Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama on *Persecution and Toleration*

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. 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 Mercatus. They're both very well-known economic historians, and today we have with us Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama. We're going to start with Noel Johnson. Ready?

I'm ready. Thank you for having me on.

A lot of historians have suggested that antisemitism 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, antisemitism 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. 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're wrong. So part of 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're being placed into 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. They're forced to live in the same place. They're forced to wear different kinds of clothes. They can do different sorts of 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— 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 this often for Jews, for example, in the sense that they are raising money for non-Jews. Like, so for towns, they might grant Jews the monopoly right to lend money. But then, of course, Jews make monopoly profit from lending at higher interest rates. But of course, the Jews don't get to keep this money, and it's taken by, say, the town burghers, and then they're taxed. This is actually a rather pernicious equilibrium because you also get a cultural byproduct, which is that Jews are perceived as Shylocks, lending at excessive interest rates. And this generates antisemitism, which in turn makes it easier for them to be taxed by the secular authority or by the 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 especially as you get more towards the Reformation, you have states expanding. So one example that I, and this is the 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— 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 sorts of institutional arrangements start to break down at the same time. And this is often when you we 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 a situation— well, first of all, you have economic dynamism so that there are other individuals who want to, say, trade long distance, and they're running up against Jews for these sorts of things. You have other people who want to be involved in, say, money lending, and they're running up against the Jews in these sorts of circumstances. But you also have Over time, you have, for example, the state may want to, they might bring in more people, right? You know, like, conquer more territory. So the French might 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 Marc Royaumont and I have written about in this case would be, say, the Albigensian Crusades to to take a non-Jewish example. 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 religious, a different religious group, 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 state's building power, you know, that's generating some persecution.

So it's the cross-connection between state's building power, there being something at stake, and there's more heterogeneity than there had been in the earlier, more zero-sum 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 hetero— this greater heterogeneity because we're expanding, or because we have to in some sense, build our state in a different way. Okay.

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 it 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, 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 so as the whole state 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. You have Magna Carta at beginning. You have the First Barons' War, you have the Second Barons' War that are taking place at the beginning of the 13th century. 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 revenue extracted from them by the king. These individuals also know that Jews are involved in the exchequer, 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 ask, in that case, we don't know for sure, but one reasonable explanation that's almost certainly playing a part in 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 competition.

So you're willing even to expel a useful scapegoat. If you can hand out rents.

Right. Although, but in— yes, 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 datasets 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 you don't need to actually kill all the Jews or expel them in order to extract resources from them. And in fact, in some way, this is off equilibrium path, right? You're no longer in some optimal equilibrium for both the ruler and for the Jewish community. And oftentimes, these Jewish communities would be expelled from a city, they would be invited to come back, and they would come back, right? 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, in the 1290s, I think I understand a little bit about why it might have happened that way. I think it was signaling credibility and 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— you just have, say, guilds moving against these Jewish communities. An example of this would be in 1614, one of the most well-known Jewish persecutions was in Frankfurt am Main. It was called the the Fettmühl Massacre. And Fettmühl was a baker. He was in guilds, and he was 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 about parts of Europe, yeah. So you're like Albania?

Possibly. Bulgaria after it's no longer part of the Ottoman Empire.

Yeah, yeah. I actually don't know. I'm not sure I have a good answer for that. The Ottoman Empire, I could talk a lot about the dhimmi system, you know, and how that works into my thinking on this. But I mean, aside from, I know something like Albania was part, you know, of the Ottoman Empire at one point, right? You know, some of these regions. I know, and this isn't closer to the Ottoman 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 Israel.

What's the Poland story? That's fine.

I'm interested in the Poland story. Now I've opened another— it's a complicated one. So Poland—

But at its essence.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In essence, in Poland, you see over time a gradual movement of Jewish communities from the Iberian Peninsula is where they initially come in, and then they're moving towards the 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 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 Poland also, never really— they experienced something called the Second Serfdom. 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 loses 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, landowners and so forth are going to increase. However, what economists often don't take into account is One response to this might be for people in power to double down on keeping peasants under their thumb. So the second serfdom in Eastern Europe, Poland, I'm thinking in particular, this is that instead of getting better deals, the peasants were made— they were put under even greater submission after the Black Death because they were not able to get the market wage. So power played a role there with the nobility, and the nobility would often take advantage of Jews' skills in, say, 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 goes through these transformations of developing state capacity. And Jews remain in this identity equilibrium in Poland, 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 institutional 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 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 relative bargaining power of people with workers compared to nobles or people who are running states and cities and these sorts of things. And so you're going to see more power 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 that the world is ending, right? You know, you have wages, you know, 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 there's disintermediation, like to use a modern word, like in a massive way. Sure. Yeah.

