The Power and the Money

How is Argentina like Puerto Rico?

Mostly, it isn’t.

But there is a sign of a disturbing history deep in the genetic heritage of most Puerto Ricans. And contrary to the popular belief, there may be some trace of the same history in Argentina. 

Some background. Over on Twitter, the great Pseudoerasmus and the great Gabriel Mathy began a debate over why North America saw relatively little intermarriage between Europeans and Native Americans compared to elsewhere. Pseudoerasmus argued that it was all about initial conditions. The Iberians migrated in smaller numbers to areas with bigger indigenous populations and in a heavily male-heavy environment. Gabe, conversely, argued that it was all about cultural norms. The English did not intermarry in significant numbers even in places with high numbers of indigenous and skewed sex ratios. 

It was an interesting discussion which I hope is put into a blog post. I participated for a bit but dropped out; Pseudoerasmus and I get along brilliantly, but in the heat of tweeting innocent responses can come across as more than slightly hostile. Moreover, the long threads are impossible to follow, quite unlike comment threads on a blog or the old newsgroups. (or ... gulp ... Reddit.) These are two of the reasons why I think Twitter is useless (at least for me) and am leaning towards quitting the platform, but I digress. If you must, try here and here. 

What does any of this have to do with Puerto Rico? Well, early DNA studies, from back when such things were new and neat, showed something a bit creepy. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed down through the female line, skewed Native American. But Y-chromosomes were entirely European and African. The implication is that something awful happened to the entire male Taino population; they were either killed or denied the possibility of procreation. Likely both.

Later studies upheld the results. Here is one from 2014, which sampled 326 people and found mtDNA that was 60% indigenous, 25% African, and 15% European, whereas the male Y-chromosomes were 85% European and 15% African.

Argentina is typically thought of as a European settler offshoot, and with good reason. In 1895, 25% of the population was foreign-born, overwhelmingly from Europe and the Levant. By 1914, that figure was up to 30%. Gross immigration between 1857 and 1914 came to 4.6 million people; net immigration ran about 3.0 million. (Pages 201-02 of the 1914 census.) All this with a population of only 7.9 million in 1914! Add in the Argentine-born children of those 3.0 million post-1857 immigrants, and you have a veritable transformation of the population. You might reasonably expect Argentines to have a similar genetic makeup to, say, white people in the northeastern United States or Ontario.

But there is some evidence that you would be wrong. 

A 2010 study found that 54% of Argentine mtDNA came from indigenous sources while 94% of Y-chromosomes traved to Europe. These results are strikingly close to Puerto Rico (minus the large African admixture on the island) ... shockingly so for a country which received mass immigration from Europe in relatively recent times.

So what explains the result?

Well, first, maybe it is wrong. It is one study of 246 individuals and sampling issues are not small. I suspect that the prevalence of indigenous mtDNA it is more-or-less correct; the result has been corroborated in multiple studies. The Y-chromosome part is dicier.

Second, another study added a wrinkle: half of the indigenous South American DNA appears to have originated outside the modern borders of Argentina. That opens up the possibility that at least half of the result may be driven by migration from Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru. As the authors write, “We did not collect bio-geographic information for most of the donors of our samples, and this is information was not available for most of the data collected from the literature; therefore, some donors could be in reality Native American immigrants (or descents form parents) from neighboring countries.”

Finally, European immigration to Argentina skewed male. (See page 271; it goes to CICRED 1974.) In 1869-1914, 1.7 males arrived for every female. That could explain some of the disproportionate prevalence of European Y-chromosomes compared to mtDNA without the specter of a Puerto Rican style past holocaust.

Nonetheless, the prevalence of native American ancestry in Argentina — and its apparent concentration in maternal ancestral lines — is a bit of surprise! There is a lot we do not know about the Argentine past ...

How Canada stopped being British

Montreal is a fascinating place. And so, in honor of being here, a few random Canadian posts.

You may be aware of the recent Australian citizenship kerfuffle. Basically, the Australian constitution prevents anyone with double-citizenship from holding public office. The exact phrase is, “Is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or citizen of a foreign power.”

That is a little weird. As is the fact that the Australian high court held that it was enough to be eligible for foreign citizenship. Weirder still is that people appear to have only recently realized that this clause exists, and so a number of politicians have had to resign.

But what really struck me was the identity of three of the four “foreign powers” causing the trouble: New Zealand, Canada, and Britain. (Plus Italy.) None of these were foreign in 1901, when the Australian constitution was written. Anyone born in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or Newfoundland was a natural-born British subject. (The link goes to the British Nationality Act of 1914, versions of which also passed in all the Dominions.)

Today, though, Australian law treats all the former dominions (including Ireland, which was grandfathered in at independence) as completely foreign countries. Since 1984, Commonwealth citizens have had no benefits in Australia, although they are still allowed to vote if they arrived before that year. In Canada, Commonwealth citizenship also confers no benefits of which I am aware. In the U.K. itself, there are a few.

So, in honor of the fact that I am in Montreal, when did Canadians stop being British? Well, the short answer is 1946, when Canada passed the Citizenship Act. Except that is not quite right! The separation started earlier and took longer to complete.

The Canadian government first limited the right of Britons to settle in Canada in 1910, under the Canadian Immigration Act of 1910. The act allowed the government to deport immigrants who were “unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada” or who had traveled courtesy of a charitable organization. The first requirement was laser-aimed at black Americans; the second at poor Britons. The act introduced the phrase  “Canadian citizen” which included “a British subject who has Canadian domicile” but which also made it clear that such domicile was not automatic. 

Ironically, the Canadian attempt to discourage Britons from emigrating flipped to encouragement after WW1, when the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 authorized Parliament to spend up to £3 million per year, the equivalent of roughly C$167 million today. Canada wanted Britons, you see, but only the right sort of Briton. 

In 1921, the Canadian Nationals Act defined Canadian nationals as British subjects who were born in Canada or who legally resided in Canada for more than five years. Weirdly, anyone naturalized in Canada would become British subject able to freely move to Britain, but being a British subject did not mean that you automatically had the right to move to Canada. 

So there was a de facto Canadian citizenship in place well before 1946.

Moreover, the special place of British subjects did not disappear after 1946. British subjects could still vote in Canadian elections after only one year of legal residency. In fact, British subjects Commonwealth citizens didn’t lose the right to vote in federal elections until the Canada Elections Act of 1970; even then, they could vote in provincial elections in B.C. and Ontario until 1985, New Brunswick until 1999, and Nova Scotia until 2006. (See pages 12-13.*) 

The slow distancing of Canada from the United Kingdom seems to have been an entirely unplanned thing. I would have thought that Québécois opinion had a lot to do with that, but I would be wrong. London just kept handing off autonomy to its North American colonies bit by bit. Each bit of devolution became harder to reverse. Moreover, London refused to graft any institutional meat onto the rotting bones of its Empire, forestalling any chance that the Commonwealth might turn itself into something like NATO or the E.U. or even a glorified free trade zone.

My current hypothesis is that the key decision was to grant the Dominions the right to set trade policy. Once they had that, they had interest groups that would refuse to reverse integration in that key sector. Add to that a very understandable reluctance to get the colonies to contribute towards their own defense and you had nothing but straight decline into irrelevance. In other words, socialist beer destroyed the British Empire.

Still, it is sort of amazing just how weak the links have become between the U.K. and its settler colonies, the ones that didn’t fight a war of independence.

* Willem Maas, “Access to Electoral Rights Canada,” Access to Electoral Rights Report RSCAS/EUDO-CIT-ER 2015/9 (July 2015). 

Vox congratulates The Deuce on attention to detail under a big picture showing the opposite

So, Vox wrote a good review of the new HBO series, The Deuce. And it does sound like a good show. But then they reviewer blows up their credibility. With a caption reading  “The series’ attention to detail is impressive,” they then show this picture:

The mistake, it jumps out at you if you lived in or regularly visited Manhattan during the 1970s (or much of the 1980s, for that matter), and it is not forgivable. Attention to detail my ass.

“Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole feud to private industry.”

Thus spoke Major Milo Minderbinder in 1943.

Was he right? Does contracting out combat support functions save money? I mean, that is not quite the whole feud, but it is some of it.

The best answer comes from study published by John McGrath, at Fort Leavenworth. Below are the figures from Table B-2 for various American wars. The figures apply only to the Army but rightfully include staging areas in Korea and both Gulf Wars: Japan and Kuwait, respectively.

So what do we got? At first glance, success! A higher tooth-to-tail ratio, awesome sauce!

We are back to the levels of World War 2! (AEF = American Expeditionary Force of WW1; ETO = European Theater of Operations in WW2.) Hooah!

Only, well, that does not include the contractors. We really should put them back into the mix, since they did jobs that soldiers did in Gulf 1 and before.

Ah. Well. Not so good.

Now, to be fair, these figures do not include the extensive host-country support the U.S. received in Korea, which would make that war look pretty bad. (Korea would fall to 28% combat troops on a BOTE calculation.)

They also do not include potential cost savings. After all, if private contractors are cheaper, then you would expect that the military would use more of them. Calculating that, however, is incredibly complex, because American operations have become far more capital and resource-intense over time. The simple calculations show ever-rising real deployment costs, but that could be a reflection of the fact that the American soldier in Gulf 2 was rather more lethal (and well protected) than the American soldier of Gulf 1, who was both more lethal and better protected (and better fed) than the American soldier in Vietnam, who was more lethal than the American soldiers who beat Hitler.

It is hard to figure.

But the headline figures should induce skepticism.

This, note, is just for outsourcing support functions; we have not gotten into questions of outsourcing actual genuine combat. You know, what Major Minderbinder really wanted to see. That is an even less-satisfying topic for another post.

“We are trying to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service”

Thus spoke Erik Prince in 2007.

Looks like my decision to take a look back at Blackwater was prescient. (Well, I had some inside information.) Today the New York Times reported that people within the Trump administration persuaded Erik Prince to try to sell the Defense Department on expanding the U.S. operation in Afghanistan by using private military contractors.

This proposal begs several questions, not least: would it save any money? But let’s punt on that for a moment. Here I just want to briefly review America’s history with private military companies.

The first clear-cut use of American private contractors to carry out a core state function — perhaps the core state function, the use of violence to defend the people — dates back to the Revolution. The fledgling United States needed to interdict British supplies and defend its commerce with its French and Spanish allies. The problem was that the rebel states had no standing navy, and lacked the time to construct one. Congress solved the problem by issuing “letters of marque” to private merchantmen. Once possessed of a letter of marque, private merchantmen would finance the outfitting of their ships with weaponry and proceed to attack British and Loyalist shipping in return for a bounty per enemy ship destroyed. The Continental Navy never numbered more than 40 vessels — Congress commissioned only 64 ships over the course of the Revolution — whereas the number of privateers peaked around 450. Almost 1,700 private vessels conducted combat operations for the United States in 1776-82.

The U.S. again turned to privateers when it again went to war with Britain in 1812, Congress having refused to appropriate money for a standing navy. In that war, privateers earned approximately $40 million — 5.1 percent of the country’s GDP at the time.

Congress again turned to contractors during the Mexican-American War. When the Army needed to make an amphibious landing at Veracruz in March 1847, it chartered 54 private steamships and 249 other boats. The Army also hired teamsters, laborers, and mechanics for service in Mexico. Civilian personnel, however, refused to serve for longer than six months, demanded exorbitant wages, and many proved to lack the skills they claimed. Reports complained of price gouging. [1] An embarrassed Quartermaster-General suggested that the Army establish a corps of enlisted laborers and proposed that the Navy should operate transports: “[I was] constantly embarrassed by the want of that practical knowledge which nautical men only possess.” [2] Congress did not follow his suggestion, and the Army again employed contractors against the Seminole Indians in Florida during the 1850s. [3]

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, both sides found themselves unprepared. Confederate privateers attacked Northern shipping. The U.S. side, however, broke with the past and did not employ privateers. Rather, Congress drafted 600 civilian vessels into armed service, and recruited 70,000 sailors to man them. Congress did, however, contract with civilians to move military supplies. One entrepreneurial New Yorker purchased a used ship for $12,000 and earned $833,000 from the government — the modern equivalent of $1.2 billion. [4]

The U.S. may not have employed armed contractors at sea during the Civil War, but it did on land. The Army of the Potomac under George McClellan hired Allan Pinkerton’s “National Detective Agency” to gather intelligence in the South and conduct counterintelligence operations in the North. A problem arose, however, when the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army, Winfield Scott, contracted with Lafayette Baker to provide similar services. In at least two cases, agents of one contractor wound up arresting employees of the other. More seriously, when President Lincoln fired McClellan in 1862, Pinkerton also resigned and took with him all the intelligence that he possessed about Confederate operations. [5] The Army eventually wound up bringing intelligence functions in-house. [6]

After the Civil War, military contracting went into eclipse. [7] The U.S. chartered private ships for use in the Spanish-American War of 1898, but only under strict military control. The federal government allowerd merchant vessels to arm themselves during both World Wars, but the centralized structure of the Merchant Marine bore little resemblance to the private contracting of the 19th century. In the Korean War, the South Korean government provided the U.S. Army with 50,000 civilian laborers to move supplies to the front, but the “Civilian Transport Corps” was never really a private organization, and the U.S. and Korean governments soon reorganized it into the paramilitary Korean Service Corps. [8] During the Vietnam War, the Military Sea Transportation Service hired private vessels to transport materiel to the war zone, but their crews were given Naval ranks and uniforms and came under military discipline while in-theater. [9] The Army employed private contractors to construct bases and ports in Vietnam, but military engineers outnumbered civilian ones 2-to-1. [10]

And that was that until the late 20th century. When the NATO occupied Bosnia and later Kosovo, the Clinton administration was reluctant to make the sort of mass reserve call-ups needed to sustain the occupying troops in the field. The figures are rather muddled and they include all sorts of non-support personnel, but about half of all DOD-funded people in the Balkans were technically civilians employed by somebody other than the U.S. government.

Which brings us to the modern era and another post.

North Carolina in historic and geographic perspective

Political events over the past few years in North Carolina have been quite depressing. Extreme gerrymandering diluted representation. In 2012, the Democrats won the popular vote for the federal House but lost most of the seats. In 2016, a 53% GOP margin for House votes won them 77% of seats; a 55% margin for state senate turned into 68% of the seats; in the state lower chamber, 53% of the vote got them 62% of the seats. (See here. For maps showing the power of gerrymandering in the state, see here.) 

Then, when the Republican governor lost re-election in 2016, the legislature moved to strip the Governorship of most of its power. 

But this is not unprecedented.

First, let us compare across space: Maryland is as gerrymandered as North Carolina, only in favor of Democrats. Is is true that Republicans benefit more nationally from gerrymandering (only Illinois and Maryland have a strong Democratic bias) but N.C. is not at all unique.

Second, the legislative power grab after the election is unique in the 21st century — the Maryland legislature did not try to strip Governor Hogan of his power in 2014 — but it is not unique across American history. First, consider Louisiana under Huey Long. For all the shenanigans, Governor McCrory did not move to destroy the opposition when he was in power the way Long did back in 1928-35. 

More ominously, consider Redemption in North Carolina. In the 1868 election, Republicans solidly trounced the Conservative Party. In 1870, however, the Conservatives managed to come back by effectively casting themselves as the white people’s party ... and using terror tactics by the Ku Klux Klan. Governor William Holden called out the militia to fight the KKK, but the Conservative nonetheless won the legislative elections. They first moved to prevent legislators from being seated from districts where the state militia arrested KKK terrorists. They then impeached Governor Holden. In 1876, the Conservative Party renamed itself the Democratic Party, becoming part of the national Democratic coalition. It took them until 1898 to fully disenfranchise the black population. (See also here.)

By those standards, North Carolina has so far been quite civilized. No riots, no extrajudicial killings or warrantless arrests, no declarations of martial law, and the courts have reined in the lame duck power grab and may reverse the gerrymander. Vigilance is warranted. Protest is warranted. And political mobilization is needed. But worse things have happened and worse has been overcome. 

