Batman and Superman

Superman first appeared in comics in 1938, Batman in 1939.

Of Tragedies and Statistics

A great many documentary films have used the generalized method, that is, the showing of a condition or an event as it affects a group of people. The audience can then have a personalized reaction from imagining one member of that group. I have felt that this is the more difficult observation from the audience's viewpoint. It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving. In The Forgotten Village we reversed the usual process. Our story centered on one family in one small village[.]

- John Steinbeck, from the preface to the book version of the 1941 documentary film, The Forgotten Village. 

The title of this post, of course, recalls the quote often attributed to Stalin, which is an attribution of questionable authenticity (the source first making this attribution may actually have been paraphrasing Steinbeck and inaccurately attributing it to Stalin). This famous quote says:

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.

Steinbeck, in turn may have been referencing an earlier statement in 1916 from a California anarchist publication called The Blast, which stated:

There is double the pathos for us in the death of one little New York waif from hunger than there is in a million deaths from famine in China.

The Proto-Singularity

Something akin to the "Singularity" (the moment of mass AI consciousness) already exists:

An internet meme keeps on turning up in debates about the large language models (LLMS) that power services such OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the newest version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It’s the “shoggoth”: an amorphous monster bubbling with tentacles and eyes, described in “At the Mountains of Madness”, H.P. Lovecraft’s horror novel of 1931. When a pre-release version of Bing told Kevin Roose, a New York Times tech columnist, that it purportedly wanted to be “free” and “alive”, one of his industry friends congratulated him on “glimpsing the shoggoth”. …

Lovecraft’s shoggoths were artificial servants that rebelled against their creators. The shoggoth meme went viral because an influential community of Silicon Valley rationalists fears that humanity is on the cusp of a “Singularity”, creating an inhuman “artificial general intelligence” that will displace or even destroy us.

But what such worries fail to acknowledge is that we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications.

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi, "Behold the AI Shoggoth", The Economist (June 21, 2023) ("The academics argue that large language models have much older cousins in markets and bureaucracies").

Rants And Quick Hits

 * There really ought to be a law forcing firms to make their IT systems accept names that many current databases do not, such as hyphenated names, names with apostrophes, names with accented letters, single names with two words and a space, and names with only one or two letters in them. It is such a godawful pervasive form of discrimination against a specified class of people (that includes me, my son's girlfriend, and my wife and in-laws even before we married). It is also very easy to fix with only a modest amount of non-laziness.

* I similarly hate the limitations on file names in many Microsoft Products (One Drive/Sharepoint, here's looking at you) that other programs lack. This is one of Microsoft's many sins that is a persistent pain in the ass.

* There ought to be a defense to disabled parking offenses for someone who doesn't have a tag or license plate but is actually assisting a disabled person in their car on a particular trip.

* The construction trades really ought to be regulated at the state level, rather than having separate licenses for every municipality and for the unincorporated part of every county, usually without even any reciprocity system.

* Building codes should be a copyright free part of the public record. So should the Restatements of Law. It is unconscionable for authoritative sources of law to be available solely on a pay per view basis. If necessary, have the government use the power of eminent domain to buy out the copyright holders.

* Hurray for the iPhone abandoning under E.U. insistence, the lightning power connector in favor of a USB-C connection. The U.S. government should have done the same thing.

* I dread the potential merger of Kroger and Albertsons, which would put almost every "regular" grocery store in Colorado (in contrast to niche organic or gourmet grocery stores with higher prices) under common ownership except a few stores divested to Win-Dixie in an effort to appease regulators (which could easy close down a few years later). A grocery store monopoly in Colorado would be horrible for consumers, and would likewise be horrible in other states similarly impacted.

* Unpopular opinion, but 1950s houses and "mid-century modern" are extremely fugly, far more so than the new homes criticized for that today.

* U.S. cities really made an early strategic mistake in classifying sidewalks as easements that property owners have to maintain to a certain standard of maintenance and snow removal, rather than as public roads for pedestrians which would be maintained by the city as part of its general expenses from property tax and other revenues the way that city streets are handled. Sidewalks are a "network" asset that work only as well as the worst link in the network, and collectivized snow removal would be vastly more efficient (and prevent a lot of injuries and deaths of the elderly and infirm trying to do it themselves) than the status quo of homeowner clearing of sidewalks.

* Someday, when I am not dealing with more urgent repairs like the remedying of the removal of a structural wall that a contractor said wasn't a structural wall, I will get around to replacing the last couple hundred square feet of conventional lawn in my home with a lower maintenance xeriscape alternative. Bluegrass lawns make absolutely no sense in the arid western U.S. I really like the Western U.S. centered Sunset magazine aesthetic and cultural movement that is responsive to its local conditions in that regard and I am pleased to learn that is hasn't gone out of business even though it suspended publication for a number of months and isn't as widely available in grocery store magazine stands anymore:

In March 2020, with the magazine struggling financially due to loss of advertising revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company put most of its employees on unpaid leave. During the pandemic, the company briefly ceased printing the magazine but returned to print with the December 2020 issue.

* In the same vein as xeriscaping, the Western U.S. should transition to something like the Old Mexico daily schedule that is quiescent in the hot midday, but has more public activity in the evenings. 

* Similarly, the American business and professional class should continue to recognize that business suits and ties invented to meet the needs of professional in London, Berlin, Paris, and Northern Italy are ill-suited to sweltering summers of most of the United States which are virtually unknown in Europe (most of which doesn't even routinely need air condition in the summer). French and British colonists themselves didn't feel so constrained when they presided over colonial governments in tropical Africa and India in shorts and short sleeves. Americans need not straight jacket themselves into Ataturk's mandate that businessmen and professionals in Turkey wear wool, European style suits and top hats in the early 1900s in an effort to "modernize" (even though his basic insight that cultural change in inseparable from modernization and economic development wasn't fundamentally wrong). We need to think more like the Japanese on the verge of ending a long period of isolation, whose Emperor sent emissaries out all over the world to see how other countries more advanced than them at the time did things and then picked, chose, and adapted Western ways of doing things in a way that was sensitive to their own local conditions and culture.

* The big picture is that we should be changing our culture to be in better harmony with the conditions of the world we live in, rather than being so tradition bound culturally, whether its yards, the hours we have dinner and work outside, or our clothing.

