Nightcap

03/20/202103/20/2021 Brandon Christensen Links Aldous Huxley, British culture, federation, Immanuel Kant, James Madison, March Madness, totalitarianism

Our very British brand of totalitarianism James Jeffrey, Critic
Federalist versus democratic peace (pdf) Daniel Deudney, EJIR
Go Bruins!

Nightcap

07/28/202007/28/2020 Brandon Christensen Links British culture, Max Weber, Søren Kierkegaard, work

Searching for consolation in Max Weber’s Work Ethic George Blaustein, New Republic
Keep doing what you love Federico Varese, Times Literary Supplement
The conservative origins of British socialism Johnathan Rutherford, New Statesman
The question that tormented Søren Kierkegaard Morton Jensen, American Interest

Nightcap

04/28/202004/28/2020 Brandon Christensen Links American politics, British culture, British politics, morality

Virus deaths in Democratic and Republican states James Rogers, Law & Liberty
How fractured is the British left? Leontios Xenophilos, American Affairs
An argument against moral blameworthiness Bill Rein, NOL
Pity the poor stepmother Susan Hill, Spectator

The Good Life vs. reality

02/21/202002/21/2020 Mary Lucia Darst Culture, Liberty British culture, expectations, ideology, inequality, Jane Austen, Jethro Elsden, progress, socialism, television

Recently, a former classmate badgered me into accompanying her on a run to the supermarket. As we were checking out, I, as a person who is very dedicated to the principle of self-interest, used a handful of coupons and a discount card to lower my final tally. My companion had a judgmental reaction to the proceedings: she gave me to understand that she never sought discounts or used coupons because to do so was beneath her station. Oddly, she could see no connection between her attitude and her continuous complaints about being short on funds. It was only much later that I connected her attitude at the cash register with her frequent monologues about a “broken society,” a slight fixation on “inequality,” and an overweening sense of entitlement.

In 1971, NBC produced a sitcom called The Good Life, not to be confused with the British series of the same name. The American series was unsuccessful, in comparison to its competition, and it was canceled after fifteen episodes. I have never seen the show as NBC has never rerun it or provided a home release of it. I first heard of The Good Life in a book, whose title I have regrettably forgotten (for a long time I thought the book was Greg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox but now I can’t find any allusion to the tv show in Easterbrook’s book.). The author of the forgotten book alluded to The Good Life as a watershed moment in tv history with its portrayal of the so-called super-rich – the one bit I remember was that the book described the show as “the most luxurious show [in terms of portrayal of lifestyle]” and connected the show to a sudden increase in a broad sense of entitled victimhood throughout society. The Good Life was also, apparently, part of creating the environment conducive for the success of the soap opera Dallas (1978 – 1991).

The plot behind The Good Life is that a middle-class couple become exhausted with the pressures of suburban life and maintaining a lifestyle that’s beyond their means. Consequently, the pair decide to scam their way into the household of an industrialist multimillionaire by disguising themselves as a butler and housekeeper. The theme which (apparently) underlay the show was the idea that there is a class of people who live extravagant, exotic lives (the proverbial good life) and therefore can afford to support some sponging malcontents.

When researching the show, one thing that struck me about it was how prescient it was in terms of foretelling some of the themes which are present in our current socio-political discourse. The two con-artists are reasonably successful college graduates who believe that society promised them the good life as a reward for going to college and having careers; however, when the pair see the lifestyle shown in glossy magazines – mansions, tennis courts, Rolls-Royce cars – the couple feels that society has reneged on its promise. The logic of the show’s premise is that the couple has been pushed by society – that wicked, amorphous “they” – toward a life of deception because there is no other path to riches open to them.

LitHub ran an article titled “How the well-educated and downwardly mobile found socialism.” The article isn’t worth reading, but the title touches on what began as the fictional premise of The Good Life and has become a full blown, ideologically fraught, issue today. What happens when perception of status is overblown and there is no sense of timeframe to temper expectations?

Thinking of the popularity of AOC or Andrew Yang and the manner in which they have successfully tapped into the tropes of “unjust society” of “inequality,” the modern millennial (my own generation) seems to have embraced the premise of The Good Life. The tv show contained a very subtle, and completely subversive, inversion of the moral order: because “society’s promises” were broken, the dishonesty of the protagonists was not immoral. The extension of such reasoning is that the industrialist was obligated to support the swindlers anyway due to his greater wealth.

