Month: September 2017
“Why Were We Untouchables?”
Isaac Chotiner interviews Sujatha Gidla, author of the new book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, in Slate.
Can you explain why someone’s caste in India is so hard to hide? I think a common American response could be, why do you tell people what your caste is?
Oh, caste is a village social institution. The village social institution persisted for a very long time, and it still does because 80 percent of Indians still live in villages. In villages, castes are very distinct by their occupation, for one thing, and second where they live. Each caste has its own colony. That is where they live. All castes don’t live together mingled. Each has separate colonies.
Because of that, everybody knows who you are and also because of what job you do. When it comes to cities, people who came from villages, they still carry those, “Oh, you are such and such person’s relative,” this and that, so they would know. Apart from that, the way you dress, your surname, what you eat, what gods you’re worshiping, and whether you can wear jewelry or not and how you cut your hair. All of these things show your caste. And because the system is 3,000 years old, even if it scientifically does not have a genetic imprint, it has something very close to it. People’s body language—the way they carry themselves—shows what caste they are.
Well-off “helicopter” parents are super annoying, but they didn’t create economic inequality
Mike Konczal in Vox:
Richard Reeves, the co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, gives a strong affirmative answer in his new book Dream Hoarders. Indeed, he argues professionals are the central drivers of inequality within our economy.
“There is one good reason why many Americans may feel as if the upper middle class is leaving everyone else behind: They are,” he writes. Reeves defines the upper middle class as those in the top 20 percent of households, or those whose incomes start at around$115,000 a year. Reeves believes “it is about time those of us in the favored fifth recognized our privileged position.”
Yet the book is based on three arguments, each of which is flawed. His first contention is that inequality isn’t a problem primarily of the top 1 percent but of the top 20 percent. “This obsession with the upper class [the top 1 percent] allows the upper middle class to convince ourselves we are in the same boat as the rest of America; but it is not true.”
His second argument is that professionals are “hoarding” opportunity for themselves. Opportunity hoarding happens “when the upper middle class does not win by being better but by rigging the competition in our favor.” Examples he emphasizes are legacy admissions (when children of elite colleges get admissions preferences), unpaid internships (which only well-off young people can afford), and exclusive zoning in highly desirable urban areas.
More here.
The First White President
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic:
IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
more here.
Bulgaria’s post-1989 demostalgie
Elitza Stanoeva at Eurozine:
My personal memory of 10 November 1989 is one of confusion and embarrassment. Ten years of age at the time, I came home from school and found my parents laughing and jumping around the kitchen like madmen. Through uncontrolled laughter, they finally answered my questions about what was going on with the brief statement: ‘Todor Zhivkov has fallen.’ Having recently joined the ranks of the pioneers, a membership extended to all third-graders, I was sufficiently indoctrinated to object through tears ‘But he is such a good man’, which only added to their exultation.
In reality, our ‘breakdown of communism’ one day after the fall of the Berlin Wall was a palace coup rather than a triumph of revolutionary momentum. With Soviet blessing, the Politburo of the Bulgarian Communist Party demanded the resignation of Todor Zhivkov, party leader since 1954, and on 10 November he handed it in officially during a televised party plenum. Less of a regime change than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, this event did not undermine the communists’ grip on power as state control was passed to Petar Mladenov, Minister of Foreign Affairs since 1971. The party – soon to be renamed to Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) – committed itself to organizing free elections with the hope of retaining control. With the name change, the BSP washed its hands of responsibility for the abuse of power by the former regime by putting Zhivkov on trial for communist crimes.
more here.
A reconsideration of ‘The Wages of Fear’
J. Hoberman at Lapham's Quarterly:
The Wages of Fear, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1953, is movie as doom show: the four principal characters have signed on to a suicide mission, driving two truckloads of nitroglycerin across three hundred miles of winding, mountainous, badly paved roads. After a lengthy setup, the movie itself becomes a fuse of indeterminate length. “You sit there waiting for the theater to explode,” the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther ended his review when The Wages of Fear opened in early 1955 at the posh Paris Theater in Manhattan.