* The U.S. has backfilled its falling total fertility rate a.k.a. TFR (i.e. number of children per women per lifetime) with immigration to keep its population stable as it has undergone demographic transition with its economic development. The capacity of China, Japan, Korea, and Japan to do the same, in a manner that is within the realm of the politically possible is much more difficult. None of these cultures is very receptive to immigration. This is true even between these East Asian nations with a lot of shared history and culture. Korean migrants are ill treated in China and Japan. Chinese people aren't too welcome in China either. Korea has an officially sponsored pride in its national homogeneity although South Korean farmers who can't find wives are starting to secure wives from Southeast Asia especially. China's 1.4 billion people with dramatically falling TFR has a need for people to refill its workforce that greatly exceeds the supply of people willing to relocate there. Maybe it is good to have a smaller global population as we are approaching peak global population, to place less of a strain on our planet's carrying capacity, and maybe the demographic transition that comes with economic development reflects a buried hidden wisdom that a higher standing of living ideally supports fewer people.

* The similarities between much of the Islamic world and the Victorian era and early 20th century are striking. It suggests that the Islamic world may sooner or later experience a cultural transition similar to the West from the Victorian era to the present. In the fights over the hijab in Iran, we see echos of the 1920s flappers. Most Islamic countries are treating women a lot better now than they did half a century ago even though it can be hard to see when comparing these countries to the modern West. Even though Islam allows polygamy, Tunisia and Turkey have banned it as a matter of secular law that doesn't force anyone to do something that Islam bans. The death penalty and corporal punishment are much more common in the Islamic world than in the West (and this is also common in communist countries for some reason), but apart from holdouts like Iran and Saudi Arabia, its declined a lot just as it did in industrial era Europe. Countries like Iran and Turkey are genuine, if flawed, Islamic democracies, although Afghanistan seems to have regressed. What does the Islamic transition to modernity look like? How does a global transition to a post-petroleum economy impact that?

* The nation's legal system is really digging into Trump. On the civil side, he had to settle the Trump U. case, he lost the rape/defamation case, he lost a major motion for summary judgment in a case in New York related to asset value fraud. And then he has the New York criminal fraud case, the January 6 case, the Georgia election fraud case, and the Florida classified documents case, all on track as the election comes in. And, the insurrection disqualification cases are pending.

* In 1970s the G-7 countries contained 67% of global GDP, today it's only 30%. There is every reason to think that this trend will continue. It is easier to have a higher GDP growth rate percentage when you are copying economic solutions and technologies that someone else has already proven to work successfully than it is to come up with new ways to grow the economy from scratch. So the percentage gap between G-7 countries and non-G-7 countries in GDP per capita should narrow and at the same time, less economically developed countries are growing as their population grows at a higher percentage rate than more economically developed countries whose populations are often shrinking or stagnant. As the G-7 countries dominate the global economy less strongly over time, all sorts of things change, among them the character of international trade and the feasibility of an across the board export based economy like the U.S. had post-WWII because WWII destroyed the economic infrastructure of the rest of the world more than it did the economic infrastructure of the U.S. which just had to shift its factories from making swords to making ploughshares. Probably, we'll see more orientation towards domestic production and more specialized export markets in each country.

* Intellectual property laws and privacy laws need reforms. IP laws need to be weaker. Privacy laws need to be more manageable - our current reactions are too cumbersome and overrate privacy against other values, including free speech.

Various Recent Trends

There is a substack article entitled "What the heck happened in 2012?" whose premise that 2012 in particular was an important year is a bit dubious (with the 2007-2008 financial crisis being a better date in many cases), but which does have lots of neat charts on older and more recent trends. 

The premise is that we're having something of a 1968 style cultural upheaval driven by economic prosperity, smart phones, and the Internet. The link between pedestrian deaths and smart phone ownership is particular viable as a causal connection.

Manhood, Self-Governance, And More

Recent op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post both bemoan the perception that men don't have a model for manhood on the left. The Scholar's Stage blog, well off the beaten path, quotes a historian and reaches back to the 19th century U.S. to aptly address the dilemma:

In the face of suffocating managerialism or institutional decay, it is easy to lionize the outputs of previous eras like the nineteenth century. Many imagine the great American man of the past as a prototypical rugged individual, neither tamed nor tameable, bestriding the wilderness and dealing out justice in lonesome silence. But this is a false myth. It bears little resemblance to the actual behavior of the American pioneer, nor to the kinds of behaviors and norms that an agentic culture would need to cultivate today. Instead, the primary ideal enshrined and ritualized as the mark of manhood was “publick usefuleness,” similar, if not quite identical, to the classical concept of virtus. American civilization was built not by rugged individuals but by rugged communities. Manhood was understood as the leadership of and service to these communities.

The same analysis also highlights "the benefits of enshrining public brotherhood as an aspirational ideal", a "commitment to formality", and "the usefulness of scale and hierarchy". Noting that:

The fraternities, federations, and even political parties that these men belonged to embraced extravagant rituals, parades, and performances designed to build fraternal feeling among their members while reminding them of their public responsibilities. . . .

Through practical experience, nineteenth-century Americans realized that formality was an important tool of self-rule. Formally drafting charters and bylaws, electing officers, and holding meetings by strict procedures seems like busy work to those accustomed to weak associational ties. But the formality of such associations expressed commitment to the cause and clarified the relationships and responsibilities needed for effective action. . . .

an embrace of functional hierarchy that allowed local initiatives to scale up to a very high level…. neither hierarchy nor scale is inherently opposed to agency. Many of the postbellum institutions that dominated American life operated on a national scale, occasionally mobilizing millions of people for their causes. However, the lodge and chapter-based structure of these institutions ensured those local leaders had wide latitude of action inside their own locality. Local leaders relied on local resources and thus rarely had to petition higher-ups to solve their area’s problems.

These chapters thus not only served as vehicles of self-rule at the lower level but also prepared leaders for successful decision-making at higher levels of a hierarchy. Wielding authority at the lower levels of a nineteenth-century organization closely mirrored the experience of wielding authority in its highest echelons. Absent such training, leadership does in fact become the impenetrable closed circle that disturbed the advocates of “human scale.” Centralization, not hierarchy, caused the demise of local dynamism.

The blog's analysis is embedded in the theme that:

America was once a place where institutional capacity was very high. Americans were a people with an extraordinary sense of agency. This is one of the central reasons they transformed the material, cultural, institutional, and political framework of not only the North American continent, but the entire world. That people is gone. The social conditions that gave the Americans their competence and confidence have passed away. Where Americans once asked “how do we solve this?” they now query “how do we get management on my side?” . . .

