YouSaid · the spoken record

John Nye

lines on the record: 65
first: 2018-11-21
most recent: 2018-11-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, the idiot's quite interesting because of the figure of Prince Michin, and that is the idea of the innocent surrounded by all this scheming and this blood and gore and evil and Dostoevsky is always worried about the problem of spirituality within the context of a real world that's changing, that's dynamic, that has good and bad and evil. And how do we reconcile that? And I think the idiot, even more, I think, than crime and punishment of the brothers Karamazov, has a kind of, at least for me, a very uniquely appealing depth to it.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hm Well, if I had to recommend the novel, the one I like to come back to is the idiot by Dostoevsky. Others are more famous.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people will still perceive you as not speaking well. And without getting into acquiring or making the effort to acquire a decent accent, I'm not talking about being perfectly mimicking someone who's fluent, but if getting a decent accent, you won't, in my view, get a fully understanding of what that language and that culture brings to you.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“90% of the time, 10% of the time I do. But I mean, clearly a lot of it would have to do, so read a lot, read very deeply. If you are a humanities person, take some hard math and science classes. If you're a science person, read Shakespeare, read, learn a foreign language, really learn it, spend some time. And when people learn a foreign language, I mean in particular, I would say the one aspect of foreign language learning that's underappreciated is accent. Most people are say, oh, by accent's good enough, and then I'm fluid. But in fact, for most people around the world, accent is the first thing you notice about someone when they're speaking a foreign language. If you have bad grammar and have a very limited vocabulary, but you can say a hundred basic phrases with 90% accurate accent, most people will say you speak fairly well. If you are, however, a fairly high degree of fluency and you have a really strong American accent.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first should they? I mean, the fact of the matter is that there's a lot of costs of being broadly self-educated. The fact of the matter is.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I taught myself French as well as later Mandarin, and now I'm trying to learn Russian. And all these things are part and parcel of my sense that it's not enough to be good at some sense. The spirit of the age favors specialization, and my personal tastes favor generalization or being a polymath, or as my advisor once put it, I have too many hobbies”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's two things. One is I was raised educated in the Jesuit tradition. I went to an elite Jesuit school in the Philippines growing up. And one of the things about that school was that there was a very big emphasis on the kind of educated Catholic gentleman that was supposed to produce. And so it was not enough to be good in one subject. You were presumed to be good in all subjects at the very high level. Secondly, I felt growing up that the Philippines really was an intellectual backwater. And I had this mythic view in my mind of what the center would or should be like. And I thought of myself as wanting to learn things so that I would be prepared to play a role as a participant in world discussion. And to that end, I studied many different things. As you know, my undergraduate background is in physics, but I also was for a while a double major in literature.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but that's almost like sort of saying let's assume a can opener. It's exactly the problem. I mean, the thing I'm really frustrated by is that it doesn't matter whether people are writing from a socialist or a libertarian perspective. Too much of the discussion of political economy is normative. It's about what should the ideal state be. And I'm much more concerned with the questions of what good states are possible. And once good states are created that are possible, what good states are sustainable? And that, in my view, is a still understudied and very poorly understood issue.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a kind of second law of thermodynamics for political economy in which disorder has a pull. And I worry a lot about the stability of the liberal world order in the next century.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hmm, that's a little trickier. I would say in recent years, the book I've been pondering a lot is Hobbs Leviathan. Because I think we've lived through such a period of relative peace and order that we are taking for granted how unprecedented this is. Despite all the wars that have erupted since World War II, there has not been a major global conflict at that level in many, many, nearly, three quarters of a century now. And that's quite unusual. And it's also unusual that the number one leading military power has done so little contrary again to what a lot of people say about it, to expand its power militarily. And there are a lot of reasons for that, many of them very good, both moral as well as practical. Nonetheless, that's an anomaly in world history.