Author Archives: LaurieBPKC

Why Would an Economic Analysis Want to Ignore American Slavery?

Mother Jones

While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from Ryan Cooper, national correspondent for the Week.

The next several years will see a rolling 150th anniversary of Reconstruction, my favorite period in American history. From about 1865 to 1877, American society as a whole tried reasonably hard to do right by the freed slaves, before getting tired of the effort and abandoning them to the depredations of racist terrorism. For the next nine decades, black Americans had few if any political rights under the boot heel of Jim Crow.

It’s both a shining example of what can happen when a society really tries to right a past wrong, and tragic, infuriating failure of will. But most of all it’s very interesting. Things were changing, social orders were being overthrown, historical ground was being broken. At a time when few nations had any suffrage at all, roughly 4 million freed slaves got the vote in a single stroke, perhaps the single starkest act of democratic radicalism in world history.

So it’s weirdly fascinating to read conservative historiography of the 19th century, such as this piece by Robert Tracinski at the Federalist, as an example of how Darryl Worley-style historiography irons all the best parts out of American history.

He’s interested in trying to prove that a “non-coercive” economy is possible, by which he means that taxes and spending could be dramatically lower than they are today. Thus he charts government spending as a percentage of GDP, finds that it was pretty low for most of the 19th century, and claims victory:

What the left wants is not just to make America’s economic history disappear. It needs to make America’s political system disappear: to make truly small, truly limited government seem like a utopian fantasy that can safely be dismissed. Please bear in mind that this latest example came up in the context of a discussion about the justification for government force. So what they want to describe as an unrealistic fantasy is a society not dominated by coercion.

One might think that when writing a paean to a noncoercive century, it might be a good idea to address the fact that for 60 percent of that century, it was government policy that human beings could be owned and sold like beasts, or that half or more of the national economy was based on that institution. But no, the word “slavery” does not appear in the piece. Neither does “Civil War” or “Reconstruction,” which as a literal war against and military occupation of the South would seem fairly coercive.

So speaking of the 19th century as one notably free of coercion is not just utterly risible, it’s also a cockeyed way to look at what was good or bad about it. The economy of the antebellum South was founded on the labor of owned human beings, extracted through torture. Slave masters set steadily increasing quotas for cotton picking, for instance, and would flog slaves according to the number of “missing” pounds. As Edward Baptist writes, they thus increased the productivity of slave cotton-picking by nearly 400 percent from 1860 to 1865.

It was akin to the Gulag system of Soviet Russia, except that it had all the power of the red-hot Industrial Revolution, including cutting-edge financial technology, behind it. That combination of slavery plus explosive economic growth and innovation made the antebellum South one of the most profoundly evil places that has ever existed — one that was an absolutely critical part of early industrial growth in both Britain and the North.

But on the other hand, the war that ended slavery, despite involving coercion in the form of organized mass killing, was therefore good! And so was Reconstruction, even though that involved extremely harsh measures against the likes of the KKK. Whether coercion is good or bad depends on just who is being coerced and why.

And that, in turn, puts the lie to conservative complaints that liberals always “blame America first.” On the contrary, grappling with the pitch-black periods of history makes the positive notes shine all the brighter. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, the “epoch of slavery is…the quintessential romance of American history.” It’s just a romance difficult to detect in the GDP statistics.

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Why Would an Economic Analysis Want to Ignore American Slavery?

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Snow’s Melting in Alaska and Pelting the South. What’s Going On?

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared at Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this month, squeals of delight (and/or searing pain) gripped much of the country as we were collectively introduced to the wonders of the polar vortex. But now the novelty’s over, and for the second time this month, an extreme weather pattern is sending Arctic weather toward the Deep South.

An uncommonly sharp kink in the jet stream is partly responsible for plunging more than half of the United States into the freeze. Meanwhile, (and for the same reason), Alaska is toasty warm. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Satellite image shows the “Arctic blanket.” NOAA/NASA GOES Project.

Much of Alabama is currently under a “civil emergency” due to snow and ice. Interstates have been shut down, and traffic in Atlanta has slowed to a crawl. It’s almost like people there don’t know what to do anymore when winter arrives. #sneauxmageddon is already shutting down New Orleans, and nearly a foot of snow is on tap for the Carolinas by Wednesday morning. The bread and milk purveyors at Piggly Wiggly must be loving this, assuming they’ll be able to keep stores open.

Wind chills have already dipped below freezing all the way south to the Mexican border, and more than a half-inch of ice could cause widespread power outages from Mobile, Ala. across the Florida panhandle.

How’d we get to this point? Here’s the science.

A good measure of the magnitude of jet stream irregularity is the Arctic Oscillation, an indicator of short-term climate variability that, roughly speaking, tracks the strength of the jet stream. In extreme cases, like this week, the circumpolar jet stream—which typically locks the coldest of the cold air up by the North Pole where it belongs—can slow down and spill Arctic frigidity southward. The current Arctic Oscillation is even more negative than during the first polar vortex cold snap, earlier this month.

Research hints that this type of pattern can be triggered by the recent massive loss in Arctic sea ice due to the effects of human-induced climate change. One recent studywhich attempted to explain this counterintuitive “Warm Arctic—Cold Continents” phenomenon during similar patterns in the 2009-‘10 and 2010-‘11 winters called it “a major challenge” to understand, though the pattern is “consistent with continued loss of sea ice over the next 40 years.” Bottom line: Something weird is going on, but scientists are still trying to nail down exactly what it is.

In preparation for Tuesday’s polar weather, meteorologists have started a massive crash course in winter weather safety, lest millions of poor wayward souls abandon all hope for any shred of common decency (think: cats and dogs living together).

One such meteorological hero, Nate Johnson of WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C., sent out this helpful tip via Facebook:

“Best advice: By dinnertime tonight, be where you want to be (with whatever you need to have) through at least Thursday.”

Back in the day, cold weather wasn’t so rare down South. Earlier this month, Climate Central did an excellent survey of the dwindling frequency of extreme cold weather across the country, which even got picked up in an xkcd Web comic.

Chart by Climate Central.

Which brings us back to Alaska, where it’s currently more than a dozen degrees warmer than New Orleans. On Monday, Seward, Alaska hit 61 degrees and broke its daily record high by more than 20 degrees. Webcams across the southern part of the state showed snow melting down to bare ground over the weekend, with all-time January record high temperatures crushed and warm rain falling over the dwindling snowpack. As a result, the snow melted so fast that it triggered massive avalanches, cutting off the town of Valdez. A nearly unbelievable helicopter video went viral, showing the extent of the snow slide.

In comparison, Tuesday night’s snow dumping probably won’t even break the currentdaily record in Raleigh, where the biggest ever snowfall on Jan. 28 was 7.5 inches way back in 1899.

The current extreme warmth in Alaska is more typical of April and is essentially being stolen from California by the abnormally persistent jet stream that has dominated the winter so far.

Alaskans, break out the T-shirts, and Southerners, hunker down. Looking forward for the next week or two, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.

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Snow’s Melting in Alaska and Pelting the South. What’s Going On?

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