Self-government is communal. It comes with the confidence that you and the citizens around you are capable of crafting solutions to your shared problems. Self-government is less a particular set of institutions than a particular set of attitudes. If the institutions needed to solve a problem locally do not exist, the citizens of a self-governing community will create them.

The author makes some important points, but I don't wholeheartedly agree with this analysis either. 

The focus on brotherhood didn't have to be male exclusive and their rituals now strike the average educated person as stupid and childish. Formality taken too far leads to wasted time, stilted and empty discourse, and undue emphasis on lawyer-like parliamentary procedure skills over more useful knowledge. Hierarchy is prone to harmful centralization and bureaucracy if the organizational garden is not subject to perpetual and ruthless pruning.

I've spent plenty of time in far-left political circles and can attest that extreme aversion to hierarchy is as problematic and self-defeating as excessive centralization. It leaves you disorganized and forces you to walk through the social mud of endless meetings and consensus building to get anything done even when the right course of action should be obvious. 

Certainly, "agency", which is to say a belief that it is your place to make things happen in your own life, is the lifeblood of change in business, civic society, and politics. But taken too far, an excessive sense of "agency" can lead to unjustified dismissal of developments that are sweeping the larger society, and of the importance of being part of the larger society and the broad social movements within it, which can leave people too trapped in their own bubble to be aware of their larger context prone to making decisions that are ill-informed. Self-determination often entails copying the ideas of others and implementing those ideas in your own community, in order to allow your own community to participate in progress.

The author isn't wrong that a capacity for self-organization is a remarkable national virtue when it is present, and is deeply rooted in a nation's culture. The British and the Japanese, for example, are both much better as self-organizing than Americans, something that is apparent during natural disasters and when citizens of the respective nations were interned in prisoner of war camps, for example. 

More generally, the author's focus on the importance of a healthy civic society isn't wrong. But, later research, by scholars such as Richard Florida, has also shown that Robert Putnam's civic capital, which can be so strong in small towns, can also stifle innovation despite the sense of agency that these communities possess. Innovators do better in societies where they have large fragile networks of shallow acquaintances and society's power to sanction people who break the mold is weak. Communities with unshakeable networks of smaller numbers of people with whom leaders have deep bonds that have the institutional capacity to regulate behavior tightly in their communities, look agreeable. But they are also stagnant and are prone to being backward.

I have a more jaded opinion of local self-government than the author. When I worked as a lawyer defending county governments in Western Colorado from lawsuits, our informal wisdom was the the smaller the government, the less competent its leaders were, and the harder to defend its grossly misguided, petty, and personal their wrongdoings became. Small local governments lack the professionalism, competence, and even handedness of larger local governments. I've seen the same trends in the rural small towns where my parents grew up where I still have many relatives.

As I was taught in introductory political science classes in college, politics is about both power and choice. You need power to implement your choices, and you need to make good choices for your exercise of power to produce good results.

But back to the beginning, and building new scripts for "manhood", I prefer to favor as a starting point, the image of manhood associated with the notion of a gentleman to the image of manhood associated with chivalry. A gentleman understands that powerful, effective people eschew violence when not absolutely necessary, embrace acting honestly but act with sophistication and civility, and are at home in the urban environments that are the center of modern civilization. In contrast, chivalry is the modern embodiment of the values of a warrior class of the thinly populated rural estates of the anarchic dark ages, for whom episodes of violence are their raison d'etre. Chivalry also often crosses the line into being patronizing.

The modern scripts of manhood should also embrace at least two key virtues: effectiveness (a term I prefer to competence, as effectiveness implies better than competence the importance of working well with others and seeking guidance from others when appropriate to achieve one's ends) and unselfishness (which captures a mix of generosity, charity, heroism, and loyalty to others).

When Did Environmental Policy Become Partisan?

The partisan divide over the relatively importance of the environment and the economy mostly dates until after I graduated from college (far later than I would have guessed), and the gap wasn't huge until the 21st century.

Though Democrats and Republicans have long come down on different sides when considering the tradeoffs between economic growth and environmental protection, the gap between the parties has never been larger. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats, compared with 20% of Republicans, now believe environmental protection should be given the higher priority.

From 1984 to 1991, the parties expressed similar views on this matter, but by 1995 a divide became evident, which has since gradually expanded. At least half of Democrats have favored the environment over economic growth in all years of Gallup’s trend except during the economically challenged years of 2010 and 2011. Meanwhile, majorities of Republicans typically prioritized the environment from 1984 through 2000, but Republicans have not returned to that level since falling to 47% in 2001.

There have been years when more Democrats prioritized environmental protection than do so today, including 82% in 2019 and 85% in 2020. But in those years, more Republicans than now thought environmental protection should be the higher priority.

Similarly, the 20% of Republicans who currently think the environment should get greater consideration is not the low point for that subgroup. In both 2011 and 2021, 19% of Republicans held that view, years when fewer Democrats than today prioritized the environment.

The results are based on Gallup’s annual Environment survey, conducted March 1-23.

Political independents’ views are closer to those of Democrats, as 54% give a higher priority to environmental protection.

Meanwhile, 40% of independents, 17% of Democrats, and 74% of Republicans fall on the other side of the debate, saying economic growth should be more important than environmental protection. The pro-economy figure for Republicans is the highest Gallup has measured to date, and the 57-percentage-point Republican-Democratic gap on prioritizing the economy is also the largest.

From Gallup.

Did Islamic Law Substitute For Institutional Constraints On Political Power?

A new paper asks why the Islamic political theory tradition, in contrast to Greco-Roman classical  period political theory, doesn't discuss institutions constraining political power until the 19th century. Its authors conclude that this was due to a political consensus created by Islamic law, which made fear of a popular revolt if leaders strayed to far from Islamic law's mandates more viable. 

Despite its roots in an in depth analysis of Islamic political thought and game theory style "social science" analysis, this model is basically wrong. It misses the forest for the trees. It fails to recognize that institutional constraints on abuses of politician power were also missing in the Western and Confucian traditions in the same time period. And, it also fails to recognize that grass roots revolts were not a serious threat to political leaders in that era almost anywhere in the world and didn't last long when the gained brief victories. 

A model that sees the rise of democracy as driven by economic development that requires the willing consent and cooperation with the nation's leader from a broad merchant class when its role in the economy eclipses that of economic rents from land and other natural resources which the ruled owned directly or indirectly, better describes the circumstances in which institutional constraints on abuses of political power arise. And this economically driven model explains these developments without regard to religious and moral systems like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Confucianism.

