Astral Codex Ten

smallpox

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smallpox

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smallpox is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between April 09, 2021 and January 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “a great plague (probably smallpox) broke out”; “the same way we’ve eliminated Smallpox”; “scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice”. It most often appears alongside Black Death, China, Native Americans.

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  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: April 09, 2021
  • Last seen: January 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: On The Natural Faculties
April 09, 2021 · Original source
This is the theory that he would put his weight behind, and which he would eventually be responsible for bringing to the majority of the western world. When Galen was 19, his father died, leaving him independently wealthy. Hippocrates wrote that a good doctor should travel, so Galen ended up spending a decade studying with medical experts from various schools in cities all around the Mediterranean, including Alexandria. After this, he came back to Pergamon where he got a job as the doctor treating the gladiators of the city. This was an unusual step for someone of his wealth and education, because despite their popularity as a form of entertainment, gladiators at the time were considered extremely low-class. It’s not clear why he took this job, but it seems likely that it influenced how he thought about medicine. Spending long hours stitching gladiators back together gave him a detailed knowledge of human anatomy, which other doctors of the time lacked. It sounds like he did a great job, too, because only five of the gladiators died during his time there — compared to 60 under the guy who had the job before. Eventually all roads lead to Rome, of course, and Galen arrived in 162 CE. His lectures and demonstrations made such an impression, and ruffled so many feathers, that he was afraid of getting poisoned by the Roman doctors and eventually left to save his life. In 169 CE, however, a great plague (probably smallpox) broke out, and Marcus Aurelius summoned him back to Rome to serve as court physician. Marcus Aurelius died the next year (according to some sources, of the plague), but Galen ended up with a longterm post in Rome as physician to the new Emperor, Commodus. Galen himself died some time between 199 and 216 CE, at the the ripe old age of between 70 and 87. It’s hard not to notice just how famous Galen was in his own time. Marcus Aurelius described him as “primum sane medicorum esse, philosophorum autem solum” — first among doctors and unique among philosophers (one wonders if Galen might have influenced the Emperor’s own philosophy). Forgeries and unscrupulous editions of his work were such a problem during his lifetime, he had to write a book called On My Own Books to try to sort it all out. Among other things, he complains that his servants were stealing private letters he had written to friends and circulating bootleg copies of them as medical advice. Galen was an incredibly prolific writer. Wikipedia claims that he produced more works than any other author in antiquity, maybe up to 600 treatises, and possibly employed 20 scribes at one point. While these particular claims are hard to substantiate, he did leave behind a whole lot of books. Fires and the various other mishaps that are guaranteed to happen to classical texts destroyed many of his works. Some of this even happened during his own lifetime, and in On My Own Books he seems surprisingly relaxed about so many of his works being lost: The books of many others perished at that time, as did all those of mine which were located in that storehouse; and none of my friends in Rome admitted to having copies of the first two books. Since, then, my followers prevailed upon me to write the same treatise again, I thought that I should give this explanation regarding the previously distributed books, in case anyone in the future finds them and wonders why I should have written a treatise twice on the same subject. Even with these losses, huge amounts of his work has survived. It’s hard to get an exact count, but Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia by Karl Gottlob Kühn, compiled around 1833 and for a long time the definitive edition, contains 122 different works in 22 volumes. That’s a lot. Despite this, I was surprised how hard it was to get my hands on primary source copies of his works (in English). Because of our own plague, I was limited to finding sources online — but for most classical works, this is pretty easy. Marcus Aurelius was a contemporary of Galen, and it’s not too hard to find multiple different translations of Meditations (though admittedly Marcus may have a slightly wider appeal). Part of this might be that Galen’s works are very badly organized. Every secondary source I read on the Galenic corpus is full of griping about how confusing the whole thing is. Galen wrote in Greek, but many of the original versions of his books are lost, leaving us only with Arabic or Latin translations, or Latin translations of earlier Arabic translations. Some of the books appear under different titles in different places, and sometimes the works are only indexed under abbreviations of those titles. Some of them probably were never intended for publication (those bootleg letters I mentioned above), and so may not have official titles or versions at all. Forgeries of his works in various languages continued well on into the Renaissance. Galen himself was very unclear on how to think about the documents he produced. At one point in On My Own Books, he starts off by talking about a piece of writing he did “as an exercise for myself”, and then immediately turns around and mentions that he gave it to friends, who in turn gave it to their friends. Needless to say, the whole thing is a mess, the scholars seem very agitated. I chose to review the longest piece I could find, which is On the Natural Faculties, specifically the translation by Arthur John Brock, which was the only translation I was able to track down. This also seemed like a good choice because, instead of being a treatise on a more limited topic like diet, the pulse, or bones, this book serves as more of an introductory textbook to what today we would call biology. III. On the Natural Faculties is divided into three books, though if the three books have any structure to them, I wasn’t able to figure it out. Galen is pretty straightforward in naming his pieces, and this book is about him trying to describe all of the “natural faculties”. This doesn’t really correspond to any modern concept, but essentially he means the fundamental or basic biological functions common to all living things. He begins by contrasting the functions of the soul, like feeling and voluntary motion (we might say “mental functions”), which occur only in animals, with the natural functions common to both animals and plants. You could maybe translate “natural faculties” as something like “basic biological functions”. I