Samizdata » Book reviews

Samizdata quote of the day

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:57:55 +0000

For the first time ever, labourers were able to purchase cheap goods for themselves. The first factories focused on mass production of cheap goods for the poor. Shoes, for example, were produced for the proletariat – the rich bought made-to-measure shoes. This was different from France, where the government’s mercantilist product standards, designed to uphold quality, ensured that nothing was produced for the poor at all. In France, mercantilism continued to be state policy for much longer than in England. This is the reason why industrialisation took fifty more years to arrive on France’s shores.

- This is a typical “I did not know that” moment from J. P. Floru‘s excellent new book Heavens on Earth: How To Create Mass Prosperity, from the chapter about the British industrial revolution.

Well, I myself did not know it. If you did know this particular thing about shoes, you will still probably find a hundred other such titbits in this book that you did not know. In an equal-but-opposite way, this made me think of how we can now buy excellent yet vastly-cheaper-than-before spectacles on the internet, that being a case of a made-to-measure product becoming available to all at a mass production price.

Besides the world-changing success story that was British industrialisation, Floru writes about: the USA and West Germany just after WW2, Hong Kong, China, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore. The miseries of despotism are not glossed over, but the inevitable failure of statist economic policies and the almost automatic benefits of free market policies, provided only that you can make them stick, are made unmistakably clear.

I hope, Real Soon Now, to be supplying a longer posting here about this fine book, along the lines of the five star reactions to it here. Short version: it is a fine book.

Samizdata quote of the day

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:35:36 +0000

“We should recognize the issue of communism and Soviet espionage has become an antiquarian backwater. After all, the Cold War is over.” With these words, a typical leftish US historian, Ellen Schrecker, recommends that a whole sector of an historical era should be ignored and work on it effectively closed down. “It is time to move on,” remarks another academic, using the modern terminology that neither denies nor accepts responsibility, but leaves a mess behind for someone else to clear up. Now historians are, by definition, paddlers up backwaters, investigators of things that are “over” and move in, not move on when invited to examine data never before available. When World War Two ended historians started, not stopped, writing about it, just as an unending stream of books about Napoleon has continued in the nearly two centuries since he was bundled off to St Helena. The idea that, just as enormous quantities of material from Soviet and other archives are being released, work on them should be called off is so ludicrous that it could only have been suggested by those who feel the foundations of their beliefs and attitudes crumbling beneath their feet.

- Findlay Dunachie, reviewing a book called In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage for Samizdata, in 2004. I came across that while trying to find something else, and was immediately hooked. Findlay Dunachie is sorely missed, now, still.

The good news is that, following the recent Samizdata makeover, we can now peruse the entire Samizdata Findlay Dunachie author archive.

Neal Asher

Rob Fisher (Surrey) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 23:16:39 +0000

It is by no means necessary for my enjoyment of art that the artist has vaguely sensible political views, but it helps. Looking for a science fiction novel to read, discovering that the latest Alastair Reynolds was something to do with global warming, I instead took Amazon up on one of its recommendations and tried Neal Asher, who has a blog, and at the time had recently written this:

So, Cameron is a nannying statist who wants to stick a minimum price on alcohol per unit. What on Earth is he thinking? Does he think that this will result in fewer pavement pizzas and fat slags crying in the gutter on a Saturday night? Does he think there’ll be less violence on the streets after chucking out time on a Friday and less chaos in A & E over the weekend? If he does think that then he’s an idiot because the people responsible for that drink in bars where the price is already way above his damned 45p a unit.

He has also written favourably about fracking.

The novel I chose was The Departure, the first of the Owner trilogy. If anything it had too much action for my taste. If Alastair Reynolds writes film noir, Neal Asher writes Bruce Willis and explosions. The science is sensible enough: there are no exotic physics and the technologies discussed are robots, giant space stations and brain-computer interfaces. The politics is very interesting. Asher seems to have perceived a slippery slope and extrapolated in the extreme. Something like the EU has, thanks to a complacent populace, taken over the whole planet. This is the Committee and it has long since stopped pretending to be democratic and gone outwardly Orwellian. Cigarettes are illegal; armed robots are used to control rioting crowds; selfish, individualistic dissidents are taken away for readjustment by pain inducer; and clever scientists are allowed to do research useful to the state but are considered a risk and kept under scrutiny or even lock and key. The protagonist is one such scientist who sets out to get revenge.

The action includes novel ways of killing people, fantastic feats of computer hacking to fool officials who trust their computers rather too much, zero-gee small arms combat and lots of expensive things getting destroyed. Interspersed is plenty of discussion of the political situation that has lead to all this.

Statism gets a good kicking. Government is described as the biggest killer on the planet. A Committee member is scorned for her belief in “knowledge-based societal planning”. Fiat currency is scorned when the protagonist uses gold to make a purchase. There is a subtle reference to the purpose of practical politics as described by H L Mencken. In a history of NASA, the agency is described as “moribund under its stifling level of bureaucracy”. One chapter opens with a description of how people obtain things forbidden by the state:

The greater the power and extent of the state, the more room there is for corruption. The more inept state services and industries become, the more pies it takes its huge cut from and the more regulation it imposes, the greater the call for black markets.

Politicians are described as using global crises as an excuse to extend their power globally. The slippery slope is described:

Make the process slow enough to sit below immediate perception and they will grow accustomed to their enslavement; they even might not realize they are wearing any chains at all.

My biggest criticism is that the theme of overpopulation runs strongly through the book. There are food, housing and other resource shortages, and while it is acknowledged that the Committee members are doing very well for themselves, this is very much in a zero sum sense. At one point the protagonist wonders about “the mindless, ever-breeding swarm” governed by the Committee. In a discussion of how government waste prevented development of technology, he claims that the only technology needed was birth control.

The author understands that technology and people can overcome resource shortages. In a sub-plot on Mars, the colony has hydroponics which are somehow not applied on Earth, though robotic farming is. The colony has problems as a result of events back on Earth and the administrators plan to cull the population but the author understands that people create wealth:

Yes, they had problems over food, air and water production and usage and, yes, by killing off many personnel these could be eked out, but they would still eventually run out and those few remaining here would die. Better by far to apply all those useful minds to their present problems, since brainpower was all that could save them.

It is obvious that centralisation and misallocation of resources is enough to cause all of the economic problems described in the book. But none of the characters seem to connect these dots and I am not sure why. I am worried the author has not either. Perhaps the rest of the trilogy will make things clear.

What the Adam Smith Institute did

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 23:44:04 +0000

Successful people are often born into a world that is not, so to speak, theirs. The world in which they get dealt their first cards is what it is and where it is, but their real world, the world they were meant for, is something and somewhere else. They are born the son of a coal miner or of a provincial shopkeeper, yet their natural place in the world is to be a classical musician or a weather forecaster in a big city or a diplomat or a music hall comedian or a technology billionaire. The mega-successes are those who know, early, not so much what they want or want to do, as where they need to be – where, for them, the action is – and who shift heaven and earth to get to that sweet spot in the world just as soon as possible, often taking truly hair-raising risks to get there. They identify where they want to be, calculate the price of getting there, and pay that price. And then, having got to where they need to be, they are happy! The inconveniences and disappointments – even the humiliations – that they then encounter do not depress them, because everything that happens, however bad, is evidence that they are exactly where they want to be and where they should be.

In the early pages of Think Tank, subtitled “The Story of the Adam Smith Institute”, we are told exactly such a story, of a group of young pro-free-market guns knowing where they need to be, and doing whatever they have to do to get to that exact place, namely within ten minutes walk of the House of Commons, in the centre of London. They juggle finances, scrounge furniture off aunts in faraway places, put money down on a London office lease well before they know how they are going to meet the payments, buy and sell cottages in Scotland, earn extra money by teaching, and generally bet their farms on their new farm being just what they want. (By the way if you want a shorter review of this book than this posting is, try the three short reviews at the other end of the above link. All three are very positive, but also very informative.)

