We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Your teeth belong to the collective.
– From a Planet Money piece quoted by Alex Tabarrok (who was linked to today by David Thompson), about how China went from the bad old days of the Great Leap Forward to the better days that followed. The above words, which Thompson also singled out for attention in his link, were an answer to a property rights query to those in authority, in the bad old days. Do we even own our teeth? No you do not.
The switch from collective “property” to actual property, as Tabarrok makes clear, was initiated by the people of China, rather than by their rulers. It began in the village of Xiaogang, whose farmers decided to go back to actual property for each individual farmer and his family, with immediate beneficial effects. And then it became a movement. The rulers of China didn’t decide to make this change. They merely decided not to stamp it out.
Madsen Pirie’s new book, Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute was launched earlier this evening in the crypt of St John’s, Smith Square. Here is what it says in the book’s first chapter, entitled “Shaping an institute” (pp. 3-4):
There was an institute in London which drew heavily on Smith’s ideas, and those of the free-market economists who had followed in his wake. This was the Institute of Economic Affairs (lEA), founded by Sir Antony Fisher twenty years earlier, and which had published a steady stream of monographs analyzing the deficiencies of central direction, state planning and economic intervention. They were intellectually rigorous, and had made their way into the literature of economics libraries, albeit in a separate corner, almost fenced off from the mainstream.
But we wanted something more. It was all very well to win theoretical arguments, but nothing seemed to happen afterwards. Governments continued on their unruly ways, while academics devised new follies to set up on the wreckage of the old ones. We wanted to change reality; to have an impact on what actually happened. We wanted to make policy.
Adam Smith might have been one strong influence on our thinking, but there were others. One was James Buchanan, the Nobel Laureate who, with Gordon Tullock, James Niskanen and others, developed what came to be known as Public Choice Theory. In essence ‘it took the ideas of economics into the domain of politics and administration. Instead of ‘treating politicians and civil servants as selfless seekers after public good, the theory treated them as if they were ordinary economic participants, out to maximize their own advantage, just like other people. it proved a very fertile theory tor explaining what would otherwise have been incomprehensible outcomes. It also fitted in with the rather less than respectful way that we ourselves regarded politicians.
Public Choice told us how minority interest groups could hijack the political agenda to have advantages created for themselves. It explained how politicians respond to pressure from vociferous and self-interested groups, but not from a public at large which might be largely unconscious of the effect policy made upon it. Public Choice Theory was basically a critique, but we began to wonder if there could be a creative counterpart to it. Just as Public Choice Theory told us why certain policies were doomed to political failure, however economically sound they might be, could it not be used to create policies that would not be subject to these limitations? Could new free-market strategies be crafted that flowed with political reality by building in the support of the interest groups which might otherwise derail them?
This was powerful stuff. …
Indeed it was. As soon as I’ve read the rest of this book, I’ll tell you what I think of it.
Meanwhile, here is a picture I took at the launch, of the author hard at work signing copies.
Not surprisingly, the ASI blog already has a posting up on the subject.
One of my hobbies is to browse the pages of the (London) Times from a hundred years ago. As I intend (though I promise nothing) to write the odd post around articles from the time I thought it might be a good idea to describe (as best I can) the world in 1912. Or, at least, the world as seen through the pages of the Times which is a potentially dangerous thing to do. Imagine, for instance, describing the world of 2012 with the BBC News as your only source.
I cannot read articles from 1912 without being aware that there’s a big war coming up. A huge war. A Great War. A war that will change just about everything. Mostly for the worse. But can I see it coming? Not really. There clearly are tensions between Britain and Germany. Last year two British officers (Brandon and Trench) were jailed for spying. Seeing as one of them went on to become a leading light in MI6 it looks like the Germans got their man. More to the point it demonstrates that there is a lot of distrust.
→ Continue reading: The world in 1912 (according to the Times)
I suppose it’ll add some spice to history exams though. Get the wrong answer and you not only fail: you get carted off to jail as well.
– The concluding sentences of a piece by Mick Hartley criticising a new French law which, once President Sarkozy signs it, will make it a criminal offence to deny that genocide was committed by Ottoman Turks against Armenians.
Michael Jennings is now, as he recently said here that he would be, in Israel. Knowing my fondness for amusing multilingual signs, he today emailed me this photo, taken in Acre:
At first I thought that “Crusader” was some kind of business brand, although on second thoughts probably not. Maybe … actual crusader latrines? To clear up any doubt, Michael added:
It means exactly what it says.