had always heard that Galen was a Hippocrates stan, but right from the get-go he’s mentioning Aristotle in the very same breath (though he reminds us that Hippocrates “lived much earlier than Aristotle”). When describing the natural faculties, he seems to base them off of Aristotle’s physics more than Hippocrates’ humors. Aristotle’s physics is a system I mostly know secondhand from the descriptions offered by Thomas Kuhn (for an example, take a look at this piece). Kuhn stresses that this system is hard for a modern mind to understand and even harder to explain, so I was surprised at how intelligible Galen’s account is. Maybe reading Kuhn’s description prepared me to understand what Galen has to say, but either way, it’s great. I think Galen does a better job than Kuhn. Basically he says, look, there are different kinds of motion: If that which is white becomes black, or what is black becomes white, it undergoes motion in respect to colour; or if what was previously sweet now becomes bitter, or, conversely, from being bitter now becomes sweet, it will be said to undergo motion in respect to flavour … when a warm thing becomes cold, and a cold warm, here too we speak of motion; similarly also when anything moist becomes dry, or dry moist. He goes on to suggest that the natural faculties are more advanced forms of motion, possibly built up out of the combination of simpler forms of motion. (Kuhn treats the Aristotelian perspective as if it was the common sense of the ancient world, but the fact that Galen has to describe it in such detail makes me wonder if that was really the case.) That’s the framework. What the exact set of natural faculties are, however, is less clear. In book one he focuses on three faculties in particular — genesis, growth, and nutrition — and provides lots of arguments that (for example) the body’s ability to grow is different from its ability to sustain itself. In book three he gives a different list of four — the attractive, retentive, expulsive, and alterative faculties — but he also suggests that these are “handmaids of Nutrition”. Elsewhere he says that genesis is not “a simple activity of Nature” but instead is “compounded of alteration and of shaping.” He also mentions faculties like “adhesion” and “presentation”. The particulars are pretty confusing, but the general gist is clear. Galen wants to lay out all the different faculties and their sub-faculties (and sub-sub-faculties?) so that the reader can understand the workings of the body. Galen makes it pretty plain that he thinks that diseases are caused by failures or overactivity of the different principles. For example, he says that in leprosy “there is adhesion of the nutriment but no real assimilation”. One faculty is working but the other is disordered. If you want to be a good physician, he says, you need to understand all these faculties so you can identify diseases (tell what faculties are misfunctioning) and treat them — “how are you going to be successful in treatment, if you do not understand the real essence of each disease?” he says. The four humors do make their way into this mix eventually, especially in the second and third books. (Though the translator often insists on translating “humor” as “juice”, which makes me very uncomfortable.) The relationship seems to be that the humors are the building material of the body, but that all the activity is carried out through the natural faculties. The student needs to know the humors to understand what is being moved around, but the humors are primitive. To Galen, biology is all about these faculties shuffling, transforming, and combining different humors. VI. Anyways, that’s what Galen wants to be talking about. But about halfway through book one, he goes entirely off the rails and never really gets back on track. The thing that sets him off is other schools of medicine. It’s clear that Galen cannot stop thinking about them. They invade his every thought; he is beleaguered by them. I would seriously believe that he loses sleep over them. Some of the commentators I’ve read suggested that Galen was an arrogant man — one said he saw in Galen “the blind assumption that he alone was graced with the ability to bring Hippocrates’ work to completion”. My sense of Galen was that he is a man who is constantly exasperated. He is just trying to write basic pieces about how to be a good physician and philosopher, and people keep descending on him with the most unbelievably pedantic arguments. Book One of On the Natural Faculties is divided into 17 sections, and he spends half of the first section hedging around ways people could potentially take his words in the wrong ways. These sound more than a little like intrusive thoughts, and it’s tempting to think that he’s blowing this all out of proportion. But from what I know about Galen’s life, it seems likely that he really was getting into disagreements all the time, and probably really did need to worry about people quoting his work out of context. One article in The Lancet describes him as “a public figure, known and recognised by many, accosted in the streets, challenged to debate.” It’s easy to imagine how being accosted in the streets might work its way into your head. Either way, these concerns absolutely consume him. He keeps getting drawn off on different tangents, before trying to return to the main thread with statements like: I said, however, that I was not going to enter into an argument with these people, and it was only because the example was drawn from the subject-matter of medicine, and because I need it for the present treatise, that I have mentioned it. Let us pass on, then, again to another piece of nonsense; for the sophists do not allow one to engage in enquiries that are of any worth, albeit there are many such; they compel one to spend one’s time in dissipating the fallacious arguments which they bring forward. What, then, is this piece of nonsense? Now, we usually refrain from arguing with people whose principles are wrong from the outset. Still, having been compelled by the natural course of events to enter into some kind of a discussion with them, we must add this further to what was said… Since, then, we have talked sufficient nonsense — not willingly, but because we were forced, as the proverb says, “to behave madly among madmen” — let us return again to the subject of urinary secretion. But, as I have said, one is driven to talk nonsense whenever one gets into discussion with such men. Having, therefore, given a concise and summary statement of the matter, I wish to be done with it. Of course, in the very next paragraph, he is immediately drawn back into a discussion of their shortcomings! In some ways, On the Natural Faculties is less of a medical treatise and more of a fascinating snapshot of the state of the academic medical world in the latter half of the second century CE. The tone sounds really contemporary in a lot of ways, and has a quality of acrimonious quibbling that is more than a little familiar, though I don’t think modern physicians are likely to be poisoned by their colleagues (but what do I know). V. We’ve established that Galen has a problem with other