Capx just ran a terrific article by Jethro Elsden, “Jane Austen, the accidental economist,” in response to the new film version of Emma. One of the interesting tidbits the author found was that in modern terms, Mr Darcy’s £10,000 per annum income is probably equivalent to £60 million today, which would make his wealth around £3 billion. Even then Elizabeth Darcy had to “make small economies” once she decided to support her sponging sister and feckless brother-in-law. Granted the economies might have been the result of not telling her husband, but still the point remains that no one can long support spongers.

Elsden alluded to the logic of social pressure and the malignant effect it had on Austen’s characters who feel compelled to engage in an “arms race.” A major reason the swindlers of The Good Life turn to dishonesty is that they feel pressured to look like successful suburban college graduates. The problem was that in the case of Austen’s characters and the tv show from 154 years later, the definition of “success” in relation to appearances was fungible. Rationally, it is ridiculous for the youngish couple of The Good Life to be in same place financially and socially as their mark, the middle-aged, widower industrialist whose lifestyle (but not work ethic) they covet.

To return, finally, to the anecdote regarding my shopping expedition, the episode is an example of a type of path that begins with frivolous preconceptions and ends with The Good Life on the comic end and the rise of Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren on the other. These politicians have located a demographic which has no sense of progression of time, stages of development, or realistic expectations. A perfect example is my ex-classmate, who has subjected herself to a fantasy regarding her own realistic expectation and now believes that the social contract has been broken. For such a demographic, the emotional trumps the rational. It is easier to believe themselves wronged than as merely victims of their own imaginations.

Elite Anxiety: Paul Collier’s “Future of Capitalism”

06/16/201906/16/2019 Joakim Book Books, Economics anxiety, book review, British culture, capitalism, class, communitarianism, Paul Collier, Pragmatism, public policy, social democracy, The Future of Capitalism

Paul Collier, the controversial Oxford professor famous for his development work and his acclaimed books Exodus and The Bottom Billion, is back. But the author of Exodus and The Bottom Billion is long gone. The compelling writing and carefully reasoned world that made Bottom Billion impossible to put down has somehow disappeared. In The Future of Capitalism, Collier is tired. He is bitter. And he is sometimes quite mad – so mad that his disdain for this or that group of thinkers or actors in society consumes his otherwise brilliant analytical mind.

Instead of having his editors moderate those of his worst impulses, he doubles down on his polemic conviction. Indeed, he takes pride in offending people in all political camps, believing that it supports the book’s main intellectual point: ideologues of every persuasion are dangerous, one-size-fits-all too constricted for a modern society and we should rather turn to a communitarian social democratic version of pragmatism – by which he means some confused mixture of ideas that seem to advocate “what works” on a case-by-case basis.

Yes, it’s about as nutty as it sounds. And he is all over the place, dabbling in all kinds of topics for which he is uniquely unqualified to offer advice: ethics, finance, education, family, social policy and on and on and on.

One reason The Future of Capitalism went awry might have been the remarkable scope: capturing all the West’s so-called ‘Anxieties’ – and their solutions – in little over 200 pages of non-academic prose. Given the topic, a very unfitting sort of hubris.

Apart from the feeble attempt at portraying a modern society that has “come apart at the seams,” there’s no visible story, no connection between the contents of one paragraph and the next and hardly any connection between one chapter and another. Rather, it’s a bedlam of foregone conclusions, appeals to pragmatism, dire stings to ideological ‘extremists’ on either side and a hubris unfitting for someone like Collier. I guess this is a risk that established academics run at the end of their careers, desperately trying to assemble all their work into One Grand Theory.

The most charitable thing I can say about Collier’s attempt is that it offers a lot of policy prescriptions – tax unearned land rents, tax-and-redistribute productivity increases, expand housing supply through local governments, have governments direct the Silicon Valley-clusters of tomorrow, cap mortgage finance, benefits for families, expand ethical responsibilities of firms, encourage marriage, create a new G6 (EU, US, Russia, India, Japan, China) that could overcome the global collective action problem (good luck with that!), expand Germanic vocational training and workers’ representation on company boards, embrace patriotism but never nationalism, detach ownership from control and place control with stakeholders (workers, suppliers, local homeowners).

The common denominator seems to be an imperative to do all these things that seem to have worked well in some time or place or utopia, conveniently ignore institutional or cultural reasons, while espousing all ideological positioning and political capture.

Just voicing the suggestions ought to spark at least some fruitful conversations.

Chapter 8, ostensibly concerned with the Class Divide, is an illuminating case study. It takes Collier about 36 pages (out of 37) to mention ‘class’ (not that I blame him: the concept is way too nebulous and politically infected to be meaningfully dealt with in such short space). Instead, Collier discusses all kinds of topics whose relevance to class is quite unclear: public policy for single mothers, German vocational training, lawyers and the rule of law, a Yorkshire project to encourage reading in school kids – not to mention a ten-page digression into the institution of marriage for stable families.

