Today I’m going to summarize three articles on historical issues. One article critiques historians’ rankings of U. S. presidents; one looks at a 1752 essay by David Hume and sees insights into the Ukraine war; and the third explains why most of the theories of economic development since World War II have fallen into the dustbin of history (I wrote that last one).
Are Presidential Rankings Biased?
It is something of an event every few years when the C-Span TV network or the American Political Science Association (APSA) reports on a new assessment of American presidents. The C-Span version relies primarily on historians, the APSA on political scientists, but their evaluations are similar. To give you a flavor, the latest rankings by both organizations have the same top four presidents: Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt. C-Span rates Eisenhower and Truman as no. 5 and 6; APSA chose Thomas Jefferson as no. 5 and Truman as no. 6.
After that, the rankings differ somewhat but they tend to be roughly consistent.
Vincent Geloso and Marcus Shera wondered if the political viewpoints of academicians influence their evaluation. To test this, they chose what is a probable truth: “If one is further to the left, budget deficits are more tolerable, and may even be desirable. If one is further to the right, budget deficits are damnable (even if there are some desirable exceptions).”
So, using regression analysis, they tested whether the historians ranking the presidents tended to favor those who had bigger deficits (that is, greater than the trend line) and
downgrade those who had fewer. In a paper to be published in the Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice they answered yes. Presidents with larger deficits (other presidential factors being controlled for) received higher rankings.
In a new measurement eliminating budget deficits as an issue, Calvin Coolidge (24 on the C-Span poll, 28 on the APSA poll) and Ulysses S. Grant (20 on C-Span, 21 on APSA) went up a few notches and FDR went down a few. Interesting, but does this really tell us that historians reflect a left-vs.-right bias in their rankings? I’m not sure and I welcome your comments.
David Hume: How Wars Drag On
As you may know, I have an interest in the causes and conclusions of war. Right now, Europe is engaged in a war that was supposed to be over quickly but has gone on for nearly a year and a half, with no sign of ending.
Economist Daniel Klein recently shared an essay by David Hume, one of the great classical liberals of the eighteenth century, that may offer some insight into this war. (Both Klein’s essay on Law & Liberty and Hume’s essay are worth reading.) Hume’s essay is titled “Balance of Power.” The term, fairly new in 1752, means that great powers try to avoid having one of them become too dominant.
In Hume’s day the great single European power was France (King Louis XV’s France), and Britain saw its role as joining with others, especially the Hapsburg empire, to keep France from overpowering the rest of Europe. France and England had been fighting a lot during past centuries (and that would continue for another 60-plus years).
But Hume told his readers—political leaders among them—to halt the fighting. He did it delicately (Klein says he was a “cagey” writer):
“[I]f we may judge by the past, their [the English people’s] passionate ardour seems rather to require some moderation; and they have oftener erred from a laudable excess than from a blameable deficiency.
. . . Our wars with France have been begun with justice, and even, perhaps, from necessity; but have always been too far pushed from obstinacy and passion.”
That is the key message. A cause may be righteous at the beginning but be overplayed, with death and destruction going on much too long. This may cast some light on the continuing Ukraine war, and it certainly should provide a lens into other wars of history, such as World War I.
Klein concludes: “Hume, addressing the ruling class, prompts them to ask themselves whether they are becoming like hubristic Roman emperors. American rulers might ask themselves whether their bellicosity resembles that of Hume’s Britain, and hence the hubris of Rome.”
Economic Development Theories in the Dustbin of History
I am running out of space so I will encourage you to read my article at AIER about the failures of post-World War II theories of economic development. Prominent economists came up with many theories—the “take-off” theory, the “backwardness” theory, the “infant industry” theory, etc. But discouragement set in. In 1985, Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, in the famed Samuelson economics textbook, asked whether perhaps there was a ”vicious cycle” of poverty that would hamper growth forever in much of the world.
Fortunately, they were wrong. Economies were developing . . . thanks to a revolution in trade that hardly anybody noticed, no one predicted, and no one had planned.
Image of Abraham Lincoln memorial statue is by Gage Skidmore and licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Dan Klein’s article showing parallels between current US policy and Hume’s analysis of Enlightenment Britain’s ongoing struggles with France is outstanding. I especially enjoyed Dan’s list of incidents in which early negotiations were rejected, and later negotiations, after much death and mayhem, brought no better results:
“The same peace, which was afterwards made at Ryswick in 1697, was offered so early as [1692];”
As Klein argues, the Russia-Ukraine conflict that has destroyed a nation might never have been, or would have been very limited, had the US encouraged Ukraine to negotiate a sensible resolution from the start. But that was never the point—we were out to reduce Russia’s resistance to our global hegemony and saw an opportunity in Ukraine. As Klein points out, “the annoying of the enemy extends to the point of regime change.” Now, instead of Russia being on the ropes and willing to make concessions to end the conflict, it has the upper hand on the battlefield—and therefore in negotiations—and the population of Ukraine has been roughly halved, with much of its infrastructure in ruins. All could have been avoided had less power-hungry heads prevailed on our side, either before Russia invaded or shortly after.