experts and schools of medical thought. That leaves us wondering how justified he is. Is he criticizing them for real problems in their work, or is this just partisan squabbling? What are the things that he takes such issue with from these other schools? I think there are two things he’s mostly complaining about. The first thing that really sets Galen off is sectarian dogmatism. “Everyone becomes like the first teacher that he comes across,” he says, “without waiting to learn anything from anybody else.” He bemoans sectarian partisanship and, in classic doctor fashion, uses a weird hygiene metaphor, calling it “excessively resistant to all cleansing process”. It is “harder to heal than any itch”. The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn! This is kind of tragicomic, because two of the main things Galen is accused of are 1) blindly following whatever Hippocrates said about medicine and 2) leading centuries of physicians to blindly follow whatever he wrote! It’s hard to know how blindly Galen is following the teachings of Hippocrates. On the one hand, he does refer to him as “most divine Hippocrates” at least once. On the other hand, he is open to pointing out the (rare) cases where he thinks Hippocrates has overlooked something, and even talks about how he wishes his opponents would criticize Hippocrates more directly! When someone disagrees with a whole suite of his intellectual heroes, he says, “now, one cannot be blamed for not agreeing with all these great men, nor for imagining that one knows more than they; but not to consider such distinguished teaching worthy either of contradiction or even mention shows an extraordinary arrogance.” Maybe other physicians really did follow Galen’s writing blindly in the centuries following his death. I’m not sure anymore. But Galen certainly can’t be blamed for it. He could not be clearer in stating that this is exactly what the student of medicine should avoid doing. It would be tempting to pass this all off as one-sided; “stop listening blindly to your teachers and listen blindly to me!” I don’t get that sense. First, we know that Galen studied all over the ancient world, so he was exposed to all sorts of ways of doing medicine. He practiced what he preached. It’s hard to know how fair a representation he’s giving of the other schools of thought, but he writes as though he has them all memorized, and he certainly was in a position to frequently get into debates with them. When he tells us that they’re uncritical, I’m tempted to believe him. Second, Galen makes a serious point to try to convince the reader of his positions. He’s not just stating “facts” and expecting you to bow down at his feet. He’s engaging with opposing points of view and trying to make compelling arguments that he thinks will convince his readers. VI. Finally, I don’t buy this because nowhere is Galen asking people to listen blindly to anyone, least of all himself. Because the second thing that REALLY sets Galen off is when people aren’t empirical enough! He constantly ridicules, in pretty harsh language, those who remain unconvinced by observation and experiment. Asclepiades, one particularly hated adversary, is charged with “bidding us distrust our senses where obvious facts plainly overturn his hypotheses.” Asclepiades has rather unusual opinions about the urinary system, and in one particularly strong example, Galen asks rhetorically (and sarcastically!), I do not suppose that Asclepiades ever saw a stone which had been passed by one of these sufferers, or observed that this was preceded by a sharp pain in the region between the kidneys and the bladder as the stone traversed the ureter, or that, when the stone was passed, both the pain and the retention at once ceased. It is worth while, then, learning how his theory account for the presence of urine in the bladder, and one is forced to marvel at the ingenuity of a man who puts aside these broad, clearly visible routes, and postulates others which are narrow, invisible—indeed, entirely imperceptible. Other schools are also attacked for denying “observed facts” or even “obvious facts”. Meanwhile, people who draw incorrect conclusions but respect the facts are praised. Galen cares a lot about physicians basing decisions on empirical observation. We know that he’s serious about this because of the many disturbing vivisection experiments he describes in great detail. In discussing digestion, he says, “I have personally, on countless occasions, divided the peritoneum of a still living animal and have always found all the intestines contracting peristaltically upon their contents.” He describes an experiment where you vivisect an animal, cutting away different coats of the esophagus, “then give the animal food and you will see that it still swallows although the peristaltic function has been abolished”. When describing the action of the stomach, he suggests that you can fill an animal with liquid food — “an experiment I have often carried out in pigs” — and cut them open “after three or four hours.” He really seems to want his readers to try these macabre exercises at home. “You may observe this yourself,” he says, “if you will try to hit upon the time at which the descent of food from the stomach takes place.” Fellow physicians are criticized for their lack of anatomical experience in the same way. “If he had ever practised anatomy, he might have known that the outer coat of the bladder springs from the peritoneum and is essentially the same as it.” The most extreme example comes from a debate with the disciples of Asclepiades about the function of the ureters, trying to convince this rival school that urine flows from the kidneys to the bladder through these channels. After exhausting his rhetorical options, Galen turns to empirical anatomy. First he shows them, in a dead animal, that the ureters connect the two structures. This isn’t enough. Next he shows them “in a still living animal, the urine plainly running out through the ureters into the bladder.” This doesn’t change their minds either. Next he takes a live animal, ligates the ureters, bandages the animal up, and lets it go. When he opens it up again later, he finds the ureters “quite full and distended”, and when he removes the ligature, everyone can see the urine flow into the bladder. You’d think the story would end there, but not so. Instead, says Galen, “tie a ligature round [the animal’s] penis and then … squeeze the bladder all over.” He points out that nothing goes back through the ureters to the kidneys, demonstrating that the conveyance is a special, one-way action. He goes on like this for a while. Let the animal urinate and tie a ligature around one ureter but not the other. Cut open both the ureters and see the urine “spurt out of it”. Bandage the animal up and open him up later to discover his insides full of urine and the bladder empty. “Now, if anyone will but test this for himself on an animal,” Galen concludes, “I think he will strongly condemn the rashness of Asclepiades.” Today we know that Galen was wrong, and that humorism isn’t a great way to think about medicine. But whatever Galen might have been lacking, it certainly