An evocation of human existence under threat of instant annihilation, The Wages of Fear is no less a manifestation of nuclear anxiety than the Japanese monster movie Godzilla (1954) or even Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). In its way, The Wages of Fear—in production when the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb at Enewetak in the Marshall Islands—is cinema’s original articulation of that angst. Given its flirtation with total obliteration, the movie could have been titled, after Sartre’s 1943 magnum opus, Being and Nothingness.
more here.
Friday Poem
Brown Circle
My mother wants to know
why, if I hate
family so much,
I went ahead and
had one. I don’t
answer my mother.
What I hated
was being a child,
having no choice about
what people I loved.
I don’t love my son
the way I meant to love him.
I thought I’d be
the lover of orchids who finds
red trillium growing
in the pine shade, and doesn’t
touch it, doesn’t need
to possess it. What I am
is the scientist,
who comes to that flower
with a magnifying glass
and doesn’t leave, though
the sun burns a brown
circle of grass around
the flower. Which is
more or less the way
my mother loved me.
I must learn
to forgive my mother,
now that I am helpless
to spare my son.
.
Louise Gluck
from American Poets of the 90's
David R. Godine, publisher
.
does microdosing on lsd make you more creative? meet the people breakfasting on acid
Emma Hogan in More Intelligent Life:
Every three days Nathan (not his real name), a 27-year-old venture capitalist in San Francisco, ingests 15 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide (commonly known as LSD or acid). The microdose of the psychedelic drug – which generally requires at least 100 micrograms to cause a high – gives him the gentlest of buzzes. It makes him feel far more productive, he says, but nobody else in the office knows that he is doing it. “I view it as my little treat. My secret vitamin,” he says. “It’s like taking spinach and you’re Popeye." Nathan first started microdosing in 2014, when he was working for a startup in Silicon Valley. He would cut up a tab of LSD into small slices and place one of these on his tongue each time he dropped. His job involved pitching to investors. “So much of fundraising is storytelling, being persuasive, having enough conviction. Microdosing is pretty fantastic for being a volume knob for that, for amplifying that.” He partly credits the angel investment he secured during this period to his successful experiment in self-medication. Of all the drugs available, psychedelics have long been considered among the most powerful and dangerous. When Richard Nixon launched the “war on drugs” in the 1970s, the authorities claimed LSD caused people to jump out of windows and fried users’ brains. When Ronald Reagan was the governor of California, which in 1966 was one of the first states to criminalise the drug, he argued that “anyone that would engage or indulge in [LSD] is just a plain fool”.
…LSD works by interacting with serotonin, the chemical in the brain that modulates mood, dreaming and consciousness. Once the drug enters the brain (no mean feat), it hijacks the serotonin 2A receptor, explains Robin Carhart-Harris, a scientist at Imperial College London who is among those mapping out the effects of psychedelics using brain-scanning technology. The 2A receptor is most heavily expressed in the cortex, the part of the brain in which consciousness could be said to reside. One of the first effects of psychedelics such as LSD is to “dissolve a sense of self,” says Carhart-Harris. This is why those who have taken the drug sometimes describe the experience as mystical or spiritual. The drug also seems to connect previously isolated parts of the brain. Scans from Carhart-Harris’s research, conducted with the Beckley Foundation in Oxford, show a riot of colour in the volunteers’ brains, compared with those who have taken a placebo. The volunteers who had taken LSD did not just process those images they had actually seen in their visual cortexes; instead many other parts of the brain started processing visions, as though the subject was seeing things with their eyes shut. “The brain becomes more globally interconnected,” says Carhart-Harris. The drug, by acting on the serotonin receptor, seems to increase the excitability of the cortex; the result is that the brain becomes far “more open”.
