Against Prison Violence As Punishment
















Ethics, Model

Terminal and Non-terminal Punishments

What happens if you don’t pay your taxes?










Take, for example, spousal or child support in arrears.





























History, Quick Fix

Weather today fine but high waves

The Battle of the Tsushima Straits is the most underrated moment of historical importance in the 20th century.

We’ve all heard lots of different explanations for the start of the First World War. The standard ones are as follows: Europe was a mess of alliances, imperial powers treated war like a game, and one unlucky arch-duke got offed by anarchists.

Less commonly mentioned is Russia’s lack of international prestige, a situation that made it desperate for military victories at the same time it made the Central Powers contemptuous of Russia’s strength.

Russia was the first country to mobilize in 1914 (with its “period preparatory to war”) after Austria issued an ultimatum to Serbia and it was arguably this mobilization that set the stage for a continent spanning war.

Why was Russia so desperate and the Central Powers so unworried?

Well, over 24 hours on May 27/28th, 1905, Russia went from the 3rd most powerful naval nation in the world to one that could have barely hoped to defeat the Austro-Hungarian Empire at sea (that doesn’t sound bad, until you remember that Austria-Hungary has no blue water harbours and never really had any overseas colonies). This wrecked Russian prestige.

What destroyed the Russian fleet so thoroughly?

Admiral Tōgō and the Imperial Japanese fleet.

In the Battle of the Tsushima Straits, Admiral Tōgō defeated and sunk or captured eleven battleships and twenty-seven other ships – practically every Russian naval vessel – at the cost of three torpedo boats (the smallest and cheapest ships used in early 20th century naval combat).

This lopsided victory was the first time a European power was conclusively beaten by an Asian one in an even battle since the Mongol general Subutai razed Hungary and smashed the armies of Poland in the 1200s.

Victory galvanized Japan. Barely fifty years before the battle, Japan had been forced open at gunpoint by Commadore Perry’s Black Ships. Shortly after this, western powers forced Japan, like China before it, to sign unequal treaties. Victory at the Battle of Tsushima showed that this era was clearly over. Japan was now a great power.

This is why I could claim that the Battle of the Tsushima Straits is the most underrated moment of historical importance in the 20th century. Not only did Russia’s defeat sow some of the seeds of the First World War; Japan’s victory also set the stage for Japan’s participation in the Second World War.

Admiral Tōgō’s message to Tokyo on the day of the battle, “In response to the warning that enemy ships have been sighted, the Combined Fleet will immediately commence action and attempt to attack and destroy them. Weather today fine but high waves.”, especially the last part, became as important to the Japanese Navy as Nelson’s remarks before Trafalgar (“England expects that every man will do his duty”) were to the British.

With such a lopsided victory under their belt, the Imperial Japanese Navy began to believe that they were invincible. They quickly became promoters of militarism and conquest.

As America began to act to check Japanese dominance in the Pacific and prevent Japan from entirely colonizing China, the Japanese Navy decided that America had to be defeated. This led to Japan taking Germany’s side in the Second World War, to Pearl Harbour, and eventually to the American occupation of Japan.

Had the Battle of the Tsushima Strait instead been a bloody stalemate, Japan may have risen less quickly and more cautiously. Russia may not have started the First World War when it did, nor succumbed to a revolution when exhausted by the same war. The Soviet Union may never have risen. Both World Wars may have happened differently, or not at all.

This is not even to mention that British naval observers at the battle used what they learned in the construction of Dreadnaught, the battleship that started a new naval arms race.

There’s too much that spilled from all of these events to predict if the world would be better or worse if Tōgō hadn’t won in 1905, but it certainly would have been different.

Today is a good day to reflect on how this single battle, the only decisive time battleships ever met in anger, helped to shape so much of the modern world. If this single moment, unknown to so many, shaped so much of what came later, what other key moments are we ignorant of? What other desperate struggles and last second decisions shaped this baffling world of ours?

History doesn’t just belong to the victors. It belongs to those who are remembered. Today, I’d like to remind you that even if events fall from history and aren’t remembered, they can still shape it.


Ending Bailouts and Recessions: Why the Left should care about monetary economics

When I write about economics on this blog, it is quite often from the perspective of monetary economics. I’ve certainly made no secret about how important monetary economics is to my thinking, but I also have never clearly laid out the arguments that convinced me of monetarism, let alone explained its central theories. This isn’t by design. I’ve found it frustrating that many of my explanations of monetarism are relegated to disjointed footnotes. There’s almost an introduction to monetarism already on this blog, if you’re willing to piece together thirty footnotes on ten different posts.

It is obviously the case that no one wants to do this. Therefore, I’d like to try something else: a succinct explanation of monetary economics, written as clearly as possible and without any simplifying omissions or obfuscations, but free of (unexplained) jargon.

It is my hope that having recently struggled to shove this material into my own head, I’m well positioned to explain it. I especially hope to explain it to people broadly similar to me: people who are vaguely left-leaning and interested in economics as it pertains to public policy, especially people who believe that public policy should have as its principled aim ensuring a comfortable and dignified standard of living for as many as possible (especially those who have traditionally been underserved or abandoned by the government).

To begin, I should define monetarism. Monetarism is the branch of (macro-)economic thought that holds that the supply of money is a key determinant of recessions, depressions, and growth (in whole, the “business cycle”, the pattern of boom and bust that characterizes all market economies that use money).

Why does money matter?

In general, during both periods of growth and recessions, the supply of money increases. However, there have been several periods of time in America where the supply of money has decreased. Between the years of 1867 and 1963, there were eight such periods. They are: 1873-1879, 1892-1894, 1907-1908, 1920-1921, 1929-1933, 1937-1938, 1948-1949, and 1959-1960.

When I first read those dates, I got chills. Those are the dates of every single serious contraction in the covered years.

Men queueing for free soup during the Great Depression
The Great Depression appears twice! Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Furthermore, while minor recessions aren’t characterized by a decrease in the supply of money, they are characterized by a decrease in the rate of the growth of the money supply. That is to saw, the money supply is still increasing, but by less than it normally does.

Let’s pause for a second and talk about the growth of the money supply. Why does it normally grow?

Under the international gold standard, which existed in modern times under one form or another until President Nixon de facto ended it in 1971, money either existed as precious metal coins (specie), or paper banknotes backed by specie. If you had a dollar in your wallet, you could convert it to a set amount of gold.

As long as gold mining was economically viable (it was in the period covering 1867-1963, which we’re talking about), there was, in general, steady growth in the money supply. Each dollar’s worth of gold pulled out of the ground made it possible to expand the monetary supply by a similar amount, although I should note that not all gold that was mined was used this way (some was used, for example, to make jewelry).

Since the end of the gold standard, governments have made a commitment to keeping the money supply steadily increasing. We commonly refer to this as “printing money”, but that’s a bit of an anachronism. Central banks create money by buying assets (like government debt) using money that did not previously exist. This process is digital [1].

