The Long Term Impacts Of Islamic Occupation In Iberia

This paper makes that case that developing a merchant class in the Middle Ages was critical to the development of literacy and self-government, and that Islamic rule discouraged this from happening for different lengths of time in different parts of Iberia (basically on a north to south gradient).

We use a unique dataset on Muslim domination between 711-1492 and literacy in 1860 for about 7500 municipalities to study the long-run impact of Islam on human-capital in historical Spain. 

Reduced-form estimates show a large and robust negative relationship between length of Muslim rule and literacy. 

We argue that, contrary to local arrangements set up by Christians, Islamic institutions discouraged the rise of the merchant class, blocking local forms of self-government and thereby persistently hindering demand for education. Indeed, results show that a longer Muslim domination in Spain is negatively related to the share of merchants, whereas neither later episodes of trade nor differences in jurisdictions and different stages of the Reconquista affect our main results. Consistent with our interpretation, panel estimates show that cities under Muslim rule missed-out on the critical juncture to establish self-government institutions.

Francesco Cinnirella, Alieza Naghavi, and Giovanni Prarolo, "Islam and human capital in historical Spain" 28 Journal of Economic Growth 225-257 (January 3, 2023).

The Legacy Of Herding

The Legacy Of Herding

Historical food productions practices influence culture and morality long after those food production practices are long gone.

According to the widely known ‘culture of honor’ hypothesis from social psychology, traditional herding practices are believed to have generated a value system that is conducive to revenge-taking and violence. 

We test this idea at a global scale using a combination of ethnographic records, historical folklore information, global data on contemporary conflict events, and large-scale surveys. 

The data show systematic links between traditional herding practices and a culture of honor. First, the culture of pre-industrial societies that relied on animal herding emphasizes violence, punishment, and revenge-taking. Second, contemporary ethnolinguistic groups that historically subsisted more strongly on herding have more frequent and severe conflict today. Third, the contemporary descendants of herders report being more willing to take revenge and punish unfair behavior in the globally representative Global Preferences Survey. In all, the evidence supports the idea that this form of economic subsistence generated a functional psychology that has persisted until today and plays a role in shaping conflict across the globe.

Yiming Cao, et al., "Herding, Warfare, and a Culture of Honor" NBER (September 2021).

Another paper fleshes out the concept a bit more (and has a nice literature review), although its description of the southern United States as historically a herding culture is doubtful. Appalachia was indeed settled by Scotch-Irish herders and does have a culture of honor, but, the lowlands of the American South (which also has a culture of honor), where plantation farming became predominant, was settled by lesser English gentry farmers, not by descendants of herders.

A key element of cultures of honor is that men in these cultures are prepared to protect with violence the reputation for strength and toughness. Such cultures are likely to develop where (1) a man's resources can be thieved in full by other men and (2) the governing body is weak and thus cannot prevent or punish theft. 

Todd K. Shackelford, "An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective on Cultures of Honor" Evolutionary Psychology (January 1, 2005) (open access). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/147470490500300126

The example of the Southern United States suggests that a weak state may be as important a factor in the development of a culture of honor as a herding economy.

The Legacy Of Plough v. Hoe Farming

Parallel hypotheses from the same disciplines associate ancestral heavy plough farming with strongly patriarchal societies with strong differentiation in gender roles, and ancestral hoe farming with less patriarchal and sometimes even matrilineal societies.

The Legacy Of Clan Based Societies

It has also become common in modern political theory to associate weak government approaching anarchy with clan based societies in which women are forced into highly subordinated roles, somewhat in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes ("nasty, brutish and short") as opposed to those who idealize an Eden-like "state of nature." See, e.g., Valerie M. Hudson, et al., "Clan Governance and State Stability: The Relationship between Female Subordination and Political Order" 109(3) American Political Science Review 535-555 (August 2015).

The Legacy Of Cousin Marriage

Also along the same lines, cousin marriage (often common in clan based societies and also among feudal aristocrats) tends to be a practice the undermines democratic government:

Image from here.

How might consanguinity affect democracy? 