More here.
how humans are evolving: Analysis of 215,000 people’s DNA suggests variants that shorten life are being selected against
Bruno Martin in Nature:
A huge genetic study that sought to pinpoint how the human genome is evolving suggests that natural selection is getting rid of harmful genetic mutations that shorten people’s lives. The work, published in PLoS Biology1, analysed DNA from 215,000 people and is one of the first attempts to probe directly how humans are evolving over one or two generations. To identify which bits of the human genome might be evolving, researchers scoured large US and UK genetic databases for mutations whose prevalence changed across different age groups. For each person, the parents’ age of death was recorded as a measure of longevity, or their own age in some cases. “If a genetic variant influences survival, its frequency should change with the age of the surviving individuals,” says Hakhamanesh Mostafavi, an evolutionary biologist at Columbia University in New York City who led the study. People who carry a harmful genetic variant die at a higher rate, so the variant becomes rarer in the older portion of the population.
Mostafavi and his colleagues tested more than 8 million common mutations, and found two that seemed to become less prevalent with age. A variant of the APOE gene, which is strongly linked to Alzheimer’s disease, was rarely found in women over 70. And a mutation in the CHRNA3 gene associated with heavy smoking in men petered out in the population starting in middle age. People without these mutations have a survival edge and are more likely to live longer, the researchers suggest. This is not, by itself, evidence of evolution at work. In evolutionary terms, having a long life isn’t as important as having a reproductively fruitful one, with many children who survive into adulthood and birth their own offspring. So harmful mutations that exert their effects after reproductive age could be expected to be ‘neutral’ in the eyes of evolution, and not selected against. But if that were the case, there would be plenty of such mutations still kicking around in the genome, the authors argue. That such a large study found only two strongly suggests that evolution is “weeding” them out, says Mostafavi, and that others have probably already been purged from the population by natural selection.
More here.
Jared Kushner’s Harvard Admissions Essay
Megan Amram in The New Yorker:
Dear Harvard,
How are you? I hope you are well! My name is Jared Kushner, and I would like to go to you. As an example of how smart I am, here is some money.
I heard from my daddy and my friends’ daddies that you are a big house for smart, good boys. I am a good boy! I am nice and my face is very smooth. Would you like a hundred-dollar bill? It has Benjamin Franklin on it! He is silly, because he only has hair on the sides, not on the top. Here are some of him!
Here are some facts about me: I am Jared. I am more than six feet tall, which is funny, because feet are on your legs, not how tall you are! That always makes me laugh. My favorite color is green, like money. My favorite shape is rectangle, like money. I also like round, which is like some kinds of money that poor people use for littering in fountains.
More here.
How did “American Gothic” become so famous?
Cancer’s Invasion Equation
Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New Yorker:
One evening this past June, as I walked along the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago, I thought about mussels, knotweed, and cancer. Tens of thousands of people had descended on the city to attend the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the world’s preëminent conference on cancer. Much of the meeting, I knew, would focus on the intrinsic properties of cancer cells, and on ways of targeting them. Yet those properties might be only part of the picture. We want to know which mollusk we’re dealing with; but we also need to know which lake.
A few weeks before the ASCO meeting, at Columbia University’s hospital on 168th Street, I met a woman with breast cancer. Anna Guzello, a supermarket cashier from Brooklyn, had noticed a small lump in her left breast a few months earlier. (I’ve changed some of her identifying details.) A mammogram then revealed a hazy, spidery mass, and a biopsy confirmed that the tumor was malignant. Guzello had a total mastectomy of the breast—a simple lumpectomy would not have sufficed, given the size and the location of the mass—and planned to have surgical reconstruction. On an afternoon in May, she came to see Katherine Crew, a breast oncologist at Columbia, to discuss the next steps in her treatment. Crew’s office, on the tenth floor of the hospital, is a small, square, sparsely furnished room. The light from a fluorescent desk lamp was flickering, and Crew switched it off. She wanted no distractions. Guzello, her hair coiled into a tight bun, leaned forward, frowning intently, as Crew drew pictures and wrote notes on a sheet of paper. “Can you read my writing?” Crew asked. “You can keep the notes and always come back with questions.” Her tone was gentle, but it was as if the weight of every word were multiplied. Guzello nodded. She drummed her fingernails on the table, producing a staccato, military sound—click-click-click—a nervous tic that seemed to calm her.