was not the empirical bent. He was no armchair philosopher, and was more than happy to cut up lots of animals to make a point about the function of the ureters. This is funny because, again, this is the opposite of the story we’re told about Galen. He’s described as a pre-scientific or even unscientific thinker, believing that experimentation and investigation are a waste of time. Clearly this isn’t the case, and he made full use of all the resources available to him. We know that human dissection was prohibited in the empire, but Galen worked with gladiators, so we know that he had firsthand experience with human anatomy. He certainly was unafraid, even eager, to practice animal dissection and vivisection. Other doctors of the time didn’t seem to do either of these things, or at least didn’t do nearly as much, and so Galen starts looking more and more like a lone light of empiricism in the wilderness. (However extreme and disturbing his methods may be.) VII. In view of this, it’s extremely depressing to see Tetlock write, “yet Galen never conducted anything resembling a modern experiment.” Galen isn’t here to respond, but if he were, I imagine he would say: and yet Tetlock never conducted anything resembling a basic literature review! Galen definitely isn’t as charitable as we might want him to be. He calls some of the ideas he disagrees with “impossible, nay, perfectly nonsensical”, or “stupid—I might say insane”. His intellectual rivals “are like slaves” he says, “caught in the act of stealing … quite bewildered, and while the one says nothing, the other indulges in shameless lying.” But I’m pretty sympathetic to Galen’s position, because his contemporaries really do sound like idiots. Of course, all this is being filtered through Galen’s own account, but if he’s describing them with any accuracy, he is totally fair in saying that they have no idea what they are talking about. Some of the positions he argues against include: Urine passes into the bladder in the form of vapors, rather than being secreted by the kidneys and passed through the ureters to the bladder. Galen argues against this first by pointing out that the kidneys and bladder are connected by the ureters (which must have some purpose), and second by the extensive evidence from vivisection that I mentioned above.
Inline links: treating the gladiators of the city, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lcW4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7c4cb0d8-ef64-4d8c-8974-1887a2877063_469x776.jpeg, this piece, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6Gdb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbb854d87-de36-4173-ab8a-2728bd8605b5_1024x635.jpeg
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
April 16, 2021 · Original source
Although 2021 seems better than 1879 in absolute material terms, George's complaint still rings true: healthcare and higher education are increasingly unaffordable, inequality is as bad as it ever was, and The Rent Is Too Damn High. And even if all of these measures had improved as well, we still have to contend with a fundamental complaint: how can human civilization have piled up an amount of wealth best described as absolutely banana pants insane, and yetstill have poverty, oppression and cyclical recessions? Yes, greed, evil, and human nature will always be with us, but isn't it weird that we haven't eliminated these economic problems the same way we've eliminated Smallpox, Scurvy, and having to write your scathing polemics about Thomas Jefferson by candlelight with a goose feather? Giving the mic back to George, he closes the chapter with this haunting quote, first written 142 years ago: If there is less deep poverty in San Fran Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind new York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets? I'll just leave this here: Number of Homeless Children in U.S. At All-Time High; California Among Worst States. I. Wages and Capital George insists sloppy terminology leads to sloppy thinking. Naturally, he spends an entire chapter beating words to death to correct this. The Meaning of the Terms Let's start with Wealth. The common usage, both then and now, is "anything with an exchange value." George doesn't like how this mixes dissimilar things. By George, what is wealth? Wealth is produced when Nature's bounty is touched by human labor resulting in a tangible product that is the object of human desire. Labor is required, but the amount and type doesn't matter - George offers the example of simply picking a berry off a bush as an act that transforms nature's gifts into human wealth. Note particularly that human desire is an important requirement of wealth; it doesn't matter how much work someone put into something, if it doesn't gratify human needs or desires in some way, it's not wealth. Speaking of human desire, let's talk about Value. Where does a thing's value come from? The prevailing theory of the day was the Labor Theory of Value which originated with Adam Smith and David Ricardo, which says that Labor is the source of value. The early formulations were a bit ambiguous, here's Smith in Wealth of Nations for instance: The value of any commodity ... is equal to the quantity of labor which it enables him to purchase or command. Labor, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. So... is a thing's value how much labor it takes to make the thing, or how much labor someone's willing to exchange for the thing? Nowadays Labor Theory of Value is most commonly associated with Marx. Marx picks a lane and says the value of something is tied to the amount of "socially necessary labor" required to produce it. George goes the other way: It is never the amount of labor that has been exerted in bringing a thing into being that determines its value, but always the amount of labor that will be rendered in exchange for it. - Henry George, The Science of Political Economy, p. 253 In other words, "a thing's value is whatever someone is willing to pay for it." This is in line with the so-called marginal revolution (the movement, not the blog) and modern theories of value. Labor Labor is the exertion of human beings. It's possible to labor to no avail (try punching a concrete wall), but typically humans labor towards an end, such as gaining wealth. But whether or not we accomplish anything with our efforts, George calls them labor. Labor isn't just making things, by the way – it's also moving or exchanging them. Production Production is labor applied "to the production of wealth." You know, productively. This is all human exertion that isn't punching a concrete wall and rewards you for your efforts with something that fits the definition of wealth. Said wealth is the "product of labor." Wages whatever is received as the result or reward of exertion is "wages." No distinction here is made between blue-collar work and white-collar work – whether one is called "hourly pay" and the other is called "annual salary," George calls them both "wages." It doesn't matter whether you receive them from your boss, from customers, or from nature. If you do work and get something from it, you have received "wages." With