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I told you once that as a boy one of the most influential books to me was the book Memoirs of a Sword Swallower by Dan Mannix. This is a fairly obscure cult book, but it's about an autobiography of him running away to the circus or the carnival, actually, and learning to become both a sword swallower and a fire eater. And what was interesting to me about that is that at the age of 10 was both the interesting detail at the level of how he got involved in magic and in the carnival and the functionings of the day-to-day, as well as the exoticism of it for Boy in the Philippines, just thinking about the way the world would develop. And it didn't make me want to run away to the carnival of the circus, but it made me think about things in a very, very different way. And it spurred my interest in fantasy, in horror, in science fiction, were all heavily driven by my interest in that book.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“university that will attract the best and the brightest to come there. Russia, I don't want to talk too much about that because that's partly what I'm involved in Russia as well. The Russians have a program to try to provide incentives for their leading universities to hire on the international market and integrate that with local professors. And I would say the higher school of economics in Moscow is the most successful institution, university institution in Russia so far at doing that, but it's still very early in the game. It's always a challenge.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's two factors. One is are they willing to commit the money to it? And second, are they willing to go through the phase of credibility building? That's the hardest thing. Many people make the early phase possible, but then they falter at the later run. And that's the real issue. How credible are you going to be with respect? Even something like tenure is something not very well understood. Are you willing to fire people before they get to tenure? And are you willing to guarantee tenure after? How do you do that? How do you do it so it's credible? Many countries cannot even guarantee that the policies instituted by one ruler will be followed by the next. And this is a very, very big issue. However, I mean, you see a lot shy. I mean, Singapore has done quite a very good job. Hong Kong's done quite a lot. The Gulf is trying now. I'm not quite sure what success, but there's surely the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology has been hiring a lot of top people in the sciences, but I'm not sure how successful they're being at creating a really vibrant.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now the downside of it is actually got confused a bit early on. So in some ways some of the preschool said he's a little developmentally handicapped. But it was really fun. He was. He was a little slower. And then one day it clicked and it was flowing in both. In fact, he was fluent in Chinese first before English. And the funny thing was very often there was a period when he would say everything twice. So he would say, look, airplane, tankan, feiji, and he would just talk about these ways. Sadly, that theory didn't work with our second son because we didn't count on the fact that the second son has the older brother to play with. And so the second son has the same phenomenon where he understands quite a bit of Mandarin but doesn't want to answer in Mandarin.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's from Taiwan. Eventually, I learned conversational Mandarin and she learned English. But we noticed that we were going to bring up our son. She was very worried about the fact that many of her friends were Taiwanese, even though both parents spoke Mandarin and in fact in many cases both parents can speak English very well, their kids would grow up not wanting to speak Chinese at all. I chalked this up to the observation little kids want to conform and they don't want to be picked on, especially if they grow up, say, speaking Mandarin, but then they get picked on in kindergarten or they just feel weird because they're answering in a strange language. And I did some reading in the literature and what I finally came up with was the suggestion to my wife. I said, here's what we're going to do. For the first two years of his life, our eldest son, you're only going to speak to him in Mandarin, and I'm only going to speak to him in English. So instead of it becoming a strange language, English becomes daddy's language and Mandarin becomes mommy's language. And strangely enough, that worked. Our son became very fluid.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is, you have to understand that when I first met my wife, we met in Paris, and I spoke no mander and she spoke no English.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They perceive this as impossibly difficult thing unless the kids live in the United States or Australia or England for a certain period of time. And so all these things swirl together. It's not unlike some of the problems Japan has, but with the extra problem that Taiwan is torn between their desires to remain reasonably independent, while at the same time being dependent on making deals with the mainland.