Hot Dog History

At Salon:

Early frankfurters were prepared in small butcher shops or kitchens and probably featured a coarser grind of meat than does the average modern hot dog, which is the product of emulsifying technology. But it's hard to pinpoint "average." Even today, the definition of "hot dog" is vague: Hot dogs can be made of beef or pork or both, with or without casings. According to the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink: "Most hot dogs are made from emulsified or finely chopped skeletal meats, but some contain organs and other 'variety' meats."

The origin of the term "hot dog" is so contentious that there is a 300-page scholarly book on the subject. The author, David Cohen, has been researching the term since 1978. His co-author, the incomparable word sleuth Barry Popik (who is famous in etymology circles for his contributions to the academic study of the word "dude") uncovered the proletarian dog's curiously blue-blooded roots: "Hot dog" was popular slang on the Yale campus in the 1890s; the "dog" was a humorous reference to the dubious origins of sausage meat. As Cohen says, "College students since time immemorial have combined a keen sense of wit with occasional bad taste. Both came into play in referring to a hot sausage as 'hot dog.' The term at first was disgusting, but of course it gradually caught on."

It seems like a good summer subject.  I'm partial to burgers though.

Nigeria and Oil

The Atlantic features a photo essay titled Nigeria: The Cost of Oil.  My favorite photo, but by far not the most graphic:

Nigerian oil companies burn off the second largest volume of natural gases in the world, with the practice of gas flaring. In 2008, Nigerian flares burned off an estimated 15.1 billion cubic meters of natural gases, or roughly 70% of the overall gas recovered that year. The flares are so prevalent, the Niger Delta appears brightly lit (lower left) in this detail from a NASA image of the Earth at night. Flare activity at night from 1994 through 2007 is also visible as a movie compiled by NOAA. (Image from a 2003 NASA map by Robert Simmon, based on data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Operational Line Scanner, processed by the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center) #

 

Wooden Shoe Beer and Samuel Adams

According to this quiz, Samuel Adams founder Jim Koch's father was the final beer master at Wooden Shoe Beer, in 1953.  Here is a history of Wooden Shoe at the website of the revived Wooden Shoe Brewing Company.  I didn't know that about the Koch family.  I assumed the answer to the question was a Cincinnati brewery, since his dad had worked there for a while.  I did get 15 out of 25 on the quiz, which I didn't think was too hateful.  I'm a pretty good guesser.

Political Self-segregation

Via Yglesias, Peter Orszag looks at where we choose to live as the main cause of polarization:

If redistricting isn’t the primary force behind polarization, what is? One crucial cause, as documented in “The Big Sort,” a path-breaking book by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing, is increased residential segregation by political party. We are voluntarily separating ourselves into Republican and Democratic neighborhoods. Today’s media and blogosphere, which increasingly filter news according to their point of view, exacerbate and reinforce the effect.
Two maps (see accompanying maps: 1976 Election and 2008 Election), taken from a recent paper by James Thomson of the RAND Corp., show the U.S. broken down by county (county lines have also not been redistricted). The dark-shaded counties are those that have swung hard one way or another in a presidential election, and so are considered polarized, while the light counties are politically mixed. The difference from 1976 to 2008 is striking: The number of light counties has fallen sharply. Roughly 25 percent more of the U.S. population now lives in a landslide county than did in the 1970s.

There is some truth to that, as liberals tend to love the center cities, and conservatives tend to move to the suburbs, and are most prevalent in rural areas.  I tend to credit population density as a contributing factor to political opinion.  If you are surrounded by lots and lots of people, you tend to have more appreciation for governmental activism.  If you live in the middle of nowhere, you don't see the need for any government involvement in your life, as long as your farm subsidy payment and your social security check keep coming, and as long as Medicare pays for your hip replacement.  Government shouldn't prevent industry from polluting, because when you are in the middle of nowhere, there isn't any industry.  That's my explanation for why the "Great American Desert" of the Great Plains is so red on the electoral maps, while the coasts are so blue.

China's First Aircraft Carrier

David Axe at Wired says it isn't all that:

Leaving aside her modest size compared to American carriers, her incomplete air wing and escort force and the fact that she’ll sail without the company of allied flattops, Shi Lang could be even less of a threat than her striking appearance implies. Shi Lang’s greatest potential weakness could be under her skin, in her Ukrainian-supplied engines.