those basics under our belt, let's circle back to Wealth: What are some examples of wealth? By George, Gold is wealth. Teddy bears are wealth. Tesla roadsters and candy canes and young adult vampire romance novels are wealth. The same goes for fish you've caught, deer you've hunted, and cool looking rocks you've picked up on your morning walk. The value of these things may differ, but as long as they're tangible, originate in nature, someone ever did a lick of work to make or acquire them, and a human being somewhere desires them for any reason, they're wealth. It gets a little clearer when we ask what isn't wealth. And by George, Money isn't wealth. Articles of gold are wealth because they're tangible things that have been dug up, crafted, and fulfill certain human desires. But paper currency, digital currencies, and other things that aren't inherently valuable but merely represent value are not wealth (outside of putting their physical articles in coin collections or making paper airplanes, and so forth). Now don't get the man wrong, these things are certainly valuable. They're just not wealth. They are certificates that represent claims on wealth. For any computer programmers in the audience, money is a pointer to wealth. Likewise Stocks and Bonds and other financial instruments are not wealth. These are also just claims on wealth. A creditor's title to Debt isn't wealth, either, it's just a claim on the debtor's (typically future) wealth. And, writing as he was not long after the Civil War, George points out that Slaves are not wealth either but, represent "merely the power of one class to appropriate the earnings of another class." Wealth, thus defined, is the terminal "ground truth" bits of the economy, and all the financial layers on top are fancy IOUs that just encode various claims on it. George offers a thought experiment to test if something is wealth: if you produce a pile of gold, fish, or Lego bricks, you've clearly increased the amount of wealth in the world. But if you produce a giant pile of IOUs that just records who owns what and who owes what to whom, it doesn't matter how many of them you pile up or how long the chains of ownership get, you still haven't increased the amount of real wealth in the world. Again, this isn't saying the IOUs aren't valuable, they are. But they're only valuable because they ultimately point to real wealth. If you magically transported everyone over to a hypothetical Earth 2, carrying over all of Earth 1's money and financial instruments but none of Earth 1's tangible wealth, the value of all those IOUs would instantly evaporate. Now what about digital goods? Leaving things like Bitcoin aside for the moment, let's consider the case of a digital image file: By George, this is wealth. Digital though it may be, it's physically encoded on a storage device somewhere, and is thus tangible (it's not a pure abstract concept flitting about in Platonic heaven) and has its origins in nature. Human exertion built the computer that encodes it, and clicking the button that saves it to disk or displays it on your screen is labor. Finally, it directly satisfies human desires (mine, at the very least). It's value may be negligible, but it's wealth. By contrast, the digital bit sitting in some database that says I own a particular eBook or mp3 is just a digital IOU – a claim on the wealth that are the physical bits on my local storage device or remote server that digitally encodes the files. The fact that digital files don't seem particularly physical, and that they can be trivially and endlessly copied, doesn't mean that Henry George, magically transported to today, wouldn't regard them as wealth. Okay, so is there anything else that's not wealth? By George, Bitcoin isn't wealth, in case you were wondering. It's just a (very fancy) financial instrument, a digital claim on wealth. And that goes for most crypto assets – a token on some blockchain that says I own a painting by Banksy is just another IOU, regardless of the technical sophistication of its distributed trustless ledger. What about intellectual property? Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are all different forms of Monopoly – the exclusive, government-granted legal right to do a particular thing (publish a certain book, manufacture a certain product, use a certain name in business, etc). The exclusive right to do or produce a thing, valuable as it may be, is not the thing itself. By George, Monopoly is not wealth. But there is something big that is wealth – the C-word. Capital. By George, Capital is "wealth devoted to procuring more wealth", and it's the next thing he insists everyone is hopelessly confused about. He quotes Adam Smith, agreeing with him thus far: That part of a man's stock which he expects to afford him revenue is called his capital. ...and also gives us a short etymology lesson on the origin of the term: The word capital, as philologists trace it, comes down to us from a time when wealth was estimated in cattle, and a man's income depended upon the number of head he could keep for their increase. ("Per capita" being the Latin for "by head") By George, all capital is wealth, but not all wealth is capital. George notes capital is often described as being "stored up labor", and endorses this view – but what it really means, is capital is stored up production. It's not literally the labor that's stored up but the wealth generated by it, set aside and then dedicated to the purpose of getting more wealth. George insists that it is the owner's intention that transforms wealth into capital. If you buy an old factory to throw parties in for your hipster friends, it's just wealth. But the minute you decide to put it to work to make something useful (or start charging your hipster friends a cover charge at the door), it becomes capital. George therefore further insists that a laborer's daily bread and the clothes on their back do not count as capital, because a person has to eat and wear clothes whether they work or not. The laborer's tools (and arguably their steel-toed work boots) can however be counted as capital, because their purpose is to assist the laborer in getting more wealth by working for wages, and the laborer wouldn't acquire, use, and maintain those things otherwise. George has more exclusions: We must exclude from the category of capital everything that may be included either as land or labor. Human exertion (labor) by itself can never be capital. The products of human labor become capital when they are stored up and set to the purpose of getting more wealth. To muddle this distinction defeats the point of having separate terms for those things at all, and prevents us from reasoning meaningfully about how they relate to one another. Labor is not capital, and neither is labor by itself wealth, it produces wealth – and if it ain't wealth, it ain't capital. And that brings us to land. Land, land, land. By George, land is not wealth. And it's definitely not capital. The unique specialness of land is George's entire schtick and the very core of his philosophy. The term land embraces, in short, all natural materials, forces, and opportunities That means