Oxford University Press's Blog, page 849

Five myths about the gold standard

By Richard S. Grossman

Although the dollar has had no legal connection to gold since 1973, the gold standard continues to hold an almost mystical appeal for many politicians and commentators. The 2012 Republican Platform called for the creation of a commission to study the possible restoration of the link between the dollar and gold. When asked about the gold standard this summer, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a potential 2016 Republican presidential nominee, replied: “We need to think about our currency that once upon a time had a link to a commodity, and I think we should study it.” Nostalgia for the gold standard is frequently expressed on the pages of America’s financial press, often perpetuating a variety of myths.

(1) Gold has been the most important money in human history. A return to gold would be a return to “real money.”

Until the middle of the 19th century, silver was the most common monetary metal. Because gold was so expensive—about 15 times as valuable as silver by weight—gold coins would have been too small to be useful for normal day-to-day transactions. Copper, on the other hand, was not nearly valuable enough to be a convenient form of money. Sweden, a large copper producer, adopted copper as a monetary metal early in the 17th century. Because silver was nearly 100 times as valuable as copper, Sweden’s copper coins were massive: the ten daler piece weighed 19.7 kilograms, or about 43 pounds. The copper standard rendered large-scale transactions all but impossible without the use of a cart and horse, which explains why Swedes were the first in Europe to use paper money on a large scale.

Aside from Britain, which adopted the gold standard in 1717, only Australia and Canada, which mined large quantities of gold, and Portugal, which had access to large supplies of gold from South America, were on the gold standard by the mid-1850s.

(2) Well, at least the United States was reliably on the gold standard from the earliest days of the Republic.

Image credit: US gold double eagle coin. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Actually, the United States operated under a bimetallic system, under which gold and silver had the same legal standing. Under the Coinage Act of 1792, silver coins contained 15 times as much silver by weight as gold coins with the same face value. Because gold was more than 15 times as valuable as silver (15.5 times as valuable), gold was hoarded and disappeared from circulation, while transactions took place almost exclusively in silver. When the United States changed the official exchange rate between gold and silver to 16-to-1 in 1834 — the market rate remained about 15.5-to-1 — the situation was reversed: now-expensive silver disappeared from circulation and relatively cheaper gold coins were used.

The elimination of gold and silver coins from circulation during the 19th century is an example of “Gresham’s Law,” under which “bad” (cheap) money drives out “good” (expensive) money. Gresham’s Law still operates today. The US Mint issues $50 gold pieces that contain one ounce — well over $1,000 worth — of gold, but have a face value of only $50. Small wonder why vending machines are not set up to accept these gold coins. If gold prices fell to only a few cents to the ounce, however, we might well see vending machines adapted to accept them.

(3) Years on the gold standard were years of prosperity and stability.

Image credit: Wall Street during the Bankers Panic of 1907. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Not exactly. The United States returned to the gold standard after the Civil War and remained on gold through the beginning of World War I. During this period the United States experienced a 20-year deflation and two of the worst financial  crises the country has ever seen — in 1893 and 1907.

After World War I, most of the industrialized countries reestablished the gold standard. Britain’s return was engineered in 1925 by Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman and was made law under the leadership of Chancellor of the Exchequer (Secretary of the Treasury) Winston Churchill, which encouraged other countries to follow suit. Britain’s return to gold had disastrous consequences. The pound was returned to gold at the same rate that had existed before World War I, which substantially overvalued the pound. This began a half-decade characterized by high interest rates, falling prices, incessant labor strife, and overall economic sluggishness, which ended with Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1931.

Britain’s interwar experience with the gold standard has been echoed in southern Europe’s experience with the euro. Because all euro-zone countries share a currency and a central bank, they are unable to undertake independent monetary policy. Thus, Greece must live with the same monetary policy as Germany, which has proved ruinous for the Greeks.

(4) The fact that the price of gold is much higher (i.e. the value of the dollar in terms of gold is much lower) than it was when the United States was last on the gold standard is a serious problem.

Unless you are an industrial strength user of gold, or plan a seriously large jewelry purchase, there is no earthly reason to care about gold costs ten times or half of what it cost in 1973. For 99.9% of Americans, the price of food and gasoline are far more important than the price of gold.

(5) A return to the gold standard now would stabilize the US economy.

If the United States were to return to the gold standard, it would first have to decide the dollar price of gold. Set the value of the dollar too high, and America’s exports would dry up; set the value too low and virtually all of America’s gold would soon leave the country. Even worse, because of the volatility of gold prices, the dollar could be overvalued one week and undervalued the next, leading to severe instability in US financial markets. Of course, since China and Russia are two of the world’s four top gold-producing nations, we can be sure that these two staunch allies would do their utmost to stabilize gold prices in order to help support American financial stability.

