Ben Muse

The Salt Boxes

Mrs. Boardman and her sisters opened their Salt Box vacation cottages for their first season in 1938.  The cottage colony was built on an old farm between the northeastern end of the Bass River Golf Club and Bass River, a little over a mile north of South Yarmouth center.

This leaflet was prepared for the ninth season, which would be the summer of 1946 - the first summer season after the end of the Second World War.

Salt Box promotional leaflet, circa 1946 (click to expand)

The Windmills of Dennis and Yarmouth

Last year Daniel Fortier, of the Dennis Planning Department, posted pictures of windmills used in the past in Dennis and Yarmouth.

There are windmills in yards to pump drinking water from wells, some apparently with elevated water storage tanks, industrial windmills to pump salt water into saltworks and to grind grain,  and masses of tiny windmills standing by the roadside for sale to tourists.  Some Wind Mills of Dennis and More Wind Mills of Dennis.

A hundred years ago, Daniel Wing could remember grist mill operations in South Yarmouth from 50 years before.  He wrote about mill operations, and about the histories of several local mills: A Description of the Farris Windmill in South Yarmouth.  The title is a little misleading - he does cover several windmills in addition to the Farris mill.

Downtown South Yarmouth About 1910

Here's a great old postcard of South Yarmouth center. The source at Wikipedia says 1910.

Route 28 won't be upgraded until 1933, and then it will come in through the yard on the left and exit towards Bass River across the way, just in front of the first building on the right. It's not obvious, but Bridge Street already runs off to the right at that spot.

A hundred years before, a ropewalk extended from the first building north, along the side of the road, where the line of buildings is. If you follow the road forward and slightly to the left, you can go to Yarmouthport, Weir Village, or South Dennis.

If you bear hard right just in front of the first building, you will come to Bass River in a quarter mile and can head across the new bridge to West Dennis. I'm a little surprised that the road to the river isn't better marked or more obvious.

Source: Wikipedia, Hugh Manatee

I'm guessing those automobiles have a 12 mph speed limit. In September 1907, the Yarmouth selectmen published new automobile regulations. The speed limit through this intersection, and down Bridge Street, was 12 miles an hour: with this condition - that all autos and motor cycles "shall come to a standstill at the corner of said South State Highway [Main Street in South Yarmouth - Ben] and Bridge street... before proceeding in either direction around the corner of said streets."

Walk forward a bit, to a point in the road just between the first two trees on the right.

First, turn around and look back where you just were:

Now, turn left, and look down (what the sign above says is) Bridge Street:

Keep standing here (at the head of Bridge Street), and turn to your left again:

Walk down the row of trees, turn, and look back where you started:

You were originally standing about 100 feet down the road on the left. This card dates to 1917. In 16 years, Route 28 will be driven through the second building from the right of the picture. Did you see the dress in the store window?

The reverse of this postcard had an important message:

Jumping forward to 1936, and looking down the new section of Route 28:

and now a little later:

Source: I believe this is from an ad on eBay.

...and later still:

In the mid-sixties:

Source: my postcards

 

Minor edit April 17, 2011. Speed limit edit added November 26, 2011. New pictures added November 27, 2011. Minor, but substantive, editorial changes same day.

The Salt Boxes of South Yarmouth

People began to open cottage colonies on the Cape in the early thirties, as more visitors began to come to the Cape in their own cars, and as demand grew for inexpensive places to stay.

The Salt Box cottage colony opened on the shore of Bass River, just north of the Bass River Golf Course, in 1938. 

Bainbridge Crist, a South Yarmouth historian, wrote about it in The Register in 1978.  You can find a copy of his article here: A baroness came, and so did a countess, in the heyday of Yarmouth's Salt Boxes. 

 
The Salt Box development is the set of roads south of the intersection of Oyster Cove Road and Salt Box Road.  Source: Google maps.

Let's permit Medicaid and Medicare payments to authorized hospitals in India...