Elections have consequences, but not all consequences are equal

Sometime it seems that every single election of my lifetime had been more important than the one before. But is that really true? What follows is a first take at that question: I hope it provokes a long and contentious comment thread. (Hope, as we again realized ten days ago, really does spring eternal.)

Let’s start a little before I was born.

1960:  Not important, even in retrospect. Would Nixon have backed the Cuban exiles? Would Nixon have tried a Keynesian tax cut? Would either have mattered in the long run? There may have be knock-on effects on the struggle for African-American equality, but those are contingent and impossible to predict.

1964: Yes, very important, but such a blow-out that it’s not worth commenting upon.

1968:  Massively important, both as it seemed at the time and (even more so) in retrospect. A Humphrey administration would have brought universal health care and universal day care, for two things, let alone the implications for American political culture from avoiding Watergate.

1972: See 1964.

1976:  Not important, with a caveat. Gerald Ford would not have been appreciably different from Jimmy Carter. Ford, however, would not have been eligible to run in 1980 under the terms of the 22^nd amendment. (He took office before January 1975, therefore serving “more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President.”) If a Ford term wracked with inflation and recession (which it would have been) allowed Kennedy to beat Reagan in ‘80, then the consequences of having liberal Democrats in office during the subsequent boom might have been very large. But that is speculation; at the time, the stakes were low.

1980:  Unknowable. First, it wasn’t really that close. (See 1972.) In that sense, it’s hard to care about the counterfactual. Second, the American ship-of-state remained remarkably steady under the Reagan administration, given the rhetoric. Finally, its importance hinges on way too many unknowables. (See 1976.) In other words, it probably mattered a lot in the long-run but it really is not easy to say how.

1984: See 1972.

1988:  Not important, really, unless you believe that a Dukakis administration would have ignored the invasion of Kuwait. If you believe that then it was massively important.

1992:  Hard to say. The re-election of George H.W. Bush would have slowed the radicalization of the Republican Party. But at the time, the election didn’t seem earth-shattering save for the issue of health care … and those reforms failed to materialize.

1996:  Yawn.

2000: Massively important … but only in retrospect. Sure, a Gore administration would have kept federal finances in better shape, but that isn’t important. Slightly higher marginal income taxes would have meant slightly lower growth of inequality, but not by much. A Gore-driven Medicare expansion would not have required the fixing that Dubya’s did, but Dubya’s expansion was in fact later fixed. The massive consequences from that election were not foreseeable at the time.

2004:  Not sure. A Kerry administration would have had a rough time disengaging from Iraq. It might have headed off the 2007 financial collapse, but I doubt it. It would have appointed some Supreme Court justices which might have some large consequences going ahead. And then it would have ended with the election of John McCain in 2008. There is a strong case to be made that the stakes were not as high as they seemed at the time.

2008: Too soon to tell. You can make a case that America and the world would be in better shape had John McCain won. (Although his Veep … gulp.) But that hinges on McCain passing a big stimulus, something like Dodd-Frank, a climate change bill and heading off the election of the current President-elect. He would need to hit the quadrifecta while avoiding foreign policy missteps. How likely was that? Moreover, I think the political consequences of having had an African-American president will become clearer in the future, as will Barack Obama’s particular historical role. NOTE: had the 2016 election gone the other way, then I would be more certain in stating that ’08 was an important election, if not 1968-level important.

2012: Important. Obamacare and the Clean Power Plan, for two things. Of course, neither may survive the upcoming administration. See 2008.  

2016: Oh my God. America will change dramatically, or so it seems. 

If this analysis holds water, then two things stand out. First, the only massive future-of-the-Republic election we’ve had up until 2016 happened in 1968. Second, most elections seem less important in retrospect. 

It is possible that 2016 will turn out to be a blip, a strange election prompted by a reaction to the first black president combined with noxious social declines in parts of white America. That will not, however, happen on its own. Opponents of the administration-to-be will need to work very hard and very smart.

Thoughts? Counter-arguments? I would like this to generate discussion; these conclusions are far from firm.

The comparisons with 1933 are not reassuring

I do not think that the coming years will be as bad as this link implies. But Hans-Joachim Voth is a sober economic historian. He does not rant. I am not even sure that he is a liberal, by the American definition. But it is a spooky piece.

Excerpted below:

Here is my attempt to think through the troubling parallels with 1933, between the “Seizure of Power” by Hitler and the surprise election of Trump. Of course, Trump is no Hitler, and history doesn’t repeat itself — at least not 1:1. With that in mind, this is my small checklist of things that look, broadly speaking, similar - and those that do not:

Similarities:

• A broad groundswell of dissatisfaction with the status quo, and especially the politicians seen to be responsible for it.
• Related to this, a message by the strongman that combines nationalism, xenophobia, and a sense that one’s own country has been headed in the wrong direction for some time. Let’s make America great again? Deutschland erwache (Germany, wake up — meaning a rebirth of Germany as a strong and proud nation once more). Your own country is amazing, ueber alles, but it has recently fallen into an abyss. And part of what has gone wrong is that the wrong people have been let in — Jews in the case of Germany, Latinos in the case of the US. 
• A growing sense of economic despair — easy to rationalize in Depression Germany, harder to explain in the US in 2016, where things are mostly going well (though some distress is clearly evident in the rust belt).
• Voters who are more enthused about “teaching a lesson” than what the candidate they voted for actually stands for. Germans in 1932 didn’t go through a checklist of policy items that the Nazis supported, from war to genocide, and liking every point, ticked the box for the Führer; they mostly had enough of austerity, misery, the politics of gridlock and seeming ineffectiveness of democratic leaders. Related to this, a surprising willingness to tolerate crassness and a complete lack of tact and etiquette from the leader in question... If you had told me that anyone can insult women the way Trump did, on the record, and have ANY chance to be elected, I would have laughed six months ago. The Hitler movement, of course, outdid any of this in terms of public declarations about what they would do once in power, what to think of their opponents, etc.
• A lackadaisical disregard for the finer details and a belief in the “triumph of the will”. Neither Hitler nor Trump care(d) about details, and sweating over the fine print of proposals is not their thing (a big difference with Stalin, who made a very effective bureaucrat-in-chief).  Watching the debates, it is very hard to believe anyone took Trump seriously as a man to lead political decision-making. But then, who would ever think that a foaming-at-the-mouth Austrian with a funny moustache could be taken seriously by anyone?
• Neither got a majority of the vote. Hitler maxed out at 44% in the semi-free election of March 33; Trump failed to win 50% of the vote.
• A right-wing elite that thinks they can control the populist strongman. Here, the Republican leadership sounds awfully like former Vice Chancellor von Papen and friends. They famously thought of Hitler as the “drummer” — a populist whose appeal was useful to them but could be controlled easily. 
• A democracy where significant parts of the population have given up on central elements of their constitution - not quite the “democracy without democrats” that historians write about in the case of Weimar, but one in which one of the oldest democracies on earth is basically governed by people (who were in turn elected by many of the people) who think the constitution is a joke, checks and balances are for woozies and elected representatives on average deserve no respect.
• A center-left elite that largely fails to take the threat seriously. German newspapers in late December 1932 were congratulating themselves that the Nazi menace was receding, and that Hitler would never become Chancellor. Enter the “big data” political forecaster-quacks here, and an elite discourse that underestimated Trump from the first day of his candidacy until the 8th of November.
• A great willingness to use military force to further one’s ends, and not only as a last resort.
• A stock market that seems to like what it sees...
• A willingness to use infrastructure (and deficit) spending to get the economy going again.
• A rejection of internationalist organizations and multilateral solutions for world-wide problems - the League of Nations in the case of Hitler, the climate change accords in the case of Trump. 
• A willingness to visit violence on the opponent. Ok, this is a bit of a stretch. The Nazis organized street fighters, the storm troopers, who not only beat up Communists and democrats, but committed murder — murder, condoned in some cases directly by the Nazi leaders — like the infamous Potempa murdersof 1932. Trump did not condone anything like that, or organize systematic violence, but... those comments about Hillary Clinton’s security detail do sound awfully like an invitation to political murder.
• A very loose sense of economic reality. Hitler clearly had no coherent economic program, other than spending on roads and arms and worrying about the consequences later. If there was any sense in Nazi policies, it was accidental or the result of right-wing elite input. Trump’s economic policies so far are equally farcical... ok, perhaps not on the scale of Feder money (the idea that bills should lose their value within a pre-specified period).

Differences:

• While Trump’s rhetoric against Latinos is pretty amazing, he doesn’t think of them as all-powerful puppet masters controlling the US today. Whatever went wrong in the US recently, according to Trump, is not directly driven by Latinos themselves; their presence is a symptom, not a cause of what he and his supporters think is a malaise
• German fascism had, if anything, a more progressive image of women. While there was a big policy push to get them out of the workforce, and back to children and the kitchen — there was also a celebration of “Germanic” heroines like the test pilot Hannah Reitsch, or the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
• No belief in “Lebensraum” — there is no potty theory leading Trump to push for territorial expansion. 
• A conciliatory start. Hitler and friends did not begin their reign by trying to suddenly sound moderate and generous towards their internal opponents (though they did go easy in terms of foreign policy aggression until Germany was stronger militarily...)
• Hitler was very eloquent and a highly talented public speaker. Nobody can accuse Trump of either...
• The right-wing elite in Weimar supported Hitler (in the end); in the US, they mostly opposed Trump. We’ll see where the opportunists jump once the inauguration has taken place.
• No aftermath of military defeat that affected voting intentions and everyday politics, as did WW I and reparations. No hyperinflation that destroyed a good part of the wealth of the middle class (ht/ Laurence Copeland).
• No business empire to take care of in the case of Hitler; while he liked money and rewarded the tax inspector who left him alone over unpaid income tax for “Mein Kampf”, there was no secondary business agenda there that might interfere with political aims.

So what does it all mean? Some kind of autocracy is coming. Something somewhere between Putin and Berlusconi, if we are lucky; something worse if we are unlucky. The thing that gets me the most is the almost pathological unwillingness on the left to believe what the candidate has been saying... Hitler’s program was available in print, and Donald Trump is not an empty slate that deserves “an open mind.” Both have an agenda, and unbelievable, even unimaginable as they seemed just shortly before, they both probably mean every word. In the face of a political elite that is fast flip-flopping to the winning side, a spineless media, and a large silent majority of people who don’t give a fig about their democracy, I don’t put too much trust in institutions, the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution, or civic society stopping even the worst excesses.

How bad could this get? Gratuitous wars in, say, the Middle East (Iran), the Far East (Korea), or Latin America (Cuba)? Possible, but perhaps not that likely. The professional input from the Pentagon will limit what can happen, to some extent — but as we saw with GWB, only to some extent. Protectionism? It's a wild card; if Trump is energetic and focused, the US withdraws from the WTO and repeals NAFTA, this can start to look amazingly ugly quite quickly. A brutal rift within NATO that de facto abandons the Baltic Republics to a resurgent Russia? Not likely, but suddenly a possibility. Deportation of illegal immigrants and the wall? Don't rule that out at all; deportations rates have varied a lot, and were actually up under Obama; there is something awkward about tolerating a large number of people who are breaking the law in one's country, and while the social consequences of suddenly righting this are very ugly, there are many fascets to this argument. A lot of pressure on the media to fall into line? For sure. And a Supreme Court that can roll back decades of social progress, down to Roe vs Wade; very likely. Hugely expanded powers for snooping and incarcerating people suspected of terrorism, including US citizens; again, quite likely. An attack on affirmative action and the like? Possible. All of this is suddenly within reach as possibly acceptable policies, and the greatest hope is that “they don't mean it” and that implementation will not be very vigorous. I hope I am wrong, but to me it looks like the world in four years time will not look like a place you imagined possible 6 months ago.

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, redux

The title of this post is a famous line in the Ford-Carter presidential debate in 1976.

President Ford was asked a question about the Helsinki agreement, which according to the moderator, recognized that “the Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe.” Now, outside the Baltics, the moderator’s claim was false! The agreement did not admit that Moscow had the right to govern the Warsaw Pact countries. In fact, the agreement did exactly the reverse, by disavowing both armed intervention and the use of economic sanctions as means of coercion. 

President Ford started to say, “I can’t under any circumstances believe ... that by signing the agreement ... 35 nations have turned over to the Warsaw Pact nations the domination of Eastern Europe. It just isn’t true!” And that would have been a fine answer to a loaded question. Unfortunately, he went on to add, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” 

Man, that was a gaffe. President Ford knew exactly what he was talking about, he just said something stupid and then refused to walk it back. (If you watch the clip, you can see him beginning a good recovery, and then blowing it by saying that he did not think that the Poles considered themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.) 

Well, yesterday, Gary Johnson made a much more serious gaffe in an interview on MSNBC. The transcript:

Mike Barnicle asked Johnson: “What would you do if you were elected, about Aleppo?”

“About?” asked Johnson.

“Aleppo,” replied Barnicle.

“And what is Aleppo?” asked Johnson.

“You’re kidding,” responded Barnicle.

“No,” said Johnson.

Uh. That boggles the mind. Stunning. Ford made a gaffe, Johnson just admitted to total political malpractice and disqualifying ignorance. I stand in slack-jawed amazement ... and now I understand why Mitt Romney has refused to endorse. 

Anyone who wanted the Libertarians to become a real third party force in America should be very angry at Gary Johnson right now. As should anyone who believes that running for President of the United States is, you know, a serious thing. 

An article that begs for historical fisking

On bad days, I really do think that modern communications technology really has ushered in something completely new. And maybe it will! But right now, this claim in The Atlantic that it the Internet has created a meaningless post-everything world, with pointless Harambe references divorced from the original context as proof, is just begging for a social historian to come along and demolish it.

Begging. Come on now. Go at it. I mean, the existence of Snake Plissken (or this movie) should be enough to show that post-everything meaninglessness is not exactly new, but I want to see a professional do this one. 

Duterte or not Duterte?

 Imagine my surprise when the Economist told me that President Duterte made two quotes in his inaugural speech: “Abraham Lincoln, expressing mildly laissez-faire views; and Franklin Roosevelt, expressing gently left-leaning sentiments.” 

Oh, I wasn’t surprised that Duterte made contradictory quotes! No, I was surprised that Abraham Lincoln expressed “mildly laissez-faire views.” What might those be? Well, here is the quote from Duterte’s speech: “And from Lincoln I draw this expression: ‘You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong; you cannot help the poor by discouraging the rich; you cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer; you cannot further brotherhood by inciting class hatred among men.’”

That certainly would be mildly laissez-faire! The thing is that the quote isn’t from Lincoln. Nope, it’s from William Boetcker, a Presbyterian minister, written in 1916.

Puerto Rico is no longer foreign in the domestic sense, it is domestic in the domestic sense

 In another post, J.H. and I had an interesting discussion about Puerto Rico’s political status. Is it a colony in which the U.S. constitution does not apply — what American law calls an “unincorporated territory”? Or is it an old-fashioned territory, like Alaska and Hawaii before 1959 or Arizona and New Mexico before 1912?  

I am going to argue that Puerto Rico is in fact a de facto incorporated territory, just like the area covered by the Northwest Ordinance or Colorado before 1876. Bit by bit, in scattered pieces of legislation, Congress has fully extended the Constitution to Puerto Rico. Sure, Congress could pass an organic act and declare the Commonwealth to be an old-fashioned territorial government, but that would change nothing. It is now just an old-fashioned territory, like Arizona used to be.

Some history: the United States annexed Puerto Rico along with the Philippines in 1898. For purely racial reasons, there was zero support for taking over the Philippines as an ordinary territory, thereby bringing 7 million “Malays” into the American polity. Congress therefore created a special colonial status for the Philippines, under which the U.S. government would exercise sovereignty but within which the U.S. Constitution would not apply. That status was extended to Puerto Rico (essentially by default) and the Supreme Court ratified it in the infamous insular cases, which ruled that Puerto Rico was “foreign in a domestic sense.”