that a field or a meadow is "land", as is a mountain. But so are the fish in the sea, the clouds in the sky, veins of gold in the earth's crust, and the oil deep under ground. These things aren't yet wealth – not until human beings both a) desire them and b) touch them with labor. So... land is not wealth. But... how come? I mean, look: land is tangible, it "comes from nature", humans are always productively applying their labor to it, and it certainly seems capable of gratifying human desires. George sees this reasoning as understandable, but insists it's the root mistake that leads other political economists astray – because for George, land just is nature itself. Come again? Land is the ultimate source of all wealth, but it's most useful to think of it as a generator, acompletely separate entity from the wealth that human labor and desire draws from it. Players of Magic: the Gathering and Settlers of Catan should already have a solid grasp of this distinction: In modern times, George would grant electromagnetic spectrum and orbital real estate for satellites the same status of "land" that already applies to farmland and terrestrial real estate. We don't even need to speculate about whether he'd attach this status to sunlight because he straight-up predicted solar power: Even the lack of rain which makes some parts of the globe useless to man, may, if invention ever succeeds in directly utilizing the power of the sun's rays, be found to be especially advantageous for certain parts of production. (That's from Protection or Free Trade, footnote 19) The important thing to grasp about land is that it comes before everything humans do or make, and is itself a thing no human can make. Okay, smarty-pants, what about the Netherlands? They've been making land for centuries! Well, land in the Georgist sense doesn't refer simply to "dry land", but also the sea bed, the oceans, and the skies above. The "new land" in the Netherlands counts as an improvement to land that already existed. The seabed was always there, but by filling it in so you can walk around on it, now it's more useful to us (George has a lot to say about improvements to land, which we'll get to later). Okay, what is land not? nothing that is freely supplied by nature can be properly classed as capital By George, land is not wealth. And since it's not wealth, it's not capital. Okay, we get it. Land is very special to Mr. George and we must never put it in the same category as wealth, labor, capital, wages, production, money, or anything else. Why exactly is this so damn important? Well, by George, if you treat land the same way you would a bar of pig iron, an hour of work, or a dollar bill, before you know it you'll get poverty paradoxically advancing alongside progress, inexplicable bouts of industrial depression, literal genocides and holocausts (he's dead serious about this), and The Rent Being Too Damn High. With terminology now firmly established, George moves on to the relationship between wages and capital. 3-for-1 special on Wages, Capital, and Labor I'm condensing three chapters here because they all deal with the same basic thing. The question George wants to answer is: Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living? The conventional wisdom of George's time is that wages are governed by a fixed ratio between the number of laborers and the amount of capital devoted to their employment, because "the increase in the number of laborers tends naturally to follow and overtake any increase in capital." So it doesn't matter how much capital you throw at employing workers, it'll just attract even more workers splitting it up, so although wages might temporarily wiggle a bit in the long term they'll always settle back to a "natural" minimum. (As we'll see in the next section, this argument stems from Malthusianism). George spends some time methodically poking holes in the theory (it's predictions don't line up with the facts he observes), and then sets out to prove his replacement theory (emphases mine): wages, instead of being drawn from capital, are in reality drawn from the product of the labor for which they are paid. He pulls a G.K. Chesterton to make his point: During the time [the laborer] is earning the wages he is advancing capital to his employer, but at no time, unless wages are paid before work is done, is the employer advancing capital to him. He starts by identifying the source of confusion: Because wages are generally paid in money, and in many of the operations of production are paid before the product is fully completed, or can be utilized, it is inferred that wages are drawn from pre-existing capital I mean, the old theory seems sensible: the employer has capital and uses it to pay wages. But however you slice it, capital's investment gets paid back by production when it takes its cut, so does it even make a difference to talk about where wages are "drawn" from? Value goes out, value comes in, isn't it all a wash? By George, it isn't: in the old theory, because capital "must come first", it follows that "industry is limited by capital - that capital must be accumulated before labor is employed", which leads to a reductio ad absurdum – We are told that capital is stored-up or accumulated labor – "that part of wealth which is saved to assist future production." If we substitute for the word "capital" this definition of the word, the proposition carries its own refutation, for that labor cannot be employed until the results of labor are saved becomes too absurd for discussion. George anticipates the following rejoinder – Well, when we say 'labor is paid out of capital' we don't mean it as an absolute statement for all stages of human development (or else we have a chicken-and-the-egg problem and civilization could never have begun), we just mean it applies to, say, every civilization that's left the stone age. George will have none of it and spends three entire chapters relentlessly beating to death the idea that wages are drawn from capital instead of from production. He starts with the simple case where wages are paid in the form of direct, concrete wealth, then moves on to the more complex case where people are paid in money and other instruments. Laboring for wages: Imagine a fishing village where nobody cooperates – each person digs their own bait and catches their own fish. Then they discover labor specialization and realize they can catch more fish together if one specializes in digging and the other in catching. So the digger digs, the catcher catches, and they share the fish. The digger really contributes as much to the catch as the one who physically pulls the fish off the hook even though the digger never directly "caught" a fish, and the fish he gets for his work is directly paid out of his contribution to the total production. Later, our fisherfolk invent canoes, and one stays home making and repairing canoes. This increases the haul of the digger and catcher, and the canoe-er gets paid out of her contribution to the increased production. And so it goes as society continues to advance. The work the specialist puts in causes more fish to be caught, and that person's wages is drawn from