Richard S. Grossman is Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is the author of WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them and Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800. His homepage is RichardSGrossman.com, he blogs at UnsettledAccount.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at @RSGrossman. You can also read his previous OUPblog posts.

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Mad politics

By Matthew Flinders

If you are reading this blog then you’ve obviously survived ‘Blue Monday’. That is, the day in the third week of January when suicide levels tend to peak and demands for counseling rocket as a result of post-Christmas debt, dashed New Year resolutions, and the inevitable sense that this year is actually unlikely to be much different to the last. The recent publication by the coalition government, ‘Priorities for Essential Change in Mental Health’, underlines the fact that mental health is likely to become the defining problem of the twenty-first century. But what does the politics of mental health – and particularly the mental health of our politicians – tell us about the state of our society?

It is estimated that approximately 450 million people worldwide have a mental health problem. Nearly 60 million Americans suffer from some form of mental illness and, in the UK, the Office for National Statistics estimates that one in four British adults experience at least one diagnosable mental health problem in any one year. This might range from anxiety and depression to more extreme forms of psychosis or schizophrenia but whatever the condition, mental illness is scary, painful and exhausting. It’s also woefully under-funded. ‘There is a substantial gap’ the opening line of the latest version of the World Health Authority’s Mental Health Atlas states ‘between the burden caused by mental disorders and the resources available to prevent and treat them’. Even today only one penny is spent on mental health for every pound spent by the NHS and mental health services seem to have borne the brunt of the ‘age of austerity’.

But what makes the experience of mental health arguably far worse is the social stigma and almost ridicule that often accompanies even the merest hint of a mental health condition. Those lucky enough to have supportive friends and family will generally find that recovery is not only possible but that the whole experience may also have unexpected positive side effects in the sense that experiencing the lows of life can add new vitality, colour and understanding to even the simplest things. Sunbathing in the Rain by Gwyneth Lewis is undoubtedly one of the best books I’ve ever read. But those who lack supportive families, friends or lots of money frequently find themselves shunted between a bewildering range of services and the decline into unemployment, homelessness or worse can be rapid.

But what about those individuals whose roles in society are seemingly designed to undermine their mental health? The work-life variables associated with mental breakdown are relatively clear from the rich seam of literature in the field of organizational psychology – high-stress and unrealistic expectations, divided and incompatible loyalties, a high-blame low-trust work environment, living away from home, long hours, an adversarial atmosphere, unpredictable hours, precarious employment, low levels of public regard, etc. – and in many ways the role of a modern politician ticks every one of these boxes. Therefore, it is not surprising that stress levels among politicians tend to be incredibly high. The life of an MP is frequently associated with poor-decision making, ruined health, family break-up, and the occasional bizarre walk upon Clapham Common. For those MPs with young children, ministerial duties and constituencies many miles from London the pressure can be intense – even brutal.

And yet how MPs manage their mental wellbeing and cope with the pressures of their profession remains a largely hidden topic. This is reflected in the manner in which periods of poor mental health are generally admitted only in the past tense in memoirs and autobiographies. John Biffen, a Cabinet Minister under Margaret Thatcher, suffered from debilitating depression for most of his career but this fact was only recently revealed six years after his death in his posthumous autobiography  – Semi-Detached.  More recently, Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, has written of his secret battle with depression but – as Alastair Campbell has explained – it remains incredibly difficult for a British politician to stand-up and admit to being human.

But it’s not only the adversarial culture of Westminster and Whitehall that explains this reluctance to speak out; the public understanding of mental health issues remains very poor and the dominant narrative, perpetuated by the media, is that ‘Mad=Bad’.

The 14 June 2012 is therefore likely to go down as a significant moment in parliamentary history as a number of MPs used a debate on mental health in the House of Commons to discuss their own psychological problems. Charles Walker MP described himself as a ‘practicing fruitcake’ while outlining a battle he has been fighting with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for more than three decades, Kevan Jones MP admitted to having suffered from bouts of depression, and two female MPs (Sarah Woolaston and Andrea Leadsom) also discussed their experience of post-natal depression. If we add Jack Straw and the Labour MP John Woodcock, who last December admitted to suffering from depression, this makes a grand total of six out of 650 MPs who have acknowledged their own mental health challenges.

In reality, the available data on mental health, in stressful occupations in particular, would suggest that a far higher number of MPs will actually have experienced (or be experiencing) some form of mental disorder. Obviously, it is up to the individual to decide on the boundaries between their private life and public duty – but what’s really interesting is that we actually know very little about the mental health of our politicians. David Owen has written about ‘the hubris syndrome’ and the poor decisions made by those intoxicated with power but for most politicians politics is – if we are honest – generally quite dull. It is often just the ‘slow boring of hard wood’.

