[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] hello today we're doing a conversations
with Tyler with two authors of a new book called persecution and Toleration the long road to Religious Freedom published by Cambridge University press they also happen to be two of my favorite colleagues at George Mason and marcadis they're both very well-known economic historians and today we have
with us NL Johnson and Mark Kama we're going to start with nol Johnson ready I'm ready thank you for having me on a lot of historians have suggested that anti-Semitism picked up in the Renaissance compared to Medieval Times is that true and if so why did that happen so by the time of the Renaissance
anti-Semitism was picking up so one myth that a lot of people believe is that there was a tremendous amount of religious persecution that was going on during say the Early Middle Ages to the late Middle Ages up until say 1200 or 1300 by the time you get to the Renaissance there is more tension that's
emerging in Europe in part because of States growing more powerful rise in state capacity so states are expanding their territory states are attempting to impose themselves more in different parts of life and this is starting to generate certain tensions uh this is sometimes called the rise of the
persecuting state if I think of the Renaissance as overall more capitalistic than the Middle Ages then there's a kind of paradox that arises in my mind it seems that across countries at any point in time the more capitalistic countries seem to be more tolerant the Dutch Republic later the Netherlands England
United States but when you view it as a Time series it seems that you get more capitalism or more advanced State structures and then more anti-Semitism how do I Square those two Tendencies or am I wrong no I don't think you were wrong so part of that this whole process as we
go through in the book there are I like to think of it as three phases that Europe is going through and they're not necessarily the same phases that every other part of the world has to go through but in Europe you have an initial phase where individuals are being categorized according to Identity
rules they they're being placed into uh legal categories and social categories that it's based on things like their religious identity Jewish communities are one of the easiest groups to identify this with uh you know they're they're forced to live in the same place they're forced to wear different kinds
of clothes they can do different sorts of uh occupations so this is an equilibrium at first and during this time you observe relatively little persecution of these groups and one reason is because they're just not uh they're in their place and so there's not the same tension you know
that's being generated there and also they're serving a purpose in the for Jews for example in the sense that they are raising money for non-jews like so for towns they might Grant uh Jews the Monopoly right to lend money but then of course Jews make Monopoly profit from lending at at higher interest rates but
of course the Jews don't get to keep this money and it's taken by say the town burgers and then they're taxed this is actually a very rather pernicious equilibrium because you also get a cultural byproduct you know which is that uh Jews are perceived as shocks you know lending at excessive interest rates
and this generates anti-Semitism which in turn makes it easier for them to be taxed you know by the secular Authority or by the uh Christian authorities so that equilibrium you don't necessarily see a tremendous amount of persecution yet however every now and then that
breaks down and you do but then what starts to happen as you get into the Renaissance and as you have and and especially as you get more towards the Reformation you have States expanding so one example that I and this is the ne next phase right you know where you're moving out of these identity rules where
importantly you don't have to have strong States in that world you can rely on uh often you mentioned Capital you can rely on Market mechanisms often in order to run your state right tax farming you know or subcontracting to Jews you know to raise money for you these sorts of things this puts them in
a precarious position but there's not a tremendous amount of persecution that comes out of it as you have the states expanding their role these uh sorts of institutional Arrangements start to break down at the same time and this is often when you see the largest amounts of persecution that are taking place so
what's the key change here that state power is being contested and it's pretty strong or is it something else the key point is that you have um a situation well first of all you have economic dynamism you know so that are other individuals who want to say trade you know long distance and they're running
up against Jews for these sorts of things you have other people who want to be involved and say money lending you know and they're running up against the Jews in these sorts of circumstances but you also have uh over time you have sort of for example um the state may want you
know they they might bring in more people right you know like you know conquer more territory so the French might do do this say in the 16th century or 15th century and as they're doing this they are also realizing that they have a lot more difference a lot more identities in their midst than they knew
before and this can generate more persecution an example that Maran and I have written about in this case would be say the alenzi and Crusades to take a non-jewish example uh so this is something that's building at the end of the 12th century so the end of the 1100s and then by the beginning of the 13th
century you have the French State expanding its power into the South and then as they do this they run into this group of uh religious a different religious group that which becomes known as cathars right were not necessarily really that different but they were different enough that they could use
this as an excuse to conquer the territory and take them over so this is a case where the rules kind of run into this heterogeneity right and so you get persecution and that's the states building power you know that's generating some persecution that's coming cross connection between states
building power there being something at stake and there's more heterogeneity than there had been in the early or more zero some environment right and then at this point a state they somebody in the state because states don't make decisions but there's some group in it
that has to make a decision right about do we want to impose the old system do we want to have the same rules that we had before where we were getting religious legitimation but we were trying to adhere to some sort of Dogma in doing this or do we have to relax the bounds of tolerance because we're either
running into this more het this greater heterogeneity because we're expanding or because we have to in some sense build our state in a different way okay so so at least for a small group maybe a small group of bad people but scapegoating is a kind of public good you blame something on a minority say how does
that public good of scapegoating get produced so it can either come from the top down or or can come from the bottom up but in the period you study what's the main mechanism that a political leader uses scapegoating to increase his power her power well this is a complicated question it can be both I'll
take a specific example so again if we stick to the 13th century right which is right before this Renaissance period you're talking about I forget the exact year but I believe the Jews are expelled from England around 1290 or so and as the whole state you know does it we
don't know exactly why this occurs but there's a lot going on in the 13th century between Nobles in England say and the crown right you have Magna Carta at the beginning you have the first Barons War you have the second Baron war that are taking place at the beginning of the 13th century and what a lot of
these wars these civil disturbances are about are you have Nobles who are having taxes extracted from them they're having uh Revenue extracted from them by the king and these individuals also know that Jews are involved in the ex cheer right and and they want to exploit the
Jews and take over both the revenue streams that the Jews have and also get rid of some of their debts so you as in that case we don't know for sure but one reasonable explanation that's almost certainly playing a part and the eventual expulsion of Jews in 1290 is that this is a credible way for the king
to give something to the Nobles so that they so it's expelling the competition expelling comp so you're willing even to expel a useful scapegoat if you hand out rents right although but in yes in this in this case but I have to say I think one of the more interesting questions that somebody can ask that I do not
fully understand and I'm not sure anybody does right now is why do you expel Jews necessarily so we've done Mark and I have done a lot of work on building data sets of Jewish persecution and Jewish expulsions at the city level and the country level in Europe over a very long period of time and a question
that I for one don't fully understand is is you don't need to actually kill all the Jews or expel them in order to extract resour resources from them and in fact in some way this is um off equilibrium path right you know you're no longer in some optimal equilibrium for both the ruler and for the Jewish