But wages go up at all. Does that mean Paul Romer is wrong about increasing returns? Because you might think, well, you lose half your people, society falls apart, everyone's wages fall. Clearly, that's not what happened, but it's what I would expect if you asked me a priori. So Paul Romer's wrong, there are not increasing returns. You can just have higher wages and be much smaller.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think Paul Romer's 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 Graham and 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 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, that is, are 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— what I just mentioned is that there's a general shift towards northern trading networks. Because of what we've been looking at, that the Hanseatic cities, which are the trading network that exists on the Baltic in the north of Europe, those cities recovered much more quickly than cities in the south, cities tied to the old Roman road network that centered on the Mediterranean, for example. And this makes sense if you think that trade had been shifting with wool trade, for example, over time 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? 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 on the one hand, so what happened during the French Revolution is that the The state, well, the revolutionaries decided that they needed money, right, you know, to issue. And so they issued these things called assignats, 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 émigrés, 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 in France, it approaches up to 7% or so of the land That's there. And then they issue this paper money initially, backed on this. Then they do this and then they have an auction 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. So there's two things going on here. So they distribute this land by auction. When they do this, auctions are pretty good mechanisms to put an asset into the hands of somebody who values it most, and there's an active secondary market that goes on for this land. The way that my co-authors on this paper, who are Theresa Findlay and Raphael Frank, the way we think about this process is that you have a set of feudal institutions and property that exists up to about 1790 or something like this, the French Revolution, early phases. In that feudal system, you have lots of overlapping property rights. So for example, if I wanted to build an irrigation canal 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, 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 started making investments in things like irrigation and drainage and having better crop rotation systems and so forth. So what that really is, it's a story about what economists are familiar with, the Coase theorem, The Coase 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 arrangement.

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 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 The revolutionaries decided to use a market mechanism to put a whole bunch of assets out there with very low transaction costs. You see that the productivity of agriculture in places that had more church land that was auctioned off was higher than places that didn't have this happen up until the end of the 19th century, as we might expect, because over time, all these assets are being reallocated and investments are ultimately being made. 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 didn't pursue it, but my theory when I was in graduate school was that they were getting a large amount of specie flow because they had mercenaries out there and so they were being paid in gold and then this created nascent institutions for banks, right? It gave them some advantage. I didn't actually look into that more deeply, so I don't know if that's true.

But Swiss banking has declined a lot, as you know.

It's also too early. They were very poor up until the chemistry and these sorts of— the chemical revolution and so forth. So I said that was my old theory.

But it's much higher GDP per capita than most of the rest of Western Europe, maybe Luxembourg aside.

Yeah, yeah. And I think they have a— it's a really interesting thing. They are able to They act like they're a culturally homogenous territory, which they are, but at the same time, they have 4 different language groups packed into a relatively small place. They have a lot of ruggedness, but they still interact, right? And there's also, if you look at the literature from— people have looked at, say, preferences over welfare, and there are big differences between German-speaking and French-speaking and Italian-speaking regions within Switzerland. I don't know the answer. I think there's something in there that has to do with size, that it can work in a place the size of Switzerland. They definitely have a national identity, which is very strong. And I'm not sure exactly how that emerged. One could tell stories about the Swiss being surrounded for so long and cutting off the mountain passes and acting in this way that sometimes I hear these. But otherwise, 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 very interesting about the volcanic eruptions is that we are discovering more and more that they may have played a large role in political change that occurred. So Joe Manning at Yale and I believe his graduate student, who unfortunately I've forgotten his name, have been doing work on they looked at a series of volcanic eruptions that led to the end of the Pharaonic Empire. So that ended around 30 or 60 BC, I forget, around right around that time. But that was an empire that lasted for 300 years before. But they experienced all these crop failures. And then once you look at it, you see that in Indonesia, all these major volcanic eruptions were happening in perfect timing with these crop failures that were taking place. And actually, they can tell from looking at the Nile, you know, and how much it's flooding and things. We also know—

That politics becomes nastier when the volcano goes off?

