Noel Johnson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. This one, I’ve looked at a little bit. And actually, Steve Broadberry and — I forgot his name [Bruce Campbell]— other people have been looking at this as well. The Samalas is happening right around the time of these barons’ wars that I was talking about. Particularly, it happens right before the Second Barons’ War. While people have been looking at it, you see that the timing’s not perfect, but it did pile on additional agricultural pressure on these nobles at a time when they were all discontented with the king’s power. They might have been individually upset before, but now they’re all becoming upset at the same time because you have crops failing, the king is still asking for revenues, and they all are feeling the pressure at the same time. And you end up getting a coordinated political action against the rulers. Now, as it turns out, there happened to be bad weather occurring in the two years previous to Samalas as well, so this wasn’t just the volcano in that circumstance. It was the volcano in addition to some other bad luck. But it’s the environment, the climate playing a role, taking on an agency role in generating political change. And that’s through coordinating activity that I think is interesting. There’s also something interesting to be said, that these events, these large climactic events and large epidemiological events that I’m talking about — they also have a bias, in that they tend to be worse when you have places that are networked together and people that are integrated. So you could also look at, say, 1815 — there’s another big volcano that goes off that’s called Tambora. In the case of Tambora, you have market integration, more or less, within Europe by 1815, meaning that when you have idiosyncratic shocks, climate shocks hitting places across Europe, you tend to have trade smoothing those over, so you don’t see it in grain prices very much, or anything like this. But when you have something like Tambora, which is a VEI 7 — it’s a very, very large volcano, the largest since Samalas. And it in the 13th century would go off, it makes it snow in Maine in June and all over the world because of all the particulates in the air and so forth, blocking the sun in April of 1816 and in 1817. And you see very much in that circumstance, the markets can’t handle it. Another project that I’ve been working on actively is trying to put together as much information as I can about that circumstance, about that event, and to basically see what was the effect that it had on these markets. What sort of effects did it have on how people were impacted with their health? And basically, to ask questions about how robust market institutions are to dealing with basically correlated supply shocks that are very, very large. And we really don’t have many like that, so I find that interesting as well. Returning to your work on tolerance, a speculative question: If you think of prejudice as having become worse when some stakes are higher, and in some ways states are stronger, and there’s more heterogeneity on the table, are you optimistic or pessimistic about tolerance today? That is, do you think we’ve cleared some hurdle, and we’re never headed back? Or do you think it’s back and forth?…

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