community so and often times these Jewish communities would be expelled from a city they would be invited to come back and they would come back right you know in 5 10 15 years sometimes even shorter but that's a little bit easier to understand so that's actually in the
case I gave you in England you know in the 1290s I think I understand a little bit you know about why it might have happened that way and I think it was signaling credibility in some political compact between the king and the Nobles but I'm not sure but that's an example of top down other times clearly people
are um you just have uh say guilds moving against these Jewish communities so an example of this would be in 164 one of the most well-known Jewish persecutions was on in Frankfurt on mine uh was called the fet milk M Massacre and fet milk was a baker he was a in Guilds and uh he was um upset about the
terms of the political deal between the city rulers the city council and what the guilds were getting okay and one of the things that the guilds wanted were the Jews to be expelled and this was competition in some sense and in your investigation when the weather turns cold and the Harvest gets worse
Jews and other groups are persecuted more in these societies sometimes it's suggested that the parts of Europe relatively close to Islam were more tolerant of the Jews is that true and if so how does it fit your model the Ottoman Empire I can speak directly to on this but that's not what
your question is you're wondering parts of Europe yeah so you're like Albania Poss part Bulgaria after it's no longer part of the Ottoman Empire yeah yeah I actually don't know I'm not sure I I have a good answer for that the Ottoman Empire I could talk a lot about the Dei system you know and how that works into
my thinking on this but uh I mean aside from I know some like Albania was part you know of the Ottoman Empire at one point right you know some of these regions I know if and this isn't closer to the Empire in my mind but Poland has a much different equilibrium with Jews that emerges and I have a story for that
but that's not about what's the Poland story and that that's fine I'm interested in the now I've now I've open up it's a complicated so Poland its Essence yeah yeah yeah in in essence in Poland you see over time a gradual movement of Jewish communities from the Iberian peninsulas where they initially
come in and then they're moving towards the um West okay and many are ending up in Poland and Poland is often claimed to be a state without stakes in the sense that it's not a persecuting Society in the way that other European areas were and the story that Mark and I tell about
Poland and I believe is that they actually had very weak State Authority in Poland and Jews were in in Poland also uh never really um they experienced something called the second surum so after the Black Death give us a time period okay yeah sure sure yeah so after 1350 is when the Black Death is
occurring around then and Europe l es about 40% of its population to this bacterial infection that spreads through and as anybody who's taken introductory economics might suggest when the labor Supply goes down by a lot you know with 40% of Europe dying then wages are going to start going up and this means the
bargaining power of peasants relative to say land owners and so forth is going to increase however what economists often don't take into account is uh one response to this might might be for people in power to double down on keeping peasants under their thumb so the second surom in Eastern Europe
Poland I'm thinking in particular this is that uh instead of getting better deals the The Peasants were made they put under even greater submission after the Black Death because they were not able to get the market wage right you know so power played a role there with the nobility and the nobility would
often uh take advantage of Jews skills and say um monitoring labor keeping books these sorts of things to help them run this situation so you have sorts of Court Jews right Jews who were integrated into that power structure in that area not all of them by any means and the story changes dramatically you
know as you move into the 19th and 20th centuries but Poland never really de never really goes through these transformations of developing State capacity and Jews remain in this identity equilibrium which insulates them from the persecution that we observe at the time
like so say 14th century 1500s up to 1800 or so that we see in the other parts of Europe but of course you don't get the emergence of a true sense of a true form of Tolerance and this comes back doubly bad or much much worse in the 19th and into the 20th century you mentioned the Black Death let's go back
to 1347 which I think is when it all starts yes what institution changes did the Black Death bring to Western Europe that's a big question so but kind of the simplest answer for someone who knows nothing yeah so the simplest institutional changes that are coming about because of the Black Death are
going to be related to so what I've looked at are first of what happens to Jews in the black death but more broadly what's occurring is you get this you lose a tremendous amount of population and it's a pure demographic shock in this sense which we don't often see in
history and this is going to change the bargaining power the the relative bargaining power of people with workers you know compared to Nobles you know or people who are running states and cities and these sorts of things and so you're going to see more power you know for these individuals well one of the
biggest changes that's going to happen is you're going to see the emergence of more trading cities in the north relative to the South and this is going to play a big role in generating the equili the economic equilibrium that comes about for the next couple hundred years but the main thing that's going on
with institutional change is going to be this shift in the bargaining power that's letting peasants have more power relative to Nobles if the Black Death raised wages does that mean that immigration today lowers wages not necessarily so yeah you would think right so the Black Death first of all
this was we have a hard time I have a hard time wrapping my head around the numbers so this is almost half of the population that is dying and it's um it's not occurring in a uniform way across all of Europe some cities disappear some cities get hardly affected by this which is interesting
for other reasons uh but it's a huge shock and I don't think we really have examples in the modern period of immigration on that level and I know from the literature on immigration which I'm not an expert in but uh typically these movements are not so large that we see them radically affecting wages in
the way that I'm talking about I mean these are you know initially when the Black Death hits It's a the world is ending right you know you have wages you wages don't go up and production just breaks down right you know like every second person or so is dead right you know and so this there's there's
disintermediation like to use a modern word like in a massive way right yeah but with wages go up at all does that mean Paul RoR is wrong about increasing returns because you might think well you lose half your people Society falls apart everyone's wages fall yeah yeah clearly that's not what happened but
it's what I would expect if you asked me a priori so Paul Paul R was wrong they are not increasing returns you can just have higher wages and be much smaller yeah yeah yeah so I think Paul rer is right and in fact I think one of the things about the Black Death that's nice
is that we can test some theories of increasing returns using it something that again Mark rman Remy yedwab and I have been working on is looking at the Black Death as a test of theories of urban agglomeration which is very much related to increasing returns in the way that you bring up so um one thing one
thing that you can look at if you want to tell whether or not increasing returns are one of the main reasons why you have cities in the place they are uh that is our people in cities where they are because that's where all the people are right is you can take the people away and then see if they move to a
different location that might have something tied to geography or tied to space which is better so for example you might uh what I just mentioned is that there's a general shift towards Northern trading networks we know because of what we just what we've been looking at that the htic cities which are the trading
Network that exist on the Baltic in the north of Europe those cities recovered much more quickly than cities in the South uh cities tied to the r old Roman Road Network that's centered on the Mediterranean for example and this makes sense if you think that trade has been
shifting with wool trade for example you know over time you know since the collapse of Rome but then if you have increasing returns you're not going to immediately see this shift in the urban network but if you take away on average 40% of the population of the Cities then this allows you to let people reshuffle