(We call currencies that aren’t backed by precious metals or other commodities “fiat” currencies, because their value exists, at least in part, because of government fiat.)

In both fiat and commodity currency regimes, there is a clear correlation between changes in the growth rate of the money supply and the growth rate of the economy. A decrease in money supply growth leads to a recession. An outright decrease in money supply (i.e. negative growth) leads to a depression. Even within the categories (depression and recession), there’s a correlation. The worse the decline in growth rate, the worse the downturn.

Whenever someone provides an interesting correlation, it is important to ask about causation. It does not necessarily need to be the case that a decrease in money supply is what is causing recessions. It could instead be that recessions cause the decrease in the rate of money growth, or that money supply is a lagging indicator of recessions (as unemployment is), rather than a leading one [2].

There are four reasons to suspect that money is in fact the causal factor in business cycles.

First, there is the simple fact that history suggests a causal relationship. We do not see any history of central banks (which remember, help control the money supply) reacting to economic recession with plans to cut the supply of money. On the other hand, we have seen recessions which were started when central banks have deliberately decreased the growth of the money supply, as the Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker did in 1980.

Second, it is possible to do correlational analyses to determine if it is more probable that something is a leading or lagging indicator. Anna Schwartz and Milton Friedman did just such an analysis on data from US recessions and depressions between 1867 and 1963 and found correlation only with money as a leading indicator.

Third, money is much better positioned to explain recessions and depressions than the alternative (Keynesian) theory which holds that recessions occur due to a fall in investment. The correlation between the amount of investment and the amount of economic growth in America (again, between 1867 and 1963) disappears when you control for changes in the money supply. The correlation between money and growth remains, even when controlling for investment.

Fourth, we do not need to be a priori skeptical of money as a key determinant of the business cycle. Money is clearly linked to the economy; it literally permeates it. The business cycle of growth followed by recession is observed only in economies that use money [3]. While it would make sense to be inherently skeptical of a theory that holds that recessions occur when not enough sewing needles are produced, we need to be much less reflexively skeptical of money. Claiming money causes the business cycle isn’t like claiming Nicholas Cage movies cause accidental drowning.

The correlation in this graph is obviously false because there’s no plausible mechanism connecting the two! This graph would be much more plausible if “Nicholas Cage films” was replaced with “New pool installations”. While our hypothetical graph of fatalities vs. installations wouldn’t be conclusive, it would be highly suggestive, in a way this graph just isn’t. Graph concept courtesy of Tyler Vigen, who is kind enough to make all of his spurious correlation graphs free of Copyright.

These arguments are necessarily summaries; this blog post isn’t the best place to put all of the graphs and regression analyses that Schwartz and Friedman did when first formulating their theory of monetary economics. I’ve read through the analysis several times and I believe it to be sound. If you wish to pore over regressions yourself, I recommend the paper Money and Business Cycle (1963).

If you can accept that the supply of money plays a key role in the business cycle, you’ll probably find yourself in possession of several questions, not the least of which will be “how?”. That’s a good question! But before I can explain “how”, I first need to define money, explain how banking works, and delve into the role and abilities of the central bank. It will be worth it, I promise.

What is money?

At first blush, this is a silly question. Money is one of those things we know when we see. It’s the cash in our wallets and the accounts at our banks. Except, it’s not quite that.

Money isn’t a binary category. Things can have varying amounts of “moneyness”, which is to say, can be varyingly good at accomplishing the three functions of money. These three functions are: a store of value (something that can be exchanged for goods in the future), a unit of account (something that you can use to keep track of how many goods you could buy), and a medium of exchange (something that you can give to someone in exchange for goods).

While bank deposits and cash are obviously money, there are also a variety of financial products that we tend to consider money even though they have less moneyness than cash. For example, robo-investment accounts (of the sort that my generation uses) often given the illusion of containing cash by being denominated in dollars and allowing withdrawals [4]. What makes them have less moneyness than cash is only apparent when you look under the hood and realize they contain a mixture of stocks and loans.

In a monetary context, when we say “money”, we aren’t referring to investment accounts or any other instrument that pretends to be cash [5]. Instead, we’re referring to the “money supply”, which is made up of instruments with very high moneyness and is determined by three factors:

  1. The monetary base. This is the money that the central bank issues. We see it as cash, as well as the reserves that regular banks choose to hold.
  2. The amount of reserves banks keep against deposits. Later this will show up as the deposit-reserve ratio, which is calculated by dividing total deposits by the reserves kept on hand by banks.
  3. How much of its currency the public chooses to deposit at banks. This will surface later as the deposit-currency ratio. This is calculated by dividing the value of all deposit accounts at banks by the total amount of currency in circulation.

What are reserves?

When you give your money to a bank, it doesn’t hold all of it in a vault somewhere. Vaults are expensive, as are guards, tellers, and account software. If banks held onto all of your cash for you, you’d have to pay them quite a lot of money for the service. Many of us would decide it’s not worth the bother and keep our cash under the proverbial mattress.

Banks realized this a long time ago. They responded like any good business – by finding a way to cut costs for the consumer.

Banks were able to cut costs by realizing that it is very rare for everyone to want all of their money back at once. If banks didn’t need to keep all of the deposited cash (or, in the olden days, gold and silver specie) on hand, they could lend some of it out and use the interest it earned to subsidize the cost of running the bank.

This led to the birth of the fractional reserve system, so named because bank reserves are a fraction of the money deposited in banks [6].

Once you have a fractional reserve system, a funny thing happens with the money supply: it is no longer made up solely by money created by the central bank. When commercial banks lend out money that people have deposited, they essentially create money. This is how the money supply ends up depending on the deposit-reserve ratio; this ratio describes how much money banks are creating.

When banks decide to lend out more of their reserves, the deposit-reserve ratio increases and the money supply increases. When banks instead decide to lend out less and sit on their cash, the deposit-reserve ratio decreases and the money supply decreases.

But it isn’t just the banks that get a vote in the money supply under a fractional reserve system. Each of us with a bank account also gets a vote. If we trust banks or if we’re enticed by a high interest rate, we hold less cash and put more money in our bank accounts (which causes the deposit-currency ratio – and therefore the money supply – to increase). If we’re instead worried about the stability of banks or if bank accounts aren’t paying very appealing interest rates, we’ll tend to hold onto our cash (decreasing the deposit-currency ratio and the total supply of money).

Holding the deposit-reserve ratio constant, the money supply increases when the deposit-currency ratio increases and decreases when the deposit-currency ratio decreases. This is because every dollar in the bank becomes, via the magic of fractional reserve banking, more than a single dollar in the money supply. Your deposit remains available to you, but most of it is also lend out to someone else.

