Authenticity in Historical Recreation

In a recent thread on an SCA group on Facebook, a number of people discussed modern sources of light that could be disguised as period, including LED "candles" complete with flicker. My contribution was to mention my wife's policy of trying to always get the dinner dishes washed before it gets dark. It occurs to me that this raises a more general issue: What are the reasons for authenticity of various sorts in the SCA or similar contexts?

One reason, and the one that the commenters pretty clearly had in mind, is to avoid damaging the ambiance, the appearance of a medieval environment, for other people. That consideration gives us the ten foot rule, the idea that everything should look period if seen from at least ten feet away. It also gives part of the requirement for participation in my encampment at Pennsic—nothing that is both obviously and unnecessarily out of period.

Fake candles, coolers concealed in chests, cameras built into something that looks period, all solve the problem of damaging the ambiance for other people but not the problem of maintaining the ambiance for the people who are using them. It's harder to imagine that you are a medieval person when you are turning on your candle by pushing a button and not worrying about whether it is too close to things that might burn, or when you are putting ice in your cooler or photographing a battle. If what you are doing poses no problem for other people, other people have no reason to object to it. But it still poses a problem for you, which is a reason why you might choose not to do it—in order to enhance your own experience.

A further reason to prefer the real medieval solution to the modern solution disguised as medieval is suggested by my wife's policy. Medieval people faced a different set of constraints than we do, and one of the differences is that they had no easy way of producing good artificial lighting. By imposing that constraint on ourselves we put ourselves in something closer to their world and give ourselves a push into figuring out how they dealt with it.

By, for instance, arranging to do anything that requires good lighting in daylight.

The Correlation Between Intellect and Pulchritude

I have spent much of my life teaching at reasonably good schools. The students who succeed in getting admitted to such schools tend to be well above average, intellectually speaking (in “intellect” I include not only intelligence but also characteristics such as organization and willingness to work that affect academic success).

In my possibly biased observation, the female students at such schools are not only smarter than average, they are better looking as well. That raises an interesting question. Assuming my observation is correct, why would there be a positive correlation between intellect and pulchritude?

One possible answer is that intellect is an input to pulchritude. The abilities that make a woman academically successful might also make her successful in improving her appearance, whether by diet and exercise, choice of clothing, or in a variety of other ways.

Another possibility is that intellect and looks are both affected by some common cause. Poor nutrition, for instance, might affect both. So might genetic factors or environmental ones, pre or post-natal. Something goes right or wrong with the process that builds a human being, and it goes right or wrong with both intellect and whatever determines physical appearance.

Another and perhaps more intriguing possibility is that the correlation is due to selective pressure in past societies. Consider a society where male status is in part dependent on intellectual ability; Imperial China would be one example, since positions in the Imperial civil service were high status and were obtained by success in competitive exams. But the same pattern could be expected in any context where individuals compete for status and success depends in part in intellect.

Further, assume that the society is polygenous—high status males are able to mate with multiple females, whether as wives, concubines, or mistresses. Men prefer attractive women, so men with unusually high intellect will be mating with women with unusually good looks, producing children with both.

There is one other possible explanation for my observation. I am attracted to smart women. Women I am attracted to appear better looking—to me—than women I am not attracted to, whether or not they actually are in some more objective sense. The phenomenon I am trying to explain may not exist; the observation may reflect characteristics of the observer, not the observed.

Debates Old and New

Someone recently webbed a debate from more than thirty years ago between me and George Smith on ethics vs economics as a foundation for libertarianism. I enjoyed watching it and thought some readers of this blog might enjoy it as well.

After a more recent debate, this one with Robert Murphy, my opponent commented in a blog post that "The only major miscommunication is that Friedman just wanted to talk about methodology, whereas I, the moderator, and the Porcfest event brochure all thought we were talking about the ethical foundations of anarcho-capitalism as well." 

I wasn't discussing the ethical foundations of anarcho-capitalism in that debate because I thought the debate was about the Chicago school approach to economics vs the Austrian school approach and the subject of both schools is economics, not ethics. But it occurs to me that my debate with George was on very nearly the same subject that Robert thought was missing from our debate, so anyone who would like to see what I would have said to Robert can now do so. I will leave it to Robert to decide whether George did an adequate job of representing his side of the argument.

