Month: July 2017

Here\’s the dilemma: On one side, it seems important that those who do early childhood education are well-qualified for the job. After all, one justification for such programs is to help children who would otherwise have already been lagging behind in kindergarten and first grade to be school-ready. A National Academy of Science report in 2015 recommended that all lead teachers working with children from birth through age 8 should have at least a four-year bachelor\’s degree. On the other side, these jobs don\’t have high pay, and aren\’t likely to have high pay in the future. Thus, the dilemma is that it doesn\’t make economic sense to require someone to go through a lengthy and potentially costly training program to qualify for a job that doesn\’t have especially high pay.

Mary Alice McCarthy tackles this question in \”Rethinking Credential Requirements in Early Education: Equity-based Strategies for Professionalizinga Vulnerable Workforce,\” written for the New America think tank (June 2017). Her proposal is that an expansion of paid apprenticeships may be a more functional way of getting high-quality teachers in place for early childhood education. She describes the underlying dilemma this way:

Few people question degree requirements for teachers in elementary schools, including in kindergarten and first grade. Advocates for degree requirements for early educators ask why we would expect anything less for the teachers of our youngest children. If a bachelor’s degree is required to teach a five-year-old, why not a four-year-old? Or a three-year-old? Teachers are teachers, according to this view, and all of them need professional training before they are ready for the classroom. …

However, the argument that teachers in early childhood centers are the same as teachers in elementary schools and should be held to similar qualification requirements is deeply problematic. Both might be groups of teachers, but they do not represent a single workforce. Just as high school teachers and college faculty both educate, they do so in such different settings and under such distinct expectations that we do not generally think of them as a single workforce. Teachers in early childhood centers operate in a vastly different segment of the labor market than their elementary school peers. The majority work in private settings marked by rules, funding sources, and employer relationships distinct from those of public school teachers. Most importantly, they generally earn significantly lower wages and enjoy far fewer benefits than their counterparts in elementary schools. These two groups of workers are not even represented by the same unions. …

Degree requirements might change who qualifies for a job as a lead teacher for young children, but they can’t change the underlying realities of the labor market—and that is the real problem with degree requirements in early childhood education and other low-wage occupations. The way the early education market is structured, the costs of any degree requirement will be borne almost entirely by workers who will see little, if any, increase in wages.  And college isn’t getting any cheaper. An average associate degree at a two-year public college costs around $9,500 a year. A bachelor’s degree from a
four-year public institution costs about $18,600 a year. That is a steep entry price for a profession where hourly wages average less than $10 an hour.

McCarthy suggests a structured and organized two-year apprenticeship program instead, which would lead to outside evaluations and a certificate of completion, and points to a pilot study in Philadelphia for evidence of workability. She makes a very strong case.

Requiring a college degree for early childhood education workers is not likely to raise wages for those workers. 

\”The working conditions of early educators, meanwhile, are also unlikely to be affected by a degree requirement. The system of funding in the early education field—not the perception of its teachers—is what drives its fragmentation and decentralization. A degree requirement will not make state and local school systems expand the size and scope of their early childhood education centers, where working conditions and pay tend to be better. Nor will it change how federal and state programs channel their funding for early education through a decentralized system of public and private early education centers. Unless those funding sources, particularly the public programs, move toward more school-based provision of early education, there is little reason to expect a degree requirement will spark a recalibration of the early education market.\”

A college degree is an inefficient way to learn the specific jobs skills needed for a job working with very young children.

\”A bachelor’s degree is a very time-consuming credential to earn. It is also a remarkably inefficient way to equip early educators with the knowledge, skills, and competencies outlined in the National Academies report and identified by key stakeholders like the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) and NAEYC [the National Association for the Education of Young Children] …\”

Requiring a college degree for early childhood education would have the effect that those working in these positions are younger, whiter, and tend to come from families with higher income levels.