Powerplants — that is, jet engines for airplanes, turbines for ships — are some of the most complex, expensive and potentially troublesome components of any weapon system. Just ask the designers of the Pentagon’s F-35 stealth fighter and the U.S. Navy’s San Antonio-class amphibious ships. Both have been nearly sidelined by engine woes.

China has struggled for years to design and build adequate powerplants for its ships and aircraft. Although Chinese aerospace firms are increasingly adept at manufacturing airframes, they still have not mastered motors. That’s why the new WZ-10 attack helicopter was delayed nearly a decade, and why there appear to be two different prototypes for the J-20 stealth fighter. One flies with reliable Russian-made AL-31F engines; the other apparently uses a less trustworthy Chinese design, the WS-10A.

For Shi Lang, China reportedly purchased turbines from Ukraine. Though surely superior to any ship engines China could have produced on its own, the Ukrainian models might still be unreliable by Western standards. Russia’s Kuznetsov, also fitted with Ukrainian turbines, has long suffered propulsion problems that have forced her to spend most of her 30-year career tied to a pier for maintenance. When she does sail, a large tugboat usually tags along, just in case the carrier breaks down.

As this story indicates, while China is rapidly advancing, they still have some very serious issues.  As James Fallows, who has lived in and covered China for much of the last decade, notes:

But paying attention to China, and taking it seriously, are different from being pie-eyed, gape-mouthed, and otherwise credulous about the overall nature of China's success. I'm not suggesting that people should be "hostile" to China, though there are aspects of its policy that need to be criticized every day. I'm talking about applying a common-sense BS-detector when you hear the next claim about how rapid, inevitable, trouble-free, and strategically-perfect the Chinese ascent will be. You could think of what I'm worried about as the "Beijing Olympic Opening Ceremony" syndrome, or the "I just rode the bullet train to Tianjin, and holy shit, we're doomed!" approach. Lots of things work in China. Lots of things don't. We understand that kind of balance immediately when it comes to America -- it's a huge success, with huge failures. China is a similar woolly package, with the difference that it's still full of hundreds of millions of poor people, and is in the middle of environmental catastrophes that dwarf the local challenges in Europe or North America. (The drought in much of China right now threatens to assume Dust Bowl proportions, as Edward Wong of the NYT, among others, is pointing out.)

While the U.S. hegemony may be slipping away as we face fiscal, energy and demographic challenges, all the other major nations also face major issues.  China may be growing rapidly and challenging us for global natural resources, but they are far from solving all of their problems.  We should welcome their advance while adjusting to our new role, and we have few things to be truly scared about when it comes to China.  The article Fallows references above, about the North-South Diversion Project is definitely interesting:

Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive solution: Divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people.
The engineering feat, called the South-North Water Diversion Project, is China’s most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature. It would be like channeling water from the Mississippi River to meet the drinking needs of Boston, New York and Washington. Its $62 billion price tag is twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest hydroelectric project. And not unlike that project, which Chinese officials last month admitted had “urgent problems,” the water diversion scheme is increasingly mired in concerns about its cost, its environmental impact and the sacrifices poor people in the provinces are told to make for those in richer cities.
Three artificial channels from the Yangtze would transport precious water from the south, which itself is increasingly afflicted by droughts; the region is suffering its worst one in 50 years. The project’s human cost is staggering — along the middle route, which starts here in Hubei Province at a gigantic reservoir and snakes 800 miles to Beijing, about 350,000 villagers are being relocated to make way for the canal. Many are being resettled far from their homes and given low-grade farmland; in Hubei, thousands of people have been moved to the grounds of a former prison.

China faces many challenges, don't get too scared about their global ambitions.

Occupations in the U.S.

Reported Occupations in the United States, 1850-2000.  h/t Mark Thoma.  Even in 2000, there were more farmers than civil engineers, but a lot fewer farmers as a percentage of the population in 2000 than in 1850.  44.687% of the population in 1850 was farmers.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Decline and fall of the American Empire, at the Guardian:

The US is a country with serious problems. Getting on for one in six depend on government food stamps to ensure they have enough to eat. The budget, which was in surplus little more than a decade ago, now has a deficit of Greek-style proportions. There is policy paralysis in Washington.
The assumption is that the problems can be easily solved because the US is the biggest economy on the planet, the only country with global military reach, the lucky possessor of the world's reserve currency, and a nation with a proud record of re-inventing itself once in every generation or so.
All this is true and more. US universities are superb, attracting the best brains from around the world. It is a country that pushes the frontiers of technology. So, it may be that the US is about to emerge stronger than ever from the long nightmare of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The strong financial position of American companies could unleash a wave of new investment over the next couple of years.