After 1898, however, Congress  and the Supreme Court slowly but surely extended the Constitution to the island. In 1917, Puerto Ricans became American citizens. In 1947, Congress extended Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution to the island. In 1952, it went further, declaring that anyone born in Puerto Rico (regardless of parental citizenship) would be a citizen. The Supreme Court then extended the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eleventh and Fourteenth amendment to the territory; extending the latter brought along the Sixth and Eighth amendments with it. 

The Seventh Amendment, which guarantees a jury trial in civil cases, does not apply to Puerto Rico. But it does not apply to any state, either: in 1877, in Pearson v Yewdall, the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment does not impose the Seventh upon the states.  

What about criminal law? Didn’t the Supreme Court recently rule that someone could not be tried separately in federal and Puerto Rican courts? Well, yes it did, but the logic of 2016’s Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle stated only that Puerto Rico was not a state, sovereign under the 11th Amendment. Rather, it was a creation of Congress. But that gives Puerto Rico the same status as any pre-1959 territorial government; nothing in the reasoning derives from Puerto Rico’s original colonial status. 

Puerto Rico is indeed treated differently in terms of federal funding — a big part of the recent crisis is in fact due to Congress’s decision to fund Medicaid at a far lower rate on the island. But is that because Puerto Rico is unincorporated? No: Alaska was similarly shortchanged for federal highway money before statehood.

That leaves the income tax exemption. (Alaskans paid income taxes before statehood; the District of Alaska was incorporated in 1912, around the time of the 16th Amendment.) It seems fair that Puerto Ricans don’t pay those taxes on the basis of “no taxation without representation,” but the courts haven’t held that. Rather, they don’t pay because of 48 U.S. Code § 734. In other words, Congress exempted the island in 1917. Could it have done that with an incorporated territory? I have no idea and I would love to have a lawyer weigh in ... but I suspect that the answer is yes. After all, nobody doubts the constitutionality of the Empowerment Zones, which provide tax exemptions for investors and businesses that set up shop inside them. 

Finally, what about citizenship? Reader J.H. worries that Congress might strip Puerto Ricans of their citizenship should it so choose. (Or, more realistically, should Puerto Ricans vote for independence.) That, however, seems unlikely. The courts have defined Puerto Ricans as natural-born American citizens. It is extremely hard to strip a natural-born American of their citizenship. The courts have ruled that taking out a foreign nationality will not do it; hell, not even serving in the armed forces of another state will do it. (My uncle Eddie served in the IDF; he kept his citizenship.) The law now recognizes the SCOTUS decisions. Note the italics: “A person who is a national of the United States whether by birth or naturalization, shall lose his nationality by voluntarily performing any of the following acts with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality.”

That is, of course, only a law. It could be changed, but the change would only apply to naturalized citizens (maybe): the courts have been clear that the 14th Amendment protects natural-born citizens unless they explicitly declare that they intend to renounce their citizenship. 

There is a peculiar court decision from 2008 that argues that Puerto Rico has effectively become an incorporated territory. Consejo de Salud Playa de Ponce V. Rullan concluded, “Actions speak louder than words. Although Congress has never enacted any affirmative language such as ‘Puerto Rico is hereby an incorporated territory,’ its sequence of legislative actions from 1900 to present has in fact incorporated the territory.” 

No other courts have cited this ruling, but the logic seems to hold: Congress could pass an organic act incorporating Puerto Rico tomorrow, and it is not clear that anything would change. 

(Statehood, of course, is an entirely different thing.)

To conclude, I am honestly not sure that Puerto Rico’s “unincorporated” status amounts to anything. I suspect that it doesn’t. 

ADDENDUM: This piece in the The Atlantic came to my attention after I wrote the above. It is accurate in the particulars but misses the point: SCOTUS ruled against Puerto Rico on the grounds that it has no independent sovereignty, just like Alaska or Arizona or Minnesota or anywhere else before they became states. The insular cases have nothing to do with it!

(Note: Some states were sovereign before statehood: the Thirteen Colonies, Texas, and maybe if-you-squint Vermont. Hawaii was sovereign but lost it in 1898, 61 years before it became a state.)

Orlando is horrifying

 I am in Florida. What happened this weekend horrifies me. I hope all the friends and relatives of the victims can put their lives back together as best as they can. And I hope the State of Florida and the United States of America will take the necessary actions to make it harder for homicidal maniacs to get their hands on the weapons that make such attacks possible. 

The statements of certain politicians have also been (albeit far less) horrifying. (At least as long as said politicians lack power.) All I can add to the debate being conducted in living rooms, bars, social media, television, and among politicians is that America has seen similar cries before ... and we have reacted far worse. Admittedly, the threat during the first Red Scare and World War 2 was far greater. But while one particular fearmongering crybaby has not been earning any respect ... in general, thus far, the reaction of the American public has been good. Even if not all their elected leaders have been profiles in courage, few have openly piled on.

I pray that continues.

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.

The United States has always been at war

 The New York Times had an article today about Obama’s “war presidency.” It isn’t a bad article, but it makes much of the idea that there is something new in the idea of a U.S. fighting foreign enemies in less than “an all-consuming national campaign, in the tradition of World War II or, to a lesser degree, Vietnam.” 

The article went on to say, “The longevity of his war record, military historians say, also reflects the changing definition of war.”

Except, as I wrote in 2012 in response to the debate around Rachel Maddow’s Drift, the definition of war hasn’t changed! I was disappointed that none of the people engaged in that debate recognized that history didn’t begin in 1945. So, it has lurched up again the idea that there is something new about having the U.S. continuously engaged in small-scale low-casualty low-footprint military actions, let me repeat what I said in 2012:

In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. Between 1898 and 1902, American troops battled Philippine insurgents. Peace came to Luzon in 1901-02, but fighting continued on Mindanao until 1912. In 1904, the U.S. navy bombarded rebel positions in the Dominican Republic; eventually U.S. Marines wound up (with the permission of the local government) occupying the customhouses. In 1906-09, we occupied Cuba, although there was (to be fair) not much fighting. In 1907 and 1911, we deployed to Honduras to halt Nicaraguan invasions. Between 1912 and 1925, U.S. Marines actively hunted insurgents (the original Sandinistas) in Nicaragua. In 1914, we once again bombarded Dominican rebels; we also occupied Veracruz to prevent arms from getting to the government. Between 1914 and 1934, we occupied Haiti: unlike Cuba in 1906-09, that one did involve quite a bit of fighting. We did the same on the other side of Hispaniola in 1916-24. In 1916-17, we invaded northern Mexico after Pancho Villa attacked Columbus.

Then there was World War 1. After which ... 

In 1917-19, U.S. troops again garrisoned Cuba. In 1919, we landed in Honduras to protect a neutral zone during a civil war. Between 1918 and 1920, American forces blundered pointlessly around Siberia doing something or other, and sustaining a lot of casualties. For a few days in Guatemala, Marines saw combat during a civil war in that country. In 1925, we invaded both Honduras and Panama during periods of unrest.  In 1933 and 1934, we waved gunboats around Cuba, but no war was necessary, since we succeeded in overthrowing the government by what would today be called covert action.

And then, peace until 1941.

Counting ... between 1898 and 1934, the United States was at peace for all of ... well, never, actually.

It is true that with the exceptions of Mexico, Siberia, and Cuba, most of the American interventions were not sold as protecting what we would today call the Homeland. But those are three large exceptions! 

In short, President Obama’s experience as a “president at war” rather than a “war president” is nothing new. McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover would find it very familiar. 

Children can handle the truth about American history

 So the other day the boy and I went down to the Lincoln Memorial. We started at the President’s house. He then wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial, because Lincoln is the best president. Why was he convinced that Lincoln was the best president? Well, he asked me, once he got over his consternation at learning that Barack Obama will not always be President, “Who was the best president?” Really, not a hard question. 

So we scooted over from the White House, down the Mall, to the Lincoln Memorial.

There is a tiny little bookstore inside the Memorial. My boy being like his father, he couldn’t resist. He ran in before I could intercept him and spotted a book by Laurie Calkhoven, called I Grew Up to be President, a bunch of short presidential bios accompanied by cute depictions of what the presidents probably looked like as little boys. 

And ... the book is terrible. Really really bad. And really bad for a simple reason: it whitewashes 19th-century American history to the point of doing violence. But it does so in this annoying lawyerly way, so that you can’t outright say they’re leaving things out ... but which will also allow irresponsible parents to be able to pretend that American history is all sweetness and light until sometime in the early 1970s and the only bad presidents were Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

What sent me over the top was, of course, Abraham Lincoln. Here is the ridiculous passage:

By the time Lincoln was inaugurated, seven states had left the Union to form the Confederate States of America. They believed that Lincon, who was abolitionist, threatened their right to make their own decisions.

What the fuck? 

Andrew Jackson is worse. Nothing about him killing a man in a duel or the veto of the Second Bank of the United States, but I could forgive that. What I cannot forgive is this:

Instead of letting Congress lead the way in passing new laws, Jackson took charge and vetoed bills he didn’t like. Only one major law, the Indian Removal Act, was passed in his eight years in office.

Yes, that’s true. And that’s really all they have to say about that particular piece of legislation??

It isn’t a conservative bias: the book is age-appropriately critical of 37 and 43.

Listen, my children will be as flag-wavingly patriotic as they come. More than most, in fact, since at least one of their parents will want them to serve time in uniform. And they can handle the fact that Andrew Jackson was a racist genocidal maniac and the South seceded in order to keep their distant cousins in bondage. 

Scholastic should be ashamed of itself for publishing this dreck. 

History still appears to be over, for the moment

 Over at Vox, Jedediah Purdy (Duke) just wrote an article entitled, “How the 2016 election undermines Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ argument.” It starts with a good explanation of what Francis Fukuyama was really arguing. It then goes off the rails by trying to argue that the 2016 election somehow shows History raising its ugly head. 

First, Fukuyama. In The End of History and the Last Man, he argued that fascism and communism had collapsed as viable governing ideologies, leaving liberal democracy the last one standing. Unless liberal democracy generated some sort of problem that liberal democracy could not solve, history in the sense of grand ideological conflict was over. Sure, Islamic theocrats might gain power or start wars, but they were not going to gain mass support among non-Islamic peoples. We all agreed on the big picture. Of course, that big picture was pretty wide, running from the U.K. under Thatcher all the way to Scandinavia. In fact, Fukuyama later used the phrase “Getting to Denmark” as shorthand for perfecting liberal democracy. (Hold that point, I’ll return to it in a paragraph or so.)

Second, 2016. Why does 2016 disprove Fukuyama’s argument? Let me pull two quotes from Prof. Purdy. 

1. “In the presidential primaries thus far, a fair plurality of voters have supported either a candidate who acts like a fascist or one who calls himself a democratic socialist.” 
2. “The economic context of this new discontent is concentration of wealth and income among the very richest, and decades of stagnation for the working and middle classes and the poor. Behind those trends is the discovery that the widely shared growth and relatively equitable distribution of income and wealth across the North Atlantic between World War II and roughly 1973 was a historical anomaly. According to Piketty's 200-year history of economic inequality, it was the only time, aside from the generalized catastrophe of war and depression, that capitalist economies have not produced compounding inequality.”

And now my head hits my desk. Jedediah, no!

First, the 2016 election is completely in line with Fukuyama. Bernie Sanders is a liberal democrat who believes in private property. Denmark is his political vision ... and Denmark, as I pointed out above, is entirely within Fukuyama’s definition of liberal democracy. Hell, the U.K. in 1950 is within Fukuyama’s definition of liberal democracy! Purdy is pulling a fast one by harping on the “socialist” label. 

Donald Trump, meanwhile, often “acts like a fascist.” And he has blown off a lot of recent taboos in American politics, which I think is dangerous. But even he can’t just come out and call for white supremacy or openly support abolishing the rule of law. Even that authoritarian blowhard needs to keep his rhetoric within the broadest bounds of liberal democracy. Oh, he is a threat, because illiberal democracies are ugly things and liberal democracies can be riven by identity politics ... but that is still small-h history, not History.

Second, Piketty found that found that the liberal democracies of the postwar period did a great job of limiting income inequality through high redistributive taxes. In other words, liberal democracies solved the inequality problem. Purdy is implicitly stating — oh, heck, it’s barely implicit — that the liberal democracies of 1945-80 were not liberal democracies. That is another fast one.

Maybe the support for Senator Sanders means we are heading towards Eisenhower’s tax rates and Canada’s health and education systems, or maybe it doesn’t. But Senator Sanders’ surprising success does not mean anything for the United States as a liberal democracy! The United States might socialize medicine, impose draconian inheritance taxes, make public universities free, and return to a 90% top tax rate ... but it would still be a liberal democracy. Because, you know, Eisenhower’s America was a liberal democracy and so is Trudeau’s Canada.

Maybe a Trump presidency would widen racial divides and inflame identity politics. And maybe it would end in Nixonian-scale scandal. Or maybe it would just be an aggravating damp squib. Either way, a liberal democracy that could survive Richard Nixon will survive Donald Trump. America in 2016 is not Italy in 1924. And it is still more likely than not that Trump loses in November.

In other words, the essay relies on pulling two definitional fast ones and ignoring the limits on Trumpism. I am more than a little surprised.

Mad Max is bullshit, people; disasters do in fact bring us together

 We have some unfinished posts fisking the World War Three novel Ghost Fleet. We are not fans of the book. And now one of the authors, August Cole, has posted this. 

“This” is a paean to Tom Clancy wargame in which there is a smallpox outbreak in New York City, after which society collapses and warlords take over. Or something. You can watch a trailer. 

Now, to be fair, Cole has nothing to say about whether a smallpox outbreak in New York would suddenly cause civilization to collapse into dog-eat-dog violence. He just thinks it’s useful to depict scenes of mass human suffering in video games because it will better prepare future soldiers for urban operations: 

“But scavenging in the confines of the New York subway system or winding up in a shootout with a local gang reinforces that your own worst enemy is all too familiar: fellow humans. The game lays bare how the odds are stacked against the survivors of such a calamity, and how even functional complex urban environments teeter and sway between chaos and order each day. Just as the novel World War Z by Atlantic Council senior fellow Max Brooks presents this uncomfortable truth through the premise of a zombie outbreak, this video game does so with close-quarters anarchy caused by catastrophic bio-terrorism ... The Division will appeal more broadly to gamers, given its formulaic progression of acquiring skills, weapons, and powers, which big studio games must incorporate in order to entice millions of players. That is also one of its strengths and perhaps greatest forms of utility in the defense realm: broad appeal. Megacity operations, be it relief or combat, will no longer be an abstract concept to young corporals or privates — or their commanding officers.”

I would like to point out here that there is remarkably little evidence that looting and unrest spike in disaster situations. The first paper of which I am aware pointed that out in 1968. A 2004 paper from the CDC reinforced the argument, showing that most looting involved necessary supplies rather than egregious attacks on other people or their property. “In contrast, researchers have found — at least in the immediate aftermath of disasters — that community resilience and unity, strengthening of social ties, selfhelp, heightened initiative, altruism, and prosocial behavior more often prevail. In short, when things are at their worst, disaster-stricken communities tend to rise to the occasion.”

This issue came up again in 2010, when preliminary reports of widespread disorder after the Chilean earthquake proved unfounded. The looting that did occur was easily controlled. No roving gangs taking over whole neighborhoods; for some numbers, we are talking about an increase in armed robberies from 52 in 2009 to 102 in the year of the earthquake. No houses were hit. It was not Mad Max. 

And again in the Philippines in 2013. Same general story.

In other words, I think our military would be very ill served if it were to promote training tools that gave soldiers the impression that organized violent gangs were going to be their main problem in post-disaster situations. 

The benefits of American empire

 “The United States provide the majority of security on earth. What would the world look like without that security? Would South Korea exist? Would they be selling us Hyundais and Kias? Would Taiwan exist? How would the Cold War have ended? Would Germany still be divided? Who would control the largest known oil reserves on earth? Would Israel exist? The armed forces of the United States guarantee certain conditions on planet Earth, conditions with which much of the Western world is happy. It is worth considering what the world would look like without them.”  