\”In other words, we can expect that the workforce will become more stratified along race, income, and age. Early childhood educators holding degrees are more likely to be young and white, and educators without degrees more likely to be older and from communities of color. That is the case for our elementary teaching workforce, which is more than 80 percent white. A bachelor’s degree requirement has the potential to reduce the likelihood that children from low-income and racially diverse backgrounds will have teachers from their communities.\”

I agree with the broad direction of McCarthy\’s proposal, but the application of this insight extends well beyond workers in early childhood education. A substantial number of those who graduate from high school have no reason to view additional academic classwork with anticipation or enjoyment. Throughout their K-12 school careers, they have mostly been in the bottom half, or bottom quarter, of the academic distribution. If a job requires additional years of classroom study, it will appear to them as a heavy burden and a strong discouragement. For many of these students, a well-structured rigorous learning-on-the-job program will be a more attractive option. Our economy needs more alternative career pathways that don\’t require piling up academic degrees as a starting point.

It\’s easy to find gloomy predictions for continued slow growth of the US economy. Thus, Lee Branstetter and Daniel Sichel caught my eye with their essay, \”The Case for an American Productivity Revival,\”  written as a \”Policy Brief\” for the Peterson Institute of International Economics (June 2017, PB17-26). Here how they start:

Labor productivity performance in the United States has been dismal for more than a decade. But productivity slowdowns—even lengthy ones—are nothing new in US economic history. This Policy Brief makes the case that the current slowdown will come to an end as a new productivity revival takes hold.  

Why the optimism? Official price indexes indicate that innovation in the technology sector has slowed to a crawl, but better data indicate rapid progress. Standard measures, focused on physical capital, suggest that business investment is weak, but broader measures of investment that incorporate intellectual and organizational capital report much more robust investment. New technological opportunities in healthcare, robotics, education, and the technology of invention itself provide additional reasons for optimism. This Policy Brief gauges the potential productivity impact of these developments. The evidence points to a likely revival of US labor productivity growth from the 0.5 percent average rate registered since 2010 to a pace of 2 percent or more. A productivity revival of this magnitude would provide a solid foundation for steady increases in wages … 

The essay spells out details behind these claims.  Here are a few of the comments that caught my eye.

Past methods for adjusting for the improved quality of microprocessors may not be working well at capturing changes in the last decade or so. 

Before the mid-
2000s, the posted prices of MPUs tended to fall as newer
models were introduced. This price trajectory allowed a
standard methodology used for semiconductors in the
producer price index (matched-model indexes) to capture
quality change through the rapid price declines of older
models. Since the mid-2000s, posted prices of Intel MPUs
have tended to remain stable, even after the introduction
of newer, more powerful models. Reflecting these relatively
flat price profiles, a matched-model index will indicate little
change in quality-adjusted prices even if the quality of each
newly introduced model is much greater than its predecessor.
The new price measure Byrne, Oliner, and Sichel
developed (an hedonic index) more fully captures ongoing
quality change and reveals rapid price declines after this
quality change is taken into account.
This evidence on faster price declines indicates that
innovation and multifactor productivity growth in semiconductors—
the general-purpose technology behind much
of the digital revolution—has been far more rapid than official
indexes suggest.

Although conventional tangible business investment is down as a share of GDP, intangible investment is on the rise.

In this figure, the light blue line shows tangible business investment, and the well-known pattern of overall decline (as a share of GDP) since the 1970s. The dark blue line shows the official US government statistical measure of \”intangible investment,\” which includes \”software, scientific R&D, mineral exploration, and the development of entertainment products.\” The dashed red line shows a broader version of intangible investment that includes both the official measures and also \”nonscientific product development, brand equity, training, and organizational capital.\” As the authors write (footnotes and citations omitted):

In fact, the overall investment share of both tangible and all intangible capital has been relatively stable since the late 1970s. This conclusion is not surprising in an economy in which the newest technical capabilities and products rely at least as much on intangible capital as on tangible capital. This feature surely characterizes leading companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft. Even industrial companies like GE are increasingly investing in big data, predictive analytics, and machine learning.

In short, Branstetter and Sichel believe that the official statistics are understating both current productivity gains as well as the investments that firms are making for the future.  They then note: \”Four developments have the potential to contribute to faster productivity growth in the United States: improvements in the healthcare system, increasing use of robots, a revolution in e-learning, and globalization of invention.\” They further argue that these changes can be supported by some mostly well-known policies: for example,

• \”robust federal investment in basic science\”
• \”immigrant scientists and entrepreneurs play a disproportionate role in driving the technological advances that power productivity growth in the United States\”
• \”globalization of invention presupposes the continuation of an open global trading and investment system supported by the United States\”
• \”a public agency or public-private partnership that could certify the efficacy of new educational technologies in the same way the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certifies the safety and efficacy of new drugs, by supervising rigorous, randomized control trials. Modest policy effort
• in this direction could yield rich dividends in the form of much faster, more cost-effective human capital formation.\”

