The Power and the Money

What if America had been unpopulated in 1492?

The long Twitter debate between Pseudoerasmus and Gabe Mathy was triggered by an essay in Jacobin by my friend and colleague Suresh Naidu. He wrote a piece about what North America would have been like had the native population avoided decimation from infectious disease.

As a piece of counterfactual history, the essay has problems. The first is that we really do not know the pre-contact population of North America. Using his assumption of 0.5% population growth thereafter, we get a range of 26 million to 234 million native Americans today. Needless to say, those are radically different scenarios. The second is that the presence of large-settled native populations would have changed the dynamics of later immigration; would as many Europeans have arrived if North America had 45 million people in it around 1800? Finally, it seems likely that a large native population would have derailed the development of the institutions that sustained rapid North American economic growth. 

But as a polemic, the essay is quite successful. The latter two arguments unambiguously strengthen Suresh’s overall point, which is that there was nothing inherent in English culture that insured that its settler colonies would become rich and democratic places. The presence of an exploitable settled population would have permanently derailed the American experiment. Pseudoerasmus and Mathy were debating whether the English would have created an apartheid scenario (Mathy) or something more like Mexico (Pseudoerasmus). Neither seemed to doubt that the resulting society would be more oppressive and less democratic than what really emerged in the northern United States and Canada. Nor does Randy McDonald in his discussion of the piece. 

The essay raises an interesting question, however. If larger native American populations would have prompted the creation of a more extractive and generally nastier North American state, potentially with multiple rounds of civil war, what would have happened if there had been no native Americans when the Europeans first arrived in 1492? What would have been different?

It turns out that James Axtell was there in 1987.

First and foremost, Spanish colonization changes completely. Without the great civilizations in the highlands of Mexico and Peru, the Spaniards take much longer to move inland. Without the Taíno in the Caribbean, it is entirely plausible (albeit unlikely) that the Spaniards give up on the whole enterprise. Still, somebody would eventually set up Caribbean and Brazilian plantations based on African slavery but Mexico and Peru will remain backwaters. Nobody settles in the Río de la Plata until the 19th century. (And I suspect that it will be British settlers who land there, claiming it from a moribund Spanish empire.) With no silver fleets there is no Sir Walter Raleigh and his tropical adventures. So no British Guyana, just a vague area where Venezuela meets Brazil. Ditto, there is no French empire in Canada. No fur trade, no New France. 

Second, when the British finally do settle the eastern seaboard, later than in our world, their expansion is slower and messier. There are no American domesticated food crops. There are no native American agricultural techniques to learn. And with no seasonal burning by the native Americans, the forests are that much harder to clear. There is no native American medicine. No snowshoes. No toboggans. No longhouses. No canoes. And idiotic English hunters crashing around in bright colors and scaring off the game. In short, the colonists will have to invent a lot of wheels for themselves that in our world they got from the Native Americans and that is going to slow initial settlement by a lot, decades at the very least, possibly a century.

New York and Pennsylvania in particular will develop more slowly; without the profits from the Indian trade, it will be much harder to raise capital for settlement. North America will be even more skewed to the slave south.

Third, no independence until well after 1776. Once the eastern settlements are finally established, expansion is going to rocket westwards with no Indians, French, or Spanish to slow it down. Slaves will get sucked into the south even faster, but there will also be more escaped slaves lighting out to form colonies in the interior. Axtell postulates, plausibly but without a whole lot of solid evidence, that absent the Indian threat American society would be a lot less religious and lose its “garrison mentality.” In his words:  “The jeremiads of New England would certainly have been less shrill in the absence of the Pequot War and King Philip’s War, when the hostile natives seemed to be ‘scourges’ sent by God to punish a sinful people. Without the military and psychological threat of Indians within and without New England’s borders, the colonial fear of limitless and unpredictable social behavior would have been reduced.”

With much more evidence, he also postulates that with no wars, there is no need for Britain to raise colonial revenues. Nor is there any reason for Britain to restrict westward expansion. That is probably enough to head off the Revolution. And if later revolts should occur, the colonists will have two huge problems. First, they will be more separated from any martial habits. No militias, no real combat experience, just a vasty totalitarian infrastructure of slave catchers. Second, they will have no Indian opponents from which to learn guerrilla tactics. 

So by 1850 you have a British slave empire that sprawls over the entire continent, well into northern Mexico. (Who knows? Maybe it will British Americans heading south who discover the mines in Zacatecas and exploit them with slave labor.) The northern reaches will not have slavery, for the same reasons as in our world, but they may be less religious and less moralistic, more crassly commercial and more dominated by large landowners. 

You have a Caribbean and a Brazil that do not look entirely unlike our own ... but which have less European settlement. (With no natives to conquer and no native women to marry, Iberian migration will be slowed.) You have growing slave populations around the Mexican lowlands, parts of Central America, and possibly parts of the Peruvian coast ... but I would venture not much in the latter. There is no Panama Real or Camino de Cruces across Panama; those routes, primitive as they were, were constructed by native American slaves captured from Nicaragua.

American silver was less important to sustaining Spanish imperialism in Europe than many realize, but there will be no Price Revolution or Columbian Exchange ... and that will change Europe in unpredictable ways. 

But in America, well, things look ugly. If a Revolution does come, it looks likely to take the form of a Treasonous Slaveowner’s Rebellion against the Crown, but that assumes that a British government unexposed to the shock of the American Revolution will be as open to the movement of public opinion as our own. This British crown might not take any serious moves against the horror, and thus provoke no rebellion. The strain of New England moralism that produced abolitionism in our world might be weaker, or not there at all. 

What is the cost of an independent Canada?

In the last post, I discussed Canada’s mysterious productivity gap with the United States. It appears to have been rather long-lasting. The current explanation is that the gap derives the fact that Canada is a smaller market and firms therefore have trouble reaching the optimal size and specialization. The implication is that had Canada been part of the United States, it would be more productive today. 

But does the gap really exist? Might the whole post be based on a misconception?

Vincent Geloso suggested that the gap may be driven by Quebec, but that does not match the data. The income gap with the U.S. holds for Ontario back to the 1870s. Moreover, we have detailed firm-level data for 1871 which shows that Ontarian firms were about 3-5% less productive than their Michigan equivalents. That is not to say that Quebec wasn’t a laggard! It is to say that the gap, inasmuch as it exists, is not due to backwardness in Quebec or the Maritimes. 

Randy McDonald, however, suggested that we might be asking the wrong question. Maybe the question shouldn’t be “Why are Canadian firms less productive than American firms?” but rather “Are Ontarian firms less productive than firms in the Great Lakes states?”

After all, were Canada part of the United States, then modern Ontario would be the State of West Canada with a northern border somewhere between Lake Nipissing and the Albany River. West Canada would be just another Great Lakes state. If real genuine Ontario has been consistently less productive than the Great Lakes states, then we can conclude that there is some Canadian factor holding firms back. But if it is not, then we might want to doubt the entire premise.  

It is easy enough to get regional GDP per capita for 1997-2016. Now, GDP per capita is a highly imperfect proxy for productivity. It does not account for differences in age structure, labor force participation, or work hours. But it is what I have. The data for the U.S. comes from the BLS. The Ontarian data is converted to U.S. dollars using the OECD PPP exchange rate. 

And so:

Wow! Ontario was ahead of the Great Lakes states in the late 1990s, falling behind only after 2003. It fell behind Michigan only in 2010. This makes me wish for a longer time series. Is 1997 or 2016 the aberration? Has Ontario basically looked like a Great Lakes state since 1871? There is a paper for an enterprising graduate student here. 

In fact, there are two different axes upon which to compare real Ontario with counterfactual West Canada. The intensive axis is productivity. Would workers and firms be more productive in Ontario had they enjoyed the same access to the American market as firms in the Great Lakes states? Did the value of being American, if any, change over time? The question is interesting in-and-of itself, but it also might shed light on the putative benefits of European union.

But there is an extensive axis as well! Before 1879, the problem with being Canadian was that the United States imposed high tariffs on Canadian exports. After 1879, however, the National Policy also imposed very high tariffs on American and British exports to Canada. Canadian firms still lacked access to American markets but they no longer had to worry about American (or British) competition.

If the policy worked, then firms would be created in Canada that otherwise might not have existed. Those firms would require workers. Where would those workers come from? They could come from farms, but the Canadian farm sector was still growing fast. They could come from existing firms, but that would raise wages. In an age of open immigration, high wages should have attracted more immigrants. As the industrial heart of Canada, Ontario should have had more firms and more people than it would have had it been West Canada, just another Great Lakes state. (If I had to guess, I would imagine that Wisconsin might be the best parallel for counterfactual West Canada, despite its closer proximity to Michigan.) 

But did the National Policy work as advertised? And if so, how much bigger is Canada’s population? And what were its costs and benefits relative to (1) the reality of American and Canadian protection; (2) a counterfactual of American protection and Canadian openness (i.e., no National Policy); (3) a counterfactual of American and Canadian openness (i.e., annexation or a North American customs union); and (4) a counterfactual of American protectionism but Canadian openness only to Britain (i.e., some sort imperial federation)?

If anyone knows of a literature, please point me to it! And if there is not a literature, then somebody should get on it! Economic history, like most things, needs more Canadian content.

Greater or Lesser Mexico is hella more likely than the Mexico what is

People tend to think of what is as what had to be. But that is not true.

The U.S.-Mexico border as-is, the place the President wants to build a wall, is a very low probability event. 

The Mexican-American war is a veritable cornucopia of counterfactuals. The United States could very easily have avoided the war. A lot had to go wrong for Clay to lose. Unchallenged vote stealing in Louisiana, dumb flip-flops on Texas annexation (see below), an idiot flirtation with nativism. The Clay campaign made more errors than the 1901 Detroit Tigers. Had 2,553 New Yorkers switched their vote in 1844, Henry Clay would have become president. 

Now, Clay was not a die-hard opponent of annexation. In fact, he wobbled on the issue, writing letters against annexation but flip-flopping during the campaign. (This cost northern votes without gaining southern ones.) That said, he insisted that annexation could only happen if there was an agreement with Mexico, which seems, well, unlikely. It is true that the annexation resolution passed in February 1845, before Clay would have taken office, but the Senate would not have taken it up had Clay been the president-elect.

But if that does not convince you, consider the legislative history of the annexation resolution. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee initially voted down the resolution. What revived it was an amendment from Senator Robert Walker (D-Mississippi) that gave the president the option of admitting Texas under the resolution or negotiating a new treaty. The amended resolution made it out of the Senate on a 27-25 vote with the expectation that President Polk would negotiate a new treaty. In a shocker, outgoing President Tyler on his last day in office invited Texas to join without a treaty. Polk kept the offer open and the rest is history. But in a history where Henry Clay becomes president, none of this happens. And as we all know, the United States of 1844 was about to be consumed by its own internal divisions: if the Clay administration survives to January 1853, then the window for annexation would close. (Clay died in 1852, but the point stands.)