While we cannot in practice hold any ratio constant, there do exist real constraints on the deposit-reserve ratio. In the US, there are laws that require banks above a certain size to keep liquid reserves equal to at least 10% of their deposits. Many other countries lack reserve requirements per se, but do require banks to limit how leveraged they become, which acts as a de facto limit on their deposit-reserve ratio [7].

It isn’t just the government that provides restraints. Banks may have internal policies that require them to have lower (safer) deposit-reserve ratios the government demands.

Governments and bank risk management departs set limits on the deposit-reserve ratio in an attempt to limit bank failures, which become more likely the higher the deposit-reserve ratio gets. Banks don’t really sit on all of their reserves, or even stuff it in vaults. Instead, they normally use it to buy assets that they and the government agree are safe. Often this takes the form of government bonds, but sometimes other assets are considered suitable. Many of the mortgage backed securities that exploded during the financial crisis were considered suitably safe, which was a major failure of the ratings agencies.

If assets banks have bought to act as their reserves lose value, they can find their deposit-reserve ratio higher than they want it to be, which often results in a sudden decline in loan activity (and therefore a decline in the growth rate of the money supply) as they try to return their financials to normal [8]. Bank failures can occur if deposit-reserve ratios get so far from normal that banks cannot afford to meet normal withdrawal requests.

If people and banks have so much control over the money supply, what do central banks do?

What central banks do depends on their mandate; what the government has told them to do. The US Federal Reserve Bank has a dual mandate: to maintain a stable price level (here defined as inflation of approximately 2%) and to ensure full employment (defined as an unemployment rate of around 4.5% [9]). The Fed is actually a bit of an aberration here. Many central banks (like Canada’s) have a single mandate: “to keep inflation low, predictable, and stable”.

The Federal Reserve building in Washington
All central banks also have an unofficial mandate: have really cool looking headquarters. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Currently, central banks achieve their mandate by manipulating interest rates. They do this with a “target rate” and “open market operations”. The target rate is the thing you hear about on TV and in the news. It’s where the central bank would like interest rates to be (here, interest rates really means “the rate at which banks lend each other money”; consumers can generally expect to make less interest on their savings and pay more when they take out loans [10]).

Note that I’ve said the target rate is where the central bank would “like” interest rates to be. It can’t just call up every bank and declare the new interest rate by fiat. Instead, it engages in those “open market operations” that I mentioned. There are two types of open market operations.

When the interest rate is above target, the central bank lends money to banks at below-market interest rates (to increase the supply of money and encourage interest rates to become lower). When the interest rate is below target, the central bank will begin selling assets to banks (to give banks something else to do with their money and thereby make them demand more interest from each other when loaning).

Open market operations are normally fairly successful at keeping the interest rate reasonably close to the target rate.

Unfortunately, the target rate is only moderately effective at achieving monetary policy goals.

Remember, the correlation we identified in the first section is for the total supply of money, not for the interest rate. There’s some correlation between the two (lower interest rates can mean a fast monetary growth rate), but it isn’t exact.

When you hear people on TV say that “low interest rates mean easy money” (“easy money” means variously “high growth in the money supply” or “growth in the money supply likely to cause above-target inflation”) or “high interest rates mean tight money” (a shrinking money supply; below target inflation), you are hearing people who don’t entirely understand what they’re talking about.

The key piece of information reporters often lack is how much demand banks have for money. If banks don’t really want much more money (perhaps because the economy is tanking and there’s nothing to do with money that will justify loan repayments) then a low interest rate can still result in the money supply barely growing. It may be that the central bank target rate is quite low by historical standards (say 1%) but still not low enough to expand the money supply via loans to banks.

Put another way, while a 1% interest rate is always easier than a 2% interest rate, there’s often nothing to tell a priori if it represents easy money, which is to say, growth in the money stock. A 1% target rate can be contractionary (shrink the money stock) if banks won’t take out loans when charged it.

Conversely, a 10% interest rate could conceivably represent easy money if banks are still taking out lots of loans at that rate. Take a case where there’s some asset currently returning 20% every year. Under those circumstances, 10% interest payments are a steal and the money supply would continue to increase. It’s certainly tighter money than a 2% interest rate, but it’s not always tight money.

If you want to see if the target interest rate is inflationary or deflationary, you should look at the market’s expectations for inflation. If the market is predicting higher than target inflation, money is easy. If it’s predicting below target inflation, money is tight.

Central banks often collect statistics so that they can judge the effectiveness of their policy actions. If inflation is too low, they’ll lower their target rate. Too high, and they’ll raise it. Over time, if the economy is stable, central banks will correct any short run problems introduced by interest rate targeting and eventually zero in on their inflation target. Unfortunately, this leaves the door open to painful short-term failures.

How do central banks fail in the short run?

First, I want to make it clear that short-term failures are bad. While long-term price stability is definitely a good thing, short-term fluctuations in the money supply can lead to recessions (remember our solid correlation between shrinking money supply and recessions). Even relatively minor short-term failures can have consequences for hundreds of thousands or millions of people whenever recessions lead to job losses.

Central banks most commonly fail in the short-run because of some sort of unexpected shock. Most commonly, shocks that lead to long recessions originate in the financial sector. The 2001 dot-com crash, for example, didn’t technically lead to a recession in the United States, despite the huge stock market losses [11].

This graph, from Wikimedia Commons, shows the scale of the losses in the NASDAQ Composite during the dot-com crash.


Shocks to the financial sector are unusually likely to cause recessions because of the key role that the financial sector plays in determining the monetary supply (via the deposit-reserve ratio we discussed above), as well as the key role that confidence in the financial sector plays (via the deposit-currency ratio).

When financial institutions run into trouble, they have to scramble for liquidity – for cash that they can have on hand in case people wish to withdraw their money [12] – which means they make fewer loans. Suddenly, the money multiplier that banks supply shrinks and the amount of money in the economy decreases.

Things can get even worse when the public loses faith in the banking system. If you suspect that a bank might fail, you will want to get your money out while you still can. Unfortunately, if everyone comes to believe this, then the bank will fail [13]. By design, it doesn’t have enough cash on hand to pay everyone back [14]. When this happens, it is called a “run” on the banks or a “bank run” and they’re thankfully becoming more and more rare. Many developed countries have ended them entirely with a program of deposit insurance. That’s the stickers you see on the door of your bank that promises your deposits will be returned to you, even if the bank fails [15].

This is one of the few images on my blog that isn't under some sort of Creative Commons license. I'm using it here under fair use, for the purpose of comment on the institution of deposit insurance. While we're here and talking about this, I think the prominent display requirement, while now not very useful, probably was once very important. When deposit insurance was new, you did really want people to see that their banks had insurance and feel secure. It's part of how deposit insurance makes itself less necessary. The very fact it exists prevents most of the bank runs it would pay out for.
Here’s what the stickers look like in Canada. According to the CDIC website (which is where I got this image), they must be prominently displayed.

