Category Archives: Books

Anonymous – A Warning

Posted on December 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Anonymous – A Warning

Anonymous – A Warning

I read this during the impeachment hearings. The book is clearly a rush job, and it doesn’t break a whole lot of new ground. This book’s effect instead is more cumulative. Its impact comes from painting a consistent picture of President Trump’s personality, his management style, and how it affects policymaking and personnel. Many of the shared inside stories and anecdotes I hadn’t previously heard line up well with Trump’s already known tendencies, and are consistent with what other inside reports from the White House reveal.

Anonymous believes Trump is unfit for office, but opposes both impeachment and any 25th Amendment actions. He (she?) would like Trump to be defeated in the election, whether in a primary or, the committed Republican grudgingly says, by a Democrat. Despite fears that Trump might not respect the results of a close election, Anonymous believes those risks are far less than they would be than with impeachment, or especially a 25th Amendment action. Yes, Trump is apparently that unstable and short-sighted.

Anonymous, however, also worries that Democrats are too caught up in Trump’s us-vs.-them style for their own good. They are at risk of choosing a candidate—Anonymous ventures no names—who pairs a Trumpian temperament with far-left policy views. Rather than flattering their opponent through imitation, it would be better for Democrats to choose a moderate. Such a candidate—Anonymous again names no possibilities—would be more electable. They would also do less damage on the policy front, from Anonymous’ conservative perspective. Time in the wilderness could also do the Republicans some good as they think over what they have done. This reviewer almost certainly has a different notion of “good” than Anonymous, but his/her larger point has merit. The GOP needs to cool its overheated emotions.

Anonymous has also rethought the thesis of their New York Times op-ed. The grown-ups in the room are simply not capable of reining all of Trump’s rash decisions. The “steady state” contingent, as Anonymous calls it, has also been shrinking. Good people and/or solid conservatives are leaving the administration in frustration, or are being fired for telling the President things he does not want to hear. Their replacements tend to much more accommodating to the President. As this natural selection process continues, the quality of the administration’s work will continue to deteriorate.

Anonymous argues that a second term would remove the pressure Trump feels to maintain his base’s approval, and move him in a more authoritarian direction. I disagree with this for two reasons. First, his base’s approval means much more to him than just job security. His ego needs it. He genuinely wants and needs popular approbation, hence all the campaign-style rallies and red meat tweets. That said, apparently his staff has long been encouraging him to do as many rallies as possible. Theoretically, when Trump is preoccupied with the rallies, he is less likely to scuttle his own policy initiatives through a tweet or an impulsive, and often temporary, flip-flop.

Second, Trump’s base support has not yet been hurt by anything ranging from his proposing stricter gun control to his obvious non-evangelicalism to his growing spending and deficits, to his trade war’s disproportionate harm to red states. As long as Republicans remain personality-driven rather than policy-driven, Trump has little to worry about from alienating his base.

This is not a book of great depth, but it doesn’t need to be to get its point across. If there is a cause for pessimism, it is that Trump came along during a political realignment, as historian Stephen Davies has argued. In the new nationalism-vs.-cosmopolitan debate, Trump has rapidly pulled the Republicans to the nationalist pole. The Democrats, who currently lack a single figure to rally around, have yet chosen to occupy the same pole or moving to the opposite, cosmopolitan pole. Their primary field contains strong candidates on each side.

Trump is a bad president. But ultimately, the problem isn’t him. Nor is it his party. It is a public ideology that is shifting in a nationalist direction. In the short term, America’s more-or-less liberal institutions will pass Trump’s stress test. The more important battle is long-term. Both parties need to discover some semblance of liberal values. Republicans will continue to reject them for as long as Trump is president. From there, who knows. Frankly, a more important short-term objective is getting Democrats to be an effective opposition. If one party is going nationalist and populist, the other should take up the opposite pole. That means resisting the temptation to copy Trump’s amygdala-driven populism. I am not optimistic.