There are, however, signs of progress. In 2007, Section 141 of the Mental Health Act – whereby MPs who were incapacitated through mental illness could be automatically removed from the House of Commons after six months – was considered and then retained by parliament. This example of institutionalized intolerance and inequality was repealed in February last year with the passing of the Mental Health (Discrimination) Act 2013. More recently still, a small budget has been agreed within the Palace of Westminster to cover the costs of counseling for MPs that are understandably reluctant to seek help within their constituency.

Even so, the stigma surrounding mental health remains acute in Parliament. The hook, twist, or barb in this argument is that recent surveys suggest that significant sections of the public would not vote for a political candidate that admitted to previously suffering from mental health problems. And yet at the very same time the public constantly demand that they want MPs to be ‘normal’ people – an adjective generally followed by the phrase ‘like you and me’ – but normal people suffer from mental health problems. The tension is obvious and as a result the secrecy and stigma surrounding mental health continues. It’s mad politics at its worst.

Matthew Flinders is Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Governance and Public Policy at Mu rdoch University, Western Australia. He is the author of Defending Politics (2012). He has suffered from depression throughout his adult life but generally manages to keep his black dog on a fairly tight leash.

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Image credit: Houses of Parliament, photo by Mgimelfarb. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Facebook turns ten: teenager or (grand)parent?

By José van Dijck

Last November, technology reporter Jenna Wortham of the New York Times observed:  “Just a few years ago, most of my online social activity revolved around Facebook … But lately, my formerly hyperactive Facebook life has slowed to a crawl. … I rarely add photographs or post updates about what I’ve been doing… Is it just me, or is Facebook fading?” Evidently, it isn’t just Wortham: despite a growth in user numbers last year, Facebook saw a significant decline in young teenagers’ daily checking of the site. An interesting paradox emerges: now that Facebook has turned ten years old—Marc Zuckerberg established his company on 4 February 2004—the world’s largest social network site appears to loose its popularity among teenagers. Is this a sign of decline or is it merely a temporary hitch in the company’s extraordinary development—a teenager’s growing pains on its way to adulthood?

Facebook logo via Wikimedia Commons

We often seem to forget that when Facebook itself faced formidable competition from other social network sites when it just entered the online stage. Remember Friendster, the most popular social networking site until Myspace took over in 2003? In 2006, 85% of teenagers online still had a Myspace account. And yet, Facebook took over from Myspace as the world’s leading social network in April 2008 and reached the critical point of 100 million users worldwide shortly after. A glance at today’s statistics shows that on 1 January 2014, Facebook had over 1,310,000,000 users and three million like buttons were pushed every single hour.

With a staggering size like this, has Facebook become invincible? Or is a Myspace scenario still possible for Facebook? When Twitter and Tumblr came along in 2006, users added microblogging sites to their social repertoire; even though Twitter and Tumblr attracted many teenagers, these sites never really challenged their Facebook loyalty. Over the years, Facebook adopted many typical Twitter features, such as News Feed and Trending Topics, which certainly helped the site’s phenomenal growth. But new features could not prevent Facebook’s freshness from wearing off and an entire generation who has grown up with Facebook now regards the site as a utility rather than a novelty. Since 2010, an impressive number of new social networking sites have arrived on the scene whose growth spurts seem to outpace Facebook’s early maturation.

Teenagers are known to favor the many young, trendy services that emerged over the past four years; Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, Tinder, and WhatsApp all heavily compete with Facebook to attract teens’ attention. What these sites have in common is their preference for transience: short messages, quickly fading pictures, provisional pin ups, and instant swiping. A Vine video lasts six seconds, swiping away a Tinder-selfie takes even less than that. Teenagers decide on a whim who’s hot and who’s not, what’s cool and what’s dated.

As early adopters, teens pave the way for older generations. They taught their parents and grandparents how to hook up with Facebook, but once adults started to flock to the site, youngsters turned away from it. Teenagers trended Twitter before middle-aged males started to boost its popularity. In more than one way, an online site’s initial popularity among teenagers is crucial for its survival in the global ecosystem of connective media.

That is why big fish like Facebook—even if itself just a teenager—are constantly on the lookout for small fish just before their growth spurt. Instagram, only 18 months old before Facebook swallowed it up, attracted flocks of teenagers who loved the vintage photo-app. Vine just got four months to mature after its birth in 2012 before Twitter snatched up the app that popularized the six-second video clip as a favorite teenage genre. But waiting for a baby to become a toddler may turn out to be an expensive strategy. When Facebook tried to acquire Snapchat (born 2011) last November, the site’s founders reportedly refused a cash offer of three billion dollars. It remains to be seen whether Snapchat’s novelty—users decide how long a recipient can view their Snap, ranging from 1 to 10 seconds, after which it will be deleted—will wear off or whether it will grow into the Next Big Thing.

Now that parents and grandparents have taken over their children’s online turf, Facebook is no longer the place for the hip and happening. Whatever adults like, teens reject and whatever becomes mainstream is no longer trendy. Eat up the young to stay young and attract the young. That is how Facebook and other aging social networking sites are constantly trying to acquire companies less than half their age—preferably newborns who have the potential to serve as bait for gullible teenagers.