Think on that one a moment. A close easily-swung election (kinda like the one in 2016) resulted in the end of the Republic of Texas and the transfer of the whole southwest into the United States. Maybe possibly the U.S. would have eventually gotten northern California, but the history would have been different and Texas would be outside the United States to this day. 

What about the other direction? As recounted, the current U.S.-Mexico border is unlikely in the extreme. Had Nicholas Trist not disobeyed orders, it would have been further south. But how much further south? This post discusses President Polk’s musings and discusses a counterfactual border. But Polk was just spitballing to the cabinet. What do we know about how much territory he would have claimed?

Well, we know two things. First, the point of expansion was to get more slave states. That means places where cotton could grow, labor was scarce, and the elite open to slavery. Second, we know that southern Senators tried to amend the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to include more Mexican territory. Their proposal can be found here, and a map is below:

It includes all of what became the Gadsen Purchase and a big chunk of northern Mexico. Not coincidentally, it is the chunk of the northern Mexico that was in fact good cotton land. (Chihuahua eventually became a good place for cotton, but it was too dry and isolated for that in the 1840s.) It is also the chunk of Mexico that tried to join the Confederacy in 1861. (1)

Here is a close up of the northeastern part. I have no idea if it would have been admitted as one or two states:

In short, once you get a Mexican-American War, it is more likely than not that northeastern Mexico winds up inside the United States: Monclova, Saltillo, Monterrey, all American cities. 

Today the border feels inevitable. But it was not. As late as 1844, the current line would have been a very unlikely outcome.

The year 2049 in a parallel universe

President Trump fired James Comey today. Comey did engage in malpractice over the Clinton investigation and he did misrepresent what was on the Weiner laptop to Congress. But we all know that is not why he was fired. So as America slips a little further into dystopia, we can take some solace in that fact that things are better than they were in 1919. For now. 

But I come to discuss the year 2049, not 1919. Here is the new Blade Runner trailer:

There is a lot going on. But stop on second 48 and note that the holographic ballet dancers are above a rotating chyron that reads: “Soviet Happy: Product of CCCP.” Add that to the Atari logo, and it is clear that the movie is not set in our universe or our future. Kudos to the writers and producers for not trying.

Still, you gotta wonder. What would turn the suburbs of L.A. into a desert with broken freeways but leave the USSR around to make, uh, Soviet Happy?

I miss pointless discussions. Never thought that I would, but I do.

Did Britain unify Germany?

With the U.K. on its way out of the European Union, now seems like the time to ask!

I am not talking about 1989. Rather, I am talking about 1871. Did the emergence of a unified German nation state owe itself to British policy?

In an entertaining tour-de-force, Thilo Huning and Nikolaus Wolf of Humboldt University argue yes, yes it did! The inituition is fairly simple. In 1815, the U.K. pressured Prussia into accepting large territories in western Germany rather than Saxony. That gave Prussia sway over the large river systems than carried German commerce. When the Zollverein came along, many of the smaller German states joined because there was not really much of a cost: Prussia controlled most of their commerce anyway. So by 1835 you had the Zollverein and (eventually) a unified German Empire.

But what if the Prussians had got their way and annexed Saxony instead of Westphalia? Well, the authors construct a series of low-cost trade routes and measure how much joining the customs union would have benefited the various German states. They then measure how much control Prussia had over the state’s commerce anyway. They find that the tradeoff predicts the decision to join the Zollverein pretty well: the less control a state had to lose, the more likely it was to join.

They then run the model using a hypothetical Prussia that controls Saxony but has no western territories. They find that no state south of the Main would have had incentives to join. Zollverein expansion peters out in the early 1830s with a map including only the blue-shaded areas below:

How would later German history have been different?

Escapism: A 19th-Century science fiction novel and a 21st-Century science fiction TV series

 First, this is the weirdest thing that I have ever read. It’s a science fiction novel from 1889. It’s badly-written. (I mean, it’s badly-written for 1889. For comparison, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was published around the same time.) The technological extrapolations are weird and wrong and barely affect the plot, which concerns bizarre machinations around the succession to the British Empire and some weird-ass scheme where the President of the United States is trying to marry off her daughter to the Emperor. It ends with Canada beating the U.S. in a war.

Anyway. Why did I read it? Well, besides insomnia most of the major characters are women, and women who were not trying to impress a man. That is pathetically rare, even today, let alone 1889. Plus the author went out of his way to point out all the awesome people in the book who just also happened to be Jewish. For something so old-fashioned, it was also strikingly modern.

Second, I finished watching Occupied on Netflix. I recommend it! The main scenario is improbable, but slightly significantly less so than before November 8th. An energy-independent U.S. has pulled out of NATO and established a valued relationship with the Russian Federation. In the midst of a massive surge in energy prices prompted by wars in the Middle East, a Green government in Norway decides to shut down the country’s oil and gas production in order to combat climate change. Panicky Europeans green-light a Russian seizure of the Norwegian fields to restart production. The Norwegian prime minister reluctantly allows this in order to avoid a war, but his county finds itself entrapped in a slow-motion conquest as the Russians slowly assume more-and-more authority. 

It is quite well done. My only quibble? Well, whoever plays the American ambassador to Norway has a Canadian accent. You know, with that weird caught=cot sound you can hear from Justin Trudeau. Given that a pretty massive plurality of Canadians don’t have a recognizable Canadian accent, it’s an impressive bit of miscasting. (If somebody finds out that the actor who plays the ambassador is actually from Massachusetts, I will be embarrassed.)

The accent screw-up is all the more inexplicable considering how good British and Australian actors have gotten at mimicking spot-on American accents, even American regional accents.

But not Russell Crowe. See minute 1:12 in this clip from an otherwise great movie. Points to the person who guesses the word he screws up in the context of getting everything else right. The mess-up is all the more pronounced considering as he is in a scene with Denzel Washington, who has a perfect New York accent considering as that is how he naturally talks.

Actually, a television show about a Russian occupation of Norway might not be all that escapist these days, considering. 

Relaxing zoning in California would not shrink Texas by 40%

I seem to lack Twitter-fu, because my questions to people on that platform go unanswered. And so, I pose the question here. 

Matt Kahn now claims that freeing up California housing markets would have caused Texas population to fall by 40%. His evidence? Uh ... well, I do not see any, save that there is a lot of migration into Texas from the West Coast. 

I went to the same IRS data source he used. In 2014-15, net migration into Texas from the rest of the U.S. came to about 59,000. Net migration from both inside and outside the U.S. was around 64,000. Of that total net inflow, about 19% came from California. Californians who moved to Texas earned about $71,000 per family; Texans who moved to California earned about $61,000. Both, interestingly, earned less than the $77,000 average income of Texan families who stayed put. 

How can you use that data to estimate a counterfactual population for Texas? I have no idea! Kahn did not say.

But he ended with a challenge. “My critics must answer the counter-factual of; what would be the population of Texas if it were easy to build in progressive coastal states?”

Challenge accepted!

So let’s stress-test the hypothesis that alt-Texas would have a population of 15.4 million in 2010, rather than 25.3 million.

In 1970 the state had a population of 11.2 million. If its population growth plunged to the national average and stayed there from that point on, Texas in 2010 would have 17.0 million. That is more than 15.4 million, but in the ballpark

How likely is it that an open California housing market would have pulled all those people out of Texas? Well, if Californian development restrictions were biting, then one would expect housing costs in California to rise dramatically relative to Texas during this period. The census measure of median rent is flawed, but it is easy to find. Assuming it measures housing costs reasonably well, what does movement in the California-Texas ratio tell us?

  

Well, that it is unlikely that the migrants to Texas were choosing to go there because California was too expensive. Certainly not during the 1970s or 1990s, at least. By 2000, Texas already had a population of 20.9 million.

In other words, unless something is wrong with the measure of housing costs, it is unlikely that the migrants pulled into a zoning-free California would have come from Texas, at least not before the year 2000. 

My answer to the question “What would be the [2010] population of Texas if it were easy to build in progressive coastal states?” is: at least 20.9 million (the 2000 population), plausibly 23.0 million (no net migration to Texas after 2000), and most likely exactly the same 25.1 million that it actually is. 

Cuba without Fidel, a retrospective counterfactual

A few months ago, I complained about an article that asked what effect independence had on Ireland without addressing how the country would have done under continued Home Rule. Doug Muir stepped up to the plate with a simple counterfactual: imagine that the Irish civil war depressed GDP about 20% and that the country would have grown at U.K. rates as part of the U.K. 

Is there another way? Well, yes there is! For a research project, I’ve been learning about a technique called “synthetic controls.” Normally we can’t run an experiment in which we take a country just like Ireland but keep it inside the U.K. while comparing it to the one outside. We can look for countries that look like Ireland, but countries rarely have a convenient twin sitting around for comparison. So what to do?

Well, one is to do the best we can with the comparison’s available. This will often take you fairly far.

Another is to compare the country in question with itself before the event you’re interested in. This can also take you fairly far, but of course raises all sorts of problems. For example, it assumes that past performance predicts future results, which is not always true. It also assumes that the changes you’re interested in (in the Irish case, income levels) are not caused by the same underlying forces that caused the event you’re interested in (in the Irish case, independence). 

The final one is to use synthetic controls. When used for cross-country estimates, a synthetic control takes a bunch of countries that look more-or-less like the country that you’re interested in and calculated a weighted average of those countries that looks as close as possible like the country you’re interested in. You can then see how that mythical control country performed after a treatment compared to the real country. For example, if you wanted to see the effect of Irish independence, you could take a weighted average of British regions that looked very close to Ireland in 1914, and then compare real Ireland to the performance of that weighted average of British regions. In that case, the experiment would be with remaining fully in the U.K. rather than Home Rule, but it could still tell you quite a bit. (Hey! Anyone want to write that article with me?) 

It turns out that someone has run that study for Communist Cuba! In 2013, Felipe Ribeiro, Guilherme Stein, and Thomas Kang did just that. They created a synthetic Cuba that was 55% Mexico, 15% Honduras and 30% El Salvador. These were not the countries that I would have imagined, but they were what provided the best fit with the real existing Cuba between 1929 and 1959. They then compared the GDP per capita of synthetic Cuba with real existing Cuba and found this:

By 1970, the GDP per capital of real Cuba is half that of synthetic Cuba. (The right axis is logged.)

