin Luther King's thoughts on economics. Some of it I disagree with, some of it I agree with, all of it I think was coming from the right frame of mind. The comment section turned into an argument over whether Progressives are to blame for segregation and Jim Crow legislation. It's not the sort of thing that seems appropriate on this anniversary. I wish we could have comments - but, well, we can't. Sorry.

Assault of Thoughts - 3/14/2011

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK

- In 1993, Michael Kremer published a famous paper demonstrating that technological development increased with the size of a population, confirming some important characteristics of endogenous growth models and demonstrating that they do a great job explaining economic growth in the long sweep of human history. Gary Gunnels shares a New York Times article that describes much the same process in a more cooperative human pre-history than a lot of people expected. This line especially jumped out at me and reminded me of Kremer, with its explicit population/technology connection:

"Knowledge can in fact be lost by hunter-gatherers if a social network gets too small. One group of the Ache people of Paraguay, cut off from its home territory, had lost use of fire when first contacted. Tasmanians apparently forgot various fishing techniques after rising sea levels broke their contact with the Australian mainland 10,000 years ago."


- There's a lot of broken window fallacy talk going on in response to the Japanese earthquake, and I'd encourage people to approach with caution. A lot of what's been written is just ideologues using the tragedy of others as an opportunity to say horrible things about people they disagree with, and enlisting good thinkers like Bastiat to do their dirty work. I have a bunch of posts on how to think about the broken window fallacy here that people can review if they're interested. I don't feel like getting into specifics on this particular instance - it just turns my stomach to see how some people have been using this as an opportunity to slander others. If anyone knows any empirical studies of the impact of disasters on output/employment I'd be interested in knowing about that work.


- We had a great time in Richmond. The John Marshall House was interesting, and we had a knowledgeable and engaging guide for that. We saw the state capital and the governor's mansion. The White House of the Confederacy was kind of ugly, but it had a nice back porch. The Museum of the Confederacy was very well done. A re-enactor on hand demonstrated a lot of daily life in the army, and all the exhibits were interesting. They have an impressive collection of the effects of all the major Confederate officers, including a lot of Lee's possessions. We did not end up getting over to the Poe museum, but I had been there before. If anyone's in Richmond I recommend the Penny Lane Pub on Franklin Street. We also went to Legend Brewery, although that was more disappointing. On the way out we drove down Monument Avenue - I'm very glad we took that detour. They have some great statues of J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, Matthew Maury, and Arthur Ashe. The whole avenue is lined with some really beautiful houses as well - it reminded me of the garden district in New Orleans.

On the way out we stopped by James River Cellars, which had a lot of great wines to offer. They were all pretty dry until you got to the desert wines which seemed to overcompensate for the other offerings. We picked up a 2007 Meritage (like a Bordeaux), which was a good year in Virginia and the last year they made the Meritage. We also got a Chardonnay. The man that did our tasting was a history teacher - we were telling him about the trip and he had an interesting perspective. He said "The war started in April of 1861 and it ended in April of 1865. A lot of people down here need to remember that". I was surprised he said it - certain tasters might not have taken it as well, but I thought it was nice to hear. I've never read all that much about or engaged the Civil War for much this reason. I don't want to dump on Lee or Jackson or the Confederacy in general. I don't want to make them out to be monsters the way a lot of people do. At the same time, the deep South made a very dumb decision and it pulled a lot of the upper South with it in that decision. They lost. It's long over. I kind of like this idea of putting it to rest. But you can't really get into Civil War history with that perspective very easily. All sides are too invested. If I ever substantially got into reading and writing about Civil War history the way I do with the interwar period or the early republic, I think I'd like to stick to the facts and just not even mention causes or motivations. I'm not sure if that's possible, though.

Here is a picture of the Lee Monument on Monument Avenue being unveiled in 1890:

Richmond ideas?

Next weekend I am getting my Christmas present from Kate - a weekend trip to Richmond, Virginia that is heavy on history tourism. I was at a conference there briefly a couple years ago, and we've been to the suburbs to visit some friends, but it's been a while since I've gotten to explore the city.

I have a few ideas of where I want to go, but I was wondering if readers have any favorites. Any ideas on historic sites, and also good places to eat?

Below is a before-and-after sketch of Richmond during the war.