José van Dijck is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media

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Revisiting reasons to ‘unfriend’ on Facebook’s 10th anniversary

On 4 February 2004, a website named Facebook was launched. Since then it has grown to become a global force affecting many aspects of our lives. Five years ago, Oxford Dictionaries selected ‘unfriend’ as Word of the Year. At the time, we also shared reasons why people unfriend someone on Facebook. On this occasion, we asked once again, why you would — or should — unfriend.

“There has never been a huge argument with a close friend or ex that has caused me to unfriend them in a huge dramatic statement of ‘I hate you now and I don’t what to see you or hear from you ever again’. I invariably unfriend people only when they are one of those distant acquaintances that continuously post comments that are banal, irrelevant, or frustrating. Here’s a few subjects that are regularly spammed onto my Facebook wall and are prime candidates to cause unfriending: babies, gym details, wildly unfounded political statements, unexplained emotional statements like ‘Feeling down’, posts with appalling grammar and spelling, long paragraph rants in all capitals, and statements about meals that have just been eaten. Am I too picky? I like to think of it as high standards.”


— Simon Turley, Marketing Assistant for Oxford Journals

“I am very reluctant to unfriend. I tend to friend people in social media who I consider friends in real life. As time goes by, I’ve also learned that most friendships are worth investing some patience in. Especially in a long friendship, I’ve learned not to give up on someone just because they are in a different phase of life or may have some very different opinions on politics or religion than I do. (I also appreciate the friends who’ve sat through my endless baby pictures or weathered an election season with me online.) One of the few times I unfriended someone, the person was showing some extremely poor judgment. As I like to post photos and stories about my children, I had to weigh whether this was in the best interest of my children to give this person any access to their lives. It wasn’t.”


— Patricia Hudson, Associate Director of Institutional Marketing

“Every six months or so I’ll do a general cleanup of my Facebook feed, going through all my friends to see how many of them I actually want to read their updates. The ones I unfriend are usually (a) people I added in the frenzy of excitement & meeting people that was the first week of college or (b) people from high school that I don’t think I’ll see ever again (and kind of don’t want to).”


— Alyssa Bender, Marketing Associate for Bibles and Religious titles

“I unfriend people who post religious posts, prayers, and scripture quotes. I’m pretty sure your prayers are supposed to be between you and God – not you, God, and all of your Facebook friends.”


— Christie Loew, Assistant Marketing Manager

“I unfriend people when they post too many pictures of their dinner.”


— Elyse Turr, Assistant Marketing Manager

“Thinking about why I unfriend people, this is what I’ve come up with: (1) They’ve said/posted things I find offensive (the merely annoying I tend to “hide” rather than fully unfriend). (2) I can’t remember why I’ve friended them in the first place or they were only brief acquaintances (e.g. people from uni that I haven’t seen since graduation; a friend’s ex, etc). I definitely have fewer Facebook friends than I did before I used Twitter etc. Facebook is now a place I share info about my life, post photos of my family, etc. I keep the friend number relatively low (in Facebook terms). I think I’m quite strict about who I add/accept.”


— Kirsty Doole, Publicity Manager

“When I first joined Facebook I was in the initial “collecting friends” phase – friending anyone who I randomly met who also happened to be on Facebook. Since then I realised they see all my posts and photos but also I get their news and then started my defriending mission to get it back to people I would actually want to hang out with. Now whenever a friend request comes through I think carefully about whether I really want to press that accept button. Defriending happens when people post radical religious or political views on my stream, keep it light-hearted, Facebook is a fun space please!!”


— Annabel Coles, Marketing Manager

“The main reason I unfriend people on Facebook is if we don’t keep in touch in real life. If I haven’t seen you or communicated with you outside of Facebook in several years, then we don’t need to be Facebook friends. There are enough people to keep up with already, so I don’t need the status updates of people I don’t really care about cluttering up my feed. I will also unfriend if you spam me with Candy Crush invitations. I used to unfriend people if they got too aggressive with their political opinions, but I think I’ve weeded most of those out by now.”


— Mackenzie Warren, Marketing Associate

“Why I unfriend on facebook:


(1) Too many baby pictures


(2) Inflammatory political statements


(3) TMI sex-related posts


(4) Consistently bad spelling or purposeful bad spelling


(5) It’s your cousins friends boyfriend who you went to Six Flags with that one time


(6) Sharing every Upworthy video they have ever seen”


— Erin McAuliffe, Marketing Coordinator

“In general, I do not unfriend people on Facebook. However, I have done so on rare occasions, mainly as a result of my friending spree during my first week of college. Facebook was a new concept, and I decided that everyone, everywhere, needed to be my friend. Over the years I’ve unfriended a person or two, only because I had to admit to myself that I didn’t know what I was doing when I first signed up.”