I would add that economic growth is by its nature a disruptive process, and part of embracing this disruption is to find ways for both its benefits and costs to be widely shared. The authors conclude: \”A standard productivity growth accounting framework captures these factors to highlight how a significant revival of productivity growth could emerge, especially in the medium to long run. A pace of 2¼ percent a year is eminently plausible—and there are solid reasons to hope for
even more rapid productivity growth.\”

Do you know the true story of how a careless clerk, while burning up some outdated money, caused the Great Fire of 1834 which destroyed both Houses of the British Parliament, along with large portions of the Palace of Westminster? Tim Harford tells the tale in \”What tally sticks tell us about how money works\” (BBC News, July 10, 2017).

In this case, the outdated money takes the form of \”tally sticks.\” As Harford explains:

The artefacts in question were humble sticks of willow, about eight inches (20cm) long, called Exchequer tallies. The willow was harvested along the banks of the Thames, not far from the Palace of Westminster in central London. … Tallies were a way of recording debts with a system that was sublimely simple and effective. The stick would contain a record of the debt, for example: \”£9 4s 4d from Fulk Basset for the farm of Wycombe\”. Fulk Basset was a Bishop of London in the 13th Century. He owed his debt to King Henry III.

Now comes the elegant part. The stick would be split in half, down its length from one end to the other. The debtor would retain half, called the \”foil\”. The creditor would retain the other half, called the \”stock\” – even today, British bankers use the word \”stocks\” to refer to debts of the British government. Because willow has a natural and distinctive grain, the two halves would match only each other.

Of course, the Treasury could simply have kept a record of these transactions in a ledger somewhere. But the tally stick system enabled something radical to occur. If you had a tally stock showing that Bishop Basset owed you £5, then unless you worried that he wasn\’t good for the money, the tally stock itself was worth close to £5 in its own right.
If you wanted to buy something, you might well find that the seller would be pleased to accept the tally stock as a safe and convenient form of payment. So the tally sticks themselves became a kind of money, a particular sort of debt that could be traded freely, circulating from person to person until it utterly separated from Bishop Basset and a farm in Wycombe.

Here are a few pictures of tally sticks: the first is from Harford\’s article, which shows accounts accounts of the bailiff of Ralph de Manton of Ufford Church in Northampton, circa 1299.The second is from a short article by Frank J. Swetz and Victor J. Katz, \”Mathematical Treasures – English tally sticks,\” Convergence (January 2011). The inscription on that tally stick shows the name of William de Costello, who was Sheriff of London in 1296.

Of course, making marks on a stick or bone to keep a record of days or lunar cycles or livestock dates back millennia. The specific idea of tally sticks to keep track of debt dates back hundreds of years; in one telling, they were invented by King Henry the First, son of William the Conqueror, when he became King in 1100 AD.  Moreover, when a tally stick was split, it was divided into two different lengths, with the debtor literally receiving the short end of the stick.

Tally sticks were a highly successful monetary innovation, in the sense that they were used for centuries. They offer a demonstration of the idea that money, at its root, is something that can be stored and then accepted for purchases: as the textbooks say, money is a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. They also demonstrate that money can be created by private actors, although textbooks typically emphasize the role of banks in creating money in the modern economy.

The punchline to the story of the tally sticks happens in 1834. Tally sticks had fallen out of use, and apparently there were no historians or museum curators nearby, so a decision was made to burn several large cartloads of remaining tally sticks. Thanks to a \”senile Housekeeper and careless Clerk of Works,\” the fire got loose and roared through the Palace of Westminster, destroying the House of Commons and the House of Lords. It was the largest fire in London between the Great Fire of 1666 and the devastation of the Blitz during War II.