Let me put an alternative hypothesis. America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show.

This is a hypothesis which I have held since at least 2001.  I think this is a tremendous country, which will continue to be a major player in the world economy.  But it will relenquish its position as the pre-eminent power in the world.  I don't think that China will take over the dominant role the U.S. has held, but that it will become the first, among many regional players.  The Eurozone, the U.S., China and eventually India will be the major players, with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Brazil the OPEC states and the Scandinavian countries filling in significant second tier roles.  The U.S. will have to address serious energy and health care issues, along with dysfunctional politics and the draining wars, before it can right its ship of state.  But overall, I believe we are heading toward a lower standard-of-living relative to the rest of the world regardless of what happens.  That doesn't mean other parts of the world will have a much better standard-of-living than ours, but that we won't have such a significantly better SOL.  I think that is something we will be forced to accept, and there is nothing we can do to prevent it.

How The Accordian Became A Signature Texas Instrument

Wade Goodwyn gives the history on All Things Considered:

It's a well-known story — the one where European conquerors ravaged the New World with disease in the 15th century. That story repeated itself, in a very different way, in the early part of the 20th century in Texas.
Only it wasn't illness that German and Czech settlers were spreading to unsuspecting Hispanics, Creoles and Cajuns. This time, it was a musical instrument from which they would not recover.
It started in the dance halls in the Texas hill country. While German and Czech farmers danced the polka on Saturday nights, their Hispanic farmhands would gather nearby to watch and listen.
It was a mistake. Because they had no immunity, the button accordion began to spread through these Hispanic communities like wildfire.
From New Braunfels and San Antonio, down to Brownsville, back up the coast to Corpus Christi and Houston and then across East Texas like a ladle full of gumbo, the accordion resisted all attempts to control it. And the infection, it seems, is now permanent.
The diatonic button accordion had many qualities that made it attractive to a Texas working-class agrarian community. First, they were cheap and easy to play. The early models had just one row of buttons; later models had two, and in 1906 you could buy one for as little as $3.
Another key to success? They're loud — you don't need an amplifier or electricity. Add a drummer and guitar, washtubs of cold beer and voila, as the Cajuns say. The early Sears catalogs described the accordion as an "orchestra in a box."

The story is pretty interesting.  The German and Czech settlers in Texas also gave the nation Shiner Bock, so I think we all ought to thank them.  The story is good to listen to, with plenty of accordian music.  I'd never heard of conjunto, but I like the zydeco and polka, so I think all accordian music is up my alley.

Fire Tornados and Water Spouts

Washington's blog features photos and video of fire tornados and water spouts. (h/t Ritholtz)

Should You Bet Against China?

Stephen Roach says no (h/t Mark Thoma):

Yale historian Jonathan Spence has long cautioned that the West tends to view China through the same lens as it sees itself. Today’s cottage industry of China doubters is a case in point. Yes, by our standards, China’s imbalances are unstable and unsustainable.  Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has, in fact, gone public with a similar critique.
But that’s why China is so different.  It actually takes these concerns seriously.  Unlike the West, where the very concept of strategy has become an oxymoron, China has embraced a transitional framework aimed at resolving its sustainability constraints. Moreover, unlike the West, which is trapped in a dysfunctional political quagmire, China has both the commitment and the wherewithal to deliver on that strategy. This is not a time to bet against China.

I find China to be a very interesting place.  I wonder about all the empty buildings and wonder if things are going to come apart, but I don't really know anything about the place.  There are a lot of things about China that seem very dangerous financially, but it is also such a big, and still poor place.  They can build tons of buildings, and yet still fill them up eventually.  I tend to think that the Communist party bureaucrats will eventually screw up the economy, but I've been wrong so far.