A Bilateral Hostage via Bitcoin

In "From Imperial China to Cyberspace: Contracting Without the State" I discussed the problem of contracts without court enforcement in the context of past practice in Imperial China and future practice online. There are at least two ways of doing it.

One is to rely on reputation. If both parties have sufficiently valuable reputations there is no problem, since the loss to either of being known to have broken its contract is more than the gain from doing so. All you have to do is to arrange things so that if one party does break the contract, the other can easily prove the fact to interested third parties. If only one party has a valuable reputation, the contract can be structured so that only that party has the opportunity to gain by failing to fulfill its obligations—most obviously, having the other party pay in advance. If neither party has a reputation, they can use a third party who does, an escrow agent or equivalent, to enforce the contract.

The other solution is to structure the contract in such a way that a party is always worse off pulling out than carrying his obligations to completion. In building a house, for instance, if the purchaser pays in advance the builder can pocket the money and leave. If the purchaser pays on completion, he can insist on "renegotiating" the price at that point. They solve the problem by a schedule of payments made as the house is built.

This may be difficult or impossible to do in a world of uncertainty, since we may not be able to predict how much a party will gain by fulfilling the contract or, alternatively, failing to do so. We can make reneging more costly to one party by having him put down a deposit in advance which the other can seize if the contract is not fulfilled. But doing so increases the incentive to the other party to reneg, since if he breaks the contract he can keep the deposit—all of this is happening in a world without courts to make him give it back. A solution to that problem is to replace the deposit with a hostage—something valuable to the party who gives it but not to the party who holds it. If I break the contract you destroy the hostage, but you cannot gain by yourself breaking the contract and holding the hostage. 

Someone recently pointed me at a blog post proposing an elegant bilateral version of the hostage solution: "Contracts Without Trust and Third Parties", by Oleg Andreev. It is a very simple idea. I make a contract with you which gives you the opportunity to cheat me out of ten dollars, perhaps by accepting an online payment but not delivering the goods or services paid for.  Before making the payment, we use bitcoin technology to deposit twenty dollars each in a form that is locked against both of us unless each of us releases it. If you never deliver the goods I refuse to unlock the deposit. I am worse off as a result but so are you, which is a good reason for you to fulfill your half of the contract.

My daughter, reading a draft of my article, pointed out a problem with the hostage solution. The hostage I deposit with you may be of no use to you but it is valuable to me, so after you break the contract you sell the hostage back to me for some substantial fraction of its value. The same problem exists for Andreev's proposal. After you fail to deliver the goods, you point out to me that leaving our deposit forever unclaimed hurts me as well as you, unlock your side of it, and wait for me to unlock mine.

Nonetheless, hostage have, historically, been used to guarantee fulfillment of promises in a variety of contexts, perhaps in part because selling my hostage back to me is a bilateral monopoly transaction with potentially high transaction costs and uncertain outcome, perhaps in part because someone who has just been cheated may be willing to accept a cost to punish the person who cheated him.

I have one improvement to offer to Andreev's scheme, in order to eliminate the deadweight cost of deposits that are never unlocked. Arrange that if the deposit is not unlocked after (say) ten days, it forfeits to a third party. Sell the right, in advance, to be that third party.

Diamonds, Advertising, DeBeers and Sex

This morning I participated in a Google hangout organized by the Huffington Post, along with Mike Huemer and some other people. The topic was engagement rings, inspired by a recent blog post on the subject.

The author of the post repeated the standard story according to which diamonds became popular for engagement rings as a result of an advertising campaign by the N.W. Ayer advertising company on behalf of De Beers. Pretty clearly the author had not read the classic article on the subject, "Rings and Promises" by Margaret Brinig, which offers a more interesting explanation of why and when the giving of an expensive engagement ring became a common custom.

Her explanation starts with the fact that pre-marital sex is not a new invention. In the early 20th century, a common pattern was for engaged couples to have sex with the understanding that if the woman got pregnant they would get married; evidence from several late 19th century European cities suggests that about a third of brides were pregnant. One problem was the risk of that the man, having gotten the sex, would dump his fiancee instead of marrying her. One solution to that, in U.S. law, was the tort action for breach of promise to marry. In a society where marriage was the main career open to women and the fact that a woman was known not to be a virgin substantially reduced her marriage prospects, seduction could impose substantial costs and result in a substantial damage payment.