When his polemics, dry writing, unsupported analysis or incomprehensive treatment of a topic hasn’t put me off (I gave up on the book at least four times during the last couple of months), some of the picture Collier paints does resonate with me. There is a social and geographical divide in Britain: the economically flourishing South-East, dominated by the well-educated English and the cosmopolitan accents of almost every language on the planet, is posited against the collapsing towns of the backward Midlands or the North. If this divide is real – in support of which Collier offers next-to-no evidence – it is not clear to me that it wasn’t already captured in, say, David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere or Branko Milanovic’s Global Inequality, or for that matter the countless of magazine articles trying to outline the fractures that Brexit unearthed about British society. Considering the effort those authors put into mapping their divides, Collier’s attempt seems frivolous.

He can do better. Much better.
___
My fellow Notewriter Rick is organising a summer reading group around Feyerabend’s Against Method. The equivalent Collier reading group could be aptly named Against Ideology.

Nightcap

05/29/201905/29/2019 Brandon Christensen Links Austrian Economics, British culture, Japanese culture, Mexican culture

Enchiladas, a culinary monument to colonialism Alexander Lee, History Today
The Marginal Revolutionaries of Austria-Hungary Tyler Cowen, MR
The other side of British India Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books
Old Tokyo, time telling, and the Chinese zodiac Claire Kohda Hazelton, Spectator

Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

04/16/201904/28/2019 Joakim Book Culture, Economics, History bonds, British culture, economic history, financial markets, literature, Martin Slater, Pride & Prejudice, Thomas Piketty, yields

On popular demand, I’m reviving a reoccurring theme of mine: teaching economic history through the lens of popular culture. Today: bonds, yields and 18th century English financial planning.

In what is probably my favourite piece ever written, I tried to estimate exactly how rich Mr. Darcy was – Mr. Darcy, of course, of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride & Prejudice. I showed that whatever method you use to translate incomes to the present, all characters in Austen’s captivating story are astonishingly rich. But, as we well know today, there are large differences even among the superrich; compare Bernie Sanders (small-time millionaire) with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (single-digit billionaires) or Jeff Bezos (wealthiest man alive).

Using Pride & Prejudice to illustrate some economic point is hardly unconventional (Piketty did this in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century), so let me similarly discuss 18th and 19th century British financial markets using the characters in this well-known tale.

The starting point is the following musing, courtesy of former Oxford Economist Martin Slater’s (2018: 52) The National Debt; how come “female characters in nineteenth-century novels always seem to have a suspiciously exact income of ‘so many pounds per year'”? Where does this money come from? Why is it so exact? And what’s the reason Piketty uses this particular literary example to illustrate the permanence and steady stream of income that capital somehow just throws off?

Consols and Financial Markets

Financial markets are truly awesome – not just in their impressive scope or potential devastation, but in the many different needs they simultaneously fulfil for many different people. Slater ably guides us through the confusing mishmash that is the 17^th and 18^th century English public finance, but what emerges by 1757, after Henry Pelham’s consolidation of government debt, is two main – and for our purposes, equivalent – securities: the Consolidated 3% Annuities (and the ‘Reduced annuities’), affectionately named ‘Consols’. These were permanent government bonds with annual interest payments of 3%. This means that they had no maturity date, i.e. the holder of the security could expect the government to keep paying 3% of the face value for all future (a Churchill-issued subsequent Consol was actually repaid and retired just a few years ago, after almost a century in service).

Two cool things happen. First, the “initial value” – the face value – of debt running in perpetuity becomes almost irrelevant, since all that matters for the issuer is the ability to maintain interest rate payments; there is no presumption of future repayment. Second, creditors – that is, holders of the Consols who receive the regular interest payments – may trade that asset on financial markets. Since the plethora of different debt assets were now condensed into a single, credible, identical and easily-identified asset, the market for 3% Consols in London developed into a very large and liquid market. With such ease of access and predictable and stable payoffs, the Consols became the instrument of saving for well-off families in Austen’s time.

A note on yields

The Consols, essentially a piece of paper with a face value of £100, entitled the owner to a perpetual stream of payments by the government, in this case 3% – or £3. Now, the actual price at which this paper could be sold in London fluctuated extensively depending on the conditions of the financial market and, most prominently in Austen’s lifetime, the Napoleonic wars. As the £3 annual pay was serviced by the British government, and financial strain during the war increased the risk for defaults (through a foreign invasion or British government itself), the price of Consols was chiefly reflecting the military success.

