"Book Reviews of Old Tomes" is a splendid service. Thanks, R.

Isteve has a post about your book review. Thanks for the good post on the book.

My first time to this website. The low quality of the narrative of western civilization is sufficient disincentive for me and perhaps others like me to engage in any serious study or criticism of history, science, and the rest of the good stuff.

Knowing what I already know makes me a target, as it conflicts with received PC widsom; I am arguably worse off learning what I have learned over the past five years. Why read books if what I read only further convinces me how, well, how wrong everybody is, and puts me in conflict with society? It would seem to be more efficient to take what I know and argue the point rather than keep adding to the metaphorical mountain of evidence that should be enough already - do we really believe that a second mountain of evidence will convince our bad-faith adversaries?

Additionally, the narrative is so bad that one hardly needs to labour beyond a perfunctory read of the classics and basic economics to sufficiently critique the conventional wisdom. A great excuse to be lazy, in other words.

Fortunately there are still a handful of chaps like you, Razib, to remind me that there is still utility in learning. I'd describe this review as brilliant, and for what it's worth I am sufficiently inspired to have just returned from my local library with a couple of gems. Hopefully I will have more than flattery to offer the next time I comment here.

What about the retrogression of Argentina, which is predominantly European (Italian especially) in its demography?

What about the retrogression of Argentina, which is predominantly European (Italian especially) in its demography?

the settler stock for this nation is marginal to 'west central europe' (he specifically excludes italy, and spain is probably even more of a long shot for inclusion), so it wouldn't be relevant to the model in any case. there is some ambiguity has closer in time to the present he switches to 'continental europe' as opposed 'west central europe.'

Let's do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see if slavery can explain Rome:

1. Slaves are 1/4 of the population.

2. Let's assume they're 50% to 100% as productive as the average Roman.

3. Let's assume they cost 1/3 to 2/3 as much as an equally-skilled free worker.

(As the 'economics of slavery' literature has noted, it's hard to get excellent, creative work out of low-paid slaves since the incentives are so poor--hence the typical use of slaves for mindless, easily monitored tasks. If you want a lot of output, you pay a lot. Fogel and Engerman's book Time on the Cross showed that in the U.S. at least, slavery wasn't that much of a free lunch. Genovese's _Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made_ tells a similar story with much better prose.)

So: 1/4*(.5 to 1)*(1/3 to 2/3) yields a range of from 4% to 17%. So under these numbers, Roman slavery boosted the resources available for the non-slave classes by that amount. Of course, that's just looking at the positive side of the ledger--on the minus side you have the extra monitoring costs and the threat of rebellion.

If you don't like the numbers I've used, feel free to provide your own! But as it stands, it seems to me that slavery could be at best a modest form of income redistribution.

In the URL I've included a link to a paper by MIT economist Peter Temin. He's written a number of good papers recently on the economy of the Roman Empire.

herrick, i definitely found the description of classical mediterranean civilization off. crotty's model just doesn't work well there IMO....

I thought Time on the Cross showed that slavery was quite productive. I didn't read it, but I listened to the EconTalk with Russ Roberts.

I mentioned earlier the theory that lactose (and gluten) tolerance developed to permit hunter gatherers to be drugged into docility in a settled civilization they were out of place in. It seems to be a marginal theory though. Does anyone with more knowledge on the subject have any comments?

I thought Time on the Cross showed that slavery was quite productive. I didn't read it, but I listened to the EconTalk with Russ Roberts.

I mentioned earlier the theory (I'd give a link except I think that caused my last comment attempt to fail) that lactose (and gluten) tolerance developed to permit hunter gatherers to be drugged into docility in a settled civilization they were out of place in. It seems to be a marginal theory though. Does anyone with more knowledge on the subject have any comments?

The quote "The milk, which weights roughly 1 lbs. per gallon,"

has to be a typo, both because a gallon is 8 pints, which for water is 8 pounds, and because the back of the envelope calculation uses 10, not 1.

8 vs 10 lowers the yield number by 20%, but milk still beats meat by about an order of magnitude. OTOH - half the calves are male, and cows have to be kept close to home to be milked, so there should be a niche for free-ranging the males. Also, I seem to remember that milk is low in iron, which would be found in the dry food. This is true, perhaps more so, in places not amenable to larger scale farming.

the original page is:
http://tinyurl.com/65ur7d

i went back and entered that in....

What about the retrogression of Argentina, which is predominantly European (Italian especially) in its demography?