... and in Mexico, Thailand, and elsewhere abroad: Outsourcing Health Care To Countries That Appreciate Efficiency (Adam Ozimek channeling Tyler Cowen channeling Ragharum Rajan).

Rajan argues that this would stimulate competition and innovation in U.S. health care.  Ozimek cites a 2008 paper from the journal Health Care - the abstract reads:

Recent discussions in health reform circles have pinned great hopes on the
prospect of innovation as the solution to the high-cost, inadequate-quality U.S. health system.  But U.S. health care institutions—insurers, providers, and specialists—have ceded leadership in innovation to Indian hospitals such as Care Hospital in Hyderabad and the Fortis Hospitals around New Delhi, which have U.S.-trained doctors and can perform open heart surgery for $6,000 (compared to $100,000 in the United States). The Indian success is a window into America’s stalemate with inflating costs and stagnant innovation.

Cross posted from The Custom House.

Anchor Dragging

Many years ago Bass River was a small, but busy, commercial port.   In 1802 there were 21 vessels, some ranging between Boston and the West Indies, others fishing locally.  In the early 20th Century, a sailing packet still kept a regular schedule between South Yarmouth and New Jersey.  Coastal vessels used the roadstead off Bass River to wait for favorable winds before passing into the Atlantic around the southern tip of Monomoy Island.  At times over 100 sailing ships might ride at anchor offshore.

This traffic supported and depended on a variety of ancillary businesses: warehouses, lumber yards, and boat yards.  Many of these ships lost things overboard, among other things - anchors, supporting another business: anchor dragging. 

In 1941, former anchor dragger Wilfred W. Fuller recalled the business.  There were a lot of ways to lose an anchor:

The Corps of Engineers looks at Bass River

Sometime in the fall of 1894, or the winter or spring of 1895, Captain Bixby of the Army Corps of Engineers visited Bass River to see if  river entrance navigation improvements were a worthwhile way to spend federal money. 

The main concern was a bar, off the mouth of the river:

From the apparent mouth of the river to its outer bar in Nantucket Sound, i.e., to the deep water of Nantucket Sound, the distance is about 1.5 miles, measured along the boating channel, this channel, as marked by stakes (cut down by the ice each winter and replaced every spring) being from about 60 to 600 feet in width; the depth on the outer bar

He wasn't enthusiastic about the value of investment in navigation. The small population and limited industry adjacent to the river meant that the demand for river traffic was small; there were also readily available substitutes in Hyannis Harbor, the wharfs at Dennisport, and the local railroad; a prospective mid-Cape canal down Bass River would shift the river mouth to the east, potentially negating the value of any work done on the existing mouth; the work would be relatively expensive in comparison with the benefits.

His report is here (pdf files): Download Corps Engineers - Bass River - 1895; title page here: Download Corps Engineers - Title Page - 1895.  A nice picture of a quiet river in the late 1890s.

King island Today

Great photos of King Island, and the not quite abandoned Eskimo village of Ukivok, circa 2006: Charlene's flikr photostream.

Thanks to David Kingma and Father Louis Renner at Gonzaga for the pointer.

Really Good News From China and Brazil

Clive Cookson reports that there's been a "64-fold increase in [Chinese] peer-reviewed scientific papers since 1981": China scientists lead world in research growth.  Projecting ahead:

Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters, said China’s “awe-inspiring” growth had put it in second place to the US – and if it continues on its trajectory it will be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020.

The Bass River "Road" Net - 1644

Charles Swift was a 19th Century newspaper editor and historian.  His 1884 history of Yarmouth, available on Google Books, has a map of Old Yarmouth in 1644 (Old Yarmouth including the current towns of Dennis and Yarmouth).

The Pilgrims reached Plymouth in 1620.  Written records place English settlers in Old Yarmouth along Cape Cod Bay by 1638-39.

