Monday, April 16, 2018
Public good provision is a powerful channel through which persistence in comparative development comes about
From On Roman roads and the sources of persistence and non-persistence in development by Carl-Johan Dalgaard, Nicolai Kaarsen, Ola Olsson, Pablo Selaya.
Click to enlarge.
The researchers do their best to control a variety of confounding variables.
What is interesting to me is their exploitation of a natural historical experiment, the fact that wheeled transport disappeared in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during the second half of the first millennium CE. What they find is that:
Spatial differences in economic development tend to be highly persistent over time. Comin et al. (2010) document, for example, that countries that were closer to the technological frontier as early as 1500 CE are comparatively richer and more technologically sophisticated today, while Maloney and Valencia (2016) document persistence in population density across half a millennium, comparing regions at the sub-national level within the New World. Findings such as these have led to a large literature that tries to identify fundamental sources of comparative development in initial conditions, and historical processes from the distant past. Spolaore and Wacziarg (2013), Nunn (2014), and Ashraf and Galor (2018) present recent surveys. At the same time, differences in comparative development are not always persistent. For example, Acemoglu et al. (2002) document a reversal of fortune across former colonies during the last 500 years.They overlay a map of Roman Roads on modern satellite maps that capture nighttime luminosity as a crude proxy for development.
These findings raise questions about which proximate factors generate the observed persistence in comparative development, and why the persistence sometimes breaks down. In this regard, we know much less. A deeper understanding of the channels through which persistence in comparative development emerges may leave clues about which fundamentals are important, and how to support development in situations where these fundamentals are lacking.
In a recent study, we explore the persistence and non-persistence of a key proximate source of growth – public goods provision (Dalgaard et al. 2018). The specific form of public good in focus is roads, and we take the roads built during the Roman Empire as our point of departure. In particular, we examine the persistence in road density across time, and its role in generating persistence in economic development across regions that were part of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the 2nd century.
The researchers do their best to control a variety of confounding variables.
What is interesting to me is their exploitation of a natural historical experiment, the fact that wheeled transport disappeared in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during the second half of the first millennium CE. What they find is that:
In some ways, the emergence of the Roman road network is almost a natural experiment – in light of the military purpose of the roads, the preferred straightness of their construction, and their construction in newly conquered and often undeveloped regions. This type of public good seems to have had a persistent influence on subsequent public good allocations and comparative development. At the same time, the abandonment of the wheel shock in MENA appears to have been powerful enough to cause that degree of persistence to break down. Overall, our analysis suggests that public good provision is a powerful channel through which persistence in comparative development comes about.
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Song of Life by Charles Mackay
Song of Life
by Charles Mackay
A traveller on a dusty road
Strewed acorns on the lea;
And one took root and sprouted up,
And grew into a tree.
Love sought its shade at evening-time,
To breathe its early vows;
And Age was pleased, in heights of noon,
To bask beneath its boughs.
The dormouse loved its dangling twigs,
The birds sweet music bore—
It stood a glory in its place,
A blessing evermore.
A little spring had lost its way
Amid the grass and fern;
A passing stranger scooped a well
Where weary men might turn.
He walled it in, and hung with care
A ladle on the brink;
He thought not of the deed he did,
But judged that Toil might drink.
He passed again; and lo! the well,
By summer never dried,
Had cooled ten thousand parchéd tongues,
And saved a life beside.
A nameless man, amid the crowd
That thronged the daily mart,
Let fall a word of hope and love,
Unstudied from the heart,
A whisper on the tumult thrown,
A transitory breath,
It raised a brother from the dust,
It saved a soul from death.
O germ! O fount! O word of love!
O thought at random cast!
Ye were but little at the first,
But mighty at the last.
Why does the public conversation deviate so markedly from the facts?
The tone and language are somewhat off or needlessly combative but The Gun Homicide Epidemic Isn’t by BJ Campbell raises couple of interesting points. His topic is interesting and factually treated but I think he undermines it through the occasional left:right reference.
Is there anything that might be done to improve the security through more effective policing? Given the frequency with which actual violence is committed by previously known attackers, it seems to be a reasonable question and yet it is rarely a part of the conversation.
I am not predisposed one way or another. I suspect there might be two strong cases to be made against the charge of policing incompetence.
Similarly, Campbell may be right or wrong in some of his suppositions but he is posing reasonable, in fact necessary, evidentiary questions that simply do not receive much attention. If we are concerned about violence, it is to the evidence we need to be turning, not the emotion and the virtue signaling.
How can there be such a sustained mismatch between facts and policy conversations?Beyond these questions raised or implied by Campbell, there is another.
Why is there such gun control enthusiasm in some quarters when gun violence is at an historic low?
Why is the focus on gun ownership rather than governmental effectiveness?
