I've seen the statement attributed to Abraham Flexner that it was only around 1900 that the average patient with the average disease seeing the average physician had a better than 50% chance of being helped. There are a number of imprecise terms in that formulation, but Flexner was probably as qualified to make the estimate as anyone.

There's another interpretation of Calhoun. He and his wife were hard core Borderlands, in fact Scots-Irish, and he didn't change is identity at all. He and Jackson were rich, intelligent and kept up with the times. But the Borderlands distrust of authority and disrecpect for law applies to both. Nullification was just a continuation of that their folks had been doing for 600 years back in Albion.

There's a paper by Doyne Farmer, among others, carrying out this kind of modeling experiment in more detail. IIRC, his three groups are fundamental investors, momentum investors and noise investors. The main result was that his market didn't settle down to an equilibrium. And his momentum investors aren't necessarily dummies. There are models in which information about fundamental values percolates down slowly to retail investors and stodgy fund managers. Under those assumptions, the movement of share prices does convey useful information. 
 
The characteristic features of bubbles include the involvement of new players and the use of debt. The sign of new players is the magazine cover indicator in which news magazines at the peak all have covers devoted to real estate, internet startups, etc. So perhaps an epidemic model would provide better insights. 
 
I haven't read Minsky, but the secondary accounts emphasize his point that debt acquired for productive investments is ok, but debt acquired to buy assets with the intent of flipping them is a Bad Thing.  
 
The standard source for the descriptive history is Kindelberger. He has a bestiary of perhaps 200 of these cycles from the GD down to real estate speculation in a single European city. And yes, the tulip bulbs are there.

Yes. "Divalog" is clearly le mot juste, considering that Cowen was a participant. Flaubert would be pleased with you.

You misspelled "divalog".

Canada had an influx of Loyalists who didn't support the Revolution. The four groups Fisher wrote up in Albion's Seed had reasons to oppose the King, so those who left would have been from the working- or middle-class group. This would have been the source of immigration from England, so it's difficult to say how much difference they made.  
 
My ancestor in the male line could have been one. He showed up in the South Side of VA by 1764 aged 18. My Y markers are almost the same (one mismatch) as someone with the same surname whose ancestors were in MD by the early 18th Cent and are know to have come from Shropshire, well south of the Borderlands. My guy at first opposed the Revolution, only later changing his mind. He had property by that time, and may have professed support for the Revolution to avoid forfeiture.

I do know that Canada had the largest Orange Order in the world up to the Thirties 
 
The "Orange" thing isn't part of the symbology of rednecks in the US. Perhaps there was a different pattern of migration after the Revolution and people who wanted to keep that tradition went to Canada rather than the US. 
 
I haven't looked up the history, but a guess is that early Canada is likely to resemble early Virginia. The commercial sponsors of the colonies recruited working class English who had mediocre economic prospects, so males and areas around ports were selected for. In VA, a governor strongly favored the aristoi, so 20-30 gentry families came, determining the public culture but making only a small contribution to the gene pool.  
 
There was probably a genetic selection process. Risk taking, but not impulsive gambling type risk. Openness to novelty. Naive optimism. Features of the American character (if that is the word) that many have found sometimes praiseworthy, and often regrettable.

I'm sure Razib knows this, but the term "Scots-Irish" is shorthand for people from the Borderlands. Some of them were in Ireland for 100 years or so, but for 500 years their culture had been formed by rejection of political authority, which entailed lack of civil order. High levels of violence, and a cultural toleration of violence are part of the package.

I wonder if fear of indians was a part of it - that's certainly the sort of danger that human cognitive biases might be prone to overrate. 
 
There was also a strain of disapproval of the settlers' treatment of the Indians, and later of slavery. One of my distant relatives was a sea captain who went back to England and married a Quaker. She refused to visit Virginia because of her disapproval of slavery. See also, John Donne's address to a party setting out for the New World.  
 
The Jamestown colony lost 90% of its population in the hard year of Our Lord 1722. Mostly to malnutrition and disease, but the Indians tried to finish them off. There was also a mass attack around 1744, but only 300 colonists were killed. There was an attack around 1775 but it posed no existential threat. 
 
They had a huge death rate from infections disease, but I don't know how much it discouraged immigration. 
 
I'm sure the longest-settled regions were safer - but, keeping in mind that over 90% came to farm, 
 
In VA they discovered that by far the most profitable crop was tobacco, so the whole colony became organized around export.  
In some ways, VA had the features of a colony with an extractive industry, rather than a balanced economy, including a shortage of women.  
 