Those words come from a review by Adrian Lewis (U-Kansas) than damns with faint praise a book called State of War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1945–2011, by Paul Koistinen (Calstate-Northridge). Koistinen describes the rise of the national security state in the United States. He does not quite call the defense industry a “vampire squid,” but he does write: “The [defense] industry became characterized by inefficiency, waste, and corruption; defense contractors too often turned out defective or failed weapons and equipment. Over time, massive expenditures for defense have had a very deleterious effect on the economy. … Of crucial significance … DOD budgets have distorted public priorities and spending, denying adequate attention and resources to infrastructure, education, medical care, and other public services and interests.”

But Koistinen, like a lot of liberal critics, acts as though the national security state came out of nowhere and survives for no reason other than its ability to lobby. Lewis acerbically points out that Koistinen needs two more chapters. One should explain why the American people “continuously put into office political leaders who sustain the Military-Industrial Complex, and who, after the Vietnam War, failed to show up to fight.” The second should describe the threats that the national security state evolved to confront. The pithy paragraph opening this post comes from that second proposed chapter.

Lewis actually saves his final one-two punch for the end. It is a doozy: “I will recommend this book to some of my graduate students. There are a few points, however, with which I strongly disagree; for example: ‘Although the armed forces had acquired some new weapons and equipment, the military as a whole appeared to be in no better shape in 1989 than it had been in 1981’ (p. 29). Having served in the Army throughout this period, though, I know this is just not true.”

Ouch!

In short, State of War seems pretty mediocre, but Adrian Lewis has pithily penned one of the best and most succinct briefs in favor of the American empire (at least as it behaved until 1991) that I have read in a long time. 

What’s in a name?

 There is a broad literature that people with recognizably African-American names suffer from greater discrimination in the United States. (See here, here, here, here, and here.) Similar results have been found for Muslim names in France (here and here) and Sweden. In short, if you want your children to get ahead, even if you are a from a visible minority, give them a nondescript majority monicker.

There is some contrary evidence. Fryer and Levitt have argued that causality runs the other way, with black people trapped in the ghetto being more likely to choose distinctively black names than their middle-class counterparts. Their data, however, is only from California and is (as they admit) not conclusive. In addition, distinctive first names have become much more common in recent decades among all Americans, despite some evidence that people with such names face discrimination regardless of their race or religion. 

So far, so complicated. But wait, it gets worse! Before 1960, having a distinctively black name may have helped. All other things equal, in the century before 1960 black men and women with black names lived a year longer than their compatriots, conditional on having made it to age 10. 

In an amazing paper, Lisa Cook, Trevon Logan, and John Parman dug into the census data. First, they extracted a list of distinctively African-American names. Then they went through three million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina between 1802 to 1970. Then they calculated differential death rates. Finally, they tried to see if having a distinctively black name was correlated with higher socio-economic status in any way. Overall, the reverse: as today, distinctive names were associated with lower status. In other words, the effect was even stronger than the headline numbers when you took other variables into account.

To be fair, it is still possible that there was name changing going on. But first, there is no evidence of such name-changing. And if there was, it would have to be mighty weird to change their results.

Their hypothesis is that having a distinctive name may have been a proxy for other, unidentifiable social capital: a strong sense of community, for example. And this was an age of open racial discrimination, during which assimilating to the dominant culture may have generated returns of zero (or negative, if white people reacted badly). So it may not have relevance for today.

But it sheds a fascinating look at the recent American past. Go, read. 

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? 

Refugees in Germany: lessons from 1945?

 As the New York Times notes this morning, Germany is being inundated with Syrian refugees. And while many of them are highly educated, most of them are not. The median refugee is a young Arabic-speaking man with limited job skills that are not up to German standards. 

This has happened to Germany before. After World War 2, the Soviets transferred large chunks of eastern Germany to the USSR and the Polish People’s Republic. Czechoslovakia and Hungary also expelled their German populations. Within two years, more than 7.0 million people had been expelled to what later became West Germany; ultimately 8.5 million refugees would settle there. (Another 3.5 million settled in the Soviet Zone.) 

The entire resettlement was chaotic, with refugees settling down wherever the Western occupation authorities decided to set up camps. These camps were located wherever it was most convenient. In the words of the U.S. military government: “Expellees of Eastern Europe have been settled, not where their skills could be best utilized, but in accordance with the availability of food and housing to meet their needs. Thus, labor supply is often remote from the centers of labor demand ... Most of these have been placed without regard to their skills, and many where there is no demand or material for them to pursue their trades.” Despite their awareness of the problem, American officials were more afraid of further disruptive population movements than they were of mass unemployment: they proceeded to deploy military forces along state lines to prevent refugees from moving. 

By 1948, refugees made up 25% of the population of Lower Saxony but only 8% of neighboring Nordrhein-Westfalen. Refugees were kept out of the cities of Bremen and Hamburg. Remarkably, there was no mass population redistribution once the situation settled down after 1948: as late as 1969, the distribution of the refugees had barely budged.

So what happened? Michael Peters (LSE) looked into the data and found something fascinating. Not unexpectedly, the former easterners were crowded into low-skilled  jobs: by 1960, almost 45% of the refugees worked in unskilled occupations, as opposed to only 18% of the same age cohorts of Western natives. (Page 21.) Also not unexpectedly, refugees aged 20 and older in 1945 earned about 10% less than natives in 1961 and 6% less than natives as late as 1970. (Pages 22-23.) Two-thirds of that difference was due to refugees being shunted into lower-wage occupations, rather than earning less than a native at the same job.

OK, fine, whatever. But then it gets weird. Sure, the refugees didn’t close the wage gap after even a quarter-century. But wages grew much faster in the unskilled occupations they flooded into than in other occupations. (Tables 9 and 11 on pages 24 and 26.) A 10% higher refugee share in 1950 increases wages by about 5% in 1975. 

Basically, firms in refugee-rich counties picked technologies that unskilled workers could learn to use on the job. Those workers then got better as they worked ... and their employers got better at deploying technologies suited to their (lack of) skills. The individual refugees never recovered from the trauma of their separation. But they led to technological innovation that benefitted those low down on the ladder.

So does this have any bearing on the current refugee inflow? Sadly, probably not. The first thing to note is that the distribution of human capital was about the same for the refugees and the natives. Circumstances pushed the refugees into unskilled jobs. They may have therefore been more equipped to learn on the job and help their employers innovate than a less skilled refugee wave would have been.

The second thing to note is times have indeed changed: deskilling might have been relatively easy to do in an industrial sector with no computers, but harder to carry out today, where (at least in theory) computer-controlled machines can purely substitute for labor. 

Finally, discrimination was minor for the earlier wave. Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia might have been different from the rest of Germany, but they were not Syria.

In short, the work opens up the possibility that the influx of unskilled refugees might unleash a wave of income-inequality-reducing innovation, even if the refugees themselves never catch up to the natives. But it only opens the possibility. There are, sadly, too many reasons to believe that this smaller influx will end less happily than the giant migration of 70 years ago.

There is still no good economic theory of the Scramble for Africa

 There is no commonly accepted explanation for why European powers carved up the African continent in the 1880s. Most historians today discount economic explanations: by the 1880s African commodity exports were a sideshow. Rather, the explanations have to do with prestige-seeking by European governments combined with the fact that military imbalances made annexation easy. Related explanations add two sorts of security dilemma: (1) the fear that if one country did not annex an area another would; and (2) local political crises driving expansion as the easiest solution. 

Now come Ewout Frankema (Wageningen University), Jeffrey Williamson (UW-Madison), and Pieter Woltje (Wageningen University) to show that African commodity prices enjoyed a sustained upturn between 1845 and 1885. Moreover, that upturn was stronger than for other regions.

This is pretty neat stuff, but as an explanation for colonialism it leaves a lot to be desired. No matter how you slice it, the profits from this trade were pretty small. In addition, we need to know how much of those profits were seized by Europeans even in the absence of formal control — my prior is that it would be a lot. Finally, we would need to know why the scramble waited until the 1880s: after all, the price rise started 40 years previously. (The authors partially address this with the point that French inland expansion started earlier.) 

That said, these results do blow a hole in the Hopkins thesis that declining commodity prices caused intra-African wars over the remaining rents, thereby opening the door to European conquest. Neat stuff. 

The reproductive revolution among postgrad women in historical perspective

 We have written that the fertility of postgraduate women has markedly increased among women born 1970-74 relative to earlier cohorts. Claudia Goldin’s (Harvard) work on college-educated women implies that the change is even greater than it seems. Now, Goldin is looking at all college graduates, not just women with postgraduate degrees ... but that makes her findings even more striking.

Among women born in the late 19th century, fully half of college graduates had no children. That fell over time (in part because, as per Gareth’s hypothesis many more women began to graduate college). Nonetheless, for women born in 1958-68 (cohort 5 in the above table) fully 26% of them had no children by age 40. 

Yet the cohort of postgraduate-educated women born just a few years later (1970-74) has a childlessness rate of only 20%. That puts them very near the rate experienced by the college-educated parents of the baby boom. For college-educated women childlessness has fallen even faster.

Something very dramatic is going on to make professional educated women who hit their peak childbearing years in the first decade of the 21st century choose both family and career. Bitsy makes too good suggestions in comments, although I am not sure how to test the first one. 

The big question, unanswerable until we have a handle on causes, is whether the fertility rise will continue in the next few decades.

Now my final word on the demographics of the War of the Triple Alliance, really!

 First, Brent is retired and the relatives do not live in affected areas. Thank you for the concern!

Second, Paraguay. While I await the coming storm of comments and questions (hah!) here is the population pyramid for the 1870 data with the estimated undercounts from 1899 added in:

Devastation among males (55%!), but little sign of a generalized crisis. Which is actually somewhat surprised: I would have expected blowing that big a whole in the labor force would have led to severe general famine.

Note that these adjusted figures are a clear undercount. First, the 1899 figures include only those who survived to 1899; some people who were not counted in 1870 passed away in the interim. Since males have shorter lifespans than females, this will also increase our projections of missing males. The 47% figure from the 1886 census is a more reasonable upper bound.

Second, the total number is too low. It comes to about 176,000. That implies an annual growth rate of 3.8% between then and 1886, which is impossible unless there were lots of Paraguayan refugees in Argentina and Brazil in 1870. There almost certainly were ... but that means that the 1870 census cannot be used to impute total deaths. 

Here is a table of plausible populations given an 1886 population of 325,000:

1870 pop at	3.0%	201,067
1870 pop at	2.5%	217,813
1870 pop at	2.0%	235,954
1870 pop at	1.6%	251,549

The irony? The War of the Triple Alliance was still devastating. It was on the same scale as the Greek War of Independence, the French conquest of Algeria, World War I in Serbia, and the Great Patriotic War. It was more destructive than the Carlist Wars, the Ten Years War, the Russian Civil War, and the two Congo Wars. It was more than twice as bad as the Napoleonic Wars were for France, inflicted over half as much time. It was a horrible event.

What it was not was singular or unprecedented. Which says terrible things about human beings.

Paraguayan demographics in the late 19th century

 Here is my final word on the demographic impact of the War of the Triple Alliance. Let’s start with the 1899 population pyramid. There is some guess work here, because Asunción accounted for 10% of country’s enumerated population of 480,000 but provided no age breakdown. These figures heroically assume that the capital had the same distribution as the rest of the country, which is almost certainly wrong. (Cities skew older in general; more so in the age before modern urban sanitation.) But the numbers are what we have.

What do they show? Unfortunately, the age groupings make it hard to see whether there are any signs of a general demographic disaster (that is, one affecting both sexes) during or right after the war, but there is nothing particularly obvious. With two exceptions, each cohort looks more or less the size you would expect in a growing mostly-rural population. 

The exceptions are the 1854-63 and the 1882-84 birth cohorts. The number of females in the first cohort is slightly smaller than you would expect given the size the cohorts around it. That population was aged 1-10 at the start of the war, so it is possible that we are seeing some effect of disease and malnutrition. The problem is that the cohort after that includes everyone born between 1864 and 1881: war-related mortality among those born in 1864-70 would be swamped by those born in the postwar decade. 

The other exception is the 1882-84 birth cohort, which is much bigger than you would expect for both sexes. I suspect that the reason is a head tax on adults or some sort of labor draft that affected both sexes: children who were actually aged older than 18 in 1899 were reported as aged 15-17 instead. (There may be an alternate explanation, but it is unlikely to involve the war.)

Now let’s take a glance at the 1886 pyramid.

What I’ve done here is add back the missing birth cohorts from the 1899 census. The categories did not easily overlap, so I have divided up the cohorts from the 1899 census equally among all the years inside that cohort. (This introduces biases, although I think they run against the hypothesis that the war had no effect.) 

Why were the undercounts so large? Well, one possibility is evasion. Another is a sloppy census. But commentator Thomas Masterson hits on a third hypothesis: temporary migration to Argentina. Argentina was booming during the 1880s and getting their from Paraguay was easy. Paraguayan migrants, however, had to compete with the waves of Spaniards and Italians pouring into that country. The Paraguayans would face racial and language discrimination (Guaraní the primary language of most locals at the time), which would not be conducive to permanent settlement. Finally, the 1899 census identified Paraguayans by nationality, not place of birth, and so Paraguayans born in Argentina but who moved back would be counted in the 1899 census as local. 

What about the impact of the war? There are clear signs of mass casualties among males: the 1886 male population is a full 41,000 less than might have otherwise been expected ... although that calculation does not account for the fact that male mortality is generally higher than female. Excess male mortality comes to 47% of the population of the relevant age group, which is consistent with the idea that about one out of every two Paraguayan males perished as a result of the war. (It also implies that almost the entire male population served, but that is consistent with Paraguayan records and the overwhelming reports of children and elderly being pressed into service.) 

That said, it is a little perplexing that there is also excess male mortality among children born during the war ,i.e., too young to have been child soldiers. There are reasons to think that male children might have been more susceptible to famine and disease, but that smacks a little of post hoc reasoning to me.

Looking at the female half of the distribution, there are some signs of higher-than-expected mortality among the cohorts born during and immediately after the war, but they are not pronounced. Paraguay experienced disease and famine (the latter partially as a result of a huge diminution of the agricultural labor force for military service) but not outside the realm of the historical experience of 19th-century wars.

Finally, it should be noted that even with my adjustments the 1886 number is still an undercount. To be fully consistent with the 1899 number the population would need to grow by 3.0% per year. That is really outside historical experience in the latter 19th century: Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic were the highest (without mass immigration) at around 2.6%. Most countries were around 1.5% or less.

Criticisms, suggestions, new information and additional questions, please! (I know that Randy is interested in why Paraguay survived as an independent nation ...)

How not to do history, Paraguayan edition

 Commentator J.H. asks what I think of the Whigham-Potthast methodology for estimating Paraguayan deaths in the War of the Triple Alliance. Coincidentally, the Whigham-Potthast article was exactly what I planned to be the subject of this post!

But first, let me say that I agree with J.H.’s point that had the country really lost 90% of its male population, then we would have seen bigger effects on its culture and literature than we do. Let me also say that careful researchers (like Reber) have tried to adjust for Paraguay’s territorial losses, but regardless those losses affected very little populated territory.

Which brings us to the work of Thomas Whigham (U-Georgia) and Barbara Potthast (Bielefeld). They uncovered an 1870 population survey taken at the tail end of the war. The survey was the work of the Provisional Government established by the Allied countries, who were not yet prepared to simply partition Paraguay between them. It isn’t entirely clear why the Provisional Government wanted the survey, but the answer is likely taxation: the government asked that information be gathered on the acreage sown with various crops in addition to the population data. 

Now, the survey wasn’t really a census: rather, the government asked the political chiefs and justices of the peace in the various counties to report the data. Age groups were divided into children, adults and elderly, with no further elaboration. In addition, the survey omitted the cities of Asunción and Pilar. But it was data, and data are always useful! Consider what we were able to do with the highly flawed 1886 census.

So what did Whigham and Potthast do with their data? First they added estimates for Asunción and Pilar. The Asunción data came from an 1872 British diplomatic report; the Pilar data came from an 1871 newspaper article. Then they added up all the reported numbers of people.