Starting in 1935 in Indiana, U.S. states started altering their laws to abolish the action for breach of promise. Women responded, by Brinig's account, by requiring a down payment from their fiancees in the form of an expensive ring—which forfeited if the fiancee terminated the engagement. Think of it as a performance bond.

Brinig looked at data on diamond imports and concluded that the demand for diamonds started to rise about 1935, four years before the Ayer marketing campaign that is usually given credit for creating the demand for engagement rings. The evidence also suggested that the custom began declining once premarital sex became widely accepted, largely eliminating the problem it was designed to solve. Since 1980, by her account, engagement rings have never amounted to as much as 20% of all diamond sales.

From which I conclude that the Ayer agency was indeed good at marketing—not necessarily at marketing diamonds, but at least at marketing itself, spreading a story that gave it credit for a stunning effect that began four years before its supposed cause.

Faking It

The son of friends of ours is required by his teacher to spend twenty minutes a day reading and report on doing so. He is being taught that reading is a chore to be done only under compulsion. Someone who follows the rules may never discover that reading is fun, since he will be cutting the book into twenty minute chunks instead of reading right through it. Our conclusion was that the best solution was to read the book and lie to the teacher, reporting a single two hours as six daily twenty minute sessions. The teacher, or whoever made the rules he is following, starts with the observation that reading a lot correlates with desirable outcomes and concludes that the way to get those outcomes is to compel children to read—whether they like it or not. The likely result is exactly the opposite of the one intended.

Years earlier, we observed a parallel mistake in a different context. Our home schooled daughter, considering a career as a librarian, volunteered to work without pay at a large local library. After a week they thanked her and told her that her term of volunteering was over. Pretty clearly, their assumption was that she was volunteering because her high school required her to, or possibly to get something to claim on her college application, and it was now someone else’s turn. Wanting to volunteer to do useful things is evidence of desirable personality traits. Volunteering because someone requires you to or will reward you for it is not. She found a smaller local library that actually had a use for her services and worked there for a couple of years.

For a third example, consider my previous post and the long comment thread. It is a good thing if people in the SCA are interested in learning what people did in period and trying to figure out how best to do it. But too often, people in the SCA are convinced that being historically accurate is not something worth doing for itself but something you do because other people are pressuring you to do it or in the hope of getting rewards and status. The result is “documentation” that consists not of trying to figure out how something was actually done but of trying to find some excuse for claiming that whatever you want to do is period. Sort of.

In each case the mistake is the same, the attempt to create the effect without its proper cause. To fake it.

Creeping Mundanity at Pennsic

(This post is about the SCA, a historical recreation group with which I have been involved for many years—readers unfamiliar with it can get some of the context from essays of mine in the Miscellany, a book my wife and I self-publish.)

Over the years, Pennsic has gotten both better and worse. There is an increasing amount of period mass entertainment such as the shows put on by the commedia del arte troupes, more interesting period work at the A&S exhibition and in the university classes and, I think, a gradually rising ratio of period tents to modern tents. But I think there is also a gradual increase in the acceptance of strikingly out of period things at Pennsic, including entirely unnecessary ones.

The clearest example of the latter this year was the sign, shown below, outside the lost and found tent. It is a reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a popular science-fiction book that not only has nothing to do with the middle ages or the SCA but deals with subjects such as aliens, space travel, and the like, strikingly inconsistent with what the SCA is about. There were other references to the book scattered about the Pennsic pamphlet and elsewhere, all inspired by the fact that this was Pennsic 42 and the number 42 has a special significance in Hitchiker, but this one was obvious even to someone who had never heard of the book. The population of the world was not 6.8 billion at any point in SCA period and if it had been it would not have been expressed in exponential notation.

My conclusion was that at least some of the people responsible for running this year’s Pennsic viewed the SCA as part of science fiction fandom. It is, I suppose, an understandable mistake for someone heavily involved in fandom—sf cons often have SCA demos at them, after all. But it is still a mistake. There has always been a substantial overlap between the two groups, but also many people in the SCA who have no connection to fandom; my impression is that the fraction of such has increased over time. Perhaps more important, the spirit of the two groups is very different. The SCA centers on recreation of real world history, fandom on fiction. Wearing elf ears at an sf con is entirely appropriate, clearly inappropriate (which is not to say it does not happen) at an SCA event. Discussions of modern science and technology fit into a con but not an SCA event.

