Category: Books

Notaries Were Useful in a Contractual Society

(p. 111) Notaries were not figures of great dignity, but in a contractual and intensely litigious culture, they were legion. The Florentine notary Lapo Mazzei describes six or seven hundred of them crowded into (p. 112) the town hall, carrying under their arms bundles of documents, ” each folder thick as half a bible.” Their knowledge of the law enabled them to draw up local regulations, arrange village elections, compose letters of complaint. Town officials who were meant to administer justice often had no clue how to proceed; the notaries would whisper in their ears what they were meant to say and would write the necessary documents. They were useful people to have around.

Source:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

“A Few Really Good Artisanal Cheese Shops Is No Substitute for a Strong School System”

(p. 836) Moretti’s writing on the “creative class” takes issue with policies associated with Richard Florida, who has exerted a considerable influence on local policymakers worldwide. Moretti uses the example of Berlin, which is a cool place full of creative types but still isn’t much of an economic powerhouse, to make the case against Florida’s recommendations.
. . .
A problem exists if city governments start thinking that their main job is to be hip rather than competent. Having a few really good artisanal cheese shops is no substitute for a strong school system. Local leaders would do well to remember that an externality-creating skilled resident is as likely to be a forty-two-year-old mother who works in (p. 837) a lab as a twenty-five-year-old looking for a good time. The forty-two-year-old’s tastes in local amenities are likely to be quite different from those of the twenty-five-year-old. If Moretti’s caution against creative class policies achieves that end, then it will have done something quite positive.

For the full review, see:
Glaeser, Edward. “A Review of Enrico Moretti’s the New Geography of Jobs.” Journal of Economic Literature 51, no. 3 (Sept. 2013): 825-37.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book under review is:
Moretti, Enrico. The New Geography of Jobs. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2012.

Human Freedom and Dignity Lived in Florence

(p. 125) Ancona was, like Florence, an independent commune, and Salutati was urging its citizens to revolt against the papal government that had been imposed upon them: ” Will you always stand in the darkness of slavery? Do you not consider, O best of men, how sweet liberty is? Our ancestors, indeed the whole Italian race, fought for five hundred years . . . so that liberty would not be lost .” The revolt he was trying to incite was, of course, in Florence’s strategic interest, but in attempting to arouse a spirit of liberty, Salutati was not being merely cynical. He seems genuinely to have believed that Florence was the heir to the republicanism on which ancient Roman greatness had been founded. That greatness, the proud claim of human freedom and dignity, had all but vanished from the broken, dirty streets of Rome, the debased staging ground of sordid clerical intrigues, but it lived, in Salutati’s view, in Florence. And he was its principal voice.

Source:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

U.S. Constitution Reflects Lockean Natural Rights

(p. A13) Over the past three decades, Richard A. Epstein has repeatedly argued–with analytical rigor and astonishing erudition–that governments govern best when they limit their actions to protecting liberty and property. He is perhaps best known for “Takings,” his 1995 book on the losses that regulations impose on property owners. Of late, he has exposed the flaws of a government-administered health system.
In “The Classical Liberal Constitution,” Mr. Epstein takes up the political logic of our fundamental law. The Constitution, he says, reflects above all John Locke’s insistence on protecting natural rights–rights that we possess simply by virtue of our humanity. Their protection takes concrete form in the Constitution by restricting the federal government to specific, freedom-advancing and property-protecting tasks, such as establishing a procedurally fair justice system, minting money as a stable repository of value, preserving a national trade zone among the states, and, not least, guarding the rights listed in the Bill of Rights.

For the full review, see:
JOHN O. MCGINNIS. “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘The Classical Liberal Constitution,’ by Richard A. Epstein; Our understanding of the Constitution lost its way when we embraced the idea that rights are created by a benevolent state.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., March 23, 2014): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 23, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘The Classical Liberal Constitution,’ by Richard A. Epstein; Our understanding of the Constitution lost its way when we embraced the idea that rights are created by a benevolent state.”)

The book under review is:
Epstein, Richard A. The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Salutati Defended the Independence of Florence

(p. 124) The independence of Florence–the fact that it was not a client of another state, that it was not dependent on the papacy, and that it was not ruled by a king, a tyrant, or a prelate but governed by a body of its own citizens–was for Salutati what most mattered in the world. His letters, dispatches, protocols, and manifestos, written on behalf of the ruling priors of Florence, are stirring documents, and they were read and copied throughout Italy.

Source:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

The Process Innovation Called “Fracking”

(p. B1) I have come to North Dakota to observe the fracking of the Irene Kovaloff 11-18H, a well on the southern edge of the Bakken Shale. It is one of one hundred wells that will be fracked in the U.S. on this particular day in October 2012, 10 in North Dakota alone.
. . .
(p. B2) The hydraulic heart of fracking is the liquid pumped into the well. Almost all of it is water: snowmelt from the upper Rockies. In the Bakken and elsewhere, companies transform the water into a viscous liquid designed to carry sand deep into the new fractures. As it heats up underground, the gel reverts to a watery state. This change allows the sand to drop out and remain in the fractures, holding them open like pillars in a coal mine. The water flows back out.
. . .
Water and guar make up about 99.1% of the liquid; the chemicals are the rest.
. . .
The next night, the 30th frack of the Irene Kovaloff is completed. It takes three hours longer than expected, but otherwise the well is a success. Soon came light, sweet Bakken crude mixed with the water. On its first full day, it produced 800 barrels of crude–a good, but not great, result. By early 2013, Marathon had pulled 20,000 barrels of crude from the well. Considering that the oil had been locked away until the frack, it was good enough.