Texas Independence

Evan and I were born in Texas, so I have to mention this - 175 years ago, today, Texas declared itself a republic, independent from Mexico.

I went to the 2009 Southern Economic Association conference in San Antonio, and although I wasn't there long I made sure I stopped by the Alamo before I left. The Battle of the Alamo was raging when independence was declared. One thing that amazed me was how small the building was. It was not a place that I would like to be outnumbered ten-to-one. They've done a really nice job presenting it - a nice walk-way around the building, and good literature and presentation of the battle outside. I didn't even go in but I got a good view of a lot of the complex. It's definitely worth seeing.

Benjamin Franklin on Property

From Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania (1789):




*****

One day I want to write a book called Jeffersonian Political Economy and American Keynesianism: 1729-1947, tracing the American tradition in economic thought back to its early days, and demonstrating how that formed the basis of an approach to the economy that made the ground fertile for the thorough adoption of Keynesianism in the 1930s and 1940s. Franklin figures prominently in that early story (not for this piece specifically - but for another paper he wrote even earlier), along with Jefferson, of course. I've been thinking about this for a while, but of course it's not something that you just sit down and write. Some day, though...

Moby Dick Discovery

Some readers may not be aware of this, but captain Ahab was real... sort of. The real captain Ahab was more pathetic than the one in Melville's book. Perhaps it is better to say that Moby Dick was real in the sense that Melville was inspired by stories he heard of a giant sperm whale smashing the the whaleship Essex to pieces in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The captain, George Pollard, made it to a rescue boat and was later picked up by another whaler that then crashed again in shoals right outside Honolulu. They just recently found the wreckage of this second ship of Pollard's. Pollard survived that wreck as well and eventually made it back to Massachusetts where he talked at length with Melville about the ordeal, inspiring the epic novel.

Why am I posting on this particular find? Well the story of the Essex is one I've heard several times before Evan shared this link with me, because one of our ancestors was the second mate on that ship (Matthew Joy, who is mentioned in the post). Joy is my maternal grandmother's name, and as I've mentioned before on here, they've been in Massachusetts since the early 1600s. Matthew Joy did not fare as well as George Pollard - he also got in a rescue boat, but he was never picked up and died at sea. The crew on the other boats ended up descending into cannibalism (of the dead, that is) before they were rescued (I think only one or two were left by that point). If I recall, Matthew Joy died before all that began, so I think his earthly remains avoided that fate.

You can read about the whole thing in In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, and also The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex (which was written by the first mate). I've read the first book, but not the second. Thomas Jefferson wrote two reports on the whale fishery as Secretary of State, in 1788 and 1791. The two authoritative histories about the fishery that you usually hear about are Starbuck's history (1878) and Tower's history (1907). These books are massive - I've leafed through them but haven't read them. I've always dreamed of doing something with the mountains of data in them. And speaking of whaling data, this is a great site.

Thoughts on The Metaphysical Club

I just finished The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand. I can't recommend it highly enough - a truly enjoyable book. It is an intellectual history of American Pragmatism, written as a biography of four men: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, C.S. Peirce, and John Dewey. There is a considerable amount of history in it too - Boston abolitionism, the Civil War, the coming of Darwinism to America, the Pullman Strike, and a big chunk of the history of American higher education. This made for a very engaging read - part intellectual history, part biography, and part history. I would like to write a book like this one day.

I've had a sympathy with American Pragmatism for a while. Kate had the book John Dewey: The Political Writings from a political philosophy class back at William and Mary, and I've effectively appropriated it and browsed through it for years now. I've always been attracted to Dewey. I never knew as much about the others, though. This book both firmed up and raised questions about my relationship to Pragmatism. There's a lot I like and a lot I don't like in each of these figures. I've also started to try to familiarize myself with Rorty. I take him much the same way I take Peirce (although Rorty himself preferred James). Rorty strikes me as technically being closer to right than the others, but I do see why people consider him a nihilist. He asks the question "well who is interested in truth anyway?" to which I want to respond "I'm interested in truth, even if I agree with you it's elusive!". Where Peirce gets the contingency of our insights right, but then is too optimistic about where all that leads, I think Rorty gets the contingency of our insights right, and then is too pessimistic (even if he insists he isn't). Rorty did not come up at all in the book, which was interesting - even in the epilogue where the author discussed the role of Pragmatism in the post-war period. I suppose that would have opened up a whole other can of worms.