— Victoria Davis, Marketing Coordinator

Social media penetrate our lives: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and many other platforms define daily habits of communication and creative production. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media by José van Dijck studies the rise of social media, providing both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of major platforms in the context of a rapidly changing ecosystem of connective media.

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Image: Unfriend by Oli Dunkley, CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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Why we should change the way we look at chronic pain

Is undiagnosed and untreated chronic pain a nationwide epidemic? Does the American legal system’s treatment of the pharmaceutical and medical fields impedes citizens’ struggles to heal themselves? Has the media egregiously focused on the abuses of pain medication rather than extolling its virtues? Judy Foreman, a well respected and nationally syndicated health columnist, poses these questions in her new book A Nation in Pain: Healing our Nation’s Biggest Health Problem. In the following video, the author offers her personal motivation for writing the book and what truths she hopes can be illuminated surrounding this controversial issue.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Judy Foreman is the author of A Nation in Pain: Healing our Nation’s Biggest Health Problem. She is a nationally syndicated health columnist who has won more than 50 journalism awards and whose columns have appeared regularly in the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News and other national and international outlets. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College, served in the Peace Corps in Brazil for three years, and received a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 2000 to 2001, she was a Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School. From 2001 to 2004, she was a Lecturer on Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She has also been the host of a weekly, call-in radio show on Healthtalk.com.

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Michael Cherlin on music theory

Music Theory Spectrum, the official publication of the Society for Music Theory, was first published in the spring of 1979 — the same year that the Society was founded. We’re thrilled that 35 years later, the journal has joined Oxford University Press. (Spectrum’s first issue with OUP will publish in the spring of 2014, but in the meantime you can read past issues of the journal for free online until 3 March 2014.) To learn more about the journal and its fascinating subject, we sat down with the Editor, Michael Cherlin. The University of Minnesota professor discusses his experience in publishing, the field of music theory, and what to expect in future.

Can you tell us about the history of the field?

Music theory can trace its root to the pre-Socratic Greeks, Pythagoras and Heraclitus both having an impact on the ways we think about music. In the nineteenth century, music theory was integrated into the emerging discipline of musicology. The split from musicology, in the late 1970s, resulted principally from the highly technical aspects of set theory and Schenkerian analysis both of which require a background not necessarily common to musicologists with their wider range of historical interests. Today, the rift has partially healed, and many theorists, myself included, publish in musicology journals as well as those devoted more exclusively to music theory.

How has the journal changed with the field over the years?

In the early years two subdisciplines within music theory dominated the discourse: set theory for post-tonal music and Schenkerian theory for tonal music. These two approaches, along with articles on the history of music theory would comprise the likely contents of early issues. The musical literature was generally restricted to the Western tradition of what for lack of a better term we might call “classical music.” As the years have passed the journal has become more open to widely varied methodologies and musical traditions. Any recent issue is likely to have studies of popular music, world music, as well as music from the Western “classical” tradition.

How would you describe the current state of music theory?

Contemporary music theorists can be quite diverse. The field includes historians of theory, theorists who work with mathematically-based modeling of musical processes, cognitive scientists who work with music perception, scholars of musical meaning including semiotics and narrative studies, specialists in various areas to include the diverse world of contemporary music, as well as analysts working in more traditional areas of harmony, counterpoint, and musical form.

When did you join the journal?

I was appointed incoming Editor of Music Theory Spectrum during the summer of 2011 when I began to read all new submissions. Mark Spicer joined me a few months later, to become the first Associate Editor for Spectrum.

How has your work with the journal changed your view of the field?

Because of the incredible diversity of submission to Spectrum, being Editor has required that I reach out to colleagues whose areas of specialization complement my own. We have an excellent editorial board, but I often have to go outside of the board, because of both the volume and diversity of submissions. The human contact with authors and readers has changed my view of the field by augmenting my perspectives on the wider community of scholars.

Describe what the journal will look like in twenty years and what type of articles it will publish.

Get back to me in twenty years on that one! Scholars who predict the future are almost always wrong. In the arts in particular, the only thing that’s predictable is that what will come will be unpredictable!

Tell us about your work outside the journal.

I am a Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota where I’ve taught since the fall of 1988. I specialize in the music of Arnold Schoenberg, but my teaching and scholarship cover the period from Mozart to our contemporaries. I have a number of scholarly interests outside of music, with the study of poetry at the top of the list.

A leading journal in the field and an official publication of the Society for Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum features articles on a wide range of topics in music theory and analysis, including aesthetics, critical theory and hermeneutics, history of theory, post-tonal theory, linear analysis, rhythm, music cognition, and the analysis of popular musics. The journal welcomes interdisciplinary articles revealing intersections with topics in other fields such as ethnomusicology, mathematics, musicology, philosophy, psychology, and performance.