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Posted in Books, Elections, Political Animals

Philip K. Dick – Electric Dreams

Posted on November 30, 2019 | Comments Off on Philip K. Dick – Electric Dreams

Philip K. Dick – Electric Dreams

Dick was a science fiction writer probably best known for movie adaptations of his books, which include Minority Report, Blade Runner, and Total Recall. This collection of 10 short stories is intended to accompany a recent tv miniseries based on those stories, which I haven’t seen. Each story includes a brief introduction by its accompanying episode’s director or screenwriter.

This was the first Philip K. Dick book I read, and apparently he wrote almost entirely dystopian stories. There is little in the way of Star Trek-style optimism and progress in this collection. The settings range from present-day (for him, mid-20th century) suburbia to the distant future. Most of the stories are on Earth, but a few are set in space or on other planets. Even the more normal settings have something off about them, whether it’s family members or local neighbors being possessed or taken over by aliens, or surveillance states stamping out any traces of dissent or self-expression in a pleasant-seeming society.

Some of the stories reminded me of some of The Simpsons‘ classic “Treehouse of Horror” Halloween episodes; perhaps Dick was an influence on their writers. I mainly read these stories before going to bed. Though I enjoyed them, in hindsight, this may have been a mistake.

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Posted in Books, Literature

Mary Elise Sarotte – The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall

Posted on November 29, 2019 | Comments Off on Mary Elise Sarotte – The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall

Mary Elise Sarotte – The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall

One of the most important events in the 20th century almost happened on a lark—an East German official made a mistake about loosening travel restrictions during a press conference and couldn’t walk it back. At the same time, the Wall’s coming down seemed inevitable. Sarotte explores this tension in gripping fashion—I couldn’t put this book down.

Even Dan Rather’s on-site news coverage was an accident. He and his crew were there to cover a diplomatic meeting, and didn’t think anything big would come of it. Turns out it did, and how. They covered the fateful press conference, and were just able to set up in a spot near the wall when the celebrants starting tearing down the concrete. Even the floodlights they used for tv lighting were a happy accident they had on hand. In all, Sarotte has done justice to one of recent history’s most important, and happiest events. Its mix of spontaneity and inevitability is the perfect microcosm for twentieth-century socialism’s larger collapse.

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Posted in Books, History, International, Uncategorized

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson – The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

Posted on November 28, 2019 | Comments Off on Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson – The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson – The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

Acemoglu has been on the economics Nobel shortlist for some time. Robinson is a frequent collaborator. When I was in grad school, their papers, often coauthored with Simon Johnson, were referred to in the shorthand “AJR,” especially  “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation” and the debate it set off in academic journals.

Acemoglu and Robinson (AR?)’s previous book, 2014’s Why Nations Fail, contrasts extractive versus inclusive institutions, and finds that inclusive-institution countries tend to be both freer and wealthier. Countries with predatory governments with corrupt legal systems tend to be poor and repressive, while countries with a strong rule of law that keep corruption reasonably in check tend to be wealthy and free. Think of North Korea vs. South Korea. While this should not be a controversial argument, it is one that many politicians and academics resist, so Acemoglu and Robinsons’ reminder, while not original, was welcome.

The Narrow Corridor uses a different framework with a little more nuance, and ultimately reaches a similar conclusion. It also does it in an accessible style—which is important in a time of rising populism that needs to be countered. The more ears that hear about the connection between liberalism and prosperity, the better. Instead of a dichotomy of extractive and inclusive, here Acemoglu and Robinson draw a trichotomy between Absent Leviathan, Despotic Leviathan, and Shackled Leviathan. They are the same awful creature, just put into three different situations.

Absent Leviathan is a government that doesn’t do the things governments are supposed to do. When a government does not protect property rights, provide an accessible and fair legal system, a reasonably stable currency, and on down the line—the list varies with one’s political views—that country tends to be poor and stagnant.

