Iterations

I just realized it has been over a year since my last post.  Unacceptable.

I shan’t go into all the details.  It’ll just get me in whine mode, and I’d rather save that mode for things that are important, namely rants about politicians, the current education system, and other iterative topics of this blog.

I will make one observation for those of you wondering where the economy is going.  (I don’t know why people ask me the “what do you think about the economy?” question all the time.  After all, I teach economics.  That’s not the same as knowing where the economy is going.  If anything, I expect the two are negatively correlated variables.)  But for those of you who insist on asking, here’s a bit of an economic observation:  if I had spare money to invest  right now, I’m pretty sure I’d put a serious chunk of it into “health care for senior citizens”.  Having dealt with the ups and downs of being a caregiver for an elderly parent, I’ve got to see a bit of what the youngsters out there are going to deal as the Baby Boom generation (i.e. mine) ages.  Forget about worrying about your 401(k), Gen Yers.  Think about how you’re going to deal with all us old farts when we pass 75.

There is going to be one crapload of a lot of old people out there.  And our generation, unlike my mother’s generation, has defined “low savings rate”.  Add in the fact that ours is the first generation of entitlement, and you’re going to have a nightmare.

Weep, Gen Y.  You’re going to have to deal with our incontinence, our congestive heart disease, our Type II diabetes, and all the rest.  For years, because we’re going to be living at least as long as our parents, and our parents were a fecund lot.

And no, the government can’t solve this one for you.  Sorry.  I hate to tell you this, but they’ve been clueless for decades.

Your generation cares a lot about sustainabilty.  Well, guess what, you are going to have to figure out how to sustain, not what this economy is doing right now….you’re going to have to figure out how to sustain unprecedented economic growth.  You’re going to have to reinvent the economic world the way the Europeans re-invented it a couple hundred years ago.

You’ve made a good start.

But the solution to dealing with us old farts is going to be tough.  I don’t care what the worriers and entitlement-people and the politicos who think all solutions are found in someone else’s pocket say.  You’ve got one “social task” ahead of you:  you need  to figure out not just “sustainable” growth.  You need to figure out how to grow growth itself.

We’ll help, of course.  But pretty soon we’re going to be old enough to demand you service our retirement “needs.”

Good luck.

I admit it.  I’m an unapologetic enthusiast for the new and cool.

I can’t think of a time I’d rather be living in.  Today’s flat world is the most exciting place of change since the British started finding new ways to combine steam and iron in the Industrial Revolution, and its happening in a world with a lot more economic wealth.

Though I’d rather be living it as 25 years younger and several hundred thousand dollars wealthier, and it would be nicer to live where I didn’t have to worry about winter soon making its annual five month visit, I think there is no place in history that I’d rather be living in right now than the world circa 2008.

Which brings me to the place of history and its study amidst all this change.

Because while I’m an enthusiast for the future, I’m also an enthusiast for the past.  Despite having written a dissertation on the economic history of company law in Victorian Britain, I remain interested in how companies work, how law works, and in what happened during that 63 years and 7 months Queen Victoria occupied the throne of the United Kingdom.

(It’s another reason, I suppose, for academics referring to the PhD as the “terminal degree”:  after having endured all the stuff that finishing the thing takes, it’s a good bet that your deep interest in the subject is going to be on life support.)

History remains a passion, and not just the history of the Victorians.  For example, I am currently reading a book on trade in the ancient world.  (More on that in a bit.)

Yet I’ve had greater and greater difficulty convincing my fellow enthusiasts about the future (i.e., the students in my economics and history classes) that there is deep value to be had from studying the people, events, and technologies of the past.  Let’s be honest, after all:  the people are dead, the events can’t be changed, and the technologies are several generations obsolete.

And let’s also be honest about those “lessons from the past”.  While they are real and while they are important, they are complicated and difficult to draw.  Between the time when the past happened and today there have been many continuities and many, many changes, and it’s very difficult untangling which is which.

The book on ancient trade that I just alluded to, Barry Cunliffe’s The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (Penguin, 2002) is an excellent illustration.  It reveals its author’s erudition (he’s a professor of European archaeology at Oxford) at every turn, and paints a detailed picture of the ancient trader’s world, of the lure of tin and the discovery of Britain.  But it is not an easy read.  Given that I’ve been reading bits and pieces of the story for several months now and have only just now passed the halfway point of Cunliffe’s 184-page book, I don’t expect to be assigning it in my economic history course.

Yet it is oddly compelling, and a book well worth the effort.  But it will take effort.

But is it really worth that effort?  What does the story of Pytheas the Massaliot (Massalia is the ancient name for what has become the modern French city of Marseille) offer for better understanding of the world of 2008?  It is after all the ultimate in stories about long-dead people, long unchangeable events, and long obsolete technologies.  Apart from French antiquarians and Oxford archaeologists, I don’t expect there are 500 people in the world who care about the ancient name of Marseille, and not many more who care about ancient trade routes or the history of tin.  Answering the “What’s in it for me?” would appear to be an insurmountable question.

Well let me point out three big reasons.

First, lets look at that stuff about trade routes.  Today’s is a world made and remade daily by trade.  When people speak of “globalization,” they’re describing a world defined by its trade.  Yet, as any good economic historian will tell you, globalization is not a recent phenomenon.  Indeed, as the story of Pytheas the Greek points out, it’s been going on for millennia.  So what’s different, really, about the 21st century’s version?  What makes our globalization so special, for good or for bad?   Well, it seems to me, you can’t answer these questions unless you get deep into the details.  Unless you think about how trade works,  about how raw materials and goods get from where they are to where they end up.  In short, you need to know about trade routes.  And the routes of trade are a lot more complicated than the half-page “circular flow” diagram that is to be found in most introductory economics textbooks.

Which brings me to the second and third reasons.   Reading along with Cunliffe as he pieces together the trade routes of the ancient world reveals just how difficult it truly is to figure out who is actually trading with whom in a global market.  And it reveals all the judgment calls one must make about “evidence” along the way of that figuring out.

If you’ve got a mind that works well with abstraction, the theoretical concepts of economics (supply and demand, opportunity cost, national income, technology, and the rest) are fairly straightforward.  But to put those concepts to work with real world situations is complicated and messy work.  Especially if you want to do it well.

Because while the 21st may put unprecedented amounts of “data” at our fingertips — just do a couple Google searches and click on a few links — converting that data into “evidence” is detailed and frustrating work.  It requires the user of data to make constant judgments and interpretations.

But when you live in a world with so much data to hand, it’s very hard to see those judgments being made.  That’s where Cunliffe’s story comes in. He is very transparent about where and how and why he’s making inferences and interpretations.

Indeed that transparency is part of what makes reading his book such slow going.  I can imagine my students saying, if I were so foolish as to assign the book and then ask for their evaluation of the book, “but he takes so long to say anything!”

Yet I’m not sure there’s any more important skill people in the 21st century have to develop than empirical judgment.  It is so, so easy for political and business and religious charlatans to just inundate us with “information”.  We must have tools of judgment as good as our tools of information transmission.  We need advanced tools, the kind of tools hitherto the province of PhD-level historians and archaeologists, and we need those tools in the hands of everyday users of information with a bachelor’s degree or less.

We need the study of history today.  More, not less, than ever before.