\”Global value chains often involve numerous cross-border operations, conducted either `intra-firm,\’ that is, between firms related through ownership or control, or between unaffiliated firms at `arm’s-length.\’\” The World Bank explains this difference in \”Arm’s-Length Trade: A Source of Post-Crisis Trade Weakness,\” which appears as a \”Special Focus\” chapter in Global Economic Prospects: A Fragile Recovery (June 2017). The chapter begins:

\”Trade growth has slowed sharply since the global financial crisis. Based on U.S. trade data, arm’s-length trade—trade between unaffiliated firms—accounts disproportionately for the overall post-crisis trade slowdown. This is partly because arm’s-length trade depends more heavily than intra-firm trade on sectors with rapid pre-crisis growth that boosted arm’s length trade pre-crisis but that have languished post-crisis, and on emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), where output growth has slowed sharply from elevated pre-crisis rates. Unaffiliated firms may also have been hindered more than multinational firms by constrained access to finance during the crisis, a greater sensitivity to adverse income and exchange rate movements, heightened policy uncertainty, and their typical firm-level characteristics.\”

Here\’s are the growth rates of US imports and exports for arm\’s-length and intra-firm trade in recent years. Detailed international data with a similar breakdown isn\’t available, although a similar pattern seems to hold in the research that has been done.

An extraordinarily high share of US trade happens through a relatively small number of firms. For example, Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding, and Peter K. Schott explained this point  10 years ago in \”Firms in International Trade,\” in the Summer 2007 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives: \”Yet engaging in international trade is an exceedingly rare activity: of the 5.5 million firms operating in the United States in 2000, just 4 percent were exporters. Among these exporting firms, the top 10 percent accounted for 96 percent of total U.S. exports.\”

These big players in international trade face a choice: import and export from affiliated firms, which often own pieces of each other, or import and export from unaffiliated firms on an arm\’s-length basis. The obvious advantage of the first approach is that when operating across national borders, there are likely to be conflicts and issues about  pricing, costs, timeliness, quality, transfers of technology and resources, and more. Addressing such issues on an ongoing basis with an affiliated firm may be more streamlined and easier than, say, trying to sue some other firm in the courts of its home country. The World Bank report notes (citations omitted):

\”In practice, multinationals employ intra-firm and arm’s-length transactions to varying degrees. In 2015, intra-firm transactions are estimated to have accounted for about one-third of global exports. Vertically integrated multinational companies, such as Samsung Electronics, Nokia, and Intel, trade primarily intrafirm. Samsung, the world’s biggest communications equipment multinational, has 158 subsidiaries across the world, including 43 subsidiaries in Europe, 32 in China and 30 in North and South America. Other multinationals, such as Apple, Motorola, and Nike, rely mainly on outsourcing, and hence on arm’s-length trade with non-affiliated suppliers.\”

In a time when international trade faces a relatively high degree of suspicion, it\’s useful to be clear on just what is involved. When it comes to trading raw materials like energy or metals, or basic manufactured goods like textiles, or exporting to emerging markets, then arm\’s length trade is common. But a lot of the prominent, productive, and dynamic firms in the US and around the world are tied into international networks of intra-firm trade and global supply chains. If US policymakers put US firms at a disadvantage in accessing and using those global supply chains, those US firms will be at a disadvantage against their global competitors.

Members of the Religious Society of Friends (often known as the Quakers) use the word \”query\” in a specific sense, to refer to a question that is intended to facilitate reflection and spiritual growth. Here, I\’d like to offer a secular query concerning attitudes about social and economic mobility across generations.

Imagine that you are a grandparent with five grandchildren. In a society with a high degree of social and economic mobility, grandparents should not have much or any effect on the social and economic position that children attain as adults. Thus, on average you should expect your five grandchildren to be evenly distributed across the socioeconomic spectrum. More specifically, if the levels of income are ranked and then divided into five groups with equal numbers of people, or quintiles, or educational attainment is divided up into five quintiles, you should expect that one of your five grand children will end up in each of the five quintiles–from top to bottom.

Some grandparents in America would be delighted beyond words if they had a reasonable expectation of this outcome: that is, they would be thrilled if three of their five grandchildren were in the middle quintile or above. Other grandparents in America would be appalled by this outcome: that is, they would be dismayed and even horrified if three of their five grandchildren were in the middle quintile or below.

With which group of grandparents do you identify?

Do you favor social mobility–which operates both up and down–for your own grandchildren?

If you believed that your grandchildren had an equal chance of ending up across the full range of the socioeconomic outcomes, does that alter how you think about policies that affect the rich, or the poor,  or the middle class?

