science

• Degeneracy and Jefferson and a Moose

  17 Mar 2021

  “The Europeans who pass into America degenerate, as do the animals; a proof that the climate is unfavourable to the improvement of either man or animal… This degradation of humanity must be imputed to the vitiated qualities of the air stagnating in their immense forests, and corrupted by the noxious vapours from standing waters and uncultivated grounds.”

  Apparently around the Revolutionary period in America, one of the most popular theories in Europe about human and animal origins was degeneration theory. Basically the idea that humans originated in the same place, but that the reason they were different in different places now is that some ended up living in different places with unfavorable climates, leading them to “devolve” and decline from their original complexity in many places. Of course, being a European theory the idea was that Europeans had not degenerated much or at all.

  Obviously this was a theory motivated by racism, used to explain the “inferiority” of other races and peoples. But a funny aspect of it is the controversy it caused with American colonists. The dopes pushing the theory implied that the American colonists had become inferior too by being exposed to the climate of North America. The idea was that the North American climate was bad for living creatures, resulting in toxic plants, which infected people and animals and made them smaller and feebler of mind and body. Some of the founding fathers got offended by Europeans calling them inferior and spent time criticizing the theory. Thomas Jefferson even had a stuffed moose sent to one of the originators of the theory to say “hey idiot, look at how massive this thing is, call my moose small and feeble, I dare you.”

  The quote at the start of this post and all of the hilariously incorrect quotes below come from a Dutch philosopher named Cornelius de Pauw who was one of the proponents of degeneration theory. The source is from a translation of his book at the link, you can look at it for free. Just prepare yourself for some horrifying racism and stupidity: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Selections_from_Les_Recherches_philosoph/4WRZAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

  “It was observed, at the discovery of the new world, that there was no such thing as a large quadruped to be found between the Tropics; there were neither horses, asses, oxen, camels, dromedaries, nor elephants; all which, except the last, have from time immemorial been so effectually tamed to the services of man in our hemisphere.”

  “The Puma, or lion of America, has no mane; nor is it to be compared for size, force, or courage, with the lion of Africa. The same may be affirmed of their Jaguar, which has been honoured with the name of tiger; as to the Couguar, or poltroon tiger, as it is called, it seems to be peculiar to this country.”
  
  

  

  “It is certain that many animals have been found in the new world, which have not their familiars in the old; from which we may infer, that the two continents were never united under the equator; for if the sea between Guinea and the Brazil had ever been terra firma, the animals of the Torrid Zone of the two hemispheres would be found on each continent: whence it follows, that each climate hath received from Nature its appropriated species.”

  “To the malignity of the air of America must be imputed the prodigious propagation of insects, venomous serpents, and infected vegetations, which so unhappily distinguish the hemisphere. The same ill qualities of the air which are favourable to these noxious productions, are probably the true origin of the degeneracy in men and animals; as the same corrupt juices which infect the vegetable nature, must taint the blood, and subdue the powers of the animal.”

  A wikipedia article on degeneration theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneration_theory

  More info on the story of how Thomas Jefferson sent a dead moose to Paris: https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/american-moose

• New Vaccine Page

  16 Mar 2021

  I forgot to post here about it, but a few weeks ago I turned my vaccine spreadsheet into a webpage on my site. You can check it out at the link below, it should be easier to navigate than the spreadsheet, especially on mobile.

  https://www.ryanbeckauthor.com/vaccines/

  I’m pretty proud of how it works, it looks simple enough but behind the scenes it’s populating the webpage tables with the values grabbed from the google spreadsheet. It took some effort and muddling through a bunch of Javascript (thanks StackOverflow!) to get it working, but now that it’s done it works pretty slick. It was one of those projects where it would have been a lot easier to just manually update the HTML every time I wanted to update the table, but I’m a fan of automation for the sake of automation so now I only have to update the values in one place.

  Anyway, for anyone who happens to see this post I hope you find my vaccine information useful and I hope you’re able to get vaccinated soon. Should be available for everyone within a couple months!

• Coronavirus Vaccine Information

  23 Nov 2020

  Trying to get information on the potential coronavirus vaccines has been frustrating. The information I want is never in one place, it’s often vague and usually scattered across multiple links. So I thought I’d take a shot 💉 at providing a more useful resource. The table below has the latest information I could find on the vaccines the US has agreed to purchase. Sources and notes are below the table with more information. The embedded table is a bit hard to navigate so for better full-screen viewing go to this link. I’ll be updating this table occasionally, check the date below the table for when it was last updated.

• Why Nations Fail

  02 Mar 2020

  I just finished the book Why Nations Fail and really enjoyed it, and I highly recommend it to everyone. Its theory is that institutions are the most important factor in whether a country is prosperous or whether it’s poor and struggling. I think it makes a strong case for capitalism based on inclusive institutions. It uses some really interesting history to argue its case, and while most theories aren’t as strong as their creators make them out to be I do think it seems like a likely explanation for a big part of the difference between rich and poor countries.

  Why Nations Fail is written by two economists, and before publishing the book they wrote a really interesting related paper that I think is worth discussing and learning about. They don’t talk about this paper at all in the book, but it’s directly related to the subject.

  The paper is called “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development” and it uses an interesting approach to show that colonialism (which directly affected the vast majority of countries on this planet) and the institutions established by it are responsible for why some countries are rich and some are poor today. Their hypothesis is that settler mortality determined whether an area was set up with extractive or inclusive institutions, and that those institutions persist to modern times in most places and determine whether a country is rich or poor. They use an instrumental variables approach to determine if their hypothesis is correct, which is a useful approach for determining causality when you can’t run an experiment.