I don't know how to study it, but there's probably a genetic sorting process involved in which people who emigrate have increased tolerance for risk and novelty. Also, dissatisfaction with authority and tradition. It would be difficult to tell whether someone came to escape limited prospects in England, or for the chance to get rich growing tobacco, but the motives probably selected for a different type of individual.

the more i read about it the less it seems that europeans were really as jazzed up about the new world as we americans like to assume 
 
Certainly true of the English. The only titled person to emigrate was Lord Fairfax, in the mid-18th Cent. If you check out the list of VA gentry in Fisher's book, they're all from second or third string gentry, if that, in England. Possible exceptions are a few "distressed gentry" who fared poorly under Cromwell (e.g. Lee family). In the 17th Cent there was a large male preponderance and a large importation of indentured servants. Clearly, it was regarded as an undesirable place to live, despite the fact that the economic and physical standard of living was higher in VA than in England by 1700. 
 
There's also ample material on how difficult it was for the French to get people to settle in Louisiana.

No one has mentioned the dysgenic theme, which is that the Roman patriciate tended to avoid marriage and children. They were concerned enough to pass laws encouraging marriage, including a tax on bachelors. Too bad we can't document the effect on SAT scores.  
 
Another factor is military involvement. I have the impression that in England, families with distinguished military figures tended to burn out, while the sedentary landed gentry had staying power. This is probably testable against records and possibly DNA data. There were only a few thousand Norman invaders, and they probably had distinguishing genetic markers.  
 
It has little to do with porn. Pagan art showed nudity and was more sensuous than early Christian art, but that's a long way from high-speed downloads of extreme fetish action.

The first rule of economics is that you can not talk about economics without treating it as a form of religion. At least in "advanced" countries, you either think that the rich are deserving and redistribution of income a vile crime against nature, or you think the less rich are deserving and redistribution is all that keeps us hanging by our fingernails above an pit of savagery. This pollutes any attempt at rational discussion.  
 
The locus classicus is a well-meaning professor trying to explain things to a student with a trust fund. They might as well be from different planets.

The Sixties didn't begin until 1965 or so. For me, it was hearing Satisfaction on a jukebox after coming in from sailing. The feeling of a modulation of the Zeitgeist, a resetting of the Matrix. Only after that point did popular colors become psychedelic and skirts short.  
 
And the whole (counter-) culture became politicized. You couldn't just like rock 'n roll, drugs and sex. It had to make a political statement.

Bob_R 
 
it is foolish to believe that level of privacy was envisioned by anyone writing or ratifying the US constitution. 
 
The Virginia gentry had an ideal of the gentleman living on his plantation minding his own business. It certainly wasn't the privacy of urban anonymity. In practice, the slaves and servants knew how the owner spent his time, and they had contact with slaves from other estates, and they gossiped. But we still don't know any details about the most famous case of rule-breaking, the Jefferson-Hemmings relationship. Another example William Byrd II. Much of the material in his diaries was known only to him and a few other people.  
 
There's a book about a sexual scandal in late 18th Cent VA which surveys the law concerning sexual behavior. Although there were laws against adultery and bastardy (and perhaps fornication), there were no prosecutions unless someone made a "public spectacle" that was "notorious". If someone had an illegitimate child and supported it, no problem. But if the woman was unable to support the child, it was likely to become a public burden and there was a prosecution. Although there was no "right" to privacy, the impression I got was that the law took notice only if you made the behavior public.  
 
And there was no law against abortion. The case in the book involved an illegitimate child which the mother may have attempted to abort using a drug thought to have been abortificent. None of the participants expressed disapproval.  
 
The immigrants from the Borderlands rejected authority outside their families and clans. They didn't have a high level of privacy in their daily lives, but they have strongly rejected the idea of a government having collections of data about them.

The hell-raisin' dudes at Emma Bovary's wedding party sound like rednecks. But that was just the backwardness of rural Europe. When they were conquered, they stayed conquered. What stands out about the Borderlands is the stubborn refusal to accept central authority.  
 
While pursuing a medical genetics question for some relatives, I came across a guy who was around for Kings Mountain, but apparently didn't particiate. He was born in the Ulster Plantation, 1763, emigrated as a 6 year old orphan and enlisted out of the Waxhaws district of SC in 1778 (age 15) and served until 1781. His papers list 7 named battles or campaigns, but no Kings Mountain or Guilford Courthouse. I think his career makes a statement about the fighting spirit of the Scots-Irish. Also their judgment.  
 