Do you have a tendency to define \”success\” in grandparenting, parenting, or your own life, in terms of being in the top income or education group relative to others? Remember, it is true by definition that only one-fifth of people will be top fifth of a distribution, and true by definition that one-fifth of people will be in the bottom fifth of a distribution, so this definition of \”success\” carries with it an implicit or explicit judgement of \”failure,\” too.

Does our society have meaningful alternative definitions of \”success\” where relative judgments play a much weaker role, and which allow for a possibility that a much larger share of the population–even more than a majority!–can meaningfully view itself as a success?

Arnold Kling tackles the hardy perennial topic \”How Effective is Economic Theory?\” in the Summer 2017 issue of National Affairs. His overall approach is to focus on \”five interlocking subjects in particular: mathematical modeling, homo economicus, objectivity, testing procedures, and the particular status of the sub-discipline of macroeconomics.\” He then compares and contrasts what economists were saying about those subjects in 1966 and 1980, compared with his views on current patterns. For details, read the essay! But here are few excerpts that caught my eye and may give some flavor of his discussion:

\”Economists are not without knowledge. We know that restrictions on trade tend to help narrow interests at the expense of broader prosperity. We know that market prices are important for coordinating specialization and division of labor in a complex economy. We know that the profit incentive promotes the introduction of improved products and processes, and that our high level of well-being results from the cumulative effect of such improvements. We know that government control over prices and production, as in communist countries, leads to inefficiency and corruption. We know that the laws of supply and demand tend to frustrate efforts to make goods more \”affordable\” by subsidizing them or to lower \”costs\” by fixing prices.

\”But policymakers have goals that go far beyond or run counter to such basic principles. They want to steer the economy using fiscal stimulus. They want to shape complex and important markets, including those of health insurance and home mortgages. It is doubtful that the effectiveness of economic theory is equal to such tasks.

\”Most scholarly research in economics is ultimately motivated by the unrealistic goal of providing effective theory to implement such technocratic objectives. But the resulting economic theory cannot be applied with the same confidence as Newtonian physics. Even worse is the fact that economists, unlike physicists, are not clear about the limits of the effectiveness of their theories. In short, when it comes to effective theory, economists promise more than they can deliver. …\”

\”There is a very real possibility that over the next 20 years academic economics will congeal into a discipline, like sociology today, which is definitively shaped by an ideologically driven point of view. Among highly educated people, ideological polarization is increasing. Economists have always had their biases about which sorts of theories seemed reasonable; some of these biases are idiosyncratic, as when one economist is inclined to believe that labor demand responds very little to a change in wage rates and another is inclined to believe that labor demand responds a great deal. But going forward, biases are likely to increasingly be driven by political viewpoints rather than by other considerations.

\”This will be evident in beliefs of economists that are politically consistent but analytically contradictory. For example, it is politically consistent for someone on the left to believe that a rise in the minimum wage would not reduce hiring and also that more immigration would not depress wages. Analytically, however, these are opposite views. The minimum-wage increase will not reduce hiring if one treats labor demand as highly inelastic (so that a small change in hiring will be associated with a given change in wages). Increased immigration will not depress wages if one treats labor demand as highly elastic (so that a large change in hiring will be associated with a given change in wages). I think we are already starting to see economists opt for political consistency at the expense of analytical consistency.

\”This more political profession is very likely to point toward the left. Economists are part of an academic community in which peer pressure and community values push left. It is inevitable that the social life of an academic is going to involve interacting with people from other disciplines who are overwhelmingly on the left. This makes it uncomfortable on campus to espouse the free-market views that one used to hear from conservatives like Milton Friedman. There are signs that the momentum within the profession is toward the left. …

\”Young economists who employ pluralistic methods to study problems are admired rather than marginalized, as they were in 1980. But economists who question the wisdom of interventionist economic policies seem headed toward the fringes of the profession.
In this respect, the barriers to effective theory in economics are different and perhaps more worrisome than was the case in 1980. The contemporary state of economic theory reflects a broader crisis in the social sciences and a deepening cleavage between the college campus and the rest of society.\”

It\’s wise to be skeptical about claims of economists. It\’s also wise to be skeptical about claims of noneconomists. It\’s true that economists are often not clear about the limits on the effectiveness of their theories. In my experience, noneconomists are typically even less clear about limits on the effectiveness of their theories–indeed, noneconomists are often loathe to acknowledge that their theories have any limitations at all.