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Image credit: Light bulb wrapped in a sheet of music notation. © zmurciuk_k via iStockphoto.

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What could you read over and over and over again?

Punxsutawney Phil has seen his shadow once more, which leaves us with six more weeks of winter. As card-carrying bibliophiles we know the only to get through this is to cozy up with a warm blanket, a hot beverage, and your favorite book to read over and over and over again. Some Oxford history authors were kind enough to share the book that is going to get them through the rest of this cold, cold winter.

Ruth Feldstein, author of How it Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement:

“Books from my childhood– that I read and re-read then– continue to be those that I love going back to now, and not just as I read them to my own children. I still love the heroines who spoke to me as a kid:  in books like Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh; A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett; and Striped Ice Cream, by Joan Lexau (to name a few).”

 

 

 

Nancy Unger, author of Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History:

“Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, is comfort food for my mind. Published in 1954, the New York Times called this satire of British provincial university life ‘happily savage.’

Neither of my parents went to college. When I am overwhelmed by academic politics in my life as a history professor, I re-read this novel about a young lecturer trying to secure his place in academia–a world that he secretly (and later not-so-secretly) finds pretentious and pedantic. Rereading Lucky Jim is a guilty pleasure that’s strangely satisfying.”


 

Federico Finchelstein, author of the forthcoming The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina:

“[my] book would be The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges. It simply expands your imagination.”

 

 

 

Stay warm and happy reading!

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Image credit: Punxsutawney Phil. Photo by Shannon Ramos. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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The First Amendment and parsonage allowances

By Edward Zelinsky

Confronting an important constitutional question about religion and taxation, the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, in Freedom from Religion Foundation, Inc. v. Lew, held that Section 107(2) of the Internal Revenue Code violates the First Amendment. Code Section 107(2) excludes from gross income cash housing allowances furnished to “minister[s] of the gospel.” Such housing allowances are today designated as “parsonage allowances.”

For three, interrelated reasons, the District Court’s opinion in FFRF is unpersuasive and should be reversed by the Court of Appeals. First, contrary to the District Court’s conclusion, Section 107 has secular purpose and secular effect. Section 107 manages the entanglement which is inevitable when the modern government decides whether or not to tax the modern church. Moreover, Section 107 accommodates the autonomy of religious institutions and actors by declining to tax both clerical housing provided in kind and parsonage allowances paid to clergy in cash. Section 107 should be understood, not as subsidizing the church, but as separating the church from the state. The economic benefit of tax exemption is a by-product of that separation.

Second, the District Court’s FFRF opinion places too much weight on the US Supreme Court’s plurality opinion in Texas Monthly, Inc. v. Bullock while giving short shrift to the Supreme Court’s earlier opinion in Walz v. Tax Commission. In Texas Monthly, the Supreme Court struck on First Amendment grounds a Texas sales tax exemption for religious periodicals. In Walz, the Supreme Court upheld against First Amendment challenge New York’s property tax exemption for churches.

A careful reading of Texas Monthly and Walz indicates that, consistent with the First Amendment, Congress can exempt from taxation churches and religious actors to avoid church-state entanglement and to accommodate the autonomy of religious institutions and actors. That is what Code Section 107 does. Third, the District Court in FFRF accepts the premise of the Texas Monthly plurality that tax exemptions are always subsidies. Often tax exemptions are subsidies, comparable to direct expenditures. However, in many instances, they are not. In constitutional terms, Section 107 is more convincingly perceived, not as a subsidy, but, per Walz, as managing the inevitable entanglement caused by taxation and as accommodating the autonomy of religious institutions and actors. In a world of imperfect choices, Section 107 separates rather than subsidizes. The economic benefit of Section 107 is a side-effect of that separation.

As a matter of tax policy, there is a strong argument for taxing all cash income including parsonage allowances now excluded from gross income by Code Section 107(2). However, as a constitutional matter, Section 107 reflects a constitutionally permitted, though not a constitutionally compelled, choice to accept one form of entanglement over others and to accommodate the autonomy of churches and religious personnel by excluding their housing and housing allowances from clerical gross incomes. For First Amendment purposes, this is a plausible choice with secular purpose and secular effect in an area where there are no disentangling alternatives.

On 24 January 2014, the US Justice Department filed notice that it will appeal FFRF to the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. The appeals court should reverse the District Court’s opinion and thereby sustain Code Section 107(2) as a constitutionally permitted, though not constitutionally compelled, accommodation of religious autonomy under Walz.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.

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Image credit: At the intersection of Church and State Streets in Salem, Oregon. © llhoward via iStockphoto.

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                Related StoriesInvoking the language of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ in international law debatesA world in fear [infographic]Was Alexander the Great poisoned? 

Was Alexander the Great poisoned?

