In 1772, Joseph Haydn and his musicians were spending a long summer performing at the country retreat of Hungary’s Prince Esterhazy. The musicians were restless and wanted to go home, but Esterhazy expected them to stay there as long as he did.
To change the prince’s mind, Haydn wrote a symphony. In the finale, each player, one by one, ends his music, snuffs out his candle, and exits—until only two violinists are left (one being Haydn) to quietly end the piece. Now known as the Farewell Symphony, it persuaded Esterhazy to release the troupe. [1]
The prince’s failed effort to control the musicians was about as heavy-handed as European governments got with respect to music in those glorious days between, say, 1700 and 1820. (Think, from Vivaldi and Telemann to Mozart and Beethoven.) The results were magnificent.
Over that period musical performances were enriched and diversified on multiple dimensions. The piano replaced the harpsichord, the cello replaced the bass viola da gamba, Bach brought the organ’s sounds to new heights—to mention just a few changes. Ways to share music—orchestras, quartets, sonatas, concertos, oratorios, and operas—proliferated. The styles we know as Baroque, Classical, and Romantic began to solidify, and the stunning masterpieces that we love today emerged.
“The veneer of civilization is always very thin, while the innate barbarity of humankind is forever very deep,” wrote the historian Victor Davis Hanson in a recent essay on the Russia-Ukraine war.[1]
Russia’s brutal destruction of civilians illustrates how thin the veneer of civilization is. There are many other examples—from the Holocaust in a country that had achieved a peak of intellectual sophistication to the protection of slavery in a country founded on the concept of freedom. And more.
So, are we barbarians or civilized? We are both.
While I can’t explain why barbarity must involve war and torture, I can offer some understanding of why our veil of civilization is often so tattered.
My source is Friedrich A. von Hayek (1899–1992). Although Hayek received a Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, he is known mostly to people of a libertarian bent, like me. To us, he is the greatest. Continue reading “The Skull Beneath the Skin”
Urban historians sometimes puzzle over why one city grows and its competitors do not. One rivalry, between St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois, is particularly interesting.
In 1840, St. Louis was a thriving part of the “urban frontier,” with a population of 35,979. It managed a rich fur trade, was a major transfer point for goods coming upriver from New Orleans (the nation’s third-largest city at the time), and its two major rivers enabled it to send grain from Midwestern prairies down the Mississippi for shipment east. Indeed, as one historian noted,
“Perhaps no American city was born under such favorable auspices as St. Louis, Missouri. It was located at the confluence of navigable water courses which drained over a million square miles of the continent, and it was built by a number of big businessmen (“big” for that time, which was 1764) who knew precisely what they were doing.”[1]
In contrast, Chicago was a hamlet of 4,470 people.
Above is a photograph of two houses in Nashville, Tennessee. They are narrow buildings, connected by a one-story hallway in the middle, and they share a driveway. Do they look a little strange? To me, they do—handsome but strange.
They show how a Tennessee law led to creative designs.
Taxes and regulations often have unintended consequences. In this post, I will share three examples of distinctive housing that came about in an effort to work around government fiats.
Nashville’s Connected Houses
Let’s start with Nashville’s connected houses. The reason is simple. Nashville has been growing, with population increasing at about double the U.S. rate during the past decade. [1] This puts pressure on housing supply, and subdividing a lot to build two houses is attractive.
Until 2014, however, zoning laws required builders who wanted to build two homes on a single lot to connect the houses—to make them legally duplexes or condominiums. So, as having two homes on one lot became financially attractive, we got homes like those above. Continue reading “How Taxes and Regulations Shaped Architecture”
We may be on the verge of a widespread switch in the auto industry from gasoline-powered cars to electric ones.
While wondering if such a massive switch will occur, I began to look into what happened to the early electric vehicles. First developed in the 1880s, electric cars were popular for several decades. An electric car won a celebrated race in Chicago in 1895, [1] and in a 1904 brochure, 21 of the 88 automobile models listed were electric. [2]
The disappearance of the electric vehicle illustrates capitalism’s “creative destruction,” a term coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter to explain how new products and services sweep away the old. (We would use the term “disruptive technology” today. ) Overall, the advent of the “horseless carriage” caused creative destruction, as it demolished entire industries— horse breeding, horse feed, carriages, saddles and, of course, buggy whips.
But why was the electric car swept up in that destruction? The usual answer is that the technology was inferior. Batteries were too heavy, too weak, and had to be constantly recharged. True, but I don’t think technology was the main reason. Continue reading “What Happened to the Electric Vehicles of 1904?”