I can give you a non-scientific answer: Liberation Theology.

Liberation theology swept the Latin American church a generation ago and moved Argentina even farther to the left than it was.

Or I could be wrong, it is just an honest guess on a group razib says is probably excluded from the book.

TGGP:

Yes, U.S. slavery was productive (key evidence: high market price for slaves), but it used low-skilled workers. Roman slaves were more educated on average (note that education for slaves was illegal in many U.S. states), so the skill gap wasn't as big, but the principal-agent problems were still real.

So I'm guessing that low-skilled Roman workers forced to work hard might be as productive as the average Roman--that's the "100%" case. And of course, if workers are worked hard they take more inputs--food in particular. So there's not much of a free lunch there. But for the sake of argument, let's say they cost 1/3 as much as wages for a comparable worker (Fogel and Engermann showed that poor white farmers had about the same material standard of living as plantation slaves, so that's likely an exaggeration). That leaves the remaining 2/3 as profit for the Roman slaveowner.

Back-of-the envelope best case then is the 25%*(2/3)*(100%) case---the 17% I mentioned.

I think that's pretty optimistic, since American slaveowners sometimes ended up paying market prices to their own slaves for produce from the slaves' private gardens. So just as the Communists gave their peasants private plots where the real production often occurred, the Southern slaveowners sometimes gave their slaves small private plots where market incentives were at play: Evidence that when slaves were "on the clock" for their masters, they were working well short of potential....

Only one EU country out of 26 is holding a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. Many countries would vote no if given the choice, like France and Holland did the last time. (you think the british would even consider voting yes?) Ireland is the only country getting a vote, largely because of Raymond Crotty. The Commission has spent major bucks festooning Dublin with flyers orgasmically proclaiming vote yes, yes!, YES!!

Ecological constraints play a large role in explaining why Ireland is different in this model; the mildness of Ireland's maritime regime means that winter fodder is unnecessary.

This is incorrect!

I grew up on a dairy farm in the Irish midlands, and grass does not consistently grow in winter in Ireland - with the sole exception of Garinish Island, in the extreme South West of the country, where the temperature never drops below 7 Centigrade, the minimum required for grass to grow.

In olden times most non-breeding cattle were sold in the fall, the remainder fed on hay in barns, or sometimes out in fields, during the milder days of winter.

Since at least the 1960's most winter forage is in the form of Silage, where farmers cut a portion of summer grass and store it for the winter. On dairy farms this is supplemented with dry animal fodder, "Cattle Nuts".

critically it is important to note that pre-modern Irish cattle were more like their South Asian cousins than continent European lineages. They only gave milk when with calf! The selection process whereby only the best milk producing lineages were kept and most calves killed in the fall did not apply to Ireland.

Prior to WWII the typical Irish cow was the Shorthorn - a dual purpose breed. They yielded about 2-3 gallons of milk per day and when crossed with a beef breed - usually Hereford - produced a calf that could readily be fattened. The main focus of farmers - mostly small farmers - was to produce yearling calves to be fattened for beef, and exported "on the hoof" - live - to England for butchering and processing. Milk and butter were consumed close to where they were produced, and Irish people ate little cheese. Dairying was small scale, as one man could only milk about 5 cows maximum by hand daily.

After WWII and especially in the late 1960's, with the advent of milking machines and rural electrification, farmers began to specialize in dairying, and replace Shorthorns with Frisians. Frisians of course yielded about 6-8 gallons of milk per day - and can yield up to 12 gallons or more. Frisians too were crossed with new beef breeds from continental Europe, especially Charalois, but also Limousin and Simmental, to produce calves for the beef trade.

In 1973 upon entering the EEC - later called EU - Irish farmers had a huge new market for dairy products, and Farmers Co-ops, began to diversify into other milk based products like casein production, liquer production - Baileys Irish Cream produced by Balieborough Co-op etc. - and setup new meat processing plants of their own. For the first time ever they realized there was a market outside the UK for Irish farm produce - especially in Germany, where Irish farm products fetched a premium - due to their perceived naturalness.

In fact Irish farmers and their co-op - which would later become corporations and make shareholding capitalists out of farmers - were the first segment of Irish society to grasp the full implications of membership of the EU, and took virtual cottage industries and made multi-national businesses out of them.
Back in 1975 my Dad and his 200-cow dairy farm was featured in a documentary series for television, called "Master Farmers"...