Cousin marriages create extended families that are much more closely related than is the case where such marriages are not practiced. To illustrate, if a man’s daughter marries his brother’s son, the latter is then not only his nephew but also his son-in-law, and any children born of that union are more genetically similar to the two grandfathers than would be the case with non-consanguineous marriages. Following the principles of kin selection (Hamilton, 1964) and genetic similarity theory (Rushton, 1989, 2005), the high level of genetic similarity creates extended families with exceptionally close bonds. Kurtz succinctly illustrates this idea in his description of Middle Eastern educational practices:

If, for example, a child shows a special aptitude in school, his siblings might willingly sacrifice their personal chances for advancement simply to support his education. Yet once that child becomes a professional, his income will help to support his siblings, while his prestige will enhance their marriage prospects. (Kurtz, 2002, p. 37).

Such kin groupings may be extremely nepotistic and distrusting of non-family members in the larger society. In this context, non-democratic regimes emerge as a consequence of individuals turning to reliable kinship groupings for support rather than to the state or the free market. It has been found, for example, that societies having high levels of familism tend to have low levels of generalized trust and civic engagement (Realo, Allik, & Greenfield, 2008), two important correlates of democracy. Moreover, to people in closely related kin groups, individualism and the recognition of individual rights, which are part of the cultural idiom of democracy, are perceived as strange and counterintuitive ideological abstractions (Sailer, 2004).

From the body text of the following article whose abstract is also set forth below: 

This article examines the hypothesis that although the level of democracy in a society is a complex phenomenon involving many antecedents, consanguinity (marriage and subsequent mating between second cousins or closer relatives) is an important though often overlooked predictor of it. Measures of the two variables correlate substantially in a sample of 70 nations (r = −0.632, p < 0.001), and consanguinity remains a significant predictor of democracy in multiple regression and path analyses involving several additional independent variables. 

The data suggest that where consanguineous kinship networks are numerically predominant and have been made to share a common statehood, democracy is unlikely to develop. 

Possible explanations for these findings include the idea that restricted gene flow arising from consanguineous marriage facilitates a rigid collectivism that is inimical to individualism and the recognition of individual rights, which are key elements of the democratic ethos. Furthermore, high levels of within-group genetic similarity may discourage cooperation between different large-scale kin groupings sharing the same nation, inhibiting democracy. Finally, genetic similarity stemming from consanguinity may encourage resource predation by members of socially elite kinship networks as an inclusive fitness enhancing behavior.

Michael A. Woodley, Edward Bell, "Consanguinity as a Major Predictor of Levels of Democracy: A Study of 70 Nations" 44(2) Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (2013). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022112443855

Pope Stephen VI Was A Very Messed Up Individual

Secular monarchies and republican governments are not the only systems that sometimes put madmen in charge. 

The Roman Catholic Church's non-hereditary monarchy, in which a College of Cardinals serving a role analogous to a self-perpetuating board of directors of an ordinary non-profit has also produced some dubious leaders, with the late 9th century CE being a particularly troubled time for the papacy. Consider for example, Pope Stephen VI.

Pope Stephen VI was the Pope from May 22, 896 CE to August 897.

Stephen is chiefly remembered in connection with his conduct towards the remains of Pope Formosus, his penultimate predecessor. The rotting corpse of Formosus was exhumed and put on trial, before an unwilling synod of the Roman clergy, in the so-called Cadaver Synod (or Synodus Horrenda) in January 897. Pressure from the Spoleto contingent and Stephen's fury with his predecessor probably precipitated this extraordinary event. 

With the corpse propped up on a throne, a deacon was appointed to answer for the deceased pontiff. During the trial, Formosus's corpse was condemned for performing the functions of a bishop when he had been deposed and for receiving the pontificate while he was the bishop of Porto, among other revived charges that had been levelled against him in the strife during the pontificate of John VIII. The corpse was found guilty, stripped of its sacred vestments, deprived of three fingers of its right hand (the blessing fingers), clad in the garb of a layman, and quickly buried; it was then re-exhumed and thrown in the Tiber. All ordinations performed by Formosus were annulled. 

The trial excited a tumult. Though the instigators of the deed may actually have been Formosus' enemies of the House of Spoleto (notably Guy IV of Spoleto), who had recovered their authority in Rome at the beginning of 897 by renouncing their broader claims in central Italy, the scandal ended in Stephen's imprisonment and his death by strangling that summer.

N.B. Pope Boniface VI, who served as Pope between Stephen VI and Formosus for just fifteen days.