right you know and in effect this did happen to a certain extent confiscating Land from the church during the French Revolution did it enhance economic value or not I believe it did why and so I get in trouble for this because uh on the one hand so what happened right you know
during the FR Revolution is that the the state um well the revolutionaries decided that they needed money right you know to issue and so they issued these things called asena and they wanted to back it with a real asset and so the real asset that they decided to back this paper money with was land
confiscated from the church they also took a bunch from Emig gray but that's a slightly different story that we can talk about if you want later but the church land they take and there's a tremendous amount of land owned by the church uh in France it approaches up to 7% or so of the land that's there and
then they issue this paper money initially they backed on this then they do this and then they have an auction you know to distribute this land so I get in trouble because sometimes people hear me say that the auctions of this land was good and they say well he's just a GMU Economist and markets are
always good and that's good but you have to remember they also confiscated all the land right so there was a two things going on here so they distribute this land by auction okay and when they do this uh auctions are pretty good mechanisms to put an asset into a hands of somebody who values it most and
there's an active secondary Market that goes on for this land and the way that my co-authors on this paper who are Teresa Finley and rapael Frank the way we think about this process is that you have a set of feudal institutions in property that exists to about 17 okay 90 or something like this the French
Revolution early phases and in that feudal system you have lots of overlapping property rights so for example if I wanted to build an irrigation canal you know or make some improvement to my land I might have to negotiate with multiple parties to do this because they all have some stake in
what I'm doing to my land so everybody is having these institutions wiped out in effect you know when the revolution comes however it's only a subset of the properties that are immediately put on the market and then auctioned off to individuals and falling into the hands of the people who value them most which
what we find is that those people ultimately started to consolidate the land and they also start making investments in things like irrigation and drainage and uh having better crop rotation systems and so forth so what that really is it's a story about what economists are familiar with the coast
theorem so you know the Coast theorem stated simply says that if there are low enough transactions costs low enough costs of trading then it doesn't actually matter who owns an asset initially people will trade it and you'll end up with the best possible we could grab a church on Fifth Avenue in
Manhattan sell it off and GDP would go up right yeah yeah yeah but what economists often ignore is that the transaction costs are very high right you know to doing this and what we have in the French Revolution is a natural experiment where for reasons unrelated to what I'm interested in the
revolutionaries decided to use a market mechanism to put a whole bunch of assets out there with very low transaction costs and you see that the the productivity of agriculture in places that had more Church land that was auctioned off uh was higher than places that didn't have this happen up until uh
the end of the 19th century as we might expect because over time all these assets you know are being reallocated and Investments are ultimately being made so I do think in that case this was a circumstance where you had a land redistribution that led to Greater efficiency why is Switzerland so wealthy
and successful relative to the rest of Europe that's a good question I had a theory about this once and I gave I I I didn't pursue it but my my in my theory when I was in graduate school was that they were getting a large amount of species flow because they had mercenaries out there and so they were
being paid in gold and then this created nent institutions for banks right you know or gave them some Advantage I didn't actually look into that more deeply so I I don't know if that's true um but Swiss banking has declined a lot as you know it's also too early like you
know they they were very poor right you know up until you know the chemistry and these sorts of the chemical Revolution and so forth so so I said that was my old Theory right I'm not sure but it's much higher GDP per capit than most of the rest of Western Europe maybe Luxembourg aside yeah yeah and and I
think they have a it's it's a really interesting thing they are able to uh they act like they're a culturally homogeneous territory which they are but at the same time they have four different language groups you know packed into a relatively small place they have a lot of ruggedness but that
they still interact right and there's also if you look at uh the literature from um you know people have looked at say preferences over welfare and there is there are big differences between German speaking and French speaking and Italian speaking regions within Switzerland so I don't know the answer I
think there's something in there that has to do with size that you know that it can work in a place the size of Switzerland they definitely have um a national identity which is very strong and I'm not sure exactly how that emerged one could tell stories right about the uh the Swiss being surrounded
you know for so long and cutting off the mountain paths is you know and acting in this in this way that sometimes I hear these but uh otherwi I I actually don't know the answer large volcanic eruptions earlier in history from an economic point of view what's the single most interesting thing we know about them so
I think what's what's very interesting about the volcanic eruptions is that we are be discovering more and more that they may have played a large role in political change that occurred so uh Joe Manning at Yale uh and I believe his grad student who unfortunately I forgotten his name have been doing work
on uh they they looked at a series of volcanic eruptions that led to the end of the fonic Empire so that ended around 30 or 60 BC I forget around right right around that time but that was that was an Empire that lasted for 300 years before uh but they experienced all these crop failures and then once to look at
it you see that in Indonesia all these major volcanic eruptions were happening in perfect timing and with these crop failures that were taking place and and actually they can tell from looking at the Nile you know and how much it's flooding and things we also know but politics becomes nastier when the
volcano goes off well if you think about the Egypt case which uh is Manning it this is um a circumstance where you have I believe it's low rainfall right and so this causes and which eruption which year is this this is around 60 or 30 BC I forget exactly when but it's a series
of them around that time and this is a when you you basically don't get the flooding of the Nile Delta right you know the Nile region and then this creates a a collapse in agriculture and then this creates revolts you know on the Nile at this time and that's creating political pressure the another
example you know of this happening although one has to be careful another volcano that went off was in 1257 Somas and so this one I've looked at a little bit and uh actually um other people you know have been looking at this as well the Somas is happening right around the time of these Barons Wars you know that
I was talking particularly happens right before the second Barons war and while people have been looking at it you see that it's the timing's not perfect but it did pile on additional agricultural pressure on these Nobles at a time when they were all discontented with the king's power but they might have been
individually upset before but now they're all becoming upset at the same time because you have crops failing the King still act asking for revenues right and they all are feeling the pressure at the same time and you end up getting a coordinated political action against the
rulers now as it turns out there happen to be bad weather occurring in the years previous to Somas as well and so this wasn't just the volcano in that circumstance it was the volcano in addition to some other bad luck but it's the environment the climate right playing a role and taking an agency role
in generating political change and that's through coordinating activity that I think is interesting I think there's also something interesting to be said that these events these large climatic events and large epidemiological events that I'm talking about they also have a bias in that they
tend to be worse when you have places that are networked together and people that are integrated and so you could also look at say 185 there's another big volcano that goes off that's called Tambora and in the case of Tambora you have Market integration more or less within Europe by 1815 meaning that when
you have idiosyncratic shocks climate shocks hitting places across Europe you tend to have trade smoothing those over and so you don't see in grain prices very much or anything like this but when you have something like Tambora which is a vi7 it's a very very large volcano the