What are the problems with this analysis? Well, three. First, while they got a good match on GDP per capita and the terms of trade, they do not come as close on two other key indicators. Synthetic Cuba had a lot more people in agriculture than real Cuba (68% versus 41%) and much higher illiteracy (65% versus 35%). Second, Mexico in particular was subject to radically different trade shocks than non-Communist Cuba would have been, whereas the analysis assumes that all post-1959 external shocks are identical. Finally, it is not clear that a non-Communist Cuba would have followed the same mix of extreme protectionism and hostility-to-FDI that Mexico followed between 1964 and 1974. (Plus, once the Cubans begin receiving large-scale Soviet subsidies around 1968, then the whole analysis goes out the window.)

That said, most of the problems cited above point to a real non-Communist Cuba outperforming synthetic Cuba. They are not fatal. And the authors admit that their study measures only counterfactual GDP per capita; educational attainment grew faster in Cuba than anywhere else. (Although Costa Rica matched Cuba in terms of reducing illiteracy.)

In short, they find about what you would expect: the Revolution made Cuba poorer by a large amount. What that does not measure, however, is the well-being of poorer Cubans as opposed to the poorer residents of synthetic Cuba. That experiment remains for another day. 

P.S. I almost called this post a “tribute,” but Fidel was at the end of the day a bloody dictator and doesn’t deserve one. So I called it a “retrospective” instead. 

A counterfactual Ireland

 The history of Ireland after 1920 follows a pattern that’s fairly familiar: anti-colonial struggle results in a flight of capital and a loss of skilled labor as the colonial elites flee. The ideological efflorescence of the pre-independence period quickly disappears, and the new state’s politics are tightly constrained by a narrowly nationalist ideology developed in the aftermath of the colonial struggle. This ideology is not particularly consistent with rapid economic growth, so development stalls for decades.

Many key industries are fully or partially state-owned; while this is not necessarily a bad thing, the new state is not always such a great manager. The former colony also goes through a period of protectionism combined with mostly unsuccessful attempts at import substitution. Trade with the former colonial power continues to be critical, despite repeated efforts to diversify. For decades after independence, the economy remains dominated by agricultural exports.

Eventually, though, the country sets out on a period of rapid economic growth that provides rising standards of living for most of the population. This also includes a belated diversification of the economy along with a concomitant diversification of trade — the former colonial master is still important but is no longer absolutely dominant. Inward investment soars. This exciting period is unfortunately marred by massive corruption among the former colony’s political elites.

Ireland after 1920 — but also a bunch of places in Africa and Asia since the mid-20th century.

* * * * *

— So. Lots of these what-ifs depend sensitively on the initial condition. Let’s assume Home Rule is somehow moved forward by a year, so that the Curragh Mutiny etc. happens in August 1913 instead of 1914. Let’s further assume that the Liberal government, when cornered, suddenly grows a spine. The suppression of the revolt may be bloody, but it’s all over by Christmas. By the time the Archduke heads to Sarajevo the new dispensation is well in place.

Okay, so: avoiding the Civil War and its economic consequences mean that right off the bat, Ireland is a fair bit richer. How much richer is hard to say, but based on modern colonial struggles I’m guessing Irish incomes sank by 10% to 20% — a pretty conservative estimate for a civil war followed by independence. This is complicated by the question of how banged around Ulster has been, and also by the fact that some of that income is actually rents belonging to Ascendancy Protestants in the south (who in this world have not been burnt out or otherwise forced to flee). But still: British Ireland in 1922 is going to be a lot more prosperous than the Irish Free State.

Figure 1 in the paper mentioned in the last post is the go-to on this, but unfortunately it starts in 1921 and not a few years earlier, so it misses most of the effects of the Civil War. Even so, it shows a relative loss of about 5% of per capital GDP (compared to Britain) in the years immediately following the war.

More generally, Figure 1 shows what all of us already knew: that Irish independence was a goddamn economic disaster for almost 50 years, after which things suddenly flipped into reverse and Ireland began growing faster than the U.K. or most other advanced economies. In fact, weirdly enough, Irish growth really took off in the mid-1970s ... right around the time everyone else was saw growth dramatically slow. I’m guessing there are some second-move and center-periphery effects here that could be fun to pick apart.

Probably coincidentally, the 1970s are also when Ireland began to receive prodigous amounts of direct support from the European Community, later Union. (See figure from page 19 here, shown at right.) While large in international terms, however, a net inflow of 3% of GDP is on the order of the net federal transfers received Wyoming or Arizona over the past 20 years and a third of that given to truly poor states like West Virginia, Mississippi, or New Mexico. (Data here.) Flows to Scotland are on the order of 10%; British Ireland would likely receive something on that level, starting well before the 1970s. Note that national insurance likely remains funded by London under Home Rule. 

But anyway: with a point of divergence in 1913 and no Civil War, the Irish economy in 1921 is going to be a lot better off than it was in reality. I said 10% to 20%. Going with that, we have to look at Figure 1 and imagine a horizontal line around 1.1 or 1.2. That’s the default GDP for British Ireland, assuming it simply tracks British GDP growth (which I don’t really believe it would, but hey — it’s a starting point). That horizontal line intersects the real-world Irish relative-GDP around 1995, give or take a couple of years. This leads to the conclusion that an Ireland that stayed with Great Britain would have been much better off until the late 20th century. Then, it would have been worse off for the last 20 years or so.

Obviously this is a grossly simplistic back of the envelope calculation that ignores all sorts of stuff, from monetary policy to E.U. membership.  And yet ...

The importance of counterfactuals

Here is a paper which attempts to assess how Ireland has done since separating from the United Kingdom. It’s title: “The Old Connection Sundered? Ireland and the U.K. since 1916.”

The problem is that the only counterfactuals posed are the expectations of three independence-era economists. Which tells you precisely nothing, save that Ireland became neither a socialist country nor practiced strong import-substitution. There is no attempt to answer the question posed in the title: how would Ireland have performed had it remained part of the United Kingdom?

I am disappointed. 

The U.S. would not have had a better constitution without the Revolution

Dylan Matthews’ third point in his screed about why the American Revolution was a mistake is that without the Revolution, we would have had a Westminster-style parliamentary government, and parliamentary governments are better.

I grant the point about parliamentary government. The U.S. constitution is a mess, at least as a governing document. It sets up multiple veto points and is quite unsuited to disciplined, ideological parties. The Canadian constitution, as it currently stands, works quite a lot better.

But the United States would not get the current Canadian constitution if we had not fought the Revolution.

Consider the Canadian constitution as it stood in 1867. It possessed this giant monstrosity called the Senate: an appointed chamber deliberately set up to represent the regions and throw sand into the legislative gears. And the Senate did just that! Occasionally, it rejected major reforms: in 1926, for example, the Senate axed Canada’s first attempt at a social security system. 

The Canadian senate, however, soon became remarkably deferential to the lower house. (For example, the failed 1926 social security bill sailed through unchanged the next year.) That is in part because the Prime Minister can appoint more senators, but mostly it is because the institution does not have the legitimacy to use its de jure powers to the fullest. It is not quite the House of Lords, but it’s close.

Now imagine designing a constitution for a British North America that includes a bunch of slaveholding states provinces. One might imagine that you would get an institution rather like the Canadian senate. But does anyone believe that politicians from the slave states provinces would hesitate to use every power at their disposal to protect their control? The end result would be an upper house that would be even more of a dog’s breakfast than our own.

And that assumes that you even get a united British North America without the Revolution! I will admit, it seems likely that the British colonies would eventually federate. But I mostly think that because Canada, Australia and South Africa eventually did federate, even if New Zealand and Rhodesia kept out of the latter two. Blind analogy is probably not a good reason to assume that British North America would go the same way.

Having North America divided into ... uh .... somewhere between 13 and 16 different autonomous entities under the British crown is not a recipe for good government. Give me the Senate instead of balkanization! Hell, give me the even messier constitutional wreck that is the European Union. 

In other words, claiming that North America would have had a better constitution absent the Revolution is ahistorical smoke blowing. Wasn’t gonna happen. 

Even fiction writers have trouble showing how the British Empire could have abolished American slavery

In 1973, a business historian named Robert Sobel published a highly entertaining book entitled For Want of a Nail. It is an incredibly detailed faux history book from a world where the British defeated the American revolution, all the way down to a plethora of fake footnotes. It is a fun read, enough to inspire me and some friends to make a long foray into fanfic back in the early 2000s. 

One of us, Johnny Pez, has received the rights from the Sobel estate to rewrite the book. Johnny intends to fill in a lot of gaps in the original as well as bring it up to 2016. He is off to a great start, which you can read here. 

The problem is that major parts of Sobel’s alternate history are simply broken. 

Take, for example, the way his imaginary British North America. At first, in his world, things are different because the slave trade is not stopped: rather, it continues until the 1830s. Then, in 1835, he has a financial crisis hit London. Cotton prices drop and slave prices go down with them. As a result, with an unspecified amount of financial support from the British government, the Southern Confederation (coterminous with our slave states of the same period) bails out the planters with a payment of £35 per slave in 1840, twice their market value. 

Well. There are a few problems with this scenario. First, take Sobel’s slave population compared with the real actual United States: 

How does a world where the slave trade remains open — itself a most improbable development — wind up with fewer slaves than in real history? Sure, the victorious British manumitted a bunch, but not that many. 

Then there is the price of those slaves. When Sobel’s financial crisis hits, the slave price he lists is roughly the same as the price of a young male slave in New Orleans in the real world. They then crash by an incredibly implausible amount by authorial fiat. He just waves his hands. The below chart shows the extent of the hand-waving; I have deliberately included data from the real 1840s to show what a punishing price decline actually looked like:

Sobel does not say how the manumission bonds are paid for. There are two possibilities. First, that the U.K. government bore all the cost. That seems weird, as he has the bill being passed by the Southern Confederation. But it could be. Only if it was, then you have a situation in which the U.K. just agreed to transfer roughly 11% of its GDP to the Southern planters with no political concessions in turn. I suppose that is possible, but it seems unlikely. 

More likely is that the Southern Confederation agreed to finance the bonds itself and then managed to transfer the cost of paying those debts to the Northern Confederation after the British agreed to unite the two small dominions into one big one in 1842. In return, the Northern Confederation gets a big protective tariff around all of North America. I can imagine that ... although one imagines a slightly more interesting convention than the one Sobel describes. After all, the new united North America is going to be born with a manumission debt worth 17% of its GDP.