When the market price of a debt falls below its face value, the effective interest rate (the “yield”) that a prospective investor receives increases; paying £50 for a Consol with face value of £100 and a £3 perpetual interest payment, effectively earns the investor 6% interest instead of 3% (3/50 = 0.06). Since the Consols were the most dominant asset on the largest financial market in the world, their price became “the single most important asset price in the world economy” as Klovland (1994: 165) called it. Here’s the yield on Consols during Austen’s life:

JA, yield on 3%

It reached a low of 3.11% in 1792 (almost at par), and a high of 6.22% in 1798 (below £50) after the suspension of the gold standard.

The Bennets and the fortunes of handsome young men

The families of Pride & Prejudice made good use of this thriving financial market – not specifically for trading but for financial planning (others, such as British economist David Ricardo, and the banking families of Rothschild and Barings, made some of their fortune trading Consols).

In the novel, Mr. Bennet – the protagonist Lizzy’s father – has an income of £2,000 a year (again, see my 2016 piece for three different attempts at “translating” these sums into today’s money). It is not clear what his income comes from, but it’s a fair guess that it stems, like many other landed gentry of the time, from renting out farm lands belonging to the family home Longbourne. In addition, we know that Mrs. Bennet’s portion to the family home is a £5,000 contribution which is the sole inheritance the (five) Bennet daughters are entitled to.

Now, the way well-off families like the Bennets would make use of Consols was to ensure that non-inheriting children had at least some source of income after the passing of their father. The underlying concern in Pride & Prejudice, causing Mrs. Bennet to worry so about fortunate marriages for her daughters, is that the Bennet estate is entailed away to Mr. Collins – and with it the presumed rental income of £2,000 a year. That would leave the girls homeless, reduced to living off Mrs. Bennet’s inheritance of £5,000.

Austen began writing First Impressions (the initial title for Pride & Prejudice) in October 1796. During the decade leading up to this, the yield on Consols had been firmly within the interval 3.5-4.5%, hovering around 4% for years. It should thus not surprise us that Mrs. Bennet’s fortune of £5,000 presumably consisting of Consols, would have been purchased at around £75, predictably yielding the family an annual return of 4%. Indeed, the characters of Pride & Prejudice seem to be squarely set on 4% being the general norm. For instance, in a desperate attempt to enhance his already-inane proposal to Lizzy, Mr. Collins explicitly says:

“To fortune I am perfectly indifferent, and shall make no demand of that nature on your father, since I am well aware that it could not be complied with; and that one thousand pounds in the 4 per cents, which will not be yours till after your mother’s decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to.”

(Chapter 19, p. 133 in the 2009 HarperCollins edition)

Here we see the great use that Consols offered families like the Bennets. Once the Bennet parents pass away, the £5,000 of Consols could be divided equally among her children; Lizzy’s share would be a thousand pounds, which earns her an annual 4% interest return, or £40 (although maybe several year’s earnings for a regular worker, this was a rather small sum for such rich families – in contemplating Lizzy’s sister Lydia’s imprudent marriage, we learn that Mr. Bennet spent almost £100/year on Lydia’s purchases and pocket money alone). Being liquid financial assets, dividing up the Consols among children was very easy, and their steady income stream ensured that they would have at least some income. Bar Napoleonic conquest, the interest payment on the Consols would reliably show up year after year.

As for the handsome young men, Mr. Bingley’s case is easier than Mr. Darcy’s. We know that Bingley’s income is not agricultural, but investments from a fortune of almost £100,000 inherited from his father, who had not yet acquired an estate. The fortune was “acquired by trade”, where (being from the North) cotton or shipping are prime candidates, but the slave trade is also a possibility. We also know that the ambiguity of his annual income (£4,000 or £5,000) lies well within the return from a fortune of that size invested in Consols. Indeed, for Bingley to hold that kind of fortune, earn that income and still not have an estate of his own, suggests that his financial wealth consists predominantly of Consols – perhaps complemented with some other stock (Bank of England or East India Company stock are plausible candidates). Clearly, new money.

Mr. Darcy, on the other hand, is plainly old money. And a lot of it. There are subtle hints in the novel that Pemberley has been in the Darcy family for generations. What we don’t know is precisely how his £10,000 a year is earned. When visiting Pemberley in Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle, Lizzy is told by the housekeeper that Mr. Darcy is such a generous and fair man: “ask any of his tenants”, she says, which indicates that Mr. Darcy, has a fair number of them – as one would expect from a sizeable estate like Pemberley. Now, what we don’t know is if the entirety of his £10,000 a year is reaped from rental income; it could be that some of his income is financial – or that either his financial or rental income is excluded from this rumoured number. Beyond a mention of his sister, Georgiana’s, fortune of £30,000 – which for convenience would likely be held in Consols – we know very little about the personal finances of Mr. Darcy.