largest uh sinas right in the 13th century would go off it shuts down it it makes a it makes it snow in Maine and June right and all over the world because of all the all the particulates in the air and so forth blocking the sun in both 1816 and in 1817 and you see very much in that circumstance um the
markets can't handle it right and so another project that I've been working on actively is trying to put together as much information as I can about that circumstance about that that event and to basically see what was the effect that it had on these markets what sort
of effects did it have on um how people were impacted with their health and basically to ask questions about how robust Market institutions are to dealing with basically a correlated Supply shocks that are very very large and we really don't have many like that you know so I find that interesting as
well returning to your work on tolerance a speculative question if you think of prejudice as having become worse when some Stakes are higher and in some ways states are stronger and there's more heterogeneity on the table are you optimistic or pessimistic about tolerance today that is do you think
we've cleared some hurdle and we're never headed back or do you think it's back and forth I'm optimistic why I don't think so so I'm optimistic about the United States and other well-established liberal democracies I I don't think we're going to head all the way back to a situation where uh I mean
so the biggest danger is a totalitarian danger and we've already seen that happen and that is totally that is completely a danger right I do worry about some sort of um Nazi type phenomena you know which could occur in like a holocaust or something like this and that's that can occur however I
think there is a general sense that's been absorbed into the culture you know that this is no longer a thing that is acceptable and I think that is a strong sense you that still exists and I think there are a lot of states that also feel strongly about this I mean even if you look at World War II the worst
atrocities that occurred against Jews they happened in the region that had states that were weakened at the time during World War II was somewhat hidden this is a point made by Timothy Snider you know it's not my own uh and so that that doesn't say I mean the Germans played a big role and they had a lot
High very high State capacity but I mean Hanah arant also has talked about similar points it's the stateless people that are at the greatest risk right and if you have strong States in place you're going to tend to have less of the persecution taking place especially in the states can also work against each
other what I'm most pessimistic about is in the developing country context you know that I don't see any reason why a developing country and say Africa is going to decide to adopt liberal values about Toleration just because they observe them in another place I think they have to go through a somewhat
similar process of building up State capacity and running into these practical reasons why a system of intolerance doesn't work in order to get there and this can be very hard and I think we also push things too hard as a uh Western Society in terms of development sometimes there's a I like
to tell my students about in England that the Glorious Revolution is in 1688 which is when we uh typically place them as having their representative Revolution however they adopt things like the test acts which are preventing Catholics from matriculating at Oxford or from sitting in Parliament you know
all the way up until I without you know um being Catholic right you know all the way up until 1828 you know is when these things are eliminated and so when we try to say jump the uh jump the card you know go too fast in a place and say well you need to have women's rights now you
need to have you know you need to respect all these different groups in your Society in addition you know to adopting institutions of capitalism these sorts of things that's not the way it occurred right in places like England you know there was actually a lot of restraint you know and it doesn't mean
we have to wait 200 years or 150 years right know to move through these phases in other parts of the world but I think it's often realistic and destabilizing for us to think we can I mean the other thing to keep in mind is the amount of homogeneity that was present in a lot of these European States when they went
through these transitions was very high if you read uh you about the United States you know for example albian seed right you know you know this those basically four different groups from England you know that came in and then were asked to eventually adopt you know the US Constitution as we have it today
and these were all white men who were Christian right you know and furthermore they were Protestant for the most part right you know so this is an extremely homogeneous group that we and and then they barely got it right you know so if you look at the the literature on voting
at the Constitutional Convention you know one of my favorite footnotes in the academic literatures from a paper that looks at uh the economic and ideological factors that generate voting at the US constition convention and it claims that you know according to their model if three or four more Backcountry Farmers
from Virginia had showed up you know it might not have worked right so it was a fairly close-run deal uh and so I think we often have a lack of appreciation for the amount of homogeneity and the amount of time it took in order to get the political arrangements to take seed right you know in in uh in modern what
we are the modern Western liberal democracies close out you're part of this convers ation or you game for a quick round of overrated versus underrated sure okay number one Amor astronomy overrated or underrated it is uh underrated but it depends on where you live you know so
amateur astronomy is hard to do in a place like Bethesda Maryland you know or which where you which is where I live uh you have to drive a little bit if you want to see the stars but you can still look at planets and the moon and things like this and I think people don't look
at them enough I got into it for different reasons that I've stuck with it you know I initially I got into it because I thought it was uh you know was science you know and I would read uh you know the foundation series by isak aimer things like this and I was very interested right you know in just
learning about the stars and it made me feel good about myself but then over time it really does give you an appreciation for the scales involved you know with Universe gives you a sense of uh a sense of proportion I mean what they say the uh the closest planet to us right now is Trappist one or something
like that it's 37 light years away uh that's that means if we want to talk to them it's going to take 80 years assuming we can and so these are these are scales that I have a hard time appreciating but I think everybody has a hard time appreciating even if you sit under the sky occasionally and looking
and look at these Stars so I amateur astronomy is a dying a dying hobby you can tell that by going to a meeting right you know of amateur astronomers they tend to be males who are about 20 or 30 years older than I am you know at these but nonetheless I think it's something that uh if if we could get the
lights to be turned off like they do in Switzerland at 11:00 at night I think we would all benefit from that MOX Faber overrated or underrated rated about right perhaps overrated uh you know I think the he has a lot of really good ideas and he had them very early on I I've used a lot of what he's written
about so rate it about right uh proest ethic and spirit of capitalism had a lot of really good ideas in it even if he might have been right for the wrong reason right know that Protestants built more schools probably right and it wasn't that there was a true ethical change his concept of bureaucracy right
has been very useful for my thinking as well Jared Diamond's book Guns Germs and Steel uh I think rated about right he he received a lot of attention for that book I tried to switch in my teaching to using uh youval Noah hari's book on sapiens and I found it wasn't a good
substitute for Diamond uh Diamond takes an approach which I think is it's it's appealing and uh even if it might flaws I still think diamond is uh one of the big one of the best books out there describing the overall Arc of geography and history over time last call European Union overrated or underrated it is uh
overrated for economics underrated for politics in my opinion so when the EU was first being generated it was to my understanding for two reasons right to basically to keep the German in check and for steel policy and I think uh they do a lot of bad things still for economics and I'm not sure the
instabilities that are generated because the EU are not awesome very sometimes and they also have generated a new source of rent seeking so for example if you're if you're a French farmer and you want protection for your cheese you can go to the EU for it you don't have to go
to France so that's not always a good thing politically though I think there's still a great value to having an organization in Europe which is formally meeting from time to time and discussing these sorts of issues and I don't see NATO doing that necessarily in the same way n Johnson thank you very much thank