Early on, some began to settle along the upper ponds of Bass River.  Samuel Rider was evidently there about 1639 and Francis Baker on the east side of Follins Pond about 1641.   One person lived close to Nantucket Sound by 1644, and Swift's map shows a road running from north to south on the western side of his map.  Swift doesn't mention other settlers between Follins Pond and the mouth of Bass River, except for Richard Berry who lived near the mouth of the river by about 1649.

Map of Yarmouth (which included what is now Dennis) in 1644 (From Swift via Google Books)

The Google edition is dated 1884, so this is Swift's conjectural map of the area 240 years earlier.  He doesn't describe his sources, but I don't think he had sketch maps circa 1644.  I assume the map is an amalgam of information about the places where early settlers made their homes, a knowledge of the 19th century road system, local tradition, and common sense.  These roads must have been more like primitive trails at this early date.  The map doesn't show any Indian trails.

The main road ran from east to west, a mile or so south of the Bay.  The map shows another road branching south from this, running around the southern side of Mill Pond, and then north and around the northern and eastern sides of Follins Pond.

Compare this to the road net in 1832: The Bass River Road Net - Late 1832.

"Why Does Getting Married Make You Fat?..."

Nicholas Bakalar reports: Study Says Women With Mate Get Heavier.  The Australian study found that:

After adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20 pounds if she had a baby and a partner, 15 if she had a partner but no baby, and only 11 pounds if she was childless with no partner. The number of women with a baby but no partner was too small to draw statistically significant conclusions.

There is no reason to believe that having a partner causes metabolic changes, so the weight gain among childless women with partners was almost surely caused by altered behavior....

The only explanation offered in the article is pretty weak, women respond passively to their environment:

Maureen A. Murtaugh, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Utah who has published widely on weight gain in women. Perhaps, she suggested, a more active social life may help explain why women with partners gain more weight.

“Think of going to a restaurant,” Dr. Murtaugh said. “They serve a 6-foot man the same amount as they serve me, even though I’m 5 feet 5 inches and 60 pounds lighter.”

Uri Gneezy and Jason Shafrin have another explanation (Why Does Getting Married Make You Fat? Incentives and Appearance Maintenance):

Married individuals weigh more on average than non-married individuals. We suggest that exiting the dating market decreases one’s incentive to maintain their appearance and leads to an increase in body weight. We hypothesize that it is most difficult for individuals to exit a traditional marriage, and easiest for individuals to exit if the couple is cohabitating but not legally married....

So, people in a traditional marriage have more security in the relationship, and invest less in appearance as insurance against a return to the dating market. 

Using a 14-year panel data set [from the Netherlands], we test whether or not the ease of exiting a domestic relationship affects weight gain. For men, we find that the type of domestic relationship has little impact on weight gain. For women, however, marriage leads to a 2.4 kg weight gain compared to cohabitating.

This is a weight gain of about five pounds.  In this explanation, men and women are purposeful agents adjusting their behavior in response to changing opportunity costs.

"Capturing Cape Cod History"

Since 2002, writers associated with the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth have been publishing short essays on Cape Cod history, and especially Yarmouth history, in the mid-Cape paper, The Register.  This fall, the society put these together into a book: Capturing Cape Cod History.  Some of the essays have information about the economic history of Bass River.

Bass River in the late 19th Century.  From University of New Hampshire's Dimond Library via David Kew's Cape Cod History web site.

How to buy presents for a girl

Megan McArdle explains: Two Shopping Days Until Christmas.  Who knew perfume was so complicated?

"Santa Claus's Trade Infractions"

Patrick Thomas and Tom Barry point out that Santa's Polar operations may violate international trade law: Santa Claus’s Trade Infractions. 

Oliver Griffiths explains why many of the presents Santa delivers were actually "Made in the U.S." or "Made in China,"  Santa, Elves and Comparative Advantage.  Griffiths is rehearsing answers to questions he expects from his children.  My guess is his kids won't ask.

Jonathan Dingel's post from last Christmas suggests the benefits American consumers receive from low taxes on imports: Christmas Tariffs.

Was Alaska Worth It?

