Joel Mokyr's "The Enlightened Economy"

Joel Mokyr is Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History, Northwestern University, and Sackler Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850, and reported the following:

The page contains, amazingly enough, two statements that summarize much of what the book is about.

The technological revolution that created the modern industrial age cannot be fully understood without its intellectual underpinnings. All the same, inventions and improvements by informed and ingenious minds opened doors but could not force a society to walk through them.

The first statement is the main reason why I wrote the book. Many economists write about economic growth as if what people knew and believed mattered but little. People just want to maximize their income and will learn whatever there is to learn. I argue in 550 pages that this is too simplified a view of the world: some societies have the intellectual and cultural proclivity to do what needs to be done to bring about economic progress. Britain in the eighteenth century had what it took, and hence its economic leadership that lasted for a century and took much of the world into a different economic life, in which more and more people live lives of economic and material comforts that in 1700 only Kings and Popes (if them) could dream about.

A second statement is this:

[e]conomies do not grow just because they want to consume more. Indeed, the desire for more income is shared by all economies; the ability to satisfy it is what makes all the difference.

This, too is central to the argument. Necessity is NOT the mother of invention, which is a statement that manages to be simultaneously a cliché and false. The parents of invention are, above all, the belief in the possibility and desirability of technological progress and the useful knowledge (science, engineering, chemistry, whatever necessary) that was needed to bring it about. The book deals with the question where that knowledge came from, and what incentives and institutions were necessary to produce it.

Learn more about The Enlightened Economy at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary Heimann's "Czechoslovakia"

Mary Heimann is senior lecturer in the history department at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed, and reported the following:

Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed is a revisionist history of the state which preceded today’s Czech and Slovak republics, and which experienced democracy, Nazi rule, Fascist and Communist dictatorships, Soviet invasion and democracy again, all within the space of an average person’s lifetime. The book is based on original research in the national archives in Prague, but is aimed at the English-speaking general reader and assumes no specialist knowledge. Page 99 [inset, click to enlarge] touches upon one of the central themes of the book: how the persecution of minorities came to be justified in the name of nationalism and codified in legal statutes right across Central Europe: not only, infamously, in Nazi Germany; but even in a democratic state like Czechoslovakia, which was brought into being in the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War.

On p. 99 of the book, which falls in 1938, the groups being targeted by the Czecho-Slovak authorities are Czechs living in the (at the time autonomous) region of Slovakia, and Jews (especially German-speaking Jews) living in the territories of Bohemia and Moravia. At other points in the story, the victims of legalized discrimination are Slovaks, Gypsies, Ruthenians, Germans or Hungarians. Sometimes the oppressors in one chapter become the victims in the next; elsewhere it is former victims who become oppressors.

The purpose in showing the darker side of nationalism is not to single out Czechoslovakia as better or worse than other states; still less to try to discredit the Czechs (among whom I count many friends, my husband and my son) as a people. Rather, it is to illustrate for the general reader – of whatever ethnic background or nationality – the danger of perpetuating nationalist myths in which one’s own side is presented as the righteous victim, and the injury done to others ignored or downplayed.

The dramatic, and sometimes tragic, history of Czechoslovakia is fascinating in its own right and deserves to be better known in the English-speaking world. Its achievements were remarkable, and the difficulties with which it had to contend at times exceptional. The variety of ways in which its various regimes were established, suffered, challenged, tolerated, supported or overthrown also sheds light on familiar twentieth-century political problems, from how to protect minorities and sustain democracy to how to account for the Holocaust, understand the spread of Stalinism, or explain the collapse of East European Communism in 1989.