I should say the other thing that I like about Rorty is that he brings in two others that I've always admired - Foucault and Heidegger. I've been marginally familiar with and generally impressed with Foucault since my time studying sociology at William and Mary. Heidegger has been of more recent interest, and I can credit Evan with introducing me to him (Evan also gave me this book, btw). I just recently found out Rorty explicitly connects Foucault and Dewey on rights and coercion. That was tremendous to learn, because I've made that connection myself for a while now, but I've never been especially sure about it. It's good to know that a celebrated philosopher came to the same conclusion. Rorty is also nice because he accepts a late logical-positivism (as long as it is sufficiently chastized about its own limitations). He sees value in the logical positivists who were more introspective in that sense (just as he sees value in Heidegger for doing the same with phenomenology). I have always enjoyed Bertrand Russell, so that's nice to see in Rorty (even though he's obviously abandoned analytic philosophy in important ways too). Ultimately, philosophically I'm still floating about, but I definitely see a coalescence with the Pragmatists.

There are absolutely unmistakable connections between the Pragmastists and Keynes in terms of action under uncertainty. I checked A Treatise on Probability (1921), and Keynes cites Peirce a few times. Gladys Parker Foster writes about the compatibility of Keynes and Dewey here. I've recently become very interested in Foster and her late husband - he especially wrote a lot about the American contribution to economic thought, and while I haven't gotten a great grasp of his views yet, he seems to suggest there was a lot in American thought that paved the way for a broad acceptance of Keynes. What's even more exciting is that he's identified many of the points I remark on - Jeffersonianism, the frontier, etc.

I'm not sure what I'm reading next - I'll decide by tonight. Possibly The Road to Serfdom, although I'm not sure I'm in the mood. Maybe The State and Economic Knowledge, which has been tempting me for a while. Maybe Forged Consensus which has also been tempting me for a while. Maybe Cycles of Unemployment, a short book by William Berridge from 1923 on the causes of unemployment. Maybe The Eerie Silence, about detecting extraterrestrial life - just for a lighter read. I feel somewhat adrift... not sure what it will be.

Two Updates on Popular Historians

There were two things I saw recently that I thought were worth noting about two popular historians - one that made me laugh a little, and one that sounded interesting.

First was this review of Ron Chernow's new Washington biography in The New Republic. The author writes:

"Modern biographers have sought to rescue George Washington from his monumental stature by revealing a lively and conflicted man within. In the latest and best of these recent attempts to humanize the great man, Ron Chernow offers a “real, credible, and charismatic,” a “vivid and immediate,” and, best of all, a “hot-blooded” Washington. Chernow insists that the father of our country began as a “deeply emotional young man who feared the fatal vehemence of his own feelings” and struggled to “conceal the welter of stormy emotions inside him.” Earthy, passionate, and ambitious, Washington even told an occasional lie."

Now granted, I don't know exactly what he means when he says "modern". Sometimes that means "recent". Sometimes that mean "everything since the 1500s". But what's interesting is how long we've been "humanizing" the founding fathers and "debunking" their monumental stature. All of this - every humanizing detail they mention in Chernow - is center stage in, for example, Douglas Southall Freeman. I used to be a big Washington fan (I've been more into Jefferson lately), and got around to reading a few biographies including several volumes of Freeman's authoritative work. I haven't read anything earlier than that - I haven't read Washington Irving's for example. But I really can't help but feeling like everything written about Washington is essentially a footnote to Freeman. What would be new and different and an interesting to read is one that actually tries to recapture a "Great Man Theory" sort of conceit for him.

The second interesting thing I saw was this report that David McCollough is coming out with an intellectual history of American intellectuals and artists in Paris from 1830-1900. I've come to like intellectual histories. I'm still reading The Metaphysical Club - a great intellectual history of pragmatism. I'm into John Dewey - finally moving along at a reasonable clip. Recently I finished the first volume of Joseph Dorfman's The Economic Mind in American Civilization. Waiting for me is Amy Sue Bix's Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate over Technological Unemployment 1929-1981. Intellectual histories are nice because they give you a broad selection view of the import of primary source material that would take a lot longer to absorb independently. It's also a very illuminating way to learn history. You understand what happened much better if you interrogate what people thought was happening as your subject. You also learn to sympathize with the views of others when you really get into the question of why they thought what they thought.