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not very sure about this, but my guess is that in Taiwan there's too much of an incentive to take advantage of the Chinese market of just use cheaper labor or of selling to Chinese rather than thinking about how do we reform Taiwan itself and how do we, because Taiwan needs many more reforms. They're very smart people, they're highly developed, but somehow Taiwan has not been able to move up the food chain fast enough to develop in something that's very advanced technologies and to make Taiwan say an intellectual hub. I would say, for example, take even universities. There's no reason that Chengda and Taida, the two leading universities in Taiwan, shouldn't be more like the top universe in Singapore, but they're not. And some of this has to do with the unwillingness of Taiwanese to switch graduate programs to be much more heavily in English, and there's a certain reluctance to learn English or difficulty that they have. On the one hand, if you talk to Taiwanese, like my in-laws, they are very much in favor of their kids learning English. On the other hand,”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very unusual. The final and most unusual aspect about China's reform is once these new regions started to grow, the center was not successful in shutting them down. You need to understand that throughout history, whenever central powers saw regional powers in their countries develop, you often crushed it. Even this happened in conflict between the king and the big city, so the good example is Francois I of France, who often had because of the problems that people like Doug North have talked about, of credible commitment, could not borrow money except with very high interest rates. But by uniting with the city of Paris, he was able to actually borrow at lower interest rates than he could by himself.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of the established companies. Second, you have plausible deniability if it fails and say what do you expect out of the back order. Third, Fujen, of course, is Fujenese, which shares a language and ethnic heritage with the majority of the people in Taiwan. And Guangdong is Cantonese, which of course shares ethnic heritage in the language with Hong Kong, who are mostly Cantonese. And one of the things that's very interesting in the early parts of China's reforms, you had investors from abroad, mostly from Taiwan and Hong Kong, investing in China in a period in which China did not have formal property rights, family and ethnic connections were often used to make informal social deals, to maintain these relations. So in many ways this was...”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that is a deep issue, but I have a theory, or rather theory is too strong a word. There's a phenomenon I observed that I really haven't seen written about. One of the things that for me is very unique about China, that not many people have discussed in any real detail is the extent to which China began its reforms outside of the biggest cities. Just thinking about that alone, to begin with Guangdong and Fujian provinces and those regions, places like Shenzhen, Guangdong, Fujian, Xiamen, to think about those cities and regions is quite remarkable. Virtually every major reform always involves the major centers of commercial power. But those who have been Beijing and Shanghai, and they were totally left out of it. In my view, that occurred for a number of reasons. One is that by avoiding that, you avoid the usual problems, political, economic problems of interfering with the rents.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that is a big issue because I think there is a suspicion that many of the Chinese are working in the Chinese government's interest. At the same time, there are many ethnically Chinese Filipinos who owe no allegiance to China and are much more loyal to the Philippines. And so you're going to get these problems. So one of the very big issues is how can not just the Philippines, but all of East Asia take advantage of often very successful ethnic Chinese minorities without incurring the suspicion that they're being disloyal to the home country or loyalty to China instead. And the more that I think China tries to intervene in local politics in the region, the more you're going to sort of see these kinds of clashes. And I worry about this a lot because many of the greatest massacres that have occurred in history have occurred by rioting people against ethnic minorities like the Chinese in India or the Chinese.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Mindanao, are those who basically are good at forming private armies or making local connections? No one group is strong enough to make Mindanao totally independent, and yet the center in Manila is not strong enough to fully, in some sense, control that island either. And so that area has always been a hotbed of political struggle and instability”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I certainly think they have a disadvantage in terms of some of the issues of state capacity and order that are a prerequisite for economic development. Take Mindanao in the south, which is a constant problem for the Philippines. In some ways, Mindanao has never fully colonized, that is to say, neither the Spanish nor the Americans, nor even the Japanese during World War II were able to fully control Mindanao. And today it is the scene of many struggles between the Muslims and the Christians there, as well as the various kinds of revolutionary factions that still exist in Mindanao. I remember having a discussion about this with the distinguished economist Jim Robinson, who wrote a paper about the fact that in Mindanao you have too many strongmen and the problem in Mindanao is you have bad institutions. And I said, Jim, you're putting the cart before the horse. You have bad institutions because it's so hard to run now. So it's not a surprise that the politicians that emerge”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Christianization, education, and in some sense homogenization of Filipinos into the greater Philippine nation was often taken care of by priests. And the Philippines was formally divided by the Catholic Church into which areas were controlled by various orders, whether the Dominicans, the Benedictines, the Franciscans, or the Jesuits.