It’s good that we’ve stopped bank runs, because they’re incredibly deflationary (they are very good at shrinking the money supply). This is due to the deposit-currency ratio being a key determinant of the total money supply. When people stop using banks, the deposit-currency ratio falls and the money supply decreases.

Since bank failures can occur quite suddenly and can spread throughout the financial system quickly, a financial crisis can cause a deflation that is too rapid for the central bank to react too. This is especially true because modern central banks have a general tendency to fear inflation much more than many monetarists believe they should [16]. This is really unfortunate! A slow response to a decrease in the growth of the money supply (whether caused by a financial crisis or something else) can easily turn into a recession or depression, with all the attendant misery.

Okay, but can you explain how this happens?

Many individuals and companies like to keep a certain amount of money on hand, if at all possible. When they have less money than this, they economize, until they feel comfortable with the amount of money they have. When they have more money, the tend to invest it or spend it.

When the money supply increases, either via by the central bank buying bonds, the government reducing reserve requirements, or people deciding to hold more of their money at banks, there are suddenly larger supplies of money at banks then they would like to hold on to.

Banks then spend this money (or invest it, which is essentially giving it to someone else to spend). The people banks give the money to immediately face the same problem; they have more money than they plan on holding. What follows is a game of hot potato, as everyone in the economy tries to keep their account balances where they want them (by spending money).

If there is free capacity in the economy (e.g. factories are idle, people are unemployed, etc.), then this free capacity eventually absorbs the money (that is to say: people who had less money on hand then they desired are quite happy to grab and hold onto the extra money). If there is very little free capacity in the economy however (i.e. unemployment is low, production high), then this money really cannot be spent to produce anything extra. Instead, we have more money, chasing the same amount of goods and services. The end result of that is prices increasing – what we call inflation – or, just as correctly, money becoming worth less.

Once prices rise, people realize they need to hold onto slightly more money and a new equilibrium is reached.

After all, the money that people are holding onto is really acting as a unit of account. It denotes how many days (or weeks, or months) of consumption they want to have easy access to. Inflation changes how much money you need to hold onto to keep the same number of days (weeks, months) of production [17].

Now, let’s run this whole thing in reverse. Instead of increasing the supply of money, the money supply is decreasing (or failing to grow at the expected rate). Maybe there were new reserve requirements, or a financial crash, or the central bank misjudged the amount of money it needed to create [18]. Regardless of how it happens, someone who was expecting to get some money isn’t going to get it.

This person (bank, corporation) will find themself having less cash on hand then they hoped for and will cut back on their spending. This spending was going to someone else who was hoping for it. And suddenly the whole economy is trying to collectively spend less money, which it can’t do right away.

Instead, money becomes relatively more valuable as everyone scrambles for it. This looks like prices going down.

The price of labour (wages), might, in theory be expected to go down, but in practice it doesn’t. It’s very emotionally taxing to try and convince many employees to accept pay cuts (in addition to being bad for morale), so firms tend to prefer pay freezes, cutting back on contract labour, switching some workers to part-time, and firings to pay cuts [19].

Decreased growth in the rate of money affects more than just workers. Factories close or sit idle. Economic capacity diminishes. Ultimately, the whole economy can spend less, if some of the economy is gone.

All of these taken together are the hallmarks of recession. We see job losses, idle capacity, and closures. And we can directly point at failures of central bank policy as the culprit.

Can changes in the growth rate of money affect anything else?

There are three interesting relationships between inflation and employment.

First, it seems that higher than expected inflation leads to increased employment. Friedman and Schwartz speculated that this occurs because corporations are better positioned to see inflation than workers. When they see evidence of inflation, they can quickly hire workers at previously normal salaries. These salaries represent something of a discount when there’s unexpected inflation, so it’s quite a steal for the companies.

Unfortunately, this effect doesn’t persist. As soon as everyone understands that inflation has increased, they bake this into their expectations of salaries and raises. Labour stops being artificially cheap, and companies may end up letting go of some of the newly hired workers.

Second, it seems that increasing money supply is correlated with increasing real wages, that is, wages that are already adjusted for inflation. While it makes sense that inflation will lead to an increase in nominal wages (that is, inflation leads to higher salaries, even if those salaries cannot buy anything extra), it’s a bit odder that it leads to higher real wages. I haven’t yet seen an explanation for why this is true, but it’s an interesting tidbit and one I hope to understand better in the future [20].

Finally, inflation can play an important role in avoiding job losses. Not all economic downturns are caused by central banks. Sometimes, the shock is external (like an earthquake, commodity crash, or a trade embargo). In these cases, certain sectors of the economy may be facing losses and may respond with firing (as we saw above, wage cuts are rarely considered a tenable option). However, inflation can act as an implicit wage cut and stop job losses long enough for the economy to adjust.

If salaries are kept constant while inflation continues apace (or even increases), they become relatively less expensive, all without the emotional toll that wage cuts take. This can protect jobs and engineer a “soft landing”, where a shock doesn’t lead to any large-scale job losses.

Obviously, this has to be temporary, so as not to erode the purchasing power of workers too much, but most shocks are temporary, so this is not a difficult constraint.

Okay, what does this say about policy?

There are three main policy takeaways from this post.

First, interest rates are a bad policy indicator. It’s hard for people to break their association between easy money and low interest rates, which means monetary policy is likely to end up too tight. The best analogy I’ve heard for interest rates are a steering wheel that sometimes points a bus left when turned left and sometimes points the bus left when turned right. If you wouldn’t get in a bus driven like that, you shouldn’t be thrilled about being in an economy that’s being driven in the exact same way.

Second, a stable monetary policy is very useful. Note that stable monetary policy implies neither stable interest rates, nor stable inflation. Rather, a stable monetary policy means that everyone can have confidence that the central bank will act in predictable and productive ways. Stable monetary policy smooths out the peaks and valleys of the business cycle. It stops highs from becoming too speculative and keeps lows from leading to terrible grinding unemployment. It also lets unions and workers bargain for long-term wage increases and allows companies to grant them without being scared they’ll become unsustainable due to below-target inflation.

Third, expectations are a powerful tool. If banks believe that the central bank will print lots of money (and buy lots of assets) during a crisis, they won’t have to stop making loans, or increase their reserves. Sometimes, the mere expectation of a forceful government intervention prevents any need for the intervention (like with deposit insurance; it rarely pays out because its existence has drastically reduced the need for it). Had the Federal Reserve reacted more aggressively to the financial crisis, it may have been possible to avoid the massive bailout to financial companies.

I know that “the money supply” will never be a progressive priority. But I think it’s a thing that progressives should care about. Billionaires may not like bad monetary policy, but they aren’t the ones who feel the brunt of its failure. Those are the workers who are laid off, or the pensioners who lose their savings.

I hope I’ve made the case that in order to care about them, we need to care about how money works.