Mounties marching in Juneau, Alaska.  Alaska might have been Canadian if Seward hadn't acted.

Did we get our money's worth when we bought Alaska from the Russians?

It only cost $7.2 million in 1867, but David Barker wonders if the U.S. taxpayers might have been better off without it: Was the Alaska Purchase a Good Deal?

We need more foreign physicians

Dean Baker makes the case: The Post's Protectionism Strongs Again: It Never Heard of Foreign Doctors

The New Device

A new Christmas classic from The Onion: New Device Desirable, Old Device Undesirable.  I certainly want one.

Why we need more foreign nurses

President Obama is opposed to liberalizing restrictions on entry of foreign nurses (White House Forum on Health Reform).

He made the comment in response to a question at a health reform event at the White House last March:

REPRESENTATIVE CAPPS:  ...we have a huge shortage of nurses today.  And estimates are that the U.S. will be lacking over 500,000 nurses in the next seven years.  Our nursing schools are only able to admit a tiny fraction of applicants.  The great -- greatest bottleneck for educating more nurses comes from the lack of nursing school faculty....

I'd love to hear your thoughts.... on how we can further advance nursing education and faculty training...

THE PRESIDENT:  ....The notion that we would have to import nurses makes absolutely no sense.  And for people who get fired up about the immigration debate and yet don't notice that we could be training nurses right here in the United States -- and there are a lot of people who would love to be in that helping profession and yet we just aren't providing the resources to get them trained -- that's something that we've got to fix....

Capps didn't ask about immigration or importing nurses, but the President must have been looking for an opportunity to make the point.

The shortage Rep Capps describes means that at current wages, the quantity of nursing services demanded is greater than the supply.  The demand for nurses will only increase as baby-boomers approach their endgame and as the numbers of persons qualifying for medical insurance increases.

Foreign-sourced nurses are a substitute for American nurses.  They are not a perfect substitute; there are differences in the cultural backgrounds of the nurses, in patient preferences, and in the costs of acquiring information about abilities of foreign and domestic nurses. 

Since they are substitutes, when the restrictions on the supply of foreign nurses drive up the wages received by those foreign nurses who actually can get jobs, the demand curve for domestic nurses will shift to the right.  As the domestic demand curve shifts, the equilibrium wage will move up along the domestic supply curve and domestic nurses will make more.

But that's not all:

• The nursing shortage will remain larger longer.
• Insurers and consumers will pay more for medical care.
• Insurance premiums will be higher.
• Insurance subsidies will be higher.
• People will purchase fewer medical services (because the price is higher).
• Doctors will be less productive (in the same way they'd be less productive if they had less capital to work with).
• The affluent, who will be able to pay more out-of-pocket, or who will be able to afford larger insurance premiums, will not be hurt as much as the less affluent.
• Working conditions for nurses will be poorer as employers try to stretch their nursing staffs (I assume that working conditions are easier the more nurses on a given shift).
• There will be an incentive to substitute technology for people to economize on human nursing services (substitute monitoring technology for nursing attention; exploit monitoring efficiencies associated with moving older people out of their homes and into wards or nursing homes).
• Consumers will have additional incentives to go abroad for medical attention.
• Family caregivers are a substitute for certain types of professional nursing care.  Expect greater use of family caregivers. 
• If we're having trouble training more domestic nurses because of a shortage of teaching faculty, maybe we should at least import teaching nurses.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla) has proposed legislation to modestly relax current restrictions: HR 2536.

But right now unemployment is over 10%, shouldn't we reserve these jobs for Americans?  Unemployment is high right now, but its not normally high.  It should begin coming down later this year.   Given the long lead-time for training and deploying new nurses, reserving jobs for nurses isn't likely to play much role in reducing unemployment during this crisis.  I assume, since there is big shortage of nurses, that there are relatively few unemployed nurses in the U.S. 

For related, somewhat broader, discussions of alternative health reform policy, see John Palmer's The Simple Economics of Health-Care Reform and Tyler Cowen's What should we do instead of the Obama health reform bill?

