Should-Read: Do historians do counter-factuals? Yes. Can you do historical counter-factuals? Yes. Could you do without historical counter-factuals? No. A world in which historians do not engage in and with counterfactuals would e a world in which human actions have no meaning, because you would never be able to say “this mattered”–you would only be able to say “this happened, and then that happened, and that is what was”. And why would anyone with any volition at all wish to create or live in such a world?

Dietz Vollrath: Can You Do Historical Counter-Factuals?: “Studying slavery and capitalism, for example, we do not have thousands of different societies or cultures to page through…

…to find one that looks almost exactly like the Anglo-American industrializing societies, but doesn’t have slavery. We cannot compare like to like, and do the plausible counter-factual… somehow “switch[ing] off” slavery…. The experience and implications of slavery are entwined with every other aspect of the industrializing societies, and pulling it out would entail massive shocks to all these other aspects. “Doing the counterfactual” looks like a big mess, and perhaps this is what Foner is objecting to because it sounds like writing some sort of alternative history novel. And it would be pure speculation to write such a novel….

[But] we don’t have to think about writing down an alternative history novel. We need to think about lots and lots of possible novels in which slavery did not exist, and lots and lots in which it did. And based on those thousands of alternative history novels, is it true that when slavery remains present into the 1800’s, that capitalism develops? And is it true that when slavery fails to persist (or maybe never really exists?) that capitalism fails to develop?… We could ask if – statistically speaking – alternative histories without slavery tended to be without capitalism, and alternative histories with slavery tended to have capitalism. When economists are talking about historical counterfactuals, I think this is what they have in mind. At least, it is what I have in mind….

The claim that slavery was not necessary for capitalism… mean[s]… that of all the alternative histories we could have gotten, the ones without slavery most likely would still have gotten capitalism anyway. And the proposed explanations for that – Indian and Egyptian supply responses, alternative labor arrangements in the US South – are arguments about the probability of capitalism occurring in those thousands of alternative histories.

I see why this can be frustrating…. How could you possibly conceive of thousands of different alternative histories, when we as yet know so little about this one?… Despite this, one advantage of thinking explicitly about this in terms of many-alternative-histories is that you can avoid falling into arguments about mono-causality. If you say that slavery is necessary for capitalism, and then say that in a counterfactual history without slavery capitalism would not have existed, you a careening perilously close to saying that slavery was the single cause of capitalism. You might try to swerve to avoid this by saying that speculating about that counterfactuals is silly in the first place….

I cannot get my head around asking “why”, as Foner does, without being able to undertake any kind of counter-factual exercise, whether in the data or in my head. But perhaps the concept of thinking in terms of many-alternative-histories, rather than feeling you must commit to a single one, is a way of making the idea of counterfactuals more palatable…

Should-Read: Dietz Vollrath: Dumb Luck in Historical Development: “Philip Hoffman’s Why Did Europe Conquer the World?… on its face is another…

…in a long line… argu[ing that] Western European economic and colonial dominance is… due to a… specific characteristic: disease tolerance, or cows, or a knobbly coastline…. Hoffman… learning-by-doing in gunpowder technology, but where learning-by-doing only occurs if you actually fight. Hence… four conditions… frequent war, lots of resources expended on those wars, use of gunpowder specifically in those wars, and few barriers to adoption of new technology…. Europe happened to meet the four conditions because of contingent historical events. In other words, Europe randomly found itself with a political setting that encouraged many high-stakes wars that involved gunpowder. Its lead was not due to some unique European characteristic, but rather was luck of the draw…. Are there any deep structural advantages that Europe had? Maybe. But my guess is that a good portion (over 50%?) of the reason Europe advanced ahead of other areas was dumb luck…. A tip of the hat to Hoffman for his effort in that direction…

Should-Read: Edward L. Glaeser (2004): Reinventing Boston: 1630–2003: “The three largest cities in colonial America remain at the core of three of America’s largest metropolitan areas today…

…This paper asks how Boston has been able to survive despite repeated periods of crisis and decline. Boston has reinvented itself three times: in the early 19th century as the provider of seafaring human capital for a far flung maritime trading and fishing empire; in the late 19th century as a factory town built on immigrant labor and Brahmin capital; and finally in the late 20th century as a center of the information economy. In all three instances, human capital—admittedly of radically different forms—provided the secret to Boston’s rebirth. The history of Boston suggests that a strong base of skilled workers is a more reliable source of long-run urban health.