Why is suicide prevention being ignored in pursuit of gun control?
What are the underlying causes of violent crime, why is it higher in the US than other OECD countries, and why does there appear to be a cyclicality to that violence?
Why do our major institutions of knowledge generation and conveyance (universities and mainstream media) fail so significantly in terms of accuracy, precision, and the scientific method?
What is the link between violent crime and substance abuse (drugs and alcohol)?
What role does the mainstream media play in trafficking in false knowledge, cause or effect?
Why is there such a common media inclination to focus on the incidental rather than the causally substantive?
Why is there not more attention on government culpability and policy with regard to violent crime?In at least a plurality of mass shootings, if not a majority, in the past decade, the shooter was an individual already known to the authorities as a risk. Pulse Night Club, Parkland School Shooting, San Bernardino, Boston Bombing, Garland Texas, Fort Hood, etc. All incidents of violent crime where the perpetrators had been previously investigated or were being actively monitored.
Is there anything that might be done to improve the security through more effective policing? Given the frequency with which actual violence is committed by previously known attackers, it seems to be a reasonable question and yet it is rarely a part of the conversation.
I am not predisposed one way or another. I suspect there might be two strong cases to be made against the charge of policing incompetence.
Humans are inherently unpredictable and our forecasting capabilities regarding human intention are simply too rudimentary to be useful.Both are credible arguments but I am not familiar with research, if it exists, that might answer the question and neither proposition is self-evident. The puzzle is that there is not much discussion of those obvious propositions.
The police already forestall a great majority of planned incidents and those that do occur are in fact rare exceptions.
Similarly, Campbell may be right or wrong in some of his suppositions but he is posing reasonable, in fact necessary, evidentiary questions that simply do not receive much attention. If we are concerned about violence, it is to the evidence we need to be turning, not the emotion and the virtue signaling.
Saturday, April 14, 2018
Forbearance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Forbearance
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?
At rich men’s tables eaten bread and pulse?
Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust?
And loved so well a high behavior,
In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained,
Nobility more nobly to repay?
O, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!
Friday, April 13, 2018
Flower in the Crannied Wall by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Flower in the Crannied Wall
by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower-but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Wheeled transport disappeared in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during the second half of the first millennium CE
From On Roman roads and the sources of persistence and non-persistence in development by Carl-Johan Dalgaard, Nicolai Kaarsen, Ola Olsson, Pablo Selaya. A very clever historical natural experiment. The question is whether public infrastructure has a persistent effect over time.
Dalgaard elaborates on the loss of the wheel in the Middle East.
For two hundred some years we have become accustomed to almost uninterrupted technological progress. It is easy to forget how fragile progress can be.
From the point of view of the present study, the abandonment of the wheel experiment in MENA opens the door to an interesting set of tests. Naturally, within a region where wheeled transport disappears, one would expect to see less maintenance of (Roman) roads. Moreover, when wheeled vehicles reappear in the late modern period, the principles underlying road construction surely differed from those during Roman times. Consequently, in the MENA region, Roman roads should be a weak predictor of contemporary roads density and, by extension, Roman roads should also be a weak predictor of contemporary comparative development. In contrast, within the European region where wheeled carriages were in use throughout the period, one would expect more maintenance and therefore more persistence in road density and, by extension, Roman roads should be a stronger predictor of contemporaneous comparative development.There are plenty of instances of technological reversion. I think the classic example is the loss by Tasmanian aborigines of the stone-working technology for anything other than scrapers and hand axes.
Dalgaard elaborates on the loss of the wheel in the Middle East.
A remarkable fact of world history is that wheeled transport disappeared in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during the second half of the first millennium CE – which is perhaps especially surprising in that wheeled transport had a very long history in that region before its abandonment.Fascinating.
Bulliet (1990 [1975]) argues that the key proximate reason for the abandonment of wheeled carriages in MENA was the emergence of the camel caravan (“the ship of the desert”) as a more cost-effective mode of transporting goods. While this seems like a reasonable explanation, it immediately prompts the question of why the ox-drawn carriage then continued to dominate land-based transport until the first half of the first millennium CE. After all, the domestication of the camel on the Arabian Peninsula pre-dates the Roman era by millennia. Bulliet’s core argument is that a series of developments had to take place before the camel could emerge as the dominant mode of inland transport in MENA. In particular, the emergence of a new type of camel saddle by 100 BCE made it possible for camel herding tribesmen to utilise new types of effective weapons, which allowed them to gradually gain control of the trade routes and, therefore, gain political power as well. Accordingly, the camel caravan could not enter the scene in a major way until these events had unfolded.
For two hundred some years we have become accustomed to almost uninterrupted technological progress. It is easy to forget how fragile progress can be.
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