Learn more about Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Metcalf's "The Life of the Longhouse"

Peter Metcalf is professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Life of the Longhouse: An Archaeology of Ethnicity, and reported the following:

Page 99 tells of the chance encounter in 1876 between an English traveller in Borneo and a war party returning from a raid on a coastal village. The Englishman was Hugh Brook Low, a trusted aid of Charles Brook, the second of the famous “White Rajahs” who carved out for themselves a personal kingdom in the great island of Borneo -- larger than France or Texas. The warriors he met came from a longhouse community in the interior led by a larger-than-life character named Aban Jau, who styled himself “Rajah Ulu,” the King Inside. Aban Jau refused to acknowledge the rule of any of the potentates on the coast, either the Moslem Sultanate of Brunei, or the upstart European adventurer. To the Rajah’s representatives he boasted “we are the tigers of the jungle and have never been tamed.” Despite this threat, the encounter – on a river some way inland – passed off agreeably enough. Low was impressed with Aban Jau’s chiefly bearing and intelligent conversation. The raid had, however, been anti-climatic. Thoroughly used to the methods of pirates along the coast, the Malay villagers simply retired inside their stockade, and scared off Aban Jau’s men with musket fire.

This incident, among others, illustrates the kind of warfare going on in this part of Borneo before colonial control. Meanwhile, the threat of attack was one reason for building longhouses – massive structures made of dense hardwoods and accomodating hundreds of people under one roof. Aban Jau’s claim to being a rajah depended on a powerful alliance he had assembled, in a mega-community with three longhouses.

The book shows the factors that allowed some communities to thrive and others not. The underlying factor was access to trade in jungle produce with the coast city of Brunei, and ultimately with China – a trade that had existed for a millenium. It also describes the lively sociality of the longhouses as I knew then from the 1970’s onward.

Read an excerpt from The Life of the Longhouse, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jimena Canales' "A Tenth of a Second"

Jimena Canales is associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Tenth of a Second: A History, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains an image. Under a vaulted ceiling, men in black coats and top hats stand in line to look through an instrument. The men are astronomers, the instrument is a telescope. It is 1874. The astronomers at the Paris Observatory aim their machine not at the sky, but at the Senate, a few miles away, housing an artificial planet and bright star driven by clockwork. They have recently noticed that they cannot adequately time the exact moment when Venus makes an apparent contact with the sun’s border. Their determinations differ by amounts close to a tenth of a second. This error, which may seem tiny from our perspective, had enormous repercussions for astronomy. They tried hard to eliminate tenth-of-a-second errors, employing telegraphy and pioneering pre-cinematographic methods. Astronomers were not the only scientists stumped by the tenth of a second: physicists, psychologists, physiologists and philosophers were equally mystified.

In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that clocks recognized a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the profound impact of these tiny moments on our lives, our history, and our culture became immediately apparent.

Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of technologies that helped define modernity, I attempt to locate the lasting reverberations of this “perceptual moment” for science, philosophy, and mass media. Once scientists associated the value with the speed of thought, they developed reaction time experiments that helped define the field of experimental psychology and spurred advances in physiology and optics. At the same time, astronomers and physicists struggled to understand the magnitude of errors caused by results that were a tenth of a second off. And references to the interval were part of a general philosophical inquiry into time, temporal development, and sensory experience that involved reconsidering the contributions of Descartes and Kant. Featuring appearances by Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein, among others, my book explores ways of writing the history of really, really short periods of time. To find out what the book is about you can read page 99, or simply look at the picture, or—if really pressed for time—close your eyes for a moment and try to grasp the tenth of a second that just flew by.

Read more about A Tenth of a Second at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Garrett Peck's "The Prohibition Hangover"

Garrett Peck is a freelance journalist who has written mostly within the alcohol industry trade circles. Based in Washington, D.C., he also regularly conducts tours of historic sites that hold a significant place in the temperance movement in and around the district.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet, and reported the following:

Page 99 from my book (including a half-sentence starting on page 98):

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell provided $4.5 million in state aid for City Brewing, and promised an additional $7 million toward infrastructure improvements, including wastewater treatment upgrades to help the brewery reopen in May 2007, ten months after closing. City Brewing invested $10.4 million in upgrading the plan; its plan was to ramp up production from an initial 100 employees, eventually reaching 250 employees.