Yes indeed, these are latrines which were once upon a time used by crusaders. And here, I presume, are those very latrines.
Don’t you just love the internet?
They said it would never be agreed. Then they said it would never be launched. Then they said it would fail. When it was a success, the euro-haters still insisted that the single currency was a recipe for economic chaos and political instability. The phobes are proving to be wrong again. At a time when so much of Europe’s political leadership is in flux, the single currency is the steadying point in an uncertain and worrying world.
Imagine that the recent turbulence on the continent had occurred when Europe still traded in pre-euro currencies. What would have happened to the French franc when neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen forced the Prime Minister to quit? The franc would have plunged. What would have happened to the Dutch guilder when an anti-immigration party with a dead leader impelled itself into government? The guilder would have plunged too. Before a German election too close to call, even the stolid old mark would be gyrating. And instability in currency markets would be fuelling even more political chaos: a vicious, downward cycle.
That this has not happened is thanks to the euro. The single currency has taken all this political upheaval in its calm stride.
– From an anonymous editorial in the Observer headed “A tolerant euro”.
From 2002, in case you were wondering.
There is nothing in this film for the Left. Where they demonized Margaret Thatcher, the movie humanizes her. It is not about the great events of her political life; these are its backdrop. Her entry into Parliament, her leadership bid, the miners’ strike, the IRA and the Falklands War all feature, but the movie is not about them. Rather is it about the strength of character with which she confronted successive challenges and crises.
– Madsen Pirie reviews The Iron Lady. Unlike Nicholas Wapshott, Pirie liked it a lot, and says it will make those who see it like and admire the lady herself more.
I link a lot to the sayings and doings of Steve Baker MP (that being the last time I mentioned him here), so this time I will be brief, and only say that I like the phrase “new money being loaned into existence”. The piece this phrase appears in is entitled Could this be a second crisis of state socialism? If you are already saying to yourself something along the lines of: “yes I rather think it could be”, you will, you will be unamazed to learn, find yourself in agreement with Mr Baker.
One of the things I notice about technological change is that it is, so to speak, quite abrupt but not completely abrupt. In historical terms, the arrival of, say, the printing press, was a huge upheaval, changing one reality to a completely different one. But on closer inspection, something like printing turns out to be a series of disruptions, including disruptions yet to come, rather than just one. And if you actually live through one of these disruptions, you typically experience it as something far more gradual and complicated than, say, a mere once-in-a-lifetime explosion.
Consider that old stager of our time, the “paperless office”, and in my personal case, its more chaotic younger sibling, the paperless home.
I have spent quite a lot of time during the last few weeks de-cluttering my home, and that has involved chucking out much paper. A particular clutch of paper that I am about to chuck out is a book. But it is not a book exactly. It is a pile of photocopied A4 pages. It is a big and cumbersome copy of a book, a copy of a copy. But it is a copy of an interesting book, one I would still like to own and consult. So, what am I replacing this biggish pile of paper with, which enables me still to read the same words? Answer: an actual book. Now that the internet enables me to buy an obscure book for coffee-and-a-sandwich money, but does not yet offer me an e-version of the same book, the logical thing to do is to buy yet more paper. In the long run, as Amazon knows better than anyone or anything else on earth, paper for reading will soon (in big historical time) be superfluous. In the meantime, Amazon circulates, hither and thither, still, a veritable mega-cyclone of … paper. For quite a few years, that was the only thing it did.
I am purchasing my new and smaller copy of this book from Oxfam, an enterprise I have no love for, and only have dealings with for private gain on my part, never purely because Oxfam itself benefits. The internet has opened up a whole new semi-business, in the form of people who can’t be doing with selling their own (often presumably inherited) piles of books on the internet, instead dumping these book onto charities, and charities then selling them for what they can get on the internet. (I sometimes suspect that the impact of Oxfam upon British society is far more profound and helpful than anything it does for places like Africa.) Again with the complication. Paper is not being chucked into a skip. It is, thanks to the internet, being rescued from the skip. Temporarily.
This is, as I say, the kind of process that does not show up in the big, broad brush history books, but it is typical of the complicated way that new technology works its complicated magic.
Another example of something similar that I recently learned of (and mentioned in passing in this earlier posting here, also about the complexity of technological change) is how the arrival of the railways caused a greatly increased demand for horses, to transport people to and from railway stations. In the long run, mechanised transport doomed the horse to becoming a mere leisure item. In the short run, it caused many more horses to be used.