you and now we turn to Mark quama also a colleague of mine he's an economics professor at George Mason I asked your co-author null this question I'd like your take it's often alleged by historians that as the Renaissance came about capitalism was more prominent prejudice against Jews other minorities
went up when there was more capitalism is this true and if so what was the mechanism it's an interesting question so whether or not capitalism is really on a rise particularly in the Renaissance centuries is isly hard to ascertain in my view because I think eventually the the 13th century the
commercial revolution 12th century as a high point of expansion of um new cities being founded in northern Europe of Italian Merchants going to the Middle East there's the Crusades but the Crusades initially kind of um religious violence you know exib a lot of religious violence and intolerance but
the Crusaders come back to Europe they're bringing with them knowledge of Arabic numerals and it's actually quite there a cosmopolitan flavor to that period to high Middle Ages then you get the 14th century in Black Death which is a terrible economic collapse but it's an economic collapse which changes the
ratio between between uh labor and land and so incomes go up incomes go up and that gives rise to some Eon some some of the changing kind of that that changes the nature of European economy in certain ways which does favor the rise of art incomes are higher people can
afford luxuries so maybe cities are uh to some extent growing whether or not the Renaissance is a period of dramatic economic change is I think um open to questioning a lot of the Ventures and trading Ventures are still controlled by chartered companies or by the or by Royal agents um so I don't see it as a
decisive break in the same way like see um say the post 18th century or post 17th century Industrial Revolution period I see that as a seismic change in the scale of of economic activity the Renaissance is um it's not clear to mean it's qualitatively different from what went before so the separate question is
why is violence and intolerance and religious V violence going up and I see that in terms of more convention non-economic factors uh the printing press the Reformation those type and and other shocks you see that's what I see as being associated with this kind greater intolerance in the Renaissance so you
think the best story we have about changes in Toleration for this period it's ultimately technology driven printing press Communications technology interacts with political institutions so it's hard to say they're totally separate but yes there's a literature historical literature about the
formation of like religious identities in this period and it makes the point that people the claim is um people John bossy is one person associated with this the Reformation christianized Europe because prior to the Reformation people had their local Saints and they they knew they were Christian in some like
background sense but it wasn't at the Forefront of their identity whereas with the Reformation is like I'm Catholic you're Protestant this is this is this becomes more sent and um that's partly due to technology a printing press if we take early modern Europe and we look at variations in the degree of Toleration
of minority groups what's the most reliable piece of knowledge or understanding we have about the causes of that variation uh I I'm going to try and explain it and hopefully it's not not too complex away there are two different types of kind of state or Society in early modern Europe and it's
difficult we have to like almost view them separately so for example Poland Poland is sometimes celebrated by historians as a state without Stakes uh which is not exactly true there are some people who are killed for religious beliefs in in early 16th century Poland but actually there a lot of Protestants
protestantism is spreading and there's no repression of protestantism and so it looks tolerant why is it tolerant well it's tolerant because there's no strong central Authority the abbility very powerful so if you're if a nobleman is sympathetic to protestantism he can
protect it there's no State capable of enforcing religious Conformity so that that's that's a reliable predictor like a weak State federalism fragmentation is a reliable predictor of an absence of persecution but what you see subsequently going forward is that's not a strong predictor of getting a liberal
State later or enduring religious freedom whereas England and France are quite different they see extreme religious violence in the mid 16th century as rulers attempt to uh maintain or restore religious Conformity but in most societies once the Tipping Point is reached where it's seen as Impossible
Too costly to restore religious Conformity then actually you've got to set about this task of Building Society where there will be religious differences and religious pluralism this is 150 200 year process so England in the 16th century is nowhere close to being there but it's on this road which
is going to lead to lead to eventually say by the late 17th century early 18 Century in British history did the theoretical Arguments for Toleration even matter so there are a number of famous debates about religious tolerance John Lock Bale in France or is this just a sideshow irrelevant what what's the
power of ideas yes a great great question so there's no evidence that the more radical kind of arguments for for rsh Toleration so this is associated with people like Sebastian castellio in um the 16th century there's no evidence may have much influence there's no evidence of radical anabaptist the
anabaptists again they want separation of church and state and that those ideas are abhorent to all right thinking people in 16th century England so what gives rise to Greater religious freedom it doesn't seem to be the personality of rulers for example their beliefs so Elizabeth I in her private beliefs is we
think you know she claims not to want to make Windows into men's Souls so she seems quite eclectic and sympathetic to pluralism but her St is basically a police state which kills up to 300 people basically for being Catholic in the 16th century so why does it change yeah I don't think the intellectual
debates are the Forefront of what's going on the political economy seems much more important so Charles II doesn't again he doesn't really care about persecuting non-believers but parliament in his period is a royalist parliament they they're desperate to maintain the Church of England so
they're they're very cruel towards Quakers and so on so yeah I down me and all together in our book we we don't think the intellectual ideas are meaningless we don't think they play no role but they're always being mediated through the the incentives of the actors who have political power I can see two
possible sets of cases one is I see a number of somewhat weaker states that may be persecu more or they're less tolerant or they're maybe semi- fascistic if you look at parts of Eastern Europe today you might see that Trend maybe in a modest form but somewhat and then there's other cases
maybe like 17th century Japan a relatively strong state for Asia East Asia and it persecutes Christians a great deal in part because it is a strong state so if either weak States or strong states can persecute minorities more what's the variable that determines which of those cases you get yeah that's
a great Point um yeah so I actually think I don't really like I need to maybe find the perfect terminology of but like the strong state is not I guess my favorite terminology it's why I always prefering this something like a liberal State a state which is like in some sense committed to to Liberal
values the Japanese case is interesting it's the most fough supression at least of Christianity that I'm aware of historically and it's done precisely because of the state has whatever it's a strong state is a difficult thing to measure but it has sufficient coercive
power relative to um the minority in question and once they seal off they pay a huge cost by the way so the main motivation for sealing off the borders of Japan is to stop Christianity seeping through so this is a state which is willing to pay huge costs to do this it's not a strong state in the sense of
the TOA Shogun at actually any control part of the country the D independent Damia have a lot of power but they're strong relative to religion and rulers seem committed they see Christianity as such a threat they're committed to pay this tremendous cost of isolating the entire country from trying to do so and
obviously 20th century examples you have a Soviet Union represses Christianity very very comprehensively and you have a Nazis as well so obviously the power of a state is going to be necessary you need a strong state to really completely suppress a religion on the other hand
there's a precondition for enforcing liberal values or allowing liberalism to flourish I I'm just not convinced that you could you have many examples of extremely weak states where this takes place because because it seems to me that very weak States like like say the Polish leanian Commonwealth are too
easily captured by a few Nobles or vested interests and so the state in some sense becomes privatized and the best you'll get is something like feudal some kind of feudal almost feudal Arrangement and that's not going to be or historically at least that's not been a conducive environment for even markets
