Indeed. America still knows how to build perfectly well. The only real question here is why we're willing to leap into action like this when it's about a highway for cars; but NOT for rail, transmission corridors, solar farms, and so on.
On the Dark Ages thing, I expect that a lot of this is over-correction from the popular impression that *nothing* happened between 476 and 1066. Obviously, some very big things happened - for one, the ancestors of all the major European nation-states were set up during this period, and they’re all descended from Germanic kingdoms, even though some of them claim a sort of mythological connection to the Roman Empire.
There was less wealth and less complex regional trade - but there was a lot more of these sorts of things than most non-historians recognize. It makes sense that if 90% of the time you are pushing back on people who have no understanding of the period in question and are just totally wrong, that you might irrationally keep pushing back the other 10% of the time. (And in general, academia needs this sort of thing, to sustain debates that actually uncover the truth, even if one half of the debate always ends up being wrong, long after the point where a reasonable person would have given up.)
And regarding John Quiggin’s point about presentism. It makes sense for an empirical discipline to have methodological structures against making any sort of normative evaluation of their subject matter, to encourage them to pursue all sorts of hypotheses. It’s probably bad for the rest of us to go along with these methodological strictures, but it’s good for the field that they insist on them.
This is all related to my general view that you get the most accurate view of a subject matter not by asking the specialists (who are usually deep in the weeds on some theory where they make their name, which is likely false, like most theories) but instead by talking to the people who work nearby, who have a sense of the evidence for and against all the leading theories, but aren’t as invested in any one of them.
"the ancestors of all the major European nation-states were set up during this period" Is this right? France claims (or used to) "‘Nos ancêtres les Gaulois", Iberia was a distinct entity in Roman times and largely Islamic in 1066, etc
There are some mythic connections to the Roman, or pre-Roman past, like the French claim to the Gauls. But my understanding is that most of the actual institutions go back to the Germanic kingdoms.
The Kingdom of France traces back to the Kingdom of West Francia, which was ruled by Charlemagne's grandson Charles the Bald. The Kingdom of Germany, which eventually got replaced by the title of Holy Roman Emperor, traces back to the Kingdom of East Francia, which was ruled by Charlemagne's grandson Louis the German. (The Holy Roman Emperor title itself was basically a continuation of Charlemagne's fiction that this German court in Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle was the successor of the Roman empire.) The leftover middle lands of Charlemagne's emperor were ruled by his grandson Lothair, and were briefly known as "Lotharingia" (or in modern French "Lorraine", and in modern German "Lothringen") but were eventually subdivided into Kingdoms of the Netherlands, Burgundy, Provence, and Italy. Most of the important vassal Dukes, Counts, etc. in these various kingdoms had their territories and allegiance structure set during this period too.
Although most of modern Iberia was controlled by Islamic rulers during a lot of this period, the Kingdoms of Galicia, Leon, and Castile go back to the Visigothic Kingdom of Asturias on the northwest coast, whose descendants eventually conquered different strips of the peninsula. (Aragon was a Frankish county that had been part of West Francia. Navarre was a Basque kingdom that didn't have Germanic origin, but does date to the same period.) Many Spanish names have Germanic origins from this Gothic period, especially last names like Rodriguez (Rodericksson), Gonzalez (Gundisalfsson), Gutierrez (Waltersson)
The Kingdom of England of course goes back to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, and actually kept their language through this period. Much of the north was probably still under Celtic kingdoms until later, but many of the southeastern counties reflect their origin in Angle or Saxon rule - East Anglia, Essex, Sussex, Middlesex. (There are towns that reflect a Roman name - Lincoln was Lindum Colonia - but I think the feudal territories were set by the Germans.)
And not a mention of the Church in this whole post. Not a mention of the essential carrier of Roman traditions, including the most basic one of literacy (which transmitted almost all the Latin classical literature that we have today, and that produced every written source that exists from the Dark Ages). What high culture existed in that era, existed in the Church, which was dominated by Roman aristocrats as it had been right through the Late Roman period. Consider Gregory of Tours, the highly-educated Gallo-Roman aristocrat amidst the knife- and poison-wielding barbarians of the Merovingian court, and you get some idea. There is a school of thought that says that the movement of peoples (i.e. barbarian invasions) had little fundamental influence except through the creation of economic disaster, in destroying the trade networks and economic foundations that existed because of the Roman state.
Jun 26, 2023·edited Jun 26, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
Surprised I've seen so few takes from dead-ender NUMTOT types proclaiming that I-95 shouldn't have been rebuilt because Roads Bad. Maybe I just haven't found them. (Edit: turns out people on r/fuckcars were calling for the entire interstate system to be torn down. LOL, have fun with that one)
Anyway, this is genuinely very impressive, and between this and his elimination of college degree requirements for most state government jobs, I have a much higher opinion of Shapiro than I do of most Dem governors.