Wood on Lepore and the Tea Party's Take on the Revolution

Gene Callahan favorably cites and David Sehat unfavorably cites a new article in the New York Review of Books by renowned historian Gordon Wood criticizing Jill Lepore's book The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History. It's hard to evaluate this because I still haven't gotten a chance to read Lepore's book. She could be as boorish and snobbish as Woods suggests, but the impression I got from earlier statements by her and discussions of her suggest to me that Woods is being a little unfair.

Lepore's argument, as I understand it, is simply that the Tea Party mischaracterizes a lot of the American Revolution and at the very least is guilty of what she calls a "historical fundamentalism" that embraces a single, ideologically convenient understanding of history that doesn't truly reflect not only the Revolution, but the fact that the revolutionaries were fighting fundamentally different battles at a fundamentally different time.

It's hard to tell what Wood has a problem with. Tone? Perhaps its harsh, but I didn't get the impression it was. Historical inaccuracy? I'm not really sure.

I don't think it's that debatable to suggest that the Tea Party has recreated the American Revolution in its own image. As Lepore points out, people do that all the time in America. It's an inaccurate thing to do, but it does say a lot about how we see ourselves. I'm receptive to that and I had gotten the impression that Lepore was too (she's said that Tea Partiers are genuinely interested in Revolutionary history). What bothers me is when Tea Partiers take that and start telling people that they are traitors to the founders, etc.

Anyway - enjoy the article, and if anyone has read Lepore's book I'm interested in what you thought.

Darwin and Keynes

I'm thoroughly enjoying The Metaphysical Club and highly recommend it to anyone interested in philosophy, history of thought, or American history. I found this passage on Darwin interesting, and it reminded me of Keynesianism:

""He was a Darwinian for fun," wrote Henry Adams about Heny Adams in The Education of Henry Adams. He meant that he had, as a young man, regarded the theory of natural selection as unproved, and probably unprovable, but had accepted it anyway. Two of the most striking things about the reception of Darwin's theory are the degree to which it was regarded, even by its supporters, as highly speculative, and the speed with which it was nevertheless assimilated by younger intellectuals. "One could not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits," as Adams explained. "One had no time to paint the surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the young men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, Law should be Evolution". Darwinianism dropped into a cultural configuration already aligned to accomodate it. Its fitness was generally appreciated before its rightness was generally established...

...On [William] James's view, two incorrect lessons were drawn from the success of On the Origin of Species. The first was the conclusion that science is an activity that is properly independent of our own (or our society's) interests and preferences. Darwin's book had, of course, scandalized the faithful; one way to defend it wwas to explain that the scientist can only stick to the facts. But for James, anti-Darwinian scientists like [Louis] Agassiz were mistaken not because they ignored the facts in favor of preconceived theories, but for the opposite reason - because they collected facts without a working hypothesis to guide them. When we look at Agassiz's work we think we are seeing a confusion between science and belief. But what we are really seeing is a disjunction between those things. This is what Asa Gray meant when he said that Agassiz had no scientific explanation for the phenomena he observed; for Agassiz had only his observations on one side and his theory on the other. His science wasn't theoretical and his theory wasn't scientific. His ideas are edifices for generating data. Darwin's theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz's closes them...

...The other wrong lesson James thought people took from On the Origin of Species is, in effect, the flip side of the first. It is the belief that evolutionary science can lay a foundation for norms - that natural selection serves as a kind of "bottom line" arbiter of merit. This is the doctrine of the "survival of the fittest," a concept that originated not with Darwin, but with Herbert Spencer, seven years before On the Origin of Species appeared. It makes the logic of evolution the logic of human values: it suggests that we should pursue polices and honor behavior that are consistent with the survival of characteristics understood to be "adaptive" and it justifes, as "natural", certain kinds of coercion. In a society that had just been through a civil war the appeal of Darwin's theory, on this interpretation, is plain...

...James believed that scientific inquiry, like any other form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values, and hopes. But this does not, in his view, confer any special authority on the conclusions it reaches."

