Re: war & recovery

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7/20/06, Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The timing of this article is sort of strange.  Lebanon is a particularly diverse
> society.  It suffered from both foreign invasion and an intense civil war.  The
> country was devastated, but seems to have recovered quite well until a few days ago.

Lebanon is diverse, even though its borders are far from straight. I
don't think it will recover for a long time, unless it becomes a
protectorate of Israel (and Israel wants it to recover and its
occupation doesn't stimulate revolt). Or maybe Syria could do the job?

> I did not understand Jim's reference to the slow recovery from the Civil War.  My
> interpretation of the period is that the Civil War created enormous economies of
> scale and a demand for labor saving devices, which unleashed an extraordinary period
> of growth in the later 19th century.

I was talking about the Southern United States, while you're talking
about the North.

I wrote:
As I understand it, the US South had a hard time recovering from the
Civil War for two main reasons that don't quite fit the above
analysis. First, the area's infrastructure wasn't rebuilt (while much
of it was aimed at serving shrinking foreign markets for cotton rather
than domestic markets). Second, both the Southern elites and (after
1876) those of the North wanted to maintain the  debt peonage of the
Black "freedmen," which went along with their not being schooled or
allowed to accumulate their own wealth. If "40 acres and a mule" had
been instituted, the South would likely not ended up as an anti-labor
backwater in the 1950s, able to turn the rest of the US into one
during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
--
Jim Devine / "You need a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.