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‘The 7 Days of Creation Correspond to the Years of the World’ – You Do the Math!

The Most World’s Important Unanswered Historical Question: “What Changed in 1800?”

Gary North

March 30, 2011

The economic historian Gregory Clark summarizes a remarkable fact.

. . . there is no sign of any improvement in material conditions for settled agrarian societies as we approach 1800. There was no gain between 1800 BC and AD 1800 — a period of 3,600 years. Indeed the wages for east and south Asia and southern Europe for 1800 stand out by their low level compared to those for ancient Babylonia, ancient Greece, or Roman Egypt.

Then, around 1800, this all changed. Economic growth began: about 2% per annum, compounded. That brought our world into existence.

We are the great beneficiaries of a process that few people understand. No one has explained cogently how it came into existence. A rate of growth so slow that no one could perceive it at the time has created a world that would have been inconceivable in 1800.

This change has taken a mere three generations. This is simply inconceivable.

My daughter gave me a great Christmas present in 2010. She scheduled an appointment for me to interview a man in her church. His name is Lyon Tyler. My daughter grew up in a city named after his grandfather: Tyler, Texas. His grandfather was John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States. He signed the law that admitted Texas into the Union in 1845.

John Tyler was born in 1790, the first full year of Washington’s Presidency.

Lyon Tyler’s younger brother, also alive, uses the ultimate one-upsmanship one-liner I have ever heard. After chatting for a while with a stranger, he springs it on him.

“As my grandfather once said to Thomas Jefferson. . . .”

You can try to top that one. You won’t succeed.

In 1889, the first volume of Henry Adams’ history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison appeared. Adams was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams. He began his book with this paragraph.

 

According to the census of 1800, the United States of America contained 5,308,483 persons. In the same year the British Islands contained upwards of fifteen millions; the French Republic, more than twenty-­seven millions. Nearly one fifth of the American people were negro slaves; the true political population consisted of four and a half million free white or less than one million able-bodied males, on whose shoulders fell the burden of a continent. Even after two centuries of struggle the land was still untamed; forest covered every portion, except here and there a strip of cultivated soil; the minerals lay undis­turbed in their rocky beds, and more than two thirds of the people clung to the seaboard within fifty miles of tide-water, where alone the wants of civilized life could be supplied. The centre of population rested within eighteen miles of Baltimore, north and east of Washington. Except in political arrangement, the interior was little more civilized than in 1750, and was not much easier to penetrate than when La Salle and Hennepin found their way to the Missis­sippi more than a century before.

The world of 1800 would have been recognizable to Socrates, except for the printed book. In contrast, the world of 1889 would not have been recognizable to the young John Tyler.

By 1889, these post-1800 inventions had arrived: gas lighting, electric lighting (arc light), the steam powered ship, the tin can, the macadamized road, photography, the railroad, portland cement, the reaper, anesthesia, the typewriter, the sewing machine, the Colt revolver, the telegraph, the wrench, the safety pin, mass-produced newspapers, pasteurization, vulcanized rubber, barbed wire, petroleum-based industry, dynamite, the telephone, Carnegie’s steel mills, the skyscraper, the internal combustion engine, the automobile, and commercial electricity.

So, as I move toward the day when I am a footnote rather than a participant, I propose a thesis. One unanswered question above all others constitutes the most important historical question in recorded history. Here it is:

 

What happened around the year 1800 in Great Britain that led to approximately 2% per annum economic growth for the next two centuries?

Some economic historians think this began around 1780. Others, most notably Angus Maddison, believe it began in 1820. The year 1800 is a good middle-ground position.

THEN AND NOW

Our world is not even remotely like the world of 1800. In contrast, 1800 was recognizably similar A.D. 1. Clark points out that in the Roman Empire in A.D. 1, information traveled at about one mile per hour. In 1800, this had increased to about 1.4 miles per hour. Compare that with the speed of light: 186,000 miles per second. That was what the telegraph did.

The world of 1876 was not remotely like 1800. Yet compare 1876 with today. A child in 1876 who read a newspaper account of Custer’s Last Stand lived long enough to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in 1969.

