Free Markets – Page 8 – artdiamondblog.com

More Winners than Losers from Columbian Exchange

Source of book image:
http://portland.readinglocal.com/files/2011/09/mann-1493.jpg

(p. D2) The foods we consider local are results of a globalization process that has been in full swing for more than five centuries, ever since Columbus landed in the New World. Suddenly all the continents were linked, mixing plants and animals that had evolved separately since the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Pangaea.

What resulted, Mr. Mann argues in his fascinating new book, “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created,” was a new epoch in human life, the Homogenocene. This age of homogeneity was brought on by the creation of a world-spanning economic system as crops, worms, parasites and people traveled among Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia — the Columbian Exchange, as it was dubbed by the geographer Alfred W. Crosby.
. . .
“There’s no way the Industrial Revolution could have so occurred so quickly and so widely if the world had depended solely on Brazilians tapping rubber trees,” Mr. Mann said. Indeed, the Asian plantations proved crucial when Brazilian trees were struck by blight.
“On the whole, there are lots more winners than losers from the Columbian Exchange,” Mr. Mann said. “I don’t want to tell Italians they can’t have tomatoes, or people in Sichuan they can’t have peppers. People have a way of taking things and making them their own. I know nothing in my garden is native, but I still have this idiotic feeling that it’s my home.”
How does he reconcile this feeling with this book? What’s a locavore to do? Mr. Mann doesn’t presume to dictate anyone’s food preferences, but he does offer one piece of advice for locavores: go easy on the preaching.
“I’m willing to pay more to get fresh vegetables grown by nice people farming nearby,” he said. “It’s incredible to eat lettuce an hour after it was picked.
“But if your concern is to produce the maximum amount of food possible for the lowest cost, which is a serious concern around the world for people who aren’t middle-class foodies like me, this seems like a crazy luxury. It doesn’t make sense for my aesthetic preference to be elevated to a moral imperative.”

For the full review, see:
JOHN TIERNEY. “FINDINGS; Fresh and Direct From the Garden an Ocean Away.” The New York Times (Tues., August 30, 2011): D2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 29, 2011.)

Unable to Compete with Cotton “European Textile Workers Bayed for Protection”

(p. 390) Cotton is such a commonplace material now that we forget that it was once extremely precious – more valuable than silk. But then in the seventeenth century, the East India Company began importing calicoes from India (from the city of Calicut, from which they take their name), and suddenly cotton became affordable. Calico was then essentially a collective term for chintzes, muslins, percales and other colourful fabrics, which caused unimaginable delight among western consumers because they were light and washable and the colours didn’t run. Although some cotton was grown in Egypt, India dominated the cotton trade, as we are reminded by the endless numbers of words that came into English by way of that trade: khaki, dungarees, gingham, muslin, pyjamas, shawl, seersucker, and so on.
The sudden surge of Indian cotton pleased consumers, but not (p. 391) manufacturers. Unable to compete with this wonder fabric, European textile workers bayed for protection almost everywhere, and almost everywhere they received it. The importation of finished cotton fabrics was banned in much of Europe throughout the eighteenth century.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Wigmakers Petitioned King “to Make Wig-Wearing by Males Compulsory”

(p. 384) . . . , pretty abruptly, wigs went out of fashion. Wigmakers, in desperation, petitioned George III to make wig-wearing by males compulsory, but the king declined. By the early 1800s nobody wanted them and old wigs were commonly used as dust mops. Today they survive only in certain courtrooms in Britain and the Commonwealth. Judicial wigs these days are made of horsehair and cost about £600,
I’m told. To avoid a look of newness – which many lawyers fear might suggest inexperience – new wigs are customarily soaked in tea to give them a suitable air of age.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Statute of Caps “Required People to Wear Caps Instead of Hats”

(p. 381) Sumptuary laws were enacted partly to keep people within their class, but partly also for the good of domestic industries, since they were often designed to depress the importation of foreign materials. For the same reason for a time there was a Statute of Caps, aimed at helping national capmakers through a depression, which required people to wear caps instead of hats. For obscure reasons, Puritans resented the law and were often fined for flouting it. But on the whole sumptuary laws weren’t much enforced. Various clothing restrictions were enshrined in (p. 382) statutes in 1337, 1363, 1463, 1483, 1510, 1533 and 1554, but records show they were never much enforced. They were repealed altogether in 1604.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Americans Resented Being Kept as a Captive Market

(p. 300) This suppression of free trade greatly angered the Scottish economist Adam Smith (whose Wealth of Nations, not coincidentally, came out the same year that America declared its independence) but not nearly as much as it did the Americans, who naturally resented the idea of being kept eternally as a captive market. It would be overstating matters to suggest that the exasperations of commerce were the cause of the American revolution, but they were certainly a powerful component.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Navigation Acts, Were “Insanely Inefficient, but Gratifyingly Lucrative to British Merchants and Manufacturers”

(p. 297) Many of Monticello’s quirks spring from the limitations of Jefferson’s workmen. He had to stick to a simple Doric style for the exterior columns because he could find no one with the skills to handle anything more complex. But the greatest problem of all, in terms of both expense and frustration, was a lack of home-grown materials. It is worth taking a minute to consider what the American colonists were up against in trying to build a civilization in a land without infrastructure.
(p. 298) Britain’s philosophy of empire was that America should provide it with raw materials at a fair price and take finished products in return. The system was enshrined in a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts, which stipulated that any product bound for the New World had either to originate in Britain or pass through it on the way there, even if it had been created in, say, the West Indies, and ended up making a pointless double crossing of the Atlantic. The arrangement was insanely inefficient, but gratifyingly lucrative to British merchants and manufacturers, who essentially had a fast-growing continent at their commercial mercy. By the eve of the revolution America effectively was Britain’s export market. It took 80 per cent of British linen exports, 76 per cent of exported nails, 60 per cent of wrought iron and nearly half of all the glass sold abroad. In bulk terms, America annually imported 30,000 pounds of silk, 11,000 pounds of salt and over 130,000 beaver hats, among much else. Many of these things – not least the beaver hats – were made from materials that originated in America in the first place and could easily have been manufactured in American factories – a point that did not escape the Americans.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