Klein’s article has one major error: Hume’s article is titled “Balance of Power,” but that does not seem to apply to the US position in the Ukraine. He equates the US with a Britain that was seeking balance with a stronger France (“we might think of the United States in place of Britain”), but Russia is not France. The US is a stronger power than Russia; it seeks not balance but dominance. Whatever we have been in the past, today we are not 18th century England, but, as Klein suggests later in the article, Rome, “which had become so dominant … that the balance of power idea became somewhat inapt.” Klein adds “it is rare that a great power resembles a benevolent despot”; we have long sought to control a former superpower that was greatly reduced in size and population by keeping it poor and weak.
Klein muddies the waters a bit by briefly mentioning a Russia-China alliance, but our actions in Ukraine have pushed Russia further into that alliance. If we were (wisely) seeking balance against China rather than dominance in our affairs with Russia, we would be encouraging the Russians to be strong allies rather than trying to impoverish, undermine, and subjugate them—they know where their own interests lie.
Still, Klein’s article has great insight. And if Hume thought the English too zealously fought to maintain a balance of power, I wonder what he would have said if his nation had been fighting to dominate lesser foes.
Thanks Jay, appreciate your comments on my piece!
I have absolutely no doubt that historians are just as biased as the rest of us!
Most historians view history through the prism of active, expanding government rather than through limited, restrained government. That’s the story of the Roosevelts versus Coolidge as reflected in the historians’ polls.
We need more Amity Shlaes and Paul Johnsons and fewer Schlesingers and Meachams….
Charles, my view of FDR is a little more nuanced. See the link I provided in my last comment.
Three interesting topics…I have more to say regarding growth and development. The Soviet experience with collectivization of agriculture in late 1920s and 1930s was widely regarded as a success in the West. It allegedly provided a surplus used to finance industrialization and “take-off.” Your review omitted Sir Arthur Lewis and his influential 1954 “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour;” but he notes in it his theory is inspired in part by the Soviet model.
Another influence was the Keynesian-based Harrod-Domar model from late 1940s; this did not begin as a long run growth model but came to be interpreted as one. William Easterly documents in “The Elusive Quest for Growth” how it persisted as a formula in Western development agencies long after it had been rejected in academia.
There’s much more to say, but development economics is a failed field, I think. In economics, it became the refuge for dirigistes as better understanding of the power of free markets and entrepreneurship grew in in 1960s-1980s in other areas of economics. This is likely in part because of the entrenched development bureaucracies in the West (which were in part a response to Soviet efforts to export Revolution to the third world).
In my opinion, development economics remains a field ripe for people – development “experts” and government officials – in the high income countries to express their messiah complexes with respect to the allegedly benighted peoples of the LDCs and make a good living doing so. Promoting decentralized decision making and institutions that foster domestic entrepreneurship in LDCs doesn’t fit well with this and tends to be given short shrift,
In several columns on presidential rankings. I point out that when you evaluate someone’s job performance, the measure should be how well the person meets the job description.
The president’s job description is set forth in the Constitution, primarily but not exclusively in Article II. The items listed there have to be “filled in” with incidents the Constitution-makers understood to accompany the items listed expressly.
Historians’ presidential surveys are defective in that they invariably apply criteria of their own rather than the criteria in the document that legally creates, defines, and empowers the President. Many of the historians’ criteria reflect academic-left political bias or their ignorance of the nature of the job.
The results often are absurd—as when in one recent C-SPAN survey six of the last Democratic presidents “somehow” ended up in the top 20.
When you apply the president’s constitutional job descriptions, Washington and Lincoln remain at the top, but the other rankings change greatly. See, e.g., https://i2i.org/using-the-constitution-to-re-rank-the-presidents/.
Excellent argument. IMO Wilson and FDR are given top marks by academics precisely because the two of them ignored the Constitution. Both belong in the basement, or perhaps even the dungeon.
An excellent article, Rob. Especially:
“These are the real measures of a president’s performance. A good president defends the Constitution and respects its limits, recommends and signs beneficial bills and vetoes bad ones, competently enforces the laws, appoints appropriate people to office, is an effective military leader, and conducts a wise foreign policy.
“Except as included in those duties, there is nothing on the list about ‘vision’ or ‘making a difference’ or ‘changing America.’”