Despotic Leviathan is a government that is too present. Like fire, government burns everything it touches if it isn’t kept in check. The twin terrors of fascism and communism are history’s starkest examples. But other types of Despotic Leviathan have appeared everywhere from most European colonial governments, and often their independent successors, to dynastic monarchies in China, Egypt, and most everywhere else in the world through history.

The goal is some kind of Shackled Leviathan, which Acemoglu and Robinson describe on p. 27: “[R]epression and dominance are as much in its [Shackled Leviathan’s] DNA as they are in the DNA of the Despotic Leviathan. But the shackles prevent it from rearing its fearsome face. How those shackles emerge, and why only some societies have managed to develop them, is the major theme of our book.”

The cage of norms is a key concept in understanding why it is so hard to keep Leviathan in that narrow corridor where it is both present and shackled. This represents a bit of a turn for Acemoglu and Robinson. Why Nations Fail was mostly about institutions; the cage of norms is about culture. Many economists downplay or ignore cultural factors in their work because it is often difficult or impossible to measure or formally model. Deirdre McCloskey is the most prominent exception. Her name does not appear in the bibliographies, but her fellow traveler Joel Mokyr’s does, along with Douglass North, Barry Weingast, and a few other similarly minded scholars.

The cage of norms is a catch-all term for highly restrictive cultures. There are many types of cages.  Some cages confine women from public and economic life. Others place taboos against commerce. Nationalist cages engrain hostile attitudes to outsiders. Traditionalist cages can lock out progress and change. India’s caste system is one example. Honor cultures are another. Religious fundamentalism is nearly always a cage of norms. Nationalism, which is currently returning to a vogue not seen in decades, is a very risky cage at the moment in several countries, including Hungary, Italy, the UK, Mexico, and the United States.

The point is that countries that have strong cages of norms gave a hard time keeping their Leviathans shackled in the narrow corridor, and are generally bad places to live.

The Red Queen Effect is Acemoglu and Robinson’s main metaphor for how Leviathan can stay in its proper corridor. It’s essentially competition. When church and state compete with each other, they direct their energies against each other rather than against people. And as Harold Berman pointed out in Law and Revolution, they were also competing for customers. Successful competitor states had to keep their behaviors in the corridor. Federalism, or competing levels of government, is another area for Red Queen-style running. So is separation of powers, with competing branches running as fast as they can to stay in the same place relative to the other branches. A vigorous civil society, unconfined by a cage of norms, is ultimately the most effective Red Queen racer.

In another intellectual turn, Acemoglu and Robinson rely more on history than on economic analysis to make their argument. They offer plenty of numbers and data, but little of the regression analysis or formal model-building that one associates with MIT or University of Chicago economists.

The wide-ranging first chapter alone travels from Wyoming to Ghana in the 19th and 20th centuries, among several other places. To illustrate Absent, Despotic, and Shackled Leviathans, they tell  stories about free-wheeling Siena in Italy, regimented and militaristic Prussia to its north, and Switzerland caught in the corridor between them. China and India get their own in-depth chapters, and the comparison of Costa Rica and Guatemala, and how coffee affected their different trajectories, is especially instructive.

Acemoglu and Robinson find their framework also applies in the present day. Ferguson, Missouri’s police department is simultaneously an Absent Leviathan and a Despotic Leviathan. It doesn’t do things it’s supposed to do, such as providing safety and security. And it does plenty of things it shouldn’t do, some of which became national news. To a greater degree than in wealthier communities, Ferguson’s majority-black residents are subjected to arbitrary and unpredictable fines for everything from jaywalking to the length of the grass in their yard. Residents are then fined further when they are unable to pay. The department’s 2014 murder of Michael Brown was a flashpoint incident that brought stark attention to how far outside the corridor Ferguson’s government—and governments in many other communities like it—had strayed.