And ... uh ... well, that is what they did. They got a total of 116,351. To that they added a guess of 50,000 people in non-reporting districts. That made a high estimate of 166,351. They then divided that number by their estimate of a prewar population of 389,000 to 457,000. Ergo, a population decline between 57% and 69%.

Do I have to explain why this is unlikely?

Oh, all right. The 1870 numbers do not jibe with other data. First, the 1870 survey reports 39,334 children. Whigham and Potthast take “children” to mean age 12 and below; which would place them as born between 1858 and 1870. In 1886, the number of the children born between 1856 and 1871 was 78,605. That is a difference of more than 39,000 people. A simple adjustment to remove 1856, 1857 and 1871 would cut that difference to 32,000, but it would still mean that more than 60% of the Whigham-Potthast upward adjustment of 50,000 would have to consist of uncounted children for their results to match 1886.

It is harder to match other cohorts. In 1870, adults were defined as anyone born between 1820 and 1857. They totaled 29,310. In 1886, people born between 1816 and 1855 totaled 52,584. Even people born just between 1836 and 1855 totaled 40,648. That is an additional 11,000 people at minimum, which would when combined with the missing children just about eat up their 50,000 fudge factor.

The Whigham-Potthast numbers are still remotely possible but ...

... the second problem is that we know that the 1886 census was also an undercount. How do we know that? Well, the 1886 census reported 28,113 people born between 1882 and 1884. By 1899, that cohort had grown to 43,907 people, all Paraguayan-born. That is, shall we say, not possible unless the 1886 count was too low. The same applies to later cohorts. The 1886 census found 80,476 people born between 1866 and 1881; the 1899 census reported 122,955 people born between 1864 and 1881. Unless 1864 and 1865 were rather astounding fertile years (which would be odd, considering as they were the first two years of the war) then the 1886 count once again has to be too low. (This problem does not apply to older cohorts; it seems that 1886 was particularly bad at recording children and young adults.) 

In other words, 1886 suffered a minimum undercount of 58,000 relative to 1899; and 1870 suffered a minimum undercount of 43,000 relative to 1886. That is a total minimum undercount of 101,000. Lopping off the 50,000 fudge factor leaves us with an additional 51,000 missing people ... for a new minimum 1870 population estimate of 217,000.

To double-check, let’s adjust the 1886 numbers using the 1899 data for the undercounted cohorts. That would give us a minimum population of 290,061. (I feel ridiculous using more than two significant digits to report these numbers, but whatever.) That implies a growth rate of 3.5% per year between 1870 and 1886, which is really not possible in the age before antibiotics. In fact, Paraguay never mustered growth much above 1.7% per year; the figure of 3.1% between 1886 and 1899 is an artifact of the 1886 undercount. 

To triple check, let’s match the 1870 data to the 1873 data. (Which actually reported numbers for 1872.) Now, we do not have original manuscripts for 1873, but I am not clear as to why we should discount its existence given that it was reported in British consular reports and Argentine newspapers. I am certain that the 1873 data are terrible, but that also applies to 1870. Anyway, the 1873 data report 86,079 people born between 1858 and 1872, which about 46,000 more than the 39,334 reported born in 1858-70 in the 1870 survey. (Jan Kleinpenning of the University of Nijmegen got to this point first.) 

Finally, their 1864 baseline is almost certainly too high. It ignores the 1864-67 survey data. (That would be point #4 at the link.) The lowest estimate that they have is barely possible, but still not that likely. 

I hate to make the calculation, but if we combine the high estimate of the 1864 population (370,000, assuming an average household size of seven people) with the low estimate of the 1870 population (217,000) we get a roughly 41% decline over the six years. Not all of that will be excess mortality, of course. Some will be international refugees, others away from their homes in Paraguay (for example, men still in the field who have not returned home), others undercounted, and some normal deaths that were not compensated for due to low fertility during the war. In other words, 41% is a meaningless figure ... but it does at least serve as a bracket. 

A more realistic 1864 estimate uses an average household size of 5.5, which was typical for Chile and Mexico at the time. That would give a prewar population of 292,000. A population size of 292,000 implies 1.8% growth between 1864 and 1899 (and 2.2% growth from 1870 to 1899). Combining that figure with an 1870 population pf 217,000 pushes the total population fall to 22%. That is still, of course, a meaningless figure ... but it is the equivalent calculation to the more dramatic claims.

In short, the Whigham-Potthast method is a good one, but in this case it relies on bum data. The war was clearly catastrophic, but a 57%+ genocidal massacre it was not. 

The existing debate on the Paraguayan War

 After I finished the legwork that went into the last two posts, I discovered two other scholars had gotten there first. In 1988, Vera Blinn Reber took on the idea that Paraguay had lost more than half its population. Her evidence fell into four buckets:

1. We have four decent censuses: 1792, 1846, 1886 and 1899. The intercensal growth rates are 1.7%, 0.8%, and 3.1%. The censuses distinguish between native-born and foreign-born populations, so we can strip out immigration, which was anyway near negligible. The numbers given imply a slowdown between 1846 and 1886, but not a catastrophe;
2. The 1857 census that gave a population of 1.3 million does not exist. It appears to have been a Stalinesque propaganda ploy by the Paraguayan government to frighten its enemies. 
3. Once the war broke out, the Paraguayan government undertook a series of annual household surveys for the purposes of taxation and conscription. If we assume a household size of 6.98 people (which is very high by the standards of contemporary Latin American countries, but about what the 1846 census showed) then the population was 370,073 in 1864. It declined to 304,824 by the end of 1867, but that could have been evasion combined with the fact that much of the male population was at war.
4. Finally, biannual figures on crop production (Paraguay had a remarkably well-organized war economy) show no declines between  1863 and 1867. 

While she effectively debunked the genocidal claims, her conclusion that Paraguay lost most likely 8% of its population is still largely conjecture. For example, roughly 80,000 Paraguayan men cycled through the armed forces during the war. She posited that it was unlikely that casualty rates could have been much higher than 24,000; roughly 30% of everyone who served. 

I am not so sure. For example, the standard figures for Confederate military mortality (including disease) in the U.S. Civil War ranged from 23% to 38%. But when J. David Hacker (Binghampton) used census records to estimate excess male mortality for the 1860s, he found numbers that were more in line with mortality rates of 33% to 54%. Considering the sex imbalances in the 1886 census, I do not find 50% mortality among Paraguayan soldiers to be inherently unbelievable. 

Her doubt comes from the fact that the size of the Allied forces arrayed against Paraguay has been greatly exaggerated. For example, there are claims that Brazil fielded an expeditionary force of 100,000. The problem is that we know that it took the Brazilians a full 49 steamships to move a single brigade consisting of 5,445 enlisted men up the Paraná river and the Brazilians never possessed that sort of logistical capability. That said, however, even if Allied forces never much exceeded 43,500, they could have caused much higher casualties upon the Paraguayan defenders through disease and malnutrition inflicted via the astute use of strategic interdiction. 

Given the evidence from 1872 and 1886, I would lean towards her high estimate of 18% total losses (including a net refugee outmigration around 3% of the prewar population), simply because the military mortality rates that she considered too high for a 19th century war are not in fact outside the bounds of historical reality. Disease made many 19th century wars more dangerous for soldiers than their early 20th century equivalent; in the second half of the 20th century advances in body armor, medevac technology, and trauma medicine produced a second prolonged decline. Consider, as evidence, the below graph of the wounded-to-killed ratios in various wars (from the amazing work of Tanisha Fazal of Notre Dame, available here):

An 18% loss, however large, is still a far cry from over half. 

In 1999, two scholars attempted to resurrect the vision of a devastated Paraguay using evidence from an 1870 population survey. Their attempt was terrible. So terrible that it is almost not worth discussing. But I will! So stay tuned.

Meanwhile, any thoughts before we turn to the political implications of the conflict?

The Philippines move right!

 Carlos Yu and I have a long-term plan to write a book on the Philippines under American rule. But it won’t be done until 2018 at the earliest.

One thing that we discovered while writing our book on the Panama Canal was that Panamanians drove on the left until April 15, 1943. The reasons for the changeover are obvious; less so is why Panama started out on the left. The influx from the British West Indies is often cited. (Colombia did not start to regularize its traffic codes until Panama had already seceded but appears to have always driven on the right.) Argentina drove on the left between 1889 and 1945. The first traffic code, from 1872, mandated driving on the right but the country switched to the left in emulation of the British-built railroads. (You can still see this in the Buenos Aires subway.) It moved back to the right on June 10, 1945.

But neither of us had any idea that the Philippines also drove on the left until March 10, 1945! That is more than slightly amazing. The vast majority of cars were imported from the United States. So how did the rule survive so long? Even more amazing, the reason for the shift given in the text of the executive order implies that imported cars had been physically reconfigured to right-hand-drive before the switch:

EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. 34: AMENDING TRAFFIC REGULATIONS FOR VEHICLES

WHEREAS it is deemed advisable to change the existing regulations providing for the driving of vehicles on the left side of the road so that the vehicle traffic in the Philippines shall conform with the practice of driving on the right side of the road obtaining in most countries of the world;

WHEREAS such a change would bring about certain economic advantages to the people of the Philippines in that it would reduce the price of motor vehicles imported into the Philippines from the United States;

WHEREAS during the present emergency the great majority of the motor vehicles of the United States Army used on the roadways in the Philippines are right-hand driven and the drivers thereof are accustomed to driving on the right side of the road; and

WHEREAS the present affords the most propitious opportunity to effect this desired change;

NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the powers vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, particularly Commonwealth Act No. 671, I, Sergio Osmeña, President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, do hereby order;

1. That section 60 of the Revised Motor Vehicle Law, Act No. 3992, be amended, as it is hereby amended, to read as follows:

“SEC. 60. Drive on right side of road.—Unless a different course of action is required in the interest of the safety and security of life, person, or property, or because of unreasonable difficulty of operation in compliance herewith, every person operating a motor vehicle or guiding an animal drawn vehicle on a highway shall pass to the right when meeting persons or vehicles coming toward him, and to the left when overtaking persons or vehicles going the same direction, and, when turning to the left, in going from one highway into another, every vehicle shall be conducted to the right of the center of the intersection of the highway.”

2. That all other sections or parts of the said Revised Motor Vehicle Law and amendments thereof shall be considered as amended or modified as they are hereby amended or modified accordingly so as to conform with the provisions of the Executive Order; and all other provisions of law inconsistent with or contrary to the provisions of this Executive Order shall be considered repealed as they are hereby repealed.

Done at the City of Manila, this tenth day of March, in the year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and forty-five, and of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, the tenth.

SERGIO OSMEÑA
President of the Philippines

Unless most American imports had been reconfigured before sale in the Philippines, then there is no reason why switching the side you drive on would make imports cheaper. Today the Bahamas drives on the left but enforces no such rule; neither does the U.S. Virgin Islands. Was there a mechanics lobby group in the Philippine Islands that insisted on reconfiguring imports before 1945? 

There has got to be a story here.

Sometimes the Europeans could do no right

 There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the European empires did very little right in Africa. I will admit that these results came as a surprise to me; my prior would have been that the Europeans would have left behind some institutional innovations or physical infrastructure of value. That case, however, turns out to be extremely hard to demonstrate outside of Southern Africa. 

The slave trade, of course, was one of the most egregious ways in which the Europeans managed to play havoc with Africa. It follows, of course, that ending it should have positive effects. And it did! The Middle Passage was a horrifying meatgrinder ... no possible cost could outweigh the reduction in human suffering from insuring that fewer people would suffer in it.

But the passage of the U.K. Slave Trade Act of 1807 may have had the consequence of boosting conflict in Africa. James Fenske (Oxford) amd Namrata Kala (Yale) argue that it did, by weakening the authorities whom had enriched themselves off slave exports. They take advantage of the fact that the British were rather more successful in reducing human trafficking from West Africa than elsewhere as a form of natural experiment to test their hypothesis.

The time series evidence is fairly compelling that something happened around then:

But I am not wholly convinced of the validity of their experiment. First, look at the above figure: there are a disconcerting number of zeroes among the controls. Second, look at the map to the right, which shows the treatment area in red and the control in blue. Are they really comparable regions?

The authors do vary the treated area and find the same result. In the map, the treated area consists of everything within 1,000 kilometers of a slave-trading port. They varied that distance to as low as 250 kilometers, with the same result. They also defined the treated zone as the current borders of countries with historical slave ports; again, similar results. Finally, they threw out the four territories annexed by European powers in 1807-40: Sierra Leone, Gambia, and Côte d’Ivoire. They also threw out Liberia for similar reasons. Again, the results hold.

Nonetheless, it still seems as though there may be a data problem: we know less about conflicts in the interior. And even if we did have comparable information, the interior likely had a radically different state structure and a much lower population density. The comparison seems forced.

Even without the experiment, the time series certainly make it seem like something happened to increase conflict in coastal Africa in 1807! The Slave Trade Act is the most probably culprit. Moreover, it is hard to argue reverse causality, i.e., that the Act was a response to rising levels of intra-African conflict. They do a good job of demonstrating that British interest in the slave trade had no correlation with interest in African conflict. (Google Ngrams is pretty neat.) In short, the experiment may be unconvincing ... but it also may be unnecessary. Read the paper!

But if they are right, it is depressing to think that ending the slave trade may have done as much to weaken African states as the trade itself. 

War in Africa before the Europeans

 There is a long literature stating that war contributed to state building. Here, for example, you can find a paper by Nicola Gennaioli (Bocconi) and Hans-Joachim Voth (Zurich). It argues that European states needed money to win wars. Thus, states got better at raising money or resigned themselves to irrelevance.

It a powerful thesis, so much that even Paul Collier alluded to the possibility that Africa might be better off if the post-1945 world allowed for violent border changes. Let Rwanda expand! In extremis, you might even want to create institutions (like the ones in the pre-1914 West) that would encourage cohesive states like Rwanda to expand. 

Or perhaps not. Did war encourage state-building in Africa before the Europeans invaded? If so, then it might be true that the continent would be better off had that process been allowed to continue. If not, however, then the implication is that European conquest did not abort local state building ... and unless something has changed radically, there would be little reason to believe that allowing that process to restart today would result in anything other than more death and destruction.

Mark Dincecco (Michigan), James Fenske (Oxford), and Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato (IMT Lucca) have done the work. They coded up 1,750 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe between 1400 and 1799. In Europe and Asia, more war in the past predicted stronger and richer states in the present. But not in Africa! In Africa, more war before 1799 has no effect on economic development today ... and is in fact associated with more civil war.

The result is strong and intriguing. Go read the paper! Africa is different. Past war does not improve present results on that continent. The unanswered question is why. Section 6, where they try to address that question, is the weakest part of the paper. 

Any suggestions?

Long-ago history does not always matter

 There has been a recent spate of papers in the category of “history only happens once.” They generally take the form of showing that some long-ago historical event continues to reverberate in the present. Two of the best in the genre are Nathan Nunn’s (Harvard) work on the effect of the slave trade on Africa or Nico Voigtlaender (UCLA) and Hans-Joachim Voth’s (Zurich) work on the medieval origins of anti-semitic violence in Nazi Germany. I had the honor of criticizing an early version of the latter paper; the authors effectively dealt with all my complaints. Amazing work.

But sometimes it can go too far. For example, many have argued that Latin America’s extreme level of inequality has its roots in the colonial past, when my people (oh, my people, at least some of them) arrived and managed to botch everything up. Except here comes my friend and colleague Jeffrey Williamson (Harvard and UW-Madison) to point out that it isn’t true. From the abstract:

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy have held the pessimistic belief in historical persistence — they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, and that it’s the Iberian colonists’ fault. Thus, modern analysts see today a more unequal Latin America compared with Asia and most rich post-industrial nations and assume that this must always have been true. Indeed, some have argued that high inequality appeared very early in the post-conquest Americas, and that this fact supported rent-seeking and anti-growth institutions which help explain the disappointing growth performance we observe there even today. The recent leveling of inequality in the region since the 1990s seems to have done little to erode that pessimism. It is important, therefore, to stress that this alleged persistence is based on an historical literature which has made little or no effort to be comparative, and it matters. Compared with the rest of the world, inequality was not high in the century following 1492, and it was not even high in the post-independence decades just prior Latin America’s belle époque and start with industrialization. It only became high during the commodity boom 1870-1913, by the end of which it had joined the rich country unequal club that included the US and the UK. Latin America only became relatively high between 1913 and the 1970s when it missed the Great Egalitarian Leveling which took place almost everywhere else. That Latin American inequality has its roots in its colonial past is a myth.

