Our Responsibility for America's Past?

 One of the complaints the right has against liberals and progressive is that we make them feel responsible for America's past. Since they weren't living then they had no participation in the misdeeds.  When the subject of reparations is raised, many point out their ancestors came to the country after the abolition of slavery. 

Two thoughts:

• the same conservatives are usually eager to affiliate themselves to the history of a glorious country.  I don't think you can pick and choose--if you love the country you have to take the whole thing; you can't have just the steak and ice cream without the vegetables.  (I realize that sentence isn't politically correct in these days of enlightened nutrition, but it makes the point, as well as comparing conservatives to children.😉)
• Carolyn Hax is the advice columnist for the Washington Post.  Her recurrent theme is you have to deal with your (spouse, significant other, relative, fried) as they are.  I think the same is true, in part, for your country. You didn't choose the country, someone choose it for you.  You can decide to leave and find one more to your liking--that's fine.  But if you remain you have to acknowledge the realities of the past.  (Hax often counsels against trying to change the person, or hoping for them to change. Obviously you can and should try to change what you don't like about America, but as with people you should be realistic.)

Bowling Alone and the Condo Collapse

 My knee-jerk reaction to the condo collapse in Florida was to think of my experience with my homeowners association, where this is also true.

As nearly everyone who has ever owned an apartment in a large building knows, however, rare is the condo owner who’s attuned to this duty, and rarer still is the one who attends association meetings, let alone serves on the board of directors.

 And I linked it to Putnam's "Bowling Alone" book, arguing for the decline of voluntary associations and the development of social capital.  But the Atlantic article piece from which the quote comes argues that states, particularly Florida, have been effective in regulating the operation of condominiums. 

So I don't know what's true.  Are homeowners associations and condo boards modern examples of building social capital, or are they due to have problems because modern America lacks social capital?

Maintenance Is Not Sexy

 I may have blogged this before, particularly in connection with maintenance of computer software, but it applies broadly, as witness the collapse of the Florida condominium.  It's a lot easier to get humans, particularly American humans, excited about doing something new, creating something, than in keeping things operating. 

How To Unite the Country: a Common Foe, Like the Pope

 The Post's Made by History series included this piece. Before the Revolution the anniversary of the discovery of the Guy Fawkes conspiracy as Pope's Day--many Protestants feared Catholicism and the Pope as tyranny. (Those who remember Rev. Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland know the modern day relics.) The prejudice was rooted in the religious wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It was, according to the piece, one thing which crossed colonial lines and united Americans. 

But come the American Revolution, with the new common foe of Britain and the need to enlist American Catholics and try to appeal to the French Canadians to join the cause, George Washington banned the celebrations.  (It didn't eliminate anti-Catholic feeling; my mother was still very suspicious of the church.) 

The Federal Government and Racism in Housing.

I think one general pattern in the development of government is evolution from the bottom, consolidation from the top.  British history has the problem of over-mighty subjects I think they're called--nobles who have their own entourages wearing their own livery carrying weapons and posing a threat to the monarchy.  Gradually their power is whittled away and the state assumes a monopoly of violence.  In the South especially there's a pattern of private and quasi-public enforcement of laws and mores, which shows most clearly in lynchings and jury nullifications.  That's been changed.  In the North roads were often developed as private enterprises, eventually to be taken over by the state. 

I could go on, but let me get to the subject: the New Deal and the federal housing agencies are commonly blamed for establishing red lines and refusing to finance housing loans in areas of the city.  IMO it's true that's what they did, but it's not true it was dreamed up in the pointy heads of Washington bureaucrats and New Dealers.  I've held that opinion all along, but it doesn't fit with the  way I see the world operating.

Now my opinion, which was based only on feelings and not on facts, is reinforce by a scholarly article in the Journal of American History.  Unfortunately it's paywalled but it includes a discussion of the development of the real estate industry. I'll quote a paragraph:

" Fisher emphasized the importance of NAREB's Code of Ethics, first created in 1913. He summarized the code and the commonsense nature of advising clients and customers on matters of value. However, he failed to mention its soon-to-be-finalized Article 34, which became one of the organization's most controversial statements: “A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” Thus racism was already well established in NAREB by the time that Ely and Fisher reached out."

"Ely" is Richard Ely, the founder of the American Economics Association, and Fisher is one of his students who worked for what became the National Association of Real Estate Boards, now the National Association of Realtors.

The article's theme can be summarized here:

?The Federal Home Loan Bank, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and their restructuring of the real estate sector were outgrowths of the network of academics, private sector professionals, trade organizations, and lobbyists that Ely assembled in the 1920s. "

To paraphrase the now deceased Rumsfeld, "you write the laws with the society you've got".  The New Deal solidified and rationalized racism in housing, racism that pre-existed the New Deal.

Barbershop/Beauty Shop Networks

 In a market economy the vendors sell something and the buyers decide to buy based on price. If it's not a commodity then quality and features come into play, but the market is supposed to be impersonal.

Got my hair cut today and got musing about networks. My experience with barbershops and my wife's experience with her hairdressers (actually just cuts) says there's a lot of networking going on.  I'd say half the patrons of my shop ask for a specific barber. (It's not a big sample; the shop is old-fashioned male-oriented and I go when there's least likely to be other patrons.) And my wife does the same thing.