An ironic twist is that his name was Adams, from a family that originated in Somerset (SW England). Some people from southern England went to Northern Ireland and turned back. But a few stayed, intermarried,, became acculturated and came to North America in the great wave of immigration. Tracing his line back, many of the Somerset names are identical with ancestors of the Massachusetts Adamses. Trying to match individuals was pointless. By the time they'd been in Ireland 100 years all they had in common with the Boston bunch was a surname and some Y chromosome markers.  
 
Another irony was that he named a son born in 1827 "John Quincy". This was before JQ became the leading advocate of abolition. The son remained true to stubborn redneck tradition and kept the middle name, which appears on his tombstone. Hee-yah!

daveinboca: 
 
To some extent, the features of Borderlands culture are part of the social stages between hunter-gatherer and kingdom, and you'd expect similar folks in Europe. The only thing that was special about the Borderlands was its stability and duration.  
 
The Scottish borders and Highlands and the Irish clans obviously missed out on most of these developments and arrived in the Appalachian Highlands with a medieval cast of mind and society plus a Protestant veneer. 
 
Some quibbles: The Hignlanders and Irish Clans spoke Gaelic and didn't immigrate in large numbers in the colonial era. Some historians characterize medieval culture has having many specialized social roles (guilds, fiefholds, Church ranks) enforced by legalistic rules. Clearly, the folks of the Borderlands wanted nothing to do with that. So in that sense they were premedieval.

I'm afraid I find your prejudice more than a little unsavory. Surely those who despise the past, and feel free to express contempt for the dead based solely on the fact that they are dead and their opinions have since become unfashionable, can at least have the decency to find interests other than history. 
 
Perhaps this quick resort to personal slime says more about your character than mine or my grandmother's.

Have you actually read any of this material? Or are you just discussing it third-hand, as it were? 
 
I downloaded and looked at the stuff you linked to. There were several books of the same ilk in my DAR/UDC grandmother's library which I read as a boy. I adored my grandmother but thought the books were wrong, and worse, pathetic and depressing. Still do.

The primary consequence of the antislavery movement was a war that killed 500,000 people - besides destroying the economy of the South, reducing the former slaves to abject destitution, and sending the Constitution into a tailspin of malignant consolidation from which it has yet to recover and almost certainly won't. 
 
My impression was that the primary consequence was the eradication of chattel slavery. The destructiveness of the war and the failure of Reconstruction don't lead to the conclusion that chattel slavery was a Good Thing. It's a separate issue. The conclusion of your argument seems to be that it was a wonderful institution that we should return to. If that isn't your conclusion, why are you wasting our time?

The Sith library indeed. 
 
The crisp, definitive statement of the issue is due to Richard Henry Lee. He said he knew that slavery was wrong, but selling off his slaves was the only way he could feed his family. This isn't admirable, but it meets one standard of "accepting responsibility for ones behavior", as conservative cant would have it. Later Southerners produced Sith libraries of pompous rhetoric trying to evade Lee's simple truth.

... if it means anything it means a legal framework in which long-term labor contracts are negotiable and enforceable. 
 
This is insane.

The Southern "coarsening" you detect, which is certainly real although like anything it is subject to a variety of evaluations, is almost certainly best explained as a reaction to the antislavery movement. 
 
It's a general wordiness and imprecision of language that turns up in most of the written prose of the time. It may reflect fashions of the Victorian period, but it's especially evident in the slavery apologetics. The writers evade a discussion of the economics and the unpleasant features of the institution.  
 
In the broader view, the "antislavery movement" was irrelevant, because outside the South, Europe and the rest of North America was a Bad Thing. It's difficult to do cliometrics on the Zeitgeist, but clearly there was change in perception of the role of the individual which was in conflict with slavery. IIRC, the Constitution recognizes this in a time limit on the trade. And to the extent that people started thinking of themselves as US citizens, not citizens of individual states, they started to notice the glaring contrast with the use of "freedom", "liberty" and "rights" in the founding documents. These changes would have happened without the agitation of the abolitionists.

KJS 
 
For erudite goofiness, it's hard to beat Oswald Spengler. I came across it in a library with a lot of old books, without knowing anything about the author or the controversies it spawned. That's the best approach, I think.  
 
Works for most other books, too.

Mencius 
 
Tucker wrote the treatise on slavery in the early 1790's, and there is a publication date of 1796. The 1861 edition would have been a reprinting.  
 