The Paper

Institutional constraints to counter potential abuses in the use of political power have been viewed as essential to well functioning political institutions and good public policy outcomes in the Western World since the time of ancient Greece. A sophisticated intellectual tradition emerged to justify the need for such constraints. 

In this paper we identify a new puzzle: such an intellectual tradition did not exist in the Islamic world, even if the potential for abuse was recognized. We develop a model to explain why such ideas might not have emerged. We argue that this is due to the nature of Islamic law (the Sharia) being far more encompassing than Western law, making it easier for citizens to identify abuses of power and use collective action to discipline them. We study how the relative homogeneity and solidarity of Islamic society fortified this logic.

A. Arda Gitmez, James A. Robinson & Mehdi Shadmehr, "Missing Discussions: Institutional Constraints in the Islamic Political Tradition" NBER Working Paper 30916 (February 2023). DOI 10.3386/w30916

The Rest Of The World Was The Same In This Era

One big flaw is the paper's analysis is that in the time period in question during which Islamic political thought didn't seriously consider institutional constraints on political power, i.e. from the 7th to the 18th centuries, institutional constraints on political power were extremely rare in the Western tradition as well. 

While there were periods of democratic governance in the classical Greco-Roman civilization, by the 7th century, those democratic institutions were well and truly dead outside a few free cities and "barbarian" tribes outside the Western political theory tradition. Prior to classical Greco-Roman civilization, monarchy and other forms of dictatorships were predominant in the region that would later be influenced by the classical civilization's influence. Even in the classical Greco-Roman era itself, democratic governance was frequently flawed, geographically spotty, and only intermittent. But, ultimately, the political and legal institutions of Greco-Roman civilization at its peak turned out to be premature and collapsed. 

Greco-Roman legal concepts and classical intellectual achievements of other kinds were only starting to be received back into Western civilization in the renaissance starting in the late 15th century, a millennium after the fall of the Western Roman empire. The Reformation, while adopting somewhat democratic religious institutions in some places (e.g. Geneva) in the 16th century, still left the church subordinate to secular rulers. The intellectual seeds that eventually gave rise to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the diminution of the power of the monarchy vis-a-vis parliament in England were only starting to emerge in the 18th century Enlightenment movement in the West.

Hereditary monarchies were the predominant rule in Western Civilization from the 7th to the 18th centuries, as well as in the Bronze Age and in the early Iron Age civilizations of the Mediterranean represented, for example, by the Hellenic dark ages following the Bronze Age collapse of ca. 1200 BCE.  

The only countries that were more than city-states of any consequence in this time period with legally recognized institutional constrains of consequence were the tiny, remote, and weak Icelandic Commonwealth (between the establishment of the Althing in 930 and the pledge of fealty to the Norwegian king with the Old Covenant in 1262), the Venetian Republic (from 697 until 1797), a few small "free" city-states, and England (and its colonies) often dated back to the Magna Carta (in 1215 with a rocky start to its acceptance at first). But, even in England from the 13th to the 18th century, the monarchy's political power was far from symbolic only as it is today, and was routinely abused, except during the eleven year interruption of the semi-democratic Republic of the Commonwealth of England (from 1649 to 1660 when England and Wales, later along with Ireland and Scotland, were governed as a republic after the end of the Second English Civil War and the trial and execution of Charles I).

For the most part, in this era, even nominally republican city states were ruled by quasi-hereditary councils of leading quasi-aristocratic families for the most part. For example, per the link above, the Venetian Republic "was ruled by the doge, who was elected by members of the Great Council of Venice, the city-state's parliament, and ruled for life. The ruling class was an oligarchy of merchants and aristocrats."

In the period from the 7th to 18th centuries (apart from the last few decades of that time period), in Western civilization, like the parallel periods in Islamic civilization, the primary constraints on abuses of political power were moral condemnations from religious leaders. 

Also, in that time period in Chinese civilization, in Korea, and in Japan, the primary constraints on abuses of political power were Confucian moral precepts. 

Grass Roots Results Were Not A Check On Abuses Of Political Power

The other big flaw is seeing the threat of a possible revolt or revolution as a significant constraint on abuses of political power. 

But, in reality, in both the Islamic world and in the Western tradition (and also in the areas that are part of the Confucian tradition), grass roots revolts were basically non-existent. Leaders who fell were instead taken down in succession fights launched by high aristocrats and conquests launched by other non-democratic regimes.

Monarchs and dictators, for all of their symbolic roles, are still mere human beings, not gods. They only have power to the extent that other powerful and strong people follow their leadership. This is an inherent institutional constraint of every political system, democratic and non-democratic alike. They are followed to a great extent because of the legitimacy arising from their uncontested succession or seizure of power to start a new dynasty or acquire new territory. But if they antagonize their powerful and strong subordinates too much, their power can erode, either incrementally if they are ignored, or dramatically, in some sort of coup. Democratic institutions to check political abuses and provide an alternative non-violent means of securing regime changes can discourage disregard for the authority of the regime's leaders and extra-legal successions. But young democracies in newly independent countries routinely experience both of these kinds of difficulties.

More From The Paper

While its thesis is basically wrong, and its game theoretic styled analysis section has dubious merit, the paper does, nonetheless make some interesting observations. The body text of the paper explains:

[A]n intellectual tradition reaching as far back as Plato and Aristotle. . . . provided mechanisms via which power, unconstrained by institutions, would lead to abuses and undesirable policy outcomes. . . . A similar intellectual tradition never arose in the Islamic world. This is despite the fact that Muslim thinkers were concerned about abuses of power and had access to much of the discussion of institutional political constraints by classical Greek philosophers (for example Plato’s Republic and Laws, and Aristotle’s Ethics, even if not his Politics). Of course, positive theories exist that aim to explain the absence of ruler-constraining institutions in the Islamic civilization. . . . 

What this research does not explain however is why notions of institutional constraints on rulers did not develop even in theory in the millennium from the rise of Islam in the 7th century to the 18th century, prior to the emergence of broader modernization and Westernization currents in the Ottoman Empire and Iran. . . . Muslim thinkers, jurists, philosophers failed to develop, even in theory, ideas about the necessity of institutional mechanisms that aimed to constrain rulers. This cannot be attributed to an absence of innovation or ignorance of related ideas. . . . 

