Charles C. Mann is the author of a new book that has been called a "historical Freakonomics": 1493 – How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth. Here's a piece by him from the London Independent:
Nicotiana tabacum, as botanists call it, was the first global commodity craze. Fun, exotic, hallucinogenic and addictive, it was – is – a near-perfect consumer product. England fell under its spell in the 1580s, when the survivors of the nation's first, unsuccessful colonies – the Roanoke ventures of Sir Walter Raleigh – landed in Brighton with strange, fiery clay tubes at their lips. Obviously conscious of the impact of their appearance, they descended on the docks, smoking languidly, like so many Elizabethan versions of James Dean and Humphrey Bogart. By 1607, when Jamestown was founded, London's streets were jammed with more than 7,000 tobacco "houses" – café-like places where the city's growing throng of nicotine junkies could buy and consume tobacco.
None of this was exceptional. Between 1580 and 1610, Nicotiana tabacum, a species originally from the Amazon, became a fixture in every inhabited part of the earth. Almost immediately it attracted governmental ire. Bans on tobacco, some enforced by the death penalty, were enacted by France, Russia, Sweden, the Ottoman and Mughal empires, and the Japanese shogunate. The smoking weed quickly became so ubiquitous in Manchuria, according to historian Timothy Brook, that in 1635 the Khan, Hong Taiji, discovered that his soldiers "were selling their weapons to buy tobacco". Enraged, he prohibited smoking.
No anti-tobacco crusader is better known than King James I, whose Counterblaste to Tobacco, issued in 1604, proclaimed that smoking was "lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, [and] dangerous to the lungs". James sought to ban tobacco outright, but was rebuffed by a hostile Parliament. Pope Urban VIII was more successful. Infuriated by reports that priests were celebrating mass with lighted cigars, the Pope promptly – and successfully – prohibited smoking in the pulpit.
Demand continued unabated. Even as James thundered against tobacco's destructive effect on society, the weed itself was sometimes sold for its weight in silver in London. In the English colony of Bermuda, farmers routinely purchased brides for bags of tobacco (typically, the weight was about 100lb). Across the globe, gangs of young smokers in Edo (Tokyo) were so outraged by the high price of a smoke that they routinely ransacked tobacco warehouses. Customs officials in Istanbul, unable to afford a pipeful, routinely shook down visitors for smoking supplies.
Coupled with high demand, tobacco criminalisation drove up its price, which led to an explosion of tobacco bootleggery that continues to the present day. Pirates grew and sold tobacco throughout the Caribbean, especially in Venezuela. Outraging the Spanish crown, Spanish and Indian smallholders in remote colonial areas converted their wheat and maize plots to tobacco, then sold the harvest to Dutch and English pirates. So powerful did the gangs become that the Spanish ambassador to England complained that English demand was causing the collapse of law and order in tobacco country. (This is not confined to the past: cigarette smuggling remains a major industry in pirate havens from southern Italy to South-east China, but is also common in less rambunctious areas; police in suburban Maryland rolled up an alleged tobacco ring in the eastern US just last month.) Even as moralists like James thundered that tobacco was destroying the family, royal tax officials were eyeing its legalisation. Few programs generate revenue more reliably than a tax on an addictive substance.
In economic terms, addicts' cravings are inelastic – they are relatively insensitive to cost. If they keep getting their hit, they will happily pay the higher prices associated with government-imposed taxes, fees and levies. Within a year of his Counterblaste, the English government had instituted its first tobacco tax.
Prohibitionists might note a disturbing parallel. Everywhere in the world, the lure of tobacco money eventually overwhelmed efforts to prevent addiction. The son of Hong Taiji, the Manchu Khan who banned tobacco, finished seizing China and in 1644 became the first emperor of the Qing dynasty. He, too, fought against tobacco. But Hong Taiji's grandson, the Kangxi emperor, started smoking at the age of seven – and watched new tobacco taxes become major financial contributors to the Qing state.