But that is fixable. What seems unfixable, at least at first glance, are the following:

1. Keeping the slave trade open until 1840 is very implausible;
2. If it remained open, there would be a lot more slaves in North America, with unknowable effects on the price and even larger fights over the spread of the institution into Indiana (our Northwest Territories);
3. If it was closed, then the slave population should still have been much larger;
4. It is hard to imagine why the slave price would have declined so much and be seen by the planters as a permanent decline. A temporary depression is not going to convince slaveowners (or any asset holder, for that matter) to sell at the bottom. You need to create some sort of contrived situation involving bankers and bankruptcies and even then Sobel has painted a situation in which all the Southern banks are going under, so who cares whether you can repay your debts?

How you can square all of those circles, I do not know! If you can find cases of reputable books from the 1960s with equally bullshit numbers, then you can say the numbers are wrong and give a story for why they are wrong. (Although ... man, the number of slaves is not a state secret, even if slave prices were hard to find. Ditto the statements about the slave trade being open seem pretty damn clear.) But that puts you in a situation where the new country has to finance a manumission cost that is more on the order of 48% of GDP and convince the planters to take the deal. 

In short, Mr. Sobel pulled a magic price decline out the air to tell his optimistic story about the British Empire. Take that away and it gets much dicier.

No, a British victory in the Revolutionary War would not have ended slavery early

July 4th is upon us, and here we go again with a bunch of “The American Revolution was a mistake” posts. Now it’s Dylan Matthews at Vox, giving us three reasons why 1776 and all that was a “monumental mistake.”

Reason number one? “Abolition would have come faster without independence.” His evidence for this? Well, only that Parliament in fact abolished slavery in 1833. 

So lets look at that abolition for a moment. The British parliament voted to raise £20 million in bonds to compensate slaveowners in the West Indies and South Africa. The Abolition Act valued slaves at their average price in 1822-30, using a database of 74,000 transactions. They then divvied up the £20 million among all the colonies according to their proportion of total slave value. Across all the islands of the West Indies, that came to 780,993 enslaved people valued at £58 each, for whose freedom slaveowners received £26 per person. (Actual valuations varied from £115 in British Guiana to £27 in Bermuda.)

This brings us to the first problem facing a hypothetical British Empire contemplating abolition: using the same methodology, North America possessed 2.1 million slaves in 1833. Using the same methodology as the Abolition Act, that would have cost British taxpayers an additional £53 million pounds, on top of the £20 million for the West Indies. 

How much was £73 million? Well, the entire nominal GDP of the United Kingdom came to only £440 million in 1833. More relevantly, perhaps, total public spending came to only £51 million. Financing an additional £50 million in bonds at 3.4% would have cost £1.8 million per year ... almost 4% of all public spending. In the abstract, that was easily affordable ... in the concrete, the additional expense could have sunk the bill.

But there is a second problem. Slave prices in the West Indies were sinking in the 1820s along with the price of sugar, which dropped (net of shipping costs) from 2.3p per pound in 1818 to 0.8p per pound in 1829. (Prices are contemporary, but expressed in modern decimal values. Data from Robert Martin, Statistics of the Colonies of the British Empire, 1839, Appendix p. 3.) There were exceptions, of course: slavery was booming in Trinidad and British Guiana. But in general slave prices were declining across the West Indies and British policy prevented slaves in declining areas (like Jamaica) from being sold on to booming places. Barbadian slave prices, for example, fell by half between 1823 and 1831. (Table 5.)

That is not to say that the British planters supported abolition: slavery was obviously more profitable to them than free labor would be. (J. R. Ward looked into that back in 1978.) It is to say that they were willing to accept compensation at 44% of the average market price because market prices were falling fast.

Contrast that with the southern United States, where the cotton boom was just getting started. By 1833, the South was starting a prolonged cotton boom driven by exploding British demand for cotton textiles. In addition, American slave populations were growing fast. Combine the two and you have rapidly growing wealth tied up in slaves:, expressed below as a percentage of the U.K. GDP:

It doesn’t take a political scientist to realize that the politics of abolition are going to look very different in the above world. West Indian interests reluctantly capitulated to compensated abolition; North American slaveowners are going to fight a lot harder. Any compromise is going to result in a much higher compensation per slave than the West Indian slaveowners received. 

We then add the third problem: in the 1830s, cotton is a strategic crop. Sugar is nice; cotton drives the U.K. economy. It is the oil of the day. Politicians could contemplate a disruption of sugar production in the West Indies with equanimity. After all, the product is available from elsewhere and who cares if it comes from within the Empire or outside? Those same politicians could not easily contemplate a reform that might disrupt the flow of cotton to British textile mills. 

Fourth, we have to think about how American independence was avoided. There are basically two scenarios: (1) British diplomacy avoids conflict, and (2) Britain wins on the battlefield. Scenario (1) implies that the British government accepted that it could not tax the American colonies. Scenario (2) implies that the U.K. repeals most or all of its exactions on the American colonies. Both make it unlikely that the U.K. would impose taxes on North America to pay for the freeing of North American slaves.

An abolitionist U.K. government will face a Hobson’s choice. They can abolish with insufficient compensation, even if it could get such a bill through Parliament — which is unlikely — they would risk triggering a revolt by Southern planters. The British Empire could probably win such a revolt (strangling Southern commerce and trying to mobilize Northern armies), but no government would take such a threat lightly. They can abolish with sufficient compensation — which would be extremely expensive and risk triggering a planters’ revolt regardless. Or they can ignore public opinion (10% of the British population signed an anti-slavery petition) and hope the problem goes away.

The problem is that the longer Parliament waits, the less tractable the problem becomes. 

 

It is certainly possible that the British Empire would have abolished slavery earlier than the United States. Johnny Pez has a post showing the roots of how that might happen in a world where Britain defeats the Continental Army. (He is currently engaged in a magisterial project of re-writing For Want of A Nail, by Robert Sobel. It promises to be awesome.) 

But the British Empire was ruled by human beings. And those human beings would have faced a situation where their medium-term political and economic self-interest conflicted with their morals and long-term interests. The result, I suspect, would be delay and half-measures, with a high likelihood of ending in a war. 

The American Revolution might have been a mistake. But it is probably not because the horror of slavery would have ended much sooner. 

Was Sykes-Picot treacherous?

 I used to go to the Middle East a lot. But then stuff happened. I got disinvited by the government of Bahrain, wound up on Hezbollah’s side of a debate over energy policy in Lebanon, and experienced a surprisingly less-than-warm trip to Israel. Plus, the one time my wife and I get to Dubai, the Burj was closed! These days I have not been travelling there as much.

But this is the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot. So let’s visit the agreement. In the Arab middle east, Sykes-Picot is usually used as a shorthand for the European carve up that laid out the modern borders of the region between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. (Inasmuch as those borders still mean anything.)

But Sykes-Picot, in fact, laid out a rather different plan from the borders that actually emerged, as the below map shows.

Well, the map sort-of shows the agreement. You need to read the text of Sykes-Picot to really make sense of it. In essence, it worked as follows:

1. There would be an Arab state encompassing both area A and area B on the map. France and Britain would each retain preferential rights in A and B respectively, but those rights were economic, paralleling the Anglo-Russian Entente in Persia:
   • Preferential investment rights;
   • Limits on the presence of advisors to the Arab state from the other country.
2. France and Britain would engage in separate negotiations with the Arab state over their “direct or indirect administration or control” of the territories colored blue and red. 
3. The brown area around Jerusalem would be internationalized, with the exceptions of Haifa and Acre, which will go to Britain. 

The agreement is often blamed for the current chaos, In the words of the Economist:

Even so, Sykes-Picot has become a byword for imperial treachery. George Antonius, an Arab historian, called it a shocking document, the product of “greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity”. It was, in fact, one of three separate and irreconcilable wartime commitments that Britain made to France, the Arabs and the Jews. The resulting contradictions have been causing grief ever since.

 Except, well, the agreement does not seem to have contradicted British promises to the Arabs. See the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence. In letter no. 4, the British say, “With regard to the vilayets of Bagdad and Basra, the Arabs will recognise that the established position and interests of Great Britain necessitate special administrative arrangements in order to secure these territories from foreign aggression, to promote the welfare of the local populations and to safeguard our mutual economic interests.” The Arabs agree to that in letter no. 5, as long as the occupation is temporary and accompanied by compensation. In letter no. 6, the British state that they have to give Aleppo and Beirut to the French; the Arabs agree in letter no. 7.  

As for the Zone A/Zone B division, that was not a partition; rather, it laid out spheres of influence inside a sovereign state, along the lines (as mentioned above) of the Anglo-Russian Entente in Persia. The British were committed to handing back the “indirect” administration in the east ... but the Arabs agreed to allow London to decide for how long it would be held.

In other words, Sykes-Picot only violated Arab expectations by hiving off the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem ... although the Sharif of Mecca was to get a seat at the table in administering it. Otherwise, Sykes-Picot wasn’t the betrayal; the betrayal was that the ultimate borders didn’t follow it. 

That said, it’s hard to see how the Sykes-Picot borders would have been any, you know, better. You would have had one giant state combining most of what we call Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, including big swathes of Kurdish territory. You would have had an “Iraqi” province, mainly Shia, eventually turned over to the giant Arab state. (I am sure that would go well, as the peoples of East Timor and Spanish Sahara can attest.) France would have carved out a strange country combining Arab Alawites, Arab Christians, Arab Shia (non-Alawite Shia), Druze, Arab Sunnis, and a whole bunch of Turkish peasants. Jewish settlers would have still flowed into the area under international administration. It would have been a mess, albeit a different mess.

Just not a “shocking” mess.

Calling Amazon: a pitch for a zombie television series

 Division Street: America is a wartime thriller that takes place in an alternate 1971 where President Dick Nixon has been battling a zombie rising for over two years and now resides in the Western White House.

Main characters are Ben, an African-American National Guardsman, and Barbara, a Mary Tyler Moore type, alongside their respective families, all living in the Denver Safe Zone. Ben and his family are refugees from Pittsburgh, living initially in a tent city, and in suburban housing by the end of the first season. Barbara, the daughter of a ranching family in Greeley, CO, is drafted into Civil Defense.

Five projected seasons: The first focuses on clearing and holding Denver and the surrounding suburbs, reflecting Spielbergian fears from Poltergeist, Close Encounters, as well as Norman Lear comedies from the era. Like The Wire, The series expands organically to get a broader view of the response to the zombie threat, to include government/military response from the local, state, and federal level.

The fifth season focuses on Ben and Barbara’s participation in the campaign to retake America. In Army Group North, Ben ultimately becomes a company commander in the liberation of New York City. Barbara joins the Reconstruction and Reconciliation Corps, following her niece, a Marine NCO, in Army Group South, putting traitors, war profiteers, and others on trial, and reuniting communities with the federal government.