I found the sign particularly disturbing because it not only clashed with the medieval ambiance, it implied that such clashing was not merely tolerable but a good thing, part of what was being presented by the people running the event. It is hard to see how members of the Pennsic staff can object to elf ears or insist that “You can keep a trailer in your encampment for storage or living space, but it must be disguised to look period” (from the Pennsic web page) when they themselves are going out of their way to present something strikingly out of period.

There is always a temptation, in the SCA context, to make a joke out of the contrast between medieval and modern, as in songs about an SCA knight in chain mail going through an airport metal detector. Such jokes might have been funny the first ten or twenty times they were made, but that was decades ago. And every such joke makes it that much harder for participants to imagine, even for  a little while, that they are actually in the middle ages—something that is, I think, part of the attraction of the SCA, what some people like to describe as the magic.

There are other ways in which the activities of the people running Pennsic subverted the medieval ambiance and endorsed other people ignoring or subverting it. There may be good reasons why some staff people need walkie-talkies, but they ought to be used with a bad conscience, as unobtrusively as possible. There may be reasons why golf carts must occasionally be used for transportation but I find it hard to imagine any good reason why they should be nearly as common as they are. Now that practically everyone has a cell phone, all it takes is one security station somewhere, preferably out of sight, with a couple of golf carts and a few people, to make it possible to get security staff to any point at Pennsic where a problem requiring them arises. As best I can tell, security at Pennsic mirrors in miniature one problem of urban policing—that driving around in a police car is pleasanter than walking a beat but does less to discourage crime. Riding around in a golf cart is not only less work than walking, it marks you as a privileged individual—and humans like status.

So far I have been talking about mundanity creeping in at the top. The situation at the bottom, among ordinary participants, is more complicated. On the one hand, an increasing fraction of participants who cannot walk very far or up and down hill and so require some sort of transport make the effort to pretend that their motorized wheelchairs and similar devices are horses, with suitable modifications. It is not a very good solution, but it may well be the best solution practical.

On the other hand, my impression is that ornamental mundanity, things obviously inappropriate to the medieval ambiance done not for convenience but for show, is becoming increasingly common. The picture shows one example—an encampment one of whose structures was outlined in electric lights.

Within the SCA, any attempt to maintain a medieval ambiance is under pressure from two directions. One is the fact that doing things in a period way is often harder and less convenient than doing them in a modern way—one reason why, outside the SCA, modern technology exists. A Coleman stove is less trouble to turn on, turn off, and cook over than a campfire. A flashlight is a more convenient device than a candle lantern. If we insisted on doing everything in as completely period a way as possible we would do very little and there would be very few of us doing it—the mistake I think of as making the best the enemy of the good. The least unsatisfactory response to that problem, in my view, is to regard mundane conveniences as a necessary evil to be minimized but not eliminated—while at the same time using the problem of how to minimize them, how to provide period alternatives, as a valuable spur to learning more about how medieval people lived.

The second source of pressure is the attraction of the cheap joke. Learning enough about past societies to make medieval or renaissance humor—for example, commedia del arte performances—requires some effort. Wearing elf ears or making jokes about dragons does not. It is unfortunate but not, I think, surprising, that individual participants often yield to to the temptation. It is disturbing when the people running the event do so.

My Porcfest Talks

Recordings of the talks I recently gave at the Free State Project's Porcupine Festival are now up.

The Chicago vs Austrian School "Debate" (with Robert Murphy)

Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own

A Consequentialist Theory of Anarcho-Capitalism

The Malthusian Tipping Point

Following along on my previous post ...  .

Assuming that McCloskey has correctly described the historical evidence, per capita real income was roughly stable at a low level most of the time, over most of the world, for thousands of years. That ceased to be true starting  about 1800 when, first in Northwestern Europe and then over a wider and wider area, real income began to rise. The global average is now, by a conservative measure, about ten times what it was through most of history, and about thirty times as high if we limit ourselves to the developed world.

This pattern raises two puzzles: 

1. What mechanism kept it stable for so long?

2. What changed?

The obvious answer to the first is something along the lines suggested by Malthus. Increases in income caused increases in population, increases in population pushed income back down. The equilibrium income was thus at a level that produced a roughly constant population.