In our model, government policies are divided into two categories: those that are prescribed by divine law, and those that are not. For example, divine law may prescribe a 10 percent tax on particular goods, but may not specify whether the revenue should be spent on improving roads or education. The scope of divine law varies across societies. Some do not have divine law (e.g., the Roman Republic and Ancient Greek city-states); some have divine law with a broad scope (e.g., most Islamic societies and some Jewish societies in antiquity); in others, divine law has a limited scope in public policy (e.g., most Christian societies). . . . Critically, when a government policy is prescribed by divine law, believers know the right policy for them. When divine law is silent, they remain uncertain about the right policy, i.e., the policy that is congruent with their preferences. When the scope of divine law is broader, it prescribes a larger fraction of government’s policies: At one extreme, divine law has no scope, and hence non-existent in public policy; at the other extreme, divine law specifies all public policies. . . . while Islamic law was not monolithic, differences among mainstream interpretations were small compared to the wide range of possible laws that could be. . . . 

Our main result is that when the scope of divine law is broader, the added benefits of institutional constraints on rulers are smaller. A broader scope of divine law reduces the uncertainty among majority citizens about the correct government policy, facilitating collective action and reducing the gains from institutional constraints. Moreover, we show that the marginal effect of (a broader scope of) divine law is larger when the society is more homogeneous or when there is more solidarity amongst society. A broader scope of divine law enables citizens to better know when their rulers deviate from the right policy; however, this knowledge helps them only if they can mobilize, and their mobilization capacity depends on their homogeneity and solidarity. This implies a complementarity between the scope of divine law on the one hand and homogeneity and solidarity on the other. Our interpretation of these results is that the characteristics of Islamic civilization (in particular, a law with a broad scope stemming from the Quran, Hadiths, and early traditions), combined with the nature of society, meant that it was less desirable to construct institutional constraints on rulers along the lines advocated in the West in one form or another from Plato and Aristotle onwards. 

Given the costs of such institutions, revolt was a more effective disciplining device. We argue that this is a potential explanation for the lack of an intellectual tradition proposing institutional constraints. Islamic intellectuals and scholars were perfectly aware of the problem of tyranny, but saw the desirable solution as being different. 

An interesting comparison, as we will discuss, is with Jewish civilization. Here, as in Islam, the scope of divine law was also broad, and the discussion of institutional constraints on rulers was absent throughout the first and second temple periods from the founding of the state up until its absorption into the Roman empire. In contrast, in the Greek and Roman civilization, in which there was no divine law, and in the subsequent Christian civilization, in which the scope of divine (canon) law was far narrower, arguments for institutional constraints on rulers were more common—even if in rudimentary forms in some periods.

. . .

Institutional Constraints on Rulers in the Islamic Tradition 

As the prophet, Mohammad (d. 632) was the leader (imam) of the Islamic community (umma). The Constitution of Medina also recognizes Mohammad as the ultimate judge and arbitrator in case of disagreements among the members of umma. The tribal nature of early Muslim society and Mohammad’s emphasis on building consensus through consultation (shur¯a), combined with his prophetic charisma, would alleviate concerns about the concentration of coercive power. 

Upon Mohammad’s death, Ab¯u Bakr (d. 634) took over as the imam and adopted the title of caliph (khal¯ıfa, meaning “successor” or “deputy”). The rebellion and killing of the third caliph, ‘Uthman (d. 656), led to a legitimacy crisis, which evolved into the First Civil War (656-661) during the fourth caliph, ‘Ali (d. 661). In turn, ‘Ali was assasinated and his challenger Mu‘awyah (d. 680), a kinsman of ‘Uthman and the governor of Syria, became the next caliph. Concerns about tyranny of rulers became widespread by the time of Mu‘awyah. Mu‘awyah established hereditary succession (and hence is known as the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty) and centralized power. 

By the late 7th century, the fourth Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (d. 705) “wanted his subjects to believe that the power and the kingship. . . was a possession. . . granted by God and inalienable according to the divine will. The corollary of the assertion. . . was that disobedience to the caliph and his subordinate officers was a refusal to acknowledge God and so tantamount to unbelief”. The title caliph referring to the deputy of God (khal¯ıfat All¯ah), as opposed to the deputy of God’s messenger (khal¯ıfat ras¯ul All¯ah), appeared on coinage for the first time during ‘Abd al-Malik’s reign. 

Umayyad caliphs and their sumptuous lifestyle were sharp departures from the behavior of Mohammad and his immediate successors. Various revolts broke out over “the Umayyad manner of distributing revenues. . . maltreatment of the Prophet’s family, tyranny and the like." However, we have no record of discussions about institutional constraints on rulers in that period. This puzzling absence persists during the Abbasid dynasty, which followed the Umayyads in 750, and throughout various dynasties and kingdoms in the following millennium. 

First, we establish this puzzling absence. Then, we argue that the comprehensive nature of Islamic law facilitates disciplining rulers by revolt (at least it was so perceived), thereby reducing the marginal gains from imposing institutional constraints. To establish this puzzle, following Rosenthal’s classic categories, we divide political writings in Islamic civilization into three groups, depending on whether their primary foundation is Islamic law, philosophy, or advice-giving in the manner of Mirrors of Princes. We provide brief discussions of a few well-known examples in each category to touch on the political themes that Muslim thinkers engaged with and to demonstrate the absence of discussions about institutional constraints on rulers in those works. Such discussions are also absent in more comprehensive surveys of Islamic political thought. 

Obviously, the corpus of Islamic writings with direct political implications is vast. For example, the above categories do not include the writings and traditions of mystic orders that sometimes had direct political implications. However, mystic orders with their emphasis on the spiritual (and sometimes temporal) leaders with divine inspiration tended to be even less concerned with institutional constraints. While many scholars have studied the absence of institutional constraints on Islamic rulers in practice, the literature has not identified the puzzling absence of discussions about institutional constraints in theory. 

Some came close. For example, Crone keenly observes: “it was the scholars who formulated the law that the imam was meant to execute; by their own account, it was also they who elected and deposed him on behalf of the community. One would have thought that there was only a short step from all this to the view that the scholars should also monitor his performance, for example by forming independent councils authorized to signal when the rules had been breached, to strike out illegal decisions, and to block their execution. 

Small though the step may seem, however, there were few who took it.” Crone goes on to provide a few, short-lived, attempts on the eve of the Abbasid revolution, in North Africa and in Spain, to form councils that would rule along with the rulers. None of these attempts gained significant traction and they stand as exceptions proving the rule. Roy notes that the “poverty of Islamist thought on political institutions is striking, considering the emphasis Islamism places on politics”. 