Well, if you think about the Egypt case, which is Manning, this is 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 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, Samalas. And so this one I've looked at a little bit, and, uh, actually, other people, you know, have been looking at this as well. The Somalas 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 acts 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 happened to be bad weather occurring in the 2 years previous to Samolas as well. And so this wasn't just the volcano in that circumstance, it was the volcano in addition to some bad luck, but it's the environment, the climate, right, playing a role and taking on 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, 1815, 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 it in grain prices very much or anything like this. But when you have something like Tambora, which is a VEI 7, it's a very, very large volcano, the largest since Samalas in the 13th century, would go off. It shuts down, it makes it snow in Maine in June, right? And all over the world because of 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, 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 event, and to basically see what was the effect that it had on these markets, what sort of effects did it have on how people were impacted with their health, and basically to ask questions about how robust market institutions are to dealing with basically correlated supply shocks that are very, very large. And we really don't have many like that. 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 I'm optimistic about the United States and other well-established liberal democracies. I don't think we're going to head all the way back to a situation where— I mean, so the biggest danger is a totalitarian danger, and we've already seen that happen. That is totally, that is completely a danger, right? I do worry about some sort of Nazi-type phenomena, you know, which could occur in like a Holocaust or something like this. And 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 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 regions that had states that were weakened at the time during World War II. This is a point made by Timothy Snyder, you know, it's not my own. And so that doesn't say, I mean, the Germans played a big role and they had a lot of very high state capacity. But I mean, Hannah Arendt also Tyler Cowen has talked about similar points. It's the stateless people that are 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— and 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 in, 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 Western society in terms of development sometimes. I like to tell my students about, in England, the Glorious Revolution is in 1688, which is when we 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 mean, without, you know, 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 cart, 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 that doesn't mean we have to wait 200 years or 150 years, right? You 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 about the United States, for example, Albion Seed, right? You know, this was basically 4 different groups from England that came in and then were asked to eventually adopt the US Constitution as we have it today. And these were all white men who were Christian, right? And furthermore, they were Protestant for the most part, right? So this is an extremely homogenous group that we— and then they barely got it, right? So if you look at the literature on voting at the Constitutional Convention, one of my favorite footnotes in the academic literature is from a paper that looks at the economic and ideological factors that generate voting at the US Constitutional Convention. And it claims that according to their model, if 3 or 4 more backcountry farmers from Virginia had showed up, it might not have worked. So it was a fairly close-run deal. 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 in modern— what we are— the modern Western liberal democracies.

To close out your part of this conversation, are you game for a quick round of overrated versus underrated?

Sure.

Okay. Number 1, amateur astronomy, overrated or underrated?

It is 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, which is where you live, which is where I live. 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, initially I got into it because I thought it was with science, and I would read the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov or things like this, and I was very interested 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 with the universe. It gives you a sense of proportion. I mean, what they say, the closest planet to us right now is TRAPPIST-1 or something like that. It's 37 light years away. 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. And I think everybody has a hard time appreciating, even if you sit under the sky occasionally and look at these stars. So amateur astronomy is a dying, a dying hobby. You can tell that by going to a meeting 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 if we could get the lights to be turned off like they do in Switzerland at 11 o'clock at night. I think we would all benefit from that.

Max Weber, overrated or underrated?

Rated about right, perhaps overrated. I think he has a lot of really good ideas and he had them very early on. I've used a lot of what he's written about, so rated about right. Protestant 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. Protestants built more schools, probably, right? And it wasn't that there was this 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.

I think rated about right. He received a lot of attention for that book. I tried to switch in my teaching to using Yuval Noah Harari's book on Sapiens, and I found it wasn't a good substitute for Diamond. Diamond takes an approach which I think is it's appealing. And even if it might have flaws, I still think Diamond is 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 overrated for economics, underrated for politics, in my opinion. So when the EU EU was first being generated, it was, to my understanding, for two reasons, right? To basically to keep the Germans in check and for steel policy. And I think 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.