The use and abuse of Consols

The financial market for government debt in the late-18th and early 19th century was not created with financial planning in mind, but by incremental improvements to previous government funding problems. The outcome, however, was a striking success for Britain, whose thriving financial market in no small part accounted for Britannia’s Century until WWI.

Moreover, as contemporary economists from Ricardo and John Stuart Mill to Malthus and Lauderdale observed, the recurring interest payments, funded by taxes, may have had quite large macroeconomic consequences. Taxing ‘productive’ investments and trade in order to fund ‘unproductive’ holders of government debt was, it was argued, harmful to the country – and in a time where government expenditures largely consisted of the military and debt maintenance, the impacts of funding the debt was of prime political interest.

Piketty’s use of Austen’s England (and Balzac’s France) was used for precisely the same distinction. Wealth, in Piketty’s view, perpetuates itself, and effortlessly earns its return (never mind the work, risk and selection issues involved). By continually paying the interest on its debt, the governments of Austen’s Britain financed the leisurly lifestyles of the rich, just as the “natural” return of the modern-day rich contribute and maintain today’s inequality.

The Consol was a revolutionary invention, but it is possible that it was not part of Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year.

Nightcap

04/13/201904/13/2019 Brandon Christensen Links British culture, gun rights, Japanese culture, national self-determination

Marxism for Tories Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
Open Borders and self-determination Eric Mack, Bleeding Heart Libertarians
The 2nd Amendment and public housing Eugene Volokh, Volokh Conspiracy
It’s time to start watching Japan’s best military sci-fi series Robert Beckhusen, War is Boring

Catholic Emancipation as a Constitutional Revolution

04/06/201904/06/2019 Mark Koyama History, Law Antonia Frazer, British culture, Catholic Church, constitutionalism, Daron Acemoglu, emancipation, Gordon riots, James Robinson, Noel Johnson, Persecution & Toleration, religious toleration

Antonia Frazer’s new book The King and the Catholics brings to light a neglected topic in British history, the removal of legal restrictions on Catholics. Catholic emancipation was a critical moment along the path to religious freedom — the theme of my book with Noel Johnson, Persecution and Toleration (see our new website for the book here).

Religious toleration is important to Britain’s historical self-image as a bastion of liberty against continental tyrants like Hitler, Napoleon, and Louis XIV.

But for much of the 18th century, Catholics in Britain were barred from government service, the army and navy, the law, and the universities. Formally, they were not allowed to inherit land or even marry with Catholic rites (though in practice there were well-recognized workarounds). Catholic priests faced life imprisonment and Catholic schools were illegal. When these laws were liberalized in 1778, this provoked the worst riot in early modern British history, the Gordon Riots.

Frazer details the travails involved in passing Catholic Emancipation. The King and the Anglican establishment were strenuously opposed to liberalizing laws against Catholics. Despite the fact that he had Catholic friends, George III opposed emancipation because it violated his coronation oath to champion the Protestant religion.

Prime Minister William Pitt proposed emancipation in 1801 and offered to resign if the King disapproved. This prompted George III’s descent into paranoia or “madness”. Frazer notes that

“There had already been a bout of this madness in 1788 and 1789, with the younger George as temporary Regent. Whatever the actual illness from which he periodically suffered, it included among the symptoms an obessional quality which certain topics unquestionably aroused. Catholic Emancipation, that appalling prospect which would cause him to be damned for breaking his sacred vow, was prominent among them:

None of this is mentioned in the 1996 film, featuring Nigel Hawthrone, of course!

Why did Catholic emancipation provoke this reaction? The British state faced a crisis in the early 19th century. Most accounts focus on the French and Industrial Revolutions, which disrupted the existing social order and alarmed ruling elites. Religion is scarcely mentioned. Thus from a Marxian perspective, the Chartists and the passing of the Great Reform Act — which extended the franchise to property holders — represent the bourgeoisie, demanding political rights to match their economic power. Acemoglu and Robinson model the transition from oligarchy to democracy as a game theoretic problem, in which the threat of revolution from below obliged elites to grant democratic rights, in order to make the promise of economic redistribution credible. Neither spends much time on religion.

But an older historical tradition saw the Catholic Emancipation as among the key causes of the constitutional crisis that the British state underwent in the 1820s and 1830s. According to John Derry (1963, 95):

‘The Protestant ascendancy was part of the Constitution: one might say without it the Constitution would never have existed. The Coronation Oath pledged the monarch to maintain the Protestant religion as by law established, while the Act of Settlement ensured a Protestant succession. Both the landed gentry and the commercial classes — as well as the urban mob — believed that if the Protestant ascendancy went the gates were open to unimaginable horrors.”