In 1967, I took a graduate seminar in economic history from Hugh Aitken. I had studied this subject as an undergraduate with him in 1962. Aitken was a great teacher. He is not famous, but several years after I took that seminar, he became the editor of The Journal of Economic History, one of the two major academic English-language journals in the field. In one session, he said this. “There is no agreement on what happened around 1800 to launch the Industrial Revolution.” There is still no agreement.

Here are the questions: (1) Why 1800? (2) Why in in the northern tier of northern Europe?

In a two-volume series, scheduled to go to six volumes, Prof. Deirdre McCloskey has surveyed the field. McCloskey argues that the fundamental change that made possible the industrial and agricultural revolutions was in the area of society. The age-old hostility to the entrepreneur changed in seventeenth-century Holland and spread to Great Britain. It was a change in ideas that mattered, not a change in property rights or technology.

The second volume, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010), is a cogently argued case against all of the arguments from economic efficiency alone. These economic changes were not sufficient to create the transformation.

The problem is this: the first two volumes do not come close to proving McCloskey’s thesis, a thesis that I have wanted to see proved for 40 years, namely, that seventeenth-century Protestantism changed the minds of people in the pews and on court benches regarding the ethical legitimacy of profits and the pursuit of economic self-interest. I wrote my Ph.D dissertation on this topic as it applied in Puritan New England. Maybe the next four volumes will do this through a careful survey of sermons, catechisms, and theological treatises of Dutch Calvinists and their imitators in Scotland and England. I hope so. But this will not be easy to prove.

 

[Note to Dr. McCloskey: take a look at the answers to the questions in the Westminster Larger Catechism (1646) on the fifth commandment: questions 126-33. See if they differ from the Lutheran interpretations a century earlier. They promote a hierarchical, status-based society that is hostile to “uppity” people of the lower sorts who start moving up.]

Dr. Clark has written a good book on the difference that 2% per annum has made, A Farewell to Alms (2006). He offers page after page of examples of how bad things were in 1800. He also offers suggestions regarding why the change took place. Dr. McCloskey challenges all of them.

And so it goes. The origin of most important transformation of human society in the last 4,000 years has no cogent, plausible, carefully documented explanation.

It had to do with liberty. But the legal foundations of liberty stretch back into European history. It had to do with technology. But men have always been inventive. Why 1800? Why Great Britain and North America?

We want this process to continue. It looks as though it will continue. We are future-oriented people. We like to think that tomorrow will be better than yesterday.

The creativity of billions of people are being coordinated by market processes that we do not understand. As Leonard E. Read wrote in 1958, no one knows how to make a pencil.

We do not know how the process began where it did and when it did, but with the failure of socialism in our era, we now know how to maintain it: through liberty of choice, by allowing people to retain the fruits of their labor, their risk-taking, and their confidence in the future.

The petty restraints imposed by politicians and bureaucrats will not thwart the growth process for long. The promise of liberty is too widespread today. While the government can and will continue to attempt to appropriate individuals’ wealth in the name of the poor, to be administered by upper middle class bureaucrats, the effort will not succeed. The wealth formula is now known. It is simple. “Get the state out of the way of future-oriented people.”

CONCLUSION

Ludwig von Mises argued in 1922 that the greatest strength of the socialists was their belief in the inevitability of victory. But they were wrong. They lost the war on two battlefields: theory and practice.

This is why, in the long run, the most effective tool in the market for liberty is confidence that individual creativity will produce a better world, as long as people keep their hands off each other’s property. “Thou shalt not steal” is a good place to start. “Thou shalt not covet” is the foundation of “thou shalt not steal.”

The battle is not technological. It is ethical. The good guys will win. That is the lesson of the free market. The free market links personal responsibility with ownership. This is the key to prosperity.

From Gary North, here.

‘Commas Save Lives’ – King Achashverosh Was Never a Stable Boy!