It goes on to talk about an openness in understanding the import of science, and James's idea of "pluralism" which I think fits very well with Keynes's openness to experimentation in policy and his care to couch the General Theory very clearly in cautions and qualifications that how and to what extent it can be applied in any given social setting is an open question. The "Keynesian revolution" has been compared to both Copernicus and Einstein in the past, I think for good reason. I think there's good reason to draw parallels to Darwin as well in trying to flesh out an account of this particular scientific revolution. Prior revolutions have been called up for various reasons - Copernicus to illustrate the elegant overthrow of a classical system that had become burdened with all sorts of stop-gaps, Einstein was used by James Galbraith to compare the unification of space and time with Keynes's unification of monetary theory and macroeconomics. Darwin, I think, is a good illustration of how in scientific revolutions the combination of a lot of anticipations and antecedents, as well as a fortuitous period in history can combine to cause the speedy adoption of a theory that frames what a lot of people have been hinting at in just the right way. It also illustrates some of the pitfalls of a speedy adoption of a theory.

Some post-WWI and Keynes links

- Keynes framed as pro-reparations, by Roger Meyerson (HT Tyler Cowen). Meyerson makes the point that Keynes only objected to the magnitude of the reparations, but was not opposed to the concept itself. He also highlights one very unique quality of the WWI reparations: they were the first reparations imposed without direct occupation.

- Keynes on psychology and capital accumulation, by Richard Green (also from Economic Consequences of the Peace). The effective demand theme comes out strong here, as does an early reference to pyramid building (an often misunderstood metaphor from the General Theory... people think the point he was making was "any government spending is good" - if you read the passage its actually about subjectivist value theory).

- Krugman on the misuse of the Weimar inflation episode, and making steam come out of Niall Ferguson's ears.

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UPDATE: And Evan just shared this fascinating looking paper from a couple years ago with me on the argument between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein in the early 1920s over the nature of time. I've only read the first several pages, but it looks very good. What's the connection with the other links besides the dates involved? The paper largely deals with relations between Bergson and Einstein and its role in the history of Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (CIC), a scientific commission of the League of Nations. The CIC's dissolution, due in no small part to the disagreements between the two men, is used as a sort of microcosm of the wider breakdown of the League of Nations and the tenuous interwar peace.

A request for sources...

I'm sketching out a small paper that I think has a high publication chance to start writing in the New Year immediately after I finish writing these populism pieces.

I'm curious if anyone knows of any work done on wage adjustment during the Depression using individual level data. Jonathan Rose has a new article in the Journal of Economic History that I have. I have a mountain of material from the post-war period, but more evidence on the Depression is crucial. Anyone know of any?

Thanks in advance.

A Revolution of Liberty, a Philosophy of Equality

Tyler Cowen noted a Google book search function yesterday, and he charted the fate of "liberty" since the mid-18th century. I was curious about doing some comparisons with "equality". Liberalism is really a philsophy of liberty, equality, and self-government, but the relative weight placed on each of these concepts shifts over time. One of the tough things about this google function is that the scales are not always comparable - but "liberty" and "equal" seemed to show up at roughly the same scale, so that their relative position could more easily be observed.

Below I've presented findings for American English, British English, French, and German (Blue is "liberty", red is "equal". The years are fuzzy, but its from 1720 to 2000). A few things stand out to me:

1. "Liberty" is a fightin' word. The spikes for "liberty" associated with the French Revolution and the American Revolution are obvious. You also have a run-up to increased levels of "liberty" that peak at 1848 for Germany. France's radical mid-19th century maintains mentions of "liberty", in contrast to America which largely sets the term aside after the Constitution is ratified.

2. "Equal" emerges as a dominant term in America, not with the Revolution or the Constitution, but with the Jeffersonians. It maintains its position until present times. What's even more interesting is that if you substitute "freedom" for "liberty", then "freedom" surpasses "equal" in the late 1840s - at the end of the dominance of the Jeffersonians. I think there are two forces at work here: first, "freedom" was the word of choice in the abolitionist literature, rather than "liberty" - and after the war it stuck. Second, of course, is the Jeffersonian liberalism was a democratic liberalism rather than a strictly libertarian liberalism. It was liberalism. It's not like ideas of liberty were left out in the cold by any means. But it was a liberalism that emphasized both liberty and equality, and of course democratic self-government.