The tangle of metaphors is a bit much, but Acemoglu and Robinson’s larger message is sound—the best government is limited government. They are not doctrinaire libertarians, and as Deirdre McCoskey argues in her new book Why Liberalism Works, they rely too much on the traditional, and mistaken, Marxian conception of capitalism as dependent on capital. Innovation and a can-do ethos of continual improvement are actually far more important. But their message of the need to limit political power is important, especially in the current political moment. Leviathan is an awful creature who can kill by the millions when let out of its cage. If government is a necessary evil, one must remember that both of those words are important.

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Posted in Books, Economics, History, International, Philosophy, Uncategorized

Timothy Ferris – The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature

Posted on November 27, 2019 | Comments Off on Timothy Ferris – The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature

Timothy Ferris – The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature

Ferris has an easy-reading prose style, a refreshing optimism, and an emphasis on reason and science as important ingredients in modern freedom and prosperity. At the same time, he oversells his case. This book is more for a general audience, and doesn’t need to delve as deeply as roughly similar-minded academics such as Joel Mokyr or Deirdre McCloskey. But there are points where Ferris is either painting with too broad a brush, or seems to not know his source material very well.

For example, possibly in his eagerness to link science and liberalism, Ferris claims Isaac Newton as a classical liberal. True, many of Newton’s achievements indeed furthered causes such as reason and empiricism. And Newton did much to raise scientists’ social status. His funeral stunned a young Voltaire, who “marveled at a society where a scientist was buried with the honors of a king.” But Newton was also something of a mystic who dabbled not just in alchemy, but maintained an active interest in millenarianism and the occult, which Ferris does not mention. Newton also had no known liberal political or economic philosophy.

At the other end of the spectrum, Ferris is a little too eager to draw a straight line from Rousseau to Napoleon to Hitler. Again, right impulse, but far too much of an oversimplification.

While I favor a big tent, Ferris’ definition of “liberal” seems to know few bounds, to the point of drawing more than one chuckle as I read. Despite this and other reservations, Ferris has the right spirit, and this book would be good for an interested undergrad or general reader, with the proviso that Mokyr or especially Deirdre are deeper, and more accurate thinkers.

Another quibble—he identifies F.A. Hayek as a Chicago school economist. Hayek did teach at the University of Chicago for several years, but not in the economics department. By that stage of his career, he had mostly moved on from technical economics and was exploring other disciplines such as political philosophy and law. Hayek is more a product of the Austrian liberal tradition of Menger, Mises, and Bohm-Bawerk, and a reaction against the German Historical School. Hayek was also influenced by earlier figures in the study of spontaneous orders such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Bernard Mandeville, and Adam Ferguson. This was a very different set of thinkers than the more concrete and empirical Chicago school, exemplified by thinkers such as Stigler, Peltzman, Gary Becker, Posner, Friedman, etc. If one were to draw a Venn diagram of the two schools’ intellectual roots, there would be some overlap. They still have distinct philosophical and methodological approaches.

Ferris also argues on page 169 that Thomas Carlyle coined the term “dismal science” in response to Thomas Malthus’ pessimism. This is inaccurate. Economic historian David Levy tells the full story in his book How the Dismal Science Got its Name (free PDF courtesy of the University of Michigan Press). Carlyle, a hardcore racist even by the standards of Victorian England, was frustrated with economists’ consistent abolitionism and defense of racial equality. He coined “dismal science” as an angry ad hominem. Malthus had nothing to do with it.

Ferris’ distinction between Bacon and Descartes is similarly broad-brush, but also a useful shorthand he returns to throughout the book. Bacon preferred hands-on experiments, just as liberal democracy is a constant process of trial and, often, error. Contrast this with Descartes, who preferred abstract deductive reasoning. Descartes’ approach to science that has parallels with top-down political orders based on intelligent design rather than messy emergent orders.