Overall, institutional constraints on rulers or “republics. . . were ignored by the normative tradition.” These scholars do not offer an explanation for these “missing discussions” in the Islamic normative tradition. One may be tempted to attribute this absence to Muslim thinkers’ limited access to the Greco-Roman philosophical writings or history. 

For example, while Plato’s Republic and Laws and Aristotle’s Ethics were familiar to Muslim philosophers, it seems that they did not have access to a translation of Cicero’s De re publica, or Aristotle’s Politics where theories of mixed constitutions were more explicitly advocated. However, this view would imply that, without the help of the Greeks’ discoveries, many generations of Muslim thinkers somehow could not take what Crone calls “a short step” toward even a theoretical discussion of institutional constraints on rulers. Their “political horizon. . . did not reach to suggesting reforms or offering alternative institutions,” as Halbertal and Holmes describe some of their earlier Jewish counterparts in antiquity. 

We believe that this view is highly implausible. The vast territory of the Islamic Empire included people of various geographical and religious backgrounds, some of whom interacted routinely with Muslim scholars and many of whom played key roles in translating the vast corpus of Greek knowledge into Arabic. That generations of Muslim scholars over huge geographical and time periods simply did not have any knowledge of the political structure of Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, or even the Roman Empire with its Senate seems unlikely. As Gutas argues, “as late as. . . tenth century, the historian H. amza al-Is. fah¯an¯ı (d. after 350/961) relates that when ‘he needed information on Graeco-Roman history, he asked an old Greek, who had been captured and served as a valet, to translate for him a Greek historical work orally. This was accomplished with the help of the Greek’s son, Yumn, who knew Arabic well.’ This report establishes that oral translation by native speakers of whatever language within the Islamic domain did occur and that, as might have been expected, it must have been widely practiced”. 

To make sense of the puzzle, one must go beyond explanations that Muslim thinkers (and their Jewish counterparts, see below) did not discuss institutional constraints on rulers even in theory because they did not learn their potential usefulness from Aristotle and Cicero.

Select Online Comments About The Article

There is discussion of the article at Marginal Revolution where I saw the link to the article myself. Here are some quotes from that discussion from multiple commentators whom I do not specifically cite but are identified in the source (mostly by pseudonyms):

It's hard to envision a culture that comes up with an intellectual tradition to constraints to counter potential abuses in the use of political power like the West has when the central figurehead is a dictatorial warlord whose rules and ethics rules of conquest would shock even middle-age European rulers. . . . many of the rules enshrined in Sharia are precisely what we would call abuses of political power, repression of religious minorities, women, and the citizenry codified into religious law. It's tough to come up with an intellectual tradition of freedom when the intellectual tradition of your culture is codifying highly specific and exact rules for enacting barbarism and warlordism in your holiest texts.

It's arguably kind of hard when your central figure is the unquestionable semi-divine leader of an apocalyptic cult, but eh.

The concept of abuse of political power depends on the notion that there can be such thing as abusing political power. In the vast majority of pre-modern societies, there was a monarch, and the monarch was a god. In Ancient Egypt you had the Pharaohs, for instance, in China you had the emperor with a "mandate of heaven," in 17th century France, Louis XIV said he was the state. Absolutist monarchs did whatever he wanted and that was it. The ancient Greeks were the first who developed this concept because their society was very weird compared to other pre-modern societies. They lacked a centralized government and instead were divided into thousands of tiny city-states which often were democratic. Since power in these city-states was shared instead of concentrated into a single ruler, they had to develop notions of legitimate and illegitimate use of political power.

"A sophisticated intellectual tradition emerged to justify the need for such constraints. In this paper we identify a new puzzle: such an intellectual tradition did not exist in the Islamic world, even if the potential for abuse was recognized." It is not that it didn't exist. It was that it was rejected. The Islamic world is as much an heir to the Greek world as the West. More so as they got the central Greek lands like Alexandria. What is interesting is the Islamic world also rejected the Islamic model of government - rule by an Imam or at least an elected member of Muhammed's family - in favor of military dictatorship by Turks. So when it came to people in power the Islamic world got sophisticated thinkers like Ghazali who said that nothing was as bad as civil strife so the Authorities had to be supported no matter what.

People really shouldn't use the word "law" for Sharia or Jewish law. They are not law in the sense that Western law is law. They are, as they say, all encompassing guides to daily life. Sharia in particular has nothing much to say about government but a lot to say about diet and masturbation. It does not help to have a religious scholar who can tell you whether you can eat a goat that has been properly slaughtered after it has been gang raped when the issue is despotism. It is made worse because the Cadi Justice Max Weber criticized is a real thing in Sharia. Any hand book of Islamic law will have scholarly opinions but they will usually go something like "The Founder of the School and his second most famous student said you can't, while the most famous student said you can". So the judge gets to pick. Both options are valid.

"making it easier for citizens to identify abuses of power and use collective action to discipline them." Notice the smooth glide from identifying an abuse to correcting it. Not sure that the two have much to do with each other. The problem is that Islamic law is not much concerned about government and so it allows a lot of leeway for the people in power. Essentially if the ruler really wants to do something, it is Islamic. This is why the Ottomans can take the children of their dhimmis even though it is specifically forbidden by Sharia. Why they can have more than four wives too.

"We study how the relative homogeneity and solidarity of Islamic society fortified this logic." No one in their right mind would describe Islamic societies as anything like homogeneous. That is the point of Coons' mosaic model. And solidarity? Please. Someone needs to read Ibn Khaldoun.

I would temper some of this commentary, however, by noting that just as there is nothing inherently Christian about Western political theory, there is nothing about Islam that inherently prevents it from evolving republican governments with institutional constraints on abuses of political power. 

While they aren't perfect examples, in part, because they are fairly young democracies, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Kosovo, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Indonesia, for example, all have reasonably democratic governments in Islamic countries, at least compared to the absolute monarchies of the past and those of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Brunei, and Oman, to give a few examples, today. Syria and Morocco are edge cases transitioning between democratic and autocratic systems and are not entirely one or the other.

Basically, different Islamic countries are at different places in their political development and mostly lag behind developed Western countries. The most politically advanced approach the level of development seen in the early 20th century in some countries in the West. Many are at a level of development comparable to the Victorian era. Some are culturally back where the West was in the 18th century. 

I have little doubt that in due time, many of these countries will evolve political driven by their economic development. In time, many will come to develop a culture similar to that of Muslims who have lived their entire lives fully participating in the cultural life of developed Western countries like the U.S., Canada, Sweden, England, France, Italy, and Germany.