In other words, something good happened in the North Atlantic during the 20th century. (Well, good in terms of inequality: there is evidence that it took a lot of depression and war to get there.) That good thing did not happen in Latin America. This is a very different view than one which dates the region’s inequality to the 16th century ... and a much more hopeful one, I think.

Gender shock

 We know that European colonization affected Africa in multiple ways. The direct effects were generally, well, at best neutral. Outside a few long-standing enclaves (like Dakar) and (maybe) Tunisia and South Africa, it’s difficult to imagine a counterfactual in which the Europeans never extend sovereignty and the Africans have a harder time of it in the 20th century.

One understudied way in which the Europeans might have affected Africa negatively is through gender norms. If there were benefits to, for example, learning English or French, but the colonial authorities only taught men, then gender inequality would increase. One can imagine many other channels in which this effect could have operated.

On the other hand, it is far from given that pre-colonial Africa was a paragon of gender equality, relative to Europe. It hard to see how colonization might have improved the situation, but it is possible.

So what was the effect? Well, Felix Meier (Utrecht)  and Jacob Weisdorf (Southern Denmark)  have an answer! It turns out that the Protestant churches in Kampala kept incredibly detailed occupational data going back to the 19th century. They found that the initial impact of colonialism was what you’d expect … but it didn’t last:

“We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white-collar (high-status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white-collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. But gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda’s independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre-colonial times. Our data also support Boserup’s view that gender inequality was rooted in indigenous social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans.”

In other words, the British conquest had little overall effect at the end of the day … or at least by the end of the 20th century. Thoughts?

Our declaration of not-quite-war on the Islamic State

 Full text here. Minus stylistically-awful preamble below:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This joint resolution may be cited as the “Authorization for Use of Military Force against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”

SECTION 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) AUTHORIZATION.—The President is authorized, subject to the limitations in subsection (c), to use the Armed Forces of the United States as the President determines to be necessary and appropriate against ISIL or associated persons or forces as defined in section 5.

(b) WAR POWERS RESOLUTION REQUIREMENTS.—

(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION.—Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.

(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS.—Nothing in this resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.

(c) LIMITATIONS.— The authority granted in subsection (a) does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces in enduring offensive ground combat operations.

SECTION 3. DURATION OF THIS AUTHORIZATION. This authorization for the use of military force shall terminate three years after the date of the enactment of this joint resolution, unless reauthorized.

SECTION 4. REPORTS. The President shall report to Congress at least once every six months on specific actions taken pursuant to this authorization.

SECTION 5. ASSOCIATED PERSONS OR FORCES DEFINED. In this joint resolution, the term ‘‘associated persons or forces’’ means individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside ISIL or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.

SECTION 6. REPEAL OF AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 is hereby repealed. 

Regarding that preamble, when did the endless list-of-whereas style become the norm? They’re really horrible to read. The AUMF for the Spanish American War limited itself to one:

Whereas, the abhorrent conditions which have existed for more than three years in the Island of Cuba, so near our own borders, have shocked the moral sense of the people of the United States, have been a disgrace to Christian civilization, culminating, as they have, in the destruction of a United States battleship, with 266 of its officers and crew, while on a friendly visit in the harbor of Havana, and can not longer be endured, as has been set forth by the President of the United States in his message to Congress of April 11th, 1898, upon which the action of Congress was invited:

Therefore, Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

First. That the people of the Island of Cuba are, and of right ought to be, free and independent.

Second. That it is the duty of the United States to demand, and the Government of the United States does hereby demand, that the Government of Spain at once relinquish its authority and government in the Island of Cuba, and withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters.

Third. That the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, directed and empowered to use the entire land and naval forces of the United States, and to call into the actual service of the United States, the militia of the several States, to such extent as may be necessary to carry these resolutions into effect.

Fourth. That the United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Islands except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people.

Approved, April 20, 1898.

Returning to the current proposal, what is “enduring offensive ground combat operations” is supposed to mean? Sounds to me like Congress is authorizing anything including invasion, as long as we do not stay there forever. Not that the current administration has any desire to invade, of course. But why spell out the list of grievances in agonizing length only to leave vague the limits on the action? Go ahead, Congress! Take a whole page to spell out exactly what’s okay and what’s not!

I also have to wonder why there are no geographic limits on the current resolution. For example, “Within the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic or, with the permission of their internationally-recognized governments, the territory of any States bordering on the Syrian Arab Republic.” Instead we got, well, nothing. (FWIW, the 1898 resolution was also pretty vague. We did, however, follow it up with an actual declaration of war two days after Spain declared war on us.)

Is this just kabuki?

It is a good thing to repeal the 2002 AUMF. And it is a good thing for Congress to weigh in. But this strikes me as an open-ended check.

The real new thing here is the three-year limit ... which I think is not kabuki. But I am open to arguments.

Technology and social capital

 There are a lot of questions about how modern technology is transforming society and social interactions. (For modern technology, read smartphones mediated by social media software.) What is remarkable, however, is how little we really know about how older technologies affected society and social interaction. 

For example, television. How much do we really know?

Well, courtesy of Elisabeth Perlman, comes some evidence from Indonesia. From the abstract:

This paper investigates the impact of television and radio on social capital in Indonesia. I use two sources of variation in signal reception — one based on Indonesia’s mountainous terrain, and a second based on the differential introduction of private television throughout Indonesia. I find that increased signal reception, which leads to more time watching television and listening to the radio, is associated with less participation in social organizations and with lower self-reported trust. Improved reception does not affect village governance, at least as measured by discussions in village meetings and by corruption in village road projects.

That does not seem good. Maybe my Luddism does not go a far enough.

Elisabeth, I should add, has a neat paper on the effect of free rural mail service on politics in the early 20th century. From its abstract:

The rollout of Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the early twentieth century dramatically increased the frequency with which rural voters received information. This paper examines the effect of RFD on voters’ and Representatives’ behavior using a panel dataset and instrumental variables. Communities receiving more routes experienced higher voter turnout and spread their votes to more parties. RFD shifted positions taken by Representatives to ones in line with rural communities, including increasing support for pro-temperance and anti-immigration policies. Our results are stronger in counties with newspapers, supporting the hypothesis that information flows play a crucial role in the political process

It is fascinating stuff.

Violent rebellion in theory and practice

 Many have speculated that drought set off the Syrian Civil War. We presented some evidence from Mexican history that supports the hypothesis ... but we also showed that the Mexican results were highly sensitive to how you defined “revolutionary activity.” 

Is there more evidence that drought causes unrest?

Cornelius Christian and James Fenske of Oxford University provide an interesting answer. In French West Africa during the colonial period, low rainfall or high temperature are associated with more unrest. Interestingly, however, they find that the effect is less in places where the French took over existing pre-colonial states. In those areas, the story goes, the French were able to use existing institutions to collect taxes even in the face of peasant resistance. In other places the state only arrived with the French, and resistance was commensurately higher.*

Does the same pattern hold in modern Francophone West Africa? No! First, they find some correlation for rainfall but none for temperature. In fact, for temperature the effect is sometimes reversed. Second, it no longer matters whether the area was part of a 19th-century kingdom; that part of the past really does seem to be past. 

I am not sure if the results have a direct application to Syria. The Syrian drought does appear to have been record-breaking; the West African shocks are not of the same magnitude. But they do imply that the correlation between unrest and drought is not one-to-one. They also provide a useful corrective to the recent spate of articles that in effect argue that history matters once: history matters, a lot, but its effects are not permanent.

Can Venezuela’s creditors grab Venezuelan assets in a default?

 If PDVSA defaults on its debts, then yes. It would be a standard commercial dispute. Once a court made its final ruling, U.S. officials would seize Citgo shares, sell them, and give the proceeds to the creditors after deducting expenses and taxes.

But if the Bolivarian Republic defaults, not PDVSA, then it gets harder. Let’s say I own shares in a company and I default on my debts. Creditors can go after my shares in the company, but they cannot go after the company’s assets. This is true even if I am the only shareholder in the company. (Limited liability goes both ways.)

This principle applies to companies owned by foreign states. An official House of Representatives report (see footnote 185 on page 196) bluntly stated: “Section 1610(b) [of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976] will not permit execution against the property of one agency or instrumentality to satisfy a judgment against another, unrelated agency or instrumentality. There are compelling reasons for this. If U.S. law did not respect the separate juridical identities of different agencies or instrumentalities, it might encourage foreign jurisdictions to disregard the juridical divisions between different U.S. corporations or between a U.S. corporation and its independent subsidiary.” 

So far, so clear. Citgo is safe from creditors of the Venezuelan government. 

But here’s the thing: I can’t hide from creditors by creating a separate me-controlled firm and transferring my assets to it. In the words of the Supreme Court, “where a corporate entity is so extensively controlled by its owner that a relationship of principal and agent is created, we have held that one may be held liable for the actions of the other.” Morever, there is a “broader equitable principle that the doctrine of corporate entity, recognized generally and for most purposes, will not be regarded when to do so would work fraud or injustice.” 

In 1983, the Supreme Court specifically extended that principle to foreign state-owned entities in First National City Bank v. Banco para el Comercio Exterior de Cuba (Bancec).

Here’s the backstory. In 1960, Bancec arranged to sell some Cuban sugar to a Canadian company. Citibank issued a letter of credit to Bancec for the sugar. Bancec handed it to the Cuban central bank  (the Banco Nacional) for collection. On September 15, 1960, the Banco Nacional presented the letter to Citibank. The next day, the Cuban government nationalized all Citibank branches. (This was remarkably poor timing.) Citibank, not surprisingly, did not pay Bancec. Bancec sued in the Southern District of New York. The Cubans let the claim sit around until 1975. When they picked it again, they argued that Bancec was an independent state-owned company; why should it be liable the Cuban government’s actions?  

The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court ruling: “Bancec is not a mere private corporation, the stock of which is owned by the Cuban government, but an agency of the Cuban government in the conduct of the sort of matters which even in a country characterized by private capitalism, tend to be supervised and managed by government. Where the equities are so strong in favor of the counter-claiming defendants, as they are in this case, the Court should recognize the practicalities of the transactions. . . . The Court concludes that Bancec is an alter ego of the Cuban government.”

Alright, then. Easy! It might be impossible to seize Citgo assets because Citgo is clearly not an agent of Caracas, but it might be possible to take Citgo shares away from PDVSA. After all, it would not be hard to argue that PDVSA has not been an independent commercial entity since 2002. 

So I ran this past a lawyer friend of mine who works on this stuff.

And ... oh boy ... PDVSA does not own Citgo directly. It owns it through PDV America Inc which is in turn a subsidiary of PDV Holding Inc, both incorporated in Delaware. And those two companies are not legally beholden to PDVSA. 

So now you have to show that PDVSA has no independence and that PDV Holding Inc and  PDV America Inc have no independence. That ain’t so easy. In short, Lex is too sanguine about the prospects for seizing Citgo. It could happen, and my lawyer friends think it will happen ... but only after a long delay.

But there’s another problem! Venezuela has ICSID judgments against it. Unless Venezuela pays them, then ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips will be sniffing around those assets. Their claims rank higher than claims by bondholders, since uncompensated expropriation, unlike default, involves a clear denial of justice. 

In short, you have a mess. Sure, the fact that Citgo is there will make the Bolivarian Republic think six times about defaulting. But the economic mismanagement in that country is of such a scale (sorry, Shah8 ☺) that Caracas no longer really has any other options.  

Now, creditors have another recourse.

The creditors could go after Venezuelan oil exports directly. There is a recent history of this. In 2007, Texas courts ordered American companies to turn over not only royalties but also physical oil due the Congolese Republic. (See here and here; the decision itself is here.) Now the legal approach used in Texas did not have legs. But to be fair, the suits were quite different than the suits that might happen regarding Venezuela. 

The Venezuelans could sell their oil at the point of embarkation and try to hide it, but that opens up foreign refineries to lawsuits. With the world awash in oil, many will be behooved to avoid going anywhere near the Venezuelan stuff. 

So here is the upshot: a default will cause much pain in Venezuela but it will not make creditors whole. Having Citgo as a target does not cancel out all the problems with legal enforcement of sovereign debt because even if the creditors win it will take forever and a day to collect. But because of the legal challenges to oil sales, default be a big enough disaster for Venezuela that the country will likely make an offer that 75% of its creditors will accept. They will then abandon any attempts to go after Citgo. 

Given what Venezuelan bonds are yielding, I’m tempted to buy them. How bad could the restructuring be?

A bad argument about the causes of the Civil War

 As mentioned in my last post, Dave Evans of Georgia took issue with my characterization of the Confederate flag as the “slaveowning banner.”

I should point out that Mr. Evans isn’t alone in thinking this. Even comparatively-normal Texas has this completely backwards monument to the Southern Confederacy on the lawn of the Capitol. “Confederate dead,” it says, “Died for state rights guaranteed under the Constitution. The people of the South, animated by the spirit of 1776, to preserve their rights, withdrew from the federal compact in 1861. The North resorted to coercion. The South, against overwhelming numbers and resources, fought until exhausted.”

So it is a common belief that the war was about something other than preserving the abomination of slavery. But Mr. Evans presents one of the silliest possible arguments in favor of that proposition. Over to him:

If it really had been “all about” slavery then why did Lincoln endorse and get the Northern dominated Congress to pass the Corwin Amendment which would have enshrined slavery in the US constitution making it irrevocable? Why did the original 7 seceding states not readily agree to re-enter the union with irrevocable slavery protected by the US Constitution?

The Corwin Amendment was a strange constitutional amendment that made it out of Congress in the dying days of the Buchanan Administration. A last ditch effort to prevent secession, it banned any future constitutional amendments to alter slavery: “No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any state, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said state.”

It was strongly backed by William Seward and President-elect Lincoln endorsed it in a letter. Why would they do that if they hated slavery?

Simple: they knew the Corwin Amendment would be toothless. In 1861 there were 15 slave states. That was enough to do a pretty good job of preventing any anti-slavery amendments to the Constitution, at least until the number of free states hit 45 ... which was not going to happen anytime soon. (There were 19 free states at the beginning of the war.) Even you think that Delaware and Maryland were going to abolish slavery in the immediate future, then the abomination of slavery would still be safe from constitutional amendments until the number of free states reached 39, even without the Corwin Amendment.

In other words, the Corwin amendment was complete bullshit. It prevented Congress and the states from doing what the current constitutional set-up already prevented them from doing. Devoted abolitionists knew that they were giving away precisely nothing by endorsing it. What it was, was a political Hail Mary pass ... maybe the secessionists would be dumb enough to be conciliated, even though it did nothing to guarantee the expansion of slavery and it did nothing to prevent Congress and the free states from continuing to whittle away at forced labor short of changing the Constitution. 

The South did not fall for it.

There was a real “compromise” proposal out there that would have satisfied the South: the Crittenden compromise. It allowed for the expansion of slavery and insured that escaped slaves would not become automatically free in the North. The Republicans were not having any of that. So it foundered.

Note what nobody offered to try to make peace: a deal to reduce tariffs. Not even an agreement to, say, turn over tariff revenues to state governments rather than fund internal improvements. That is because secession had nothing to do with trade policy or infrastructure spending. 

I doubt that much of this is new, although most of the easily accessible stuff fails to point out why the Corwin Amendment conceded nothing to the South. So I hope that I have added at least a little value. If not, enjoy the pictures of Austin!

Further thoughts always welcome.