His election came about as a result of riots soon after the death of Pope Formosus. Prior to his reign, he had twice incurred a sentence of deprivation of orders as a subdeacon and as a priest. After a pontificate of fifteen days, he is said by some to have died of the gout, by others to have been forcibly ejected to make way for Stephen VI, the candidate of the Spoletan party. 

At a synod in Rome held by John IX in 898, his election was pronounced null and void.

Given some of the antic of Kim Jong-Un, the current supreme leader of North Korea, however,  we should not kid ourselves into thinking that society and human decency has advanced all that far in the meantime. For example:

O Sang-hon (Chosŏn'gŭl: 오상헌; RR: O Sangheon; MR: O Sanghŏn) was a deputy security minister in the Ministry of People's Security in the government of North Korea who was reportedly killed in a political purge in 2014. According to the South Korean newspaper The Chosun Ilbo, O was executed by flamethrower for his role in supporting Kim Jong-un's uncle Jang Song-taek.

European Population History In a Nutshell

You too can watch European population figures, by country, unfold with video maps and dramatic music for every year since 400 BCE, over a little less than twelve minutes.

One insight is how thinly populated places like Britain were until quite recently.

Another is that political boundaries are anything but static in the long run.

It also brought to my attention the Novgorod Republic in what is now Northern Russia, that lasted nearly three centuries in the late Middle Ages and was one of the earliest and most successful democratic experiments which is often overlooked.

UPDATE January 31, 2018: Today at sister blog Wash Park Prophet, I made the 9000th post from the combined Wash Park Prophet and Dispatches From Turtle Island blogs since I began the Wash Park Prophet blog on July 3, 2005.

Negative Probabilities

Many, if not all, of the fundamental and irreducible differences between quantum physics and classical physics, which makes phenomena that would be impossible in any classical physical model possible in quantum physics, boil down to the presence of negative probabilities in the quantum physics formulas. Negative probabilities, a concept that is hard to even define or conceptualize in the abstract, are axiomatically forbidden in classical physics.

The Albert's Socks Illustration Of Negative Probabilities

A recent blog post by Johannes Koelman on negative probabilities in quantum mechanics is the most lucid explanation of the concept aimed at a layman that I have ever seen. An academic paper made available in preprint form the same week covers much of the same territory in a manner that is more mathematically rigorous and that explores two subtypes of the concept.

The post uses the analogy of "Albert's Socks", involving a mysterious three drawer by three drawer sock chest in which only one row, or one column of drawers may be opened on any given day (with socks redistributed between days). Any given drawer may have either one sock or no sock. Any row will always have either zero or two socks with equal probability. Any column will always have one sock.

This seems to be contradictory. If every column has an odd number of socks, there must always be a odd number of socks in the chest. If every row has an even number of socks, there must always be an even number of socks in the chest. But, a set of rules that involve negative probabilities can fit the data.

A probability function that produces this outcome has ten possible states. Nine states (each of which is assigned a probability of 1/6) have every possible way to have two socks in a row. One more state has no socks in the chest at all (which is assigned a probability of negative 1/2). By adding up all ten states for any given row, or for any given column, one can get the probability that is observed when any given row or column is measured.

The state with negative probability suppresses a particular subset of outcomes of the other "realistic" outcomes (whose combined probabilities exceed one in isolation whenever negative probabilities come into play) in a particular, well defined way.

Since it is impossible to view all of the drawers at once, an observer can never know which of the ten possible states came up when a particular column or row was observed, and the negative probability state itself is never observed, for example, when an observe chooses to look at a column.

In general, negative probabilities are only possible in systems (1) where only part of the system is observed at once (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle decrees that this cosmic censorship principle is necessarily true in all real world quantum mechanical systems), (2) where the sum of all probabilities of given states, positive and negative sum to one, and (3) all observable probabilities are non-negative.

This basically parallels the notion of complex numbers, which often are used in intermediate steps in applied applications, but in the real world, arising in formulas where the observable outcomes are always real valued rather than complex.