“First, the good news,” Crew said. “There’s no visible cancer left in your body.” The surgeons had removed the tumor, with wide margins on all sides. The lymph nodes in the armpits—a frequent site of cancer metastasis—also contained no sign of cancer. In oncology parlance, Guzello would be classified as N.E.D.: “no evidence of disease.” But that’s a squirrelly phrase: “evidence” refers to the state of our knowledge, not the state of the disease. Breast-cancer cells could have escaped and settled in Guzello’s brain, spinal cord, or bones, where they might be invisible to scans and tests. Women with complete mastectomies and “no evidence of disease” can relapse with metastatic breast cancer months, years, or even decades after the removal of the primary cancerous mass. Patients who succumb to cancer generally die of these metastases, not of their primary tumors. (Notable exceptions are brain cancers, which can kill patients by occupying the skull, and blood cancers, in which the cancerous cells are inherently metastatic.)
More here.
the solution to understanding the mysterious Voynich manuscript
Nicholas Gibbs at the TLS:
For medievalists or anyone with more than a passing interest, the most unusual element of the Voynich manuscript – Beinecke Ms. 408, known to many as “the most mysterious manuscript in the world” – is its handwritten text. Although several of its symbols (especially the ligatures) are recognizable, adopted for the sake of economy by the medieval scribes, the words formed by its neatly grouped characters do not appear to correspond to any known language. It was long believed that the text was a form of code – one which repeated attempts by cryptographers and linguists failed to penetrate. As someone with long experience of interpreting the Latin inscriptions on classical monuments and the tombs and brasses in English parish churches, I recognized in the Voynich script tell-tale signs of an abbreviated Latin format. But interpretation of such abbreviations depends largely on the context in which they are used. I needed to understand the copious illustrations that accompany the text.
I first came across the Voynich manuscript some fifteen years ago when, as a professional history researcher, I was looking into some of the more bizarre claims by commentators about some of my ancestors – John Florio (1553–1625) and Jane Fromond (1555–1604/5), the wife of Dr John Dee and grand-daughter of Thomas Fromond, the great English herbalist. I am also a muralist and war artist with an understanding of the workings of picture narration, an advantage I was able to capitalize on for my research. A chance remark just over three years ago brought me a commission from a television production company to analyse the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript and examine the commentators’ theories.
more here.
on claude mckay’s ‘Amiable with big teeth’
Vaughn Rasberry at Public Books:
In the mid-1930s, amid the Second World War and the Great Depression, competing forms of internationalism—the Communist International, Black Internationalism, the League of Nations—defined the political zeitgeist. In the United States as elsewhere, writers, artists, and activists weighed the possibilities and constraints of these and other formations, as individuals felt increasingly compelled to take a stand in world affairs. Yet even at a time when countless intellectuals embraced an internationalist politics, the cosmopolitan career of Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay stands out.
His extended sojourns took him from Jamaica to Tuskegee to New York City, then to London, Marseille, Moscow, and Morocco, among many more locales; and the global savoir faire borne of this nomadism infuses his final and recently discovered novel, Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and thloe Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, written by McKay in 1941 and unearthed in a Columbia University archive in 2009 by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, then a graduate student.
Expertly edited by Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards, the publication of Amiable with Big Teeth is indeed a monumental literary event, as the book’s dust jacket claims. The magnitude of this event, though, has less to do with the novel’s unforgettable gallery of Harlem’s politicos and tricksters and literati, or its time capsule depiction of black diaspora solidarity—unexpected literary gifts, to be sure—than with its treatment of a quirky but crucial conundrum: the puzzling nature of the relationship, or “love affair,” between blacks and Communists during the peak of internationalist activism.
more here.
remembering John Ashbery
David Lehman at The American Scholar:
John Ashbery, who died in the early morning hours on Sunday of Labor Day weekend, was doubtlessly the best known and most influential poet of his generation, a mentor to me, and a good friend. I went to readings he gave in my sophomore year at Columbia and was, like many of my classmates, blown away by his long poem “The Skaters,” which many of my buddies on the Columbia Review, committed as we were to the aesthetic of the New York School, thought was the single finest long poem in English since “The Waste Land.” He very quickly became my favorite poet.