Edits: various during Nov 26.

Yup'ik conservation

Nancy Hooper, 5th Grade Tununak School Ms. Boonstra's class, second place entry in Alaska Department of Fish and Game Sport Fish Regs Cover Art Contest, 2001. Tununak is a small town on Nelson Island.

For many years non-Native sport fishermen have come to the Yup'ik homeland in Western Alaska for the salmon, trout, and grayling fishing.  Sport fishermen may catch (and commonly release) ten or twenty fish a day.

The sport fishermen bring cash and, since they are practicing catch-and-release fishing, the resource - which the Yup'ik use for subsistence - isn't being damaged.  Why should the Yup'ik care? 

Alaska's gold production is up

Elizabeth Bluemink reports: Alaskan Gold production highest since 1916 (Anchorage Daily News,  November 8, 2009). 

 

Fort Knox mine.  Source: Kinross Gold Corporation.

In  summary:

Alaska produced about 800,000 ounces of gold in 2008 - the largest amount since 1916 ( High as that output is, Alaska currently only accounts for ten percent of U.S. gold production).  Almost all, about 84 percent, came from two mines - the open pit Fort Knox mine near Fairbanks, and the underground Pogo mine near Delta Junction.  About five percent of the gold came from small scale placer mining.

It's getting relatively more expensive to live in rural Alaska

The cost of living differential between urban and rural Alaska has increased since 1985 - an important reason is the introduction of "big box stores" in urban Alaska. 

Pat Forgery has a nice piece in today's Alaska Empire summarizing testimony to the Alaska House Finance Committee by McDowell Group economist Jim Calvin: Urban, rural cost divide widens.  The McDowell Group was hired by the state to look at regional cost-of-living differentials.  This study will be used in labor negotiations.

In summary:

Daniel Libby visits King Island, 1867

Construction of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable pushed the limits of 19th Century technology.  In the 1860s construction was begun on an alternative telegraph line to Europe - across Alaska, under the Bering Strait, and across Russia.

Capt. Daniel B. Libby was in charge of a telegraph construction team that wintered at Port Clarence on the Seward Peninsula in 1867.   Libby was 25 or 26 at the time.  

The Bering Strait. Port Clarence is the embayment to the southeast of the cape (Cape Prince of Wales) on the American side. (Wikipedia)

In March 1925 a roughly dressed man visited the Juneau law offices of  James Wickersham.  The man, Libby's son, needed money to get to Copper River where he understood he could find work as a welder.  He had a packet of papers - his Dad's papers from the Port Clarence days: letters, records, pictures, and a five by seven inch brown notebook with a diary for 1867.  Was Wickersham interested? 

Apparently Wickersham was; the diary was in the Wickersham papers for many years, and is in the Alaska State Historical Library today. 

On June 20 1867, Libby had taken a trip to King Island.  The telegraph construction team that had spent the winter in Port Clarence was beginning to run low on food.  The trip to King Island was evidently part of a larger effort to find food:

King Island, June 1912

William Van Valin was a school teacher at Sinuk, Alaska, during the 1911-'12 and 1912-'13 school years.  Sinuk is on the Bering Sea coast of the Seward Peninsula to the west of Nome, not far from King Island. 

In June 1912, he went walrus hunting in a small powered schooner with a party of Eskimos.  From Sinuk they traveled east to Nome to pick up another passenger, then went west, across the Bering Sea to the Siberian Coast. 

On June 8, they reached King Island and spent two days there.  Van Valin was a sympathetic and careful observer.  He wrote about his visit in his book,  Eskimoland Speaks, published in 1944.  For reasons explained at the end of the post, I' m assuming this trip was in June of 1912 (if I'm wrong it's not by more than plus or minus one year).

As the schooner approached King Island one of the first things he noticed was masses of birds wheeling around the rocks:

Eleven Reasons the Obama Administration's Chinese Tire Decision Was a Bad One

At least the administration was embarrassed, releasing its decision late on Friday to minimize publicity. 

