Sometime commenter and (as Henry Farrell says) one of the Internetses’ smartest guys Cosma Shalizi has kindly listed my Blessed Among Nations on his list of “Books To Read While the Algae Grows in Your Fur” (also known, perhaps less slothishly, as “Books I’ve read in the last month or so and feel I can recommend”). So I think it’s only fair to respond to his query, which is so astute that only my colleague Kathy Olmsted has previously raised it. To wit:
Rauchway seems to find it unproblematic that a certain set of institutions should form Back In The Day, when they fit conditions … and then tend to survive later, when they did not fit so well. But I would like some explanation of why adaptive processes had an easier time working in the earlier period, as opposed to the later one.
Here is what I think I think, if I understand the question correctly:
In the earlier period the US was subject to evolutionary pressures in its environment that encouraged it to develop certain policies (those having to do with controlling and directing immigration and capital investment) but not others (those laying the foundation for a modern welfare state).
At around 1920, that environment ceased to exist, and so did those evolutionary pressures. But they were not replaced by an immediately imperative new set of pressures, because in this new environment the US was not only, if you like, top predator, but top predator in a damaged ecosystem (if I remember my Alfred Crosby-esque arguments correctly).
So under these circumstances it did indeed keep its old habits, and there was no immediate direct pressure to change them. But the old habits did not make the US a particularly good steward of this environment, nor entail a restoration of its previous vigor. Instead they caused a progressive deterioration of the environment of the 1920s, and then a precipitous and disastrous collapse beginning in 1929.
Those of you wishing extra credit can flesh out the climate-change analogy on your own time.
I would go further: the new, much more direct evolutionary pressures of the 1930s did indeed work on the US just as one would imagine they should, and encouraged changes in American institutions accordingly. But if we want to talk about that, we need to talk about a different book.
27 comments
September 25, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Brad
Whoa, there was no way I saw that last link coming….
To throw some fresh meat out there for the apex commenters:
I found Cosma’s question kind of odd. A bureaucratic organization is always built around trying to solve a specific set of problems. After a period of time, the problem changes, or even goes away. How useful the organization is after that period of time depends on how well it can be reorganized. It requires a lot of effort to reorganize, while keeping it the same is easy as long as the money is there. I think one could make an analogy with entropy and information.
September 25, 2008 at 3:31 pm
andrew
Whoa, there was no way I saw that last link coming….
The search terms are deceptive.
September 25, 2008 at 3:47 pm
andrew
Also, I assume you’ve had a question about what this evolutionary model means for people who want to take action to shape institutions in ways that go against the current evolutionary pressures?
September 25, 2008 at 3:52 pm
kathy
I’m thrilled to discover that Eric thinks that I’m astute. Occasionally.
September 25, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Vance
Like, “how can we tell, without a crystal ball, which pressures are ‘evolutionary’ pressures?”
September 25, 2008 at 3:53 pm
eric
“how can we tell, without a crystal ball, which pressures are ‘evolutionary’ pressures?”
I think I take your point, Vance, but are you really unsure?
September 25, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Vance
What I was thinking was that “people who want to take action to shape institutions” is, in fact, pressure; and if it has an effect (which is not inconceivable), then it’s evolutionary pressure.
Unless by “evolutionary pressure” we mean specifically non-intentional environmental pressure, which is not an unreasonable category of things.
September 25, 2008 at 4:00 pm
eric
Unless by “evolutionary pressure” we mean specifically non-intentional environmental pressure
Yes. Glad to hear it seems not unreasonable. I should add, you know, this is not exactly a full-fledged interpretive model in the book, more a (supposed-to-be) helpful metaphor.
September 25, 2008 at 4:11 pm
andrew
No, I meant more that Eric identifies a number of (non-intentional) pressures that shaped American institutions. Historically, there’s the question of what options were available to people who did not want American institutions to develop in the way that they eventually developed. One answer is to fold them into that developmental story: they didn’t succeed in shaping the institutions after their own ideas (from a broad perspective), but their opposition did affect the eventual shape of those institutions (at the level of details).