By Philip A. Mackowiak, MD

Alexander the Great, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copanhagan, Denmark

In the January issue of the journal Clinical Toxicology, investigators at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom offer yet another theory as to the cause of the untimely death of Alexander the Great just prior to his 33rd birthday. Their article has generated considerable chatter over the internet. In it, they propose that Alexander was poisoned by wine laced with an extract of Veratrum album (white hellebore). They base their theory on the fact that of all of the poisons proposed to date as Alexander’s killer, none is as likely as white hellebore to produce the symptoms Alexander is purported to have manifested during his 11-day terminal illness –“sudden epigastric and substernal pain accompanied by nausea and vomiting, followed by bradycardia and hypotension with severe muscular weakness.”

Poisoning, in fact, was one of the earliest explanations for Alexander’s sudden demise. Of the possible assassins, Antipater had, perhaps, the most to gain from the king’s murder and thus, was an early suspect. He had consolidated a position as regent of Macedonia during Alexander’s absence in the East and likely feared for his own safety given the scores of officials who had lost their posts and their heads on Alexander’s return from India. According to the poison theory, Antipater was assisted in the murder by Aristotle, who feared for his own life after his nephew, Calisthenes, had been implicated in an earlier assassination plot. The poison was reputed to have been so toxic that it had to be transported to Babylon in the hoof of an ass. Antipater’s son, Cassander, was said to have conveyed it to the king’s court, where it was administered to Alexander by his taster, Iolaus, at a banquet hosted by Medius.

Although both Arrian and Plutarch were skeptical of the poison theory, it deserves consideration, if for no other reason than many, like Antipater, would have welcomed Alexander’s death in 323 B.C. Alexander had offended many of his fellow Macedonians by adopting the dress and customs of the vanquished Persians. His plans for yet another campaign around the horn of Arabia and along the coast of North Africa must have been greeted with alarm by his exhausted army. By the time of his death, he had become neurotically suspicious of independent achievement. Moreover, his claim to be the son of Zeus-Amon was abhorrent to the Macedonians, not just because of the absurdity of his pretension of divine status, but also because it was an insult to the memory of Philip, their former king. And perhaps most important, Alexander was surrounded by an extremely able and ambitious staff, each eager for his own share of the empire. Thus, the possibility that Alexander was murdered, poisoned in fact, cannot be dismissed easily.

Unfortunately, the historical record contains varying descriptions of Alexander’s signs and symptoms during his terminal illness. Plutarch, for example, maintained that Alexander had no abdominal pain, as others had written, positing instead that the symptom had been added to the clinical record for the purpose of rendering the king’s death as tragic and as moving as possible. In those accounts in which abdominal pain is mentioned, its precise location is not given. Therefore, we cannot be certain that Alexander had the “epigastric and substernal pain” that is characteristic of poisoning with white hellebore. Likewise, neither nausea nor vomiting is mentioned in any of the accounts, and, of course, although Alexander’s physicians likely monitored his pulse, their records contained no observations that might enable us to recognize “bradycardia and hypotension” as a feature of the king’s final illness. In fact, fever is the only feature of the illness that is consistent throughout the historical record. Fever was one of Alexander’s earliest complaints. The first day of the illness it was severe enough that Alexander retreated to his bath house for relief and spent the night there. The next day, the fever seemed to subside only to return that evening and then increased steadily throughout the illness.

Fever is not a cardinal feature of arsenic poisoning, hellebore poisoning or any of the other poisons that Alexander’s associates might have used to kill him. Although there is no way to know for certain what killed Alexander, his clinical picture was much more consistent with an infection, one dominated by fever, a fever so debilitating that it rendered a man of legendary stamina and strength too weak to raise his head as his troops filed by his bed in silent review – typhoid fever, for example.

Philip A. Mackowiak is Professor and Vice Chairman, Department of Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland. He is author of Diagnosing Giants: Solving the Medical Mysteries of Thirteen Patients Who Changed the World.

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Images: (1) Alexander the Great, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copanhagan, Denmark, by Michiel2005. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr. (2) The Death of Alexander the Great after the painting by Karl von Piloty. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Invoking the language of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ in international law debates

By Catriona Drew and Matt Craven

A decade after Iraq, the chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians in Eastern Damascus on 21 August 2013 sparked a political and public debate in the United Kingdom about the legality of military intervention. For international-law veterans of Kosovo and Iraq, the central question was familiar: in the absence of authorisation by the United Nations Security Council, would it be lawful to undertake military action against Syria?

Both camps claimed to have international law on their side. For its advocates, military action was necessary in order to uphold international law. ‘We cannot afford the weakening of the global prohibition against the use of chemical weapons’, wrote British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, in the Daily Telegraph. To intervene, Paddy Ashdown told the House of Lords, would be to act as a ‘bulwark for international law and above all to protect one of the few pillars of international law that has been in existence for 100 years and more – against the use of chemical weapons and against gas.’