Uncle Sam to Bond Holders: The Check is in the Mail

Via Ezra Klein, Donald Marron tells about the day the Treasury Department defaulted on debt payments:

Since the day of Alexander Hamilton, the United States has never defaulted on the federal debt.
That’s what we budget-watchers always say. It’s a great talking point. One that helps bolster the argument that default should not be an option in Washington’s ongoing debt limit slowdown.
There’s just one teensy problem: it isn’t true. As Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal recently noted, the United States defaulted on some Treasury bills in 1979. And it paid a steep price for stiffing bondholders.
Terry Zivney and Richard Marcus describe the default in The Financial Review (sorry, I can’t find an ungated version):

Investors in T-bills maturing April 26, 1979 were told that the U.S. Treasury could not make its payments on maturing securities to individual investors. The Treasury was also late in redeeming T-bills which become due on May 3 and May 10, 1979. The Treasury blamed this delay on an unprecedented volume of participation by small investors, on failure of Congress to act in a timely fashion on the debt ceiling legislation in April, and on an unanticipated failure of word processing equipment used to prepare check schedules.

The United States thus defaulted because Treasury’s back office was on the fritz.
This default was, of course, temporary. Treasury did pay these T-bills after a short delay. But it balked at paying additional interest to cover the period of delay. According to Zivney and Marcus, it required both legal arm twisting and new legislation before Treasury made all investors whole for that additional interest.

I had never heard anything about this.  But I have definitely heard people say the U.S. has never missed a payment.  That is an interesting little story.

Going Whole Hog

Peter Smith reviews the book, Meat, Salt, Time, about an old-style salami maker (h/t Yglesias):

Tony Seichrist, a Georgia chef and development director at the Portfolio Center, put out a slim volume last year called Meat, Salt, Time.
The book is a flattering look into the life of Cristiano Creminelli, a salami maker adhering to his family's time-honored Italian tradition of curing meat. What's interesting is how Meat, Salt, Time blends design with its subject matter: slow food and do-it-yourself charcuterie instruction. This instructive chart of a pig's muscle and skeletal lines reflects technique, Seichrist told me:

A breakdown for a salumi hog is different than a breakdown for a fresh meat hog, a bacon hog, or a larding animal. That flexibility should inspire confidence to dig in and to get cutting but it more often has the opposite effect.

I didn't know that.  Anyway, I liked the chart.  It kind of reminds me of the beef chart which used to be on the wall in my cubicle.

Chart of the Day

Yglesias:

I would be curious if this is somehow related to passing more spending responsibility to the states and local governments.  I would also expect that it reflects the completion of the Interstate Highway System.  But I think it does indicate that we have been investing less in our infrastructure, while still running record deficits, and now, those dollars don't go as far as they used to, as asphalt and concrete costs have increased dramatically.

Can We Revive Manufacturing in the US?

Noah Smith suggests higher population density for the U.S (also via Mark Thoma).:

In this framework, shifting geographic patterns of wealth can cause booms and busts in far-away places. For example, as the center of global economic activity shifts from Europe to Asia, it may make less sense to locate a bunch of heavy industry in, say, Michigan (which is ideally positioned to supply things to America's Europe-facing East Coast).

The thing is, on a global level the U.S. itself doesn't make a natural "core." We have a lot of land, and not a lot of people on that land; geographically, we look a lot more like your average resource-producing country (say, Argentina) than your average manufacturing powerhouse (say, Brazil). Yes, the U.S. has some pockets of high density, and yes, the existence of tradable services complicates the picture. But if you read the news, you hear all the time about companies relocating production to Asia to (hopefully) take advantage of the huge new Asian consumer markets. That is economic geography in action.

If we want to bolster our manufacturing sector over the long run - whether to give us a better way to fight recessions, or to allow us to continue to benefit from industrial clustering, we may need to increase our population density over time. This will require that we do two things. First, we have to continue to allow large-scale immigration. Second, we have to make big policy changes to encourage urban density - public transit, high density housing, etc. Basically, the kind of stuff that Ed Glaeser is always recommending that we do. The alternative (and here I exaggerate) may be a steady process of deindustrialization as we revert to being an exporter of corn and coal.

His discussion about a weaker dollar earlier in the piece, which leads to more manufacturing (and ag) exports, didn't mention one of the reasons opponents (or just average people) want a stronger dollar, which is oil prices go up with a weak dollar, and we have to import lots and lots of oil.  We need to drastically cut the usage of oil, just to allow us to get closer to a trade balance, and greater population density would help. 