One by one, other states slowly followed the Manchu lead, legalising and taxing tobacco. Marijuana is following the same path, slowly becoming tax fodder in nation after nation. Here Mughal India was perhaps the first society to reverse course (the East India Company later added opium taxes to the mix). Decades later, countries such as the Netherlands followed the Mughal path. Even in the notoriously anti-drug US, places such as California and Massachusetts, hard hit by recession, are considering marijuana's use as a taxable commodity.
Yet history should not give too much encouragement to the forces behind unfettered legalisation, either. If tobacco and other drugs are a guide, legalisation is followed, eventually, by social disapproval. Everywhere that tobacco has become a fully accepted commodity its use has – eventually, after decades – declined. The tobacco-besotted colonial US, the nation that held the world's most permissive views on tobacco during the 17th and 18th centuries, ultimately became the land where bewildered European and Asian smokers would be ejected from restaurants, cafés and bars. Even as recently as the 1980s, Britons mocked the "puritanical" anti-tobacco crusades in the US. They have fallen into line. So have the Italians, Turks and even the Chinese.
Drugs that become uncool fall into disuse, as tobacco is falling into disuse today. If history is any guide, our grandchildren's grandchildren will regard today's struggles over marijuana, cocaine and opium as bewildering fossils of an unsavvy past...
The long shadow line: History and the war on drugs
Charles C Mann
Monday, 10 October 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/the-long-shadow-line-history-and-the-war-on-drugs-2368050.html
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
How Austerity Is Ushering in a Global Recession
Robert Reich
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
http://robertreich.org/post/9014405465
Not only is the United States slouching toward a double dip, but so is Europe. New data out today show even Europe’s strongest core economies – Germany, France, and the Netherlands – slowing to a crawl.
We’re on the cusp of a global recession.
Policy makers be warned: Austerity is the wrong medicine.
We all know about the weaknesses in Europe’s “periphery” – Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. But the drop in Europe’s core is dizzying.
Germany grew at an annualized rate of just half a percent last quarter, down from 5.5 percent in the first quarter of the year. France didn’t grow at all.
What’s going on in Europe’s core? Partly it’s a loss of confidence due to debt crises in the periphery. But that’s hardly all.
Europe depends on exports – especially to Asia, India, Latin America, and the United States. But exports to China and other emerging markets have been dropping. China, worried about inflation, has pulled in the reins on its sizzling economy. Brazil has been pulling back as well.
And as the United States economy sputters, exports to America have been slowing.
But chalk up a big part of Europe’s slowdown to the politics and economics of austerity. Europe – including Britain – have turned John Maynard Keynes on his head. They’ve been cutting public spending just when they should be spending more to counteract slowing private spending.
The United States has been moving in the same bizarre direction. Cutbacks by state and local governments have all but negated the federal government’s original stimulus, and no one in Washington is talking seriously about a second. The pitiful showdown over increasing the debt limit has produced the opposite: a Rube-Goldberg-like process for capping spending rather than increasing it, and a public that’s being sold the Republican lie that less government spending means more jobs.
Yes, governments on both sides of the Atlantic are deeply in debt. But policy makers on both sides seem to have forgotten that economic growth is the most important tonic.
Public debt has meaning only in relation to a nation’s GDP. When more people are working, more companies are profiting, and economies are expanding, revenues pour into national treasuries.
When economies stop growing or contract, the opposite occurs. Economies can fall into vicious cycles of slower growth, lower tax revenues, spending cuts, and even slower growth.
That’s what we’re seeing now.
What’s worse, nations are so intertwined that when every major economy is slowing the cumulative effect is larger.
With anemic growth in America and Europe, the Japanese economy comatose, and emerging markets (including China) pulling in their reins, the vicious cycle could become worldwide. If global demand for goods and services continues to fall behind the potential supply we’ll see unemployment rise further and growth slow even more — especially in Europe and the U.S.