Ferris takes this framework through the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and up to today. While he oversells his case and needs to be a little more rigorous in his factual research, this is a good introduction to a powerful thesis: positive cultural attitudes towards science, reason, and progress are important ingredients in making possible the mass modern prosperity we enjoy today.

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Posted in Books, Economics, History, Science, Uncategorized

Alexander Woodside – Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History

Posted on November 26, 2019 | Comments Off on Alexander Woodside – Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History

Alexander Woodside – Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History

It reads like a Ph.D thesis. Despite its dry style, trendy humanities jargon, and casual disdain for neoliberalism, which he never defines, Woodside argues that there is more than one kind of modernity. He sees it as essentially a rejection of feudalism. Europe went about it one way, on a Renaissance-Scientific Revolution-Enlightenment trajectory. East Asia went about it another way, rejecting hereditary status through a merit-based examination system for government officials.

I would define the term differently–modernity comprises roughly bourgeois popular values that favor openness and innovation. These values, when combined with roughly liberal political institutions, result in the mass prosperity we see today in Europe, America, and the Asian tiger economies–and rapidly emerging today in China and India.

But within his too-narrow confines, Woodside does well. China’s examination system was, for a long time, the world’s most thorough attempt to institute a meritocracy rather than a hereditary aristocracy. It didn’t work perfectly. But the system was far more modern, at an earlier date, than any governmental system in Europe. Neighboring countries had their own variations on examinations and their own rejections of feudalism.

Just as there is more than one trajectory to modernity–Renaissance and examinations being Woodside’s two primary examples–there are significant within-system variations. For examples, Woodside turns to Vietnam and Korea’s examination systems. These were influenced by China, but evolved distinct characteristics to fit their circumstances. Other East Asian countries such as Cambodia also had their examination systems, though Woodside did not have the space to cover them in detail. All of their examination systems were vastly different than Japan, which had no examination system and maintained a strict feudal system until its own rapid embrace of modernity in the 19th century.

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Posted in Books, History, International, Uncategorized

Rose George – Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

Posted on November 25, 2019 | Comments Off on Rose George – Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

Rose George – Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

I was expecting a science-oriented book that would also touch on history and culture. Instead, George offers mostly ideology. Different chapters go through blood donations, leech treatment, the author’s work with HIV patients in South Africa, hemophilia, plasma, and other blood -related issues. The science, history, and culture of all these has the potential to be fascinating; perhaps I’ll find a book someday that does them justice.

In some cases, George’s strident ideology is for the good. HIV/AIDS patients do not deserve the social stigma they receive. The global hush-hush attitude towards menstruation, and the awful treatment of menstruating women in the world’s more illiberal regions, are blatantly unjust. George’s attempt to shed some light on the matters and move social norms in the right direction is needed and welcome.

But her hostility to paid blood donations is literally killing people. This is an inhumane stance she should immediately take back. She should at the very least listen to Georgetown University ethical philosopher Peter Jaworski‘s arguments. George’s virtue signaling contributes to easily-solved blood shortages that deny patients life-saving care for no good reason.

There is some good content in Nine Pints, just not enough. And George deserves praise for her advocacy on behalf of HIV/AIDS patients and women’s rights. But her amount and intensity of ideological posturing off-putting, and her anti-paid donation stance hurts sick and injured people around the world.

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Posted in Books, Economics, Nanny State, Science, Uncategorized

Douglas Adams – Mostly Harmless

Posted on November 24, 2019 | Comments Off on Douglas Adams – Mostly Harmless

Douglas Adams – Mostly Harmless

The fifth and final volume of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Arthur Dent is finally settling down into a stable life, and even beginning to enjoy it. But then he has to go on one last adventure to save the universe, which is every bit as farcical as one would expect from a Douglas Adams book.

Early on, Adams throws some quality barbs at New Yorkers, such as “In New York, nobody is nice to each other without a reason.” When describing a written message regarding a phone call, “It was a 212 area code number, so it was someone in New York, who was not happy. Well, that narrowed it down a bit, didn’t it?”