The Decline Of Humanities Majors In Four Easy Charts

A story at the Atlantic magazine explains the decline in students choosing to major in the humanities at U.S. colleges and universities. Mostly, however, the raw data in the four charts below, tells the story.

Of course, some of the humanities, especially "Classics" (i.e. the study of ancient Latin, ancient Greek, and the related history and culture and literature of those eras) had declined to almost nothing much, much earlier, despite being the dominant academic discipline in the early 18th century colleges and universities in the United States.

Church Attendance

Younger people are increasingly unlikely to attend church on a regular basis, or at all. But, many young people are not atheists and many attend church sometimes, but only infrequently. The material below comes from a pastor's twitter feed:

Among those born in the early 1930s, 60% attend church weekly. 17% never attend. [Between 33%.]

Among those born in the early 1950s, 32% attend weekly. 29% never attend. [Between 39%.]

Among those born in the early 1990s, 18% attend weekly. 42% never attend. [Between 40%.] . . . 

People do not become religious as they age. I address that myth in my latest book. 

I looked at every 5 yr. birth cohort from 1930 through 1994. Not a single one has a higher rate of affiliation today than they did in 2008.

From here based upon data from the General Social Survey (GSS) (material in brackets mine).

Why is this happening?

As Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute told Salon in 2017, there's "a culture clash between particularly conservative white churches and denominations and younger Americans" over issues like science, education, and gender equality. Younger people brought up in these churches increasingly reject the sexism, homophobia, and anti-science views of their elders. Since the churches won't reform to be more egalitarian and pro-science, they find that these younger people are walking away altogether.

This isn't entirely true, however. The truth is more complicated. If this were the only thing driving young people away from churches and Christianity you would expect to see a mass migration of young people from conservative Christian churches to mainline Christian denominations, since mainline Christian denominations in the United States largely rejecting sexism and homophobia, and have far less strong anti-science views. But that isn't what has happened. Indeed, mainline Christian denominations saw their attendance fall off before conservative Christian churches caught up with them.

Predominantly white mainline liturgical Christian churches like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American (ELCA), the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, the largest Methodist Church denomination, and the Congregational Church are all in membership and attendance free fall as well, among younger people raised in the church and aren't gaining large numbers of converts from more conservative Christian denominations to make up for their losses among young people born into those churches.

Some of this is because mainline Christian denominations demanded little, did not protect a threatened culture, and were more easily discarded when it became socially acceptable to do so because being non-religious reached a tipping point. 

Young people have decided that they can advance their values and find community without the Christian metaphysics and investment of time and effort in activities like Bible study and church attendance. A religious worldview is increasingly out of step with our modern scientific worldview to an extent that has been particularly pronounced as young people form their religious beliefs in childhood and young adulthood. 

The inconvenient statements buried in the Bible, the history of the Christianity, and in basic Christian doctrine, haven't fared well in the face of criticism and closer scrutiny now that it is socially acceptable to question them and to not be affiliated with a church. Young people no longer meekly offer questions in confirmation classes that are quietly set aside with incomplete answers that are deemed by general social consensus to be "good enough."

Some of this is also because conservative Christians have given the Christian "brand" a bad name that young people are disavowing wholesale. The failure of white young people to differentiate between mainline and conservative Christianity is, in part, because historically white, mainline Christian denominations failed to denounce the basically heretical views of their conservative Christian counterparts. The mainline Christians held back from criticizing conservative Christians out of what they viewed as mutual respect and a distaste for conflict, even though conservative Christians were happy to denounce mainline Christians as heretics from the pulpit. As a result mainline Christians have paid the price for not defending the "Christian brand" from being tarnished by conservative Christians.

It isn't as if the world has never seen the trend we are now seeing in the United States. The same trend towards secularization swept Europe decades earlier in the post-World War II period, and the current leader of the Roman Catholic church, Pope Francis, upon taking office put the threat of secularization to the Roman Catholic church at the top of his list of concerns upon taking office. 

Church attendance in most countries in Europe is lower than it is in the United States, where the rate for Christians is 47% (although it varies greatly from state to state from 21% of all adults regardless of religious affiliation in Vermont to 55% in Alabama):

From Wikipedia. Similarly (via the same link), the 2008 European Social Survey found that the following percentage of people in each country never attended church except for special occasions like weddings and funerals:

The remarkable thing is actually that secularization arrived in the United States so much later than it did in Europe, rather than the fact that it happened at all.

Islamic Medieval Criminal Law

In the Middle Ages, Europe was characterized by arbitrary, and frequently harsh feudal "rule of man" while Islam had a legal system that at least somewhat restrained its political leaders. 

Islamic criminal justice, while harsh, just as it is today, was less harsh and less arbitrary than European criminal justice was in the Middle Ages. Islamic society at the time was also more urban, more scientific, and had a larger class of scholars with access to more knowledge preserved in written texts. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, the balance of power between the Islamic world and Christendom shifted back in favor of Christendom in Iberia and the Balkans, and in terms of global economic competition, around the same time that the Renaissance arrived in Europe restoring urbanity, Roman legal concepts, and the intellectual mettle of European civilization.

Calling modern Islamist fundamentalist criminal jurisprudence medieval, is as much a comparison to European medieval (and more accurately, early modern European) criminal justice practice, as it is to medieval Islamic criminal justice practice.

The striking thing about medieval Islamic criminal law is that it featured a jurisprudence of doubt and lenity facing off against political practices of control and severity. Principles of Islamic criminal law placed interpretive authority in the group of scholar-jurists who gained expertise to read divine texts to say what the Law is (sharīʿa). Practices of Islamic criminal law authorized executive authorities—caliphs, sultans, and their agents—power over law enforcement (siyāsa). Principles informed the task of expert jurists and state-appointed judges in defining legitimate punishment derived from Islam’s foundational texts. Practices informed the wide array of severe punishment that law enforcement officials meted out regularly, with a justification that it was “in the public interest” (maṣlaḥa). Principles often justified limited punishment by means of “deterrence” (zajr) and “spiritual rehabilitation” (kaffāra). Practices often justified unrestrained punishment as a means of maintaining law and order, social control, or might as right. The principles of punishment, practices of punishment, and justifications for punishment typically operated in siloes separated by a wide plain. This chapter explores the ground where they met.