3. The British case is the only case where "equal" dominated "liberty" for the entire period (although Germany came close). This would likely look very different if the data stretched back to the 17th century. If "liberty" is truly a fightin' word, as I suggested in point #1, then the British had already had their fight.

It's dicey to draw too much from this data, but that's what I noticed - the point that "liberty" is associated with revolutionary breaks, while "equal" is more stable I think comes across very clearly, though. Is there anything else worth noting?

American

British

French

German

H. Vernon Eney - Goldbug

On a few occasions I've talked about my great-grandfather, H. Vernon Eney, and his work as president of Maryland's 1967-68 Constitutional Convention. The Constitution failed, but it was an important reform effort that tried to make the state government more efficient and more responsive to the needs of modern society. I've previously called his work an example of a non-reactionary case for states rights.

Well, one thing I don't share as often (that I haven't shared at all) is that in the thirties, Eney also played a small role in pushing back against the Roosevelt administration's most important policy of monetary stimulus: the demonetization of gold. I was reminded of this recently by a Peter Klein post about the "gold clause" cases in 1935. Eney argued a less famous gold case before the Supreme Court in 1937 (I believe this was ten years after he passed the bar). To be honest, the argument on the part of Eney's client (Machen) and two other petitioners was a little contrived. All three petitioners were arguing that they deserved interest payments on their Liberty Loans from after a 1935 redemption call. The argument was that the call was made null because it was a call on the initial bonds but did not stipulate that payment would not be made in accordance with the language of the initial bonds (i.e., in gold). They argued that "the payment that it [the call for redemption] promises is not the payment owing under the letter of the bond", and so was not valid.

The court ruled that the call for redemption was simply a notice that must be construed in the context of current law, and current law had stated that gold would not be paid out by the Treasury (this was the issue at stake in the earlier, more controversial rulings). The notice wasn't nullified by the fact that it didn't explicitly note that payment would be in a manner different than what was laid out in the language of the bond and so the petitioners were unjustified in demanding interest payments after the call.

Riveting stuff, huh? Anyway - I've always thought the small part that Eney had to play in monetary policy during the Great Depression was interesting, and this post by Klein today reminded me of it. It would probably be a stretch, I suppose, to say that if he had won it would have worsened the "depression within a depression" of 1937!

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Note: Justice Cardozo, who delivered the opinion of the court in this case, is pictured above. Cardozo was appointed by Hoover in 1932, and was generally considered to be a liberal justice. He has also been said to look like Conan O'Brien, but I personally don't see it.

Assault of Thoughts - Thanksgiving Edition - 11/25/2010

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK

First - Happy Thanksgiving!

- The New Republic has put up a series of archived articles that it has published on the Puritans here. I'll allow it because it's still interesting New England history. But it's still shaky to associate this too closely with Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving marks a harvest celebration of the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, who could accurately be described as "Puritans". The important thing to remember is that while it's probably safe to call all Pilgrims "Puritans", it's not safe at all to call all Puritans "Pilgrims" or associate all Puritans with Thanksgiving. The major Puritan wave came later and settled Massachusetts Bay Colony*. Here, The New Republic seems to present some articles on the Pilgrims, but some on later waves of Puritans that had nothing to do with the establishment of Thanksgiving.

- At Think Markets, Chidem Kurdas reviews past reactions to Thanksgiving. She cites Daniel Boorstin, noting that the Puritans did not celebrate Christmas, leaving Thanksgiving as a good chance to take it easy (so here Kurdas also talks about "Puritans" rather than "Pilgrims", but since she's not talking about the first Thanksgiving - but rather later celebrations of it - she seems in the clear). She also hints at some of the thinking behind Roosevelt's decision to establish Thanksgiving as the fourth Friday in November: it provided an extra shopping day and therefore served as a stimulus of sorts.

- Thanksgiving is always a great opportunity to highlight the power of market exchange to foster social progress. I'm sure everybody knows the story - when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth they required that everyone share everything they produced. They established a communist society, essentially. It failed miserably, Governor Bradford ended it, and they all lived happily ever after. Alex Tabarrok has a longer version here from a couple of years ago, with a good long selection from Bradford on the episode. I do think it's important to emphasize that this does not rule out charity or collective action. The survival of the colony was not merely due to the emergence of a market economy. They also have the Wampanoag to thank for their survival. But the point is clear - collectives cannot run markets. State care for the poor, of course, continued in Massachusetts throughout the colonial period and up to the present day. But that's very different from expecting a collective to run a market. I think it's great that we have such a good example of market efficiency so early in our history to point to. It sets a very important precedent.