Some locals (including me!) have been coming around to the idea that 95 should be removed between the Betsy Ross and Walt Whitman bridges, rerouting all that through traffic out of a major urban center and off the Delaware waterfront would be a huge boon to Philly, and there was some local congestion but no "traffic apocalypse" that some were afraid of. But that's in large part because 295 is an existing parallel route that's a very short detour, trying to get rid of the "entire" interstate system would probably not end well.
Jun 27, 2023·edited Jun 27, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
Thank you for this newsletter Noah!
As a Vietnamese, I would like to give some other perspectives about our own renewable energy productions. While we have built a lot of solar farms and wind turbines, we are still a developing country and thus, our electricity usage is currently still rising rapidly. This coupled with a low efficiency in using electricity for GDP growth and recent drought due to El Nino have led to major blackouts from end of May to start of June this month, and even multinational companies also suffered: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-05/vietnam-blackouts-hit-canon-multinationals-in-industrial-parks
We had a chance to build a nuclear power plant in South Central Coast of Vietnam, however due to various problems (NIMBYsm, security issues with China, etc. ), we had to shelve our plan 6 years ago.
So Noah, if you have a chance, could you write a post here about what would be the solution for developing countries to build more renewable energy generations, with a feasible baseload? Because it seems that the baseload energy is still a major problem for developing countries. (We could try to build large batteries like in South Australia, however I don't think that would be scalable for a developing, though rapidly rising economy).
Lazy, entitled Millennials and Gen Z? (no). Concentration of power in the Big 4? Would wage increases help? Bigger questions: In your ideal build-everything society, how much talent would you want to allocate to financial maintenance and financial reporting? And in such a country where their friends and peers are building essential and cool things, how do you convince someone that their boring yet stressful job moving numbers around spreadsheets is just as important?
That's interesting, because my friend is starting a company to do accountant outsourcing, for just this reason!! I'm not sure I have a take, but she probably does!
Noah, I'd like to get your opinion on this article published on the Dispatch website which critiques the work of a think tank called "American Compass."
The Bad Math Behind Economic Doomerism: It’s not getting harder for families to purchase basic necessities. by Scott Winship and Jeremy Horpedahl Jun 21, 2023
I don’t know that this fits the general economics vibe here, but since you mentioned Prigozhin’s mishap in Russia this past weekend, I thought it might be a good thing that more people are aware of what the Russian *criminal culture* looks like and its relationship to Putin and the other elites.
Regarding renewables, I don't think boosters are doing themselves any favors by just touting big installed base numbers. It leaves them open to arguments about how all that capacity isn't actually online and contributing to the grid for a variety of reasons. I'd love to see more data on the amount of power actually produced by renewables over time, not just installed. As well as the actual price per kWh compared to fossil fuel sources. I'm a renewables proponent, but I bet those numbers would show we still have further to go. Not quite time to declare victory yet!
My problem with the Dark Ages anxiety is that it tends to ignore altogether the Roman Empire, i.e. what we today for reasons that have their roots in the actual Dark Ages call the Byzantine Empire. Everything that existed during the Classical era of Rome existed in Constantinople which was by multiples the largest and richest city in the west and possibly the world with a very robust written record. The implication is that if western Europe was going through a dark age, then that's all we need to know. The Romans preserved classical culture to be handed to the west when it was ready for them.
Agreed. I always found the Dark Ages metaphor to be not just Eurocentric but Italio-centric. What the West called the Dark Ages was a time of great theological and scientific and technological discovery just a couple of peninsulas away.
But there is a lot of classical culture that is lost because the Church in Western Europe didn't bother to preserve it. We have "Western civilization" as one entity because of various bodies of religious scholars serving as an editor for Greek and Roman culture.
Thanks, Noah, I needed the smile today and "stasis bias" is a very appropriate metaphor right now.
What does state capacity actually mean when you say America possesses "reservoirs of state capacity"? I would suggest that a big part of state capacity consists in having a state that is able to make important decisions in the face of opposition from powerful rent-seeking interest groups. Any functioning state is capable of hiring a construction company to build a highway if there is an overwhelming consensus to do so. From that perspective I don't think the I-95 repair demonstrates much about American state capacity because this was a unique situation where there was an overwhelming consensus about what had to happen.
The crucial point about the Dark Ages controversy is that, according to the orthodoxy of academic historians (and not confined to them) any judgement about the past is unjustified "presentism". You can't say slavery was bad, because that's imposing current values on the past.
