The running of the bulls

Apologies for any grammatical gaffes; I write with frantic urgency tonight.

Because this is bad. Actually, bad doesn't begin to describe it.

Greenspan calls it the worst economy in a century. Robert Peston of BBC News? "Meltdown Monday." The Associated Press summed it up in a word: "stunning."

That it is.

I'm a young guy. I've got some vague memories from the old Bush Administration rattling around in my mind; as a doctoral student in history I know my Americana.

But I was a Clinton kid. I entered and just about left my teenage years while Bubba ran things. I remember "it's the economy, stupid" (and my outrage over Clinton mocking an old man). I remember the late great Peter Jennings wondering whether computers had banished recession to the trashbin of history. I remember members of Clinton's administration lecturing the Japanese about their economic failings. And yes, I watched Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser, when the biggest news week in, week out was just how high the stockmarket had climbed. I didn't know what it meant back then - but I did know it was good. The economic crises I learned about in those boring highschool classes? Ah, the folly of the ancients. The future was bright, the west ascendent . . . BORING!

What a difference a little George W. makes. Okay, it's not all his fault. It would be simplistic to assume that even a President has absolute control over the vast machinery of our global economy. So let's look at the past eight years from an entirely economic perspective, leaving politics aside for now.

The picture is pretty bleak.

Instability in the Middle East; skyrocketing fuel prices. Failing airlines; a teetering industrial sector (although, how's Halliburton doing these days?). The export not only of low-level manufacturing jobs to the third world but, increasingly, of high-level technical and scientific positions to Europe and Asia. Booming unemployment; plummeting consumer confidence.

The camel was overburdened, but it wasn't a straw that broke its back. Instead, a ten-ton boulder: the credit crisis or, more accurately, the subprime mortgage crisis. Essentially the U.S. housing bubble burst: risk was undervalued, loans given too easily. It's the sort of thing that could stagger a robust economy, let alone that dead man walking Bush had called promising (okay, I can't help incorporating some politics - especially when this is happening).

Is this a good time to mention that one academic who foresaw the crisis years in advance is called Toby Daglish? No?

In the last week things got worse. Credit is kind of important to a modern economy; among other things, it's what drives major purchases and powers the market. And Wall Street bankers discovered they had made their share of bad loans. On September 7 the Federal Housing Finance Agency formally took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae, two firms that owned or guaranteed about $12 trillion dollars in the mortgage market.

And then today, for Wall Street "the most extraordinary 24 hours since the late 1920s." Merril Lynch, a financial services and insurance firm, swallowed by the Bank of America. Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, announcing bankruptcy. That's $700 billion . . . gone. And insurance giant AIG, teetering on the precipice of disaster. Oh, by the way: a nosedive in stock markets around the world not seen since September 11.

Through it all home values keep falling, and the subprime mortgage crisis continues, intensifies, a fire that can perhaps only end with the destruction of the forest.

Remember when pundits and party hacks bickered about whether we were really in a recession? The question now is just how bad things can get. Just like I had a certain fascination in seeing how high the markets could go when I turned to PBS in the Clinton years, now I feel a morbid, sinister sort of curiosity when Wolf Blitzer's bearded mug flickers across my TV. How many billions lost today? What news from the front? And could this be the beginning of the end for America's economic hegemony?

I'm no economic expert - not even close. Actually, the most I know about these things concerns the pre-war state of the Nazi economy. So beyond this vague, nightmarish outline and my own surging worry I can't sketch a clearer picture.

But at least the politicians are keeping up to date on things. Right?

Quoth New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine: “I do not understand how we got into this situation."

Just what we need to hear.

Climate and Human History

My thoughts tonight turn to climate change, as often they do. My doctoral dissertation will examine the impact of the Little Ice Age on Dutch society, discerning whether the sudden, prolonged cooling of our planet around 1300 had any part to play in the simultaneous rise to power of Holland in the low countries - and eventually the world. The bigger questions are obvious: how do humans respond to climate change? How does - and did - such changeimpact history? What lessons can we draw - if any?

On a smaller level the questions are just as interesting . . . and significantly more innovative. Did the Little Ice Age have a greater - or, at least, more negative - impact on societies competing with Holland for regional dominance? Did lower sea levels facillitate efforts at land reclamation in the Netherlands? Did they improve access to peat, the driving energy source behind the Dutch Golden Age (and capitalist economy) of the 17th Century? Did increasingly ferocious storms - and the combined response they necessitated - serve as catalyst for the uniquely egalitarian nature of contemporary Dutch society?

Such a pronounced impact would not be unusual given the impact of the Little Ice Age elsewhere in Europe. After all, the Vikings were virtually extinguished as a major European power by the onset of climatological cooling. Greenland was obviously a lost cause (and the suffering there was truly apalling - "chilling," as an unfortunate, unpleasant former colleague would awkwardly announce). Iceland was surrounded by pack ice from the arctic, isolated from the rest of the Viking world. Of course, Viking colonization attempts further to the West were scarcely realistic now. More importantly, Sweden and Norway lost half their population - Denmark a third.

But the consequences were as pronounced a bit farther to the south. In the wake of period of great prosperity Scotland was particularly affected when cold winds first blew from the North; harvests failed beginning in the fourteenth century, farms in higher elevations were simply abandoned, and before long unrest swept across the country. In a cold, dry climate Scotland was increasingly eclipsed by England, which, while gripped by a climate so frigid that the Thames froze over during winter, nonetheless escaped devastation on the same scale. A union of the Scottish and English parliaments was arguably rendered inevitable . . . and it is no coincidence that it followed in the wake of the coldest period in the history of the Little Ice Age.

What consequences, then, across the channel? Strangely, little has been written about the cooling climate's impact on the Low Countries, a region undergoing tremendous change and uniquely sensitive to climatological fluctuations.

Here's another interesting caveat: during the "Little Ice Age" - the most significant cooling event to afflict our planet in 10,000 years - the world's average temperature dipped by 1-2 Celsius.

In 2007 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarized the belief of more than 2500 scientists from 150 countries: the Earth’s average temperature will rise by at least 1 Celsius by 2100. Scientists described in vivid terms the catastrophic and apparently inevitable results of such a deceptively small increase, warning of flooding, drought and intensified storms.

Perched on a rollercoaster just beginning its descent, that's what we worry about today - sweeping changes in the shape and nature of our planet driven by a rise of just one or two celsius. But it's happened before, with an impact lessened only by the diminished scale of humanity's presence on Earth . . . and, of course, the absence of a risk for runaway, out of control warming through the greenhouse effect.

Still, the point is simple: what is to come has happened before. That's what makes this project so interesting. If the world is undergoing potentially catastrophic climate change, shouldn't we examine those who thrived when it happened the last time? Thrived, it must be said, by creating an expansive, capitalist economy nearly two centuries before the Industrial Revolution?

It should be interesting. At least . . . as interesting as such research can be.