The Latrobe Brewery reopened. It now brews beer, including Samuel Adams for the Boston Beer Company; flavored malt beverages; and nonalcoholic drinks. In other words, Latrobe went from being a single-product brewery [Rolling Rock Extra Pale] to producing multiple products under contract for other companies. This is the niche in which its owner, City Brewing, plays. So the Latrobe Brewery survived another day and even expanded its product line, though it was a roller-coaster ride for the town and the brewery's workers.

Now I'm kicking myself for not buying the Rolling Rock lava lamp.

The Prohibition Hangover is written from a literary journalist point of view, so I included first-hand accounts of visiting places important to the alcoholic beverage industry, while telling the story of how the United States became a drinking nation again in the 76+ years since Prohibition ended in 1933.

The passage you read above is the half-page closing for the beer chapter, "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer." Oh the irony that this falls on page 99! This particular page may read a little factual and dry, but it immediately followed a humorous description of touring the Latrobe Brewery in Pennsylvania. This was a well loved brewer that made Rolling Rock until Anheuser-Busch bought the brand - but not the brewery (the beer is now made in Newark, New Jersey). I was trying to explain how a small business got swept up in a global market, and had difficulty competing against larger companies with much deeper distribution. Though the brewery itself survived, it had to change drastically or shut down completely. In writing this, I showed how globalization has forced many companies to adapt or die.

The punch line to the passage - that I didn't buy the lava lamp (I got a T-shirt instead) - was because the brewery closed its Rolling Rock store. Rolling Rock paraphernalia disappeared. And just how cool would it be to have a green lava lamp that you can't find anywhere?!

Read an overview of The Prohibition Hangover, and learn more about the book and author at Garrett Peck's website.

Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition.

Writers Read: Garrett Peck.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Hinderaker's "The Two Hendricks"

Eric Hinderaker is Professor of History, University of Utah.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery, and reported the following:

For three quarters of a century before its American colonies declared their independence, the British Empire competed with France and Spain for North American territory. In this competition, Indian relations were supremely important, and the Iroquois Confederacy came to be regarded as crucial to the fate of British North America. The Iroquois gained a mythic status as a uniquely powerful and enlightened Indian polity.

How did this come to be the case? And how can the myth of the Iroquois Confederacy be squared with the reality of an embattled string of villages fighting for their very survival?

Two Iroquois Indians, both named Hendrick and long thought to be a single person, help explain this puzzle. Both played important roles in diplomatic relations with the neighboring colonies of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. They also became famous in London and throughout the empire, where they symbolized both the power and the civility of the Iroquois.

Page 99 of The Two Hendricks discusses the impact of the first Hendrick’s visit to London, where he met the queen and many leading men of state, had his portrait painted, and made a dramatic impression on the public. He was seen, not as a savage, but as a civil Christian. This was a transformative moment in the public understanding of the Iroquois Confederacy.

Among their own people, meanwhile, the two Hendricks calculated the interests of their communities and labored to maintain the confederacy’s power. They argued for the benefits of the British alliance even as their circumstances became more and more precarious. From their perspective, a close tie to Great Britain seemed to offer the best chance for survival.

We know enough about only a handful of Indians from the colonial era to support a biography. But the lives of both Hendricks are richly documented, and they emerge from the records as surprisingly vivid characters, with a significance that reaches far beyond the scope of their own lives. The Two Hendricks tells a richly detailed story that will change the way you think of early American history.

Read an excerpt from The Two Hendricks, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Klepp's "Revolutionary Conceptions"

Susan E. Klepp is is professor of history and affiliated professor of women's studies and of African American studies at Temple University. She is author or coeditor of six books and editor of the Journal of the Early Republic.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820, and reported the following:

Lots of people know the story of Margaret Sanger. In the early 20th century she opened clinic after clinic offering birth control devices to the poor. Readers may also remember that clinic after clinic was raided by the police and closed. Eventually the laws would change and the small clinics became Planned Parenthood. That history is the supply-side version--there was a demand for contraception that Sanger supplied.