As I pointed out a while ago, this is highly problematic once you consider the fact that history is continuous and generations overlap. Was it OK for Douglass to denounce slavery, but bad history for Dubois to do so? OK for Dubois but not for Martin Luther King? OK for King but not for Ta-Nahesi Coates.
I think there is a difference between saying "X was bad" because it conflicts with our present values and "X was bad" because of enumerated consequences (some of which concern values on a conventional objective scale, such as economic output, longevity, etc.).
Presentism isn't necessarily itself misguided--after all, we write history for ourselves and to influence future people. But it's limited in the insights it facilitates. If we fix our subjective attitudes towards slavery, monarchy, etc., it will influence our ability to grasp complex social paradigms (thinking of Dilthey's goal of verstehen: historical understanding built on ever-deepening grasp of how past institutional and social arrays configured levels of lived experience). However, avoiding being guided in research and narrative by subjective values doesn't mean not having them. As Rock_M writes, our judgment doesn't help us understand, but it doesn't have to hinder understanding: research oncologists can study and be fascinated by cancer despite an unwavering commitment to destroy it.
We can certainly make the judgment that slavery is bad, and this will gain us the approbation of our friends, but that doesn't help us understand anything about history of societies. To my mind, the second is much more interesting than the first.
I love the story about I-95. It deserves the close attention we pay to scandals and wars, except in this case the point would be to learn and copy!
Indeed. America still knows how to build perfectly well. The only real question here is why we're willing to leap into action like this when it's about a highway for cars; but NOT for rail, transmission corridors, solar farms, and so on.
On the Dark Ages thing, I expect that a lot of this is over-correction from the popular impression that *nothing* happened between 476 and 1066. Obviously, some very big things happened - for one, the ancestors of all the major European nation-states were set up during this period, and they’re all descended from Germanic kingdoms, even though some of them claim a sort of mythological connection to the Roman Empire.
There was less wealth and less complex regional trade - but there was a lot more of these sorts of things than most non-historians recognize. It makes sense that if 90% of the time you are pushing back on people who have no understanding of the period in question and are just totally wrong, that you might irrationally keep pushing back the other 10% of the time. (And in general, academia needs this sort of thing, to sustain debates that actually uncover the truth, even if one half of the debate always ends up being wrong, long after the point where a reasonable person would have given up.)
And regarding John Quiggin’s point about presentism. It makes sense for an empirical discipline to have methodological structures against making any sort of normative evaluation of their subject matter, to encourage them to pursue all sorts of hypotheses. It’s probably bad for the rest of us to go along with these methodological strictures, but it’s good for the field that they insist on them.
This is all related to my general view that you get the most accurate view of a subject matter not by asking the specialists (who are usually deep in the weeds on some theory where they make their name, which is likely false, like most theories) but instead by talking to the people who work nearby, who have a sense of the evidence for and against all the leading theories, but aren’t as invested in any one of them.
"the ancestors of all the major European nation-states were set up during this period" Is this right? France claims (or used to) "‘Nos ancêtres les Gaulois", Iberia was a distinct entity in Roman times and largely Islamic in 1066, etc
There are some mythic connections to the Roman, or pre-Roman past, like the French claim to the Gauls. But my understanding is that most of the actual institutions go back to the Germanic kingdoms.
The Kingdom of France traces back to the Kingdom of West Francia, which was ruled by Charlemagne's grandson Charles the Bald. The Kingdom of Germany, which eventually got replaced by the title of Holy Roman Emperor, traces back to the Kingdom of East Francia, which was ruled by Charlemagne's grandson Louis the German. (The Holy Roman Emperor title itself was basically a continuation of Charlemagne's fiction that this German court in Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle was the successor of the Roman empire.) The leftover middle lands of Charlemagne's emperor were ruled by his grandson Lothair, and were briefly known as "Lotharingia" (or in modern French "Lorraine", and in modern German "Lothringen") but were eventually subdivided into Kingdoms of the Netherlands, Burgundy, Provence, and Italy. Most of the important vassal Dukes, Counts, etc. in these various kingdoms had their territories and allegiance structure set during this period too.