Further Reading and Sources

I drew heavily on Money in Historical Perspective, by Anna J. Schwartz when writing this blog post. The papers Money and Business Cycles (1963, with Milton Friedman), Why Money Matters (1969), The Importance of Stable Money: Theory and Evidence (1983, with Michael D. Bordo), and Real and Pseudo-Financial Crises (1986) were particularly informative.

Scott Sumner’s blog The Money Illusion is an excellent resource for current monetarist thought, while J. P. Koning’s blog Moneyness provides many excellent historical anecdotes about money.


Like all of my posts about economics, this one contains way too many footnotes. These footnotes are mainly clarifying anecdotes, definitions, and comments. I’ve relegated them here because they aren’t necessary for understanding this post, but I think they still can be useful.

[1] Separately, banks create currency for day to day use based on the public’s demand for currency. The more you go to the ATM, the more bills the central bank creates for you to withdraw. Banks return currency to the central bank every so often (either to buy assets the central bank holds, or to replace it with its digital equivalents). If fewer people want cash and ATMs are overprovisioned, banks will deposit more cash with the central bank than they, as a whole, withdraw.

Therefore, while the central bank controls the growth of the money supply, the public collectively determines the growth in the cash supply. While in general the cash supply continues to grow, this may change as more and more commerce becomes digital. Sweden has already reached peak cash and is now seeing their total cash supply decline (without a corresponding decrease in money supply). ^

[2] That would be to say, that money decreases at or near the peak of a business cycles because of some delayed effect from the previous business cycle, rather than as an independent variable that will affect the current business cycle. ^

[3] Furthermore, it seems that depressions can be transmitted among countries with a common currency source (e.g. the gold standard, the current international dollar based payment regime), but are less likely transmitted outside of their home regime. China, for example, did not see a contraction during the first part of the Great Depression (it used silver as its monetary base, rather than gold) and only saw a contraction once the US began buying up silver, effectively shrinking the Chinese monetary supply. ^

[4] Although crucially, they don’t allow instant withdrawals, because they require some time to sell assets. ^

[5] We aren’t losing anything by making this distinction. The growth of products like credit cards has not affected the monetary transmission mechanism, see Has the Growth of Money Substitutes Hindered Monetary Policy? By Anna J Schwartz and Philip Cagan, 1975. ^

[6] Financial terms referring to banks are often oddly inverted. Customer deposits with banks are termed liabilities (as the bank is liable to return them), while loans the bank has made are assets (as someone else will hopefully pay the bank back for them). If you want to see which of your friends have been reading about economics, say “I think a lot of the loans that bank made have become liabilities”. The ones who visibly twitch or look confused are the ones studying economics. ^

[7] In addition to regulation, government policy can affect the deposit-reserve ratio. In the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve began, for the first time, to pay interest on reserves (both required reserves and excess reserves). This move led to a huge increase in excess reserves (to more than 16x required reserves by 2011; this happened because banks became very risk averse during the crisis and getting interest on their excess reserves became a risk-free way to make money) and a precipitous drop in the deposit-reserve ratio, which, as we discussed above, means a precipitous drop in the supply of money (which tends to lead to recessions and depressions). Scott Sumner calls this one of the greatest ever failures of monetary policy. ^

[8] In addition to cutting back on loans, this often results in banks selling assets, to try and increase the amount of cash they have on hand. If multiple banks run into trouble at once and they sell similar assets at the same time the value of the assets can drop precipitously, forcing other banks to sell and raising the possibility of multiple bank failures. This is called contagion, a word that came up a lot in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. ^

[9] “Full employment” is a term economists use to mean “the unemployment rate during neutral macroeconomic conditions”, which is simply the unemployment rate outside of a recession or a speculative bubble. It’s my opinion that full employment is heavily dependent on the political and culture features of a country. Canada and America, for example, have rather different full employment rates (Canada’s allows more unemployment). I’d argue this is because Canada has more of a social safety net, which would imply that some people working in the US at “full employment” really would prefer not to work, but feel they have no other choice. This seems to fit well with empirical data. For example, when the extended unemployment benefits program ended in 2015, we simultaneously saw a drop in the unemployment rate and a decrease in wages. This is consistent with unemployed people suddenly scrambling for jobs at rather worse terms than they’d previously hoped for. ^

[10] Narrow exceptions apply and normally represent some sort of promotion or implicit sale. For example, short-term car loans on last year’s models will often be discounted below the target rate. It is generally a good idea to take a short-term loan at a below-target interest rate rather than pay a lump. This is not financial advice. ^

[11] Technically, for an event to qualify as a recession, there must be two quarters of successive contraction in national GDP. This never occurred during (or after) the Dot-com crash. Interestingly, the initial contraction was immediately preceded by the Federal Reserve signalling its intent to tighten monetary policy so as to rein in speculation, which it did by raising the interest rate target three times in quick succession. When markets crashed, it quickly reversed course, which may have played a role in averting a longer recession. ^

[12] This is another way of saying either “they try and return a deposit-reserve ratio that has become too high to normal” or “they try and shrink their deposit-reserve ratio”. In either case, the money supply is going to shrink. ^

[13] Banks, as Matt Levine likes to say are “a magical place that transforms risky illiquid long-term loans into safe immediately accessible deposits.” He goes on to point out that “like most magic, this requires a certain suspension of disbelief”. This is pretty socially useful; we want people to trust their bank accounts, but we also want loans for things like houses and factories and college to exist. Most of the time the magic works and everything is fine. But if people stop believing in the magic, it turns out that the guy behind the curtain is a bunch of loans that you can’t call due right away. If you try to, the bank fails. ^

[14] Remember, this is generally a good thing as it makes bank services much more affordable. If banks held onto all their reserves, banking services would be very expensive and many more disadvantaged people would be unbanked. ^

[15] Before insurance, only the first people to get to the bank would get their money back. This meant that you had a strong incentive to pull your money out at the very first sign of trouble. Otherwise stable and well-run banks could be undone by a rumour, as everyone panicked and flocked to the withdrawal counter. Deposit insurance changes the game; now no one has to rush to be first, which means no one needs to withdraw at all. ^

[16] Runaway inflation is bad! But a decrease in the money supply, or a decrease in the growth rate of the money supply is bad as well. A very irresponsible program of monetary growth could trigger double digit inflation. Failure to respond promptly to a decrease in the growth rate of money will cause a recession. Unfortunately, central banks aren’t blamed for recessions (by the government or the general populace) but are blamed for inflation, so they tend to act to minimize their chance of being blamed, instead of acting to maximize social good. ^

[17] Now in real life (as opposed to this simplified model), people probably don’t immediately spend or invest absolutely every extra dollar they get. They may expect to spend some extra in the near future and want to hold it in cash, or they may want to build up more than of a cushion.

This would be an example of an inelastic relationship, where a change in one variable (money supply) leads to a less than proportional change in another (spending/investment).