actually to flourish in my my view or for human Freedom more generally to flourish if I take your book with no and whatever it is you've added to our understanding of Toleration if you would to boil that marginal contribution down to a sentence what would that sentence
be general rules so like the in some sense that's perhaps a truism so I'm going to have to break your I'm going have to like expand on one one sentence so so perhaps many people would agree we're not the first people to say that uh rule of law a general rules treating treating people equally before the law
is is like the sinqua of of of a of a state which allows kind of human individuals to flourish and I I call States like that Liberal Liberal States what we add to that is then the religious story so that religion is at the heart of this rise of liberal states and it's at the heart of the rise of
kind of these the shift from Identity rules to general rules again I'm going way over one sentence I think so that's that's the bottom line what we add I'd also say that we another contribution we make is distinguishing between States where there's no persecution or there's like facto there there's some bunch of
religions and people are not being burnt alive all the time we didn't distinguish that from the idea of a liberal state which is committed to pluralism to plural like to free expression free thought and a multiplicity of religions and what's the single best piece of evidence for that marginal claim so I
think we're contrasting the experience of like so Europe or the West even today is not doesn't conform to our kind of uh ideals liberal ideals but there's something we can agree upon about modern liberal societies which makes them very distinct from say other examples where people
like historians have argued there was so-called religious toleration such as the Roman Empire maybe or Spain under the uh you know the the Islamic caliphate which people claim to be a golden age of religious pluralism when you actually look at the details it's quite different to what we see in modern
liberal societies and I think we're we're making the claim that political philosophers social scientists who are interested in like liberalism or liberal societies haven't actually done a good job of engaging with the actual history of how these societies emerged sometimes argued that the West has less cousin
marriage and thus is less clan-based and perhaps more free more democratic more liberal agree or disagree broadly speaking I agree I think there's a there's a distinction the difficulty is is UN un unpackaging the there's a package of goods which come come together and um prohibiting cousin
marriage which is this this this is a something the Catholic church was doing in the in high Middle Ages or early Middle Ages that's part of this package which seems to seems to arise in Western Europe and seems to be associated with um with undermining kingship groups that comparison really rest it's most
persuasive when you compare the Middle East or Islamic societies with Europe I'm not sure it's as persuasive if you want to explain rise of Europe Visa rise of or the experience of say China or Japan uh why I know less about the prevalence of cousin marriage for example your most frequently cited
article is on the origins of anti-user laws why are there still so many anti-user laws at the state level in America that's a good question so my best answer to that is just going to be trying to explain why uh why these laws were common so why and why so there's obviously a widely held moral intuition
so the initial cause I think is often a misunderstanding of why interest exists so Aristotle believe the interest was was theft people think that certain level of Interest might be justified but there some level can't be explained through underlying kind of economic fundamentals and it's a misunderstanding
of kind of the fact that we have different preferences different attitudes towards intertemporal smoothing and and in some situations the only way I'm going to be able to get alone is if I'm winning to pay a high rate of interest so it's a there's an activistic very common antipathy towards
these types that said I I don't have a strong view about regulating them at some level so the fact that we know that on in general these laws are bad doesn't mean in some circumstances like we might want to limit them uh so for example one of the you know there their accounts you
can you can write down a model where it makes sense some in some under some circumstances if it's severe moral hazard orever selection perhaps of some justifi justifiable reason for them however just to come back to my paper I I tend not to think that's the reason so if you you see these these interest
rates restrictions in European history an economist can come forward with a with an adverse election or moral haszard story which will justify the Restriction but actually if you look at the history it doesn't seem to explain why Europe for example ban all interest rates throughout most of the Middle Ages
that seems to be a combination of rent seeking by um Merchants who could evade these laws by rulers who might license some groups often Jews to lend an interest and thereby collect Monopoly rents from from that practice why was China as a nation or territory so large
so early in world history yeah so that's a great question uh so there there are several potential explanations one of which is geographic another one would be there's also an argument from like the writing system but I think the geography story is quite important and Jared Diamond was that what Jed Diamond
Building on people like Eric Jones kind of argued that China's geography and essentially there's one well there are two core geographic regions in China around the yellow and yangi river deltas which produce a huge amount of of like grain or rice and so if you control those core regions you you you have a
very you can raise large armies you can have a large population and dominate the subsequent regions whereas the argument is for Europe these core regions are perhaps arguably more separated by geographical boundaries the limitation of that argument on its own is the geography static so it doesn't really
tell you anything about the timing and China the interesting thing about China in my view is not just that it was once unified or unified early but it's persistently unified it it reunify and it actually interestingly enough the periods between periods of De unification get consistently smaller so
there there are always periods where it's fragmented like the warlord period in the early 20th century but over time may become smaller Europe doesn't seem to have that centrifugal force so Europe most of Europe is Unified or a lot of Europe is Unified by the Romans but it's
not able to come back together along those those lines later and the argument that I put forward in an article of Twan Singh and you co of um National University of Singapore is that it's not just the core geographical reasons that's part of it but actually the periodical periodic threat for monatic
step is another key factor so this is Geographic because China has a very sharp kind of slope from really productive agricultural land to land which is only fit for horses for EUR Asian step so China could be invaded very easily from the north by the step Nomads whereas
Europe it was much less vulnerable to us and that helps to explain why the Chinese state is often a Northern State so just to if I can add sh if you think about China today or even China in the past the the really productive land a lot of it's in quite far south near Shanghai yangi Delta the political cent
of China is near Beijing or it's in the north and that's that's due to this political economy threat from the step and it's these periodic step invasions which are we argue responsible for the for the centralization and almost militarized character of a Chinese State through history and would you be bullish
on Chinese political Unity today I'm not saying you need to think everything in the country will go well but just that it will hang together not only bounce back but stay more or less as a un I'm not really enough of an expert on China to have a strong view when I when I yeah when I talked to Chinese I I was
surprised relative to my prior that um they're they're more separatist than than I would have thought before I kind of knew as much about the country so you know uh people from you know the Shanghai region or people from gu and Hong Kong where they have more separate more of a regional identity than you
might expect and they find they feel that the state the Chinese state is quite dominated by Northerners so the most nationalistic Pro CCP Chinese often from the north and it's there that the identity of the Chinese State and the Chinese people are really bound together whereas for people in the periphery it
seems less so so I would not be so put it this way China has fragmented every couple of hundred years in its history uh the most recent one though was fairly was still not that long ago so I don't see it happening anytime soon but in the awake of a disaster or some catastrophic
collapse you can imagine it happening what you can put your money on is that the Chinese state is going to be it's it's Unthinkable for them you know that's why they're so keen on Taiwan becoming part of China again their ideology is based on one China why did China and Japan react so differently to