Should-Read: George Orwell: On Book Reviewers: “These books deal with subjects of which he is so ignorant…

…that he will have to read at least fifty pages if he is to avoid making some howler which will betray him not merely to the author (who of course knows all about the habits of book reviewers), but even to the general reader…. At about nine p.m. his mind will grow relatively clear, and until the small hours he will sit in a room which grows colder and colder, while the cigarette smoke grows thicker and thicker, skipping expertly…. In the morning, blear-eyed, surly and unshaven, he will gaze for an hour or two at a blank sheet of paper until the menacing finger of the clock frightens him into action. Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases — ‘a book that no one should miss’, ‘something memorable on every page’, ‘of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc. etc.’ — will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go…

Should-Read: Gideon Lewis-Kraus: The Great A.I. Awakening: “Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved…

…Rekimoto[‘s]… Japanese… opening to Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” then ran that passage back through Google into English… alongside Hemingway’s original….

NO. 1: Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

NO. 2: Kilimanjaro is a mountain of 19,710 feet covered with snow and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. The summit of the west is called “Ngaje Ngai” in Masai, the house of God. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude.

Even to a native English speaker, the missing article on the leopard is the only real giveaway that No. 2 was the output of an automaton. Their closeness was a source of wonder to Rekimoto, who was well acquainted with the capabilities of the previous service. Only 24 hours earlier, Google would have translated the same Japanese passage as follows:

Kilimanjaro is 19,710 feet of the mountain covered with snow, and it is said that the highest mountain in Africa. Top of the west, “Ngaje Ngai” in the Maasai language, has been referred to as the house of God. The top close to the west, there is a dry, frozen carcass of a leopard. Whether the leopard had what the demand at that altitude, there is no that nobody explained….

Everybody wondered: How had Google Translate become so uncannily artful?… Translate had been converted to an A.I.-based system for much of its traffic…. The new incarnation, to the pleasant surprise of Google’s own engineers, had been completed in only nine months. The A.I. system had demonstrated overnight improvements roughly equal to the total gains the old one had accrued over its entire lifetime…

Must-Read: Simon Wren-Lewis: Understanding Free Trade: “There you have, in one calm and measured paragraph, the contradiction at the heart of the argument…

…put forward by Liam Fox and others that leaving the EU will allow the UK to become a ‘champion of free trade’. You cannot be a champion of free trade, and have sovereignty in the form of taking back control. It is not a contradiction, of course, if you are happy to accept the regulatory standards of the US, China or India. That appears to be the position of Leave leaders like MP Jacob Rees Mogg. Ellie Mae O’Hagan spells out what this may mean in practice. Lead in toys–bring them in so we can sign a trade agreement with China. And you can be sure that this will be the nature of the discussion every time a trade deal is signed. In each case we will be told that we have to accept this drop in regulatory standards, because British export jobs are on the line.

This is the point of Dani Rodrik’s famous impossible trilemma: you cannot have all three of the nation state, democratic politics and deep economic integration (aka free trade). His trilemma replaces sovereignty, by which in meant in this context the nation state being able to do what it likes, by democracy. In the past I have always found this problematic. Surely a democracy can decide to give away a bit of its sovereignty in return for the benefits of international cooperation (in the form of trade deals, or indeed any other kind of international cooperation). After all, every adult in a relationship knows that this relationship means certain restrictions on doing just what they would like…