To help me think about this posting, I asked a respected friend what he thought of the Adam Smith Institute. I expected some sort of rumination on what they had achieved and what they might yet achieve, on what they have got right and what wrong. Instead my friend simply said that he liked Madsen Pirie. This is a significant fact about the ASI, I think. Simply, they are nice people, fun and interesting to be with. Following Madsen Pirie’s lead, they exude a gleeful camaraderie that my friend and I, and surely many others of a like mind, find very appealing. Madsen Pirie’s Think Tank radiates a similarly good humoured and companionable atmosphere. When reading it, I kept hearing that Madsen Pirie voice, with its big grin and its self-mockingly over-precise diction.

Cards on the table. I liked and admired this book a lot, just as I have long liked and admired its author. I was given a free copy of it by its author, who had very good reason to hope that I would say nice things about it, and I will. I recommend this book as an entertaining and informative way to acquaint yourself with the Adam Smith Institute and with those who founded and still lead it.

The early pages in this book, the ones with the early financial juggling and the furniture scrounging, concern the only period in its history when I myself did not know of the ASI’s existence. Everything else in the book concerns activities that I already, very approximately speaking, know a bit about. The fact that I particularly enjoyed these early pages suggests to me that someone who only recently became aware of the ASI might enjoy this book even more than I did, which was a lot. If you have only recently arrived on the libertarian-stroke-pro-free-market scene, and the only thing you know about the Adam Smith Institute is that they are there, alive and kicking, blogging and publishing, arranging public meetings and not so public meetings, generally advancing the libertarian economic and political agenda wherever they can, in London and everywhere else on earth that beckons, and that everyone else you admire thinks they’re terrific people, then this could be just the book for you. It will tell you how they got where they are, and what they did for the next three decades. And it does this in the style of a man who is not, as he freely admits, always accomplishing all that he wants to accomplish, but who is nevertheless engaged in the exact struggle that he wants to be in, and who is therefore fundamentally happy. The style is long on entertaining and often quite self-critical anecdotage, less burdened with much in the way of earnest tactical or strategic theorising.

This may actually make this book rather more useful to researchers than a different book, shorter on anecdote but longer on abstract theorising, might have been. People wanting to learn about Think Tanks can and will surely want to do their own theorising. What they need is lots of vivid little cock-ups-and-all vignettes of what actually happened over the years to an actual Think Tank, and a pretty significant one at that. This book will be read by people way beyond the ASI’s mere fan base.

The ASI was inspired by, among other things, that other famously pro-free-market acronym, the IEA, aka Institute of Economic Affairs. I recall a time not that long ago when hardly an introduction to a new IEA publication seemed to go by without reference being made to the wise advice that Anthony Fisher got from Friedrich Hayek about concentrating on ideas rather than mere policies. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the ASI was always, from the moment it pitched its tents in central London in the late 1970s, different. The ASI wanted, and still wants, more immediate political and policy impact. Its focus is on what can be said right now, derived from the fundamental ideas but translated into the language of here and now, that might move and shake the world’s movers and shakers in the desired direction, and hence also excite the next generation of free marketeers. When you attend some ASI event, what your ear tends to get bent by is not the distant past but the immediate future. What Madsen Pirie talks about is not what he did ten or twenty years ago, but what he is doing now and hopes to do even more of in the next few days and weeks. When I met up with Pirie a few months back, he told me that he just wanted to do … more. Of everything. Next year. So, a book of autobiographical history by him is something of a change of his regular tone. And because I am not used to hearing him reminisce at length, I found this all the more welcome.

Telephones seem to loom rather large in this story, both as things that an ambitious Think Tank has to have in abundance, and as things that the government, in former times, use to screw up (pp. 13-14):

We needed a telephone and a photo-copier. We were told by the Post Office, which ran the state monopoly telephone service, that there was a fourteen-month wait to have a line and phone installed. We somehow bargained them into doing it within six weeks by pointing out that our predecessors in the building had used a switchboard with four separate telephone numbers, one for each of the companies that had used the place, and all we wanted to do was to re-activate one line. Until the GPO engineers came, we had to conduct all the new Institute’s business from the public call box on the corner, and we ensured we kept a ready supply of
coins for the purpose.

The Post Office would not let us buy a phone; we had to rent one from them. This was their standard practice. The instrument they graciously allowed us to rent was a black, Bakelite instrument with a rotary dial, designed in the 1930s. For this magnificent piece of equipment we had to pay a quarterly rental of £14.65, or just under £60 a year. We overcame the problem by rewiring the place ourselves with extensions, and buying US phones on our visits there, complete with conversion sockets. This was contrary to all the Post Office rules, but it worked. And it meant that we were among the first in Britain to use such gadgets as recall dialling, wireless remotes and one-button dialling of our most-used numbers.

Others were messing with the phones in other ways (pp. 8-9):

One of our friends, telephoning family in South Africa, was surprised when a telephone engineer entered the conversation to say that because the call did not sound urgent, he was disconnecting it. The union had ‘blacked’ non-urgent calls to South Africa, and its members monitored private calls to enforce it.

Pirie continues:

More sinisterly, there were trade unionists and intellectuals who would rather have seen Britain as part of communist Eastern Europe rather than Western Europe, and there was genuine doubt at the time as to whether they might succeed. Both Stuart and I wished to keep our lifeline to the US. We said that if American helicopters came in to rescue their people ahead of the collapse, we wanted to be on them. We were joking, but only just.

I remember that atmosphere well.

With hindsight, which always makes things so much easier to understand, I think we can say that the ASI’s activities were intended to provide statists with a dignified retreat, in the form of regulated capitalism rather than full state ownership and state control. The ASI attitude, as I remember it, was that it was okay to have a bunch of new regulations (and more portentously, new regulators), provided you got firms into private hands, or got the state doing something more like business, or competing, or in general doing anything in a more genuinely market-like way. In due course, the regulated businesses would agitate against these regulations, or would at least be amenable to the regulations being done away with, and fully fledged freedom would reign. Or at least might.

But since that time, the regulations have multiplied. Regulations were at first a retreat from full-blooded government ownership and control, but they also served as a means of for the government to reassert control, of everything. A while ago now, I did a flurry of postings about health and safety signs. That was only a rather thin wedge during the times described in this book. It has got a lot thicker in the years since the 1980s and 1990s, when the ASI had its first and so far only period of substantial policy influence.

I do recall one ASI initiative that struck me as odd even at the time, namely the so-called Citizen’s Charter, which seemed like a mere announcement, by the government, that everyone should have the right to demand that the government will do a good job, will do everything that it promises to do, etc. But only those who believe such things to be routinely possible would want to make that a right. In other words, I recall thinking something like this:

Public services can be made to copy some of the practices of private businesses, but only for a time. Without the pressures and incentives that lead private firms to behave as they do, the very different pressures that work on the public sector will reassert themselves.

However, those words appear in this book, on page 203, following an admission that maybe the Citizen’s Charter was asking a bit much.

Tax Freedom Day, on the other hand was and is a notion that most free marketeers can enthusiastically get behind. The chapter about that begins thus:

The ASI did not invent Tax Freedom Day.

Which is typical of this generous book, full of acknowledgements to allies and collaborators, full of credit being shared around rather than irritatingly monopolised. Sadly Tax Freedom Day 2013 is still many months in the future. (Imagine living in a world in which TFD2013 had already been and gone!)