September 25, 2008 at 4:24 pm
andrew
I see that the conversation moved on as I wrote that comment, which was in response to Vance’s at 3:52.
September 25, 2008 at 4:26 pm
eric
there’s the question of what options were available to people who did not want American institutions to develop in the way that they eventually developed
Assume for the sake of argument that you have not wanted American institutions to develop in the way they did over the past eight years. What options were open to you?
September 25, 2008 at 4:58 pm
andrew
Well, there have been elections…. But I’m not sure that’s the same question; at least, the scale is a bit different. Anyway, it seems generally true that possible outcomes often look more open in the present than they do in retrospect.
Take immigration: it’s not clear what U.S. policy is going to look like in a decade or two, but it is clear that it’s an area subject to a lot of non-intentional outside pressures. I wonder if in the long run the eventual outcome, whatever it may be, is going to seem to have been overdetermined. Of course, in the current moment, that’s no reason not to advocate for the policy one prefers. Just as the historical interpretations of later decades aren’t an argument that the people fighting immigration restriction in the early 20th century should have seen the writing on the wall and given up.
I suppose I shouldn’t have phrased it “what options were open” when I seem to mean “what were the chances for success.”
September 25, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Cosma
I blush modestly in the general direction of Davis.
But I still find myself doubtful, for two related reasons.
Real evolutionary systems always contain populations, and adaptation results from differential success at reproduction within those populations. (See, for a period example, William James.) But there is only one America, and indeed only one country even roughly like America — as Eric make very clear in Blessed — so it is not as though we have a population of many different Americas which tried out many different institutional packages, some of which worked better than others, and so took over from the rest.
To give a contrary case, to the extent I understand Tilly’s story for the formation of the emergence of the modern state, it is about how there was a large population of territorial polities in Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, which did try out many different institutional packages, and some of them took over the others in an arms race that was both figurative and literal. (Top predators compete with other members of their species!)
On the other hand, there were a huge range of actors within America, with many divergent interests and ideas about how things should be organized. The institutions we see at any one time are precisely the upshot of how those differences played themselves out. What was it that made those patterns less susceptible to change in the 1920s (say) than in the 1880s and 1890s? I think what you are saying is that changes in the economic situation gave outside actors less influence over what happened in America, so powerful Americans were freer to do what they liked, and what they liked was to leave things the way they were. OK, but why was that their preference? (One could I guess tell a habit-formation/reinforcement-learning story here, rather than an evolutionary one.) And why didn’t the slackening of external influence free up, say, labor to push for more of a welfare state? Turned around, if the 1920s had seen the same patterns of international trade and migration, etc., but rapid institutional innovation within the US, how astonishing would that be, really?
Let me add once again that this is all methodological carping around the edges of a book I found extremely persuasive.
September 25, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Cosma
And to respond to Brad’s comment: it’s not as though those organizations inscribed themselves on some tabula rasa of utterly unorganized society. They had to force their way in among all kinds of other institutions, and so on until the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. (Fairly literally; our ancestors were social animals before they were human beings.) So why was the institutional structure of society more plastic at some times than at others? That’s my question.
September 25, 2008 at 7:57 pm
John Emerson
I’m just reading Eric’s book. My angle is that in Minnesota socialists (the Farmer Labor Party) actually did control the government for eight years starting in 1931. The state was transformed and played a unique role in American politics until until ten or twenty years ago. (Regression toward the mean, alas.)
Supporters of the Farmer Labor Party included farmers, labor, small town bankers, Communists, Trotskyists, Nazi sympathizers of the Charles Lindberg type, and organized crime. A seemingly fragile coalition, but it lasted right up until WWII. After the War the FL Party merged with the Democratic Party; Hubert Humphrey engineered that — in 1948 Humphrey was a centrist in Minnesota but a leftist nationally. (Alas, he also regressed toward the mean).
In 1936 FL Congressman John Bernard, a Communist of Corsican origin, was the only Congressman to vote against neutrality in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 FL Senator Ernest Lundeen, implicated in Nazi propaganda, was the first Minnesota Senator to die in a mysterious plane crash.