As I try to piece together my own views on these topics, I\’m reminded of some comments from Herbert Stein, who was an economist in many positions in Washington, DC for more than 50 years (from his 1995 collection of essays, On the Other Hand – Essays on Economics, Economists, and Politics). Here\’s his comment comparing the knowledge of economists and non-economists (p. 78)

\”In the preface to a book of mine called Washington Bedtime Stories, I summed up two main lessons derived from more than fifty years in Washington as a civil servant, researcher, presidential adviser, observer, and commentator:

• Economists do not know very much. 
• Other people, including the politicians who make economic policy, know even less about economics than economists do.”

Stein also had some pungent comments on how people are affected by their preexisting political views (p. 248 of the same book):

\”I think that most people—even those who read the editorial and op-ed pages—do not want to encounter opposing views. They want a good expression and confirmation of the views they have, or the views they would have if they thought about the subject. I can see that tendency in myself. I rarely read the columnists I know I am going to disagree with. Life is too short. … Probably almost all readers of magazines with pronounced ideological or partisan slants share those slants. They want to be massaged, not informed.

\”In all my years of writing opinion pieces, I don\’t think I have ever received a letter from a reader who said that I had changed his mind. I get some letters–a few–from readers who say they agree with me. Many of them say not only that they agree with me but that they had had the same thought ten years ago and had written a fifty-page essay about it that they would like my help in getting published. Some write to disagree with me, often violently. But I don\’t remember any saying that I had changed his mind. \”

And here\’s one more shot of Stein (from pp. 1-2 of the same book):

\”An old saying goes that whoever is not a Socialist when young has no heart and whoever is still a Socialist when old has no head. I would say that whoever is not a liberal when young has no heart, whoever is not a conservative when middle-aged has no head, and whoever is still either a liberal or a conservative at age seventy-eight has no sense of humor. Obviously, orthodox certainty on matters about which there can be so little certitude must eventually be seen as only amusing.\” 

For myself, I don\’t have much problem when politicians or actual real-world people choose to read economists with whom they basically agree. Choosing the experts who fit with your predispositions is a very human thing to do, and asking nonspecialists to arbitrate disputes between specialists is difficult. But here\’s the kicker: When you have chosen the experts with whom you basically agree, a basic degree of intellectual consistency means that you need to listen to all that they say–including possibly unwelcome warnings about limitations, problems of implementation, other implications, and so on. So choose your expert, by all means, but then also be predisposed to follow or at least to acknowledge both the welcome and unwelcome parts of what that expert has to say.

Who said: \”Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty?\” Well, it wasn\’t Thomas Jefferson, at least not according to the official Jefferson Library. However, a few years ago a blogger named Anna Berkes at the Jefferson library website took a deep dive to search out the source of the quotation. Berkes found that \”eternal vigilance\” and \”price of liberty\” were used more than 700 times in close proximity in various newspapers and books during the first half of the 19th century.

For this post-Fourth-of-July ramble, I\’ll follow in Berkes\’s footsteps, but add a different kind of detail. Specifically, I\’ll take a look at five notable earlier appearances of this phrase. My focus will is on what specifically were the early users of the quotation suggesting that we liberty-loving people need to be eternally vigilant about?

1.  The first time that we know the terms \”eternal vigilance\” and \”price of liberty\” were used in close proximity was by an Irishman named John Philpott Curran in 1790, discussing the rules for electing the Lord-Mayor of London.
2. The first time we know that the the entire phrase was used together was during in an 1809 discussion of how James Jackson helped fight off the \”Yazoo land grab\” in western Georgia. 
3. The first use by a US president, in Andrew Jackson\’s Farewell Address in 1837, was about the need to fight off the Bank of the United States.
4. The first use by someone who would later be a  US president was when James Buchanan applied the phrase to discussing the merits of the presidential veto.
5. The use of the term in its more modern meaning, as pushing back against encroachments on personal liberty, in the speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass starting in 1848 and continuing to the years after the Civil War. 