“A Brilliant and Exhilarating and Profoundly Eccentric Book”

“David Deutsch.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. 16) David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything: art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future, infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it anything like the attention it deserves, in the small space allotted here, is out of the question. But I will do what I can.
. . .
The thought to which Deutsch’s conversation most often returns is that the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, or something like it, may turn out to have been the pivotal event not merely of the history of the West, or of human beings, or of the earth, but (literally, physically) of the universe as a whole.
. . .
(p. 17) Deutsch’s enthusiasm for the scientific and technological transformation of the totality of existence naturally brings with it a radical impatience with the pieties of environmentalism, and cultural relativism, and even procedural democracy — and this is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes creepy. He attacks these pieties, with spectacular clarity and intelligence, as small-minded and cowardly and boring. The metaphor of the earth as a spaceship or life-support system, he writes, “is quite perverse. . . . To the extent that we are on a ‘spaceship,’ we have never merely been its passengers, nor (as is often said) its stewards, nor even its maintenance crew: we are its designers and builders. Before the designs created by humans, it was not a vehicle, but only a heap of dangerous raw materials.” But it’s hard to get to the end of this book without feeling that Deutsch is too little moved by actual contemporary human suffering. What moves him is the grand Darwinian competition among ideas. What he adores, what he is convinced contains the salvation of the world, is, in every sense of the word, The Market.

For the full review, see:
DAVID ALBERT. “Explaining it All: David Deutsch Offers Views on Everything from Subatomic Particles to the Shaping of the Universe Itself.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., August 14, 2011): 16-17.
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs added; ellipsis in Deutsch quote in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review is dated August 12, 2011 and has the title “Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe.”)

Book under review:
Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. New York: Viking Adult, 2011.

Refuting Claims of Bread Adulteration

(p. 67) . . . : The Nature of Bread, Honestly and Dishonestly Made, by Joseph Manning, M.D., . . . reported that it was common for bakers to add bean meal, chalk, white lead, slaked lime, and bone ash to every loaf they made.

These assertions are routinely reported as fact, even though it was demonstrated pretty conclusively over seventy years ago by Frederick A. Filby, in his classic work Food Adulteration (1934), that the claims could not possibly be true. Filby took the interesting and obvious step of baking loaves of bread using the accused adulterants in the manner and proportions described. In every case but one the bread was either as hard as (p. 68) concrete or failed to set at all, and nearly all the loaves smelled or tasted disgusting. Several needed more baking time than conventional loaves and so were actually more expensive to produce. Not one of the adulterated loaves was edible.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)

Bricks-and-Mortar Restaurants Use Police (Instead of Better Food) to Beat Food Trucks

“Kim Ima and Kenny Lao parked their food trucks on Front Street in Dumbo.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) FOOD trucks, those rolling symbols of New York City’s infatuation with haute casual food, are suddenly being chased from Midtown Manhattan. In the last 10 days, the Treats Truck, which has sold cookies and brownies for four years during lunchtime at West 45th Street near Avenue of the Americas, has been told by police officers that it is no longer welcome there, nor at its late-afternoon 38th Street and Fifth Avenue location. The Rickshaw Dumpling truck, a presence for three years at West 45th Street near the Treats Truck, has been shooed away as well.

The police “have told us they no longer want food trucks in Midtown,” said Kim Ima, the owner of the Treats Truck, a pioneer of the city’s new-wave food-truck movement, who began cultivating customers on West 45th Street in 2007.
. . .
Mr. Lao and other food-truck operators said they suspect that the police are responding to complaints by brick-and-mortar businesses that resent competition. Such was the case last year, when store merchants on the Upper East Side complained about Patty’s Taco Truck, which sold tortas, tacos de lengua and cemitas on Lexington Avenue. The truck was towed several times and the operator arrested, prompting the Street Vendor Project, an advocate for vendors based at the Urban Justice Center, to file the lawsuit that resulted in Judge Wright’s ruling, which said food is merchandise that can be regulated.

For the full story, see:
GLENN COLLINS. “Food Trucks Shooed From Midtown.” The New York Times (Weds., June 29, 2011): D4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated June 28, 2011.)

“For the First 40 Years of Indian Independence, Entrepreneurs . . . Were Looked Down Upon”

(p. 8) Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder of the National Association of Software and Service Companies in India, explained that for the first 40 years of Indian independence, entrepreneurs here were looked down upon. India had lost confidence in its ability to compete, so it opted for protectionism. But when the ’90s rolled around, and India’s government was almost bankrupt, India’s technology industry was able to get the government to open up the economy, in part by citing the example of America and Silicon Valley. India has flourished ever since.

“America,” said Srivastava, “was the one who said to us: ‘You have to go for meritocracy. You don’t have to produce everything yourselves. Go for free trade and open markets.’ This has been the American national anthem, and we pushed our government to tune in to it. And just when they’re beginning to learn how to hum it, you’re changing the anthem. … Our industry was the one pushing our government to open our markets for American imports, 100 percent foreign ownership of companies and tough copyright laws when it wasn’t fashionable.”

If America turns away from these values, he added, the socialist/protectionists among India’s bureaucrats will use it to slow down any further opening of the Indian markets to U.S. exporters.

For the full commentary, see:
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN. “It’s Morning in India.” The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun., October 31, 2010): 8.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated October 30, 2010.)