Still, the more money that is dumped into the economy, the closer we get to the idealized model. If you win $100 in a lottery, you may just leave it in your bank account. But if you win $1,000,000 you’re going to be spending some of it and investing a lot of the rest. ^

[18] Remember, it is possible for the central bank to increase interest rates (create less money) without changing the monetary growth rate. If banks are creating a lot of money and the economy is already at capacity, the central bank can sometimes safely cut back on the amount of money it’s creating while still allowing adequate money to be created by banks. This is why central banks often raise interest rates during booms. It can be necessary to keep inflation from rising. ^

[19] I am not the first to wonder if co-ops might be more “recession-proof” than conventional firms. Since co-ops generally operate via profit-sharing, rather than set wages, they may exhibit less downwards nominal wage rigidity (the economic term for people’s aversion to pay cuts), which means they might weather recessions with wage cuts, rather than outright job losses. I haven’t been able to find any studies on this subject, but I’d be very interested to see if they exist. ^

[20] There is a strain of leftist thought that views Paul Volcker reining in inflation as much worse for workers than any policy of Reagan’s. I’m trying to find a better explanation of this position somewhere and plan to write about it once I do. ^

Literature, Philosophy, Politics

Book Review: On Violence



















































Economics, Politics, Quick Fix

Against Degrowth
















History, Literature

Book Review: The Horse The Wheel And Language

The modern field of linguistics dates from 1786, when Sir Willian Jones, a British judge sent to India to learn Sanskrit and serve on the colonial Supreme Court, realized just how similar Sanskrit was to Persian, Latin, Greek, Celtic, Gothic, and English (yes, he really spoke all of those). He concluded that the similarities in grammar were too close to be the result of chance. The only reasonable explanation, he claimed, was the descent of these languages from some ancient progenitor.

This ancestor language is now awkwardly known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It and the people who spoke it are the subject of David Anthony’s book The Horse The Wheel And Language [1]. I picked up the book hoping to learn a bit about really ancient history. I ended up learning some of that, but this is more a book about linguistics and archeology than about history.

Proto-Indo-European speakers produced no written works, so almost all of their specific history is lost. The oldest products of their daughter languages – like the Rig Veda – date from well after the last speakers of the original language passed away.

Instead of the history that is largely barred to us, this book is really Professor David Anthony attempting to figure out who these speakers were and what their lives looked like, without the benefit of any written words. He does this via two channels: their language, and the physical remains of their culture.

Unfortunately, there is at least one glaring problem with each approach. Their language is thoroughly dead and there was (at the time of writing) no scholarly consensus on where they originated.

Professor Anthony is undaunted by these problems. It turns out that we can reconstruct their language and from that reconstruction, determine where they most likely lived. If both approaches are done properly, it should be possible to see archeological details reflected in their language and details of their language reflected in their remains.

The first problem to solve then is the reconstruction of PIE. How does one do this?

Well it turns out that all languages change in similar ways. The way we pronounce consonants often shift, with hard sounds sometimes changing into soft sounds, but very rarely the reverse. How we say words also changes. Assimilation occurs because we tend to omit difficult to pronounce or inconvenient middle syllables (this has led to the invention of contractions in English) and addition happens because we add syllables in the middle of difficult tongue movements (compare the “proper” and colloquial ways of pronouncing the word “nuclear” or the difference between the French athlète and the English athlete).

It would be very odd for an additional syllable to be added in an area where tongue movements aren’t particularly hard, or a syllable to be removed from a word that is typically enunciated. Above all, these changes are regular because they rely on predictable laziness.

Changes tend to happen to many words at once. When people began to hear the Proto-French tsentum (root of cent, the French word for 100) as different from the Latin kentum, they had to make a decision about how exactly it would be pronounced. They chose a soft-c, a sound Latin lacks, but that is easier to say. This change got carried over to every ts-, c-, or k-, that had previously made the same sound as kentum/tsentum, except those before a back vowel (like “o”), presumably because a soft sound there is actually harder to say [2].

There’s one final type of change that Anthony mentions: analogy. This is where a grammatical rule used in a single place (e.g. pluralization with -s or -es) is expanded to encompass many more words or cases (most English nouns were originally pluralized with other suffixes, or with stem changes like “geese”; it was only later that people decided -s and -es would be the general markers of plural nouns).

If you have a large sample of languages descended from a historical language (and with Proto-Indo-European, there really is no lack), you can follow a bunch of words backwards through likely changes and see if they all end up in the same place.

If you do this for the modern words for “hundred” from many PIE daughter languages, you’re left with *km’tom (an asterisk is used before sounds where there is no direct evidence). All words for hundred in modern descendants (as well as dead ancient descendants that we know how to speak) of Proto-Indo-European can be derived from *km’tom using only well-attested to and empirically observed rules of language change.

(I occasionally got chills reading reconstructed words. It’s amazing how some words that our distant ancestors spoke thousands upon thousands of years ago are fairly well preserved in our modern speech.)

This is pretty cool, because it allows us to start seeing which words were common enough in Proto-Indo-European to be passed down to all daughters and which words were borrowed in.

With a reconstructed vocabulary of about 1,500 words, we can figure out some things that were important to Proto-Indo-Europeans. They seem to have words for relatives on the male side, but not the female side. This suggests that after marriage, the wife moved in with the groom. Less domestically, they seemed to have a word for cattle rustling, suggesting that they weren’t unfamiliar with increasing their wealth at the expense of their neighbours’.

That’s not all we can get from their words. Linguists also believe that Proto-Indo-Europeans had chiefs, who in turn had patrons. They worshipped a male sky deity and sacrificed horses and cattle to him. They formed warrior bands. They avoided speaking the name of the bear. They drove, or knew of, wagons. And they had two words that we could translate as sacred, “that which is forbidden” and “that which is imbued with holiness”.

(There are many more minor cultural touchstones scattered throughout the book. I don’t want to spoil them all.)

We also know the animals and plants they had words for. Reconstructed PIE has words for temperate trees, horses and cows, bees and honey.

These give us clues to where they lived, in the same way that knowing the words “shinney”, “hockey”, “Zamboni” and “creek” are spoken somewhere might help you make a guess as to where that somewhere is.

And while these words help us rule out the Mediterranean and the deserts, they don’t give us much in the way of a specific location without a when, which requires two different methods.

First, we can figure out the approximate death of Proto-Indo-European, the approximate century or millennium when it was entirely splintered into its daughters, by using what linguists have discovered about the rate of language change.

While most vocabulary changes rather quickly, making this a poor tool for dating very old languages, there are a group of words, the core vocabulary, that change much more slowly. The core vocabulary of any language is only a couple hundred words, but they’re some of the most important ones. Normally, core vocabulary includes the words for: body parts, small numbers, close relatives, a few basic needs, a couple of natural features or domesticated animals, some pronouns, and some conjunctions.

English, a prolific borrower, has borrowed 50% of its total vocabulary from the romance languages. It’s core vocabulary, however, is largely free of this borrowing, with only 4% of core vocabulary words borrowed from romance languages.