Example #1: John Philpott Curran and the rules for electing the Lord-Mayor of Dublin

\”After the Seven Years War, the core of the dominant political coalition in Great Britain was composed of the landed gentry, whose power rested on a political system based on land ownership. The leader of the coalition, Prime Minister Lord North, had the support of the king. His cabinet was composed of Bedfordite ministers and, when dealing with serious issues, Lord North could always count on the support of Parliament, which was dominated by landed gentry. The coalition also enjoyed the support of the High Anglican Church. The members of this coalition were all loyal to a political system based on land ownership, and they considered the members of the general public to be unfit to participate in politics and objected to the idea of making any concessions to the American colonies. … The landed gentry, who controlled the incumbent government, feared that making concessions to the American colonies would intensify the pressure for democratic reforms, thus jeopardizing their economic and political position.\”

• \”Trying to Envision the Original United States\” (July 4, 2016)
• \”Adam Smith on the Economics of US Independence\” (July 4, 2013). 
• \”Economic Underpinnings of the U.S. Revolutionary War\” (January 31, 2012)
• \”Independence and Depression: Economics of the American Revolution\” (November 8, 2011)

With the July 4 holiday near at hand, it\’s a time to reflect on love of country in all its forms, including variations on patriotism and nationalism. Earlier today I offered some thoughts from George Orwell on these topics. The once-prominent historian Carlton Hayes reflected on the topic of \”Nationalism as a Religion\” in a provocative 1926 essay, writing in the shadow cast by of World War I. He wrote:

“My country, right or wrong, my country!” Thus responds the faithful nationalist to the magisterial call of his religion, and thereby he intends nothing dubious or immoral. He is merely making a subtle distinction between governmental officials who may go wrong and a nation which, from the inherent nature of things, must ever be right. It would sound pedantic for him to say, “my nation, indicatively right or subjunctively wrong (contrary to fact), my nation!” Indeed, to the national state are now popularly ascribed infallibility and impeccability. We moderns are prepared to grant that all our fellow countrymen may individually err in conduct and judgement, but we are loath to admit that our nation as a whole can make mistakes. We are willing to assail the policies and even the characters of some of our politicians, but we are stopped by the faith that is in us from doubting the Providential guidance of our national state. This is the final mark of the religious nature of modern nationalism.

\”The most impressive fact about the present age is the universality of the religious aspects of nationalism. Not only in the United States does the religious sense of the whole people find expression in nationalism, but also, in slightly different form but perhaps to an even greater degree, in France, England, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Russia, the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, the Balkans, Greece, and the Latin-American republics. Nor does the religion of nationalism thrive only on traditionally Christian soil; it now flourishes in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, India, Korea, and is rearing its altars in China. Nationalism has a large number of particularly quarrelsome sects, but as a whole it is the latest and nearest approach to a world-religion. …

\”I would not have anyone gather from what I have said that I condemn nationalism because it is an expression of man\’s “religious sense.” I am too convinced a believer in the inherently religious character of man to make light of religion; and to condemn nationalism because it depends on religious emotion would seem to me as futile as to condemn vegetation because it thrives on sunlight. I would suggest, however, that there are many, many ways in which man may express his religious sense, and that religious emotion, like any other instinctive emotion, is always susceptible and often needful of conscious direction and control. Some forms of religion are superior to others, and when we recognise the religious nature of modern nationalism we have still to ask ourselves whether it is the form or religion most conducive to human betterment.

\”Most great religious systems of the past have been unifying, rather than disintegrating, forces in the history of the human race. … Modern nationalism, while evolving customs and ceremonies which externally are very reminiscent of rites and practices of Christianity, has developed quite a different spirit, and set itself quite a different goal. Despite the universality of the general concept of nationalism, its cult is based on a tribal idea and is, therefore, in its practical manifestations, peculiar to circumscribed areas and to persons of the same language. The good at which it aims is a good for one\’s own nation only, not for all mankind. The desires which it inspires in an Englishman or a German or a Japanese are not the same as the desires which it inspires in a Frenchman, a Pole, or an American. …

\”Nationalism as a religion inculcates neither charity nor justice; it is proud, not humble; and it signally fails to universalise human aims. It repudiates the revolutionary message of St. Paul and proclaims anew the primitive doctrine that there shall be Jew and Greek, only that now there shall be Jew and Greek more quintessentially than ever. Nationalism\’s kingdom is frankly of this world, and its attainment involves tribal selfishness and vainglory, a particularly ignorant and tyrannical intolerance, – and war.\”

\”Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

\”So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word ‘nationalism’ for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one\’s own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.

\”It is also worth emphasising once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. … When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right. …

\”It can be plausibly argued, for instance — it is even possibly true — that patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism …\”