What could have made that mechanism stop working? In my previous post, I suggested that economic and technological developments made land a less important input to production than it had been in the past, hence made income less sensitive to population. One should add to the model positive effects of population density. A denser population increases the opportunities for specialization and economies of scale. It increases the number of people creating productive innovation, intellectual property broadly defined. Looking at the modern world, it is hard to see much evidence that population density has, on net, a net negative effect. A few sparsely populated countries get substantial income from their natural resources, but most rich countries are densely populated and the obvious exception, the U.S., does not derive a very large fraction of its income from agriculture, the most obviously land-intensive industry.

That suggests one simple answer to the puzzle. Changes were occurring which lowered the importance of land in production. As long as income remained sufficiently sensitive to population density for the Malthusian mechanism to work, the change slowed the speed with which higher incomes were eliminated by the resulting population growth but did not change the equilibrium level of income. When the negative effects of population growth became small enough to be at least balanced by the positive effects, the system hit a tipping point, since there was now no equilibrating mechanism holding incomes down.

This answer assumes that the feedback mechanism went through pressure of population on land, as per Malthus. Are there other interesting alternatives?

One is predation. Primitive societies have small governments because they cannot afford large ones—if a significant part of the population is in the business of living off others instead of producing, everyone starves. Perhaps what maintained the equilibrium was that, as soon as incomes got large enough to support a predatory state, such a state came into existence. To put it in less abrupt terms, whenever increased incomes allowed the state to grow, it grew. Its consumption then pushed average incomes back down.

That story appeals to my libertarian prejudices, but, unlike my first suggestion, it does not offer an obvious explanation of what eventually turned off the mechanism. Perhaps the answer is some variant of McCloskey's. Beliefs changed, rhetoric changed, social norms changed, in a way that made predation a less viable strategy than it had been before.

When I have finished reading her book I may have a clearer idea of how that might have happened. Until then, it is worth looking for other candidates, other mechanisms that could have held real incomes at an equilibrium level for a very long time, then stopped working. Any solution must explain not only my two points above, but also a third: The fact that, whatever the cause, it was contagious. Technology could explain that, as one society imitated another. So, perhaps, could ideology—economic success makes good advertising.

The effect of contagious diseases might depend on part on population density. Could one tell a version of the story based on that? On other mechanisms? Suggestions welcome.

The Puzzle of the Other Hockey Stick

I have been reading Dierdre’ McCloskey’s Bourgeouis Dignity, the second volume of a projected six volume project. Judging by the early chapters, the book contains three central theses:

1.    The graph of real per capita income over history is a hockey stick. For thousands of years, the overwhelming bulk of the world’s population lived at a real income equivalent to about three dollars a day. Over  the past two centuries, that increased roughly ten-fold averaged over the world population, twenty or thirty fold for developed countries, probably by a good deal more if one tries to allow for improvements in the quality of what was available to buy—electric lighting over candles, air conditioning over house fans. And the average continues to rise.

2.    Conventional material explanations of economic growth offered by economists with approaches ranging from Marx to the Chicago School cannot explain the size and speed of the change.

3.    The correct explanation is a change in attitude, the shift, first in North-west Europe and then increasingly in the rest of the world, from regarding “bourgeois” activities, trade, manufacturing, money making, as low status to regarding them as dignified and worthy of respect.

It’s an interesting thesis. The first part, so far as I can tell, is correct—we really are enormously better off than our ancestors. I am skeptical about the second part, not because I know what the right explanation is but because proving a negative is hard. Also, while the increase in material well being over two centuries is indeed enormous, it represents the cumulative effect of an average increase of less than two percent a year, which looks less startling and so easier to offer possible explanations for.

As for the third part, McCloskey is pretty clearly describing  a real and important change in attitudes—rich people no longer feel obliged to apologize for the fact that they made it in trade instead of inheriting it, and we no longer take it for granted that, having made a fortune in business, the only respectable thing to do with it is to use it to buy land and so buy your way into the landed elite. How much responsibility that change has for economic growth I do not know—but I am still in the early parts of the book.

I am struck, however, by a puzzle that McCloskey does not discuss in any detail—the long handle of the hockey stick. If, as she claims, real incomes were roughly constant for thousands of years, there must have been something keeping them that way, an equilibrating process that pushed incomes back down if some exogenous factor such as improving climate or the availability of new food crops was increasing it, and back up if some exogenous factor pushed it down.

The most plausible candidate for such a process was offered more than two hundred years ago by Thomas Malthus. His argument was not, as modern references sometimes imply, that population growth leads to catastrophe. It was rather that population growth made impossible any large sustained increase in the standard of living of the masses. The argument was simple and persuasive—and its implication strikingly inconsistent with what actually happened over the next two hundred years.