Another turn in the South

 In 2004, a good friend and I drove around Georgia, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. I had just gotten back from Fort Huachuca, he was getting leave from Fort Benning, and we both had family in Broward County, Florida. (And in my case, Miami-Dade as well.) We had been to the region quite a bit ... but rarely outside the confines of an Army post. So why not take my old Ford Focus and tool around the deep southeast for a few weeks before heading down to Fort Lauderdale? 

It was a great trip. The South is definitely different. The first thing you notice is how the countryside is intensively farmed. In fact, there is this ah hah moment when you realize that most of the woods you have seen are actually tree farms. My buddy said, “We’re not in New England,” after which we started yelling “Niner niner!” every time we spotted anything really alien. For example, take Quitman, Georgia, with the decaying mansions set back from the streets and its obvious poverty and extreme segregation. Neither poverty nor segregation are alien to New York or New England, of course, but once-rich and now-poor all black small towns are not particularly common. The only thing not “niner” in that town was the small market catering to Mexican immigrants.

Or consider Dothan, Alabama. The town depends on Fort Rucker for its existence, but that was not what made it not like New England. Nor did the suburban sprawl around the town; most American towns look like they’ve exploded across the countryside. What made Dothan southern was the way the sprawl had sucked all the life out of the center of the town, leaving it mostly a vasty expanse of parking lots. There was none of the quaint cuteness that would have filled a similar town in New England; but even California towns have more life in their centers. (In that sense, Quitman was actually more like a northeastern town than most Southern ones.)

The deadness of the centers applied to the larger cities, as well. (Birmingham was a partial exception.) We arrived into Montgomery at night, so it was less than surprising that the central city seemed deserted. We did find a nice little brewpub next to a retro-style minor league ballpark. It closed early, but the patrons suggested two other nearby bars. We went to one on the first floor of a motel on a hill at the edge of downtown, where the buzz-cut bartender sold me a $15 contraband Cuban cigar (putatively) that I then got to smoke right at the bar. (Some differences, they are awesome.) But the difference really showed up during the  day, where the downtown seemed to never open. It was an expanse of parking lots, vacant storefronts and drive-through banks, punctuated by the piles of government buildings and frighteningly devoid of traffic. And I don’t mean just pedestrian traffic. Kids could have played hockey in the middle of Dexter Avenue at 10am, if there had been any kids. And lunch didn’t change anything. Did all those government workers stay holed up in their offices?

Now, it is not like the northeast did not have abandoned urban centers when I was growing up. Central New Haven circa 1990? Ugh. The once-great “Hub” of the South Bronx? Awful. Baltimore? You have seen the Wire. And my first visit to Buffalo in 1990 can only be called depressing, along with my second, third and fourth. 

No, what was weird to a northeastern sensibility was that downtown Montgomery felt abandoned but not decayed. The streets and plazas were spotless. The empty storefronts were well-sealed and well-maintained. It all looked as if it had been suddenly abandoned in the face of an invading army. It was strange.

But that was just weird. What made Montgomery downright eerie was all the Confederate memorials. Sure, Rosa Parks had her plaque. And there were no slaveowning banners. But you couldn’t escape the oddly-respectful memorials to the Lost Cause. Statues of “The Statesman,” e.g., Jefferson Davis. Murals in the state capitol (which the legislature no longer uses) celebrating horseback-riding antebellum aristocrats. A memorial to the Confederate dead who served in the “War of Southern Independence.” 

The monuments to the Civil War were even more common outside the big cities: the below picture is from Havana, Florida, and it captures just how strange the monuments are:

Consider exactly what those soldiers were defending their families, communities, state and nation from. And then consider that the term “nation” is in that sentence. Wait ... what?

In southeastern Georgia we saw many more slaveowning Battle Flags than in Alabama, including a bumper sticker on a truck bearing the ominous slogan: “It’s Not Over.” A Shell station off of I-75 right over the Florida state line flew a gigantic Third Flag of the Confederacy. The design of the Third Flag is sufficiently obscure that it leaves little doubt that whomever put it up knew exactly what it stood for; no pretending to hide behind “southern heritage” here.

It completely weirded me out. As I wrote at the time, “It’s not the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, it’s slavery, dude. I can see memorializing the poor bloody soldiers who suffered and died for the CSA, but the CSA’s leaders should be treated the way the Germans treat the Nazis.”

Now, this was late 2004, so some of the strange atmosphere was supercharged from the recent election. In Georgia, an angry pickup driver threateningly tailgated us on a rural road, probably incensed by my Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers. He pulled up next to us and looked like he was about to start something when he noticed my friend was wearing BDUs. He got solemn and suddenly sped off. In Gainesville, we overheard loud laments about the war in Iraq from hospital workers eating at a Japanese steakhouse made up to look like a pagoda. And in Birmingham, Alabama, a diner did in fact serve us “American fries.”

And while not directly election-related, we kept running into angry demonstrations against the use of “Happy Holidays.” This was not a new thing by 2004, but I had lived in Mexico from 1996 to 2002 and spent most of 2002-04 in New Haven, various Army posts, and overseas. So the angry demonstrations against a completely anodyne phrase that had been used in the more Jewish parts of America since before I was born took me completely off guard.

But for all that, the real strangeness had to do with the war. The war that had ended 139 years ago by that point and will reach its 150th anniversary this year. 

Which brings us to a recent comment by Dave Evans of Georgia, who took issue with my characterization of the Confederate flag as the “slaveowning banner.” In the next post, I will lift my response to him from the comments. I think it is worth highlighting. But for right now, I just want to leave it with the statement that driving through the English-speaking South is a far stranger experience for a New Yorker than anywhere in English-speaking Canada west of Quebec. 

If you impose capital controls, you need to take some risks

 Capital controls are state-imposed restrictions on moving money in or out of a country. If you have money inside a state with capital controls, then it is legally-difficult to lend that money to foreigners or use that money to buy foreign assets. In fact, to be binding, it even has to be difficult to use that money to freely import stuff. Otherwise you could move money out simply by buying something overseas on credit, importing it, and selling it to yourself at an inflated price.

Why might a government want to impose them?

1. Governments sometimes impose capital controls during economic crises. They might do this to stem a panic. Say that people have started dumping assets and taking the money out of the country. (If they are not doing that, then they are likely using the money to buy other assets, which is less of a problem.) The fire sale is driving down asset prices and pushing otherwise healthy companies towards insolvency. In that situation, capital controls basically stop the foreigners from being able to dump their assets. It’s a way of forcing everyone to calm down, the way a bank facing a run might stop withdrawals for a little while.  
2. Capital controls can also be used to give central banks the ability to fight a crisis without worrying about the exchange rate. They can prints lots of money and do other unorthodox things without the fear that people will start dumping the currency. In countries where lots of companies have foreign-denominated debt, that is a good thing.
3. Finally, governments can shift the pain of external adjustment by using controls. A collapse in the exchange rate has all sorts of distributional effects. If a government doesn’t like those effects, then it can use capital controls to shift them around. (Venezuela is doing this ... for so long that it long became massively counterproductive. But that is a different issue.) 

Kris James Mitchener and Kirsten Wandschneider have a good working paper on capital controls during the Great Depression. What did they find?

1. Controls worked on the most basic level, as in governments succeeded in making it hard to take money out of the country;
2. Controls abetted recovery from the Depression ... but no more so than in the countries that just let their currencies depreciate;
3. One of the reasons for (3) is that central banks seemed very reluctant to take advantage of the manuevering space that the controls provided. In short, they stuck with basically the same policies as the countries that let their currencies float, even though they no longer needed to. 

What are the implications for the current Russian predicament? I see two. If the crisis really is a panic-driven flight, then the controls may work well. The Russian government has been informally imposing such controls for several weeks, mostly by ordering state-owned businesses to refrain from taking money out of the country.  

On the other hand, if the crisis is more systemic, then the Russian government could use controls to keep the ruble from plunging further while it uses its foreign reserves to bail out various companies. That might be useful! It would keep import prices from spiking and keep various exporters solvent. But it is not clear that it would really produce less overall pain than just letting the ruble fall.

The problem does not seem to be driven by a short-term panic, so it seems that the Russia government has a difficult choice. But the lesson seems to be that capital controls do not do much good unless you have a plan for using the breathing room. Does anyone in Moscow?

UFOs explained!

 There was a giant upsurge in UFO sightings in the 1950s. It would not be unreasonable to blame that on the zeitgeist. Russians and rockets and Russians with rockets, coming right after the Germans aimed for the Moon but hit London. Mass psychology is a plausible explanation.

But such logic would be wrong! The Air Force started Project Blue Book in 1952. Testing for the U-2 spy plane started in 1955. And whaddaya know? A recently declassified CIA report tells us that more than half of all UFO reports in 1955-69 turned out to be U-2 (or later A-12) sightings. From pages 72-73 of the CIA report: “When the sun dropped below the horizon of an airliner flying at 20,000 feet, the plane was in darkness. But if a U-2 was airborne [at 60,000 feet] in the vicinity of the airliner at the same time ... its silver wings would catch and reflect the rays of the sun and appear to the airliner pilot, 40,000 feet below, to be fiery objects.”

I will bet dollars to doughnuts both that the earlier 1947-55 sightings and most of the remaining unexplained from 1955-69 are due to flight tests that remain classified for whatever silly reason.

This post does not really belong in the “space” category, but it seemed like the closest fit.

Hat tip: Will Baird.

A review of the Empire Trap misses the big finding, with special attention to how Richard Nixon slapped around Peru

 Negative reviews are not disheartening. People get things wrong. Interpretations differ. These are discussions worth having. 

But it is disheartening when a reviewer you respect appears to have just plain missed one of the primary empirical findings of your work. I do not mean that the reviewer thinks my data is incorrect. I mean that the reviewer did not note that I provided any data at all!

Here is Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman’s review of The Empire Trap. It is a well-written review that makes very cogent criticisms. I liked it, even if it is less than positive!

But there was one place in the review where I slapped my face with my palm and started to cry, “Where, dear Lord, did I go wrong in my writing?” 

Here is where I did the self-face-slapping. (It sounds better in Spanish: autobofetada.) In the 1970s, the Peruvian military government nationalized a swathe of American investments. The incoming Nixon administration put the screws in, yanking aid and making other dire threats. Regarding my account of the episode, she writes:

The military junta in control of Peru in the early seventies, for instance, nationalized a number of industries, from oil to copper to sugar. President Nixon, the State Department, and the CIA all trembled that retaliation might “lead to reprisals against other U.S. investments, alienate the Peruvian people and . . . perhaps push Peru further toward . . . relations with the Soviet bloc” (p. 372). American investors were effectively held hostage, lest the local government switch sides in the Cold War. In Peru as in countless other countries, what followed was essentially a long, drawn-out process of rescuing the hostages. Maurer calls these negotiations “imperial intervention,” though it’s hard to see how the horse-trading that achieved partial compensation for dispossessed investors was terribly different from any other bruising business transaction. Both sides sought the best deal possible — and peaceably came back to the table when they saw ways to advance their interests. 

I added the italics, because one of the big empirical findings of the book was that over the entire 20th Century the United States managed to extract rather more than market value for aggrieved American investors. Seriously! That was one of the big findings. If the Red Army was not involved, then the U.S. government helped American investors beat foreign governments again and again and again, across administrations and across continents. I tried to highlight it over and over throughout the book, including the first chapter. Right here on page 2:

The Empire Trap is about the shift from politicized confrontations like the imbroglio of 1900 to legalized disputes like the more orderly affair of 2007. It advances four basic findings. First, American government intervention on behalf of U.S. foreign investors was astoundingly successful at extracting compensation through the 1980s. [Italics in the original.]

I am not bothered that someone might disagree with the finding; I am saddened that someone would miss it altogether.

Specifically, the U.S. managed to obtain full compensation in Peru. My primary evidence comes from secret communications between the expropriated companies and the American negotiators. The companies listed the minimum valuation that they would accept as compensation. These numbers were not negotiated by the Nixon Administration: the companies laid them out. 

And the companies all in fact got more than those numbers! My argument largely stops there. But it is possible to check the result against market benchmarks for the two largest investments in Peru: the Cerro copper mining enterprise and the IPC oil company. (They together received 57% of the total compensation Peru paid.) 

The copper company, Cerro Corporation, was publicly traded. The market value of its Peruvian investments was $58 million in 1971. One might argue that fear of the Peruvian “Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces” had pushed down that value, but Cerro’s p/e ratio matched that of other copper producers, including those geared towards domestic American production. Cerro told the Nixon Administration that it wanted $65 million; it got $68 million. (It publicly asked for $133 million, but it would, no?)

The International Petroleum Company (IPC) was not publicly traded, but it did provide data that lets us see if it received fair compensation. It privately told the Nixon Administration that it wanted $20 million. It publicly told Peru that it wanted $85 million, a palpably ridiculous number. Now, on paper Peru made like Michael Corleone.

The Peruvian government, however, paid compensation to the U.S. government, not the companies directly. The U.S. government diverted $22 million from the settlement to IPC. In practice, then, the Peruvian government agreed to overpay other American claimants (in the knowledge that the funds would be diverted to IPC) in order to be able to pretend that it paid nothing for the oilfields and refineries. 

Was $22 million a fair amount? Yes. Over the previous decade, IPC earned around $1.9 million per year at a time when U.S. oil companies traded at p/e ratios rather below five. Unless you believe that an investment in a country ruled by the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces was less than half as risky as an investment in a country ruled by Richard Nixon, then IPC got more than twice a market price.

(Hmm. Richard Nixon? Another day, another day.)

I am fine with saying that I am wrong in calling Nixon’s strong-arming of the Peruvians “imperialism.” I am also fine with saying that others have argued that covert intervention was not used to defend American investments ... although I believe that such a conclusion is incorrect, I am also well-aware that I may be placing too much weight upon a few internal communications and President Nixon’s taped offhand comments. And if you show me how, I am fine with saying that my numbers are wrong!

But please acknowledge that I brought some numbers to the table! (And not just for Peru; for every single expropriation of American natural-resource FDI from the 1890s through the 1980s.) Those numbers may well be wrong. But they took several years to gather! So even if the numbers are wrong, please acknowledge that the numbers are there? Or at least somebody tell me how my writing went so off the rails that a great historian could miss that I presented data to back my claims.

If you want to know more, a working paper about the Peruvian episode can be found here.

Thoughts and opinions are very welcome.

Vox fails World War 2 history

 Vox is a very useful website. I admire what they are trying to do. But sometimes they just completely screw things up. This time, they did so in their grandiosely-named “40 maps that explain World War II.”

The big problems start with Map 10: “The amphibious invasion of the United Kingdom that never happened.” All you need to know about the problem is in the last line of the caption: “As the British advantage in the air grew, Hitler was forced to shelve his invasion plans.”

Christ almighty, no. No. No no no. Nazi Germany had no way of successfully invading the British isles regardless of the outcome of the Battle of Britain. First, the Royal Navy was in the way, not just the Royal Air Force. Second, on four occasions the British military waved away the entire Royal Navy and Royal Air Force in order to game out an invasion ... and in all four exercises the invasion collapsed with days. Click the link for Alison Brooks’ classic essay.

After that, the other problems are minor. Map 13 is about Operation Barbarossa. It is true that the Germans failed to take Moscow before winter set in, which was a serious problem ... but the order of the sentences in the caption implies that the Germans failed to take Moscow because winter set in, which is not what happened: 

The Nazis were able to drive hundreds of miles east and reach the outskirts of Moscow by October. But then Stalin was saved by the bitterly cold winter. The Soviets had more experience operating in cold weather and were better prepared than the Nazis. German equipment was not designed for below-zero temperatures, German soldiers were under-dressed, and they lacked essentials such as antifreeze. Germany never took Moscow.

And while Map 1 points out the Allied economic advantage (meaning really the U.S., U.K., and USSR) the point gets lost in all the later discussions. Here are two examples. First, Map 19 recounts Free French victories in Africa and provides a much-needed antidote to the image of French fecklessness. The problem is that the caption says that the victories “deprived Hitler of much-needed resources,” which is not true. The Axis did not draft African soldiers and the  area did not provide any strategic raw materials. (Frex, Gabonese oil production did not start until 1956.)  