You can understand why--a haircut is very personal so someone who cares will choose their barber on particular features. I guess that the market works well enough because buyers have different preferences, and there's enough of us who don't care to keep the market fairly liquid. 

The Future of Fake Food

 I follow some dairy-oriented blogs and twitter accounts, many of which are concerned about the rise of fake milk--plant-based milks.  There's also concern about plant-based meat.

The increasing popularity of these "fake foods" (I'm using the term somewhat tongue in cheek) seems result from several things:

• newness, perhaps faddishness.
• health concerns. It's not clear any of the fake foods are better for you than their "real" competition, but they might be.
• environment.  Animal agriculture, whether dairy or beef, takes a hit from concerns about methane production, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
• animal rights/welfare. You have to kill beef cattle and the male calves of dairy cattle, and we don't like that thought.
• pollution.  CAFOs impact the air and water.

The saving grace for real foods is cost--centuries of development ensure that real foods are cheaper calorie for calorie, nutrient for nutrient, in today's markets.

I remember my mother kneading in the coloring package which came with the block of margarine (butter was scarce in WWII), very upset that she had to serve fake food to us when our cows were producing good milk. The last I checked margarine was cheaper than real butter, although the two products seem to be co-existing.  

I see a similar outcome for today's fake foods: innovation will continue until they're able reasonably to compete with their real counterparts on price and taste, just as margarine does with butter.  Whether real foods become just a high-end niche product for gourmets I'm less sure about. 

[Update--part of this is relevant.]

Agriculture Development Lessons from Outside US

I think the following analysis applies equally to current problems in developing nations and to the history of agriculture in the US,  particularly when you consider the South from 1865 to 1985 or so:

In our evaluations, we often see different results across different segments of farmers—even when assistance is pretty uniform. Farmers with relatively high incomes tend to leverage their access to financing and irrigation to take full advantage of training, often making dramatic gains in production and sales in just one season. In contrast, subsistence farmers and women have more difficulty improving their situations through training, given the multitude of constraints that they face. As a result, we have found income gains concentrated among the top quartile of farmers, with more than half of farmers no better off than when the program began. These findings highlight a natural tension in the sector between helping the poorest of the poor reach food security, on one hand, and helping more established producers formalize their operations, on the other.

When Humans Are Elephants

 The NYTimes Magaine has a short piece on the herd of elephants in China who've gone walkabout. Apparently they just took off in search of better, perhaps because of disturbances in their environment and have now traveled 300 miles. The article suggests the excursion is a model of how nature adapts to change.

To me it suggests what humans have done over the millennia--how we have traveled from Africa across the world reaching every continent and significant island by 1300 CE (except Antarctica.)

I've read one book (Wrangham?) suggesting that periodic shifts in Africa from moist to dry had the effect of pumping humans out of Africa.  So we are elephants too.

Norton's 1774: the Long Year of Revolution

 Mary Beth Norton published this book in 2020,  Reading it in the light of the 1619 Project and our current partisanship makes it particularly interesting.  

Tidbits:

She defines a "long 1774", essentially starting with the Boston Tea Party (December 1773) and ending with Concord and Lexington in April 1775.

Different communities reacted differently to the importation of tea by the East India Company--the Tea Party was the most extreme among the ports (NYC, Philadelphia, Charleston) in that property was destroyed.+

Gadsden writes from SC that the colony is weakened by its high proportion of enslaved blacks--makes them indecisive in responding to the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Port Act (the first UK response to the party).

The activist faction used tactics to manipulate the results.

"Patriotic terrorism" was a thing in 1774. The "woke" were sometimes successful in silencing their opponents, those who disagreed with nonimportation and possibly nonexportation agreements to protest the "Coercive Acts" punishing Massachusetts for the destruction of tea in the Boston Tea Party.

Much of the dynamic seems to be a recognition that all the colonies needed to act together, hence the first Continental Congress and the "Continental Association"

There was a ratchet effect, each big event pushed the sides further apart. In America the progression cemented unity among the colonies and a sense of being a separate country.  Americans might have accepted a revised status similar to that achieved by Canada and Australia in the next century but neither side was able to offer concessions which could have initiated such negotiations.

Within America there was a splitting, as some came to recognize themselves as "Loyalists" and others as committed to the "Patriot" cause, even at the risk of civil war. As the book progressed the reactions of the players seemed similar to those we have seen recently.  As the Patriots coalesced they tend to unite around stronger positions much as the way progressive Democrats have emerged and coalesced since the days of euphoria over Obama's election.

If the Bill of Rights had been in effect in 1774 the Patriots would have violated many of its provisions. Assessing them it seems they followed the rule: look at what we say, disregard what we did.

The British government was receiving reports from the Netherlands and elsewhere of Americans buying arms and gunpowder to smuggle into America.  They took steps to intercept such shipments and pressured the Dutch government to block such sales.  Norton describes these reports but doesn't offer any description of the background--were these individual entrepreneurs acting out of fear of war, much as today people go to the gun store when alarmed, or hope of profit, or were some acting as agents for people in the legislative bodies attempting to speak for the colonies (some improvised conventions, some the colonial assemblies)? Likely there's little documentation to provide such background. 

Although Amazon reviews have criticized the writing as dull, I liked it--it's well done scholarship.