Scott Sumner says: "I used to hate older guys that told me I just didn’t understand how things were in the old days. Now I’ve turned into that jerk." In the 1950s, Eisenhower presided over 90% income tax rates. Until the late 1970s the US government set prices in many industries. . . Samuelson’s textbook once predicted the Soviet living standards would surpass the US by 1990. If true, shouldn’t we adopt a democratic form of socialism in America? We’ve come a long way. Right-wingers should not get too discouraged about the regulatory “reforms” being considered. Of course the crackdown on derivatives will probably do more harm than good, but the key point is that the harm it does will be trivial compared to the harm done by policies in the 1970s that even conservatives bought into. The reason everything changed after the mid-1970s is that most economies hit a brick wall around 1974. And it wasn’t just the...

Today we remember the victims of communism, "history’s bloodiest ideology". In this November 2009 post, I explained in some detail why the longstanding relative neglect of communist crimes is deplorable — not just from the standpoint of understanding the past, but also that of doing justice in the here and now and ensuring a better future. In recent decades, the question of acknowledging communist crimes has become something of a left-right issue in many quarters. That situation is deeply unfortunate, but far from inevitable. I have nothing to add to last year's post. It has several links to other material....

I've been reading about the reaction to the recent government blunders with some amusement. The Tea People are sorely disappointed and they seem to represent the majority view of the nation in this if not all things. A minority of extremist Democrats and loosely aligned supporters have reacted violently while accusing the Tea People of violence. Odd that, since it has always been those Democrats and fellow travelers who have been the most violent ones, charmed by the revolutionary rhetoric of communists and other malcontents, bragging about bringing guns to knife fights and sending their opponents to the morgue if one of their own is sent to a hospital. It's just talk for the most part, but what talk! I chuckle when some soft and pudgy academic claims to be a voice of reason and restraint when reason has nothing to do with their views or their rhetoric, and their restraint is only occasional, letting their masks slip with...

Insights from the DNA pooper scooper. "In principle, one can take a pinch of soil and uncover which living creatures, animals and plants lived in the area half a million years back in time. With ancient DNA analysis, we are completely independent of skeletons, bones, teeth and other macro-fossil evidence from extinct animals. This greatly increases the possibility of finding evidence of the existence of a species through time. Whilst an animal leaves only a single corpse when it dies, it leaves quantities of DNA traces through urine and faeces whilst it is still alive. It is these DNA traces which we find in the soil." . . . "Our findings show that the mammoth and the horse existed side by side with the first human immigrants in America for certainly 3,500 years and were therefore not wiped out by human beings or natural disasters within a few hundred years, as common theories otherwise argue. The technique behind ancient-DNA...

The world is large and old - at least by local experience - and humanity is diverse. It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error, but a single erroneous belief runs through all of the successive delusions of the past decade. With few exceptions, both left and right seem to think that history is a directional process whose end point - after many unfortunate detours - will be the worldwide duplication of people very like themselves. . . But whereas this confidence-boosting notion was still genuinely believed a decade ago, today it is a kind of comfort blanket against an unfamiliar world. The reality, which is that western power is in retreat nearly everywhere, is insistently denied. Yet the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century - neoliberalism just as much as communism - are obsolete. Belief systems...

A thread on one of the lists is paying homage to those who digitize old books, making them searchable and downloadable. For example, this old text A practical treatise on the manufacture of vinegar (1914), digitized by Google from the library of the University of California, is reviewed thus: If others know of anything similar that is in the 100-year old range, there may be a wealth of valuable information out there for us - free. I am amazed at the good technical quality available 100 years ago. I am pretty sure the author knew more about charcoal making than anyone alive today. . . One surprise for me was that those early 1900's charcoal-makers were getting up to 50% more vinegar than char by weight. They valued the char, but nowhere near as much as they valued the wood vinegar. . . A reply noted that: The scanning of these old books is proving to be a great...

While growing up May 1st was always a special day for me. It was my mother's birthday, an important event for a young child. Later I learned that it was a day freighted with other significance, which seemed particularly unfortunate to me given its personal import. So, in recent years I have enjoyed the annual May Day celebration at The Distributed Republic, even if it's a rerun this year. Every year for the past five, we have taken time on May 1st to remember the victims of communism. Because of our busy personal lives, we did not have the time to put together any original articles this year. For that, I apologize. Instead, I will link to a few of our articles from previous years. We hope to bring it back next year bigger than ever. The Red Plague by Professor R. J. Rummel The Road To Hell Was Paved With Bad Intentions by Bryan Caplan Cambodian Year Zero...

Stewart Brand reports a presentation to the Long Now foundation given by historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz. In Schwartz’s opening remarks, he said that his plans to write a book titled THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM were derailed by reading Ferguson’s WAR OF THE WORLD. He’s been grappling with the issues Ferguson raised for 18 months. “You do alternative pasts, I do alternative futures. Where historians commune with the dead, futurists have imaginary friends.” Schwartz characterized Ferguson’s view of history as basically down, with an upside possibility, whereas his own view was of history as basically up, with always the possibility of getting things wrong. . . Ferguson said, “I think our difference is that I’m a pessimist and you’re an optimist. You’re Pangloss and I’m Cassandra.” Schwartz noted that since his parents were in slave-labor camps in World War II, and he was born in a displaced-person camp after the war, “It would be churlish not to...