NO, ACHASHVEROSH NEVER SERVED A STABLE-BOY

 

Yaakov Jaffe

Writings about Purim from virtually every stripe make reference to a well-known myth that Achashverosh, King of Persia, rose to power from being a former stable-boy. A simple google search yields dozens of online results for this myth, some in passing and others expanded,[1] some academic[2] and others some more traditional;[3] some on blogs and others in books.[4] Yet, it seems that these references to Achashverosh the stable-boy are all rooted in a common mistranslation of the Talmud in Megilah.

This essay will investigate the myth that Achashverosh was a stable-boy from a bibliographical, traditional, and textual perspective, and not from a Biblical, historical, or archeological perspective. Our goal is not to prove – based on historical or archeological evidenced – that a king of Persia did or did not rise to power from the stables; it is to analyze whether Jewish tradition has such a view about one specific king of Persia.

Continue reading…

From Seforim Blog, here.

NOTE: I changed my mind about endorsing this theory.

The Winners Write the Economics Textbooks…

Those Lying Textbooks

By 

March 30, 2011

The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. It was founded by Congress in 1913 to provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system. Over the years, its role in banking and the economy has expanded.

The paragraph (italicized) introduces a booklet published by the Federal Reserve, The Federal Reserve System: Purposes and Functions (9th edition, 2005). It has been in print continuously since 1939.

This paragraph is universally believed among the intellectual elite in the United States. It is believed by virtually all academics, in every social science. You cannot find a college textbook published by any major publishing firm in either introductory economics or American history that does not rest on the acceptance of the truth of this paragraph.

One of the difficulties that critics of central banking have, all over the world, is that academic economists are almost universally supportive of central banking.

To understand why this is the case, we must understand the economics of banking as an aspect of the economics of cartels.

  1. All modern banking systems are based on government licensing and regulation.
  2. All licensing and regulation systems create barriers to entry.
  3. All government-created barriers to entry create cartels.
  4. All central banks are enforcement agents of the national banking cartel.

No chapter on central banking in any introductory or upper division economics textbook published by a mainstream publisher discusses central banking in this light. The chapter on central banking is kept several chapters away from the chapter on money and banking. The two chapters are not cross-referenced.

This has gone on ever since the end of World War II. It may have gone on before, but the textbooks of that era are difficult to locate. University libraries throw out old textbooks. This makes it difficult for historians of thought in any field to write histories of college-level opinion.

[Note: libraries also do not bind popular journals. It would be impossible to write an accurate history of American social thought without access to the Reader’s Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan. Yet there is no easy access to any of them. This is why books on American social thought are mostly histories of what academics have written about what they perceive as important trends marked by best-selling books, movies, and a few public opinion polls.]

THE ECONOMICS OF CARTELS

All schools of economic opinion have much the same criticism of cartels. Read the chapter on cartels in any college-level introductory economics textbook. The analyses in all of them will be about the same. Cartels are presented as organized groups of self-interested producers who use government intervention to keep more efficient producers out of the market. These associations oppose price cutting by individual firms. They seek to create agreements within the industry to refrain from price cutting. All schools of economic opinion regard this as being against the interests of consumers. Cartels promote actions in restraint of trade.

The standard chapter on cartels identifies the cartel as an aspect of monopoly. A monopoly is defined as a single seller that extracts an economic surplus by restricting production, thereby enabling it to charge a price higher than that which it would charge if it sold all that it could produce. A cartel is a monopoly system based on more than one producer.

Economists recognize that few if any monopolies can exist without government intervention. (The perennial exception, Arm & Hammer’s baking soda, is never discussed. It deserves at least a master’s thesis.)

No cartel comes to legislatures with this message:

We want you to pass laws against companies that offer lower-priced goods to buyers. Such offers reduce our profit margins. We want to maximize our net profit by keeping retail prices high. We cannot keep innovative forms out of the market, but you can. We want you to pass laws against the sale of goods unless these firms agree not to sell at prices lower than those set by our organization.

Instead, it comes with this message:

The public is being exposed to low-quality goods that put people in danger. If the legislature stands idly by, allowing inexperienced and unqualified producers to exploit the ignorance of the public, the common man will be exposed to serious risks. The best way to protect the public is to require all products to meet basic standards of quality, and to require all producers to be certified by law. The government should set basic standards and require all producers to meet them.