Probability Amplitudes Methods Compared

The alternative way of reaching the same result without the radical concept of negative probabilities involves probability amplitudes, in which probabilities are represented as vector quantities (i.e. arrows in space), rather than as scalar quantities (i.e. simple numbers), and the final probability is the square of the magnitude of the the sum of the probability amplitude vectors for all of the possibilities combined. The best layman oriented explanation of that mathematically equivalent alternative to using negative probabilities is by Richard Feynman as a part of his transcribed series of four lectures entitled "QED" (for quantum electrodynamics, which he was pivotal in formulating in terms of probability amplitudes).

Thinking of negative probabilities that contribute to an outcome as probabilities oriented in different directions in some sort of phase space is easier to get one's head around than trying to understand the meaning of individual negative probabilities in isolation (and in much the same way, conceptualizing complex numbers as vector rather than scalar quantities that are opposed in different directions on a complex plane is much easier than simply trying to understand the square root of negative one in isolation).

The probability amplitude method makes the condition that all observed probabilities are non-negative be non-negative when the formulas are applied appear obviously and trivally true. This is reassuring, because it is not easy to state the conditions that must be present once negative probabilities are introduced, for this condition to hold when an algebraic as opposed to a geometric description of the concept is used.

But, it is far less obvious when using probability amplitudes that the sum of all of the probabilities for every possible outcome in a given application really do sum to exactly one, which is often trivial in an algebraic approach using negative probabilities.

Also, an algebraic approach using negative probabilties makes the point that there is a deep and fundamental connection between the fact that not of all a system is observable at once (even in theory) and the phenomena (like quantum tunnelling) that are possible in quantum electrodyamics (and quantum physics generally) which would be impossible using Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism (and in purely classical physics generally). This deep and fundamental connection is not nearly so self-evident when probability amplitudes are used.

The way that probability amplitudes dovetail nicely with the notion of complex numbers likewise being vector rather than scalar quantities that are manipulated accordingly, also provides a natural segue between complex numbers and related notions like quaternions, which have a very natural vector representation that generalizes transparently from the complex number concept even though the abstract algebra generalization of complex numbers is rather daunting.

Other Applications

Because the concepts of probability amplitudes and negative probabilities are so fundamentally necessary in every day, routine quantum mechanics, the mathematics involved are quite well developed and the issues are quite well understood.

Of course, like any other kind of mathematical idea, there is no good reason that a concept like this that has applications in one context might not have applications in another totally unrelated field.

To my knowledge, this hasn't been done in any field outside of the physical sciences in any serious way. But, the Albert's Socks analogy suggests one place where it might have an application, which is in describing public opinion, for example, in politics.

One of the odd features of public opinion that comes up a lot in the political theory of voting is that political preferences are not necessarily transitive. The fact that a majority of people prefer Quinn to Erin, and that a majority of people prefer Erin to Dave, does not in fact necessarily imply that a majority of people prefer Quinn to Dave.

This reality is known as Arrow's Paradox (after economist Kenneth Arrow), and is often stated as follows:

[W]hen voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no rank order voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a specific set of criteria. These criteria are called unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives. . . . Although Arrow's theorem is a mathematical result, it is often expressed in a non-mathematical way with a statement such as "No voting method is fair," "Every ranked voting method is flawed," . . . These statements are simplifications of Arrow's result which are not universally considered to be true. . . .what Arrow's theorem really shows is that any majority-wins voting system is a non-trivial game, and that game theory should be used to predict the outcome of most voting mechanisms. This could be seen as a discouraging result, because a game need not have efficient equilibria, e.g., a ballot could result in an alternative nobody really wanted in the first place, yet everybody voted for.

(Note that Arrow's paradox merely says that no voting method is fair for all possible distributions of preferences - the fortunate reality is that most of the time there is a single consistent ranking but that there are gray area cases where ranking preferences cannot be done consistently in any particular system.)

Given that Arrow's paradox involve circumstances where incomplete information gathering about the total data set at any given time can produce seemingly inconsistent outcomes, a negative probability framework might have application to these kinds of problems in the social sciences and provide insight into their deeper structure.

The subdiscipline of economics where Arrow's paradox and related theories come into play are mostly related to how to maximize utility for a group of people even though one person's utility can't strictly and rigorously be equated with another person's utility, is called "welfare economics", not because it is about welfare programs, but because it is about the general welfare of the members of the community at large.