the arrival of the West so it's a great question I think that there are many factors I I'll describe the one kind of I've I've looked at in some some of my research with again with t sing and Chi moruchi but I think there's several interesting features so one is that Japan is well the so we're going to
focus on the science so the science is very different that's for Star China's just vast and so even if the most developed parts of China and yangi area are urbanized and commercialized and and probably doing quite well until at least 1750 you have these peripheral regions which are which are facing very
different climatic and economic conditions China is transformed by well both China and Japan are basically insulated from Western threats until the mid 19th century then they face them very it's very Stark so it's very quick that you have the ability of Americans and British to St
sail steam sh ships into into the you know into the harbor of Yokohama but Japan it's very small and it's all of Japan is vulnerable and so this is a geopolitical crisis of of the of the highest order for Japan China they they can initially have they initially don't necessarily care about the British they
don't take them very seriously it's huge and once they do take them seriously they have to face threats from both Russia so the Russians are really pressing in on the Chinese in the 1850s and they've got these Coastal threats from a British and it's very difficult for this traditional Chinese state which
has emerged and developed to protect and dominate the step it's extremely there's no Navy for example it's extremely difficult for that state to adapt to face the threat from Britain and France uh agility is kind of a a term you know we sometimes think about it with respect
to to States as well as individuals but premodern states are not agile they can't re they can't redeploy resources rep prioritize and so the Chinese State really struggles to do this Japan also struggles so Japan under goes political crisis for 15 years from Perry's arrival in 1853 believe it's when the Black ship's
first arrive to 1868 which is the ma restoration it's 15 years of total chaos and individual Japanese kind Amo and and like statelets are like basically going to war with Western as English ambassadors are being killed but once they overthrow the Shogun nut and restore the the emperor they're able
partly I think because of it's a cohesive territory to to to develop This Modern state which can respond to the West that said I don't think we have a total explanation for it it's still a bit of a mystery that they're as successful as they were there's a large part of the of that you know we are
squared of my explanation about the size and the political history is is quite small I think I think a large part of it is very difficult to explain and one either has to make recourse to luck to the amazing you know some amazing abilities of specific Statesmen or to cultural factors which are quite
difficult but Cortez was also luck with the Aztecs to me it's striking that you have the British in China the Spaniards in Mexico pulling off miraculous military Maneuvers and it seems there's some common element there maybe lack of a concept ual scheme almost for the victims yeah they don't know how to
interpret it that's that's definitely true the Japanese are so one one piece of research which so the modern histography to the extent I'm kind of up to date with it on the Japanese downplay it emphasizes their they're reading western texts for so called Dutch learning they're increasingly reading
western text in the 19th century and they're paying attention to what happened to China so for example when the Opium War happens the Japanese initially think that the British just kind like you know they could be swatted aside and China would just destroy them and so they're shocked and and initially
the Chinese initially the chain Court initially sends word to the Japanese that they've destroyed the British and this is like they're the victors and then the Japanese find out the real what really happened and that that's a shock to them but they get that shock in the
1840s and they can they have 10 years or 20 years to adjust to the new realities so maybe that gives them something of an edge a final thing is the the Chinese are minority Manu State and so I think that really shapes their vulnerability they're really worried about a hand Uprising and they have a typing
Rebellion to deal with the Japanese ethnically cohesive why was England such a coherent nation state so early some people say 13 Century yeah Alan McFarland is origins of English individualism there certainly um so it's hard to know how far back it goes to be quite honest in my view the you can see
nationalist sentiment in England certainly from the 14 Century that's cha that's when the English Elite starts speaking English the monarchy starts speaking English rather than French decisively they stop he stopped speaking French effectively some 100 years wars is important now the question is how
much further it goes back before then how much is the anglosaxon experience crucial and I would bow to experts on this but certainly the Anglo anglosaxon England seems to be a very cohesive State that'ss a state created out of Wessex in the N late nth and then the 10th Century now I just don't know
enough about how how to believe English Ang and historians think of this as a very modern as a very powerful state for its age the Doomsday Book testifies to the bureaucratic capabilities of the Anglo-Saxon state which the Normans then take over so there is something there
which is um yeah I don't know I don't know quite what what what causes what I what I what I should say is I don't know what the England ends up being this strong nation state and so I don't know if it's just an artifact of that but we then look back and see the antecedence of the strong state in all this early
medieval stuff whereas it could be that Catalonia you know had Catalonia become a powerful State we could find evidence of it in Early Middle Ages so it's there's an element of Select of Survivor survivorship bias but I I'm definitely always impressed by whatever I read
about angl taxs in England what was the most undervalued Factor behind the British Industrial Revolution there's plenty of theories you could cite 20 or 30 factors maybe they all play a role but what's being neglected okay so let's just think about the ones which are not neglected so you have like natural
resources you have coal you have uh this idea of like high W High wage economy associated with Bob Allen which now seems to be under under under pressure uh you have stories about imperialism and trade I think those all um people understand those I perhaps I mean I don't know if it's underrated but
perhaps this cohesive nation state story is part of uh part of it one noticeable thing about the English Industrial Revolution is it doesn't occur in a political sense it occurs in the periphery in Manchester Yorkshire kind of Birmingham darbishire and so how many if we look at like economic Miracles or
Essences I don't know how many of them arise in the capital region in the political Center and how many arise in peripheral regions maybe more than I think but something about English English society that allows a bunch of entrepreneurs to basically Kickstart this revolution far away from
like what's going on in London seems to be quite important to me and it takes many years of experimentation that these industrialists are self-funding many of their many of these developments they're not borrowing money from so London has a has a sophisticated banking sector but the London Bankers are not financing the
Industrial Revolution they''re been financ out of savings and so it does take a long while to get going and it's being neglected like not many people are talking about it in the 1750s 1760s 1770s I mean famously Adam Smith doesn't really talk much about what's happening
in terms of industrialization at the time he's writing at least since Cromwell England has been relatively tolerant toward the Jews compared to much of Europe and if you're trying to build out a broader theory compare some amount of English or British tolerance but then compare that to How the Irish
are treated or how the colonies or India is treated is there a unified approach that ties this all together or the British just schizophrenic in some way with respect to tolerance I mean I think my quick answer would be that it's because it's the BR the British rules in Britain are very different to rules
outside Britain so for example slavery you couldn't if a if a slave you couldn't have slavery in England uh to my best of my knowledge at least from the 16th century onwards so slavery is a is a huge part of a British Empire and it's something which done outside Britain but it's not something which is
practiced in in in within the kingdom itself even in the like you know 17th 18th century I don't know the all the ins and outs of why that's the case but the uh they're invited in in a favorable time so there's a lot of anti-Semitism in in in English History Shakespeare um there's a crypto Jewish doctor of
