One interesting tidbit: When Genghis Khan wanted to take over a big fortified city, he would attack surrounding small villages and drive the inhabitants as migrants and refugees to the big city. Swelled with a larger-than-usual population, the big fortified city would collapse from within, its resources (such as food) exhausted. This saved Temüjin, the Great Khan, the effort of a traditional Greek/Roman-style siege and catapult attack on a walled city.
Karl Marx remains one of the most referenced and taught authors in Academia today. The best that one has been able to say about him was that he was a great historian and sociologist, but a failure as a prophet. It was supposed to be a rich industrialized country that turned socialist and, ultimately, communist, not a relatively poor and just-beginning-to-industrialize country such as Russia. (the Bolsheviks got a big boost from Germany, though, which may have distorted the natural course of history)
What if the socialist governments that returned to a market system, e.g., in Russia and China, were not evidence that Marx was wrong, but only that the particular countries that had adopted socialism weren’t rich enough?
The U.S. right now is in an unprecedented position of material prosperity. Americans on welfare today have a far higher material standard of living than did middle class Americans in Marx’s time. Suppose that Bernie wins the primary elections and then at least wins the popular vote in November. Wouldn’t that be evidence that Marx was right? Once a country is rich enough, the working class citizens will demand socialism and many of the elites will go along with this.
One staple of American elite media is the scary headline regarding a potential fall in population. Without open borders and a warm welcome for migrants, the story will read, U.S. population will actually drop. The same papers sing the praises of middle class wage growth from 1950-1970, when the population was about half what is it today, so it is unclear why a return to that level is an emergency for the elite.
“The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague” by Dorsey Armstrong, a professor at Purdue, explains exactly why! The fall in population from the Black Death in Florence led to a dramatic reduction in the economic power of the elite. Skilled and unskilled laborers experienced at least a 3X boost in wages. She attributes the Ciompi Revolt (1378) and similar uprisings elsewhere in Europe (e.g., one in England) to the loss in elite power that occurred due to the population reduction.
The Florentine elites knew that a shrinking population was going to be bad for them. The miracle of valorizing single motherhood was in the future, so they came up with the idea of giving young single women dowries to ensure that they would get married as quickly as possible and then start to produce children. (See “When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children?”)
It is interesting to see how little has changed in 650+ years!
“Population decline spells trouble for the U.S.” (Deseret News): “Japan’s situation is dire. … If that situation hits the United States, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid all would face crises of existential proportions. The huge national debt, now at $23 trillion and growing at a rate of $1 trillion a year, would be impossible to retire.” (Perhaps the Japanese can flee their blighted land to Nigeria, which enjoys a population growth rate of 2.6 percent annually, or Equatorial Guinea, at 2.6 percent.)
“Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Politico), a Harvard economist’s calculation that low-skill immigration at current U.S. levels transfers $500 billion per year from working-class to elite Americans
Oh yes, guess where the author says the first wave of plague that hit Europe in the 14th century started? The Hubei province of China, in 1331.
Related:
“Immigration is the Reverse Black Death?” (Professor Armstrong concurs with other scholars that the reduction of population by 50 percent led to an enormous boost in income and standard of living for the survivors and their descendants; the U.S. is trying this in the other direction and expecting the same result!)
I hope that we can all agree to give thanks that we’ve moved on from this phase of personal computing!
Separately, with no Thanksgiving to slow them down, China can concentrate fully on Christmas decoration weeks earlier than Americans. “There’s Snow Place Like Shanghai Disney Resort” shirts in a city where November high temps had fallen to around 70 degrees…
Related:
William Shockley, the not-very-woke developer of the modern transistor and founder of Silicon Valley
Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari (see the game console in the photo)
Adam Osborne, the leader of the team that gave us the first mass market portable personal computer
Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, marking the anniversary of the beginning of European immigration to the U.S. (Who will be brave enough to suggest a further renaming of Columbus Day to “Destruction of Native Society via Immigration Day”?)
I recently finished The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. This book, by contrast, says that it was mosquito-borne diseases, notably malaria and yellow fever, that were responsible for most of the killing. North America had mosquitoes prior to European migration, but was free of malaria, yellow fever, and a variety of other diseases spread by mosquitoes:
The deadly yellow fever virus disembarked in the Americas with African slaves and an imported Aedes breed of mosquito that easily survived the journey on the slave ships, reproducing in the plentiful barrels and pools of water. European slave traders and their human cargo provided ample opportunity for a continuous cycle of viral infection during the voyage until fresh blood could be claimed upon arrival at a foreign port. The Aedes mosquito quickly found its niche and a suitable home in the cheerful climate of its new world and thrived both in its superiority to domestic species and in its role as a deliverer of suffering and death.
Readers: What do you think? Most of what I have read suggests that malaria and yellow fever were at their deadliest in the coastal South. Yet Native American populations were largely destroyed throughout the continent.