The publication of a note on 29 August, setting out the British Government’s legal case was headline news. If the Security Council is blocked from acting, the note advised, the United Kingdom could take ‘exceptional measures’ to ‘alleviate the scale of the overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe’ by ‘deterring and disrupting the further use of chemical weapons’. This doctrine of humanitarian intervention would be available to the United Kingdom providing three conditions were met:

there was ‘convincing evidence of extreme humanitarian distress on a large scale requiring immediate and urgent relief’;
it was ‘objectively clear’ that there was ‘no practicable alternative’;
and any use of force was ‘necessary and proportionate to the aim of relief of humanitarian need’.

As the BBC’s legal correspondent, Clive Coleman, observed, this steered a course ‘very far’ from Iraq-styled regime change.

On the other hand, opponents argued that military action would undermine international law. Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, warned the House of Commons that intervening without a Security Council resolution ‘would send a message to everyone else that international law can be ignored when it is inconvenient.’ International lawyers cast ‘legal doubt’ on the Government’s case. There is ‘very little evidence of state support’ for the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, Dapo Akande told the Guardian newspaper. Indeed, most states had rejected it. Even if it did exist, the British Government’s conditions were ‘too lax’. A rule of humanitarian intervention would not merely be about ‘deterring and disrupting’ the use of chemical weapons but about preventing and stopping their use. As there were still other options available – the General Assembly, the International Criminal Court — the legal conditions, Akande concluded, had not been met.

The media debate over the legality of intervening in Syria highlighted some perennial problems of international law: its indeterminacy; its unenforceability; its susceptibility to Great Power politics. Yet, by focusing on the question of legality, the debate also obscured another deeper set of questions (and problems) about the relationship between international law, humanitarianism, and intervention. Can humanitarian interventions be distinguished from the earlier history of imperial or illicit interventions? Does a focus on intervention to prevent human rights abuse in Syria divert us from seeing the ways in which our everyday interventions in the Arab world (the arms trade, the World Cup) legitimise repressive regimes and contribute to human rights abuse? How should we respond to the reappearance of a civilisational discourse that characterises the use of chemical weapons as ‘barbarous’ when, historically, that same discourse was deployed to justify the use of chemical weapons against colonial peoples? And does it matter that the humanitarian interveners of today are the colonial powers of yesteryear?

This last question is likely to resonate in Syria. August 2013 was not the first time that violations of the laws of war by a powerful, unelected government against the civilian population of Damascus had sparked an international outcry. From 18 to 20 October 1925, in response to a popular uprising against its rule, France bombarded Damascus, causing an estimated 1500 civilian deaths and widespread destruction of property, and precipitating a now famous exchange in the American Journal of International Law. For the international lawyer Quincy Wright, the bombardment of Damascus (as an undefended city) was a violation of the laws of war (in particular, the Hague Conventions of 1899). For US Army Captain Elbridge Colby, on the other hand, France had not violated the laws of war for the simple reason that the laws of war did not apply: civilised peoples (such as the French), Colby explained, were not bound by the rules of international law when engaged in fighting ‘savage tribes’ .

It is tempting to consign Colby’s response to Wright to international legal history – a footnote to international law’s colonial past. Yet, is there not a parallel between the argument Colby deploys in favour of unconstrained colonial warfare in Syria and those relied upon by contemporary proponents of humanitarian intervention? For Colby, the Syrian rebel is ‘the savage’ — denied the protections of the laws of war. For Hague et al, the Syrian Government is ‘barbaric’ — denied the traditional protections of sovereignty. In both cases, the language of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ is invoked to justify the Western bombing of Damascus.

Catriona Drew is a lecturer in International Law at SOAS and CISD (Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy) with a focus on public international law. Matt Craven is the Dean of the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, a professor of International Law at SOAS, and the Director of the Centre for the study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law. Catriona and Matt, alongside Susan Marks, Stephen Humphreys and Andrew Lang, form the Editorial team behind the London Review of International Law.

The London Review of International Law is a new journal, published by Oxford University Press, which publishes highest-quality scholarship on international law from around the world. Reflecting the pace and reach of developments in the field, the London Review seeks to capture the ways in which received ideas are being challenged and reshaped by new subject-matters, new participants, new conceptual apparatuses and new cross-disciplinary connections. The first issue is free to read online for a limited time, and you can sign up to receive updates as new content publishes online.

Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in international law, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, latest titles from thought leaders in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from humanitarian to international economic to environmental law, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide. For the latest news, commentary, and insights follow the International Law team on Twitter @OUPIntLaw.

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Image credit: Palmyra, Syria – March, 25th 2011: A demonstration moves along the main street in the town of Palmyra in the middle of Syria. Young people stand on the roof of a moving car holding the Syrian flag. The Syrian uprising started in March 2011. © Sporthos via iStockphoto.

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