Elizabeth the first he's burn hung drawn in CED or burnt alive I can't remember which in the 1590s it's a lot of anti-Semitism but the Puritans uh and religious Independents of whom Cromwell is basically the leader they they identify with Zion and Israel they give their kids Israelite and abrahamic and
Old Testament names and the Jews who who petition Cromwell to settle in England a sponic Jews from Amsterdam they have Capital they have money they're Allied in the war against Spain and the Spanish Empire and so it's a very politically opportune moment for them to come and may secure good terms
and then subsequently there's really not many problems with them there's a little bit of there some there's some issues there's some riots but in general they their allies with the Protestants St many they're small they're small community so at least until the late 18th century there's not really much
reason to be really hostile to them unless you're like a verant anti-site whereas other cases it's a little bit different so the Irish are coming in large numbers they're Catholic and their Catholicism is seen as suspect because of the geopolitical consequences of it
so they just they're just less favored for those reasons simly the British behavior in the colony is very repressive often but that's again a SCH the schizophrenia is not within Britain it's between what's inside and what's outside today why have so many parts of northern England declined so steeply
compared to the industrial parts of Germany parts of the Netherlands arguably France it seems worse in northern England what's your account of that so Nick craft has written some good stuff on this so the only period when like the south is not the center of English History is of Industrial
Revolution and the but the wealth of these industrial cities was remarkable in the late 19th century and so and I've been to like you know a lot of these places and some of them better than others so like to it's the ones which are big like Manchester and Liverpool have actually you know they have
cultural amenities which mean that they're still flourishing parts of them and they've actually revived a little bit in the last 20 years I would say it's places like dast and Barnsley which were often like mining towns or one industry towns which have really fallen into into dis disrepair I don't know
enough about the I mean Germany's Germany I'm not surprised cuz German manufacturing has survived to a much larger extent than British manufacturing I don't know if for comparison with France or America might be more San because you've like Co towns for example and I think C towns in you know in in in
Pennsylvania or West Virginia have done very badly as well so the German example would be would be manufacturing which has survived much more compared to say these British towns by the way have been declining since World War II so Britain lost these are so-called the industries
of the first Industrial Revolution they're driving Britain's progress from the 19th century they've been in Decline since the 1930s 1920s like if you think of just take South England for now the last maybe 30 years do you see that as a time of fundamental break where South England has become a fundamentally
Multicultural Society in a way that will never be reversed and is unprecedented in English History and that will just be swallowed or will that in some way be undone and brexit is stage one and speculative but what's your prediction um so my so I have to just first off like I did not you know predict that
brexit would happen so and I'm someone who's from the south of England and all the time I spent in the UK most of it with an exception of one year in New York was in the south of England so this is a so I have a favorable an optimistic reading of of that and I think for the the British Society at least what I
observed of it observe of it is actually fairly successful in integrating most migrants uh so that everyone get a vote on that right yeah including Northern England yeah and my experience is obviously jars with like what you read or see about you know backlashes or antagonism towards European or
non-european migrants in the rest of the country and so the question is is it I I I don't see how it's reversible so for example there are many there are many EU Nationals currently residing in Britain and I think Teresa may was pretty bad and not immediately granting them kind
of basically permanent leave to stay and there are many high skill people leaving but I think there just too many of them like there's no way these people are returning to their countries they've made their lives in the UK and so long as they're there there's um you're not going to go back to the England of the
1950s which is like which is quite boring at least anecdotally you're up for a closing round of overrated versus underrated sure okay number one home team advantage in English football overrated or underrated now overrated so s it was very sent in the past it's definitely gone down and if you if you
look at like the best teams like Manchester City they they do very well away from home and why did it go down home field advantage I mean this is this is very speculative but my my hypothesis with Jimmy Reid was that in a so so team sports so team sports are different to individual sports and HomeField
Advantage seems to be more prevalent than team sports now probably the biggest reason for HomeField advantage and it's still relevant is is is swaying the referee so that's not something we we talked about so you influence a referee that's a big deal especially in like soccer because there's a lot of
referees a lot of discretion until very recently there no video replays so discre referee pressure is huge the other fact that we talk about is that in team sports there's a sharking problem and so um each individual player might have an incentive to have a margin sh a little bit because they're in a team and
so if their teams go win 2-0 anyway they'll under invest a little bit and so the argument is is when you're following your team just by reading the scores in the newspaper or maybe hearing it on the radio I don't know who's I I just know the team won 2-0 I don't know the
individual performances very well so that might describe uh English uh soccer or football in the 1980s or 7s the idea is now with every game being televised and also not just that to be honest it's also the internet where you have every player's performance can be rated and they know with Statistics now how many
how many kilometers each player is running then uh it's much harder for any individual player to sh and the idea was that the home the home U fan base or audience or Stadium they can observe all the they get much better information on each individual player's performance Max vber overrated
or underrated underrated why Well because most people just know a Protestant Theory and may Mis may misreport it whereas actually his most interesting stuff's on like Chinese religion and like ancient Judaism and just the the role history of music right yeah he I mean he he wrote so much right
so yeah could you pick a well-known painter whom you regard as somewhat overrated uh Plenty Money uh tell us why well so it's hard to say so I think for anyone who becomes if you go to an art gallery like an art gallery you'll see people I mean people always look at the paintings but they also look at the name
tag and so there's always this tendency if it's like Mone like oh it's money so we go look at this one whereas actually it might be the sizzly or the uh man of pizaro that might be the better painting sometimes that said that this is this goes back to something you like to talk
about uh it depends if you're judging the high points or the average the high points of Monet are fantastic and it's hard to overrate them but the average is not that special the movie Schindler's List overrated or underrated uh so I saw this recently resaw it recently and uh it's yeah it's been underrated it's
been it's been I mean it deserved to be reissued it's been uh it's it's an amazing piece of Cinema I think it's not a perfect piece it's far from a perfect piece of Cinema because the the problem with it just just to say what's wrong with it is that it's a happy story about
survivors about an event for which for vast majority of people did not survive so it cannot be the the holocaust movie for those reasons the second half is too sappy for me but I think the first half is amazing exactly no that's exactly right the first half first half is amazing and it reminds you that Stephen
Spielberg is just technically an amazing film director he just his sentimentality is his is his problem and it's it's a shame that he hasn't done more serious movies final question what is a conceptual or philosophical or historical movie you would recommend that we all see other than Schindler's
List so there are tons I'm quite a big fan of historical movies I saw Loren Margo recently uh 1994 uh Isel arjani moving about being a sent B Day Massacre and French Wars of religion Queen Margo is the is the uh the forc to marry hry of Nar to kind of patch up this peace but really it's it's a a lure to get the
Protestants in one place so they can be massacred and it's a movie about how the the the French monarchy kind unravels but there many many others I think the Americans and British don't do as good a job of historical movies compared to like French Japanese other cultures Italians marama
thank you very much great thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show