Related:
our neighbors are in a panic due to a new mosquito-borne threat; “3rd Person In Massachusetts Dies From EEE This Year” (tends to prove the thesis of The Mosquito book that mosquitoes are always ready to thin any significantly packed herd of humans)
The crowds are thinning out at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. I simply showed up on a recent Sunday afternoon and was able to walk in (in theory this is possible only on weekdays in the off season).
The most prominent funders of the museum are white do-gooders:
And they are challenging stereotypes by serving fried chicken and collard greens in the cafeteria:
Slavery is presented as something that white Europeans did to African blacks. This sign regarding Olaudah Equiano is about as close as the museum ever gets to noting that black Africans were predominantly captured and sold into slavery by fellow black Africans and/or Arabs.
The museum confidently presents an economic history in which black labor is the basis of American wealth:
The Smithsonian does not explain how it is possible that enslaved blacks generated most American wealth and yet the South was much poorer than the North, to the point that it lost a war where the defense had a big advantage.
Suppose that the $250 million number for the value of cotton produced by slaves in 1861. A guesstimate of U.S. GDP at the time was $4.6 billion (source, in which it is noted that the $8.3 billion number for 1869 might be good, but earlier numbers are extrapolations).
Also, if slaves guarantee long-term wealth, why aren’t the other parts of the world that had a lot of slaves in the mid-19th century very rich today?
Most of the exhibits consist of “artifact plus explanatory written sign” that would have been familiar to a visitor to the British Museum circa 1759. And the collection is actually kind of short on artifacts, so much of the experience becomes reading while standing in a crowd. Will this be compelling for visitors in 25 years after everyone has grown up wearing AR glasses?
The most shocking revelation to me was that the future P-51 fighter pilots were also doing needlepoint:
A KKK hood from New York and Chuck Berry’s Cadillac:
An updated touch-screen lunch counter for sit-ins:
The museum explicitly notes that “the critical role played by women in the Civil Rights Movement has not received enough recognition,” that attention should be paid to a “black lesbian feminist group,” and that the Third World Women’s Alliance “encouraged women to recognize their ‘triple jeopardy’: racism, imperialism, and sexism.”
After telling visitors that women are important, the museum shows that one man’s achievements far exceed those of all women collectively:
The shrine to Barack Obama, whose connection to formerly enslaved African Americans is never explained, continues in the bookstore:
A giftshop section “Because of Her Story” does not come close to tilting the scales in favor of women against Barack Obama:
(Unrelated, but fun:
)
Does black gay man beat black straight woman in the Victimhood Order of Hands? If so, the museum is ready:
African Americans are the group whose prosperity is most injured by low-skill immigration (Harvard study) and the museum notes that “Caribbean immigration increased 1,000 percent from 50 years earlier.”
(Result: lower wages, but some awesome calypso albums.)
The art museum part of the museum has some great pieces that are conventionally organized and presented:
The first African American to star in a TV drama is a challenge for the curators:
I’m in Washington, D.C. today. What does the former malarial swamp have to do with the mostly-frozen (still) Northwest Passage? It turns out that timbers from a British Royal Navy ship sent out to search for Franklin, HMS Resolute, were used to make the Resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes.
Who is using the desk now? Donald Trump! (at least until he is convicted following the impeachment process that the New York Times assures us is right around the corner)
Where else in the U.S. do folks love polar exploration? One of the experts on our cruise had studied the Arctic at Ohio State, home of the Institute for Polar Studies (renamed “Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center” because #ClimateMatters).
Here are some photos from Nome, Alaska, commemorating the Amundsen-Ellsworth airship trip over the North Pole, very likely the first time that humans reached that point:
Readers: What do we make of the fact that most American presidents do much of their work at a desk that is associated with a famous British failure?
Related:
In the #MeToo age, let’s just be grateful that no furniture associated with the polar hero Fridtjof Nansen is in the White House; it turns out that he was sending nude selfies (made with a view camera?) to a woman 30 years his junior (Vice)
New England’s latest museum to open is the American Heritage Museum in Hudson/Stow, Massachusetts. It is run by the long-established Collings Foundation, which owns priceless warbirds and classic cars, but shows off a new collection of armored vehicles.
It is a great museum any time (passionate and knowledgeable volunteer guides bring the machines alive), but especially great this coming weekend when they’re having the “Tanks, Wings, and Wheels” event.
[It is currently not simple to buy a membership at the front desk, so if you want to get an annual membership, sign up via the web site.]
Here’s a book cover that shocked me at the San Diego airport:
The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West bears a subtitle that makes me wonder how many Native Americans would agree that the white-skinned folks from the East were “settlers” (the land wasn’t already settled? Shouldn’t they be called “migrants”, “invaders”, or “immigrants”?) and/or were bringing “the American ideal” (but maybe the “ideal” included killing and displacing the natives?).
How did this one get through a major publishing house?