Some of his friends called him Ashes. I favored JA in part because of his brilliant early poem “The Picture of Little JA in a Prospect of Flowers,” the title of which was itself a lift from a poem by Andrew Marvell. We—those of us privileged enough to get close to the man—would entertain one another with anecdotes about him, clever things he said, or just news of a great new poem, such as “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” which knocked our socks off when it appeared in Poetry magazine in 1974. A year later it was the title poem of a poetry collection that captured the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, an unprecedented triple crown.
more here.
Liberals Compete for the Soul of Economics
Noah Smith in Bloomberg:
The New Heterodox Explosion rose in large part out of strongly left-leaning intellectual circles, particularly sociology, the humanities and other disciplines outside economics. It has also found a home in some economics departments in other countries (most notably the U.K.). Recently, it has started to permeate blogs and the media.
The new website Evonomics, for example, is heavily devoted to strongly worded critiques of the entire edifice of modern economics and it’s where the work of many of the most outspoken champions of the New Heterodox Explosion appears. These include evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, activist and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, speechwriter Eric Liu and Eric Beinhocker of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. In a spate of recent blog posts and editorials, these thinkers have advocated replacing mainstream economic theory with thinking based on evolution, and/or on complexity theory.
Though it’s difficult to boil down these critiques to a few sentences, one basic theme of Wilson, Hanauer, et al.’s thinking is that modern economics is based on selfishness. Mainstream theories model human beings as atomistic individuals pursuing their own wants. But, say these Evonomics writers, people are social beings who care a lot about their fellow humans, and are also deeply embedded in larger social structures and organizations like communities, nations and cultures.
I’m sympathetic to this point of view. I’m not at all sure that economies can be completely understood by looking at individual decisions, any more than I’m certain the growth of a tree can be understood simply by looking at the motions of the particles in the leaves and roots. And I do wish that economists dedicated a lot more thought and attention to the phenomena they call “externalities” and “social preferences.”
But I’m also very wary of applying the Evonomics ideas to policy-making without a lot more work. First, the connection to evolution and complexity theory often seems less than solid. Nobody really knows if economies evolve the way organisms do. And efforts to connect complexity theory to economics, led by the Santa Fe Institute, have been going on for quite some time without any dramatic breakthroughs.
The Worst Lies You’ve Been Told About the Singularity
George Dvorsky in io9:
In a nutshell, the Technological Singularity is a term used to describe the theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence matches and then exceeds human intelligence. The term was popularized by scifi writer Vernor Vinge, but full credit goes to the mathematician John von Neumann, who spoke of [in the words of Stanislaw Ulam] “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
By “not continue” von Neumann was referring to the potential for humanity to lose control and fall outside the context of its technologies. Today, this technology is assumed to be artificial intelligence, or more accurately, recursively-improving artificial intelligence (RIAI), leading to artificial superintelligence (ASI).
Because we cannot predict the nature and intentions of an artificial superintelligence, we have come to refer to this sociological event horizon the Technological Singularity — a concept that’s open to wide interpretation, and by consequence, gross misunderstanding. Here are the worst:
“The Singularity Is Not Going to Happen"
Oh, I wouldn’t bet against it. The onslaught of Moore’s Law appears to be unhindered, while breakthroughs in brainmapping and artificial intelligencecontinue apace. There are no insurmountable conceptual or technological hurdles awaiting us.
And what most ASI skeptics fail to understand is that we have yet to even enter the AI era, a time when powerful — but narrow — systems subsume many domains currently occupied by humans. There will be tremendous incentive to develop these systems, both for economics and security. Superintelligence will eventually appear, likely the product of megacorporations and the military.