To understand why this was so, and why Catholic Emancipation paved the way for further liberalization and the rise of liberal democracy, let us revisit the argument of Persecution & Toleration.

The significance of the Protestant Ascendency reflected Reformation England’s Church-State equilibrium. The treatment of Catholics is a canonical instance of what we call condition toleration. Catholicism per se was not illegal, but it was constrained, and these constraints were justified in political terms. Throughout the 17th century, Protestants feared a return of Catholicism which they associated with unrestrained autocratic rule. For Henry Capel MP in 1679:

“From popery came the notion of a standing army and arbitrary power. Formerly the Crown of Spain, and now France, supports the root of this popery amongst us; but lay popery flat and there’s an end of arbitrary government and power. It is a mere chimera without popery”.

It was on these grounds that the Whigs sought to disbar James II from the throne. After the Glorious Revolution, the Toleration Act of 1689 excluded both Catholics and atheists. And famously, the great advocate of religious toleration, John Locke rejected toleration for Catholics, as they were loyal to a foreign prince.

The religious aspect of the Glorious Revolution is neglected in the seminal accounts of it in the political economy and economic history literatures (i.e. here). But the Glorious Revolution settlement did not only guarantee the independence of Parliament from the Crown, it also safeguarded the political position of the Anglican Church by excluding Catholics from positions of power. In return, the Church of England remained the mainstay of state. As J.C.D. Clark (1985, 438) observed:

“The Church justified its established status on a principle of toleration — the toleration of other forms of Trinitarian Christian worship. It drew a sharp distinction between this and the admission of Nonconformists to political power.”

This was particularly significant in Ireland, where the Protestant Ascendency ensured the political and economic dominance of the Anglo-Scottish Protestant elite over the Catholic majority.

Now 18th century Britain was much less reliant on religion to legitimate political authority than prior regimes. As Jared Rubin argues, one consequence of the Reformation was a decline in the legitimizing power of religion; it was superseded by institutions such as parliaments, which represented economic rather than religious elites.

Other things had changed too. The ascendancy of the Church of England was seen as crucial to state security in post-Reformation England. But this was no longer the case by 1800. Following the initial break with Rome in the 16th century, these fears had not been groundless: Protestant Englishmen felt threatened by revanchist Catholic powers such as Spain and France and, in the Gunpowder plot, Catholic conspirators threatened the death of the king and the destruction of Parliament. The fact that the vast majority of Catholics were loyal to crown and country was not enough to alleviate Protestant fears, which occasionally erupted into persecutions, such as those that accompanied the Popish plot.

Following the French Revolution, however, Catholicism was no longer associated with an aggressively expansionist continental power. The old enemy was now secular. Catholic priests fleeing Revolutionary persecution found sanctuary in Britain. And by the 1820s there was a growing pragmatic and liberal opinion in favor of Catholic Emancipation. Lord Palmerston’s argument, as summarized by Frazer (p 157), was that

“. . . times had inevitably changed, and the argument to history could not be sustained: what if Nelson, Fox and Burke had all happened to be Catholics by birth. Would it have been right to deprive the nation of their services?”

Liberal Protestant clergy further argued that

“a Catholic layman who finds all the honor of the state open to him, will not, I think, run into treason and rebellion” (quoted from Frazer, 2018, 158).

Translated into the framework of Persecution & Toleration: the equilibrium had changed. Catholics no longer posed a political threat. The legitimatizing power of the Church of England was waning. Population growth, urbanization — particularly the rise of new urban centers — as well as immigration from Ireland, undermined the ideological hold of the Church of England.

Nevertheless, when the issue finally came to head in 1827–1829, it brought down the government. Catholic Emancipation was the Brexit of its day. When the pro-emancipation George Canning became Prime Minister, its leading opponents, the Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel resigned and the Tory party split into two. Canning then died. But the move towards liberalization now had momentum. Agitation in Ireland raised fears of revolution. In 1828 the Test Act was Repealed. Wellington and Peel reluctantly switched sides. 1829 Catholic Emancipation passed, despite the fact that King George IV disapproved of it.

Thus according to J.C.D. Clark’s insightful (though contested) account:

“As significant were the consequences of Emancipation: the belief that the sovereign would not resist massive constitutional change; and the profound schism which now rent the party of Wellington and Peel” (Clark, 1985, 536).