It's notable that he was able to publish it without apparent damage to a long and successful legal career. This would probably not have been possible in most of the South at a later date. Also, he was concerned with the real-world operation of the institution, not just the cases he examined, an approach that seems advanced for the 18th Cent. Both these features tend to confirm my impression that the 19th Cent, especially in the South, was a period of coarsening and retrogression.  
 
An aside: St. George Tucker was stepfather to John Randolph, the eccentric Congressman. There are a couple of books on an incident involving the Randolphs, in which Tucker plays the role of sane advisor trying to temper their financial, emotional and sexual excesses.

In favor of the economic determinism position is the fact that many Virginians freed their slaves beginning around 1790. The law professor at William & Mary, St. George Tucker, wrote a treatise on the law of slavery which was highly critical of the institution. He proposed a scheme for phasing it out.  
 
This was after the tobacco market had cratered and before the rise of cotton culture. It's hard to avoid the connection.

gene berman 
 
At the time of the Civil War, so many of the Southern planter class were so deeply in debt (to mostly Northern bankers) that it was a widely-circulated (and believed) story that seccession was primarily a ruse to reneg on debts. 
 
The same was true of the VA gentry and the Revolution. They owed huge sums to English trading houses and the legislature voided the debts after the war started. John Marshall's early career in Richmond was defending the planters against attempts to collect. One provision of an important post-war treaty with England was the enforceability of the debts, and this was upheld by the USSC in the 1790's.  
 
[Tyler] lives in the house built (on the James River) 
 
Where on the James? I know about Harrison's Landing, close to William Byrd II's stomping grounds. Didn't remember the Tylers. 
 
I have a friend in Austin, TX whose wife is a direct descendant of Mass. Gov. Bradford, lately of the Mayflower 
 
There's a place in NW Louisiana a few miles from the Red River called "Alden Bridge". It's named after one Philo Alden, descendant of the historical John Alden. He came from NY well before 1840, when a huge raft of fallen trees and decaying vegetation was removed, opening the river for navigation. Mr. Alden was interested in timber, including large stands of cypress. Later, he built a sawmill, and to reach it, a bridge over a small stream. The mill and the bridge are gone over a century, but Philo's name is still on the land as a term for the neighborhood. Philo went on to become High Sheriff of the Parish in the 1850's, but I'm aware of no New England influence he left.

John Emerson 
 
I have little knowledge of the subject, but Lind's description sounds accurate. I'n not sure how it fits into the gentry/borderlands distinction. Fischer points out that the borderlands culture tolerated large income disparities. It was cool to be rich as long as you weren't uppity about it. Exploiting the help was tolerated, especially if they were an ethnic outgroup. So I wouldn't characterize the classic Texas oilman as an extension of the gentry tradition.  
 
Southern country clubbers (Republican if you insist on the tautology) tend to be heirs of the gentry's manner, and sometimes their genes.

I thought the quakers were from north of the midlands. Warwickshire and Northamptonshire are midlands and at the apex of the triangle for gentry origins. Aren't quakers north and west of there? That region and East Anglia had strong Scandanavian influences. In East Anglia, Danes. In the north, a hodge-podge of traders and raiders. In both cases, people relate to a community larger than the famiily. We see this today in the Scandanavians, with their horrid socialism .

I've read Albion's Seed, and it seemed to me that the two northern cultures were glaringly different from the southerners in emphasis on nuclear family, large settlements and universal education, among other things.  
 
I don't put down the New England contribution to the Revolution. Both were necessary. But it was the last contribution of the Virginia gentry to US culture, depending on how you want to count what my ggrandfather referred to as "the late unpleasantness".

New England, although it's difficult to see much difference from the Quakers. And of course ignoring the intense religiosity of the Puritans.  
 
Gentry culture has been dead for at least 100 years. The gentry ideal was a cavalier living on a large plantation, economically self-contained, with sharp social stratification from the lower orders. To make it work, a valuable export crop was necessary (tobacco, then cotton) and a source of cheap labor (indentures, then slaves).  
 
It's made two worthwhile contributions: the American Revolution and the modern concept of personal rights. The Revolution reflected aristocratic reaction to an overreaching king and was strongly supported by the Virginians. And a corollary to the lord of the manor ideal is that what you do in private is not the state's business. The New Englanders had a much more limited idea of personal autonomy.  
 
The people you're referring to as Southerners are heirs of Borderlands Culture, aka Scots-Irish, aka Rednecks. Sen. Webb has written a book about the culture. There are some traits that are maladaptive in a modern society, such as poor social organization (no town greens in the Southern hills) and lack of emphasis on social advancement (including advanced education).