What makes Division Street: America compelling is its rich, complex characters whose arcs explore race, sex, and society in the face of the apocalypse. Pairs well with Man in the High Castle.

A GOP insider view of Trump

 This Saturday I took a flight back from Miami to Washington. I was seated next to a GOP political operative; communications director for a major gubernatorial campaign and senior campaign aide to a currently beleaguered senator. Smart fellow. We talked a long time. I had no problem acting as if I were still a Republican ... ah, my useless bipartisan skillz in this partisan time. 

He had an interesting take on the election. Trump is better than Ted Cruz for two reasons. In reverse order of importance: (1) Ted Cruz would be even worse than Trump for the downballot races. Trump has some record of bringing in crossover voters; Cruz did not. (2) Cruz would make at least as bad a president. Not for policy reasons. Rather, the operative said that he could easily imagine Cruz vetoing a continuing budget resolution or a debt-ceiling increase in a game of chicken gone wrong. 

Neither of these positions is unassailable. I had my doubts that Cruz would behave irresponsibly in office: his wife is from Goldman Sachs, for example. And Trump has shown a disturbing disregard for political and constitutional norms. My seatmate agreed with my assessment of Trump; he just thought Cruz would bring about an entirely constitutional disaster.

I also doubt that Trump has real crossover appeal. He brought new voters into some primaries, yes, but nobody decided not to vote in because Trump was on the ballot. In the general, Trump could lose more voters than he brings in. I also mentioned the evidence (courtesy of Carlos Yu) from the Democratic primary that some Sanders supporters are remarkably apathetic in the downballot: for example, in the recent Wisconsin election there was a downballot race for judge. Exit polls showed that 96% of Clinton voters in the Wisconsin primary voted for the liberal judge. The same polls showed that only 85% of Sanders voters did the same.

My seatmate did not think that the choice mattered much, however. He was convinced either one of the two was fated to go down in flames in November and a True Republican third-party run was impossible. His absolute confidence in a GOP loss in November might be a useful tonic for some of my Democratic friends. 

A great conversation with a smart person. He gave me a much better understanding of why the GOP is not rallying around Cruz.

What I wonder is whether it matters. Imagine a world without Cruz. It isn’t hard to do. Would Kasich have started cleaning up after Florida?

Could Irish independence and the civil war have been avoided?

 Ireland celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising on March 27th. (The rising actually started on April 24th, 1916.) The Rising started the process of gaining Ireland its independence from the United Kingdom. The revolt was not popular in Ireland and the British easily suppressed it, but the heavy-handed British response after the violence mobilized Ireland in favor of independence. The rest was history.

But was it inevitable? There was a Home Rule deal on the table in 1914 that was highly favorable to Ireland. Moreover, the U.K. was in the process of creating the modern welfare state; the bill kept National Insurance in U.K. hands. Ireland could take it back ... but why would it want to? It was a pretty good deal. Ireland would have kept fiscal stabilizers, a full banking union and access to centrally-funded social insurance. 

On the other hand, history. The U.K. was slow to enfranchise Catholics, it tolerated discrimination until the bitter end, and the Famine. Memories of wrongs on that scale run deep. Moreover, the final 1914 home rule bill excluded northern Ireland for six years, which would have likely become permanent and become a running sore. It is entirely plausible that at some point after 1916 the United Kingdom would have split up despite any advantages for the residents of Ireland. 

So here is my question: had Britain been more intelligent in the aftermath of the Easter Rising and avoided the idiotic Conscription Crisis of 1918, would Ireland have remained part of the United Kingdom through the Second World War? Or was Home Rule destined to fail once the First World War postponed its implementation? 

P.S. I have read Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-22, by Ronan Fanning. He makes a solid case that partition was inevitable but does not really address the question of whether southern Irish independence was inevitable. He argues that no British government would have implemented the act (even without the war) but I do not quite grok why he believes that. Since I do not unfortunately regularly talk with Irish historians, this post is an honest call for schooling.

Was the Libyan intervention a failure?

 At Vox, Shadi Hamid argues no. He rightfully says that in order to evaluate the success of the intervention, we need to evaluate the Libya that is against the Libya that would have been without NATO airpower. He argues, pace Barack Obama, that “had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria. ... and so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction.” 

Do we know that, however? It is also possible that the government would have invaded Benghazi, killed tens of thousands of people in reprisals and round-ups, and then re-established its authority. 

If you believe that a prolonged civil war was inevitable, then the intervention was not a failure. If you believe that the government could have re-established order, then the intervention succeeded only if the subsequent chaos led to fewer deaths than a government victory. 

Was it realistic to believe that the Libyan dictatorship could have (unlike its Syrian counterpart) re-established order and survived, or was the country doomed to fall into chaos once the rebels chased government forces out of eastern Libya in February 2001?

What if the United States bordered Russia instead of Mexico?

The United Kingdom has been in the midst of a giant immigration backlash prompted by the net arrival of roughly 1.4 million Eastern Europeans since 2004. From my perspective, that was surprising. After all, the Eastern Europeans are white and Christian or post-Christian. Don’t we all know that the reason the United States — or at least Trump supporters — gets all wiggy about Mexican immigration is because most Mexicans don’t look “white”?

Well, do we really know that?

There is evidence that racial phenotypes have had a strong impact on Mexican-Americans. Before 1945, many southwestern states (well, Texas) treated Mexican-Americans as black for the purposes of segregation. The historic impact of that has been under-studied. There is evidence, however, that once the legal barriers fell away in the late 1940s and 1950s, Mexican-Americans began moving into the “white” category, both de jure and de facto ... until the 1970s and the advent of mass immigration from Mexico.

At that point, native-born whites began to react against the arrival of Spanish-speaking immigrants. But because those immigrants were (in most but not all cases) phenotypically different, native-born Anglos began to discriminate against anyone who looked like the new immigrants. That in turn made race more salient in the lives of native-born Mexican-Americans and impeded assimilation. This is the finding advanced by Tomás Jiménez in his book. (Discussed here in the context of Reihan Salam’s misinterpretation of Jiménez’s results.)

So there is evidence that prejudice against immigrants hits most second, some third, and a few fourth-generation Mexican-Americans.* 

But imagine for a moment that the United States bordered Russia to the south, instead of Mexico. Is there any evidence that Americans would have reacted better to the net arrival of 12 million Russian-speakers between 1970 and 2015? Russia is a violent and corrupt country. Assuming (reasonably) that a Russia right next to the United States would have neither nuclear weapons nor imperial ambitions, it is not at all clear to me that the anti-immigration reaction right now would be any less were most of the immigrants pale-skinned, blond-haired Russians.**

Rather, the difference would be that native-born Russian-Americans would be far less likely to be bothered by anti-immigrant sentiments than native-born Mexican-Americans. Not because the Russian-Americans would be any different than the Mexican-Americans in their underlying attitude. Rather, native-born Russian-Americans, being clearly white and indistinguishable from other white people, would not face day-to-day prejudice imposed upon them by the reaction of non-Russians to the presence of their newly-arrived cousins. 

In short, in that world, Trumpism might be stronger. 

American aid and Greek economic growth

 Two years ago, I wondered about the importance of property rights in economic growth. The reason for my doubt was the example of Greece. The country has terrible property rights, yet managed to grow remarkably quickly between 1950 and 1980. As illustrated in the below figure (nicked from here), its annual output per worker rose from the level of Colombia to the level of France, before falling slightly behind. 

Well, what happened? One useful line of inquiry might be to dig deeper into history. In 1950, Greece had suffered greatly from World War 2 and the subsequent Greek Civil War. It is entirely plausible that the country possessed reserves of human capital far in excess of its contemporaneous Latin American counterparts. Maybe there is nothing miraculous about its catch-up economic growth in the subsequent decades.

But then I came across a recent paper by Carmen Reinhart and Christoph Trebesch. On page 11, I spotted this rather stunning figure:

Wow.

Now, the aid between 1946 and 1949 went to fight the war, but it meant that the opportunity cost of equipping the Greek National Army was essentially zero. It also meant that Greek civilians avoided much privation that might otherwise have been expected. In fact, the economy managed to grow during the war, albeit from the depressed levels at the end of the Axis occupation. (See page 30 here.) 

American aid continued after the war, however. In fact, it was not until 1961 that high levels of direct support metamorphosed into (rather soft) loans. 

To be frank, I do not think that American aid caused rapid Greek postwar growth. I am still not sure what caused that. But even had Greece avoided a Communist takeover without the aid, the chances are very high that the country would have slid into counterproductive redistributionist battles had American taxpayers not agreed to cover Greece’s continuing current account deficits. My prior would be that a counterfactual Greece without American aid would go the way of Argentina, at best. Some catch-up growth, rapidly petering out, followed by relative stagnation at the level of a wealthy Latin American country. 

Of course, we did it to keep the Communists at bay, not promote Greek economic growth. But it makes you wonder. Could foreign aid at the right time have kept Argentina, for example, from running off the rails in the postwar decade?

And what was it about Greece, anyway, that let it catch up so fast to the rest of Western Europe once aid covered the cracks? There had to be something else different about the place compared to Argentina or Mexico. No? 

Ghost Fleet

 Novels about great power war have long held fascination, particularly since the world hasn’t really seen one since the Korean War ended in 1953. Red Storm Rising is well known, as is Red Army and the Third World War. All three dealt with a conventional European war against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. All wrestled with the specter of nuclear weapons and all got most of the technical stuff right. The best of the bunch is Red Army, in part for the characters, and in part because the author dared to have the United States lose.

All of those books, however, took place in what was more-or-less the present at the time they were written. Today, unlike the 1980s, the United States holds near-absolute military superiority. War is still possible, of course ... see, for example, Eric Harry’s Arc Light. It portrays an accidental war between the United States and the Russian Federation in the early 1990s. What makes Arc Light unique is twofold: it gets the politics and economics absolutely and it lets nuclear weapons out of the bottle without destroying the world. (I won’t spoil it by saying how; the book is worth reading. James should take a look at it for this series.) The war depicted was a great power war, of course, but it was accidental and it was not between peers. 

So to consider what a modern great power war between peers might be like we need to move into the future. On this blog, Martin Skold discussed what a near-future great power war might be like. But that excellent discussion was heuristic and only tangentially touched upon operational or technological issues, let alone the politics. (Go read!) 

And now we have Ghost Fleet, by P.W. Singer and August Cole! In it, China and the United States go to war in 2024. (The authors give away the exact year on page 48.) A real, genuine great power war. Both sides refrain from using nuclear weapons (for reasons I find plausible) and the conflict plays out over land, sea and space. It has gotten good reviews and it is a book that we really wanted to like.