Catholic Emancipation thus set in motion a more general constitutional revolution. Both Whigs and Tory ultras who opposed Catholic Emancipation lost faith in the existing Parliamentary system. A fundamental pillar of society, the Church-State alliance, had been undermined. It was followed by the Great Reform Act and the rise of liberal democracy. In Clark’s word’s

“. . . the effect of the measures of 1828–1832 was to open the floodgates to a deluge of Whig or radical reform aimed against the characteristics institutions of the former social order . . . English society can point to few events which changed the pattern on the ground with the totality and the dynamism of 1776, 1789 or 1917: 1832 was not such an event. It was, however, decisive in many other ways, for it dealt a death blow to England’s old order. In the process, it produced what in other disciplines is called a ‘paradigm shift’”(Clark 1985, 555–556).

Nightcap

03/27/201903/27/2019 Brandon Christensen Links British culture, civil liberty, communism, Francis Fukuyama

Conscientious refusal to plea bargain Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order Branko Milanovic, globalinequality
How the communists re-educate Muslims James Millward, ChinaFile
The counterfactual histories of Nazi Britain Catherine Gallagher, Aeon

Britain’s Pornographer and Puritan Coalition

03/12/201903/20/2019 Nick Cowen Current Events, Economics, Liberty, Politics British culture, free market, free speech, internet, pornography, sex, United Kingdom

Brexit isn’t the only ridiculous thing happening in the United Kingdom. In April, the British government is rolling out statutory adult verification for pornography websites and content platforms. This requires all adult content providers to have proof of age or identity for all their users, whether a passport or a credit card (or more ludicrously a ‘porn pass’ that Brits wishing to browse anonymously will have to buy from local newsagents). The government plans to require internet service providers to block pornography websites that are not in compliance with adult verification once the system is in place. For those with university institutional access, Pandora Blake has written a timely explanation and critique published in Porn Studies: ‘Age verification for online porn: more harm than good?’.

Technical challenges with rolling out the system have led the dominant pornography search platform owner, MindGeek, to develop proprietary solution, AgeID, in cooperation with regulators. This cooperation between the dominant commercial pornography platform supplier and a Conservative government publicly intent on restricting access to pornography might appear surprising. However, it can be explained by a particular pattern of regulatory capture identified in public choice theory as a Bootlegger and Baptist coalition. Bruce Yandle observed that throughout the 20^th century, evangelical Christians in the United States agitated for local restrictions on the sale of alcohol with the avowed aim of reducing consumption but with the secondary effect of increasing demand for alcohol for illegal bootleggers. Hence both interest groups, apparently opposed in moral principle came to benefit in practice. We now have a classic British case study. In this case, MindGeek is not acting as a literal bootlegger. It intends to be fully legally compliant with the filtering regime. However, the law will block all non-compliant competitors without a comparable verification system. They can gain a competitive advantage with a proprietary technical solution to the barrier introduced by the government.

Introducing identity verification systems has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. It is costly to develop or implement but easy to scale once integrated. The larger the pornography enterprise, the more easily these costs can be absorbed without the risk that it will not be worthwhile to serve the British market. For many smaller international pornography websites, without in-house legal advice or technical expertise, it might prove uneconomical to serve British users directly. So MindGeek’s platforms could become the least-cost legal gatekeeper between small enterprises producing pornographic content and the British public. The government is raising transaction costs to accessing pornography in a way that impacts larger and smaller platforms asymmetrically and favors one dominant platform in particular.

Both the premise of this policy and its likely impact on the market for pornography is unpromising. At its most benign, this could be a characterized as a ‘nudge’ against the consumption of pornography and reducing access of inappropriate content to minors. But these limited benefits have costs for both producers and consumers. On the consumption side, it increases risks to data security and privacy because it will plausibly tie records of pornographic access to verified identities, with a clear likelihood of being to infer an individual’s sexuality from private browsing. This could represent a particular vulnerability for LGBTQ identifying individuals who live in communities where there is still stigma attached to minority sexual orientations.

On the supplier side, it takes what already appears to be a market with strong tendencies towards a winner-takes-all model, and then augments it so that a dominant platform has a legally enforceable competitive advantage over potential rivals in the market. Ultimately, it threatens to further strengthen the bargaining position of a single corporate pornography platform against the sex workers who supply their content.

Afternoon Tea: Isaac Newton (1795)

02/20/201902/11/2019 Brandon Christensen Culture art history, British culture, English culture, Isaac Newton (1795), William Blake

From the British artist and poet William Blake:

NOL art Blake newton 1795 — Click here to zoom

I’ve never been a huge fan of English art, but Blake is an obvious exception to the rule when it comes to art out of England. If you expand British art to include its imperial domains, then British art is spectacular, but as for England itself, meh. (William Blake excepted, of course.)