Although most of modern Iberia was controlled by Islamic rulers during a lot of this period, the Kingdoms of Galicia, Leon, and Castile go back to the Visigothic Kingdom of Asturias on the northwest coast, whose descendants eventually conquered different strips of the peninsula. (Aragon was a Frankish county that had been part of West Francia. Navarre was a Basque kingdom that didn't have Germanic origin, but does date to the same period.) Many Spanish names have Germanic origins from this Gothic period, especially last names like Rodriguez (Rodericksson), Gonzalez (Gundisalfsson), Gutierrez (Waltersson)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Spanish_surnames
The Kingdom of England of course goes back to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, and actually kept their language through this period. Much of the north was probably still under Celtic kingdoms until later, but many of the southeastern counties reflect their origin in Angle or Saxon rule - East Anglia, Essex, Sussex, Middlesex. (There are towns that reflect a Roman name - Lincoln was Lindum Colonia - but I think the feudal territories were set by the Germans.)
And not a mention of the Church in this whole post. Not a mention of the essential carrier of Roman traditions, including the most basic one of literacy (which transmitted almost all the Latin classical literature that we have today, and that produced every written source that exists from the Dark Ages). What high culture existed in that era, existed in the Church, which was dominated by Roman aristocrats as it had been right through the Late Roman period. Consider Gregory of Tours, the highly-educated Gallo-Roman aristocrat amidst the knife- and poison-wielding barbarians of the Merovingian court, and you get some idea. There is a school of thought that says that the movement of peoples (i.e. barbarian invasions) had little fundamental influence except through the creation of economic disaster, in destroying the trade networks and economic foundations that existed because of the Roman state.
Thank you for writing this very complete description of the influence of Rome on the Dark Ages, so I didn't have to.
Yes, the I95 success is very inspiring. Let's build on it as you say. Let's dissolve stasis subsidies and embrace build it subsidies!
Surprised I've seen so few takes from dead-ender NUMTOT types proclaiming that I-95 shouldn't have been rebuilt because Roads Bad. Maybe I just haven't found them. (Edit: turns out people on r/fuckcars were calling for the entire interstate system to be torn down. LOL, have fun with that one)
Anyway, this is genuinely very impressive, and between this and his elimination of college degree requirements for most state government jobs, I have a much higher opinion of Shapiro than I do of most Dem governors.
Some locals (including me!) have been coming around to the idea that 95 should be removed between the Betsy Ross and Walt Whitman bridges, rerouting all that through traffic out of a major urban center and off the Delaware waterfront would be a huge boon to Philly, and there was some local congestion but no "traffic apocalypse" that some were afraid of. But that's in large part because 295 is an existing parallel route that's a very short detour, trying to get rid of the "entire" interstate system would probably not end well.
Thank you for this newsletter Noah!
As a Vietnamese, I would like to give some other perspectives about our own renewable energy productions. While we have built a lot of solar farms and wind turbines, we are still a developing country and thus, our electricity usage is currently still rising rapidly. This coupled with a low efficiency in using electricity for GDP growth and recent drought due to El Nino have led to major blackouts from end of May to start of June this month, and even multinational companies also suffered: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-05/vietnam-blackouts-hit-canon-multinationals-in-industrial-parks
We had a chance to build a nuclear power plant in South Central Coast of Vietnam, however due to various problems (NIMBYsm, security issues with China, etc. ), we had to shelve our plan 6 years ago.
So Noah, if you have a chance, could you write a post here about what would be the solution for developing countries to build more renewable energy generations, with a feasible baseload? Because it seems that the baseload energy is still a major problem for developing countries. (We could try to build large batteries like in South Australia, however I don't think that would be scalable for a developing, though rapidly rising economy).
Let me look into that a bit.
Great round up. In a future one, I’d love to read your take on the shortage of accountants.
FT - https://www.ft.com/content/e8dc2264-6b8d-4ed5-8bbd-e4a67e7d1e46
WSJ - https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-so-many-accountants-are-quitting-11672236016?mod=article_inline
Lazy, entitled Millennials and Gen Z? (no). Concentration of power in the Big 4? Would wage increases help? Bigger questions: In your ideal build-everything society, how much talent would you want to allocate to financial maintenance and financial reporting? And in such a country where their friends and peers are building essential and cool things, how do you convince someone that their boring yet stressful job moving numbers around spreadsheets is just as important?
That's interesting, because my friend is starting a company to do accountant outsourcing, for just this reason!! I'm not sure I have a take, but she probably does!
historybro cope if i have ever seen, full of ad-hominem attacks and unfounded hand-wavey claims of racism
Noah, I'd like to get your opinion on this article published on the Dispatch website which critiques the work of a think tank called "American Compass."
The Bad Math Behind Economic Doomerism: It’s not getting harder for families to purchase basic necessities. by Scott Winship and Jeremy Horpedahl Jun 21, 2023
https://thedispatch.activehosted.com/index.php?action=social&chash=9a3d458322d70046f63dfd8b0153ece4.1318&nosocial=1
I can email you the text if necessary. I do have your email address.
Actually yes, please email me that!