And however much things may now still be regulated, and more regulated by the year, at least our telephones are better. I am even now pondering the purchase of a new smart phone, of a sort massively more powerful than my first desktop computer, and about half a ton more portable. I wonder what the state of Britain’s phones might now be, if some evil fairy waved a magic wand and retro-abolished the ASI. Maybe not now that different, but this is a risk I wouldn’t want to take.

I was particularly interested in what might be thought of as some of the big omissions in this book, namely the lack of much discussion of Big Issues, like Europe, the Environment, and more recently the Financial Crisis. Instead of such discussions, we are told about such things as how Sir James Goldsmith wrote out cheques. (Quickly – p. 50.) Or about an amazing function at Number 10 Downing Street. (Complicated, by Neil Hamilton being involved, just when the press were baying for his blood in the matter of cash for questions, and by Downing Street being preoccupied by some Euro-crisis – pp. 199-20. But the ASI people had a good time.)

It’s not that the ASI never has anything to say about Big Issues. But I think the point here is that the ASI is not in the business of bundling issues together and having a great big set-piece battle about them, all our guys against all their guys. For a movement that is not strong on sheer weight of numbers, this was, they reasoned, a losing strategy. What the ASI did was unbundle Big Issues into lots of much smaller issues, with the result that people who might have been antagonised by a big battle approach, instead become quiet supporters of this or that incremental measure, often against their ideological instincts. I recall many times being told by Madsen, and his fellow Two-Man-Teamer Eamonn Butler, that the ASI often used to get at least as much mileage out of so-called Wets as they did out of Thatcherite true believers. John Major is not now held in very high esteem by free marketeers, but the ASI always had a very good relationship with him and his government. The ASI was always searching for policies that would work, not just in their results, but politically, in the sense of being enactable in the first place. And the same goes for politicians like John Major.

When the ASI got started, its aim was to change the climate of opinion within which British policy was made, but I sensed while reading this book that their focus may have changed, as a consequence of what, looking back now, they can say they did and did not achieve.

I remember someone saying to Chris Tame and me, back in the 1980s, that what we Alternative Bookshop libertarians were doing (and by the way that little enterprise also gets a mention in this book – p. 39) was using students to get to the Conservative Party. We replied that we were using the Conservative Party to get to students. Spreading the ideas was what mattered to us, not playing party politics.

Something a bit similar now seems to me to apply to the ASI. Originally, they were aiming to change the thinking of about 650 key political movers and shakers (see p. 32), and as a result British economic policy, and to some extent, especially in the short run, this is what they accomplished. They communed with academics and students because academics and students could help them get to those 650 key people, by writing stuff and by doing stints in the ASI office, and by then keeping in touch as supporters during their subsequent careers. But more and more, I suspect that the long-term impact of the Adam Smith Institute will be seen as them having taken the libertarian agenda and bounced it off, so to speak, those movers and shakers, using them as an amplifier and glamoriser of the basic message. During the 1980s and 1990s, those movers and shakers seemed to be paying quite a bit of attention to at any rate the economic aspects of the libertarian agenda, but now these people are back to their bad old tricks and habits, themselves apparently quite unmoved and unshaken.

Yet throughout this time, the ASI has probably done more to spread libertarian and free market ideas among students than anyone else, and I don’t just mean among students in Britain. By connecting the freedom message to the world of politics, and I do mean the world, they have kept the basic message interesting, fresh, newsworthy, relevant. This in its turn caused students to try to get their heads around the fundamental ideas, often with the help of the many books published by or in collaboration with the ASI, not a few of them written about these ideas by Madsen Pirie and Eamonn Butler. Many a curious teenager must have started this kind of intellectual journey by hearing about “privatisation” on or in the news, and wondering what that was about. Is that even possible? And if possible, is it really desirable? Would not unleashing the free market bring chaos and disaster? And if not, what do I say to people who think it would? They looked for answers, not least from the ASI whose politicking first got their attention, and they found them.

In answer to the charge that the ASI has had, looking back on it, rather little effect on Britain, I would respond by pointing out that their impact has absolutely not been confined to Britain. Their effect on Eastern Europe, to name a particularly important case, has been just as profound, and for the time being anyway, part of one of the world’s great economic success stories. Remember when doom-mongers prophesied doom for Eastern Europe?

The education gene is deeply embedded into the ASI. It is telling that a lot of the ASI leaders’ early income came from part-time teaching jobs of various kinds. Equally tellingly, Madsen Pirie now has a continuing connection with Pembroke College, Cambridge. I have not myself attended many of the big ASI student jamborees, but I have actually addressed one such gathering. It was one hell of a crowd to be talking to, let me tell you. The number of such students who have been thus addressed over the years, by the great and the good, and me, must now add up to a huge number.

I also had the feeling, while reading this book, that Madsen Pirie was mentally organising himself, prior to the next and more active phase in the ongoing struggle, and the next few chapters in the ASI story. I have called this posting “What the Adam Smith Institute did” because that implies a later posting, to be done about a decade hence, entitled “What that Adam Smith Institute did next”. Definitely something, is my bet.

I attended the launch of this book on February 15th, and would love to be able to say that I was as quick off the mark in writing this posting about it as that suggests. Sadly, the February 15th in question was in 2012, but at least I did some kind of posting about that event, right after it happened. As for this, about the book itself, well, better very late than never, or so I hope.

That Madsen Pirie himself is still, as of now, pushing this book suggests that I may yet be contributing something to its still-in-progress sales campaign. As I say, I hope so.

Alex Singleton on Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 13:08:09 +0000

Incoming from Alex Singleton:

I know you’ve described Noam Chomsky as “a monster” before now, so I thought you might be interested in a review that I have written of his book Manufacturing Consent.

Singleton’s review is entitled “Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Herman isn’t just wrong: it is ludicrous”. Chomsky argues that multinational corporations have it all their own way in the mainstream media. Singleton argues otherwise:

As Herb Schmertz, former VP at Mobil Oil, put it in a 1986 book: “[Many people are] under the false impression that the wealthier the organization, the more seriously its views are taken. I wish that were true! If anyone still believes that old canard, I invite them to spend a month working for a major oil company during the next fuel shortage.”

Indeed.

Having worked in the media himself, Alex Singleton now earns his living advising organisations, big and small, about how to handle the media. So, if you run a wealthy organisation, and you are facing some sort of crisis and consequently are liable to get a media beating, why not give Singleton a call? Maybe he could manufacture some consent for you.

I have yet to read most of it but I already greatly admire Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:42:59 +0000

Can one say worthwhile things about a book that one has only begun to read? I think, often: yes. One thing one can definitely report is whether one is reading this or that book with enthusiasm, eager to learn what will follow, or only because of a self-imposed, well-I’ve-started-so-I-might-as-well-finish sense of mere duty.

So far, I have only read somewhat over a hundred and fifty pages of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, but it definitely passes the above test. It is a huge book. Just before finishing this posting I happened to drop my (paperback!) copy of it on my foot, and it really hurt. The text alone runs to over eight hundred pages, and the notes take it over a thousand, yet I already know that I am going to go on reading this book until I finish it, and that when I do finally finish it (I am a very slow reader) I will almost certainly be somewhat regretful, as if coming to the end of a wonderful holiday trip or a particularly satisfying job assignment.

There are so many things I could say about this book, so many thoughts in it and provoked by it that would be blog-worthy, but let me focus on just one, which is that it is such a very, very worthy subject for an academic to be writing about. Pinker has chosen a subject that, he says, needs a long book. Well, a decent but short book could have been written about the relentless decline of violence in human affairs, but I am very happy that this one is indeed extremely long. It is not so much, for me, that this subject needs a long book, as that it so very much deserves one.