- All this talk of Massachusetts is moot, of course. Why? Because the first Thanksgiving celebrated in English speaking America occurred where all great "firsts" in English speaking America occurred: Virginia. In 1619, two years before the Pilgrims celebrated theirs and almost a year before the Pilgrims even set sail on the Mayflower the twelve year veteran colonists in Virginia celebrated their own Thanksgiving at Berkeley Hundred (which is just up the road from William and Mary).



*This includes the earliest ancestors of mine that I know of to come to America. Thomas Joy came over to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 - a Puritan, but not a Pilgrim. My maternal grandmothers maiden name was Joy and we can trace it back from there. We're going to Baltimore this Thanksgiving, and I know my paternal grandmothers line has been in Baltimore (the Eney's) since at least 1850 (I've written here before about H. Vernon Eney and his work on the Maryland Constitutional Convention of 1968). So the Eney's may go back a ways too - I just don't know. If Maryland was where they first settled, it's unlikely they've been here longer than Thomas Joy. We also have French Canadians on my mother's side - the Comeau's - who conceivably could have been here before Thomas Joy. Again I just don't know, but I imagine that's unlikely. The Kuehns themselves came from Germany in the 1890s or so, so they're the late-comers. Finally, on my Dad's side, we have Davises in ante-bellum Alabama. As I understand it, much of the settlement of Alabama came from the Carolinas, which again makes it unlikely that any of these Davises pre-date Thomas Joy - I have no reason to expect it, but again I just don't know (after the Civil War, the Alabama Davises moved to North Carolina where they stayed until the early 20th century at which point they moved to Maryland, where my great-grandmother Margaret Davis met and married my great-grandfather and well established Marylander H. Vernon Eney).

Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1921

THANKSGIVING - 1921
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - A PROCLAMATION

That season has come when, alike in pursuance of a devout people’s time-honored custom and in grateful recognition of favoring national fortunes, it is proper that the President should summon the nation to a day of devotion, of thanksgiving for blessings bestowed, and of prayer for guidance in modes of life that may deserve continuance of Divine favor.

Foremost among our blessings is the return of peace, and the approach to normal ways again. The year has brought us again into relations of amity with all nations, after a long period of struggle and turbulence. In thankfulness therefore, we may well unite in the hope that Providence will vouchsafe approval to the things we have done, the aims which have guided us, the aspirations which have inspired us. We shall be prospered as we shall deserve prosperity, seeking not alone for the material things but for those of the spirit as well; earnestly trying to help others; asking, before all else, the privilege of service. As we render thanks anew for the exaltation which came to us, we may fittingly petition that moderation and wisdom shall be granted to rest upon all who are in authority, in the tasks they must discharge. Their hands will be steadied, their purposes strengthened, in answer to our prayers.

Ours has been a favored nation in the bounty which God has bestowed upon it. The great trial of humanity, though indeed we bore our part as well as we were able, left us comparatively little scarred. It is for us to recognize that we have been thus favored, and when we gather at our altars to offer up thanks, we will do well to pledge, in humility and all sincerity, our purpose to prove deserving. We have been raised up and preserved in national power and consequence, as part of a plan whose wisdom we can not question. Thus believing, we can do no less than hold our nation the willing instrument of the Providence which has so wonderfully favored us. Opportunity for very great service awaits us if we shall prove equal to it. Let our prayers be raised, for direction in the right paths. Under God, our responsibility is great; to our own first, to all men afterward; to all mankind in God’s own justice.

Now, therefore, I, Warren G. Harding, President of the United States of America, hereby designate Thursday, the twenty-fourth day of November, to be observed by the people as a day of Thanksgiving, devotion and prayer; urging that at their hearthsides and their altars they will give thanks for all that has been rendered unto them, and will pray for a continuance of the Divine fortune which has been showered so generously upon this nation.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington this thirty-first day of October in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-one, and of the independence of the United States OF America the one hundred and forty-sixth.

Warren G. Harding