Adams also expands the cast. Trillian, another human who escaped Earth’s earlier demolition is joined by her interdimensional analogue Tricia, from a world where she had stayed on Earth, which wasn’t destroyed. Arthur Dent also learns he is a father. He had earlier used sperm donations to fund his interplanetary travels, and Tricia used a sample to havea daughter named Random Dent. Thanks to the vagaries of time travel and interdimensional weirdness, she isn’t quite sure about her age. But she is definitely a full-throated teenager prone to instant mood swings and outbursts, though she does have her sympathetic points.

There is noticeably less joy in this book than in the earlier volumes, something I also noticed to a lesser degree in volume four. The book, and the series, ends with the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself being obliterated, a possible indication that Adams was more than ready to move on to other pursuits.

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Posted in Books, General Foolishness, Literature, Uncategorized

John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath

Posted on November 23, 2019 | Comments Off on John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath

The story of the Joad family’s heartbreaking journey from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to Depression-wracked California. It can be a hard read, not just because of the characters’ exaggerated Okie dialect, but because the characters endure so much hardship through no fault of their own. For all his literary merits, Steinbeck was unfortunately not much of an economic analyst. Since much of his work was intended to make economic arguments, this causes some problems.

For starters, any first-year economics student can spot the common economic error in the following exchange on p. 241 of the Penguin edition (here’s a hint):

“Well, we all go to make a livin’.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “On’y I wisht they was some way to make her ‘thout takin’ her away from somebody else.”

In a market economy, people make money by creating value for other people—this is a positive-sum game, not a zero-sum game. For one person to have more, does not mean that another person must have less. The zero-sum model is often accurate for cronyism and for government, but not for voluntary activity. Deals don’t happen unless all parties expect to benefit. Steinbeck seems unable to tell the difference between cronyism and capitalism.  His attacks on cronyism ring true, but he keeps calling them capitalism, inaccurately. Many of the injustices in the book, whether perpetrated by banks, farm owners, company store clerks, or others, persist only because they have backing from politicians or police.

The scene in which the above conversation takes place involves just such a confusion of markets and cronyism. Most of the California-bound Joad family is staying at a campground somewhere in New Mexico where the owner charges 50 cents per night. Tom Joad arrives to meet his family there hours later, after fixing up a car. The owner wants to charge Tom as well, since he wasn’t with his family when they first arrived.

Tom says if that’s how it is, then fine. He won’t put up a fight. He’ll camp down the road instead, where he can avoid being charged. The owner says there is vagrancy law on the books, and he’ll call the police if Tom does that. Paying up is his only option. Tom, who is a bit smarter than most of the other characters, asks if the local sheriff is his brother-in-law, since that is a pretty sweet arrangement for the campground owner.

Steinbeck portrays this as capitalism, unmoored by greed. He’s right that the campground owner is a greedy man of low character. But there is nothing capitalist or free-market about him. Tom has an available alternative he prefers to paying money—sleeping a little farther down the road. Instead, the campground owner is using a government law, backed by government police, to force Tom to pay money for a service he doesn’t want. What is free-market about that?

This was not the only economic confusion surrounding the Joads’ story. The movie version of The Grapes of Wrath was one of the few American films allowed to be shown in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Its depiction of American hardship and poverty at the hands of capitalist oppressors sent a message he wanted the Soviet people to hear.

It backfired. Most Soviet people who saw the movie instead came away in awe that in America, even the poorest of the poor could afford their own car. In the USSR, only the elites had access to cars. Moreover, the Joads could travel across the country without a work permit or an internal passport.

Steinbeck brilliantly shows how physically draining and spiritually crushing poverty is. He shows how important it is to make life more secure and dignified for people at the economic bottom. In my own work as a policy analyst, poverty eradication is one of the top criteria by which I judge public policies, from tariffs to occupational licensing to minimum wage laws. In that sense, Steinbeck offers a vivid reminder of why I do what I do. What policies can make life better for people like the Joads? While Steinbeck had his eye on the right prize, he also had a poor grasp of what keeps it out of peoples’ reach.