The story Pinker tells is of the relentless rise of what he is not afraid to call civilisation. Simply, we humans have become ever less nasty and sadistic towards one another as the decades and centuries and millennia have rolled by, both qualitatively and quantitatively. To make this point, he has already (as I am reading) piled on plenty of agony, about such things as medieval torture devices, and I am sure there will be plenty more such horrors to come.

Says Pinker of this process of moral improvement (on page 160 of the Penguin paperback edition), in a deeply felt parenthetical interjection …

- and if this isn’t progress, I don’t know what is -

Well said. As I say, there is much that I could already say about only what I have read so far, but the main thing I want to say to Pinker is simply this: Well done Sir. You have written a huge book about a huge and hugely important and significant subject, a subject that is entirely worthy of all the work you have put into it.

As Pinker himself surely well knows by now, from all the abuse he gets and from the many directions from which he gets it, he is one of those something-to-offend-everyone intellectuals. He is not a team player, other than in the very broadest sense, of being a member of the let’s-be-civilised team.

Many, for example, just refuse to believe that the progress that Pinker describes has even happened, it being to convince such doubters that Pinker made his book so long. Many intellectual teams have a view of the world and its history which simply forbids them from even seeing this or any other kind of progress, let alone trying to account for it. Related teams might be all set to trash Pinker, only to find that he provides better arguments than they may ever have done for some at least of their most sacred tenets.

Christians, for instance, might welcome the moral achievements achieved by Christians that Pinker itemises, yet not take kindly to his deeply irreverent sprint through all the slaughter and mayhem that is recounted in the Bible, much of it inflicted by God himself or by persons of whom God strongly approved.

Other teams might be inclined to claim Pinker as one of their own, only to find that he trashes one or several of their most sacred tenets. So it would probably be for any regular writer or reader here who reads this book.

We here would surely rejoice that Pinker is not afraid to speak of progress, of the advance of civilisation. Civilisation, says Pinker, should advance, it has advanced, and there is very reason to hope that it will carry on advancing. Most of us here would raise a glass to all of that. Certainly me.

But to explain these advances, Pinker destows praise upon a very mixed cast of figures, ancient and modern, many of them of the sort that we here might grumble about, such as law-and-order zero-tolerance politicians splashing out on ever more policemen to pound our pavements, and to such people as animal rights activists. A crucial role in pushing down the murder rate, says Pinker, was played by the development of government, of sovereign power over wide swathes of territory. I recall reading something a while back about the “Not So Wild Wild West” (this), but Pinker will have none of that. The USA’s Western frontier was every bit as anarchic, in a bad way, as Hollywood showed it to have been, in fact more so. His views on gun control would not align with the orthodoxy here at all.

But, I really do not care. Such challenges to my preferred ways of thinking are, for me, and coming from a man like Pinker, not bugs but features.

This, I think, is how Public Intellectuals should to live and should work. Long may Pinker continue in his labours on behalf of everything that is true and good.

So, back to reading it. I expect, although I promise nothing, to be posting further thoughts about this book, as I continue to make my way through it.

Violence has decreased over time

Rob Fisher (Surrey) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:56:39 +0000

Ben Pile at Climate Resistance notes Steven Pinker’s latest book:

In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. With the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps, Pinker presents some astonishing numbers. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals—all substantially down.

Sounds good, and all very plausible. But how to explain it?

Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, bargain rather than plunder, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence.

I am not sure about that government bit. Perhaps “rule of law” might be more accurate. Perhaps the Amazon reviews can shed some light. Says one reviewer:

Pinker challenges the two prevailing views of human nature – Rousseau’s view that the noble savage has been corrupted by civilization, and Hobbes’s idea that human greed and violence can only be curbed by strong government. The first view is common on the left of the political spectrum, the second among conservatives. The reviewers who think poorly of the book may have been upset by the fact that Pinker rejects both positions. Instead he shows, with a mass of evidence and interpretation, that violence has declined through history. We seem likely to have started with the high levels of inter-group killing found in our chimpanzee cousins, eventually to be tamed by the slow development of effective government, peaceful trading and eventually Enlightenment thinking.

Says another:

Words like `democracy’, `government’ or `gentle commerce’ are not seriously analyzed. Consequentially, his view of history is a very mechanical one: we were extremely violent in the past and thanks to the Leviathan and `gentle commerce’ we have become better persons. We either accept the political and economical assets of our era or we risk going back to violence and chaos.

My sense is that Pinker’s evidence for decreasing violence over time will be very interesting to see, but his explanations for why this is so will be less interesting. I think the answer is that technology makes us less violent, by making our lives overall so much more comfortable that violence seems even more out of the ordinary, and so to be avoided, than it otherwise would.

Samizdata quote of the day

Johnathan Pearce (London) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:12:17 +0000

“I am not one of those who have ever flattered the people, or striven to win favour by telling them that from the Crown or from Parliament that could be got which could not be got from themselves, by themselves. I would impress upon you this. What the State gives to you, the State takes from you first; it further charges you with the cost of collection, and with the cost of distribution. Better by far that you should save for yourselves and spend for yourselves, than put into the purse of the State your earnings of which only part can at best come back.”

- Charles Bradlaugh, 19th Century British parliamentarian and campaigner on issues such as rights of non-believers, contraception, the case against the monarchy, and as this quotation shows, an opponent of socialism. The quote is taken from a review of a book about Bradlaugh by Bryan Niblett, who is known to some of us at Samizdata. Bryan is an Objectivist (as in an admirer of the philosophy of Ayn Rand) and has worked for many years as a private arbitrator concerning areas such as intellectual property. A very good and smart man all round, in fact.

Beethoven’s Ninth – before and after

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:34:42 +0000

I have already quoted from and commented on The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824 a couple of times here. Now I’ve read it. Unless I’m being paid to read a book, I only read it to the end if I’m enjoying it, so point one to make about this book is that I wasn’t paid to read it. Samizdata writers and readers are not brought together by a shared fascination for classical music and the world in which it was created and had its first impact, so I don’t know if you would also enjoy reading this book. But I can say a bit about why I did.

I know Beethoven’s music, and the Ninth Symphony in particular, quite well, possessing as I do a large classical CD collection containing lots of Beethoven and more than a few recordings of the Ninth. A painlessly entertaining way to learn more about classical music in general, and Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony in particular, is, for me, always welcome. This book was painless partly because it is all written in a language I can easily follow, English. Many books about classical music use lots of musical notation. I can just about decipher such symbols, but seldom with the fluency that is necessary immediately to get the points an author is trying to make with them. Sachs could easily have peppered his text with such hieroglyphics, having himself been a conductor before he became a writer. He did not. He relied on words. He also avoids using Italian words, saying very loud rather than fortissimo, and so on.

This book is also painless in being quite short. 225 pages, including all the extras. I’m a slow reader, so that, for me, was another plus. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony itself famously includes words, in its particularly famous final choral movement, as well as just orchestral music. It is therefore entirely proper, when pondering the meaning and impact of this symphony, to think also about the general artistic atmosphere – involving such things as poetry and literature – that surrounded its creation and reception, rather than just, say, Beethoven’s earlier pieces and the other music being composed at the time. More so, if anything. Nobody else was then writing music like Beethoven’s, but the wider artistic ambience definitely chimed in with what Beethoven was trying to say with the Ninth. The Ninth, in its turn, reinforced these tendencies by setting them to music.

How accurately Sachs describes this general artistic ambience, I am not educated enough to say. But he at least convinces me that he knows what he is talking about. That I was doing something to fill a big gap in my knowledge of a crucial time in cultural, political and economic history, was yet another reason for me to be glad to have read this book.