The Obama administration has decided to impose import duties of 35% on imports of low cost Chinese passenger and light truck tires (U.S. to Impose Tariff on Chinese Tires, Wall Street Journal).  These are scheduled to drop to 30% in a year, and 25% in another year.

Here are eleven reasons this is a bad idea:

1. It limits competition in the U.S. tire market, and it will increase costs to U.S. consumers.  Tires will cost more.
   
2. It will increase the costs of making things in the U.S.  Things made with tires (cars and trucks) will cost more.
   
3. It will increase the costs of our exports.  Anything we make with these tires and then export will cost more.
4. The tax is imposed only on tires from China.  Foreign producers in other countries, who will not be subject to this tax, will benefit.  Actually, this will limit the damage done to U.S. consumers and producers, but then, what was the point?
   
5. It is counterproductive to impose a tax on consumers, increase the prices they face, and reduce their incomes and consumption, during a serious recession.
6. This is a regressive tax, it will fall proportionately harder on poor and middle-income people than on the rich.
   
7. The world has been struggling to avoid the reductions in demand associated with protectionism during this recession.  This action undercuts these efforts. 
   
8. The Chinese can retaliate with respect to other U.S. goods.
   
9. This may violate administration promises not to impose new taxes on persons with lower incomes ("Middle class families will see their taxes cut – and no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase.").  This promise probably was only meant to apply to the income tax, and was itself a bad promise in any event.  But what is the value of the promise to taxpayers if the protection it offers only applies to one tax and not to others?  This new hidden and regressive tax on U.S. consumers wasn't the place to start breaking the commitment.
   
10. We need Chinese help on a lot of issues, its not worth imperiling that for 5,000 jobs (see below).  As Jonathan Weisman noted in the Wall Street Journal story on this issue: "The United States needs China to help float a U.S. deficit expected to reach $1.56 trillion this year. Mr. Obama is also likely to seek new sanctions against Iran to combat its nuclear program, and China's vote on the United Nations Security Council is pivotal."
11. Holding workers in industries making low cost tires doesn't keep them in an industry in which we are likely to be able to compete internationally.  Even if you think industrial policy is a good idea, this is bad industrial policy.

The request for the tariffs (tax increase) was pressed by labor interests, but oddly, according to the Wall Street Journal story above, not by the tire industry: "Notably, the tire industry didn't join the case -- tacit recognition that it has long ago left the US market for the low-end tires at issue."

The number of jobs lost in recent years seems small: "Meanwhile, four U.S. tire plants closed in 2006 and 2007. Three more are planned for closure this year. There were 5,168 fewer workers in the U.S. tire industry in 2008 than there were in 2004."

Cross-posted from The Custom-House.

Edit Sept 19 - editorial but not substantive change to point 9.

King Island and the Russian Fur Traders, 1822

When westerners began to visit the Bering Strait, they were touching the jugular of a thriving trade in furs between America and Asia. 

Furs from central and northern Alaska, and from as far east as Canada's Mackenzie River drainage, made their way west, from one set of hands to another, through a network of Native fur traders.  The furs were funneled through the Bering Strait, made their way across Chukotka and Siberia, to Russian and Cossack traders, southeast down the Lena River, across and around Lake Baikal, and into China.  On the backhaul blue beads, tobacco, knives, axe heads, and iron ware, made their way east.

King Island was just south of the Strait, and King Islanders were active middlemen in this trade.

John Bockstoce, the historian of the northern whaling industry, has a new book out on the 19th Century northern fur trade: Furs and Frontiers in the Far North.  In Furs and Frontiers he describes a visit by Russian explorer/traders to King Island in 1822.

The Russian-American Company probed north into the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait from its bases on Alaska's Pacific coast, looking for ways to intercept the trade and its profits.  In 1822Vasily Stepanovich Khramchenko was sent north in the brig Golovnin to survey Norton Sound and the Bering Strait.