‘The S-word’: how young Americans fell in love with socialism
Chris McGreal in The Guardian:
At 18, Olivia Katbi was answering the phones and emails in a Republican state senator’s office in Ohio. Then the legislator threw his weight behind a particularly contentious anti-abortion law. “I realised that the party I’m working for is evil. After that I identified as a Democrat but I wasn’t really happy with their policies either,” said Katbi, now 25.
Back then, she couldn’t articulate her reservations about President Barack Obama. There were the drone strikes, and the limitations of his healthcare reforms. But mostly it was a frustrating sense he wasn’t serving her interests so much as those of a monied elite. So in the 2012 presidential election, Katbi voted for Jill Stein, the Green party candidate. But that didn’t change the world.
It was only last year, when Bernie Sanders made his run under the banner of democratic socialism, that it all started to fall into place.
“My politics were to the left of the Democratic party but I didn’t realise there was an entire ideology, an entire movement that was there. It had never occurred to me,” said Katbi. “Bernie was my introduction to the concept of democratic socialism. It’s not like I associated it with the cold war. It was a new concept to me completely. That was the case for a lot of millennials, which is why the movement has grown so much.”
Katbi, who works at an organization helping to settle immigrants and refugees in Portland, Oregon, became “socialist curious”. She joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a rapidly growing big-tent movement that has drawn in former communists and fired up millennials. The DSA is now the largest socialist organization in the US as surging membership, which has quadrupled since the election to around 25,000, has breathed new life into a once dormant group.
More here.
Thursday Poem
The Kings of the World
The kings of the world are growing old
and they shall have no inheritors.
Their sons died while they were boys,
and their neurasthenic daughters abandoned
the sick crown to the mob.
The mob breaks it into tiny bits of gold.
The Lord of the World, master of the age,
melts them in fire into machines,
which do his orders with low growls;
but luck is not on their side.
The ore feels homesick. It wants to abandon
the minting house and the wheels
that offer it such a meager life.
And out of factories and payroll boxes
it wants to go back into the veins
of the thrown-open mountain,
which will close again behind it.
.
Rainer Maria Rilke
from News of the Universe
translation: Robert Bly
.
What made 17th-century England so unbearable that thousands risked the voyage to America?
Tim Smith-Laing in The Telegraph:
With all the political focus on immigration to these shores, it is easy to forget that anyone ever leaves Britain. But they do. Last year the Office for National Statistics recorded the emigration of 128,000 British citizens. Of course, that needs to be seen in context: out of a total population of 65 million, 128,000 is not even a fifth of a per cent. Which goes some way to showing how much of a decision it is to leave one’s country and live elsewhere; even in the 21st century it tends to take a certain kind of person and a certain kind of impetus to do so. The International Passenger Survey records reasons for leaving the UK under the four bland categories of “work-related” (50 per cent), “accompanying others” (just under 10 per cent), “formal study” (just under 5 per cent), and “other/not stated” (everyone else). A more imaginative officialdom might rename the same categories as “money”, “love”, “knowledge” and “mystery”. That would hardly fly as a set of boarding-card labels, but – having been in the first and third categories, and as a beneficiary of the second category – I think it gets closer to the truth of things. We are talking about human motives, after all.
It is worth bearing in mind what it takes to emigrate nowadays when reading Emigrants, James Evans’s engaging account of English emigration to America in the 17th century. If so few people are willing to leave Britain when most of the world is a few hours’ flight away, what possessed them to risk it when a transatlantic voyage could take anything from five weeks up to eternity? They did leave, though, and in droves. As Evans points out, figures are harder to come by for the 17th century, as no one was keeping track, especially not of those who counted among “the offals of our people”, as one writer put it. But historians estimate that across the century an average of 38,000 people left England for America each year, from a population of around five and a half million. That is a smaller percentage than today’s figures, but it is, Evans notes, “a colossal number” in a European context. The so-called “swarming of the English” was twice as large as contemporary emigration from Spain, and 40 times that from France. In an era when England had no significant means of competing on the imperial front with France or Spain, we became instead “the pioneer of mass migration” – a move that cemented the “Anglo-Saxon” character of North America.
More here.