Explanations are pending. An extraordinary economic crisis (beginning well before the Depression) plus a very large foreign born population were obvious factors. But iI say it was a unique concatenation of influences. When do I get my Nobel?
September 25, 2008 at 8:48 pm
ben
I’m not sure I understand Cosma’s question at all. (I haven’t read Eric’s book, so that may explain that.)
Why is it averred that adaptive processes no longer “work”? I mean, is it those specific adaptive processes, in which case the answer is surely trivial (circumstances to which to adapt are different), or adaptive processes in general, whatever they may be at whatever point, in which case, surely they do?
Or is the question meant to be, why is it that adaptive processes haven’t seen to it that the institutions that no longer fit so well haven’t died out, in which case, surely Cosma, a bright boy, could come up with scads of plausible hypotheses?
September 25, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Cosma
Eric will I hope correct me if I get this wrong, but the broad-brush caricature of the story he tells us that in the late 19th century the US developed one set of institutions, which fit its location in the global system. But then circumstances changed, those institutions were no longer adapted, and yet they persisted, with calamitous results.
OK, good, splendid. But developing institutions to fit circumstances doesn’t just happen; there are always mechanisms, adaptive processes. Those late-19th century institutions displaced others, which were no longer adaptive. Why was that process of removing the no-longer-adaptive and establishing the now-adaptive easier in the late 19th century than in the 1920s? In fact, the impression I took away from Eric’s book was that he regards the adaptive value of the late 19th century institutions as an explanation of their emergence, which only makes sense to me if some quite strong adaptive process is taken as given. Why should this turn itself off circa 1912? Again, it’s not obviously enough to point to institutional inertia, since that evidently doesn’t explain why the previous institutions were displaced by the ones Eric chronicles.
This pattern of historical story-telling – X appears Back In The Day as an adaptation to the forces of that time, then X persists, minimally changed, as a shackle on further development – is not, of course, confined to Eric. I think it was reading Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind which crystallized for me what bugged me about it, which is not that it’s necessarily wrong but that it raises the question of why things were so much more fluid or plastic back then. The early days of X were after all the late or middle days of all kinds of other things.
But now I really need to run off and write a problem set.
September 25, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Vance
(Parenthetically, Eric, apologies for the condescension at 3:59 above. Just bad writing — I meant to say something like “the term ‘evolutionary’ doesn’t quite put the line where you want to, but I know what you mean.”)
September 25, 2008 at 10:08 pm
eric
Thanks for your kind comments, Cosma, and the thoughtful questions.
It’s a key point of the book that the entire global environment changed dramatically 1914-1920 (not too controversial a view, I hope). The top nations of the previous era all, to a metaphorically meaningful extent, killed each other off.
This left the world’s most successful industrializing nation—the US—as top nation. But it had not prepared for (adapted to, if you like) this role, nor did it have similar pressures on it as top nations previously had, being as it was more or less alone in the role.
So the case is that in the 1920s the adaptive pressures that had previously done so much to shape US institutions no longer existed, because the environment was so different.
Which means it’s not that evolutionary pressures, or adaptive pressures, no longer operated, it’s that the environment had so changed.
To some extent I do think this should be a non-controversial metaphor, because after all, biological adaptations do outlive their usefulness, and even survive into environments in which they might prove detrimental to species survival.
But it is a metaphor, and I don’t think I lean too very heavily on it in the book—which is I hope why Cosma (kindly) says he finds the book overall persuasive.
September 25, 2008 at 10:09 pm
eric
No apologies necessary, Vance. Though ben: you didn’t do the reading? For shame. (Though you got a summary in the first full chapter of the Great Depression book.)
September 25, 2008 at 10:48 pm
andrew
Isn’t it also the case that some of these institutions were a long time in forming? The pressures in question start up in the late 19th century, but the federal reserve doesn’t come about until 1913 and immigration restriction is even later. That it seems like these adaptations came about easily is partly a function of the persuasiveness of the argument and the way it’s periodized (thematically and chronologically rather than more strictly chronological).