Second, Map 28 describes the Battle of Midway as a turning point, which it was in the sense of beginning the U.S. offensive ... but was not in terms of being key to a U.S. victory. By the summer of 1943 the U.S. had a wave of new carriers. Japanese-occupied Midway would be right on the doorstep of the main U.S. naval base. It would be thousands of miles away from Japan’s. The U.S. would be able to bomb it at will (as we did Wake Island) and rather rapidly starve out the survivors. The Marianas campaign might be pushed back to 1945, but by then the U.S. would have overwhelming superiority. And then the atomic bombs are ready by August.

A later Marianas campaign might give the Soviets the time and inclination to occupy all of Korea instead of just the northern half ... which would make the Battle of Midway the turning point of a war that hadn’t even started. You could call the South Korea the big winner of that battle. 

But honestly, the implication that Operation Sealion could have worked is the real error. Not to take anything away from the Battle of Britain, which accomplished much, but keeping the Nazis out of London was not one of them.

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.

How Many ‘White’ People Are Passing? with apologies to Henry Louis Gates

 Hella more than you think. Frank Underwood, certainly.

For most of its history, the stereotype of the racial line in the United States was the one-drop rule. You had any African ancestry and you were considered black.

Of course, the stereotype of the American caste system never really held. The United States was never organized enough to universally enforce the one-drop rule. If you looked white enough to convince strangers, then it was possible for you to “pass” for white. We know that happened a lot. What we don’t know is how common it was. Consider Daniel Sharfstein: “According to just about anyone who has considered the question, the migration [from black to white] is impossible to reconstruct... At best, such evidence is scattered across local archives and county courthouses, in library stacks and microfilm reels. Beyond the isolated anecdotes, there seems to be only silence.”

Except that’s wrong! The U.S. census identified people by race; the census-taker did the identification. So we can, in theory, find out how many people moved from black to white and what happened to them.

And here come Emily Nix and Nancy Qian to do the work! And what do they find?

Using the full population of de-identified historical Censuses for ten Southern states during 1900-1940, we document that over one-fifth of black males “passed” for white at some point during their lifetime, a tenth of whom later reverse-passed to being black; passing was almost always accompanied by geographic relocation to communities with a higher percentage of whites; occurred at all ages; and was positively associated with political-economic opportunities for whites relative to blacks, such as schooling, earnings and voting rights.

The figures in their paper are even more surprising than that. The one-fifth number (21%, to be more exact) is a lower bound: it refers to the individuals that they were able to identify across censuses with perfect confidence. Their most likely estimates are much higher. Consider Table 5: of Southern black children aged 5-14 in 1900, 43% of them were identified as white in 1940. (The absolute lower bound for that number is 28%.)

They also find, less surprisingly, 95-97% of “passers” moved counties and 54% switched states. In addition, passing was associated with crappier conditions for black people in the county of origin. They are going to code up lynching in future work but I doubt that the results will surprise.

But there is still a lot we want to know! How did passers do relative to non-passers, adjusting for socioeconomic status? Did they marry whites or blacks and how did their children identify? What determined the counties that they moved to, besides having a higher percentage of whites? How many moved to the North, and where? What determined reverse-passing, e.g. going back to identification as black? 

The authors note that according to data from 23andme, the number of self-identified whites who would be black under the one-drop rule is about 20%. (The 23andme sample is far from random; I suspect the white people skew towards the descendents of Ellis Islanders.) If the Nix-Qian numbers are correct, however, then 20% is likely an underestimate unless one of three things is true: (1) The children of passers re-identified as black in significant numbers; (2) Passers showed significantly below-average fertility; or (3) Passers showed high levels of endogamy, that is, marrying other passers. 

Even in Jim Crow America, the color line is turning out to have been extremely fuzzy. 

Devo Max 1.0, circa 1914

 This is a bit of a shaggy dog post about Ireland a century-ago and Scotland today, but I want to put it up anyway.

In 1914, the British government finally passed a Home Rule bill for Ireland. Unfortunately, World War I intervened and London never fully implemented the law. That helped fuel the Easter Rising of 1916. Britain and Ireland still might have remained united even with London’s botched response to the revolt but for the government’s misbegotten decision to extend conscription to Ireland in 1918. My understanding of Irish political history is limited, but finally put paid to the possibility of a peacefully united British Isles seems to have been the combined one-two-three-four punch of (1) suspend Home Rule; (2) put down the Rising with brutal force; (3) shoot the leaders of the rebellion; and (4) finally try to draft the Irish who had in fact already volunteered in large numbers . 

How many Irish volunteered during the war? We know that 140,456 enlisted in the armed services over the course of the conflict. Of those, 55% gave their religion as Catholic, according to Keith Jeffrey in Ireland and the Great War.  That would come to a little under 15% of the 1911 Catholic male population aged 15-35. To that one should add the rough 58,000 Irishmen who were already serving the armed forces in 1914, but religious figures for them are hard to come by. A random guess of half would place the number of military-age Catholic men in the war at 20%.

That is not small. It is twice the percentage of military-age male Americans who served during the Vietnam War, and that war involved conscription and a far far lower risk of death. In fact, less than half of all military personnel actually went to SE Asia in 1965-73. 

Anyway, to the point: many have argued that had Home Rule been implemented, then Ireland would still be part of the U.K. today. Which makes it surprising that the actual text of the act is so hard to track down! But I finally did. So what were the provisions of the Home Rule act and does it provide a model for Scotland?

Irish Home Rule, circa 1914:

Trade: Ireland would be part of the United Kingdom for commercial and customs purposes. 

The West Lothian question: Home rule cut the number of Irish MPs from 103 to 42. That cut Ireland from being overrepresented (15% of seats against 10% of population) to underrepresented (6% of seats), but those MPs still had full voting privileges. Nothing EVEL here. 

Tax collection: U.K. bureaucrats would continue to collect and administer all taxes. The funds collected in Ireland would then be remitted to the Irish parliament. This would save autonomous Ireland from the need to set up an internal revenue service.

Courts: The Privy council would remain the chief court of appeal, but it would now be the only court of appeal. In this, Ireland would become like the nominally-independent countries of the modern West Indies.

Services: The bill kept the U.K. in charge of the following: old age pensions, national insurance, post office banks and friendly societies. (But not the actual post office, which would fall under Irish control from the start.) The Irish parliament could take the reserved services over whenever it wanted with a one-year warning. The Royal Constabulary would move to Irish control after six years, although local police, prisons and courts would come under Dublin immediately.

Infrastructure: One service, however, would never be devolved: road-building. Under Article 19, Irish petrol taxes and car license fees would continue to go into the all-U.K. fund and Irish projects would be funded just as elsewhere under the Development and Roads Improvement Fund Act of 1909. The thing is, in practice the Road Fund simply returned car taxes to the county where they were collected. In other words, not a hidden subsidy.

Finance: This part got complicated. Basically, under Home Rule the imperial government (that is the phrase used in the act) would pay Ireland the cost of all Irish services as of 1912 plus £500,000. (Measured as a % of the British GDP, that would be the 2013 equivalent of £340 million.) The surplus was then slated to fall to £200,000 within six years. The Irish government could vary tax rates or impose new ones; if it cut taxes, the transferred sum would fall commensurately and if it raised them it would rise. The £500,000 was in addition to the existing net transfer of £1.5 million, for an initial subsidy of £2 million.

So far, so simple. But there were a few catches. First, £2 million was a realtively small amount of money even for the time. It came to 16% of all government spending in Ireland and only 1.5% of Ireland’s nominal GDP in 1912. (From Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History.) 

Second, if Irish expenses grew for any reason, then Dublin would have to finance them from new taxes or by borrowing. Increases in the revenue from existing taxes (say from economic growth) would go to London. Ireland could borrow on the markets, but that was a limited recourse and under an implicit British veto. Of course, the arrangement also provided security against a fall in revenues. The problem, really, would have been that the transferred sum was neither linked to economic growth nor inflation. It would not therefore have provided much of an automatic stabilizer for the Irish economy. 

Third, the whole set-up was transitory. Article 26 stated that once all combined Irish and imperial tax revenues collected in Ireland exceeded all combined Irish and imperial expenses in Ireland over three consecutive years, then Parliament would revisit the finance question. In short, once Irish tax revenues exceeded expenses, then London would have a license to cut all subsidies. On the other hand, if revenues fell further behind expenses, then Ireland would be on its own unless Parliament acted.

Of course, Ireland would still have representation in the national parliament, so it might be able to defend (or even expand) its subsidy. Absent faith in the political influence of its representatives in London, however, the Irish parliament in Dublin would have to be nuts to take over the reserved services from the U.K. 

Defense: Note that defense was not included. Ireland would pay nothing for the protection of the British army and Royal Navy.

Scottish Home Rule, circa 2014:

Under modern Home Rule, with some adjustments for scale and context, Scotland would see its current fiscal relationship swapped for a lump sum equal to the amount of current U.K. non-defense spending in Scotland plus 4%, presumably adjusted for inflation. 

That is really not all that different from the current set-up, under which Scotland gets a block-grant for devolved functions set at 10.03% of English spending on those functions. The big difference is that under a Home Rule-like proposal the grant would no longer be effectively indexed to U.K.-wide economic growth ... and who would want to accept that?

In addition, a modern equivalent of the 1914 Home Rule act would cut Scottish seats in Parliament from 59 to 36. That is less than a solution to the West Lothian question. Moreover, Scotland is barely overrepresented at Westminster in 2014, whereas Ireland was massively overrepresented in 1914. 

The current status of Scotland, then, looks a lot like Irish Home Rule with a more generous funding formula. Devo Max, which cuts Scotland off entirely from the U.K. fiscal regime, is rather more autonomy and not a whole lot less insurance. There are better arrangements than Devo Max (consider either American or Canadian fiscal federalism) but the Home Rule proposals of a century ago are not one of them.

Of course, nobody is saying they were! I just ran across a copy of the bill and got curious as to why the precedent never seemed to come up in the modern debate. And now I know.

A lesson for China from Australian history?

 If ever there was a country less likely to provide useful lessons for China, it is Australia. Australia has always been underpopulated. It is practically the platonic ideal of a settler colony, having wiped out the locals far more thoroughly than its American counterparts. The settlers brought British institutions with them and then improved them: in humanity’s slow move towards democracy and the rule-of-law, Oz has always been on the forefront.

But there is one thing that past Australia shared with future China: a huge imbalance of men over women!

There has been a lot of blather about China’s sex-imbalance, most recently in the Washington Post. In the words of our co-blogger, Doug Muir: 

I’ve been reading variants of that article since well back in the Clinton administration. Is anyone aware of any hard evidence linking skewed sex ratios to a more aggressive foreign policy? Because AFAIK there is none, which makes these articles Just So stories justifying another round of yellow peril pearl-clutching.

I note that China’s oldest sex-skewed cohorts are in their thirties now. So far, the major effects seem to be a rise in prostitution and a lot more time spent on the internet. Both negative social consequences to be sure, but a long way from the Tong Wars and “virile” foreign policy these two dopes are going on about.

So what did an unbalanced sex ratio do in Australia? Well, Pauline Grosjean and Rose Khattar of the University of New South Wales decided to take a look! Their findings:

We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th and 19th century. In areas with higher gender imbalance, women historically married more, worked less, and were less likely to occupy high-rank occupations. Today, people living in those areas have more conservative attitudes towards women working and women are still less likely to have high-ranking occupations. We document the role of vertical cultural transmission and of homogamy in the marriage market in sustaining cultural persistence. Conservative gender norms may have been beneficial historically, but are no longer necessarily so. Historical gender imbalance is associated with an aggregate income loss estimated at $800 per year, per person. Our results are robust to a wide array of geographic, historical and present-day controls, including migration and state fixed effects, and to instrumenting the overall sex ratio by the sex ratio among convicts.

In other words, the historical evidence does not point to a future of gang warfare and foreign adventurism. Rather, China will be more traditional, more married, and slightly poorer than it would have been otherwise. And if the lessons from the West and Latin America hold, the result of that will also counterintuitively be a much lower birthrate than in more gender-equal countries.

China in 2050? A big giant Queensland! But with robots. 

This is not as sexy as a Venezuelan-style crime wave combined with an invasion of Siberia, or whatever. But it has the advantage of being grounded in this thing we historians call evidence. 

2014 is not like 1914, but less than some think

Courtesy of Will Baird, I read this post by Martin Skold, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of St. Andrews. The title is “Troubles of our Own: Why 2014 is not like 1914 (but is scary anyway).” He lists six differences:

1. We have nuclear weapons now, and we don’t make light of them. 
2. It is more difficult to hold onto conquered territory, and less useful to try. 
3. There is no military conscription in most great powers today, and there are demographic and technological reasons why it is unfeasible.
4. The great powers are broke. 
5. Finance is globalized.
6. And finally: people are older, richer, more heavily taxed, more heavily subsidized, and more cynical.

The first two points I agree with. The third is incomplete. The penultimate two are incorrect. And the last is irrelevant. Allow me to take them in turn.

Nuclear weapons: Skold’s discussion is excellent. I would only add that it was not clear in 1945 that the taboo on their use would be so universal. The world could have become a far more dangerous place. 

The difficulty of conquest: Skold’s discussion is even more excellent and worth reading. Key quote: “This is not to say it is impossible for a state to conquer territory in the modern world and hold it. It is to say that the costs of doing so have gone up and the benefits have gone down. This, rather than anything the international community did, may be the main reason Vladimir Putin chose to overtake parts of Ukraine by fomenting unrest and sending covert thugs rather than by force majeure.”

Conscription: On one level, he is merely stating a fact. The Western powers, China and India do not have conscription. This is different from 1914!

The problem is that he goes on to say that conscription is both impossible and useless, which is an entirely different proposition. An argument about modern mass conscription that ignores Israel, Singapore and South Korea is one that it is hard to take seriously.

In addition, he mentions an interesting point about modern military equipment — “As is readily apparent in observing the procurement process for ships and aircraft, the replacement of lost equipment will be a more complicated matter in any future war than it was in 1914” — without drawing any inferences about what that means for future great power war.

National debts. There are two claims here. The factual one is that debt-to-GDP ratios are high compared to 1914. For the U.S., yes, although there have been many periods like today. For the U.K., not so much. Ditto France: in 1914, it had a debt-to-GDP ratio of 67%, lower but not hugely lower than its current 91%. (The 91% figure is up from 64% in 2008 as a result of the Great Recession.) Moreover, France had a national debt of 101% of GDP in 1890. (See this paper, page 23.) Germany also walked into WW1 with a national debt of 63% of GDP. In short, the factual claim is incorrect.

The implicit theoretical claim is that even if modern countries were more indebted than in 1913, it would somehow interfere with their ability to mobilize for war. That claim simply makes no sense to me. Perhaps it is correct, but anyone claiming that it is needs to make the case. They cannot simply assert it as self-evident, because it is not. After all, debt-to-GDP ratios soared in the Napoleonic Wars and both World Wars to levels much much much higher than current ones ... you don’t need any familiarity with the complexities of historical war finance to conclude that modern governments could issue a lot of debt if they needed to fight another world war.

Finance is globalized. This part of the essay should be a little embarrassing, especially in light of the quality of earlier discussions. The worst part: “This [American debts to China] is in stark contrast to the financial world of 1914, in which governments overwhelmingly owed money solely to their own citizens.” No no no no no. 

The effect of the globalization of supply chains on the likelihood of interstate war is more interesting to think about. I am skeptical of the claims, but unlike finance we truly are in uncharted territory in that respect. 

Older, richer, more taxed, more subsidized, more cynical. All that applied to the citizens of the Yugoslav successor states in 1991. Perhaps that is not a good example, but it makes me wonder if those differences between our world and the world of 1914 matter all that much.

To recap: the discussion at the link of nuclear weapons and nationalism is excellent. The discussions of conscription and culture is incomplete and the discussions of fiscal issues are wrong. That said, the essay is worth a look.