  A common example of the instrumental variables approach is cigarette taxes and health. Though it seems obvious, it’s hard to prove with evidence that smoking causes bad health because you can’t force a random group of people to start smoking in order to compare their health outcomes to a control group. Since you can’t do that, it leaves open the possibility that maybe people with bad health choose to smoke as a comfort. In other words it’s difficult to determine which way the causality goes. So instead you can choose an instrumental variable, like cigarette taxes, and see if places with high cigarette taxes have better health. An important factor with instrumental variables is the variable can’t be a direct cause of the final result. The tax itself is going to have no direct effect on health outcomes. It’s only through the tax’s effect on the price of cigarettes that the health outcomes change. Another important component is that your causal chain has to be accurate. If places with higher cigarette taxes don’t actually have less smoking then even if their health is better your theory is busted. The causal chain is broken because smoking isn’t less than in other places. So using that instrumental variables approach you can indeed find that places with higher cigarette taxes have less smoking and better health. This is strong evidence of the link between smoking and bad health outcomes, and my understanding is instrumental variable approaches like this are kind of the gold standard in studying things where you can’t run a randomized controlled trial.

  The paper uses settler mortality as their instrumental variable. They theorize that settler mortality determined whether institutions became inclusive or extractive. In South America and Africa settler mortality was high due to disease. So the theory is that instead of settling there and establishing colonies where settlers would come to live, they set up extractive institutions to get slaves and gold. They established institutions based on forced labor, few or no rights, and the colonists using power and violence to rule with an iron fist and extract the wealth for themselves. In contrast, places like North America, New Zealand, and Australia had lower settler mortality. The colonists moved there to live, eventually setting up institutions where they would have political power and rights. The quote below is from the paper, discussing places where extractive institutions were developed.

  This is in sharp contrast to the colonial experience in Latin America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in Asia and Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The main objective of the Spanish and the Portuguese colonization was to obtain gold and other valuables from America. Soon after the conquest, the Spanish crown granted rights to land and labor (the encomienda) and set up a complex mercantilist system of monopolies and trade regulations to extract resources from the colonies.

  Europeans developed the slave trade in Africa for similar reasons. Before the mid-nineteenth century, colonial powers were mostly restricted to the African coast and concentrated on monopolizing trade in slaves, gold, and other valuable commodities–witness the names used to describe West African countries: the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast.

  But wait, couldn’t it be that places with high mortality are poorer just because they have more people dying making it harder to succeed? The paper addresses this point by noting that the mortality of native people was a lot lower than that of settlers. Many Africans develop a resistance to malaria so that while it’s still dangerous in childhood, adults are often not affected by it. Settler mortality often differed drastically from native mortality, and therefore using settler mortality is still valid.

  Something interesting the paper notes about settler awareness of mortality rates is that the early pilgrims who arrived to settle the United States had originally planned to go to Guyana until they learned of the high mortality rates in Guyana. People had enough information to have a good idea which places were deadly and which were safer to settle in.

  They also present evidence to prove their theory that early institutions are hard to change and often still persist to this day, which is why those early institutions are so important for modern day wealth.

  So the causal chain the paper uses is this:

  (Potential) settler mortality –> settlements –> early institutions –> current institutions –> current performance

  They find that their hypothesis is strong and accounts for a good portion of the difference in modern day wealth and performance. Places with high settler mortality are much poorer on average than those with low settler mortality, and they show that the causal chain holds up and that the type of institutions (extractive or inclusive) matters a lot.

  They check their work by controlling for or including a number of other factors like geography, colony origin (British, French, Dutch, etc.), prevalence of malaria, and so on. They find these other factors have little effect on the results and conclude that settler mortality and its effect on institutions is the most important factor.

  Like all theories it’s not perfect, and I know there has been some back and forth between the authors and another economist who criticized the quality of the settler mortality data. Getting accurate data from a few hundred years ago can be difficult. But it does seem to be a pretty convincing theory that seems to me to be respected by the authors’ peers. Even if it doesn’t explain all of the difference between rich and poor countries I think it makes a pretty strong case that the type of institutions a country has are important for its development and that those institutions depend on historical factors and can be difficult to change.

  Link to paper: https://economics.mit.edu/files/4123

• Technology and Jobs

  13 Feb 2020

  People have been afraid of technology taking jobs for a long time. Apparently in the 1500s William Lee invented a knitting machine and went to Queen Elizabeth to apply for a patent. The story is second or third hand so it’s not a direct quote, but apparently part of her response went something like this:

  “My Lord, I have too much love to my poor people, who obtain their bread by the employment of knitting, to give my money to forward an invention which will tend to their ruin, by depriving them of employment, and thus make them beggars.”

  This isn’t entirely about technology because apparently it was common practice to grant monopolies to well-connected people, kind of like a more powerful patent, and part of her concern was about letting Lee have a monopoly in a time when there was some political opposition to the many monopolies that had been granted. But still it does seem like part of her concern was the technology taking jobs issue.

  Technology doesn’t eliminate jobs and make more people unemployed, it just changes which jobs people do. It also makes us all better off. In the short term we should be concerned about making sure people whose jobs become obsolete are supported and can still live comfortably, but demonizing technology just makes us all worse off in the long run.

  The quote and more info here: http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-story-of-william-lee-and-his.html?m=1