The political story Sachs tells is of a continent aroused into radical enthusiasm by the French Revolution, but then disappointed both by that revolution’s subsequent Napoleonic nature and then by its defeat by a coalition of anti-radical powers. The Napoleonic Wars were followed by a period of political reaction, all over Europe. In such a world, the liveliest minds shied away from real world politics and instead turned inwards. Instead of challenging the powers-that-were with riots and revolutions, they challenged them with Art, asserting the primacy of Great Artists over merely aristocratic inheritors of power. Power from within would trump the inherited privilege of the old aristocracy who remained, temporarily, in political command. (If that reminds you a bit of the history of the USSR, Sach agrees with you.)

The contemporary of Beethoven who came most alive for me, as a result of reading this book, was Byron. Poet, scored with lots of women, died fighting in Greece for … something or other. That was pretty much the limit of my knowledge of Byron. I don’t know a lot more now, but I do know a bit more. The point of Byron’s Greek enthusiasm being that supporting Greek resistance to the Turks was just about the only kind of radical enthusiasm you could publicly indulge in, and get away with. On the back of this peculiar gust of political emotion, Byron, himself a hereditary aristocrat (although he didn’t know he would be that until he suddenly became that), became that very modern sort of figure, an international celebrity, with no official position but lots of influence. As Beethoven had already become. Other early nineteenth century artistic celebrities whom Sachs also writes about are: Stendal, Hegel, Pushkin, Delacroix and Heine, about all of whom, as with Byron, I now know a bit more than extremely little.

Like their confreres of our own time, these Great Artists were typically very scornful of those other sorts of new men, the money grubbing capitalists. Heine is quoted expressing lofty disdain for these mercenary oafs and their contemptible preference for mere entertainment over Art. This despite the fact that it was the new money of these mere tradesmen that, then more than now, was providing the Artists with their new found clout, either directly, or indirectly via the spending power of the greater number of state bureaucrats that their endeavours were making possible. The first performance of the Ninth was staged for a paying audience, and at least partly with the idea of easing Beethoven’s money worries (so much for the notion that artists don’t fret about mere money), rather than commissioned and all paid for by an aristocrat. The contrast with how the Eroica Symphony (number three of Beethoven’s nine symphonies), as shown in the film Eroica that I referred to in an earlier Beethoven posting here, was extreme. The Eroica Symphony first exploded into the world, assuming Eroica has the story roughly right, in a large room in an aristocratic mansion, in front of an audience that was outnumbered by the orchestra. The premier of the Ninth differed from a classical concert nowadays in that the audience responded to the music more in the manner of a jazz audience nowadays, but nevertheless it was a much more modern occasion.

Not that Sachs spends much time describing that concert. He describes the music itself, in English, but now so much how the audience first received it. Describing classical music in English is a lot like writing about sex, being awfully liable to provoke unintended mirth, but Sachs does it pretty well. However, I learned more about the actual event itself, as opposed to the music, by reading the sleeve notes of one of those Ninth CDs of mine. Sachs is more concerned to describe the Ninth itself, the world that gave rise to the Ninth, and the impact upon the world that the Ninth then had. He writes about a great many years besides the year 1824, and many more afterwards, and includes a very good short biography of his hero.

As far as Beethoven’s and the Ninth Symphony’s impact is concerned, the personality who, for me, came most alive from reading the bits in this book about the decades after the Ninth Symphony was created was Richard Wagner. Sachs (perhaps his name got him paying particular attention to Wagner from an early age) entertainingly quotes Wagner patting Beethoven on the back for showing the world the way towards the artistic perfection that was “Music Theatre” (which is something entirely different from the Italian trash known as “opera”). Beethoven dipped his toe in the process of setting significant Words, expressive of profound philosophical ideas and profound spiritual and emotional sentiments, to music. Wagner perfected the process. According to Wagner, that is. Fair enough. When Wagner said the things Sachs quotes he was well into creating his great body of op … sorry, works of Music Theatre. Wagner’s Great Artist posturings were all part of what made him a great artist, just as such ambitions did the same for Beethoven himself. Had Beethoven not stormed the musical heavens, would Wagner have been able to? We will never know, but the question is a good one, because it gives us a sense of Beethoven’s colossal influence on everything that followed.

What I hadn’t really taken in before, although I am sure I read through such things in all those CD sleeve notes of mine, was just how obsessed Wagner was with Beethoven’s Ninth, his Ninth in particular, mentioning it constantly in his voluminous writings, and being constantly mentioned talking about it, right up to his own death, in the diaries left to us by Wagner’s wife. Wagner launched the building of his brand new Bayreuth … Music Theatre in 1872 by performing this symphony, his point being: this is where Beethoven ended, and where I, Wagner, have taken over.

For somewhat different reasons, when the Bayreuth Festival was relaunched (following that embarrassing Nazi interlude) in 1951, Beethoven’s Ninth was again performed. The point of that being that the impeccable Beethoven brand, as we would now say, would help to purge the much sullied Wagner brand.

As Sachs notes at both the beginning of and at the end of his book, Beethoven’s music generally, and his Ninth Symphony in particular, is felt by almost everybody who responds to it to communicate and to represent all that is good about humanity and human aspirations. Every good cause of our own time (by which I simply mean a cause that thinks it’s good) that can afford to (EUrope being the most famously obtrusive current example) basks in the moral aura cast by the Ninth. That so many of the great political villains of the twentieth century, of the sort alluded to in my previous paragraph, who between them did so much (as Sachs notes) to make us all think again about worshipping Great Men, used this music to confer moral grandeur upon their mega-slaughters, seems to do nothing to change this.

Sachs concludes his book with a little autobiographical essay along the lines of: What Beethoven Means To Me. Way back when he and his friends were protesting against the Vietnam War, Beethoven provided Sachs with his inspirational soundtrack. Again, fair enough, given that, crucially, Sachs does not say that Beethoven would, had he been alive now, have been on Sachs’s side. Sachs merely says that it felt like that, as I am sure it did. Beethoven still sounds as if he is on your side, whoever you are. And no piece of his music did more to make this true than the Ninth.

A look at Robert Heinlein

Johnathan Pearce (London) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:59:57 +0000

This caught my attention, at a site called “The Smart Set”.

“If the zeitgeist has a face, it supposedly belongs to Ayn Rand and her capitalist philosophy of Objectivism. Talk radio hosts adore the author’s demands for limited government; Congressman Paul Ryan insists that his staffers read her overstuffed opus Atlas Shrugged; picket signs at Tea Party rallies suggest that we all “READ AYN RAND.” And yet, some pieces are missing. Ayn Rand was anti-war, but spending for hundreds of military bases and two-and-a-half wars remains sacrosanct even as Congress made the debt ceiling a major issue. She found homosexuality “immoral” and “disgusting,” and yet gay marriage has regained the initiative in the public square. And Randian heroes are explicitly — nay, objectively — elitist. They are genius millionaire square-jawed heroes who walked right off the screen at the movie matinee. The average Tea Party rallier, not so much.”

A bit of a jumble. Rand was anti-war, certainly, but she certainly was no pacifist, either about the Nazis or any other totalitarian regimes. She had a problem about homosexuality, but I doubt she favoured the state using its violence-backed powers to suppress it; indeed, from my reading of her journals and other material, I don’t know if she had developed views on this subject at all. As for the line about her support for “elitism”, it does rather depend on what you mean. For Rand, and most who broadly support her views (as I do), the idea was that people are entitled to develop their lives and talents to the greatest extent possible in free trade with their fellows. There is plenty of room for upward mobility, striving and competition. This has nothing to do with privilege, which is often what can be meant by an “elite”, for example. (Elitism is, of course, a boo word for the egalitarian left, and I suspect the author of the piece tilts in that direction).