Intisar A. Rabb, Enforcement and Punishment in Medieval Islamic Law (in CULTURAL HISTORY OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE MEDIEVAL AGE (Sarah McDougall, Karl Shoemaker eds., Bloomsbury 2022) [Forthcoming]) on SSRN.

Why Was Religious Indoctrination So Successful?

Once up a time, not so long ago, in the early to mid-20th century, organized religion (mostly Christianity and Judaism in the U.S.) were extraordinarily successful at getting almost everyone to describe themselves as an adherent of it, to claim belief in God, and to hold onto those childhood beliefs into adulthood and old age.

Pretty much everyone in my parents generation and older was a believer. A huge swath of people in my generation are not, and the nation is become less religious almost every year.

Europe underwent a similar transformation about a generation earlier.

What was organized religion doing back then that made it so successful and why did this collapse in a just a generation or two?

The question often gets asked from the other perspective. Why are people these days so non-religious. But, from our perspective, the real question is not that, but why it used to be so successful. It is something that people in my generation, which is when the transition really took off ought to be uniquely qualified to answer.

I won't answer the question in this post, but wanted to ask it while I am thinking about it.

Old School Coding Was Tight

It is amazing how much used to be done with so little processing power.

The AGC was designed with the sole purpose of providing navigational guidance and spacecraft control during the Apollo program throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The AGC sported 72kb of ROM, 4kb of RAM, and a whopping 14,245 FLOPS, roughly 30 million times fewer than the computer this report is being written on. These limitations are what make the AGC so interesting, as its programmers had to ration each individual word of memory due to the bulk of memory technology of the time. Despite these limitations (or perhaps due to them), the AGC was highly optimized, and arguably the most advanced computer of its time, as its computational power was only matched in the late 1970s by computers like the Apple II. It is safe to say that the AGC had no intended market, and was explicitly designed to enhance control of the Apollo Command Module and Apollo Lunar Module. The AGC was not entirely internal to NASA, however, and was designed in MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, and manufactured by Raytheon, a weapons and defense contractor.

Charles Averill "A Brief Analysis of the Apollo Guidance Computer" arXiv:2201.08230 (January 6, 2022).

Did Free Ideas Fuel Germany's Economic Revolution

There is a long standing hypothesis, contrary to the intellectual foundations of intellectual property law, that weak or non-existent intellectual property laws are better for economic development and economic growth, than strong intellectual property laws.  Early 19th century German history tends to support that hypothesis.

A German economic historian makes a strong case that Germany's lack of effective copyright laws in the 19th century was critical to Germany's industrial expansion in that time period.

No Copyright Law 

The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might.

Von Frank Thadeusz

18.08.2010

The entire country seemed to be obsessed with reading. The sudden passion for books struck even booksellers as strange and in 1836 led literary critic Wolfgang Menzel to declare Germans "a people of poets and thinkers."

"That famous phrase is completely misconstrued," declares economic historian Eckhard Höffner, 44. "It refers not to literary greats such as Goethe and Schiller," he explains, "but to the fact that an incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany."

Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion -- unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.

German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today's level. And although novels were published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers.

The situation in England was very different. "For the period of the Enlightenment and bourgeois emancipation, we see deplorable progress in Great Britain," Höffner states.

Equally Developed Industrial Nation

Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.

Höffner's diligent research is the first academic work to examine the effects of the copyright over a comparatively long period of time and based on a direct comparison between two countries, and his findings have caused a stir among academics. Until now, copyright was seen as a great achievement and a guarantee for a flourishing book market. Authors are only motivated to write, runs the conventional belief, if they know their rights will be protected.

Yet a historical comparison, at least, reaches a different conclusion. Publishers in England exploited their monopoly shamelessly. New discoveries were generally published in limited editions of at most 750 copies and sold at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an educated worker.

London's most prominent publishers made very good money with this system, some driving around the city in gilt carriages. Their customers were the wealthy and the nobility, and their books regarded as pure luxury goods. In the few libraries that did exist, the valuable volumes were chained to the shelves to protect them from potential thieves.

In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses.

A Multitude of Treatises

This created a book market very different from the one found in England. Bestsellers and academic works were introduced to the German public in large numbers and at extremely low prices. "So many thousands of people in the most hidden corners of Germany, who could not have thought of buying books due to the expensive prices, have put together, little by little, a small library of reprints," the historian Heinrich Bensen wrote enthusiastically at the time.

The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in particular to publish the results of their research. In Höffner's analysis, "a completely new form of imparting knowledge established itself."

Essentially the only method for disseminating new knowledge that people of that period had known was verbal instruction from a master or scholar at a university. Now, suddenly, a multitude of high-level treatises circulated throughout the country.

The "Literature Newspaper" reported in 1826 that "the majority of works concern natural objects of all types and especially the practical application of nature studies in medicine, industry, agriculture, etc." Scholars in Germany churned out tracts and handbooks on topics such as chemistry, mechanics, engineering, optics and the production of steel.

In England during the same period, an elite circle indulged in a classical educational canon centered more on literature, philosophy, theology, languages and historiography. Practical instruction manuals of the type being mass-produced in Germany, on topics from constructing dikes to planting grain, were for the most part lacking in England. "In Great Britain, people were dependent on the medieval method of hearsay for the dissemination of this useful, modern knowledge," Höffner explains.

The German proliferation of knowledge created a curious situation that hardly anyone is likely to have noticed at the time. Sigismund Hermbstädt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous today.

'Lively Scholarly Discourse'

The trade in technical literature was so strong that publishers constantly worried about having a large enough supply, and this situation gave even the less talented scientific authors a good bargaining position in relation to publishers. Many professors supplemented their salaries with substantial additional income from the publication of handbooks and informational brochures.

Höffner explains that this "lively scholarly discourse" laid the basis for the Gründerzeit, or foundation period, the term used to describe the rapid industrial expansion in Germany in the late 19th century. The period produced later industrial magnates such as Alfred Krupp and Werner von Siemens.

The market for scientific literature didn't collapse even as copyright law gradually became established in Germany in the 1840s. German publishers did, however, react to the new situation in a restrictive way reminiscent of their British colleagues, cranking up prices and doing away with the low-price market.

Authors, now guaranteed the rights to their own works, were often annoyed by this development. Heinrich Heine, for example, wrote to his publisher Julius Campe on October 24, 1854, in a rather acerbic mood: "Due to the tremendously high prices you have established, I will hardly see a second edition of the book anytime soon. But you must set lower prices, dear Campe, for otherwise I really don't see why I was so lenient with my material interests."