Lessons From a Landscape Architect

As a civil engineer, that is not something I thought I would say, but this post at Signal vs. Noise is pretty interesting.  Plus, Olmstead is pretty amazing (h/t Ritholtz):

Frederick Law Olmstead (1822-1903), the father of American landscape architecture, may have more to do with the way America looks than anyone else. Beginning in 1857 with the design of Central Park in New York City, he created designs for thousands of landscapes, including many of the world’s most important parks. His works include Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, Mount Royal in Montreal, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol and the White House, and Washington Park, Jackson Park and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. (The last of those documented excellently in Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City.) Plus, many of the green spaces that define towns and cities across the country are influenced by Olmsted.
Below, ten lessons from Olmsted’s approach:

My favorite is #6, Formal training isn't required

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link at naked capitalism: Dung loaming: how llamas aided the Inca empire, at the Guardian:

The Incas may have created the biggest empire in the Americas and built Machu Picchu, among other wonders, thanks to a previously overlooked ingredient: llama dung.
Manure from llama herds provided fertiliser which enabled corn to be cultivated at very high altitudes, allowing the Inca civilisation to flourish in the Andes and conquer much of South America, according to research.
The "extraordinary plant-breeding event" about 2,700 years ago transformed the region's political economy and enabled the Incas to emerge centuries later, said Alex Chepstow-Lusty, of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima.

"This widespread shift to agriculture and societal development was only possible with an extra ingredient – organic fertilisers on a vast scale." The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Antiquity, found corn pollen in the mud of Marcacocha lake, near Ollantayambo, showing the cereal could be grown at least 3,350m above sea level.

The reason llamas were so helpful?  They all crap in the same place, so it was easy to collect.  This story is just one more reminder of how agriculture was the building block of every society in the world.  The links also include a story on the connection between high finance and sex, which includes a bit of New York sex trade history.

What Makes a Good Investor?

Barry Ritholtz:

Graduation season is upon us. From the next generation of Warren Buffett wannabes, I occasionally hear questions such as “What should I learn to become a great investor?”
Contrary to popular belief, investing isn’t a traditional academic discipline. Money management is hardly a typical major. There are, of course, plenty of “Business Administration” undergrads, but their focus tends to be on running companies, rather than investing in them.
We churn out MBAs like made-in-China widgets, yet few ever become outstanding investors. And don’t even ask about economists — the profession that missed the housing boom and bust, the Great Recession, the credit crisis and the market collapse.
Great investors are savvy generalists. I can think of five fields that are hugely helpful to asset management. If you were to study these disciplines, your understanding of how markets work would greatly improve. And you would be a better investor.
How? You will generate better risk-adjusted returns; meaning, you will get the most bang for the bucks you are putting at risk. You will suffer less from volatility — the stomach-churning ups and downs in the markets that are one part risk, one part opportunity. And you will avoid the typical mistakes that most investors make.

He recommends an understanding of history, psychology, skepticism/logic (his example is a trial attorney in a courtroom), mathematics/statistics and accounting. I tend to think that good professionals of all kinds need a background in each of these fields.  They can come in handy no matter what somebody is doing.  The hard part is that the person will have to make efforts on their own to learn some of these fields, or spend a couple of extra years in college taking courses outside of a single major.  That is kind of what Barry did:

A reader recently asked me what was my undergraduate “Class of”.
That turns out to be a surprisingly long story.
The short but inaccurate answer is Class of ’83. But in my junior year, I switched from applied mathematics/physics to poli sci/philosophy, which meant I was on the 5 year plan. So I got to I hang around til ’84.
At the time, I never physically received my diploma; On graduation day, a few friends got together and, um, well, let’s just say we had our own graduation ceremony.
No pomp, lots of circumstance.
I simply assumed I graduated. I had a ton of credits courtesy of the 5 year plan meant — something like 136 total, when I only needed 120 credits needed to get my BA. When I went off to law school 2 years later, I never gave it a second thought.
Perhaps I should have.
Funny thing: Because I was on the equestrian team (really) I ended up with P/E credits. Many, many way P/E credits. In fact, too many. It turns out there was a cap on gym classes; back out the excess, and I had only 118 credits left to apply towards matriculation.
I only discovered this deep in my 3rd year of law school, when they had to certify that I was qualified to sit for the Bar Exam in NY.  As it turns out, one of the qualifications was having a college degree. Which, as it turned out, I didn’t have.