Central banks may try to reverse this course. Ben Bernanke and company at the Fed have committed themselves to near-zero interest rates for the next two years (not exactly a rousing endorsement of America’s economic prospects in the near term). Given the sharp slowdown in Germany, the European Central Bank might now feel some pressure to lower interest rates there – or at least delay the next increase.
But when growth is slowing so dramatically and unemployment is already high, monetary policy can’t possibly do it alone.
Without an expansionary fiscal policy, low interest rates have little effect. Companies won’t borrow in order to expand and hire more workers unless they have reasonable certainty they’ll have customers for what they produce. And consumers won’t borrow money to spend on goods and services unless they’re reasonably confident they’ll have jobs.
Fiscal austerity is the wrong medicine at the wrong time.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
http://robertreich.org/post/9014405465
Not only is the United States slouching toward a double dip, but so is Europe. New data out today show even Europe’s strongest core economies – Germany, France, and the Netherlands – slowing to a crawl.
We’re on the cusp of a global recession.
Policy makers be warned: Austerity is the wrong medicine.
We all know about the weaknesses in Europe’s “periphery” – Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. But the drop in Europe’s core is dizzying.
Germany grew at an annualized rate of just half a percent last quarter, down from 5.5 percent in the first quarter of the year. France didn’t grow at all.
What’s going on in Europe’s core? Partly it’s a loss of confidence due to debt crises in the periphery. But that’s hardly all.
Europe depends on exports – especially to Asia, India, Latin America, and the United States. But exports to China and other emerging markets have been dropping. China, worried about inflation, has pulled in the reins on its sizzling economy. Brazil has been pulling back as well.
And as the United States economy sputters, exports to America have been slowing.
But chalk up a big part of Europe’s slowdown to the politics and economics of austerity. Europe – including Britain – have turned John Maynard Keynes on his head. They’ve been cutting public spending just when they should be spending more to counteract slowing private spending.
The United States has been moving in the same bizarre direction. Cutbacks by state and local governments have all but negated the federal government’s original stimulus, and no one in Washington is talking seriously about a second. The pitiful showdown over increasing the debt limit has produced the opposite: a Rube-Goldberg-like process for capping spending rather than increasing it, and a public that’s being sold the Republican lie that less government spending means more jobs.
Yes, governments on both sides of the Atlantic are deeply in debt. But policy makers on both sides seem to have forgotten that economic growth is the most important tonic.
Public debt has meaning only in relation to a nation’s GDP. When more people are working, more companies are profiting, and economies are expanding, revenues pour into national treasuries.
When economies stop growing or contract, the opposite occurs. Economies can fall into vicious cycles of slower growth, lower tax revenues, spending cuts, and even slower growth.
That’s what we’re seeing now.
What’s worse, nations are so intertwined that when every major economy is slowing the cumulative effect is larger.
With anemic growth in America and Europe, the Japanese economy comatose, and emerging markets (including China) pulling in their reins, the vicious cycle could become worldwide. If global demand for goods and services continues to fall behind the potential supply we’ll see unemployment rise further and growth slow even more — especially in Europe and the U.S.
Central banks may try to reverse this course. Ben Bernanke and company at the Fed have committed themselves to near-zero interest rates for the next two years (not exactly a rousing endorsement of America’s economic prospects in the near term). Given the sharp slowdown in Germany, the European Central Bank might now feel some pressure to lower interest rates there – or at least delay the next increase.
But when growth is slowing so dramatically and unemployment is already high, monetary policy can’t possibly do it alone.
Without an expansionary fiscal policy, low interest rates have little effect. Companies won’t borrow in order to expand and hire more workers unless they have reasonable certainty they’ll have customers for what they produce. And consumers won’t borrow money to spend on goods and services unless they’re reasonably confident they’ll have jobs.
Fiscal austerity is the wrong medicine at the wrong time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