Paul Johnson, thank you very much.

Thank you.

And now we turn to Mark Koyama, also a colleague of mine. He's an economics professor at George Mason. I asked your co-author Noel 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 the rise, particularly in the Renaissance centuries, is, is a slightly hard to ascertain. Spain, in my view, because I think eventually the, the 13th century, the commercial revolution, 12th century, as a high point of expansion, of 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 a religious violence, you know, exhibit a lot of religious violence and intolerance. But actually, the Crusaders come back to Europe, they're bringing with them knowledge of Arabic numerals, and it's actually quite I think there's a cosmopolitan flavor to that period, to the High Middle Ages. Then you get the 14th century and the Black Death, which is a terrible economic collapse, but it's an economic collapse which changes the ratio between labor and land, and so incomes go up. Incomes go up, and that gives rise to 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 to some extent growing. Whether or not Renaissance is a period of dramatic economic change is, I think, open to questioning. A lot of the merchant ventures and trading ventures are still controlled by chartered companies or by the— or by royal agents. So I don't see it as a decisive break in the same way that I see say, the post-18th century or post-17th century Industrial Revolution period. I see that as a seismic change in the scale of economic activity. The Renaissance is— it's not clear to me that it's qualitatively different from what went before. So the separate question is, why is violence and intolerance and religious violence going up? And I see that in terms of more conventional, like, non-economic factors. The printing press, the Reformation, those type— and other shocks you see. That's what I see as being associated with this kind of 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? Yeah.

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, that people— John Bossy is one person associated with this— 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 Reformation, it's like, I'm Catholic, you're Protestant. This becomes more salient and that's partly due to technology, the 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?

I'm going to try and explain it and hopefully it's not too complex a way. 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, which is not exactly true. There are some people who are killed for religious beliefs in early 16th century Poland, but actually there are 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 nobility, very powerful. So if you're— if a nobleman is sympathetic to Protestantism, he can protect there's no state capable of enforcing religious conformity. So 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 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 it eventually, say by the late 17th century, early 18th century.

In British history, did the theoretical arguments for toleration even matter? So there are a number of famous debates about religious tolerance. John Locke, uh, Bell in France, or is this just a sideshow irrelevant? What's the power of ideas?

Yeah, so it's a great, great question. So there's no evidence that the more radical kind of arguments for religious toleration. So this is associated with people like Sebastian Castellio in, um, the 16th century. There's no evidence they have much influence. There's no evidence of radical Anabaptists. The Anabaptists, again, they want separation of church and state, and that those ideas are abhorrent 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 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 state is basically a police state which kills up to 300 people basically for being Catholic in the 16th century. So why does it change? I mean, 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're desperate to maintain the Church of England, so they're very cruel towards Quakers and so on. So yeah, I doubt— me and Noel together in our book, 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 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 maybe persecute 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. Yeah. So I actually think I don't really like— I need to maybe find the perfect terminology for this, but like the strong state is not, I guess, my favorite terminology. It's why I'm always prefacing this with something like a liberal state, a state which is like in some sense committed to liberal values. The Japanese case is interesting. It's the most thorough suppression at least of Christianity, that I'm aware of historically. And it's done precisely because of— the state has— whether 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 Tokugawa shogunate actually only control part of the country. The independent daimyo have a lot of power, but they're strong relative to religion and their rulers seem committed. They see Christianity as such a threat that they're committed to pay this tremendous cost of isolating the entire country from trying to do so. And then obviously 20th century examples, you have the Soviet Union represses Christianity very, very comprehensively and you have the Nazis as well. So obviously the power of the state is going to be necessary. You need a strong state to really completely suppress a religion. On the other hand, as a precondition for enforcing liberal values or allowing liberalism to flourish, I'm just not convinced that you have many examples of extremely weak states where this takes place because it seems to me that very weak states like, like say the Polish-Lithuanian 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— it's some kind of feudal, almost feudal arrangement. And that's not going to be— or historically at least, it's not been a conducive environment for either markets actually to flourish in my view or for human freedom more generally to flourish.

If I take your book with null and whatever it is you've added to our understanding of toleration, if you were to boil that marginal contribution down to a sentence, what would that sentence be?