An idea for next week’s “Interesting Things”: the new proposed patent legislation from Tillis and Coons (e.g., https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2023/06/sens-tillis-and-coons-introduce-the-patent-eligibility-reform). Most everyone has the same goal in mind - supporting innovation and US business - but there are some major disagreements on how to do this.
Oooh, that's really interesting!!
Five for five, all solid bangers.
I'm normally wary of "news roundup" substack posts but these have been great - thank you.
Great stuff, Noah!
I don’t know that this fits the general economics vibe here, but since you mentioned Prigozhin’s mishap in Russia this past weekend, I thought it might be a good thing that more people are aware of what the Russian *criminal culture* looks like and its relationship to Putin and the other elites.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/16/russia-prisons-wagner-group-ukraine-crime-culture/
Wow. Yeah that's pretty horrible. I'm not sure I have much to add, there!!
I really enjoyed Erik Nielsen's latest Sunday Wrap on the remarkably similar inflation trajectories and policy responses in the US and the euro area, even though the drivers of inflation are quite different: https://www.research.unicredit.eu/DocsKey/economics_docs_2023_185203.ashx?EXT=pdf&KEY=C814QI31EjqIm_1zIJDBJLR5JK9QeXkXjYRsH_QWl8k=&T=1&T=1
I'd love to hear your take on this!
Ooh thanks, will check it out!
Regarding renewables, I don't think boosters are doing themselves any favors by just touting big installed base numbers. It leaves them open to arguments about how all that capacity isn't actually online and contributing to the grid for a variety of reasons. I'd love to see more data on the amount of power actually produced by renewables over time, not just installed. As well as the actual price per kWh compared to fossil fuel sources. I'm a renewables proponent, but I bet those numbers would show we still have further to go. Not quite time to declare victory yet!
My problem with the Dark Ages anxiety is that it tends to ignore altogether the Roman Empire, i.e. what we today for reasons that have their roots in the actual Dark Ages call the Byzantine Empire. Everything that existed during the Classical era of Rome existed in Constantinople which was by multiples the largest and richest city in the west and possibly the world with a very robust written record. The implication is that if western Europe was going through a dark age, then that's all we need to know. The Romans preserved classical culture to be handed to the west when it was ready for them.
Agreed. I always found the Dark Ages metaphor to be not just Eurocentric but Italio-centric. What the West called the Dark Ages was a time of great theological and scientific and technological discovery just a couple of peninsulas away.
But there is a lot of classical culture that is lost because the Church in Western Europe didn't bother to preserve it. We have "Western civilization" as one entity because of various bodies of religious scholars serving as an editor for Greek and Roman culture.
Thanks, Noah, I needed the smile today and "stasis bias" is a very appropriate metaphor right now.
What does state capacity actually mean when you say America possesses "reservoirs of state capacity"? I would suggest that a big part of state capacity consists in having a state that is able to make important decisions in the face of opposition from powerful rent-seeking interest groups. Any functioning state is capable of hiring a construction company to build a highway if there is an overwhelming consensus to do so. From that perspective I don't think the I-95 repair demonstrates much about American state capacity because this was a unique situation where there was an overwhelming consensus about what had to happen.
The crucial point about the Dark Ages controversy is that, according to the orthodoxy of academic historians (and not confined to them) any judgement about the past is unjustified "presentism". You can't say slavery was bad, because that's imposing current values on the past.
As I pointed out a while ago, this is highly problematic once you consider the fact that history is continuous and generations overlap. Was it OK for Douglass to denounce slavery, but bad history for Dubois to do so? OK for Dubois but not for Martin Luther King? OK for King but not for Ta-Nahesi Coates.
I think there is a difference between saying "X was bad" because it conflicts with our present values and "X was bad" because of enumerated consequences (some of which concern values on a conventional objective scale, such as economic output, longevity, etc.).
Presentism isn't necessarily itself misguided--after all, we write history for ourselves and to influence future people. But it's limited in the insights it facilitates. If we fix our subjective attitudes towards slavery, monarchy, etc., it will influence our ability to grasp complex social paradigms (thinking of Dilthey's goal of verstehen: historical understanding built on ever-deepening grasp of how past institutional and social arrays configured levels of lived experience). However, avoiding being guided in research and narrative by subjective values doesn't mean not having them. As Rock_M writes, our judgment doesn't help us understand, but it doesn't have to hinder understanding: research oncologists can study and be fascinated by cancer despite an unwavering commitment to destroy it.
We can certainly make the judgment that slavery is bad, and this will gain us the approbation of our friends, but that doesn't help us understand anything about history of societies. To my mind, the second is much more interesting than the first.