The cartel then writes the standards, so that new, under-funded competitors are kept out. The legal fees for getting authorization to sell a low-cost product will keep most new firms out of the market.

The chapter on cartels offers a detailed account of how the cartel seeks government intervention in its program to restrain trade by restricting entry into the market. The textbook encourages the student to think through the implications of the cartel’s argument in favor of restricting entry. It presents this appeal as a self-interested quest for higher profits at the expense of consumer choice.

None of this analysis is applied to central banking.

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.

‘Let Thy Food Be Thy Medicine and Medicine Be Thy Food’

My Expulsion from Medical Practice

Censorship and economic ruin threaten dissenting physicians

by Dr. Albert Louis

(OMNS Feb 14, 2021) It’s a very bizarre state of affairs when, as a doctor for over 30 years, I suddenly find myself completely isolated from people I know, and from humanity. In this situation, there seems to be no way to help with healing or caring or treating, because I have been expelled like a priest excommunicated from the church. I have been cancelled.

This happened because I was not conforming to the religion of medicine. I said things that were against the perceived modus vivendi. I was immediately suspended and completely and utterly cut off, as if I were a dangerous, evil person.

This sense of doing wrong eats into your guts. It is like you have done some kind of severe sin, where you have done something so bad and so awful, that you can never be recuperated or saved because you’ve gone against absolute authority.

Now, this authority is determined and written by AHPRA, the medical board of Australia which produces the code of behavior. [1]

This code of behavior was not something I had contradicted in public. I hadn’t attacked or injured a patient. I had posted on Facebook statements which were inimical to the system, because I criticized issues about the system which were not good.

Looking outward into the world beyond medicine, I have learned that the best companies are run with their employees feeling a group spirit, where the team is heard, understood, and appreciated.

But over the past two to three years, when working in medical practices, I’ve seen no such thing as a team spirit. I found modern medical clinics in Australia to be like workhouses, where the doctors are consumed with input and output of patients. The only thing that the practice owners care about is a throughput of patients to give an indecent profit.

So doctors effectively become part of a cattle market that accepts as many patients as possible to be treated with a preset path of investigations, drugs, and referrals, and are quickly released. Beyond that, the doctors must also have good marks on social media to make sure that the patients return.

This medical meat market lacks the previous dedication of the medical profession to treating or caring about patients. It seems that, the whole system has become so computerized and automated that it has become the “fast-food” modernization of medicine.

Apparently, there is no such thing as medical practice in the absolute sense anymore. Caring goes out of the window. Nowadays, a patient arrives, and it’s in and out within five minutes, and all the patient gets is a drug – often an antidepressant!

Considering our modern world, I realized that this new concept of medical practice is part and parcel of what is happening in the larger society. It seems that we no longer have a society that even cares about itself.

In medical lectures and webinars I see health professionals giving lip service to the need for patients to be looked upon with a certain sense of care by the doctors — the therapeutic agents. Yet this seems an utter hypocrisy because doctors nowadays are more concerned about the efficacious use of investigational processes and therapeutic agents than a direct relationship with the patient.

In fact, there’s no such thing as a partnership in medicine anymore, even in functional medicine. This has gone out the window because society and particularly the medical system frowns upon anything to do with mind, body, or with healing itself.

People are eating the wrong kinds of food because doctors have not been taught nutrition in medical school, and have not learned that food is one of the most powerful therapeutic agents. People are eating themselves to death by the toxic foods that they get from their local stores.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment, marginalization, and alienation due to the need to keep separate have increased, and have accelerated to the extent that there is a significant increase in mental illness.

This is because priority is placed on COVID-19 itself. In medical practices, other illnesses are being left behind and people are no longer being treated to the extent they were previously for chronic illness, heart disease, and cancer.

In this COVID-19 epidemic situation, the simple nutritional supplements that could prevent COVID-19, such as vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, magnesium, and hydrogen peroxide sprays are looked upon by the medical establishment as being useless and are banned. This is also the case with social media who rely on “fact checkers” who have not been educated in nutrition.

