The Ancient World and our world: review of Mary Beard’s “Confronting the classics”

I enjoyed tremendously Mary Beard’s “Confronting the classics”. Beard is the most engaging writer, her style is fresh and open, and she treats the ancient and the modern world as a continuum which to today’s reader makes the ancient world closer and more easily understandable. It is a book, I believe, directed both to dilettante  amateurs of ancient history and to the professionals in the field. The reason for the latter is that the book is a collection of some thirty Beard’s reviews of books on the ancient world written by her peers. Thus, I guess, the original reviews were very likely to have been written for and read by the top professionals in the field.

Beard covers what I would call  the “high-school antiquity”, that is the antiquity that most of us have studied in the high school, which includes the Peloponnesian Wars, Alexander the Great, The Roman republic and the Punic Wars, and the peak of the Roman Empire. She brings, at least for me, a very fresh look at a number of people and issues (I will mention some below), but I feel a bit of a regret  that she has not engaged, at least not in this book, with less well-known and more difficult periods, especially with the crisis of the 3^rd and 4^th centuries and the rise of Christianity.

I would like to focus this review on three issues: methodology, role of the individual in history, and a bit of economics (as you would expect).

An overwhelming impression that one retains from Beard’s book is how fragmentary our knowledge of the ancient world is, and how despite a seeming abundance of material evidence (objects of art and daily life, writings, skeletons etc.) many questions  will probably never be answered.  This fundamental lack of knowledge allows Beard to question our received wisdom: was Hadrian really so much better than Nero?, was Alexander a military genius or an arrogant, drunken youth endowed with incredibly good luck (which might have run out had he not died young)?, and the perennial question of whether Caeser’s assassination was a tyrannicide.  

This lack of knowledge leads ancient historians to employ the methodology that Beard beautifully deconstructs in the most devastatingly negative review of any book in this volume, Anthony Birley’s “Hadrian: The restless emperor”. The methodology used by Burley and many others is “a combination of scholarship, conjecture and fiction”. Scholarship is based on a rather narrow interpretation of the evidence. But since that evidence, even for Hadrian, is scant (writings on his reign date for at least a century after it ended), the authors have to resort to conjuncture. The tell-tale terms are “seems”, “he must”, “it might be” “it was done in such-and-such way, no doubt”, “they would have been”, “presumably”, “the odds are” etc. Beard provides a number of such examples, and putting them together amount to a devastating indictment of the approach. And soon, after conjecture, fiction takes over. Why is this bad? Because, Beard writes, “the issue is that this veneer of scrupulous scholarship (“I shall claim nothing as fact that I cannot authenticate”) turns out to act a brilliant alibi for outright fiction”. (p. 173).

This made me think of the same approach used in economics. Since it has become impossible to claim causality between two phenomena unless extremely stringent criteria are satisfied, economists have taken to masking this fact by a legalistic use of language, very similar to what ancient historians do when they “conjecture” (that is, make up) things. The historians do not write that they have a proof that Hadrian walked along the Hadrian wall; they write that “he no doubt was expected to make on-the-foot review”. Of course, the objective is to tell the reader that indeed he did do such a review, but to cover oneself academically through the use of the conditional. Economists are given a Faustian choice of either not publishing anything since they fail to have a proof of causality, or publishing articles that go out of the way to claim that they discuss only “associations” while in reality they convey to their readers the impression that it is really of causality they are speaking. For if the writer really believed that he has uncovered only a mere association, what would be the use of such a finding? Thus both sciences resort to a massive cover-ups.

After I became so thoroughly convinced by validity of Beard’s critique, I started  paying  closer attention to the weasel words that she so aptly identified.  And, lo and behold, most of them were there when she too discusses events for which conjecture is the best we can come up with! I did not go back to the earlier reviews to look for such words, but in only two reviews following her demolition of Hadrian’s biographer, there are terms such as “almost certainly”, “most likely”, “we can only wonder” etc. So, it seems that even when we do know what should be done, we are, given the state of our knowledge, unable to follow our own rules---for otherwise we shall publish nothing at all.

Thus conjecture and perhaps fiction is best we can do in discussing Hadrian or Nero (or anybody else in the ancient world). It is here that Beard introduces some really interesting points. Alter showing the similarities between Nero and Hadrian (their peripatetic  careers,  admiration--kowtowing as some Romans would no doubt see it--- for Greek language and culture, unconventional behavior, love of luxury) she asks whether their rules were really so much different as we conventionally believe. Could not the ideas about the qualities of their rules have been largely conveyed  by the elite opinion that prevailed after their deaths? Since Nero was assassinated, the assassins had to claim that his rule was disastrous; Hadrian died in his bed, was succeeded by Antonius Pius, hand-picked by Hadrian, was deified and remained forever enshrined as a “good emperor”. But for the majority of the population (who did not seem to mind, or might have rather enjoyed, Nero’s extravagances), was there any difference?