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To begin with, basically the Catholic Church colonized the Philippines. People may not realize that the Spanish had very little power to colonize the Philippines militarily. It was very difficult. The Philippines has over 7,000 islands. It's quite scattered. There's a lot of mountains, jungles, Spanish soldiers would die of malaria. So most of the colonization outside the Manila region was often handled by the church in the sense that the church had incentives to send people there and to kind of proselytize. And it's in the course of proselytization that they extended the influence of the central Spanish government. In addition, the military intervened in much the same way they did in a lot of South America, more by there were many separate tribes. The Philippines was not united, and so very often some of these deals, I'll help you defeat your enemy in exchange for your, you know, owing allegiance to the central power and things of that sort. But even after these deals were made,”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rise of open divorce, the sexual revolution, all these things create a market in which you have huge numbers of losers, and even without formal polygamy, that easy divorce and fairly loose sexual morals lead to a world in which you are recreating some form of polygamy, and that these lead to stresses that are far go far beyond the standard inequalities that you talk about economically. And in many ways are actually more interesting.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean Wellbeck in my view is very interesting in that he's an avowed anti-liberal but what's interesting about him is that he sees two things I think he sees in some sense the loss of confidence in Western traditions that seems to be very typical of many leading Western elites today and secondly I think he sees the problems that were articulated very differently by people like Keynes or by Schumpeter about the fact that capitalism evolved in the West against a certain background of social, religious and cultural norms which are often undermined by the aspect of competition itself in particular Wellbeck is very big on the issue of sexual competition and the way in which breakdown of the nuclear family”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It nourished capitalism, whether or not, say, for example, a more eastern eastern version of capitalism would have arisen under China with polygamy, with sort of very soft kind of pantheistic religions. That's a separate question. As we think of the way in which modern economic development has occurred, it's also co-evolved with the rise of the Western state, which is tied to the rise of the way in which Christianity played out, both as a secular force as well as a spiritual one.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to the extent that what we think was modern economic growth began in the West and was a very uniquely western phenomenon in the modern sense, only later adapted by Japan and then more recently by many Asian economies. It's clear that Christianity played a very big role. And I think one of the things that say Fukuyama mentions in one of his recent books and others have mentioned is the role the Catholic Church played in promoting the nuclear family. Banning cousin marriage without special permission, focusing on trying to unify romantic love with formal marriage, asking for the consent of women in the marriage vows, focusing on the need for celibacy and the need for monogamy. Doucting polygamy and extended family. All these things were part and parcel or at least supported by what we think of as the underlying institutions.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't, but what I do think is the following. I think that much of the things that are very good about that state capacity are tied to the political constraints that also make it hard for them to encourage diverse competition. And one of the fears they have is one could argue that this is part of what happened in the 1990s, is the breakdown of the worst aspects of the Soviet Empire also broke down some of the many better aspects in terms of their ability to provide a high quality, say, secondary educational system, high quality average university quality, and to a very good state capacity. And so recreating the state capacity while also promoting greater economic diversity and economic competition is, I think, one of the great challenges for Russia.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's different. If Russia could hand over two-thirds of its landmass and keep a large chunk of what we think of as Western Russia, I think it would develop a lot faster. But that's exactly what will not happen. Look, forget about handing anything over to the Chinese. The Russians don't properly develop Vladivostok. They don't properly develop the Russian Far East. Why shouldn't Vladivostok, for example, just to take it off the top of my head be as fully developed as San Francisco is for the United States in some sense, it's the other outpost. You have the eastern leaders and you have the Western leaders. And so what you don't see is you don't see cities in Russia on the eastern part, which are as advanced as successful, as commercial, and as dynamic both intellectually and commercially as Moscow and St. Petersburg and their inability to permit that or encourage it or in fact, in my view, their tendency.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I unfortunately I think Russia suffers very much from two problems one is the well known problem of resource curse. I do think that Russia having abundant oil and gas makes it very hard for them, for their political economy to develop properly for all the known reasons. The other thing I think is not talked about is that since Russia became such a gigantic empire, in particular in the 19th century, Russia has had such a hard time. I would argue the political impetus, the imperatives of holding together such a large land mash and all the peoples in it and worrying about its borders overwhelms incentives to promote growth and development within the country.