James McCormick

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Instapundit has a post up on a book about the Medici and Italian banking:

SO I’VE BEEN READING TIM PARKS’ Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. It’s a pretty interesting book, with a juxtaposition of prejudices against sodomy and usury (both seen as “against nature”) as a background for the Renaissance.

It’s mostly a history of the Medici banking empire, though, and it’s interesting to see how the bank declined. The problem was the passing of a generation of bankers who loved the work — Cosimo Medici said that he’d remain a banker even if he could make money by waving a wand — and its replacement by those who weren’t terribly interested in the actual work, but rather in the opportunity their jobs provided to hang around with kings, queens, and cardinals. Not surprisingly, things went downhill fast once that happened.

I think that’s a metaphor for politics and journalism today — and a cautionary example for the blogosphere.

Economic historian Joel Mokyr believes that these periods of innovation in technology (hard and soft) can be spotted repeatedly back to the Greeks (see his Gifts of Athena: Origins of the Knowledge Economy reviewed here, and the The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress). The distinction, finally, with the Scientific/Industrial Revolution was that the inevitable rent-seekers couldn’t get an adequate grip and the Malthusian caps were breached. The widening of the “epistemic base” (which Mokyr represents with the symbol omega) was creating usable knowledge (symbol lambda) faster than it could be controlled or stamped out by antagonistic parties. To quote Mokyr: “The broader the epistemic base, the more likely it is that technological progress can be sustained for extended periods before it starts to run into diminishing returns.” A virtuous cycle rather than a negative feedback loop gets established. He’s got a great article on Why was the Industrial Revolution A European Phenomena? available in .PDF format.

Read more

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

• Bourne, Kenneth, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815-1908 (1967)
• Campbell, Charles, From Revolution to Rapprochement: The Unites States and Great Britain: 1783-1900 (1974)
• Campbell, A.E., Great Britain and the United States: 1895-1903 (1960)

The history of relations between the US and Great Britain/Canada during the 19th century is complex and fascinating. It is also the subject of a very large body of historical research. In this post, I’d like to briefly introduce three titles that cover portions of the period in slightly different ways.

Read more

Five Years A Dragoon: ’49 to ’54 and other Adventures on the Great Plains. Percival G. Lowe (1905) reprinted 1965 University of Oklahoma Press Norman

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

One of the great dramas of the late 19th century was the rapid American transition from self-absorbed isolationism to globe-trotting bravado in the last decade of the 19th century. Part of the story is the buildup of muscle and self-confidence which the American public and American military acquired during the development of the West. The vast scale of the American continent, its settlement and policing, was to absorb the energies of America through most of the 19th century. After somber hints to Napoleon Bonaparte from Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was to add 282,000 square miles to the United States, almost 22% of its ultimate continental extent. Settlement of the Missouri drainage west of the Mississippi was initially quite slow. With the discovery of gold in California in 1849 however, the wagon trails from Saint Louis, Missouri were striking off in greater and greater numbers each year. Five Years a Dragoon may seem a strange subject for a chicagoboyz book review but it describes the American military experience for an ordinary soldier during a period when European nations could ignore American activities except for the border clashes in Maine and Oregon (settled effectively, if not amicably, by treaty with Great Britain). Percival Lowe was an enlisted man and writes in a lucid clear style reminiscent of US Grant’s autobiography. Without a military reputation to enhance, his accounts of the period from 1849 onward in the region from Kansas west to the Rocky Mountains are notable in many ways.

Read more

Kurzweil, Ray, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Viking, 2005, 672 pp.

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Every twelve to eighteen months, according to the common interpretation of Moore’s Law, the performance of our computers (measured against a fixed cost) doubles. It has done so for decades, and shows every indication of continuing for decades more. In the early 90s, chess grandmaster Kasparov disparaged computer chess programs. Yet a few years later, in 1997, Deep Blue (a fearsomely specialized computer built by IBM, running 256 customized modules) beat Kasparov. Five years later, Deep Fritz (running on eight ordinary networked personal computers) reached a draw with the then reigning grandmaster, Vladimir Kramnik. Sometime within the next few years, software running on ordinary PCs will reach a chess ranking of “2800,” and effectively pass all human players for good. For decades, during the early development of computers, the dream of a chess-playing program was seen as a fantasy or delusion. But the people watching the development of such programs, in tandem with the changes in information technology and material science, were actually watching two different curves and predicting two different futures.

On the left, the linear progress of chess programs appeared pathetic for decades, but then suddenly the machines began beating novice and then mid-level players. As the “knee” of the development curve was reached, progress shifted from pathetic to awesome in a relative eye blink. Mapping development on a logarithmic plot during those bleak decades, however, such progress was both predictable and apparently inevitable. Computing pioneer Ray Kurzweil has spent the last four decades thinking about the implications of such logarithmic curves across the fields of computation, science, and economic development and developed a general Law of Accelerating Returns. Readers of Jim Bennett’s Anglosphere Challenge will recognize the significance of exponential development on the Anglosphere’s relative advantage in coping with rapid change. Kurzweil has now created a comprehensive presentation of the Singularity concept that is revolutionary in its implications and central to thinking about the Anglosphere.

Read more

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Computer scientist and mathematician Vernor Vinge is credited with inventing the term “technological singularity,” a moment of impending accelerating technological change so profound that “seeing beyond” the point isn’t possible. Vinge’s ideas have been widely discussed, and a recent book by Ray Kurzweil called the The Singularity is Near documents many supporting trends in computation and scientific development suggesting that a Singularity is entirely likely. In late 2004, Jim Bennett further proposed that the English common law countries have a unique cultural advantage in dealing with rapid change and with any Singularity that might appear. So how does Professor Vinge view the Singularity at the moment?

Fortunately, in addition to his academic activities at the University of Californa (San Diego) [UCSD], Dr. Vinge is a famous science fiction writer and winner of four Hugo awards. His latest novel is called Rainbows End. Though I’ve not read his earlier books, a positive review and podcast on Rainbows End by the Instapundit encouraged me to give it a try.

Read more