Hippocrates said “Let food be your medicine and medicine your food.” This applies to an excellent diet that provides the essential nutrients while avoiding excess sugar and processed foods with empty calories, as well as safe and inexpensive vitamin and mineral supplements. It can also apply to drugs that are effective against COVID-19 and do little harm such as hydroxychloroquine/zinc and ivermectin. If everyone would take the vitamin and mineral supplements (vitamin C 1000mg 3x/day or more, vitamin D 5000IU/day, magnesium 400 mg/day, zinc 20 mg/day, etc.) we could end the pandemic in a month. [2-7] But any doctor who says these things in public will be cancelled.

This epidemic has been handled as if the governments in charge are following rules from some unknown puppet master. Each knows how to follow the rules, and the rules are such that every government is being taken for a ride and they don’t even realize it. I am referring to individual governments who do not realize they are being taken for a ride by the profit-seeking medical establishment. Is it the WHO, the drug companies, or are we all responsible?

I started listening today about the need for sending vaccines to Africa, Egypt, and India. This was on the BBC and they were talking so eloquently about the need for vaccines, particularly for health workers. These vaccines have been put out in a rush without the full testing that should be done before a vaccine is given to large populations. The mRNA vaccines are quite new and may have unforeseen consequences and yet the medical authorities don’t seem to care. Already many adverse effects are being reported and ignored.

And what could really help Africa and India is not being talked about. Even when hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are being given they’re not being widely discussed. What they did talk about on this particular BBC presentation was the fact that over 2 billion people, particularly in Africa and India have sanitation problems. There are so few latrines that many people die from cholera. Also one billion people have no bathing facilities. If philanthropists really cared, instead of focusing on vaccinations and billions of dollars for drug companies, they should be providing education, latrines, clean water and bathing facilities, and excellent nutrition and vitamin supplements to the poor!

The international and USA media make no connection between the fact that people are going to get COVID-19 simply because they haven’t got the immune strength to defend themselves against a virus, any virus! And what about the new COVID-19 variants that may be able to evade current vaccines? Virus variants are nothing new, that’s how viruses propagate, and that’s why the annual flu vaccines aren’t universally effective. Bottom line – the immune system empowered with adequate nutrition and supplementation will likely provide excellent protection — as a strong immune system can generate new antibodies faster than new vaccines can be developed!

Most medical doctors and especially the media, or should we say the “propaganda industry,” don’t know about the social determinants of health — education, low psychological stress, good hygiene, excellent nutrition. They just think that the vaccine is a magical cure, which allows everyone to ignore other solutions. This will likely continue as long as the media suppress relevant information and medical professionals avoid learning about nutrition. This is utter absolute stupidity and hypocrisy.

(Editor’s note from Andrew W. Saul: Normally I include a brief “about the author” statement here, but in this case, if I did so, Dr. Louis would be in even more hot water than he or she already is. Suffice to say that, as a journalist, I opt to protect my sources. To that end, Dr. Louis is a pseudonym. But the doctor, an Australian, is very real indeed)

 

References

1. Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) https://www.ahpra.gov.au

2. Downing D (2020) How we can fix this pandemic in a month. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n49.shtml

3. Mercola J, Grant WB, Wagner CL (2020) Evidence Regarding Vitamin D and Risk of COVID-19 and Its Severity Nutrients, 12:3361. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/11/3361/htm

4. Holford P, Carr AC Jovic TH, et al. (2020) Vitamin C – An Adjunctive Therapy for Respiratory Infection, Sepsis and COVID-19. Nutrients 12:3760. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3760/htm

5. Rasmussen MPF (2020) Vitamin C Evidence for Treating Complications of COVID-19 and other Viral Infections. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n25.shtml

6. Gonzalez MJ (2020) Personalize Your COVID-19 Prevention: An Orthomolecular Protocol. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n31.shtml

7. Doctor Y, et al. (2021) Nutrition to Treat and Prevent COVID-19. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v17n03.shtml

 

Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine

Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information: http://www.orthomolecular.org

 

Find a Doctor

To locate an orthomolecular physician near you: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n09.shtml

 

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From OMNS, here.