the growing pile of fish. As George puts it: "Earning is making." George gives another example: If I take a piece of leather and work it up into a pair of shoes, the shoes are my wages – the reward of my exertion. Surely they are not drawn from capital – either my capital or any one else's capital – but are brought into existence by the labor of which they become the wages; and in obtaining this pair of shoes as the wages of my labor, capital is not even momentarily lessened one iota... As my labor goes on, value is steadily added, until, when my labor results in the finished shoes, I have my capital plus the difference in value between the material and the shoes. And another: If I hire a man to gather eggs, to pick berries, or to make shoes, paying him from the eggs, the berries, or the shoes that his labor secures, there can be no question that the source of the wages is the labor for which they are paid. George goes on to say it doesn't matter if you're paid in money or directly in wealth, because the money is a direct claim on the underlying wealth. It also doesn't matter if you get paid on commission. Imagine a whaling ship where each crewman gets paid a share out of whatever the ship catches. When the ship sails back into port with a hold full of whale oil and bone, the crew gets paid in money, the owner simultaneously adds to his capital oil and bone. The crew's money directly represents their share of the concrete wealth that is the oil and bone. The owner's capital hasn't decreased, and the workers drew their wages directly from the production. So let's get to the point, Mr. George – wages aren't drawn from capital but instead from production. Great, let's grant that – so what? George hammers away at this because thinking wages are drawn from capital leads to a false conclusion, namely that "labor cannot exert its productive power unless supplied by capital with maintenance." "Maintenance?" Well, workers need food and clothing and they get paid by their employers, so you could imagine capital as a limiting factor on labor. But by George, food and clothing isn't capital, it's just wealth, as we said before. And with regard to wages, the point is that the employer always gets "paid" first, because the second the laborer produces value, the employer's capital increases: As in the exchange of labor for wages the employer always gets the capital created by the labor before he pays out capital in the wages, at what point is his capital lessened even temporarily? Okay, but what if I'm just a terrible businessman and I pay somebody $500 an hour to smash Ming vases, then sell the fragments as aggregate to a construction crew for a few pennies a pound, all at a tremendous loss? Surely then the laborer's wages must be drawn from my capital, because there's not enough productive value generated by the labor to draw them from! George says okay, sure, but only because I'm an idiot and will soon be out of business: Yet, unless the new value created by the labor is less than the wages paid, which can be only an exceptional case, the capital which he had before in money he now has in goods – it has been changed in form, but not lessened. Fair enough, Mr. George, but what if I'm building some enormously expensive multi-decade project, like a dam or a nuclear power plant or a cathedral? The kind of thing we call a "capital-intensive" project? What do you have to say to that? George points out that as laborers labor, they progressively add value to whatever they're producing. Take the case of a shipwright building ships for an employer – even if the boss can't sell a half-finished ship, it still holds value (for one, it costs less to finish a half-finished ship then no ship at all). And with every stroke of the laborer's work, the employer who owns the shipyard gets an incremental increase in his stock of capital. It is not the last blow, any more than the first blow, that creates the value of the finished product – the creation of value is continuous, it immediately results from the exertion of labor. A pedant would point out that the "last hit" that finishes the product which makes it ready for market adds disproportionate value, but George's point is just to establish that value is continuously created, and doesn't magically come into being allat once right at the end. George further points out that if you look at things like agriculture you'll see the market directly acknowledging his theory: As a plowed field will bring more than an unplowed field, or a field that has been sown more than one merely plowed... It is tangible in the case of orchards and vineyards which, though not yet in bearing, bring prices proportionate to their age. George freely admits that capital can be required for certain kinds of work, but he disagrees with what its purpose is. It's not a pool that wages get paid out of. He goes on for another chapter on "The Maintenance of Laborers Not Drawn From Capital" but I think we can safely skip it and move on. TL:DR – George hammers to absolute death the idea that Laborers derive their own maintenance (food/shelter/clothing/etc) from their wages, with George insisting it is drawn from production and... you guessed it, not from capital. At least some of George's ideas will not seem so radical to modern readers (especially those already critical of capitalism or neoclassical economics), but it's important to understand that at the time almost everything he was saying was considered deeply radical and shocking. Capital was the fundamental driving force of the economy and labor was utterly dependent on it, and the Malthusian theory of overpopulation was the accepted explanation for why wages were low and workers were starving. Political Cartoon literally demonizing Henry George – Puck magazine Oct. 20, 1886 The Real Functions of Capital Okay, Mr. George. You've spent three whole chapters beating me over the head with what the functions of capital aren't. So what are the functions of capital? Capital "increases the power of labor to produce wealth." How? By enabling labor to apply itself more effectively (power tools go brrrr)
Inline links: absolutely banana pants insane, Number of Homeless Children in U.S. At All-Time High; California Among Worst States, Labor Theory of Value, marginal revolution, blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!szbX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F02e3f9db-5fe4-4a1b-bd19-5a13bac84aa1_500x500.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cDFG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28ef979e-83da-4d1b-8d81-5f08fd6103a5_516x600.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PVE6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F68f4f7f0-2016-4fe9-9996-879a3c92db74_516x600.png, Protection or Free Trade, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aeD5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F348d4d74-8c98-42e6-b5f7-7bd79b30a816_960x611.png
Ancient Plagues
December 15, 2021 · Original source
The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu. They actually extracted it from the cadaver of a frozen woman. that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.