The problem with ancient history is that paucity of evidence does not allow us (except in some obvious cases like the Gracchi or Caesar) to even so much as glimpse the social forces that were opposing or supporting various emperors. We thus end up in the unfortunate position of judging emperors solely by their, largely attributed, personal character. We have “good” emperors, and we have “bad” emperors. This is obviously a very simplistic view of studying history. However, this simplistic view has in popular culture gone further than explaining only the ancient history and today it informs most of our thinking about the contemporary world.  Demonization of individuals without any account being taken of the context within which they operate (all evils of Iraq are due to Saddam—we know now how accurate that view was, or of Syria to Assad, or of Russia to Putin, or of Iran to Ahmadi-Nejad (remember him?)) is made of the exactly the same materiel as Robert  Graves’ ubication of all the world’s deviousness in Livia (and Beard is scathing about Graves and even more so of the BBC adaptation). For  Rome perhaps we cannot do better since we know so little about the social conditions under Hadrian or Nero, but for the present world we surely can.  

Finally, let me come to economics which play a very small role in Beard’s reviews (and presumably in the books she reviews). I found most interesting her discussion of slavery in relation to Henrik Mouritsen, and Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledgge (eds.) books on the topic. There are two huge issues there. First, Rome is among all known societies with extensive slavery the only  one where manumission was practiced on an extensive scale. Beard believes that ¾ of the population were freedmen (liberati) or descendants of freedmen. We do not understand what led owners to such massive granting of liberty. Was it because holding people as slaves was uneconomical (in the old age), or because many developed personal relations with domestic slaves (sex and marriage)? But the former cannot explain the scale of manumissions of younger slaves, the latter cannot be something specific to Rome (nor can explain manumission of non-domestic slaves). So, according to Beard, we have no answer. It is surely something that economists should try to understand better, because in our explanation of why Rome never developed labor-saving machinery, the cheap labor of slaves plays a very important role. But the scale of manumissions bellies that interpretation.

Second, what was the social structure of a society where ¾ of the population were freed slaves or children of freed slaves? Here, I think a modern comparison with the role of immigration in the United States may be useful. While being an immigrant does carry a stigma in today’s US, that stigma is minimal (compared to Europe) because almost every American born person has a parent or a grand-parent who was an immigrant. Then stigmatizing others for something very close to what oneself is, is indeed difficult and makes the societal acceptance of an otherwise “negative condition” easier. In addition, as much as freedmen were proud of having done well after being freed (as we can see from the inscriptions on their funeral monuments), so the number of migrants who have done well further reduces the generality of the stigma.

The fact that I could write yet another review, perhaps of equal size, of Mary Beard book show sufficiently how much both fun and useful it is. Now, I cannot wait to read her “SPQR: A history of ancient Rome”.

The long shadow of 1989

As I was reading a new EBRD report on the life in transition, my attention was drawn to two remarkable facts, one positive, another negative, that came out of a detailed survey-based analysis. On the negative side, the generation born around the early 1990s, which has now reached its maturity, has on average a height of about 1 cm less than the previous generation. The explanation is not only, the report argues, in suddenly plummeting incomes (Russian incomes decreased more than the US income during the Great Depression), but in additional factors, like parental stress, alcoholism and drug abuse, and all kinds of pathologies that made people unable to take care of their families.

The good news is that the happiness gap between Eastern and Western Europe has closed. East Europeans are no longer systematically unhappier (in terms of self-reported happiness) than their Western counterparts.  What greater unhappiness there exists in the East is due to the differences in income; moreover, in an ironic twist, the gap was also in part closed because of the unhappiness hysteresis in the West, where the effects of the Great Recession led the population to a lower happiness path.

Both the height loss and the happiness stories illustrate well the importance to people’s lives of traumatic events like the economic collapse during the transition or the Great Recession. Sometimes, it seems that the real trauma of such events is felt more acutely once they are past.

And in a fitting reminder of these events, I read Simon Kuper’s today’s piece in the Financial Times on the diverse fortunes of Merkel, Putin, Kaczynski and Orban who were all, in different places and positions in 1989, and whose 1989  experience very much influences their today’s beliefs and policies. Their varying personal stories are well known and need no retelling here, and whoever is interested in them, may read Kuper ’s article.  

What I found interesting in Kuper’s article are two points which were very seldom found in Western press at the time of the 1889-90 revolutions and even less frequently afterwards. The first is recognition that the 1989 revolutions were essentially nationalist revolutions, or revolutions of national self-determination. Kuper is acknowledging this in reference to Viktor Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, but the same point can be made with respect to all then activists and later post-communist leaders. Even Yeltsin’s revolution was a peculiar nationalist revolution where the core nation decided it wanted to get out of a federation. A quarter century before Brexit, Yeltsin did the same thing: he was a nationalist “Russexiter”.