“There is another writer whose political and philosophical influence is finally being felt in the public sphere. You may have read one of his books as a child. His name is Robert A. Heinlein, and he wrote science fiction. He was a libertarian enamored of military might, a conservative who championed free love. His heroes are certainly competent. They’re also folks who hack the systems in which they live, not elitists who abandon a corrupt world full of moochers and looters to worship the dollar as an end unto itself. And unlike Rand, most of Heinlein’s work is actually readable.”

Some of this is true, though I don’t think Heinlein was “enamoured” of military might; he understood that values need to be defended, of course, so to that extent he understood the warrior ethic and code, but he also understood the trader ethic, too. He was able to see how military codes develop and why they exist (his book, Starship Troopers, is about this very issue).

The idea that the characters in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged “worship the dollar as an end unto itself” proves that the author of this article clearly has not thought straight. The point for Rand is that the dollar, preferably a gold-backed dollar, is a symbol of liberty, not something that you worship as a totem.

It is sometimes instructive when a writer from outside the usual field opines about something about which you know quite a lot, as I do about Rand and Heinlein, having read pretty much everything they wrote. The author of this article hits on some good points, so don’t be put off by my nit-picking.

A review of Detlev Schlichter’s Paper Money Collapse on Amazon.com

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 01:26:46 +0000

I have just posted the following review on Amazon.com of Paper Money Collapse. I only learned last night that the review embargo date had now arrived and that the time to be talking this book up is now, so this review was somewhat hastily written, although it is the result of quite a lot of thought. This was my very first review of any book on Amazon, and it shows, I’m afraid, particularly in my blundering attempts to italicise, which work here by those methods, but not there. Also, although I said I liked it, I didn’t tick the box saying that I liked it. Can I do anything about any of that? Probably not. (LATER: actually, I now learn that you can edit these reviews. The italics thing now makes no sense!) Oh well, blog and learn, review on Amazon and learn. I will be amazed if I don’t find myself wanting to say lots more about this book, but what follows is my first best shot.

An effort but definitely worth the effort – could be huge

I agree with the bit on the cover of this book where it says that this is not an easy read. For me, it has not been, and not just because the truths Schlichter spells out and explains are so not-easy to take. I am a huge fan of his, and have been ever since I first heard him talk about the analysis in this book in London about a year ago, but he makes me work hard. This book is heavy on logical exposition, much lighter on diverting anecdote. For the latter sort of Schlichter stuff, you must read his blog.

One way to describe Paper Money Collapse might be to say that it is the sort of book that the great Austrian School economist and economic historian Murray Rothbard might have written, had he lived a bit longer. Last year I read Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State. While doing this, I kept hoping that I would read a theoretical analysis of our current financial woes, as opposed merely to Rothbard’s general take on Austrian Economics as a whole. I realise that this was a lot to ask of a book published several decades ago, and not surprisingly I was, although in general much educated, largely disappointed on that particular count. Well, what I was only hoping to read in that Rothbard book was what I did read in Detlev Schlichter’s much shorter book, which I heartily recommend to anyone willing to really get stuck into it. Here is a conceptual analysis, in very much the painstaking Rothbard manner, of how non-commodity-backed currencies behave when they collapse, and why they do collapse, always, inevitably. In other words it is about the times we now live in.

I learned a lot from reading Paper Money Collapse. In particular, Schlichter has convinced me of the wrongness of the argument that since we want economic activity in the world to increase indefinitely, but gold is, barring a few trivial further discoveries, fixed in quantity, gold won’t work as the basis of currency. But non-elasticity is exactly why gold is such a good basis for currency. Totally elastic money, on the other hand, inevitably collapses, always and everywhere. Why should our elastic money be any different?

Schlichter is not pointing the finger at individuals. This is not a detective story, where in the final chapter all the suspects are rounded up and Herr Schlichter points the finger at the guilty man. President Nixon’s decision to break the final link between the dollar and gold is deplored, and Ben Bernanke’s recent pronouncements are likewise disapproved of, but many of the decisions that lead to our current mess were made many, many decades ago, and by their nature they are the kind of decisions which are far easier to make than they are to reverse and clean up after.

Nor does Schlichter believe that hyper-inflation now threatens us all because central bankers are unaware of the badness of hyper-inflation. They know that hyper-inflation is bad. Unfortunately, they also know that if the collapse that Schlichter describes occurs while they are in office, then that, for them, will be even worse than a bit more inflation or even quite a lot more inflation. So, they carry on printing money and postponing the resolution of the problem, which means that when nemesis does finally arrive, it will be all the worse. But, says Schlichter, they know what they are doing; they just don’t know how to stop. Schlichter telling them to stop will accomplish nothing.

I suspect that Schlichter may be being rather kind about just how plain stupid some even quite high ranking central bankers now are, but clever or stupid, these people are now thoroughly boxed in by their previous decisions and by the decisions of their predecessors of earlier years and decades.

I have been using the phrase “paper money”, as Schlichter himself does in his title. But as we all know, when central bankers now create yet more money, they are mostly putting numbers in electronically managed bank accounts. It is not the printing of bank notes that is the problem; it is the lack of a commodity base to control the process. By the same token, paper bank notes that refer to a currency that is solidly based on something like gold would be fine. But I am sure that Schlichter has thought long and hard about this phrase, and I gladly defer to his decision to call it “paper currency” in his title. I certainly don’t know a better way of putting it. “Fiat” money? “Elastic” money? (That’s the phrase that Schlichter switches to in the subtitle, also prominently displayed on the front cover.) Both are a bit more accurate than “paper” money, but are also a bit less attention-grabbing for the kind of intelligent and educated everyman whom Schlichter is trying to reach. “Paper” gets over the gist of the problem pretty well, I think. And you start learning what that means as soon as you read the sub-title.

When it comes to Schlichter’s pessimism about him personally having any influence on the conduct of public policy, I agree with him, in the short run. But I think he may be proved wrong, in the longer run. I agree with him that there is nothing much he can say to the people now in charge of financial policy that will persuade them to do the right thing now, which basically means getting the collapse over and done with as soon as possible. But when this collapse starts seriously happening anyway, in just the manner and for precisely the reasons that Schlichter says, he could then become a very Big Cheese, as we say in my native England. In fact, if this book does half as well as I suspect it may, Schlichter will probably be accused, by various paper (fiat, elastic) money idiots who know only the title of this book but nothing of what it says, of having precipitated the catastrophe he describes. But other people, including politicians and central bankers, could also then be asking him: So, Schlichter, what the hell do we do now? I urge Schlichter to be ready for this moment. Suggested title for his next book: Now What? (Presumed answer: Let non-state controlled and non-state backed bankers supply currency, which they will back with gold. Get out of their way and let them get on with it.)

Meanwhile, I urge anyone who thinks that he might find this book enlightening, and helpful for personally navigating through the mess, to go ahead and be enlightened. I think this book may become very big. It certainly deserves to.

The age of steam powered transport

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:36:58 +0000

A Brief History of the Age of Steam: The Power That Drove The Industrial Revolution
Thomas Crump
Carroll & Graff, 2007, 370pp., paperback, $15.95 (but now much less – I got my copy for £3.99 in a remainder shop)

The best thing about this book from my British point of view is that it does not focus only on British events and circumstances. It surveys the entire world, as best it can in the space it allows itself. In most other stuff I can recall reading about the history of the steam engine, Newcomen, Watt and Trevithick, the British pioneers of steam engines during the eighteenth century (Trevithick being the first to build a steam engine that propelled itself along a track – in other words the maker of the first locomotive), are followed immediately by the heroic deeds of George Stephenson and IK Brunel, the mighty British railway pioneers of the Victorian age. Foreign places get mentioned because Stephenson’s son did railways in them. Steamships are mentioned because Brunel also did them. But before you know it, you are being told about streamlined steam locos breaking speed records by hurtling from London to Scotland in the nineteen twenties and thirties, which was all good stuff but hardly central to the history of steam technology. By then, steam locomotives were a mature technology and soon to be an obsolete one.