Not long ago, Rob Fisher asked, back at his blog, before he started writing here, whether there is a correlation between an early enthusiasm for science fiction and later being a libertarian, and if so what might be the cause of such a correlation. And I seem to recall the notion finding its way here also, although I can’t recall or find where. It may have been in a comment thread. My take is that SF embodies the idea that things could be very different. Maybe a more general version of the same idea is that SF leads to political radicalism of all kinds. There was certainly a huge enthusiasm for SF on the left before World War 2. Think only of H. G. Wells.
I recently mentioned to Michael Jennings that I too went through a big SF phase in my teens and twenties, while in the process of becoming a libertarian, and that although I subsequently stopped reading much SF, I did later become very keen on reading history. I still am. The connection between reading SF and reading history, at any rate in my mind, is that just as SF says that the world can be very different, history is all about the fact that, in the past, the world actually was very different. Things change, from era to era, from epoch to epoch. History and SF both say that very loudly. Libertarianism, and all the other isms, say that also.
As far as history is concerned, I’m thinking of things like how the sea, in the European Middle Ages, far from being any sort of defensive wall (as Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt famously describes it – and as it later became) was actually more like a motorway system, for those able to command the vehicles to make use it of. I’m thinking of how very different life was if most of the people in the place you lived in were illiterate, perhaps including you. I’m thinking of how very hard it was even to preserve the great ideas of the past, let alone accumulate new ones with any success, before the printing press was contrived. I’m thinking of what a difference swords and bows-and-arrows and gunpowder and machine guns successively made, and what a difference atom bombs and hydrogen bombs have made to our own time. I’m thinking of what a different world it was when it was very hard to send messages of any complexity (or for that matter human beings) any faster than a succession of very expensive horses could gallop.
Michael’s response was that reading lots of SF, then becoming something like a libertarian, then reading lots of history, is a fairly common intellectual biography. So rather than ramble on, let me ask commenters. Does that sequence of interests ring any bells with any of you good people?
As was flagged up by this recent SQotD, I have been reading The Last Crusaders by Barnaby Rogers, the point of this posting being that some of these Last Crusaders were also the first global explorers. This can’t be a review, because I have only reached page 50 out of 481, but I will be very surprised if my good opinion of this book now is in any way challenged by the experience of reading the rest of it.
A question that had always vaguely puzzled me, in a very not-thinking-about-it-carefully way, was: why Portugal? How come Portugal, of all now rather insignificant little backwaters, was the country that lead the way in the European conquest of so much of the rest of the world, a gigantic epoch only now drawing to a close?
It is of course not at all hard to see how this should be. Portugal may now be a backwater (I’ll say more about that at the end of this posting) but in the fifteenth century, from the point of view of exploring the world, it was a frontwater. All you need to do to understand how Portugal led Europe into the big wide world out there is to stop looking at the Portuguese East Indies or the various Portuguese parts of Africa or South America (which is what I had been doing), and look instead at Portugal itself, and its immediate surroundings. Once you do that, Portugal making the first big steps in the when-Europe-ruled-the-world story is not just explicable, it is close to inevitable.
Time for a date. In 1415, Portugal captured and, even more significantly, subsequently held the North African trading city of Ceuta, just across the Straights of Gibraltar from Gibraltar itself. They hoped this would drop into their laps all the trade that was done between West Africa and everywhere else through Ceuta. But not for the first or last time, grabbing the physical place turned out not to mean effortlessly controlling what had previously gone on there. Nevertheless, it was a start, by which I mean a start in the process of Europe confronting Islam not in the obvious way, but the other way. The obvious way was to bash on against Islam in the Eastern Mediterranean and surrounding parts, the Balkans, North Africa and what we now call the Middle East. The other way, of course, as we now all know, was to go round it.
Forget for a moment all the European nations who subsequently did this, and forget all the many places the world over that they arrived at and did business in and with. Consider only the very first steps in that process, that needed to be taken in the early fifteenth century. What did they consist of? Basically, someone European needed to sail down the coast of West Africa, establishing bases and trading relationships along the way.
If this had been easy, Portugal would probably never have lead the way. Spaniards, Genoese and Venetians, even though preoccupied with that Islam bashing in other parts of the Mediterranean world, would probably have overwhelmed those very early Portuguese efforts. But crucially, it was not easy. The Atlantic was a huge barrier, requiring huge efforts before even the possibility of profit could cut in. So far so obvious. But what is less well known nowadays (certainly not known by me until now) is that something similar applied to the West Coast of Africa. → Continue reading: How Portugal led the world past the Cape Bojador barrier
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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