For the most part we see what we expect to see. Scholars have long assumed the Spaniards first introduced chickens to the New World along with horses, pigs, and cattle. But now radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a chicken bone excavated from a site in Chile suggest Polynesians in oceangoing canoes brought chickens to the west coast of South America well before Europe's "Age of Discovery." . . . In 1532, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro recorded the presence of chickens in Peru, where the Inca used them in religious ceremonies. "That suggests chickens had already been there for a while," says Storey. "It's possible there are stylized chickens in the iconography that we have not recognized because we did not know they were there. A great deal of scholarship seems like this to me. The more we know the less we see . . . until someone manages to be confronted by something difficult to deny, and so...

The Hollywood version of the American southwest after the Indian wars and the closing of the frontier - and much earlier in Texas - is of rough, vigilante justice meted out by flawed heroes. The truly bad were tracked down and summarily dispatched with a minimum of fuss or passion. All in a day's work. There's some truth in that but it was as likely to be solid citizens as flawed heroes who did the deeds. One of the striking changes in American society after 9/11/2001 was the number of solid citizens who remembered their roots - or at least the Hollywood version - and voiced interest in some vigilantism. That's one of the reasons that Bush was applauded for his initial handling of the event. I'm putting this out there for your consideration with a fully conflicted heart. I don't feel diminished by the deaths of Mohammed Atta and the other creeps who killed thousands on September 11....

This post began as a quicky update to I'm Late, I'm Late, which briefly explored some ideas about oikophobia, the aversion to home, the mirror to xenophobia. But perhaps it can serve as a brief meditation on nationalism on this holiday weekend which honors the birth of the United States. Born on The 4th [via Maggie's Farm, which dredged up this old article by David Gelernter that I read before but had forgotten] As Disraeli saw it, liberals and conservatives were equally progressive. But liberals were rational internationalists who worried what the Germans would say. Conservatives were romantic nationalists who worried what their forefathers would have said. (Thus "national" Republicans invoke the wisdom of the people and the authority of the Founding Fathers. "Philosophic" Democrats invoke the wisdom of the intellectuals and the authority of the United Nations.) There's some mixing of concepts here. In Disraeli's time "liberals" were Whigs who favored free trade and such, and so quite...

It's useful to be sceptical about narratives - just-so stories about how things are or were in the past - since they are always instrumental. There is no such thing as history in the sense of a narrative that is a true account of what happened in the past, there are only histories, just-so stories told about the past in service of present objectives. What actually happened wasn't known at the time and will forever remain mysterious. The same is true of news stories or blog posts - early drafts of histories - but more so. Still, they are all we have, they can't just be ignored. Seeking out and comparing various accounts of things may not shed any light on truth but they can at least debunk one another and save us from giving them unwarranted credence. Consider this account of neglected news [via Instapundit]. "The present era of globalization and low inflation has an important precedent: 1880-1914,...

Jon Christensen's column in the Jan-Mar 2006 issue of Conservation In Practice, What Does “Wild” Really Mean?, briefly explores the perennial dispute about the words "wild" and "wilderness" by reviewing articles in the Wildlife Conservation Society "status report", State of the Wild 2006. You would think that the Wildlife Conservation Society might have a grip on what it means to be wild. The society grew out of the venerable Bronx Zoo to become one of the most respected wildlife conservation organizations in the world. . . But the inaugural 2006 edition seems to be deeply troubled by a question that has plagued conservationists of late: What does “wild” really mean? It’s ironic that Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature (2), has literally the last word in an afterword to the State of the Wild 2006. McKibben is in many ways responsible for starting this most divisive of debates in modern conservation. But there is a surprising twist...

One of the common confusions of this time, like all other times, is mistaking new methods for new behaviors. This post by Douglass Rushkoff The Networked Individual is an example. [via Future Now] Sure, we knew that people existed in their individual bodies for a long time. Even cavemen knew that hitting the guy over there meant hitting someone else. But people were so highly identified with their tribes, clans or fiefdoms, that they didn't really think of themselves as individuals. Anyone who was a true individual was pretty much an outcast -- either banished, mutant, a leper or, at best, a shaman, whose individuality was as much a curse as a blessing. Then as now everyone exists within a society and disregards its behavior norms at risk of exclusion or worse. Nothing has changed but the names and scale of society. The cell phone may be bringing us into a new renaissance, but it may end up differently...

Archaeological journalist David Keys' book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization and his theory that in 535 A.D. a world altering event occurred which largely determined the course of civilization was the subject of an episode in the PBS series Secrets of the Dead, one of my guilty pleasures. Using evidence from ice cores, tree rings and carbon dating he develops a theory that a massive volcanic explosion caused years of failed crops and disease that brought down major civilizations all over the world and allowed societies better adapted to those conditions to thrive...and replace those of antiquity. Perhaps it is so. Perhaps the dark ages really were dark for a time due to a world girdling cloud of volcanic ashes and vapors which drastically cooled the world. The resulting crop failures and increase of diseases such as bubonic plague might explain the fall of civilizations from Constantinople to pre-Columbian America. The recorded history of the...