And then there's smallpox. No mystery why smallpox died out - we killed it. But then we stopped vaccinating people against it, and now if it comes back it would be really bad.
Inline links: we killed it
This actually raises a broader question: how worried should we be about getting smallpox from corpses and artifacts in general? Should we freak out every time we dig up an Egyptian mummy? This paper does our freaking out for us - they catalog several incidents of archaeological or incidental excavation of smallpox-infected corpses - including, yes, the mummy of Pharaoh Rameses V.
Inline links: This paper
Book Review: The Others Within Us
May 21, 2024 · Original source
Falconer treats our Eurocentric individualistic citadel mind as a terrible historical mistake, in which a whole continent foolishly amputated its capacity for spiritual experiences. I think of it as more of a triumph: realizing on some level that belief in demons made them real, we eradicated that belief with the same fervor that we displayed when eradicating smallpox, polio, and all the other causative agents for dangerous medical conditions.
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
The book speculated that the Antonine Plague - the one that killed 33% of Romans in 165 AD - was probably smallpox. A population’s first encounter with smallpox is inevitably horrible - just ask the Native Americans. 165 AD might have been when the disease first evolved, which explains why the Europeans suffered Native American level death rates.
H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
January 01, 2025 · Original source
<1% chance it’s more than 100x as bad (unprecedented) If you multiply the 5% chance of an H5N1 pandemic per year by the 7% chance of severity ≥ Spanish Flu, you get an 0.35% chance of a Spanish Flu level pandemic this year - one in three hundred. That’s a little higher than base rates - the last pandemic as bad as Spanish flu was smallpox hitting the Indians circa 1500. If we don’t count that one (where would our conquistador equivalents come from?), then the last equally bad pandemic was the Black Death in the 1300s. So we seem to get that level of pandemic once every 500 - 1000 years; a 1/300 chance suggests a 2-3x elevated risk. The Spanish Flu killed about 50 million people. A second Spanish flu could kill more people (because the population is higher), or fewer people (because medical care is better). If we assume those two cancel out, and that a second Spanish flu’s death toll would also be 50 million, then a 1/300 chance of 50 million deaths = 166,666 deaths. In some weird probabilistic expected utility way, about as many people will probably die of H5N1 next year as died in the past year of the Ukraine War. You will have to decide whether this is a reasonable way to allocate mental real estate to different catastrophes. Other Considerations Even if H5N1 doesn’t go pandemic in humans for a while, it is already pandemic in many birds including chickens, getting there in cows, and possibly gearing up to get there in pigs. This will have economic repercussions for farmers and meat-eaters. The CDC and various other epidemiological groups have raised the alarm about drinking raw milk while H5N1 is epidemic in cows. There is an obvious biological pathway by which the virus could get into raw milk and be dangerous, but I haven’t seen anyone quantify the risk level. Epidemiologists hate raw milk, think there is never any reason to drink it, and will announce that risks > benefits if the risk is greater than zero. I don’t know if the risk level is at a point where people who like raw milk should avoid it. Everyone says that pasteurized milk (all normal milk; your milk is pasteurized unless you get it from special hippie stores) is safe. There are already H5N1 vaccines for both chickens and humans; pharma companies are working hard on cows. First World governments have been stockpiling human vaccines just in case, but have so far accumulated enough for only a few percent of the population. If H5N1 goes pandemic, it will probably be because it mutated or reassorted, and current vaccines may not work against the new pandemic strain. Some people have suggestions for how to prepare for a possible pandemic, but none of them are very surprising: stockpile medications, stockpile vaccines, stockpile protective equipment. The only one that got so much as a “huh” out of me was Institute for Progress’ suggestion to buy out mink farms. Minks are even worse than pigs in their tendency to get infected with lots of different animal and human viruses; they are exceptionally likely to be a source of new zoonotic pandemics. Mink are farmed for their fur, but there aren’t as many New York City heiresses wearing mink coats as there used to be, and the entire US mink industry only makes $80 million/year. We probably lose more than $80 million/year in expectation from mink-related pandemics, so maybe we should just shut them down, the same way we tell the Chinese to shut down wet markets in bat-infested areas. ACX grantee One Day Sooner is trying to help the FDA get more resources for Operation Warp Speed style pushes that could expedite approval of pandemic-related vaccines. ACX grantee Duncan Purvis is trying to improve existing influenza vaccines in ways that could make them more effective. ACX grantee Blueprint Biosecurity is working on pan-viral suppression techniques. Conclusions / Predictions All discussed earlier in the piece, but putting them here for easy reference - see above for justifications and qualifications. H5N1 is already pandemic in birds and cows and will likely continue to increase the price of meat and milk.
Inline links: raised the alarm, H5N1 vaccines, buy out mink farms, exceptionally likely, is trying to help the FDA get more resources, is trying to improve existing influenza vaccines, is working on pan-viral suppression techniques