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Failure. And so, in that sense, what you really need to understand is, why is it that it's so hard to do? What is it about the human condition? What is it about the problems of organizing mankind in a world that includes problems of political organization, coercion, violence, dissent that makes order such a constraint on what is permissible in terms of freedom?”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrated I think John Stewart Mill's take on liberalism is too much that Ivy Tower would take. And I think that it doesn't take into consideration. It's too normative. It's too much. What should liberalism be about as opposed to what I think of us a lot of my career has been about, we're just trying to understand what kinds of things made liberal reform possible in the real world? What kinds of things made liberal reform sustainable in the real world? I often talk about it the way I tell my classes is something like the following. In economics, we're always talking about the benefits of free markets, the benefits of trade, the benefits of open competition. And yet, by that standard, the revealed preference of humanity is to be poor, since the periods of really open trade growth and innovation are very tiny in the long span of world history or innovations take a long time to develop and they're often held back and the waves of innovation and growth often crash on the rocks of stagnation or even”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There, I'd say yes, probably, but two to one. I think Caruana has maybe a one in four, maybe not even a one in three, one in four chance at most, but Carlson is clearly the most phenomenal player to come along since Kasparov.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not a musician, but for me personal taste I think is overrated. There's a certain flashiness about him that I much prefer, I guess, other pianists to him.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly. In times of peace, be aware that these things are not necessarily self-sustaining. I would sort of say that's the conservative worldview, that civilization and order are not default states of mankind. It's very Hobbesian.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's this question of suspicion and the tendency to not appreciate how much is going on under the surface. I think people tend to see these things narrowly in terms of Cold War paranoia. But in Hitchcock was a political conservative, and he was much more of the very old sort of British conservative view that one should be wary. Suspicion is metaphysical.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is underrated. I think despite its high ranking, it should be rated even further. I mean, look at this movie. It's on all Martins is great. You know, Jimmy Stewart is often thought of as this awesucks kind of guy is portrayed in a very dark kind of way. It's a very modern kind of take on sort of the average American, as well as being very introspective and very suspenseful. And there are so many things that other directors steal or take from Hitchcock from these pictures. I think vertigo rear window to catch a thief in north by northwest are all peerless.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in fact, the dishes that a lot of people eat in Korea are not things most Americans would like to eat on a regular basis, which is a big emphasis on the various kinds of kimchi, the pickles, the hot soups, the noodles, various kinds of other kinds of. In the same way, there's a lot of Asian dishes that are not as common, or if you look at Thai food, Thai food has served in both Thai restaurants, has very little to do with what you would eat in Thailand. And so I think Filipinos haven't found a way of packaging food that is sufficiently exotic and uniquely Filipino, but will appeal to American tastes. Once you can do that, then it's possible for, I think, the more interesting regional dishes that would also be interesting to foodies to get introduced as well.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other stuff. Secondly, I don't think Filipinos know how to pick the dishes that are not just good for the Philippines, but good for Americans, so that in particular, if you think again, think about, say, even Korean food, which is probably the most authentic food I think of in America relative to the home base. It's not the same thing. Even with the Koreans, we focus very, Americans tend to like stuff like Bulgogi and the barbecues and the fried chicken.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, since I like Filipino food, I'd say it's underrated. But if we just focus on the question why isn't there more Filipino food, there are two things to note. One is that the biggest reason I would sort of say is that no one has yet found a sufficiently America-centric Filipino food to sell. People don't realize, think about the most common popular American Asian foods. That would be Chinese. And when we think of the good Chinese food, it's not, in fact, what made Chinese food a household name. The fact that you and I can buy very good Sichuan or Cantonese food is not a function of the best dishes. It's a function of the kind of mediocre chaomain, fried rice, which has nothing to do with the chao mien or fried rice that you get in Hong Kong and things like Mugo Gaipan and sweetened sour pork. And because you don't have this mass appeal food underlying it, you can't experiment with the best.