But when did women and men begin to demand access to birth control information? When did they come to prefer small family sizes? After all for most of history large numbers of children were seen as valuable assets--bringing parents free labor, prestige, support in old age and more.

Revolutionary Conceptions traces that change in attitudes on family size to the era of the American Revolution. Americans were vowing not to be the slaves of Britain, they demanded liberty and independence. These ideas spread, not just among politicians, but among rich and poor, free and slave, men and women. Women came to seek equality in marriage, more options in life, and better treatment of children, especially daughters--goals that could be accompished through family planning.

Pp. 99-100 begin a discussion of how women used humor to spread new ideas. They created "a shared language of laughter, protest and reformation."

Other sections of the book trace changes in medicine and birth control, art and ideas of female beauty, law and the policing of sexuality. There is also a section on early opposition to new ideas on family planning.

Read an excerpt from Revolutionary Conceptions, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carol Graham's "Happiness Around the World"

Carol Graham is Senior Fellow and Charles Robinson Chair at the Brookings Institution and College Park Professor at the University of Maryland. She is the author of numerous books and articles on poverty, inequality, and social welfare policy. Graham has an A.B. from Princeton University, an M.A. from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Ph.D. from Oxford University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds us right in the middle of studying happiness in Russia, from 1995 to 2000, a period of time when both economy and society were undergoing tremendous changes due to the collapse of communism. What we find, which supports one of the remarkable stories in the book, is how similar the standard determinants of happiness are across societies – even in contexts of adversity: Russia is no different. Enough but not too much income makes people happier; marriage, employment, and health also make people happier. There is a U shaped relationship between happiness and age, with the low point in the mid to late forties; remarkably this relationship holds across countries across the world. Happier people are healthier and generally perform better in the labor market.

Russia departs from the rest of the world, though, in that married people are not happier than the average and because retired people are unhappy (unhappy pensioners?). Other things about happiness in Russia do support our world-wide story: happier people are more supportive of democracy and have higher prospects of upward mobility for themselves and their children. In short, happiness seems to be linked to things we care about, like democracy, and may even result in better outcomes in the labor market and in the health arena.

That’s the simple part of the story. Our happiness research – both in Russia and in the rest of the world – suggests that people are remarkable at adapting to extreme adversity and maintaining their natural cheerfulness, while some others that live in prosperity report to be miserable: the paradox of happy peasants and miserable millionaires. Respondents in Afghanistan are happier than the world average, and Russian respondents living in contexts of high unemployment are happier than the average for Russia. This may be a good thing from an individual psychological perspective: Afghani respondents manage to retain their good cheer despite high levels of conflict, poverty, and corruption, while Russians living in low or no growth contexts have adapted to an unpleasant certainty, which they seem to prefer over the uncertain prospects of economic change. Yet this capacity to adapt may result in collective tolerance for things like crime, corruption, unemployment, and other bad things, helping keep some societies stuck in bad equilibrium.

My studies of happiness around the world suggest that happiness is a good thing and that we want more of it in the world. And happiness surveys are allowing us to answer all sorts of new questions, such as the effects of obesity, crime, commuting time, and participating in politics on happiness. At the same time, before we leap to making happiness an objective of public policy, we must understand its complexity and how its definition varies across people, countries, and cultures. Finally, some outcomes that we as societies care about, such as the toppling of dictatorships or the reduction of budget deficits, may require much unhappiness in the short term in order to achieve a greater good. This very nascent science is still grappling with these questions.

Learn more about Happiness Around the World at the Oxford University Press website, and read Carol Graham's brief essay, "Happy Talk: The Economics of Happiness."