The whole story of how he graduated with an undergrad degree and a law degree the same day.  The guy is an interesting person, and he's worth checking out each day at The Big Picture.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link from naked capitalism: Artificial light: how man-made brightness has changed the way we live and see forever, at the Independent:

This new light first illuminated factories, commercial districts, and the homes of the wealthy. It remained a luxury for most home owners until electric lines began to arrive in middle-class and working-class neighbourhoods during the first decades of the 20th century. The last to receive electricity were usually those who lived in poorer city neighbourhoods or in the countryside. By the time it arrived in American farmhouses in the 1930s – generally lit until then by dim kerosene lanterns – incandescent light couldn't really be separated from all the other things that electricity brought into the home: refrigerators, washers, dryers, irons, stoves, vacuum cleaners. It seemed to define what it meant to be modern. And although all these other things would dramatically change domestic life, somehow it was the light people were waiting for.

The rapid expansion of power grids throughout the 20th century means those in industrialised countries now live in a world built of light, but the light that affords us an ease and freedom our ancestors couldn't imagine also has consequences. It has so effectively chased away the ancient night that more than half the people in the United States and Europe cannot see the Milky Way from their homes. Astronomers were the first to raise an alarm concerning light pollution, calling for better-designed lighting and an end to excessive lighting, which not only obscures the night sky but has consequences for our well-being – it affects human sleep, among other things – and can wreak havoc in the natural world by disrupting the migration of birds, for instance, that depend on celestial light to navigate, and affecting the ability of nocturnal animals to hunt and hide.

Only a conscientious effort to reduce lighting will ensure a future in which the brilliance we live by even remains the same, for our reaction to light isn't always rational. Not only do we love its beauty and ease, we imagine it makes us safer in the night, though safety may not always be a function of more light: blinding glare can give advantages to modern-day footpads and thieves, and light itself can help them to navigate their way.

It is hard to sit today and contemplate what life was like "back in the day."  It is always a good reminder to read about what it actually was like.  The Rural Electrification Act has to be one of the most valuable acts of legislation of the New Deal.  Life on the farm prior to electrification was brutal.

History and Second-Tier Cities

In a discussion of job-creation concerns in India and China, Ashok Bardhan delves into the development and shift to obscurity of cities (h/t Mark Thoma):

Many urban problems in emerging economies have deep historic roots, and Indian cities, in particular, are burdened by two unique legacies. The first has a colonial origin and concerns the location of major urban centers of modern India. Many ancient and medieval nations and empires were primarily land-based. This was true of the military campaigns of Alexander of Macedonia across the Eurasian heartland, or the territorial conquests of Genghis Khan. Many, if not most of the major cities of the time were in the hinterland, controlling access to strategic land assets and straddling vital trade routes. The Mughal Empire in India, or the successive Chinese dynasties, except for the dramatic oceanic adventures of Zheng He during the Ming period, were by and large inward looking and oriented to their vast hinterlands. The rise of seafaring colonial powers led to the development of large coastal cities like Bombay and Shanghai, serving both as the locus of colonial power and as entrepôts for trade.

The geographical distribution of major cities in pre-colonial versus colonial/post colonial India and elsewhere serves as a vivid illustration of how wrenching economic and political changes can affect the urban landscape. Thus appeared the relatively recent Bombays, Calcuttas and Hong Kongs, pushing aside the Agras (Agra, where the Taj Mahal is located, was a major city under the Mughal Empire) and the Kaifengs (one of many capitals of ancient and medieval China). Cities, however, are resilient, living historic monuments and while their prospects may wax and wane, even the neglected ones do not disappear entirely and gently “into that good night” under the churning and dislocating impact of modern economic development. That path dependence and history still matter is borne out by Delhi and Beijing, both historic hinterland cities, and which have retained their importance throughout the colonial and contemporary periods. In any case, it was the pattern of trade and linkages of the colonial periphery with the core that determined urban growth rather than any organic economic process from within. It is this pattern that has left scattered across India a series of second tier cities that present a challenge for urban development, as well as an opportunity to wean away people and resources from the megapolises and their diseconomies of agglomeration.

