1. How the Old World Ended, by Jonathan Scott. Just read a sample, and I may not have reached the meat of the book, which I believe is focused on political and cultural change. Looks like another try at what Charles Kindleberger used to call the “well-squeezed orange” of the history of the Industrial Revolution. Scott’s version prioritizes water transport as a stimulus to trade and political freedom as a stimulus to innovation. These elements first affect the Netherlands. Then they move to England, where they are amplified by natural resources (coal) and vast population expansion, including large settler populations in America.
2. The Power of Bad, by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister. Their main point is to advise us to lean against our tendency to focus on the negative. My favorite passage:
The modern world will always be in crisis because its wealth and freedom have created a crisis industry. In the agricultural era, society could afford to support just a few intellectuals, usually beholden to royal patrons who didn’t welcome criticism of their policies. . .But after the Industrial Revolution. . .a new class of secular doomsayers emerged armed with charts, theories, and printing presses.
Some other excerpts:
The precise term for the adults scaring these children is availability entrepreneurs. They’re the journalists, activists, academics, trial lawyers, and politicians who capitalize on the human tendency to gauge a danger according to how many examples are readily available in our minds.
The one bit of good news on September 11 was that this new terrorist threat to aviation was already obsolete [because pilots would not longer passively hand over control of a plane].
But the horror of the bad news overwhelmed everyone’s judgment. . .In its rush to protect travelers, Congress created a bloated bureaucracy to screen passengers, the Transportation Security Administration. . .squandered more than $50 billion over the next decade
In the experiment, people who saw the negative version of the review rated the critic as significantly more intelligent than did the people who read the positive version.
Blackmailers shake down hotel managers and restaurateurs by posting a bad review on TripAdvisor, Yelp, Google, or Facebook
That is not my first impression after reading the book’s description. What is missing from Jared Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee”/”Guns, Germs, and Steel [GGS]” is an appreciation of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand (or Kling’s more relevant PSST model). I think his appreciation of specialization and trade in his later analysis of Polynesian Culture was a move in the right direction but GGS makes a direct link between the domestication of plants/animals and Pizarro’s capture of the Incan emperor Atahualpa (Battle of Cajamarca in November 1532) and skips over the crucial “commercial sea powers” in-between.
The English/Dutch commercial sea power duopoly (maybe add France in here) displaced the previous commercial sea power duopoly (Portugal and Spain) which replaced the previous commercial sea power duopoly (the Italian Maritime Republics Venice and Genoa) which emerged after the dark ages when the commercial sea power aspect of the Roman Empire as captured in the “Periplus of the Erythraean Sea” document.
Historians traditionally focused on the Big Man aspects of history. Diamond focused on “geobiology” and others focused on “geopolitics” which have aspects of geography that are independent of human agency. Books like Johathan Scott’s hold the promise of a focus on “geoeconomics” which is central, in my opinion, in understanding the transitions from Rome->Venice->Netherlands->England and may give insight into why Venice didn’t fast-follow Portuguese naval innovation and why the Industrial Revolution happened in England rather than the Netherlands.
As another side-note, I don’t think the Industrial Revolution is a “well-squeezed orange”. The common narrative told by economists like Joel Mokyr is certainly a well-squeezed orange but the narrative misses the core innovation: the product-market fit of global industrial cotton. I’m waiting for the first squeeze of a new hybrid clementine that takes the economic history in the book “Empire of Cotton” and replaces Sven Beckert’s obsession with oppressive colonialism with a balanced postive-sum analysis of the underlying “geoeconomics”.
Oh, I’d love to see a “Geoeconomic” analysis of the Indian Subcontinent and why it lost its dominant global exporter crown that it held throughout the Rome->Venice->Spain/Portugal global economic sea power reigns.
The Italian city states and Spain and Portugal excelled at seafaring and thus trade, but I don’t think they were exporting powerhouses like the Netherlands and Britain. The former two mostly traded goods produced elsewhere in Europe. What first set the latter two apart, especially the Netherlands, even before Dutch trade took off, was their booming textile industries. Textile production soared in the Netherlands starting I think in the late 16th century, which created huge incentives to increase trade. It wasn’t just seafaring and trade that catapulted the Dutch and British to such heights, but big increases in productivity of domestic industries. This is a big part of Douglas North’s explanation of the west’s economic ascent, and why it happened in Netherlands/Britain and not in Spain. The Dutch and British also gradually rendered the East more and more redundant by replicating (either domestically or in their colonies) or surpassing Eastern textile, tea, and porcelain etc. manufacturing techniques.
The Battle of Cajamarca, as described by Jared Diamond, can be considered the story of the first shipment of what was to become Spain’s main export over the next two or three centuries: Peruvian gold and silver. This export was so large that it caused permanent inflation. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations discusses this historical phenomena as the basis for why corn rather than gold should be used for comparisons involving the price of commodities and wage labour; a one product basket of goods in a modern CPI calculation.
Under the TSA there has not been a single US airline hijacked.
When private business had the same responsibility for airline security we regularly had planes hijacked.
So by what objective standard is the TSA bloated?
Metric 1: employee-hours required to screen a passenger and/or bag.
Metric 2: ratio of flight time to total travel+airport time