Malthus started with the observation that humans like sex, and sex produces babies. He concluded that, unless there were large costs to producing babies, population would increase at something close to the biological maximum, leading to an exponential growth rate high enough to overcome any plausible rate of increase in human productivity. Looking around him, he observed that  most people were poor enough so that the cost of supporting an additional child was a substantial burden. He concluded that if that was not the case, if, as Godwin and Condorcet, the authors he was responding to, expected, the future saw a sharp rise in the standard of living of the masses, making additional children only a minor burden, population would increase rapidly and the pressure of population against a fixed supply of land would push standards of living back down.

It’s an elegant argument and provides a plausible explanation for most of human history, but one that stopped working within the lifetime of its author. Why? What went wrong with Malthus’ model?

The answer cannot be simply that output increased, and kept increasing, fast enough to outweigh population growth, because if that had happened the population would eventually  have been growing at something close to the biological maximum, and although population in England during the 19th and 20th centuries did indeed increase, it did not increase nearly that fast.

One possibility is that Malthus overestimated the cost of holding down population growth. Implicit in his argument is the assumption that the only practical alternatives are having babies and not having sex. While modern contraceptive technology appeared too late to explain the first century or so of economic growth, contraception itself is a very old technology, in at least two forms. Coitus Interruptus, intercourse with withdrawal just before orgasm, is mentioned in the bible, discussed in medieval Islamic law, pretty clearly a known option for at least the past two thousand years and more. The rhythm method, refraining from intercourse during the woman’s fertile period, is a second low tech alternative, although it is less clear how far back the knowledge necessary to use it goes. And, of course, there are the various forms of non-vaginal intercourse.

Critics of the Catholic church’s stand on contraception sometimes blame it for large family sizes in poor Catholic countries. It occurred to me long ago that they were probably wrong. Rhythm is not as reliable a form of contraception as the pill, diaphragm, or IUD, but if the objective is only to have four children instead of eight, it does not have to be all that reliable. A mildly cynical defender of the Catholic doctrine might argue that it bans forms of contraception sufficiently reliable to make sinning—non-marital intercourse—safe, while permitting a form reliable enough to substantially reduce population growth.

Which brings me to an empirical question to which I do not know the answer, but someone else probably does: How effective are pre-modern forms of contraception? If a couple uses rhythm and withdrawal, does their birth rate go down from one child every two years to one child every twenty-five months, or does it go down to one child every five years? If the latter, then a central assumption of Malthus’ argument, the high cost of holding birth rates down, is wrong. That would explain why his prediction failed to hold through the 19th and 20th century but leaves us without an explanation of why it worked pretty well for millenia before that.

A second possibility is suggested by a modification of the argument introduced by Malthus’ friend David Ricardo, arguably the first great economic theorist. He argued that what level of income corresponded to the Malthusian population equilibrium depended on the tastes of the masses.The more luxurious the tastes of the working class, the higher the income level at which the cost of an additional child was no longer an adequate incentive to hold down the birth rate. Hence he concluded that the “friends of mankind” should wish that the workers have more luxurious tastes. Following out that argument, one might explain the rise of incomes over the past two centuries as a result of increases in the level of income that ordinary people considered acceptable. That would be a non-material explanation, although not the same as the one that McCloskey offers.

Like the previous possibility, that explains the past two centuries at the cost of failing to explain all of previous history. Standards of living have gone up and down at various points in the past. Why didn’t each increase result in a rise in expectations, ratcheting up the level of the Malthusian equilibrium?

Which brings me to a final possibility, and one that I think is consistent with at least the most obvious data. One of the assumptions that went into the Malthusian argument was the high cost of holding down birth rates. The other was the economic importance of land. Suppose we weaken the former assumption, for the reasons I have already suggested, and drop the latter.

Consider an economy in which land is a very important input, making per capita output very sensitive to population density. In such an economy, even a weak version of Malthus’ theory is sufficient to produce the Malthusian conclusion. If real incomes go up substantially population grows, even if at nothing like the biological maximum, and even a modest population growth is sufficient to push incomes back down.