One also might imagine that the use of negative probability outcomes might be helpful in game theory to identify circumstances and conditions in which using seemingly inconsistent strategies makes sense, depending upon the manner in which one part of a larger problem presents itself to a decision maker. Negative probabilities, also known as quasi-probabilities are also used in mathematical finance and derivative pricing.

Irrigation Incompatible With Democracy

An in depth analysis shows that irrigated farming, measured not by actual irrigation, but by potential crop yields from irrigation, is a causal factor in authoritarian government structures.

Presumably, the theory is that the coordination of effort required to establish and manage irrigated agriculture requires centralized authority and that the easiest way to achieve such centralization is with an authoritarian government whose legitimacy flows from the value added by the irrigated farming system relative to the status quo. Rainfall based agriculture apparently does not empirically show such strong tendencies towards authoritarian government.

John Hawks on Andrew Lawler On Steven Pinker

Is human "progress" real in the sense that there is a secular trend towards reduced violence?

This is the core premise of Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. A recent issue of the journal Science contains a collection of articles on human conflict including a critique of Pinker by Andrew Lawler from the point of view of ethnographers of primative societies. Lawler notes that "biological anthropologists and archaeologists . . . find the data too weak to support such sweeping claims and add that the statistical averaging done by Pinker and Gat erases the enormous variation in small-scale societies."

Upper Paleolithic era physical and evoluationary anthropologist John Hawks takes on this debate concluding that:

My oversimplified view of matters is that Pinker abstracts a single latent variable from the data on violence and aggression: violence appears to decrease as social complexity and hierarchy increase. The anthropologists here are arguing for a more complex, and possibly cyclical, relationship in which other factors besides social complexity are important. George Milner's example:

He cites the example of the Hopewell culture of the 1st through 5th centuries C.E. in eastern North America, which appears to have been “socially permeable,” allowing traders to safely transport obsidian from sources in what is today Wyoming as far east as Ohio. Such ease of movement would have been unthinkable before and after that era, when violence between groups was more common. The interesting question, Milner says, is what changed. “To see this from a solely Hobbesian viewpoint misses the real story,” he adds. “We want to know why people switch from peace to war and back again.”

Rousseau was wrong. The Pleistocene was never a peaceful state of nature.

Hobbes is too simplistic. Violence in human societies is multidimensional and we perceive it differently depending on its cultural motivation. This is why every discussion of Pinker's thesis (including Lawler's) begins by acknowledging the industrial-scale warfare and mass killing of the 20th century. Such events mean something different than big-city crime. Pinker's generalization is correct, but why it is correct depends on how the social uses of violence have changed over time. Hunter-gatherer groups often used violence, in ways that varied among groups and across time to maintain sometimes-elaborate systems of social control. Pinker's generalization is incomplete, and its incompleteness may be explained by the multidimensionality of violence in human societies.

Like Hawks, I'm not sold in Lawler's critique of Pinker. Pinker may not have the whole story, but he has at least an important part of it right.

There may be enormous variation in the levels of violence in small scale societies. But, given the relatively short time periods of any ethnographic data in small populations that inherently leaves room for considerable sampling error, averaging to mitigate against mere random variation is a necessary evil.

Also, the Hopewell example cited itself can quite plausibly be explained by the social complexity thesis ad the heart of what Hawks gleans from Pinker.

An emerging narrative of modern era Mississippian culture depicts the Hopewell situation as likely involving the rise and fall of a pre-Columbian New World empire and not simply a decentralized archaeological culture. Hence, the existence of trade networks when it thrived is comparable to the Pax Romana experienced at the same time in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Indeed, given the increasing indications that longer term climate trends are a major driver of the rise and fall of empires and civilization, it is likely that the Roman and Hopewell parallels in the same error are not mere coincidences but represent a period of favorable climate in which independent Old World and New World empires thrive as a result and because of their success are able to maintain peace over large geographic areas sufficient for trade in ways not possible before they arose or after they fell. The largest city in the Hopewell culture, near modern day Saint Louis, Missouri, was on the same order of magnitude as ancient Rome in population at its peak.

If some of the most notable exceptions to the rule, like the Hopewell case, turn out to be cases that aren't actually exceptions but are instead insufficiently understood episodes of history, then the case for Pinker's thesis grows quite a bit stronger vis-a-vis his critics.