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Gerson's "The Unfinished Revolution"

Kathleen Gerson is Professor of Sociology and Collegiate Professor at New York University. The author of No Man's Land: Men's Changing Commitments to Family and Work and Hard Choices: How Women Decide about Work, Career, and Motherhood, she frequently contributes to such media as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and CNN.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America, and reported the following:

As the last page of the first part of the The Unfinished Revolution, page 99 alludes to one of the book’s central arguments: amid the gender revolution at work and in the home, “flexible approaches to work and parenting help all types of families overcome economic uncertainties and interpersonal tensions (while) inflexibility in the face of new social realities leaves (other) families ill prepared to cope.” Contrary to popular images, 21st century families are unfolding pathways, not static types, and their fate depends on the ability of parents and other caretakers to respond to unexpected economic and interpersonal crises in flexible ways. The generation who came of age in this era of revolutionary change agrees that gender flexibility in providing both money and care is the key to achieving family well-being. Women and men from all family, class, and ethnic backgrounds thus hope to share earning and caring in the context of a flexible, egalitarian, and lasting partnership.

Page 99 concludes that “building on these lessons, young women and men from all family backgrounds are searching for new, more flexible ways to combine love and work. But mindful of the obstacles that block this path, they are also preparing for a bumpy journey with no preordained destination.” This conclusion hints at the central story of the book’s second part, in which we find that, despite their egalitarian aspirations, today’s young women and men are preparing for “second best” options that may put them on a collision course. While the gender revolution has created new ideals, it has not provided the supports needed to achieve them. Fragile relationships and rising standards for marriage leave women doubtful about the chances of finding a suitable partner to share family and work, while time-greedy workplaces leave men fearful of the heavy penalties that family involvement imposes. Amid these fears, women and men are falling back on different – and conflicting – strategies, with women seeking self-reliance through work and men hoping for a neo-traditional relationship that leaves primary caretaking to someone else.

Despite the obstacles, we can take heart in the high aspirations of young women and men. In today’s uncertain world, gender equality and family well-being are not in conflict. To the contrary, the welfare of a new generation and the generations to follow depends on creating the flexible jobs and child-supportive communities that will help them close the widening work-family divide.

Learn more about The Unfinished Revolution at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexandra Natapoff's "Snitching"

Alexandra Natapoff is Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a nationally recognized expert on criminal snitching.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice (NYU Press), and reported the following:

Criminal informants are everywhere in the American justice system. Every year, thousands of offenders--from drug addicts to Wall Street investors—avoid punishment for their crimes by providing the government with information. Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice reveals how influential these snitching deals have become: from the war on drugs to hip hop music, white collar crime, and terrorism investigations. An important consequence of these widespread deals is that they make the criminal system more informal and secretive. Guilt is increasingly resolved off the record and under the table, while investigations rely heavily on confidential criminal sources. Chapter 4, entitled “Secret Justice,” is devoted to this problem and it concludes on page 99 as follows:

Today’s informant culture goes beyond the inquiry in any specific case about whether it might be dangerous to reveal the name of an informant or whether a particular investigation might be compromised by such revelations. Rather, the system is moving towards wholesale policies of keeping cases, dockets, and practices secret. Today, the potential threat to some witnesses is now seen by courts as a reason to overcome the presumption of openness for all criminal records.

In these ways, the practice of using informants undermines public transparency throughout the criminal system. By resolving liability in secret, it insulates investigative and prosecutorial techniques from judicial and legislative scrutiny. This reduced public access affects numerous other constituencies as well, making it more difficult for the press, crime victims, families, and policy analysts to obtain information about the workings of the justice system or about specific criminal cases. Informant use has thus become a powerful and destructive informational policy in its own right, reducing public transparency and obscuring the real impact of criminal practices on individuals, communities, and other institutions.

Snitching creates some other big problems for the criminal system as well, each of which is addressed in a separate chapter. “Beyond Unreliable,” for example, discusses the infamous unreliability of informants and why police and prosecutors continue to rely on them. “Snitching in the Hood” describes the heavy use of criminal informants in poor urban communities and the increased crime and violence that can result, while the chapter on “Stop Snitching” explores problems of witness intimidation and police-community distrust. The book also surveys the common use of informants in white collar, political, and terrorism investigations. By examining these pervasive underground practices, Snitching reveals surprising and sometimes shocking features of how our criminal process really works.

Read an excerpt from Snitching, and learn more about the book at the official Snitching blog.

--Marshal Zeringue