A question frequently posed at the conference was – Can second tier cities play a positive role, both directly in the urbanization process itself by attracting people from the countryside, but also in helping mitigate some of the overgrowth of the megacities? There is an interesting example right here in the US of “alternative urban centers” that were set up deliberately, albeit with a different set of objectives and in a different context. In 32 states in the US, the state capital is in a second tier city: Albany, Sacramento, Carson City, Salem, Olympia etc., thus separating geographically the economic and political seats of power. It turns out that, by and large, the location choice process was quite idiosyncratic, with differing compulsions and histories, and largely reflected the desire of rural elites to carve out their own sphere of influence. But perhaps a more interesting question is this – what economic impact did this process have historically by creating an alternative focus of urban agglomeration? Did urban and state performance differ over time across these two different sets of states?  The combination of immigration, conquest, and land settlement in the westward move across the US makes its urban history pretty much a unique case, but perhaps there is a lesson here for emerging economies to promote alternative urban centers, given how their main metros are huge agglomerations, and where most provinces/states have just one congested city that is the economic, political and cultural capital, all rolled into one.

I find the historical development of the United States and its cities to be extremely interesting.  As he mentions here, there was an east-to-west pattern in the U.S., but it was more complex and interesting than that.  For example, the eastern seaboard cities first developed as ports for the export of raw materials and the import of manufactured goods for the country.  Then they became the first industrial centers.  After that, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis and New Orleans developed along the Ohio-Mississippi River system.  Then the opening of the Erie Canal made Buffalo a significant place. made San Francisco the principal city on the west coast. The gold rush The railroads made Chicago into a major city.  The steel and auto industries fueled the growth of Cleveland and Detroit into major cities.  Later came growth to Los Angeles, and later still, growth in the Mountain West and South.  It seems that transportation and agriculture first drove growth, then industry, then climate.  It is also interesting how immigration fed and followed such growth.  The waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants in the 1770's into the early 1800's settled in the Appalachian region and started immigrating into the Northwest Territory.  The Irish and Germans followed next, and settled both on the Eastern Seaboard and into the old Northwest, especially in the Cincinnati, Louisville and St. Louis area.  In the 1840's, with the potato famine and 1848 uprisings, these immigrants settled Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota.  By the 1890's through until immigration was limited in the 20's, Eastern Europeans and Italians settled in Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, South Bend, Toledo, Duluth and other regions which were centers of the auto and steel industries.  Those patterns and unique histories have always intrigued me.  When I hear that Buffalo, New York was the eighth largest city in the United States in 1900, I am intrigued.  What happened to make that change?  It is a fascinating subject to study, and since it is now much smaller, implies some lessons may be learned about the current growth in the South and West. 

Crumbling Infrastructure-Satellite Edition

From All Things Considered yesterday:

Then, Lubchenco used the occasion to point to the importance of NOAA's satellite program.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: Satellites are a must-have when it comes to being prepared in detecting and tracking dangerous tropical weather. Not having satellites and not applying their latest capabilities could spell disaster.
HAMILTON: And she said there's a very real possibility that could happen.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: The future funding for our satellite program is very much in limbo right now.
HAMILTON: Already, Lubchenco said, the agency has been forced to delay the launch of a critical satellite. It would have traveled in a polar orbit, beaming down information for weather and climate forecasts. As a result, when the current satellite doing that job stops working, there will be no replacement.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: We are likely looking at a period of time a few years down the road where we will not be able to do severe storm warnings and long-term weather forecasts that people have come to expect today.
HAMILTON: And Lubchenco says satellites aren't just for hurricanes.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: For example, our ability to do a five-day heads-up about the severe tornadoes that hit a couple of weeks ago was a direct consequence of our having polar orbiting satellites.
HAMILTON: Lubchenco's comments come after years of warnings by groups, including the National Academy of Sciences, that the U.S. needed to replace many aging satellites used to study and monitor the Earth.

The Republican attempts to slash non-defense, non-entitlement spending, combined with constant tax cuts, leads to valuable basic science funding being slashed.  These programs don't have a strong constituency, but they have large real-life effects, and are extremely cheap based on their usefulness.  This nation will suffer for many years because of the 30 years of malinvestment under generally Republican guidance.