Middle-class: questioning the definitions

02/02/201902/02/2019 Mary Lucia Darst Culture, Current Events bourgeois, Brexit, British culture, class, Deirdre McCloskey, Jonah Goldberg

Vestis virum (non) redit

~ Latin proverb

As Brexit drags on, there is a reassessment occurring of Margret Thatcher and her legacy. After all, in addition to being a stalwart defender of free markets, free enterprise, and free societies, she helped design the EEC, the precursor to the EU. So in the process of leaving the EU, there is a lingering question regarding whether the referendum is a rejection of Thatcher’s legacy. Those who equate the referendum with a repudiation of Thatcher offer explanations along the lines of: “Thatcher destroyed the miners’ way of life [NB: this is a retort spat out in a debate on the freedom-vs.-welfare split in the Leave faction; it has been edited for grammar and clarity.].” Sooner or later, Thatcher-themed discussions wend their way to the discontents of capitalism, especially the laissez-faire variety, in society, and the complaints are then projected onto issues of immigration, sovereignty, or globalism.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Tucker Carlson’s January 2 polemical monologue contained similar sentiments and provoked a response that proved that the same issues have divided America as well. Much of Carlson’s complaints were predicated on the concept of “way of life,” and here lies a dissonance which has meant that swaths of society talk without understanding: merely possessing a way of life is not equal to having values. In all the discussion of the “hollowing out of the middle-class,” one question is never raised: What is the middle-class?

It is only natural that no one wants to ask this question; modern society doesn’t want to discuss class in a real sense, preferring to rely on the trite and historically abnormal metric of income. To even bring up the C- word outside of the comfortable confines of money is to push an unspoken boundary. Although there is an exception: if one is speaking of high-income, or high-net-worth individuals, it is completely acceptable to question an auto-definition of “middle-class.” Everyone can agree that a millionaire describing himself as middle-class is risible.

It is the income dependent definition that is the source of confusion. The reality is that modernity has conflated having middle income with being middle-class. The two are not one and the same, and the rhetoric surrounding claims of “hollowing out” is truly more linked to the discovery that one does not equal the other.

In his The Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg wrote on the subject of the back history of the Founding Fathers:

[….] British primogeniture laws required that the firstborn son of an aristocratic family get everything: the titles, the lands, etc. But what about the other kids? They were required to make their way in the world. To be sure, they had advantages – educational, financial, and social – over the children of the lower classes, but they still needed to pursue a career. “The grander families of Virginia – including the Washingtons – were known as the ‘Second Sons,’” writes Daniel Hannan [Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World (HarperCollins, 2013)]. [….]

In fact, Hannan and Matt Ridley [The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (Harper, 2010] suggest that much of the prosperity and expansion of the British Empire in the eighteenth century can be ascribed to an intriguing historical accident. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the children of the affluent nobility had a much lower mortality rate, for all the obvious reasons. They had more access to medicine, rudimentary as it was, but also better nutrition and vastly superior living and working conditions than the general population. As a result, the nobility were dramatically more fecund than the lower classes. Consequently, a large cohort of educated and ambitious young men who were not firstborn were set free to make their way in the world. If you have five boys, only one gets to be the duke. The rest must become officers, priests, doctors, lawyers, academics, and business men.

Goldberg concisely summarized the phenomenon which Deirdre McCloskey argues created the original middle-class. But more importantly, Goldberg’s history lesson emphasizes that the origins of America, from an idea to a reality, have a deep socio-cultural angle, one that is tied to status, property rights, and familial inheritance, that is often lost in the mythology.

As Goldberg explained, the complex, painful history of disenfranchisement due to birth order was the real reason the Founding Fathers both opposed the law of entail while simultaneously focusing almost myopically on private property rights in relation to land. As Hernando de Soto studied in his The Mystery of Capital, George Washington, who held land grant patents for vast, un-surveyed tracts in Ohio and Kentucky, was horrified to discover that early settlers had established homesteads in these regions, before lawful patent holders could stake their claims. Washington found this a violation of both the rule of law and the property rights of the patent holders and was open to using military force to evict the “squatters,” even though to do so would have been against English common law which gave the property to the person who cleared the land (Washington was no longer president at that point, so there was no risk that the aggressive attitude he expressed in his letters would lead to real action.).

Before repudiating Washington for his decidedly anti-liberty attitude on this score, we should turn to Deirdre McCloskey and her trilogy – The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions Enriched the World – for an understanding on why this might be important, and why conflating way of life with social standing and identity is both fallacious and dangerous.

Part II coming soon!