In this book, by contrast, the steam engine arrives at its early nineteenth century state, but then the scene switches from Britain to North America. Steam engines, being still very heavy, made sense as the engines of big river boats on big American rivers well before they made sense as small locomotives on railway lines less than five feet apart. The USA, unlike Britain, has an abundance of huge rivers, in exactly the parts of the USA that were then developing most rapidly. The next chapter then concerns itself with rivers and canals (the two often being rather hard to distinguish) elsewhere in the world, most notably in central Europe, in particular in the form of the Rhine and its many reconstructions and appendages.

But already, I am getting ahead of the story. The first big job performed by steam engines was pumping water out of coal mines, the market that Newcomen catered to (1712 being the date of Newcomen’s first installation), and then the one in which James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton also got their start. Until Newcomen made his engine, many a British coal mine would have to cease operating, not because the coal had run out but because the coal that remained, often in large quantities, was under water. Any kind of mechanically powered pump, however expensive and inefficient, could make itself useful in circumstances like that, a classic niche market of just the kind that a cumbersome but clearly important new technology needs to get started.

Thomas Crump (and yes, that is a rather Victorian sounding name, isn’t it?) does not make anything of the comparison, but the similarity between the early steam engines and the computers of our own time will strike anyone who reads this book. Steam engines started big and cumbersome. Then they got smaller and more powerful, thanks to a succession of technical innovations, and thanks to a general rise in engineering savvy and all-round craftsmanship. Not that this steam engine/computer parallel won’t have occurred to Crump. It’s merely that this book is published as one of a series called “A Brief History of …”, and you often sense, sometimes because Crump comes right out and says it, that lots of interesting stuff is being left out. Personally, given my technological ignorance, I would have appreciated just a few more pictures to explain how steam engines and their successive iterations and improvements actually worked. The big improvement that Watt made was that he contrived for the down beat of the steam engine to be powered, as well as the upbeat. And, he somehow made steam engines better at twiddling wheels than they had been hitherto. Another hugely important development was when they started using steam of much higher pressure, which is the sort of thing you can only do if the general standard of craftsmanship is high. A good idea like that in an unsatisfactory engineering environment is a recipe not for success, but for untimely explosions, of which there were plenty anyway. Later came the steam turbine, which means squirting a jet of steam at a big propellor, yes? A few more pictures might have fixed the details of these and other developments in my head a bit better, and also given a better idea of how big each of these things was, and what they looked like from the outside. The general point, however, I did get. The steam engine wasn’t just one giant leap forward. It was a succession of important steps, resulting in a constantly improving power to weight ratio and a steadily widening range of applications. Crucial from the historical point of view was the moment when it was possible to put an engine on railway wheels that was powerful enough not only to drag itself along, but other loads also. But, there were plenty of other important moments in the story.

This, however, is a book which is strong on maps of railway systems and waterways in various parts of the world, less so on the ins and outs of the technology itself. That is because it is at least as much about the impact and context of the steam engine, about what circumstances made people invent and develop it and what they did with it, rather than merely what, in their various and successive forms, steam engines actually were. Never mind. The Internet (our internet mania being not unlike the mania that kicked off the railway age) is a big and most informative place, and at least I now know more of the words that I need to type into google to learn more.

I did enjoy the maps. One of my favourites shows the many early – pre-Stephenson’s rocket – railways in the vicinity of the River Tyne (p. 149). The point being that the railway age had begun well before the Rocket made its first journeys between Stockton and Darlington in 1825. Railways as a technique for shifting stuff were actually centuries old by then, having a history that is entirely distinct from the matter of putting machines on them, to drag things along them. People, horses and gravity had been doing this for ages, until the late eighteenth century along rails made of timber rather than iron or steel. There are some very good pages about the development of rails to assist military engineers in their efforts to life earth out of trenches, and suchlike. The first application of the steam engine to railways was in the form of stationary engines at the end of short railway lines, dragging wagons along with ropes or chains.

That Tyneside map of ancient railways illustrates a general point about transport technology. Please now follow me along a slight digression.

I have long been fascinated by the ins and outs of the history of communications technology, which is of course heavily dependent upon transport, especially in the days when complicated messages could only travel as fast as a human message-carrier could. And a recurring story in the history of the technology of communication is how someone invents a new method of communicating, and everyone then says: hey, this is going to put a stop to … some earlier and much loved method of communication. Printed books, it was said, and then television, would kill the art of conversation. The internet will finish off books and television. And so on. But what really happens is that methods of communication combine and assist one another. People use emails not to stop meeting each other, but, among many other things, to arrange meetings and to continue the conversations started at those meetings. Television gives people new stuff to talk about, and it also sells books, for example the books on which television dramas are based. The internet doesn’t kill off books either. On the contrary, one of the first mega-businesses of the Internet age is a bookstore. Physical books like this one that I am now writing about may in due course become a thing of the past, but virtual books will live on vigorously.

Similar things apply to transport. Someone invents a new way of travelling or of transporting stuff, but as likely as not and especially to begin with, the new system of transport revitalises the older methods rather than rendering them instantly obsolete.

What that map of the River Tyne shows is all the little railways which connected coal mines to … the River Tyne! The railways were all separate. They went downhill, with horses dragging the empty wagons up to the top again when they had been unloaded. Then, when the railway age as we now think of it got into its huge and interconnected and above all steam-driven stride, horses, far from being done away with, increased greatly in number, to transport people to and from railways stations, and to transport people into and within the huge new cities that the railways made all the huger. The horse population boomed in the steam age, before later forms of locomotion pushed both steam locomotives and horses, and smaller horse-drawn boats on smaller inland waterways, into the relative (but only relative) backwater than is the leisure industry.

Or consider those big rivers in America. There comes a point as you travel downstream on the upper reaches of such a river when it becomes navigable by ocean going ships, at which point there is invariably a big city where all the resulting loading and unloading gets done. But loading and unloading is cumbersome, especially in the absence of twentieth century cranes and the like. So instead, you can bind lots of little boats together, like so many tree trunks, and stick a super-powerful steam-powered tug boat on the front. Steam doesn’t put a stop to smaller boats on smaller waterways. It instead greatly increases their productivity, even though the boats themselves are far too small to accommodate a steam engine actually on them. Are you thinking “containers”? Me too.

Railways and state power were always intermingled. In Britain, this mostly took the form of the politicking needed to contrive the lines of violated property rights that railways needed to get built at all. Then, the government was again “needed” (Crump has entirely conventional ideas about this) to compel railways to be operated more safely than might otherwise have happened quite so soon. Crump’s political views seem to be conventionally centrist. He favours human advancement and prosperity, but takes it for granted that governments were needed to get railways started, and then to regulate them, impose safety regimes upon them, and so on. As a libertarian, I can’t help wondering what might have happened to the steam age if landowners could simply have vetoed railways on their land if they felt inclined, and if those railways that did nevertheless materialise had been allowed to be as unsafe as their proprietors felt inclined for them to be. But, as is often said in pro-laissez-faire blogs like this one, the triumph of laissez-faire in the nineteenth century was only very partial.