General rules. So in some sense, that's perhaps a truism. So I'm going to have to break your— I'm going to have to expand on one sentence. So perhaps many people would agree, we're not the first people to say that rule of law, so general rules, treating people equally before the law is the sine qua non. 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 the, that's the bottom line, what we add. I'd also say that what we— another contribution we make is distinguishing between states where there's no persecution or there's like de facto, 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 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 Islamic Caliphate, which people claimed 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 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.

Tyler Cowen: 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 distinction. The difficulty is unpackaging the— there's a package of goods which come together and prohibiting cousin marriage, which is— this is something the Catholic Church was doing in the High Middle Ages or early Middle Ages. That's part of this package which seems to arise in Western Europe and seems to be associated with with undermining kinship groups. That comparison really rests— 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 vis-à-vis the rise of, or the experience of, say, China or Japan, where I know less about the prevalence of cousin marriage, for example.

Your most frequently cited article is on the origins of anti-usury laws. Why are there still so many anti-usury laws at the state level in America?

Yeah, that's a good question. So my best answer to that is just going to be trying to explain why these laws were common. 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 believed interest was theft. People think that a certain level of interest might be justifiable, but there's 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 in some situations, the only way I'm going to be able to get a loan is if I'm willing to pay a high rate of interest. So there's an atavistic, very common antipathy towards these types of— that said, I don't have a strong view about regulating them at some level. So the fact that we know that in general these laws are bad, doesn't mean that in some circumstances, like, we might want to limit them. So, for example, one of the— there's accounts, you can write down a model where it makes sense under some circumstances if there's severe moral hazard or adverse selection, perhaps there's some justifiable reason for them. However, just to come back to my paper, I tend not to think that's the reason. So if you see these interest rate restrictions in European history, an economist can come forward with an adverse selection or moral hazard story which will justify the restriction. But actually, if you look at the history, it doesn't seem to explain why Europe, for example, banned all interest rates throughout most of the Middle Ages. That seems to be a combination of rent-seeking by merchants who could evade these laws, by rulers who might license some groups, often Jews, to lend at interest and thereby collect monopoly rents 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. So 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— Jared 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 Yangtze River deltas, which produce a huge amount of like grain or rice. And so if you control those core regions, 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 that geography is 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 reunifies. And actually, interestingly enough, the periods between periods of de-unification get consistently smaller. So There are always periods where it's fragmented, like the warlord period in the early 20th century, but over time they've become smaller. Europe doesn't seem to have that centrifugal force. So Europe, most of Europe is unified, or a lot of Europe's unified by the Romans, but it's not able to come back together along those lines later. And the argument that I put forward in an article with Tuan Huy Singh and Chiou Koh of National University of Singapore is that that it's not just the core geographical reason. That's part of it, but actually the periodical— periodic threat from the nomadic steppe 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, uh, for Eurasian steppe. So China could be invaded very easily from the north by these steppe nomads, whereas Europe, it was much less vulnerable to this. And that helps to explain why the Chinese state is often a northern state. So just, uh, if I can add, if you think about China today, or even China in the past, the really productive land, a lot of it's in quite far south near Shanghai, Yangtze Delta. The political center of China is near Beijing, or it's in the north. And that's due to this political economy threat from the steppe. And it's these periodic steppe invasions which are, we argue, responsible for the centralization and almost the militarized character of the 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 unified China.

I'm not really enough of an expert on China to have a strong view.

Is anyone?