For the full article, see:
RUSSELL GOLD. “Book Excerpt: A Look Inside America’s Fracking Boom.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., April 8, 2014): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date April 7, 2014, and has the title “Book Excerpt: A Look Inside America’s Fracking Boom.”)

Gold’s article was excerpted from his book:
Gold, Russell. The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Political Entrepreneurs Can Find Ways to Overcome Vested Interests

[p. 202] In their recent book, Leighton and López (2013) place special emphasis on political entrepreneurship in making policy reform possible. For new ideas to overcome vested interests, they write (p. 134), it must be the case that “entrepreneurs notice and exploit those loose spots in the structure of ideas, institutions, and incentives.” They provide four case studies of this process: spectrum license auctions, airline deregulation, welfare reform, and housing finance. In their words (p. 178): “[T]he public face of political change may be that of a madman, an intellectual, or an academic scribbler. But whatever form these leaders may take, they are political entrepreneurs–people whose ideas and actions are focused on producing change.” As these authors stress, political entrepreneurship can be socially harmful, as when the pursuit of individual rents comes at the expense of overall inefficiency. But the returns from shifting the political transformation frontier out can be very large as well.
. . .
(p. 206) I owe a special debt to the recent book by Edward López and Wayne Leighton (2012 sic) for stimulating me to put down on paper a number of ideas I had been mulling over for some time.

Source:
Rodrik, Dani. “When Ideas Trump Interests: Preferences, Worldviews, and Policy Innovations.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 189-208.
(Note: the bracketed page number refers to the Rodrik article; the page number in parentheses refers to the Leighton and López book; ellipsis added; italics, and the bracketed letter, in the original.)

The book Rodrik discusses is:
Leighton, Wayne A., and Edward J. López. Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Salutati Imitated Antiquity “in Order to Produce Something New”

(p. 124) ” I have always believed,” Salutati wrote . . . , that “I must imitate antiquity not simply to reproduce it, but in order to produce something new. . . .”

Source:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
(Note: first ellipsis added, second ellipsis in original.)

Process Innovations, Allowed by Deregulation, Creatively Destroyed Railroads

(p. A11) In “American Railroads: Decline and Renaissance in the Twentieth Century,” transportation economists Robert E. Gallamore and John R. Meyer provide a comprehensive account of both the decline and the revival.   . . .    They point to excessive government regulation of railroad rates and services as the catalyst for the industry’s decay.
. . .
. . . deregulation, Mr. Gallamore and Meyer demonstrate, was a process of creative destruction. Conrail was created by the government in 1976 in a risky, last-ditch attempt to rescue Penn Central and other bankrupt Eastern railroads. It was quickly losing $1 million a day, and its plight helped make the case for the major revamp of railroad regulation that came in 1980. A wave of mergers followed, and the new companies slashed routes and employees on the way to profitability. The shrinking of the national rail system helped, too, as freight companies consolidated traffic on a smaller (and therefore cheaper) network. Freight-train crews were cut to two or three people from four or five. Cabooses were replaced by electronic gear at the end of freight trains.

For the full review, see:
DANIEL MACHALABA. “BOOKSHELF; Long Train Runnin’; Track conditions got so bad in the 1970s that stationary freight cars were falling off the rails thanks to rotting crossties.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 9, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 8, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘American Railroads’ by Robert E. Gallamore and John R. Meyer; Track conditions got so bad in the 1970s that stationary freight cars were falling off the rails thanks to rotting crossties.”)

The book under review is:
Gallamore, Robert E., and John R. Meyer. American Railroads: Decline and Renaissance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

“In the Name of God and of Profit”

Writing of the period of the mid to late 1300s in the area of Florence:

(p. 114) The surviving archive of a single great merchant of this period, Francesco di Marco Datini of nearby Prato–not, by any means, the greatest of these early capitalists–contains some 150,000 letters, along with 500 account books or ledgers, 300 deeds of partnership, 400 insurance policies, several thousand bills of lading, letters of advice, bills of exchange, and checks. On the first pages of Datini’s ledgers were inscribed the words: “In the name of God and of profit.”

Source:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

The “Miasmic Smog” of Europe’s Nostalgia “Stifled the Imaginations of Those Who Stayed”

(p. D12) Most people remember Mr. Drucker, a longtime contributor to the Journal who died in 2005, as the most influential management consultant of the 20th century. What they may not know is that, like Mr. Zweig, he was born in Austria and fled from the Nazis when Hitler came to power. What’s more, Mr. Drucker’s memories of prewar Vienna, which he compared in “Adventures of a Bystander” to Atlantis, Plato’s imaginary island paradise that fell from favor with the gods and disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean, are no less richly evocative than those in “The World of Yesterday.”
. . .
Born in 1909, three decades after Mr. Zweig, [Drucker] concluded as a young man that Europe’s nostalgia for its prewar past was a “miasmic smog” that stifled the imaginations of those who stayed there. So he emigrated to the U.S., where he found an open society that was bumptiously naive but also vital and forward-looking: “Unlike Europe, where it was felt that ‘the center cannot hold,’ the ‘center’ held in America. Society and community were sound, hale, indeed triumphant.” And whereas Mr. Zweig succumbed at last to despair, Mr. Drucker unhesitatingly embraced America’s democratic culture and flourished, building a new career for himself.

For the full essay/review, see:
TERRY TEACHOUT. “SIGHTINGS; One War, Two Fates.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 6, 2014): D12.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the essay/review has the date June 5, 2014.)

The Drucker book discussed by Teachout is:
Drucker, Peter F. Adventures of a Bystander. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.