But we have read it, and while it is a good gripping read ... we just cannot give it a thumbs up. The reasons are basically technical. The authors appear to get enough issues seriously wrong to make it impossible to keep our disbelief suspended. 

Over the next few days and weeks Will Baird and Noel Maurer will be collaborating on a series of short posts pointing out the problems with the scenario laid out by the authors. We are doing this for three reasons. First, it is a fun bit of procrastination. (The book is well-written and fun to read!) Second, the book has gotten a lot of attention in policy circles ... and if we are right about the flaws, then that is a problem. Finally, we think we might be able to learn something. These posts aren’t intended to pan or fisk the book; rather, we think of them as opening up a conversation. Are we missing something? Do the authors know something we don’t?

We have divided the apparent errors into three types:

1. “That’s Not How It Works” technical problems that affect verisimilitude, but not the main plot.  

2. “That’s Not How It Works” problems that don’t affect the plot, but are so major that they yank you out of the book completely. “WTF moments” is another good term.

3. Serious screw-ups that make whole sections of the book impossible as portrayed.

Watch this space.

How many electoral votes could Bernie Sanders win?

 So imagine something weird happens and Bernie Sanders gets the Democratic nomination. The Republicans, meanwhile, nominate that nice boy from Miami, Marky Rubio. Marky picks Governor Johnny Kasich of Ohio to be his running mate. They unleash their inner moderates and charm America. It’s a massacre. Rubio-Kasich pulls in a fully Reaganesque landslide. They win the popular vote by 18 points, just like Reagan-Bush in ‘84. It’s a 22-point swing from Obama-Biden’s 2012 margins.

In 1984, Reagan-Bush won every state but Minnesota and the District of Columbia. In 2016, with the same popular vote margin, assuming a 22-point uniform swing, Rubio-Kasich gets a map like this:

Bernie Sanders would win fully 119 electoral votes. After all, in 2012 the Democrats won eight states by more than a 22-point margin. Even with a Ronald Reagan like popular landslide, the Democrats will keep California and New York. 

You basically can’t get an all-red map these days, the way you could back in 1984. The Republicans have lost too much ground in the northeast and west coast.

And note that this map is really a floor under a Sanders candidacy.

In reality, I do not think that he would lose with a 22-point uniform swing. I suspect that he would hold the Pacific Northwest and at least a couple of states from the old manufacturing belt: Illinois and Delaware certainly, Pennsylvania and Minnesota likely, Wisconsin possibly if there is a Walker backlash, with Iowa and Michigan and the rest of the Northeast within reach. It would be hard for Bernie Sanders to win the 2016 election. It would not be that hard for him to hold the Kerry-Edwards electoral map.

What about the other way? Something equally weird happens and Donald Trump wins the GOP nomination. Lindsey Graham refuses the veep nomination. So in an attempt to reach out to evangelicals and “teh blacks,” Trump picks Ben Carson.

It is a massacre, a fully Johnsonesque landslide for the Clinton-Castro ticket. The Democrats win by 23 points, a 19-point uniform swing over 2012. 

Well, in this world the Democrats really do manage to turn a popular landslide into an electoral landslide, just like back in ‘64. Sure, the makeup of the states are different, since Republican margins in the South are not what they once were, but Trump-Carson gets only 73 votes scattered across a bunch of very-white mostly-rural states.

Only the map to the right, unlike the one above, doesn’t seem possible. I can’t imagine Trump losing Mississippi and South Carolina. And could the Democrats take Texas, even against the Donald and with Julián Castro on the ticket?

So I ask you, my readers, especially the usual suspects. Who would be the Donald’s best pick for Veep, if not Carson? And how many states would a Trump candidacy really win? Inquiring minds want to know! 

Was independence essential to American economic success?

 A couple of posts down, I cast some doubt on the assertion that continued British rule would have slowed American economic growth after 1776. I have now come across a Gavin Wright essay that makes just that case. 

Wright argues, correctly I think, that a lot of early American growth was based on the creation of a labor market that excluded slavery from the Northwest (i.e., Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio), a relatively egalitarian land distribution, a unified national product market and deep capital markets. If those three things do not happen under continuing British imperial rule, then North America will be poorer. 

On page 294, Wright suggests that the British parliament might have done less to exclude slavery from the Northwest. I am skeptical of that proposition. It is true that Indiana only rejected slavery because Congress would not have admitted it as a slave state under the written conventions on Senate balance. But it is also true that the imperial British parliament could have even more clearly and less contentiously banned slavery from the area. I do not see why London would be slower to act than Washington. After all, the Empire did ban slavery almost three decades before the United States. 

Wright raises the issue of a more egalitarian land distribution but then drops it. It seems uncontestable that American policy fostered a more equal land distribution. (Certainly in what was then called the Northwest.) two propositions remain unclear: (1) how much those policies worked relative to an imperial counterfactual and; (2) how much they mattered to growth as opposed to distribution. Color me agnostic.

It is true that independence fostered the growth of American capital markets. But Canada developed solid capital markets and a strong banking system. It is possible that internal disunity under British rule would have delayed the creation of an American capital market, but I am skeptical. There certainly would have been less fear of default among British colonial provinces than American federal states. 

What does that leave? Continued British rule might have led to interprovincial protectionism from each other combined with lower tariffs against Britain. Both outcomes are possible. Canadian history suggests otherwise, but only after a span of decades. For example, Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick only established reciprocal free trade in 1846. That on a continental scale would have made British North America poorer than our United States.

In short, had continued British rule fostered multiple small and protectionist provinces (as it did in Canada for a remarkably long time), then it would have been bad for North America.

But was that a likely outcome?

What would Lesser Mexico have been like?

 In comments, Will Baird asks what would have happened to Mexico had the United States taken even more territory in the Mexican-American War.

The answer is that it depends. 

First things first: the current U.S.-Mexico border is improbable given the result of the war. 

The U.S. won all the battles in the north and asked for a settlement after occupying Veracruz. The U.S. gave its envoy instructions to take everything north and east of the Rio Grande, plus Arizona north of the Gila and California down to a line between the 32nd parallel and 35°45′5. The former would have put the border a few miles north Ensenada; the latter would have left San Luis Obispo and modern-day Bakersfield in Mexico ... along with, obviously, Los Angeles.¹ 

Had the Mexicans agreed to a settlement, then all of southern California would be under Mexican sovereignty today.

But Mexico refused. So eventually General Scott pressed all the way to Mexico City.

The American envoy to the Mexican government, Nicholas Trist, was a member of the Whig Party and an opponent of the war. President Polk appointed him to negotiate with Mexico for precisely that reason; it gave him political cover against accusations that the war was just a land-grab for the slave states. (Northern Mexico was a good place to grow cotton.) The problem was that after the U.S. wound up occupying Mexico City because the Mexicans refused to negotiate, President Polk decided to expand his ambitions.

President Polk recalled Trist, intending to demand more Mexican territory. Trist, however, ignored his recall order. In fact, he took it to the Mexicans and said, in effect, “Negotiate with me, you idiots, because the next guy is gonna demand a lot more territory.” The Mexicans agreed with this logic and negotiated a treaty that more-or-less gave us the current border. (Trist was not a bad negotiator: given his instructions, he pushed the border almost as far south as he could.) Treaty in hand, Trist returned to Washington, which put President Polk in an impossible position. The Whigs in Congress refused to vote money to continue the occupation of Mexico unless the President accepted a tariff increase.

At the time the Democrats were the party of free trade, which gave Polk three unpalatable choices. (1) Submit the Trist treaty to the Senate and give up on the dream of new slave states in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila; (2) Get more Mexican territory but accept the permanent tariff increase to finance the occupation for the duration of the negotiations; or (3) get absolutely nothing beyond Texas when Congress refused to finance the army. He went with option (1).

But what if he had taken option (2)? Or what if Trist had obeyed orders and gone home? The U.S would have taken an additional swathe of northern Mexico. How would that have changed Mexican history?

The first question we need to answer is: how much more territory? We know that President Polk told his cabinet as early as May 30, 1846 (a mere 18 days into the war) that he preferred a boundary at the 26th parallel, although he would settle for less.² When the Mexicans proved incalcitrant, he told his cabinet that he also wanted to seize the port of Tampico and “make the Sierra Madra [sic] the line.”³ That is a pretty concrete counterfactual, and it provides us with a new border. It would run from a little north of Los Mochis, continue east to the north of Torreón and Saltillo. Between Saltillo and Monterrey it would turn south, skirting to the west of Ciudad Victoria and then darting to the coast right below Tampico. (It’s the thick black line below.)

What effect would the new border have on Mexico? My first answer was that it would have nothing predictable until 1910. And upon consideration, that answer is probably right.

Some history: France invaded Mexico in late 1861, ostensibly over unpaid debts. In reality, the French had struck a deal with disgruntled Conservatives in Mexico, who were angered by the anti-clericalism of the Second Mexican Republic. In our world, the French pushed the Republican forces under Benito Juárez back to El Paso de Norte. (El Paso de Norte is now called Ciudad Juárez.) They then established the Second Mexican Empire under Maximilian. But they were reluctant to obliterate Juárez’s forces so close to the United States. A year later, with the Civil War over, the U.S. began to give military support to Juárez. Slowly but surely, the Republicans pushed south, and by 1867 the Second Mexican Empire was no more. 

The red arrows on the map represent the movements of the Juárez government. It retreated across the Coahuila state line at the end of 1863. In our history, Juárez took refuge in El Paso de Norte. That city bordered Union-controlled territory, at least once troops from California occupied West Texas in 1862. 

My first thought was that the new border would have little effect on the course of the Intervention. The French would be reluctant to attack a Saltillo so near the U.S. border. Either that or Juárez would just cross into the U.S. and establish a government-in-exile. The Republicans would regroup, reinvade and win after 1865 just like they did in real history.

Except it isnt that simple. Is Chihuahua in Confederate or Union hands in early 1864? Coahuila is deep in Confederate territory. (In the real world, the state’s Mexican governor supported the Confederacy.) The Confederacy supported the French. French troops would have cornered Juárez in Saltillo and destroyed the remains of his government, although the president himself might still escape to Union territory.

But Chihuahua would have been in Union territory. First, Coahuila might have been Confederate, but it would have been weakly Confederate. There is no drive on Chihuahua the way the Texans idiotically tried to invade New Mexico. Second, Chihuahua was filled with old Spanish military colonists who would have been fairly aggressively Union when the other option was dominated by slaveowning Protestants. Third, the main travel routes ran north-south, not east-west; the Californians that reconqured El Paso would have found it very easy to travel to Chihuahua City if need be. 