When I talk to Chinese, I was surprised relative to my priors. That they're more separatist than I would have thought before I kind of knew as much about the country. So, you know, people from, you know, the Shanghai region or people from Guangdong and Hong Kong, they have more of a regional identity than you might expect. And 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 state, and the Chinese people are really bound together, whereas for people on 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— it was still not that long ago. So I don't see it happening anytime soon, but in the wake 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 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'll describe the one kind of I've looked at in some of my research with, again, with Tuan-Hoang Singh and Chiaki Moroguchi. But I think there's several interesting features. So one is that Japan is— so we're going to focus on the size. So the size is very different. That's the start. China's just vast. And so even if the most developed parts of China, like Yangtze area, urbanized and commercialized and probably doing quite well until at least 1750, you have these peripheral regions which are facing very different climatic and economic conditions. China is transformed 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 sail steamships 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 the highest order for Japan. China, they can literally have— they 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 the British. And it's very difficult for this traditional Chinese state, which has emerged and developed to protect and dominate the steppe— 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. Agility is kind of a term, you know, we sometimes think about it with respect to states as well as individuals, but pre-modern states are not agile. They can't redeploy resources, reprioritize, and so the Chinese state really struggles to do this. Japan also struggles. So Japan undergoes political crisis for 15 years from Perry's arrival in 1853, I believe it's when the black ships first arrived, to 1868, which is the Meiji Restoration. It's 15 years of total chaos and individual Japanese kind of daimyo and like statelets are like basically going to war with Westerners. English ambassadors are being killed. But once they overthrow the shogunate and restore the emperor, they're able, partly I think because it's a cohesive territory, 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 that, you know, the R squared of my explanation about the size and the political history 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 Cortés 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 conceptual scheme almost for the victims.

Yeah, they don't know how to interpret it. That's definitely true. The Japanese are— so one piece of research which— so the modern historiography, to the extent I'm kind of up to date with it on the Japanese, downplays— it emphasizes that they're reading Western texts, the so-called Dutch learning. They're increasingly reading Western texts 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 are just kind of like, you know, they could be swatted aside and China would just destroy them. And so they're shocked. And initially the Chinese— initially the Qing 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'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 Chinese are a minority Manchu state, and so I think that really shapes their vulnerability. They're really worried about a Han uprising, and they have a Taiping Rebellion to deal with. The Japanese are ethnically cohesive.

Why was England such a coherent nation-state so early? Some people say 13th century.

Yeah, Alan Macfarlane's Origins of English Individualism, there's certainly— so it's hard to know how far back it goes, to be quite honest, in my view. You can see nationalist sentiment in England certainly from the 14th century. That's Chaucer. That's when the English elite starts speaking English, the monarchy starts speaking English rather than French decisively. They stopped, they stopped speaking French effectively. So the Hundred Years' War is important. Now the question is how much further it goes back before then. How much is the Anglo-Saxon experience crucial? And I would bow to experts on this, but certainly the Anglo-Saxon England seems to be a fairly cohesive state. That's the state created out of Wessex in the late 9th and then the 10th century. Now I just don't know enough about how, how to believe English Anglo-Saxon 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 causes— I, 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 that we then look back and see the antecedents of this 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 the Middle Ages. So it's— there's an element of select— of survivorship bias. But I'm definitely always impressed by whatever I read about Anglo-Saxon 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 this idea of like high wage economy associated with Bob Allen, which now seems to be under pressure. You have stories about imperialism and trade. I think those are all— people understand those. Perhaps, I mean, I don't know if it's underrated, but perhaps this cohesive nation state story is part of it. One noticeable thing about the English Industrial Revolution Tyler Cowen is it doesn't occur in a political center. It occurs in the periphery, in Manchester, Yorkshire, Birmingham, Derbyshire. And so how many— if we look at economic miracles or effervescences, I don't know how many of them arise in the capital region and the political center and how many arise in peripheral regions, maybe more than I think. But something about English society, if it 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 sophisticated banking sector, but the London bankers are not financing the Industrial Revolution. They're being financed 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 are 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 British rules in Britain are very different to rules outside Britain. So for example, slavery, you couldn't have slavery in England to my best knowledge, at least from the 16th century onwards. So slavery is a huge part of the British Empire and it's something which is done outside Britain, but it's not something which is practiced within the kingdom itself, even in the, like, you know, 17th, 18th century. I don't know all the ins and outs of why that's the case, but the Jews, they're invited in a favorable time. So there's a lot of antisemitism in English history, Shakespeare, there's a crypto-Jewish doctor of Elizabeth I, he's hung drawn and quartered or burnt alive, I can't remember which, in the 1590s. So a lot of antisemitism. But the Puritans and religious independents of whom Cromwell is basically the leader, they identify with Zion and Israel. They give their kids Israelite and Abrahamic and Old Testament names. And the Jews who petition Cromwell to settle in England are Sephardic Jews from Amsterdam. They have capital. They have money. They're allied in a war against Spain and the Spanish Empire. And so it's a very politically opportune moment for them to come and they secure good terms.