September 26, 2008 at 12:22 am
sharon
I haven’t done the reading either, but… maybe the concept of ‘path dependency’ would help here? In any case, what you’re all talking about seems pretty familiar from experience of British politics: stuck somewhere c. 1880 (notwithstanding different party labels). The Houses of Parliament could be almost symbolic of this – utterly inadequate facilities and environment for 21st-century government, but no one’s going to admit it, let alone do anything about it because they’re our Heritage!!! fucking blah blah blah. Perhaps because this is the system that was in place when Britain was Great, so we believe it’s what made us Great, and therefore any changes would be an admission that we’re not any more, not to say a sign that civilization as we know it is about to end. When you can start pretty much from scratch, you get something rather different – cf. the devolved Wales and Scotland governments.
September 26, 2008 at 9:05 am
Cosma
I think path dependence is more of a label for the phenomenon to be explained, rather than a real explanation itself. (There is a nice paper on this by my former boss Scott Page, which is slightly infamous for introducing the term “phat dependence”.) The ball-and-urn models are at best reduced-form descriptions of the actual processes. Henry Farrell’s “The Mechanisms of Nixonland” is a nice sketch of how one might actually explain
the path-dependence of a particular (malignant) set of institutions .
September 26, 2008 at 9:06 am
Cosma
This, by the way, concludes this week’s episode of “Incestuous Amplification in the Academic Blogging”.
September 26, 2008 at 9:25 am
eric
I’m happy to have a more rigorous model for the path-dependence of institutions. And for the aforementioned incestuous reasons, I’m entirely familiar with Henry’s point.
But one of the arguments I think you’re gesturing at here is that institutions persist because they serve particular, powerful interests within a society even if they don’t serve the whole society particularly well. This is of course true.
The institutions I’m talking about in Blessed Among Nations do not fit that description. Or rather, you might think they do, but you wouldn’t be right.
The institutions are those that adapt the US reasonably well to a global economy while providing a minimal amount of social welfare.
You could say, “aha! but that’s in the interest of the ruling class!” And you would be right.
But you would not be right enough, because the assumption there is, large majorities of people would be clamoring for a more generous welfare state, and were thwarted in getting it by the rich and powerful.
The problem is, that’s not what happened. The clamoring that happened was on behalf of a more limited set of policies much like those that in fact got passed by Congress.
This is, I know, a merely empirical point.
September 26, 2008 at 11:26 am
Student
I was wondering when someone was going to get around to the question of power. Other “empirical points” suggest examples of thwarting by the powerful and wealthy that may have had an impact on the level of social welfare in the US. A notorious example is the fate of Upton Sinclair’s 1936 campaign; EPIC plainly would have an impact on the New Deal, but plenty of thwarting was going on in California. It’s also worth considering whether thwarting occurred during the Truman era, for example the fate of the 1) the Full Employment Act and 2) Truman’s national health insurance proposals. (Taft-Hartley may be another example.) There’s a famous old book on the Full Employment Act (”Congress Makes a Law”) which, as I recall, suggests that large corporations and their lobbies (Committee for Economic Development) had a major hand in watering the Act down. The stories about the AMA’s opposition to Truman’s health insurance proposals are well known, but no doubt it was not simply the AMA that opposed Truman. If thwarting took place, it would have had a significant impact on social welfare in this country.
February 19, 2009 at 12:09 am
Student
I was wondering when someone was going to get around to the question of power. Other “empirical points” suggest examples of thwarting by the powerful and wealthy that may have had an impact on the level of social welfare in the US. A notorious example is the fate of Upton Sinclair’s 1936 campaign; EPIC plainly would have an impact on the New Deal, but plenty of thwarting was going on in California. It’s also worth considering whether thwarting occurred during the Truman era, for example the fate of the 1) the Full Employment Act and 2) Truman’s national health insurance proposals. (Taft-Hartley may be another example.) There’s a famous old book on the Full Employment Act (”Congress Makes a Law”) which, as I recall, suggests that large corporations and their lobbies (Committee for Economic Development) had a major hand in watering the Act down. The stories about the AMA’s opposition to Truman’s health insurance proposals are well known, but no doubt it was not simply the AMA that opposed Truman. If thwarting took place, it would have had a significant impact on social welfare in this country.