In the USA, railways were all mixed up with the creation of new states of the union. Railways made it possible for new settlers to move in, and for them then to sell their produce to rest of the USA. And of course, railways played a huge part in the waging of the American Civil War, railway junctions, then and since, becoming important military objectives. I was charmed to read an oddly large number of pages in this book (pp. 140-146) about an amazing episode in the Civil War, upon which the movie The Great Locomotive Chase was based, which was one of the very first movies I ever saw. All I remembered, of course, was locomotives chasing one another. I didn’t care why, and I assumed they’d made the whole story up. But not so. Now, I know more about who really was chasing whom and why. Many other late nineteenth century wars, with prominently featured railways, are referred to, most notably wars in China.

Railways and war is another topic that British-centric books about the steam age tend to neglect somewhat, apart from how the railways managed to keep going during World War 2 despite all the bombing, because British railways were probably more innocent of military motivation in their origins than the railways almost anywhere else in the world. In most countries, economic and national-strategic considerations tended to go hand in hand, giving rise to lots of financial corruption involving politically adept plutocrats, most especially in Russia, surprise surprise. In Russia the plutocrats got vast amounts of money from the government. In the USA, the plutocrats used their vast amounts of money to buy governments. The pattern in the world generally tended to be that the railways were built to aggrandise states and state military power, but then it was thought by the relevant national grandees, well, now that we’ve built these things, we might as well allow mere people to use these trains to transport themselves and their produce, if they would like to, which invariably many of them did.

I especially enjoyed the pages about Japan. I knew, very roughly, about how Commodore Perry first parked his ship off the coast of Japan and demanded that Japan get with the nineteenth century. I did not know, until I read this book, that when Perry made his second visit to Japan to sort out the details, he brought a train set with him:

Conforming to oriental custom, Perry, on his second visit, brought a variety of gifts, among which was a quarter-size model railway, complete with locomotive, tender and a carriage, with several miles of rails. The American visitors having laid a circular track – about a mile long – behind the reception hall at Yokohama, proceeded to show the assembled dignitaries what the train could do. They were overwhelmed. According to Perry’s official record: ‘Crowds of Japanese gathered around, and looked on the repeated circlings of the train with unabated pleasure and surprise, unable to repress a shout of delight at each blast of the steam whistle.” One official actually rode the whole circuit, sitting on the roof of the diminutive carriage, and reported that the experience was ‘most enjoyable’. Travelling at 20 mph was far beyond anything conceived possible in what was still a feudal state. …

And the “assembled dignitaries” duly decreed that the railways should come to Japan. Their heads were full of armies which could then be transported hither and thither and which could then more easily rampage about in China and Korea. But much more entertaining, for me, was the story of how the new trains in Japan impacted upon the Japanese silk trade, which was the big economic story in Japan when the railways first arrived. When silk is first harvested, or whatever it is you do to silk when you first get your hands on it, you have then to spin it into silk thread very quickly. Wait more than a few hours and the silk stops working, apparently. This meant that the traditional Japanese silk industry required silk spinning, as well as harvesting, to be highly decentralised. Harvesting and spinning effectively had to be the one operation. But once railways started snaking their way across Japan, that all changed. Now it was possible to transport harvested silk to bigger, steam powered spinning … places, by train. If the train went through where you lived, then your silk harvesting stayed in business and prospered as never before. But if the train went elsewhere, your silk business collapsed. I knew nothing about any of this, until I read this book. In general, Crump observes, the railways centralised. They created huge new cities, with huge new business empires based in them, while causing many a small town to die.

In India, the same pattern was repeated, of politics leading and people following. The rulers, this time British, built their railways to do such things as suppress the Indian Mutiny, and then wondered if mere Indians might like to travel on them also. As many a dramatic photo tells us, Indians took to train travel with a passion. I am fond of writing at this blog about the game of cricket, which now serves as one of the great modern unifiers of India. Right up there with cricket is another British designed, Indian built wonder of the modern age, the Indian national railway system.

Ocean going liners figure prominently towards the end of Crump’s story, as they should, and he credits Brunel with the key insight upon which the nature (very big) of modern ocean going steamships was based (p. 289):

Brunel, although no shipbuilder, had the fundamental insight that a substantial increase in size was the key to building a ship that could carry sufficient coal for crossing the Atlantic in either direction. Quite simply, with the increase of the dimensions of a vessel by any factor, its carrying capacity increases by the cube of that factor while the resistance to be overcome by its engine increases only by its square. With the help of this principle it is possible to determine the minimum dimensions of a steamship able to carry sufficient fuel for a voyage of any prescribed length – such as the distance involved in any Atlantic crossing.

This will seem banal to many of Samizdata’s tech-savvy commentariat, but I had never before encountered this particular point about how much size matters, when it comes to steamships. Does any similar kind of principle apply to modern jet airliners, I wonder?

Crump makes much of the sinking of the Titanic, a story he tells at similar length (pp. 313-317) to his earlier telling of the story of the Great Locomotive Chase. His excuse is that the Titanic sinking drama illustrates the crucial contribution made by wireless telegraphy to ocean going liners and their voyages, and the “need” for the law to demand greater safety at sea. Had just one wireless telegrapher on a nearby ship been at work instead of having just a minute or two earlier gone to bed, all of the Titanic’s passengers would have been saved. Having made a point of ignoring the movie-induced Titanic mania of recent years, I did not know this. Crump also earlier emphasised the contribution made by telegraphy of the wired sort to railways. Obviously communications technology is intimately mixed up with the story of transport, to the point where it is hard to separate the two. Think only of national newspapers and postal services everywhere, both impossible without the means to transport the messages.

A number of things make me suspect that this book was first written not as a history of the steam age generally, but rather as a history of the application of steam to transport. The final chapter, for example, is entitled: “The Eclipse of Steam Transport“. Steam did utterly transform transport, but it did other things too, like spin that Japanese silk. Crump tells us little about how steam power was applied to making clothes, printing newspapers, and powering “industry” – i.e. industry of the sort that goes on inside huge and immobile factories. Crump describes steam engines before they climbed onto the rails, so to speak. And he also mentions the stationary steam engines that still throb away, still powered by coal and still generating the bulk of the modern world’s electricity supplies. And, he makes the further point that steam power lives on in nuclear power stations, in the form of steam turbines supplied with steam heated by nuclear means. The steam age is still very much with us! But as a general observation, Crump tells us little about what steam did indoors during the railway and steamship age. I guess I should read this book.

Nevertheless, as you can surely tell, I enjoyed reading this book very much, being much more diverted by what it did say than in any way annoyed about anything it may plausibly be said to have omitted. That’s usually the way with books reviewed by unpaid bloggers. Why read a book carefully enough to write about it if you aren’t enjoying it?

I’ll end this with a general point, about technology and technological history and about the people who made it, and continue to make it. One of the great intellectual divides of modern times is between those who take technological modernity for granted, and those who do not. Those of us who regularly write for or read Samizdata are surely in the latter camp. We know how much sheer graft, as well as intellectual insight and analysis, went into and goes into the development of steam engines, railway lines, steam locomotives, steamships, power stations, and cars and airplanes and computers and space rockets and nanotechnology and mobile phones and better washing up liquid and cheaper laser eye surgery and corn flakes, etc. etc. etc. We also know that the right economic policy setting is needed for such things to be devised, or even borrowed from elsewhere and applied. This stuff doesn’t just design and make and operate itself. That much I do know about technology and its ongoing history, even if I know little of the technological detail, as I fear I have made only too clear in this review. This, fundamentally, is what I liked about this book. It celebrates the achievements of people who deserve to be celebrated, just as our current techno-wizards also deserve to be celebrated. True, a lot of what the steam age pioneers did was construct the technological sinews of war, as the book well explains. But that doesn’t diminish the impressiveness of their achievements, or the debt that we, who are fortunate to live the almost uniquely peaceful and comfortable and entertained lives that we mostly do now live, still owe to them.