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Posted in Books, Economics, Literature

Walter Scheidel – Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

Posted on November 22, 2019 | Comments Off on Walter Scheidel – Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

Walter Scheidel – Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

Since Rome fell, there has never been another empire so large, so dominating, and so enduring. Scheidel asks, why is that? His short answer is polycentrism. In post-Rome Europe, squabbling among kings and nobles prevented unitary states of any significant size from emerging. The rise of the Catholic church added church-vs.-state competition to the mix. The church itself had numerous internal splits leading to the Reformation, adding intra-church competition to the mix. As the economy slowly recovered from the Dark Ages, transportation and trade added economic competition to the mix.

A bit of context: Rome was founded in 753 B.C., at least according to mythical lore. Though Rome itself fell in 476 A.D., its government remained the de facto political system in much of Western Europe for another two centuries until Arab conquerors ringed three quarters of the Mediterranean and cut Europe off from long-distance trade. The Empire’s  Eastern half, the Byzantine Empire, continued until 1453 A.D. In all, the same state held sway over significant territory for more than 2,000 years—as much as a hundred generations. Nothing like that breadth or length has been approached before or since.

This is not for lack of trying. Europe alone had Merovingian and then Carolingian France; post-Columbian empires by the Netherlands, Spain, England, France, and Belgium; the Habsburgs; Napoleon; and America’s own efforts in Latin American and the Phillipines. Asia had Attila the Hun; Post-Mohammed Arab conquerors; Genghis Khan and his descendants’ four empires; Tamerlane; Imperial Russia; Chinese dynasties from the Zhou, Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing; Japan’s Imperial Period; and more. None of these empires stuck around the way Rome did.

Scheidel’s answer to why Rome has never repeated is essentially a broader-ranging, but less sophisticated version of Harold J. Berman’s thesis in Law and Revolution, which applies polycentric frameworks to the evolution of law. Berman does not appear anywhere in the notes; Scheidel would likely find a lot to like in Berman. Berman also argued that his narrow polycentrism thesis applied much more widely. But as a specialist in the law, he intentionally confined himself to that, leaving a natural opening for someone like Scheidel. Nor does Scheidel cite Henri Pirenne, who not only dates the fall of Rome differently than Scheidel, but emphasized decentralized economic and political institutions as important engines of openness and progress. It would be a short step for Scheidel to add that such decentralization and polycentrism is also an important check against a re-emerging empire.

He also leans on economic historian Joel Mokyr’s arguments about a “culture of technology” leading to change and progress. Scheidel argues that dynamism prevents power concentrating in one set of hands for too long. Near the end, he also cites Deirdre McCloskey’s emphasis on values—when people hold roughly liberal cultural values, empire cannot emerge.

On the minus side, Scheidel relies too heavily on counterfactuals. Historians and social scientists use them sometimes to ask “what if?” some event or policy had turned out differently. For example, how would history have changed if the Nazis had won World War II? There is no way to know for sure. There is some value in these thought experiments, but they should not be treated as serious evidence. Initially defending them as an edgy alternative to traditional analysis, he leans on them throughout the book, shoehorning them into his narrative where they do not fit, and where they neither help nor hurt his polycentrism thesis. Most bizarre is his “what if Europe and East Asia switched places on the map?” What is London faced the Pacific, and China faced the Atlantic? It is never clear how this relates to Scheidel’s thesis about empires and polycentrism.

Escape from Rome is a good read. Scheidel’s polycentrism thesis is compelling and, in my estimation, largely correct. The best defense against a monopoly is competition. As with markets, so with geopolitics. Excising most of his counterfactual nonsense would have made this lengthy book shorter while improving its quality of argumentation.

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Posted in Books, History, International, Uncategorized