Now introduce one change—technological progress that makes labor rather than land the key input. The logic of the situation is the same as before, but the magnitudes have changed. Rising income produces an increase in the birth rate, hence in population, but that exerts only a modest downward pressure on incomes—one that can be outweighed by technological improvement, better property rights, increased foreign trade, or any of a variety of other positive factors.

Forty some years ago, when population played the same role in public discourse that global warming now does—the looming catastrophe that could perhaps be prevented if only we took sufficiently strong measures against it—I did a simple calculation, designed to test the popular assumption that the reason poor countries were poor was overpopulation. I calculated population density across countries, and found the five most densely populated. Two were rich developed countries, Belgium and the Netherlands. Three were rapidly developing countries, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore. Hong Kong had about ten times the population density of Singapore, but I did not include it because it was not an independent country. I concluded that population density was probably not nearly as important a factor as generally supposed.

The reason, most spectacularly illustrated by the later history of Hong Kong, was that land in a modern economy is not all that important an input. I do not know enough economic history to say with any confidence just when the shift from land to labor as the most important input to production occurred, but it provides at least a possible explanation of the puzzle of McCloskey’s hockey stick, an explanation of both the long handle and the short, and steeply rising, blade.

Before ending I should say that although that particular puzzle is what has so far interested me most about the book, there is a great deal more there. McCloskey’s overall project, with which I am very much in sympathy, is a defense of the modern world, of capitalism very broadly defined, against its critics, left and right.

Medievalism Plus High Tech

I am currently in a minivan heading east on route 80 through Nebraska, en route to the Pennsic War, the Society for Creative Anachronism’s biggest annual event. In a few days I will be in a medieval pavilion I built, sleeping on a rope bed I built (based on an early medieval ivory carving). I will be there for most of two weeks, along with, by the end, something over ten thousand other medieval recreationists.

For most of the trip, which takes about five days each way not counting time spent visiting with friends and relatives along our route, the car is a floating hotspot, courtesy of Verizon; my cell phone functions as a wi-fi router with as many as three laptops (mine, my son’s, and my daughter’s—my wife does most of the driving) connected to it. Occasionally, most often in Nevada, we lose the connection, and for much of the trip it is only 3G, so slower than what we are used to at home via cable, but still fast enough for most purposes short of playing World of Warcraft.

My main activities at Pennsic are teaching classes—thirteen by my current count, including a few repetitions—and running a bardic circle, an attempt to create the illusion of a group of medieval people sitting around a campfire entertaining each other with poems, songs and stories. In order for the bardic circle to work, other people have to know it is there—and it helps if they also know what is or is not expected of participants. I have just posted the relevant information to the relevant groups on Google Plus and Facebook.

It’s a wonderful world.

My Retro Site

I originally constructed my web page about seventeen years ago, using a low end construction program. I currently maintain it with the free editor included in SeaMonkey. From time to time, some friendly person offers to redo it in order to bring it into the 21st century, which I gather involves Cascading Style Sheets, pull down menus, and a variety of other functional and/or ornamental features typical of current web sites. 

So far I have always declined such offers on the theory that the page works fine as is, I want to be able to maintain it myself, and maintaining a more up to date page would require spending time and effort learning how to do it. But I'm curious about the views of other people, in particular people who both read this blog and use my web page. Would a more up to date version be significantly easier and pleasanter to use? Alternatively, should I let it stand as a living fossil, showing the new generation how the (virtual) world looked back at the dawn of the Internet age?

The Zimmerman Case

I was relieved by the verdict, since I did not see any basis for claiming that Zimmerman had been shown to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, which is supposed to be the standard of proof in criminal cases. But I find the commentary, mostly online, depressing. As best I can tell, practically everyone believes he knows what happened and argues from that belief. I may be the only person in America who does not.

As best I can tell, the evidence is consistent with Zimmerman's story--that Martin attacked him and was on top of him beating his head against the concrete when Zimmerman shot him. If that story is correct, the shooting was done in self-defense, so neither murder nor manslaughter. That is true whether or not the confrontation was a result of Zimmerman following Martin around suspiciously.

But while the evidence appears consistent with that story, I don't think it is inconsistent with other stories, in particular with a version according to which Zimmerman started the fight. If he started the fight and could have ended it by letting go of Martin and running away, then the shooting was criminal. Since that could have happened, comments that depend on the confident assumption that Zimmerman's story is true are unjustified, just like comments that depend on the opposite assumption.

But it appears that very few people are willing to accept "I don't know" as a valid conclusion.