So Juárez retreats across the U.S. border in this world, regroups, and reinvades after 1865. Would there be differences? Yes, probably. Would they be predictable? No. In short, losing the northern territories would have changed Mexican history, but until 1910 those changes would not have been predictable or systematic.

And after 1910? The collapse of the Porfiriato in 1910 and the rise of the subsequent regime was almost entirely a northern story. Take Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila out of the federation and you remove both the factions and personalities that drove the Mexican Revolution. So you either get no Mexican Revolution or an unrecognizable one.

At that point it’s a mug’s game to predict the result. But it won’t look like modern Mexico. You'll still have a big semi-industrialized country — we are not talking Greater Guatemala. A succession of unstable military governments is the most likely outcome, but not the only one. All we can say is that Mexico would have been very different.

And the United States? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Counterfactual Mexicos?

 In comments, Sam King-Walters asks about “counterfactual Mexicos.” Short version: I think it’s a fun essay, and John Coatsworth is a brilliant economic historian, but I don’t think the conclusions are quite right. 

The essay, which I first read back in 2006, postulates three counterfactual scenarios for Mexico. In the first, Mexico declares independence in 1776 instead of 1821. In the second, Mexico declares independence between 1796 and 1808. In the third, independence happens on schedule, but the United States wins the War of 1812 and as a result does not invade Mexico in 1846.

In the first scenario, the U.S. loses the war of independence. (That is almost certainly true, although as Coatsworth concedes, the possibility of a Mexican independence revolt in 1776 is zero. But let’s run with it.) The assumption is that Mexico remains chaotic for the same period as it did in reality, but since the chaos starts in 1776 instead of 1821 economic growth begin commensurately early. He allows economic growth to start in 1800 and doubles population growth. He also halves the growth of thirteen colonies laboring under British rule.

The problems? Well, first, I have no idea why continued British rule would halve the growth of the thirteen colonies. No, seriously, I have no idea. British taxes were not onerous and foreign trade did not drive American growth during the period. Nor is it likely that London would have prevented western settlement from occuring for very long, the Proclamation of 1763 notwithstanding. The slowdown in American growth just does not make sense; I need to hear a better justification to believe that a hypothetical British North America would have grown much slower than the actual United States. 

As for the acceleration in Mexican growth, well, it ignores the contributions of one John Coatsworth. Political instability wasn’t the only reason for slow growth; the country inherited some pretty lousy institutions from Spain. In addition, it had a terrible geography, which required railroads. It is plausible that a more stable Mexico might have started to build railroads around the same time as Spain did (1848), but that advances the onset of economic growth by only 25 years. And even that is not clear: the demand for industrial metals drove Mexico’s economic growth in the late 19th-century. The demand for those metals would not change because Mexico became independent earlier. There is no reason why the country could not have had 100 years of independent chaos instead of 55. (And let’s remember that Mexico actually had 65 years of chaos; the last ten years of Spanish rule were a mess.)

The above objections also apply to the scenario in which Mexico declares independence between 1796 and 1808. That said, Mexican independence during this period could well have led to Louisiana becoming part of Canada, and that would have greatly changed later history! Unless, of course, Britain transferred all or part of Louisiana to the United States, which is a not-improbable outcome. 

It is true that Mexico would have benefitted from holding on to the territories lost to United States. But it is not true that Mexico would have held them with a British buffer or that Mexico would be much richer today. Would Mexico have held California? Maybe ... but with no American threat, London might have seen a very nice chance to take the territory for itself. Or, even more likely, the Californios would have declared independence. And even had Mexico held on to the territory, it is completely unclear to me why it would be any richer than the similar territories that Mexico retained after 1848. Sure, a Mexico with more area and population like Nuevo León and less like Chiapas is a richer Mexico, but that is not the scenario that the essay implies. 

The final scenario (where the U.S. wins the War of 1812) fails for all of the above reasons plus a few more. First, it would have implied a declaration of independence by the Mexican elite in the middle of the Hidalgo Revolt, and that was not going to happen. Second, an American victory in the war of 1812 would have made American expansion into Mexico even more likely, as the country tried to preserve sectional balance between the free North and the slave South. Finally, even had the U.S. won the War and 1812, and even had said victory short-circuited an American invasion, and even had Mexico declared independence early, there is no reason to think that independent Mexico would have exhibited any less instability or started to grow any earlier. 

Mexico has missed many opportunities (and grabbed others; things could have easily been worse!) but these three are not, I think, among them.

The left-wing success of a McCain administration?

 It is hard to see how John McCain could have won the 2008 election. Unlike 2000 or 2004, it was not a close-run event. But still, what if he had? (And with, say, Vice-president Pawlenty, not Palin.)

If the Supreme Court upholds Obamacare, then it is a no-brainer. Similarly, if you believe that President McCain would have let the auto industry go hang, then it is a no-brainer. But if the Supreme Court throws out the first and you do not believe (as I do not) that McCain would have done the second, then it is worth asking. Would a McCain administration have been better or worse?

The is one giant gain from a McCain administration: we would probably have a carbon ceiling and a carbon price. Assuming that the ACA does not survive, and that Detroit would have, what Obama administration accomplishments would have fallen by the wayside under a President McCain?

1. Passed the stimulus ... but McCain would have passed one as well. It would be more weighted towards tax cuts, but similar in size;
2. Passed Wall Street reform ... but some sort of bill was inevitable, what with a Democratic congress, and McCain was not a particular friend of Wall Street;
3. Killed Osama bin Laden ... but honestly, if the opportunity arose, a McCain administration would have handled that as well as President Obama. McCain was not George Bush;
4. Ended the war in Iraq ... thing is, I am not convinced that the Iraqis would not have kicked us out in 2011 anyway, given the political realities in Baghdad;
5. Abolished “Don't Ask, Don't Tell”;
6. Stopped torture ... oh, come on! Of course McCain would have done that;
7. Kicked the banks out of the federal student loans;
8. Boosted fuel efficiency standards ... but with a climate bill it would not matter that much. Plus, I think this is the kind of policy where the old pre-2004 McCain might have resurfaced, a safe way to be mavericky;
9. Passed mini stimuli in 2010 and 2011 ... they would have been bigger under McCain. The Democratic Party is structurally less-disciplined than the GOP, and I know that McCain’s advisors are foxhole Keynesians. Put his election at risk, and we get them;
10. Halted the construction of new coal plants ... but again, not necessary with a climate bill;
11. Signed the New START treaty.

Monetary policy would have been about the same. And both Souter and Stevens would still be on the Supreme Court. No difference there, at least as of early 2012.

So what have we got? No equal rights for gay Americans to serve their country; the vampire squid continuing to suck blood from federal student loans; and no START treaty. Plus some greater risk of a catastrophic economic mistake.

On the other side, a market for carbon! And, ironically enough, possibly more stimulus. But a market for carbon! A weak market, with big caps, and no permit auctions ... but a market.

The difference seems not huge once you take the ACA and auto bailout off the table. (I am assuming that Libya would have gone similarly and that when confronted with the military and diplomatic reality, President McCain would have stayed out of Syria.)

I must be missing something. Can somebody help me out and tell me what?

The decolonization that wasn’t

 Spain holds two small enclaves on the Moroccan coast.  The twin cities are currently heavily-fenced enclaves of the European Union. Their presence causes occasional minor spats between Madrid and Rabat, but in general relations are very good. Neither government would gain any internal advantage from risking a conflict. The two countries had a brief spat over Perejil island in 2002, but war was never in the cards. (For a rather silly exploration of a 2002 Spanish-Moroccan war, go here.) If I had to bet, I would bet that Spain will still have control over Ceuta and Melilla 93 years from now, in the year 2103.  

It turns out, however, that if things had gone slightly differently 93 years ago, in 1917, the territories might indeed be Moroccan today. The British Foreign Office wrote a memo suggesting that it would make strategic and diplomatic sense to swap Gibraltar for the North African enclaves. The General Staff and the Air Ministry concurred; the Royal Navy, unsurprisingly, did not. Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour concluded that “the difficulty of negotiating such an exchange (of Gibraltar for Ceuta) would be great, and that to raise the question at the Peace Conference would, therefore, only be justified if the naval and military advisers of His Majesty’s Government were in complete accord on the subject.” So nothing happened. Seven years later, in 1926, the Spanish government raised the possibility of making the swap, but this time the U.K. rejected it.

So what if Ceuta and Melilla became British in either 1919 or 1926? Well, given the history of British imperial retreat in the 1960s and 1970s, I’m having trouble imagining that London wouldn’t return the territories to Morocco. Why not? It buys goodwill with a strategic ally at no political, strategic, or economic cost. The Spanish inhabitants might or might not drift back to Spain (Britain certainly would not have allowed them entry) and that would be that.

OK, this is not a big change, as these things go. And it’s hard to see how the Royal Navy would have been convinced to change its position, or why Balfour would have decided to overrule the R.N. But it is an amusing little wrinkle in history; something I only noticed because of the earlier discussion of Britain’s proposal to “buy” an Indonesian island during the 1979 Vietnamese refugee crisis.

Thoughts? Not that I’m expecting any, but surprises are always welcome.

Margaret Thatcher and island-buying in 1979: less than it seems

 Did Britain and Australia really propose to create a new Hong Kong in the Philippines to be populated by Indochinese refugees?  The Guardian says yes.  The documents from the National Archives say no.  Unless there is more than the Archives made available, or I missed the juicy stuff in my long skim, nobody seems to have really considered the creation of a new Crown Colony in 1979.  I can’t find any references to an entrepreneurial city or opposition from Lee Kwan Yew; I certainly can’t find any references to an actual transfer of sovereignty.

Judging from the documents, the story does have a grain of truth.  There was a bilateral meeting between Australia and Britain, although little seems to have been discussed other than the possibility of a joint position at the U.N. conference.  (Both countries had already tried and failed to get the main Western powers in for a sit-down before the U.N. meeting.)  The British ambassador to Jakarta did raise the possibility of buying an island from Indonesia for an expanded refugee camp capable of housing up to 200,000 people.  The thing about that is that the report about the British suggestion and the Indonesian response is phrased in vaguest possible terms.  It isn’t clear who exactly would have put up the money.  (I suspect that the British were thinking about the UNHCR, not HMG)  It certainly isn’t clear that the use of the term “buy” meant “transfer sovereignty” as opposed to a simple land purchase. 

The rest of the stuff in the Guardian story is easy to find, from the worries about riots to the weird decision to try to make it harder for immigrants to bring their spouses into the U.K.  But the island-buying and rival Singapore?  Can’t find it. Maybe I’m not reading carefully enough. 