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“period of greater consumption equality all across Western Europe and certainly in France and Napoleon III has a great deal to do with that.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“O vastly underrated. Napoleon III was, you know, he's often referred to as, he's the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. He's often referred to as the idiot emperor or the little Napoleon. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that he's considered to be a bumbler. He lost, he basically lost eastern large parts of eastern France in the Franco-Brussian War. But in fact, Napoleon III ushered in many of the great reforms of the 19th century, not least to which the 1860 Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce. But also under Napoleon III's regime, he was able to promote not just free trade, but greater industry, modern banking, a lot of what is modern Paris comes about under Napoleon III, the development of the railroad, and the road networks comes under Napoleon III. Moreover, the growth in the wages of the working classes start to increase after the 1850s. The late 19th century, contrary to what people think of, is not in fact a period of massive inequality, but it's”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the systemic mistake really boils down to how do you deal with the problem of power? How do you deal with the problem of different groups, different cultures wanting their place at the table? I mean, it's clear that if you look, a lot of the fight of imperialism was great power competition. You know, if you look in the Far East, for example, some people may know that the United States took the Philippines from Spain at the end of the period of Spanish control of the Philippines in 1898. Partly, this was due to Perry's decision to sail into Manila Bay. One of the things that's not discussed is that most people are unaware of is that the German and British fleets were waiting in Hong Kong. They were waiting to see what the Americans did. And it's quite likely that had the Americans not steamed into Manila Bay, that the Germans or British would have intervened in the Philippines once the Spanish collapsed.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it was inevitable at all. I do think the war was, the World War I was a genuine shock to that, that is to sort of say, I think that you could have imagined a world in which globalization would have received more support and more development for at least a couple of more decades. But it is also true that I think what you see is that historically there doesn't, you know, put it another way. There's not much evidence that human beings somehow evolve into very liberal political entities. And so the periods that promote political and economic Increased individual freedoms as well as increased economic freedoms plus economic growth is either stable or sustainable is not clear cut to me.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This I'm not so sure about. I think we see a lot of things there, and there, you know, it's hard to tell how much of that is what happened in the interwar period of it and how much of it was the turn to socialism around the time of World War II. But there's certainly the case that Britain loses some of its innovative edge. On the other hand, Britain does still play a very big role intellectually. So I'm not quite sure I understand why Britain underperforms, but there's something to be said for both a regulatory story and in some sense a breakdown of the state capacity having to do with greater conflict between the upper classes and the working classes in Britain.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made it possible for people to move out of agriculture as well. And growth in both agriculture and industry favored a more powerful Britain, but a much weaker set of dispersed aristocratic elites who altogether had the control of the British Parliament. But as these dispersed elites were getting weakened, both the rise of the state directly through greater regulation and indirectly through having more concentrated, in some sense, centers of power, there's a lot of evidence that British landholders were much more concentrated by the mid-19th century than the French were. So there was greater inequality in ownership, and that was favorable again to certain elites who benefited from the shift to liberalism.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it played a role, but it was also it was one of these Baptist and bootlegger stories. There were both those who ideologically were in favor of greater liberalism in free trade, but I don't think they would have succeeded if they hadn't benefited from divinality of many of the ministers who wanted to increase the power of the city and increase the power of the British civil state at the expense of the landed aristocracy. If you think about it, one of the things that improved markets did and in particular improved national markets in agriculture was to make agriculture more efficient. But by making it more efficient, they essentially destroyed the local monopoly of many agricultural landholders who weren't that very efficient. You had some big winners, but one of the things they did is that it made England a more efficient whole and you get consolidation, both in terms of the most powerful domestic and commercial industries, and you get consolidation in agriculture and consolidation in agriculture.”
2018-11-21 · Conversations with Tyler · John Nye on Revisionist Economic History and Having Too Many Hobbies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source