Core vocabulary changes by about 14-19% every thousand years depending on the language. It’s also known that once two dialects differ by more than 10% of their core vocabulary, they are more properly thought of as separate languages.

Here’s where written language comes in handy. By comparing written inscriptions with known creation dates in different daughter languages, we can make a guess as to when the languages diverged.

The oldest inscriptions in a PIE-derived language are in the Anatolian languages (which were spoken in what is now Turkey). However, Anthony chooses not to use these, because they entirely lack many grammatical innovations that are otherwise common in daughter languages. This leads him to believe that they split away much earlier than other daughters. The presence of later shared innovations means that at the time of the Anatolian split, Proto-Indo-European was probably still a living language and still evolving.

Better candidates are archaic Greek and Old-Indic, both of which have inscriptions dated to around 1,450 BCE. By comparing the differences in wording and grammar between these two and using known rates of change, Anthony dates the end of Proto-Indo-European at around 2,500 BCE. This means that after 2,500 BCE, it doesn’t make sense to speak of a single unified Proto-Indo-European language.

Second is the birth date, the other half of the critical window. To find it, Anthony looks for words that have a known date of invention, specifically “wool” and “wagon”. Getting broadly useful amounts of wool from sheep wasn’t possible until a mutation made sheep coats much larger. We know roughly when this mutation occurred, because sheep suddenly became a larger portion of herds around 3,500 BCE, displacing goats (which produce more milk). The only reasonably explanation for this event is the advent of wool producing sheep, which were very valuable as a source of clothes.

Similarly, wagons have left physical evidence (both directly and in preserved images) and that evidence has been carbon dated to 3,500 BCE [3].

Since all Proto-Indo-European languages outside of the Anatolian branch have related words for both “wagon” and “wool” that show no evidence of borrowing from other languages, it seems reasonable to conclude that some form of the language existed when wagons and wool first began to reshape the pre-historic world. That means the language had to exist by 3,500 BCE.

There is, I should note, one competing theory that Anthony outlines, in which PIE and Indo-Hittite languages split around 7,500 BCE. This theory requires several unlikely things to happen however; it requires the word for wagon to evolve from the same verb meaning “to turn” in both branches (five similar verbs existed), it requires the PIE speaking people to disperse over all of Europe and become the dominant culture then (this would have been very hard pre-horse domestication, when material cultures were small and language territories tended to be much smaller than modern countries), and all of this would have to happen while material cultures were becoming very different but languages (supposedly) weren’t evolving.

Anthony doesn’t give this theory much credence.

With a rough time-range, we can begin looking for our Proto-Indo-Europeans in space. Anthony does this by looking for evidence of very old loan words. He finds a set coming from Uralic, which also has a bevy of very old loanwords from PIE [4].

Uralic (appropriately) probably first emerged somewhere near the Ural Mountains. This corresponds well with our other evidence because the area around the Urals (where borrowing could have taken place) is temperate and home to the flora and fauna words we know exist in PIE.

The PIE word for honey, *médhu (note its similarity with the English word for a fermented honey drink, “mead” [5]), is particularly useful here. We know that bees weren’t common in Siberia during the time when we suspect PIE was being spoken (and where they were common, the people weren’t herders), but that bees were common on the other side of the Urals.

Laying it all out, we see that PIE speakers were herders (there’s an expansive set of words relating to the tasks herders must accomplish), who lived near the Urals but not in Siberia. The best archeological match for these criteria is a set of herder people who lived in what is now modern-day Ukraine and it is these people that Anthony identifies as the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

If this feels at all dry, I want to assure you that it wasn’t when I read it. I felt that the first section of the book was the strongest. Anthony provides an excellent overview of linguistics, archeology, and some of the crazy stuff he’s had to invent to help him in his studies.

For example, he believes that horses were ridden much earlier than was commonly thought, perhaps around or before 3,500 BCE. To prove this, him and his wife embarked on a study of how bits wear teeth in horses’ mouths, which culminated in empirical studies with a variety of bit types (including rope) done on live horses that had never been previously given bits, assessed using electron microscopy. The whole thing is a bit bonkers, but it has resulted in a validated test that allows archeologists to determine if a given horse was ever ridden, as well as vindication for Anthony’s chronology of domestication.

Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of the book was genuinely dry. There was a dizzying array of cultures inhabiting the Eurasian steppes in the period Anthony covers, each with their own house type, pottery type, antecedents, and descendants. Anthony goes through these in excruciating detail. It’s the sort of thing that other archeologists love him for – a lot of these cultures are very poorly described outside of Russian language publications – but it’s hard for a lay-person to follow. I may have pulled it off if I built a giant flow chart, but as it was, I mostly felt overwhelmed.

(Anthony has to go through them all to explain how PIE-derived languages ended up everywhere we know them to have. People of Europe don’t speak PIE-derived languages just because of Latin. Many people the Romans conquered spoke languages that were distantly related to the invader’s tongue. Those languages need to be accounted for in any theory about Proto-Indo-Europeans.)

This is disappointing, because the history started off so engagingly. Anthony outlines how the earliest ancestors of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had persistent cultural frontiers with hunter-gatherers on the Urals on one side and the farmers in the Bug-Dniester valley on the other.

The herding and farming economies required a moral shift from previous hunter-gatherer practices, one that would see agriculturalists harden their hearts to their own children starving, if the only thing that could assuage their hunger was their last few breeding pairs or their seed grain. This is the first time I saw someone lay out the moral transformation necessary to accept agricultural and having it laid out so starkly made it much easier to understand why not every pre-historic group was willing to adopt it.

(I had always thought the biggest moral change was accepting accumulation of wealth, but this one is, I think, more important.)

This is not to say that the herders and farmers were exactly alike; their different ways of life meant they were culturally distinct. In addition to their dwellings and material culture, they differed in funeral customs and probably in religion. Everything we know about early-PIE speakers suggest that they worshipped a sky god of some sort. The farmers who lived next door decorated their houses with female figurines, figures that never show up in any excavation of herder camps or grave sites.

I was also shocked at the amount of long distance trade and the wealth acquisition that was going on 6,000 years ago. There are kurgans (circular rock topped graves) with grave goods from Mesopotamia dating from that long ago, as well as one kurgan where someone was buried with almost 4 kilograms of gold ornamentation.

The herders and farmers didn’t live next door in harmony forever. Changes to their stable arrangement happened as a result of one of the Earth’s period historical climate fluctuations (which caused a collapse among many of the farmers and may have led to more raiding from the early-PIE speaking herders) and later the adoption of horse-riding (which made raiding easier) and wagons (which allowed herders to bring water with them and opened the inner steppes up to grazing).