The full story, best as I can tell, is below.

On June 15th, 1979, the U.K. cabinet sat down to discuss the refugee problem, after receiving from hysterical letters from Thailand and threatening ones from Malaysia.  The Thais bluntly stated that they believed that the Vietnam intended to displace or kill the entire Cambodian population and “replace them with Vietnamese immigrants.”  The Singaporeans were more limited in their assessment:  they believed that the Vietnames aimed at expelling a potential Chinese fifth-column.  The Malaysians didn’t care about the reason; they simply stated that they intended to start sinking refugee-laded ships. 

This prompted a lot of worry back in London.  There was some discussion about allowing some into Britain, if only to convince other countries to take them, but Margaret Thatcher ixnayed that.  “Sir Murray Maclehose said that … he hoped that the U.K. would feel free to make a bid of her own.  The Prime Minister explained the difficulties created for the British government by the pressure of 2 million immigrants on our large cities.” (1)  I assume that meant two million existing immigrants, and not the possibility that Britain would accept two million Vietnamese refugees.

On June 22nd, the Malaysian foreign minister, Tan Sri Ghazali, stated that he believed that the Vietnamese were determined to expel their entire Chinese population.  He also believed that if the refugees were not allowed to depart by sea, the Vietnamese would push them over the border into Thailand—interestingly, and accurately, he no longer bothered to refer to Cambodia as a separate country.  He therefore proposed upping the capacity of the proposed Galang facility to 200,000.  “He commended this idea to HMG and … hoped that it would receive HMG’s support.” (2)  The British believed that the total number of additional refugees would not exceed 800,000; I have no idea where that number came from.  (3)

On June 26th, France put some pressure on London. “Since the tragedy of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos has begun to assume the character of a veritable transfer of population … the President of the Republic has decided that France will welcome 5,000 additional refugees … for every 1,000 inhabitants of France, there is one refugee from Indochina … France urges all states able to do so to add their efforts.” (4)  By that point, France had accepted 51,500 refugees; proportionately about the same as 230,000 who had arrived in America and far above the 2,316 that had arrived in Britain. (5)  The southeast Asian countries were losing patience.  The Indonesians had agreed to set up a 10,000-person processing center on Galang Island, but the U.K. suspected that their plan was to shunt the refugees they had already accepted to Galang, rather than take more.  Of course, that would imply packing 32,000 people into a facility built for 10,000 … ugh. (6)  Britain, meanwhile, had given £3.5 million to the UNHCR in 1978, and expected to give £4.75 in 1979.  That, however, still left the UNHCR underfunded to the tune of US$67 million … assuming that the problem didn’t get any worse. (7)   

On July 6th, Belize agreed to accept 1,000 refugees, as long as the U.K. provided funds for their “health, education, and welfare.” (8)  One July 12th, Britain pledged another £5 million for the UNHCR. (9) The next day, Britain’s ambassador in Jakarta reported that they had approached the Indonesian government “about the possible purchase of an Indonesian island,” and had been rebuffed. (10) The same day, the FCO reported that Britain would be on the hook for US$7.503 million for refugee aid and resettlement. (11)

The Malaysian government then reiterated its proposal for a 200,000 person settlement on an island, somewhere. It proposed that the United States set up a “United Nations Processing Centre for Vietnamese Refugees,” preferably on its own territory, but also possibly Hainan (!), Okinawa, Darwin, or New Caledonia.  All the refugees would then be transferred to the Centre, and “security and other matters affecting sovereignty and ownership of the land should be determined by the government of the United States of America … but ways must be found to overcome difficulties in the municipal law, e.g., the writ of habeus corpus … in order that these U.N. processing centres are immune from the process of local laws.”  (12) It is too bad that the Malaysians didn’t have better lawyers, or they would have known that the Constitution already did not apply to America’s Pacific territories, save Hawaii.

And that seems to be pretty much it.  Unless I missed something, which is quite possible. 

Thoughts?

(1)  J.S. Wall to Stephen Wall, “Vietnamese Refugees,” 15 June 1979. Reference PREM/19/130.
(2)  Telegram 204, “Vietnamese refugees,” 22 June 1979.
(3)  Telegram 644, “Your Telno 284:  U.N. Conference on Indo-Chinese Refugees,” 20 June 1979. 
(4)  Telegram 268, “France : Council of Ministers : Indo-Chinese Refugees,” 26 June 1979.  Reference PREM/19/130.
(5)  Lord Carrington to the Prime Minister, “Vietnamese refugees,” 25 June 1979, p. 6.  Reference PREM/19/130.  Canada had accepted 15,000.  The FCO didn’t have up-to-date Australian numbers, but stated that the country had taken in 19,500 as of May 1st.
(6)  Ibid, p. 9.
(7)  Ibid, p. 14. 
(8)  George Price to Margaret Thatcher, “6 July 1979.
(9)  JS Wall, “Indo-China Refugees,” 12 July 1979. 
(10) JS Wall to Brian Cartledge, “Possible State Visit by President Suharto of Indonesia,” 13 July 1979. 
(11) Telno 318, 13 July 1979.
(12) Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie to HMG, “The Vietnamese ‘Boat People’—An Outline of Malaysia’s Proposal to Resolve the Problem,” 14 July 1979.  Reference PREM/19/130

Links from parallel universes

  Or, in fact, not.  The first comes from Alex Harrowell.  It seems as though Margaret Thatcher quite seriously proposed to the Prime Minister of Australia that the two countries buy or lease an island from Indonesia or the Philippines in order to house Vietnamese refugees.  In 1979.  Even more astoundingly, Lee Kwan Yew took the idea seriously enough to strenuously oppose it.  Alex gives links to the primary source documents, if you’re having as much trouble believing it as I did.

Truly, the mind boggles.  Ferdinand Marcos was all kinds of corrupt, but he hid it behind a veneer of nationalism ... it’s impossible to imagine him selling part of the country to the U.K.  Leasing, though ... okay, I can’t imagine this.

The second is a commercial currently popular in Mexico, courtesy of Gancho. If you don’t know who the American is, you need to watch more sports.  Enjoy!

Reposted from a parallel universe

  A casino, a liquor store, a Bureau of Indian Affairs office, a corrupt judge, a BATF operation gone way wrong, and a bewildered FBI investigator trying to understand how the high price of Coca-Cola fits into the other strange goings-on in San Cristobal County ...

“In syncretistic religions, Scully, the attributes of one religious figure,” Mulder taps a case containing a weeping St. Catherine, “are given to another. In this case, John the Baptist’s connections with water: rivers, dunking ...”

“Baptism?”

“... made him the prime candidate to represent Chac, the Mayan water god.”

“I see. Like a mid-season replacement.”

Mulder glowers. “Now, traditionally, fermented corn mash was used as the sacrament in Mayan ritual, mixed with some magic herbs. A little binge, a little purge, and soon you're seeing visions.”

Scully looks around at the vaguely Catholic ornamentation encrusting the church. “I can’t imagine why.”

“The Spanish must have stopped the magic mushroom part of the ceremony, but you still had the folk belief that to receive the numinous, you had to expel the profane. Hence the burping contest we saw at Mass.”

“And that’s where the Coca-Cola comes in.”

“Yeah. What a racket. No wonder El Jefe owns the bottling plant.”  Mulder looks up at a garish mural, Salome being presented with the martyred St. John’s head. Not too many redheads in Spanish colonial religious art.

A ditch not dug

In 1911, U.S.-Latin American relations almost took a dramatic turn for the different.

In October of that year, the head of the Panama Canal Zone's civil administration, Maurice Thatcher, told a U.S. Senate committee, “We must have courts ...  I would like to see an American civil population here ... These Americans would come here to live, make their homes here, and they would prefer to live under the dominion of the American government, under American laws.” 

George Goethals, the rather un-Brooklyn-like Brooklynite in charge of construction thought differently.  “Introduce the franchise, and we’d go to pieces.”  The Taft administration agreed with Goethals.  The Canal Zone was not to receive elected government, civil courts, or even private property.  The Zonians remained a population of transients.  (Vocal, obnoxious, and slightly-crazy transients, but transients.)

But what if Thatcher had won the argument?  The Zonians would have owned farms and businesses.  They would set their own tax rates.  They would elect their governor.  The strange monopoly that the federal government held over ancilliary businesses would not last.  The Zonians would not all work for the federal government.  They would be a settled population, certainly larger than the actual Canal Zone population, which bounced around 50,000 in the 1950s and '60s.  And it is hard to imagine them lacking a non-voting representative in Congress.

Under such circumstances, could Congress have agreed to give the Canal Zone back to Panama?   

Missing post

This is weird.  I could have sworn that I had a post up here where I discussed Charlie Stross and science fiction.  But I can't find it.  It's gone, pffft.  Anyone out there who can help me figure out where and how I misplaced an entire post?

This is just wrong

Carlos will remember my tales of the disturbing town of San Juan Chamula, Chiapas.  The misshapen crosses, the angry children, the dirty market, the uprooted tree, the church in the plaza, the candles, and the offerings of the holy Coca-Cola to the water god.

You do not want to go there.  Go infiltrate the FARC instead. 

Mérida, Yucatán, is several hundred miles away, and a very pleasant town.  Or so I thought when I last visited the place, which must of been 2000 or thereabouts.  I mean, ritual decapitations by death-worshipping criminal gangs?   

Maybe I should have watched the X-Files more closely.

In a Free State

Did you know that Trinidad almost became part of the United States?

OK, that’s not quite true.  What happened was that at a summit at Camp Rapidan in October 1929, President Herbert Hoover told Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald that the U.S. would cancel Britain’s war debt in exchange for Trinidad, Bermuda, and British Honduras.  Hoover only wanted Belize in order to split it up between Guatemala and Mexico, and nobody expected London to part with Bermuda.  (Strangely, MacDonald drew the opposite line at the summit, insisting on retaining Belize but showing no objection to giving up Bermuda.) 

The real prize was, of course, Trinidad. Hoover had worked there, the place had oil, and its location was perfect.  Between Trinidad and Puerto Rico U.S. planes could overfly the entire Lesser Antilles (and Venezuela), pretty much turning the Caribbean into an American lake.

How much did Hoover offer, you ask?  Well, in nominal terms, a little less than £1.0 billion.  In 2006 terms, £44 billion.  And as a percentage of Britain’s GDP, the equivalent of £254 billion today.  Not a bad deal for the U.K. 

MacDonald, of course, eventually said no.  Hoover later wrote that MacDonald knew that Hoover had previously suggested a moratorium on war debts, and therefore the perfidious British saw no reason to pay off what they owed. 

But what if MacDonald had said yes?