For the other leaders, from the Baltics to the Balkans, nationalism as the main ideology was self-evident. In no small measure, they despised internationalism because it was part of communist ideology.  Thus, the return to nationalism in the East, which coincides with the nationalistic turn taken by Western Europe too, came very naturally to the leaders issued from the 1989 revolutions. It is also coming easily to the second-generation leaders who are indeed the products of heavily nationalist and at times clerical education in their countries.

It is useful in that context to mention that West’s (and especially American) support to anti-communists during the Cold War was primarily directed toward nationalist activists who seemed, due to the power of the siren song of nationalism, particularly able to organize an effective opposition to the communist rule. There were two groups of activists who were supported: those whose objective was national liberation from Soviet domination, and those whose objective was national emancipation that required the break-up of the countries where they lived. The second of these obviously had much more dramatic consequences because it involved wars, both in Yugoslavia and in much of the territory of the Soviet Union. A return of nationalism of the Orbans and Kaczynskis today is just another instance of a “blowback”, not dissimilar from that of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The second interesting point by Simon Kuper is the recognition, through the lives of the four politicians, of diversity of experiences triggered by the transition. This was hardly recognized as the triumphalism of the 1989-90 made it appear that it was all one great festival of freedom and good humor. But it was not—and especially it was not for multiethnic societies which were divided according to ethnic or religious principles. Sizeable minorities, who either were of mixed backgrounds or had identities associated with the country that was now divvied up, were left totally unmoored. (To complete the irony, the break-up according to nationalist principles in the East took place while the West celebrated the dawn of a new age of multiculturalism.)  

I know of many people, myself included, who for several decades had one national identity, and then within months had to start believing they had another one. Anyone who thinks it is a simple process and that people can, at the drop of a hat, start believing the opposite of what they believed for several decades is deluding himself. Anyone who believes that countries are lego-blocks that can be, with ease, put together or broken  apart, is deeply wrong. Just look at the Scottish referendum, Brexit and Catalan strive for independence.

The India-Pakistan Partition in 1947 was and remains a defining moment in the lives of many Indian and Pakistani families, regardless of the fact that it is now almost 70 years old. The break-up of countries (or unification, in the case of Germany) likewise remains a defining moments for many people who had lived through the 1990s in Eastern Europe. Despite my pro-federalist and pro-Yugoslav feelings at the time, I am glad—today—that Yugoslavia no longer exists because I became convinced that managing it would have been impossible. Of all the books on the break-up of Yugoslavia, the most influential for me, was AJP Taylor’s “The Habsburg Monarchy”. It shows the failure of all constitutional arrangements between 1809 and 1914 that tried to solve the famous “nationality problem” in the Empire. Each arrangement solved one problem at the cost of opening another one. Taylor ends the book by pointing out that success or failure of Tito’s Yugoslavia will answer that perennial question of whether it is possible to have a multiethnic federation in Eastern Europe. We know the answer today.   

But the opinion about the inevitability of the break-up that we may hold today, cannot make us forget not only how traumatic and bloody the process was, but also how many of the newly-created countries, from Ukraine to Bosnia, remain utterly fragile and, it seems, permanently suspended over the precipice of yet another war. And how the past extends its long shadow over the present.

Will social democracy return? A review of Offer and Söderberg

Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg (“The Nobel factor: the prize in economics, social democracy and the market turn”) look at the strange death of social democracy at the hands of market liberalism. That death was accelerated by the role of the Nobel prize in economics that conferred to economics an allure of science and that was used to much greater profit by neoliberal economists to push for their version of economic policies.

Offer and Söderberg define social democracy as a continuation of Enlightenment: from equality before God to equality before law, to equality between men and women and races, to equality of entitlements between citizens. Since each citizen goes through periods of dependency (as a child, as a mother, as unemployed, or as an old person) when he/she cannot earn an income, he has to depend on transfers from the working age population. This life-cycle pattern is shared by all, and thus society, in a form of social insurance, sets a system that provides redistribution from the earners to the dependents.

How does market liberalism solve the life-cycle problem? By positing that everyone is a free agent with his endowments of capital and labor. When he cannot work, he uses the proceeds from his capital (assuming of course that he originally either inherited or saved enough wealth to have a capital). It is not a “society” in a true sense of the word, but a group of “agents” who manage own income over the life-cycle. Since returns are to one’s ownership of labor and capital and there is no redistribution, it is a “just world” society where one gets back what he has put in, and where income inequality is never an issue—precisely because income is exactly proportional to one’s contributions.