Larger herds and changing boundaries led to clashes among the herders (we’ve found kurgans where the bodies bear marks of violent deaths) and to raids on agriculturalists (we’ve found burned villages peppered with arrows), although interestingly, never the farmers directly adjacent to the steppes. It may be that the herders didn’t want to disrupt their trading relationships with their neighbours and so were careful to raid dozens of kilometers away from their own borders (a task made easier with horses).

The farmers were no pushovers; some of their towns held up to 10,000 people by the third millennium BCE. These towns were bigger than the cities of Mesopotamia, but lacked the civic organizational features of the true cities of the Fertile Crescent.

And it was at about this point in the narrative where the number of cultures proliferated beyond my ability to follow and I began writing down interesting facts rather than keeping track of the grand narrative.

Here are a few that I liked the most:

  • About 20% of corpses in warrior graves (those with weapons and other symbols of membership in warrior society) whose gender is known are female. This matches the percentage in much later steppe graves. As Kameron Hurley said, women have always fought.
  • Contrary to popular stereotypes, the cultures of the Eurasia steppes weren’t reliant on cities for manufactured goods. They had their own potters and metalsmiths and they made many mining camps. In fact, by the 2000s BCE, it seems that Mesopotamian cities were dependent metal mined on the steppes,
  • In the early Bronze Age, tin was worth its weight in silver. When tin wasn’t available, bronze was made with arsenic.
  • Horses were probably domesticated because they winter better than the other animals that were available in Eurasia at the time. Cows will starve to death if grass is hidden by snow, while sheep and goats use their nose to move snow off of grass (which means that they’re helpless once it’s covered in ice). Sheep, cows, and goats are all unable to drink water that is covered in ice. Horses break ice and move snow with their hooves, making winter no real inconvenience to them. Mixing horses with cows can allow cows to eat the grass that horses uncover.
  • Disaffected farmers may have been attracted to the herding economy because wealth was much easier to build up. Farmland is hard to acquire more of without angering your neighbours, but herds given good pasture will naturally grow exponentially. A lot of the spread of the herding economy into Europe probably used some sort of franchise system, where locals joined the PIE culture and were given some animals, in exchange for providing protection and labour to their patron.

I’ve struggled through a lot of books that are clearly meant for people more knowledgeable in the subject than I am. It might just be a function of how interested I am in archeology (that is to say: only tolerably interested) that this is the first of them that I wish had an abridged edition. If you aren’t deeply interested in archaeology or pre-history, there’s a lot of this book that you’ll probably end up skimming.

The rest of it makes up for that. But I think there would be market for Anthony to write another leaner volume, meant for a more general audience.

If he ever does, I’ll probably give it a read.


[1] David Anthony is very sensitive to the political ends that some scholars of Proto-Indo-European have turned to. He acknowledges that white supremacists appropriated the self-designation of “Aryan” used by some later speakers of PIE-derived languages and used it to refer to some sort of ancient master race. Professor Anthony does not buy into this one bit. He points out that Aryan was always a cultural term, not a racial one (showing the historical ignorance of the racists) and he is careful to avoid assigning any special moral or mythical virtue to the Proto-Indo-Europeans whose culture he studies.

White supremacists will find nothing to like about this book, unless they engage in a deliberate misreading. ^

[2] This is why the French côte is still similar to the Latin costa. ^

[3] Anthony identifies improvements in carbon dating, especially improvements in how we calibrate for diets high in fish (which contain older carbon, leading to incorrect ages) as a major factor in his ability to untangle the story of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. ^

[4] Uralic is the language family that in modern times includes Finnish and some languages spoken in Russia. ^

[5] While looking up the word *médhu, I found out that it is also likely the root of the Old Chinese word for honey, via an extinct Proto-Indo-European language, Tocharian. The speakers of Tocharian migrated from the Proto-Indo-European homeland to Xinjiang, in what is now China, which is likely where the borrowing took place. ^

Model, Politics, Quick Fix

The Nixon Problem























Model, Philosophy, Quick Fix

Post-modernism and Political Diversity

I was reading a post-modernist critique of capitalist realism – the resignation to capitalism as the only practical way to organize a society, arising out of the failure of the Soviet Union – and I was struck by something interesting about post-modernism.

Insofar as post-modernism stands for anything, it is a critique of ideology. Post-modernism holds that there is no privileged lens with which to view the world; that even empiricism is suspect, because it too has a tendency to reproduce and reify the power structures in which in exists.

A startling thing then, is the sterility of the post-modernist political landscape. It is difficult to imagine a post-modernist who did not vote for Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein. Post-modernism is solely a creature of the left and specifically that part of the left that rejects the centrist compromise beloved of the incrementalist or market left.

There is a fundamental conflict between post-modernism’s self-proclaimed positioning as an ideology without an ideology – the only ideology conscious of its own construction – and its lack of political diversity.

Most other ideologies are tolerant of political divergence. Empiricists are found in practically every political party (with the exception, normally, being those controlled by populists) because empiricism comes with few built in moral commitments and politics is as much about what should be as what is. Devout Catholics also find themselves split among political parties, as they balance the social justice and social order messages of their religion. You will even, I would bet, find more evangelicals in the Democratic party than you will find post-modernists in the Republican party (although perhaps this would just be an artifact of their relative population sizes).

Even neoliberals and economists, the favourite target of post-modernists, find their beliefs cash out to a variety of political positions, from anarcho-capitalism or left-libertarianism to main-street republicanism.

It is hard to square the narrowness of post-modernism’s political commitments with its anti-ideological intellectual commitments. Post-modernism positions itself in communion with the Real, that which “any [constructed, as through empiricism] ‘reality’ must suppress”. Yet the political commitments it makes require us to believe that the Real is in harmony with very few political positions.

If this were the actual position of post-modernism, then it would be vulnerable to a post-modernist critique. Why should a narrow group of relatively privileged academics in relatively privileged societies have a monopoly on the correct means of political organization? Certainly, if economics professors banded together to claim they had discovered the only means of political organization and the only allowable set of political beliefs, post-modernists would be ready with that spiel. Why then, should they be exempt?

If post-modernism instead does not believe it has found a deeper Real, then it must grapple with its narrow political attractions. Why should we view it as anything but a justification for a certain set of policy proposals, popular among its members but not necessarily elsewhere?

I believe there is value in understanding that knowledge is socially constructed, but I think post-modernism, by denying any underlying physical reality (in favour of a metaphysical Real) removes itself from any sort of feedback loop that could check its own impulses (contrast: empiricism). And so, things that are merely fashionable among its adherents become de facto part of its ideology. This is troubling, because the very virtue of post-modernism is supposed to be its ability to introspect and examine the construction of ideology.

This paucity of political diversity makes me inherently skeptical of any post-modernist identified Real. Absent significant political diversity within the ideological movement, it’s impossible to separate an intellectually constructed Real from a set of political beliefs popular among liberal college professors.

And “liberal college professors like it” just isn’t a real political argument.

Model, Politics

The Character of Leaders is the Destiny of Nations





















Military Dictatorships






