Jews.

And then subsequently, there's really not many problems with them. There's a little bit of— some— there's some issues, there's some riots, but in general, they're, they're allies with the Protestant state. Then 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 very anti-Semite. Whereas other cases, it's a little bit different. So the Irish are coming in large numbers, they're Catholic, and Catholicism is seen as suspect because of the geopolitical consequences of it. So they're just less favored for those reasons. Similarly, the British behavior in the colonies is very repressive often, but that's again, 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 Crafts has written some good stuff on this. So the only period when like the South is not the center of English history is the Industrial Revolution. And 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, 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 Doncaster and Barnsley which were often like mining towns or one-industry towns which have really fallen into disrepair. I don't know enough about the— I mean, Germany, I'm not surprised because German manufacturing has survived to a much larger extent than British manufacturing. I don't know if a comparison with France or America might be more salient because you have like coal towns, for example. And I think coal towns in Pennsylvania or West Virginia have done very badly as well. So the German example 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 so-called industries of the first industrial revolution. They were driving Britain's progress in 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?

So my, so I have to just first off, like I did not could not predict that Brexit would happen. 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 York was in the south of England. So I have a favorable and optimistic reading of that. And I think the British society, at least what I observed of it, is actually fairly successful in integrating most migrants. So that—

But everyone gets a vote on that, right?, 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 don't see how it's reversible. So for example, there are many, many EU nationals currently residing in Britain. And I think Theresa May was pretty bad and not immediately granting them kind of basically permanent leave to stay. And there are many high-skilled people leaving, but I think there are just too many of them. These people are returning to their countries. They've made their lives in the UK. And so long as they're there, there's, 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 1, home team advantage in English football, overrated or underrated?

Now overrated. So it's saying it was very salient in the past. It's definitely gone down. And if you, if you look at like the best teams like Manchester City, 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 team sport, so team sports are different to individual sports and home field advantage seems to be more prevalent in team sports. Now, probably the biggest reason for home field advantage, and it's still relevant, is swaying the referee. So that's not something we talked about. So you influence a referee. That's a big deal, especially in like soccer. Because there's a lot of— referees have a lot of discretion. Until very recently, there were no video replays. So referee pressure is huge. The other factor we talk about is when team sports, there's a shirking problem. And so each individual player might have an incentive to, at the margin, shirk a little bit because they're in a team. And so if their team's gonna win 2-0 anyway, they'll underinvest 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 just know the team won 2-0. I don't know the individual performances very well. So that might describe English soccer or football in the 1980s or '70s. 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 kilometers each player is running then it's much harder for any individual player to shirk. And the idea was that the home fan base or audience or stadium, they can observe all the— they get much better information on each individual player's performance.

Max Weber, overrated or underrated?

Underrated.

Why?

Well, because most people just know the Protestant theory and they misreport it, whereas actually his most interesting stuff's on like Chinese religion and ancient Judaism and just the role of history of music, right? Yeah, I mean, he wrote so much, right? So yeah.

Could you pick a well-known painter whom you regard as somewhat overrated?

Uh, plenty. Monet.

Uh, tell us why.

Well, actually, 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, I see people always look at the paintings, but we also look at the name tag. And so there's always this tendency, if it's like Monet, like, oh, it's Monet, so we'll go look at this one. Whereas actually it might be the Sisley or the, uh, Manet or the Pizarro that might be the better painting sometimes. That said, 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, we saw 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— the, the— just, just say what's wrong with it is that it's a happy story about survivors about an event event for which the 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, the first half is amazing, and it reminds you that Steven Spielberg is just technically an amazing film director. He just— his sentimentality is his problem, and it's amazing. It's a shame that he hasn't done more serious movies.

Final question: what is 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 La Reine Margot recently, 1994, Isabelle Adjani movie about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and French Wars of Religion. Queen Margot is forced to marry Henri of Navarre to kind of patch up this peace, but really, it's a lure to get the Protestants in one place so they can be massacred. And it's a movie about how the French monarchy kind of unravels. But there are many, many others. I think the Americans and British don't do as good a job of historical movies compared to like French, Japanese, and other cultures, Italians.

Mark Koyama, thank you very much.

Great.

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