These are indeed two different views of the world. As Offer and Söderberg write, social democratic view was extremely successful empirically but was not theoretically worked out much by economists. The neoliberal view has exactly the reverse characteristics: empirically it was not much of a success (look at private pension schemes in Chile), but economists have extensively worked on it theoretically.

Neoliberal view became dominant in the early 1980s as social-democratic model was blamed for the slowdown in growth. The Nobel prize accelerated this shift because it tended to favor neoliberal version of economics. The origins of the Nobel prize are revealing in the same way that a look at the beginning of every great fortune  is revealing. There are there details that are better left unexplored. The prize has all but been bought by the Swedish Central Bank (Riksbank) that had the magnificent idea that a Nobel prize in economics can help it assert its independence from the government by elevating economics to the position of a “science”. The Swedish government let the Riksbank lobby with the Nobel Committee for the introduction of the only prize not envisaged by Alfred Nobel, essentially as a vanity project. The Riksbank prevailed upon the committee by, inter alia, removing some constraints on the financial instruments in which the Nobel Committee could invest and by funding the prize itself. It was a great example of entrepreneurship: buy a prize for yourself. (One wonders if, for example, Apple may not follow Riksbank and buy a prize to award for the most promising technological development.)

There was, according to Offer and Söderberg, another reason why social democracy was abandoned even by the parties that were brought into existence through social democracy like British Labour, French socialists (SFIO) and German SDP. The leadership of the parties passed from social activists and workers into the hands of credential leaders who emphasized meritocracy and in whose eyes redistribution rewarded the “underserving poor”. This is the background to Bill Clinton’s “end of the welfare as we know it”, and Tony Blair’s New Labour. The shift was also helped by the self-interest of the new leaders who in  the process (as the Clintons and the Blairs show) immensely enriched themselves. It could be even said that the parties were to some extent hijacked by their self-interested leadership.

Offer and Söderberg do leave the door open to a possible return of social democracy and see the harbingers of such a change in the increasing role played by the left wings of the social-democratic parties as in the case of Bernie Sander, Corbyn, Syriza and Podemos.

I find the Offer-Söderberg narrative largely persuasive but I do have somewhat of a disagreement in that I think that the “objective” conditions that  played against social democracy are not sufficiently emphasized. This is not only of an antiquarian interest. If the objective conditions have indeed changed, as I believe, then the future appeal of social democracy will also be more limited. In other words, we are unlikely to return to a status quo ante even if the failure of neoliberalism is clear to most (except perhaps to a few economists whose self-interest lies in denying the obvious).

There are four such changes that I see which work against the ideal-typical model of social democracy. (And some of them were mentioned at the recent presentation of the book at the New School in New York.)

The first is multiculturalism. Social democracy was created for ethnically and culturally homogeneous societies. West European societies today are much more diverse than they were sixty years ago. This is the issue on which Assar Lindbeck  (incidentally, the most influential person in the creation and early awards of the prize) has picked early on. If cultural norms differ and if there is a “lack of affinity” between the groups (to use Peter Lindert’s term) then willingness by some to fund transfers for the others wanes.

The second challenge is the end of Fordism. With much more heterogeneous labor, in terms of their skills and tasks; smaller size and geographically dispersed units; the self-employed rather than workers, the natural constituency of social democracy (homogeneous labor assembled in one place) disappears.

The third challenge is demographic. Social democracy was very successful through the use of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) system in the countries where population was increasing and the working age population was large. Many people worked and they could transfer income to the retirees in the expectation that the same deal will apply to them when they become old. But when the population is in the decline and there are too many retirees compared to the working age population, maintaining the integrity of the PAYG system is harder. It is not impossible as the pension age can be raised and pensions reduced, but it is certainly not politically easy to do.

The fourth challenge is globalization. Social democracy operated within rather closed economies  where migration (and thus the challenge of multiculturalism) was minimal and where capital was generally locked in nationally. None of that is true anymore.  Capital is much more mobile, and if heavily taxed to provide funds for social transfers, will flee. Developed welfare states that make sure that nobody is left behind may provide incentives particularly to the low-skilled migrants. Thus “better” social democracy may perversely attract lower quality migrant labor than the much more austere and “mean” systems.

These, and perhaps a few other, elements seem to me to imply that a return to the Golden Age of social democracy is unlikely to happen. On the other hand, there is a realization of inadequacy of the neoliberal model that bequeathed a huge crisis (which did not turn into another Great Depression precisely because the key rules of neoliberalism were abandoned in order to save the system). As many times in history, we are now at the point where neither of the two established doctrines seems to provide reasonable answers to today’s issues. That leaves the field open to new thinking and experimentation.