“Whoever becomes imbued with a noble idea kindles a flame from which other torches are lit, and influences those...
Interesting study on Russian real wages before and after 1917 . The paper measures real wages in St Petersburg, Moscow, and Kursk over 1853-1937. Workers in construction and large scale industry are studied. For the imperial period and the NEP, new series of prices are collected from archival and printed sources, and these radically revise previous measures of inflation. Russian living standards…
Found a new study: Implicit land taxes and their effect on the real economy . Land taxes are widely viewed as an efficient source of public revenue, yet explicit land taxation is rarely implemented. We study a closely related but largely overlooked object: implicit land taxes that arise within standard property tax systems when tax assessments place different relative weights on land and…
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germans & Steel ( GG&S ) is highly flawed. Almost every big picture book is, to a degree, and this one particularly so. But I believe GG&S has become a punching bag to signal holier-than-thou historian cred or something. I think nowadays most people railing against him haven't even read the book, but have read some Reddit FAQs. The entire section around the battle of…
Henry George has some spicy words on a number of different groups in his The Condition of Labour . On the Socialists: its advocates generally teach the preposterous and degrading doctrine... childishly blaming the stone for hitting it, it wastes strength in striving for remedies that when not worse are futile... While its methods, the organization of men into industrial armies, the direction and…
Digging up some old musings on the 2022 Sept/Oct print issue of Foreign Affairs , in which there was Timothy Synder's absolutely blessed article on Ukraine, a a really good article on Putin's view of history, and a decent article on how America must support democracy globally. There was also notable realist Stephen Walt's article on how to build a better world order. I suggest reading it with an…
In response to endless examples of people making quips about mud pies or working hard to dig random holes, Marx's theory does not ignore utility. The third sentence of Capital is: A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. We start with utility. Utility is assumed for a commodity. Furthermore, on the first…
Recently read an interesting discussion of Marxism and Ralwsianism by Professor Joseph Heath. Some interesting narrative So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every…
Looking at these two articles in conversation: Neoliberalism can reduce well-being by promoting a sense of social disconnection, competition, and loneliness and The Politics of Lonliness . Liberal spaces often discuss the atomisation of society (see the whole "bowling alone" issue). There's even occasional, but persistent, lamentations about the decline of religion providing a social centre for…
With the US-Iran war kicking off, I was looking some stuff about the first Gulf War and stumbled onto this article which seems quite relevant and prescient. The Myth of Air Power in the Gulf War The implication of my analysis for U.S. foreign policy is that air power may play a decisive role in future U.S. operations to halt an enemy's mechanized assault on a U.S. ally. It will not likely be…
When it comes to immigration, a larger labour pool allows for increased specialisation, which increases productivity, and leads to real increases of wealth. Contrary to simpleton's claims that more workers means cheaper labour, immigration increases the demand for labour, as migrants need goods and services. There's a reason why you had very large population growth over the 20th century but this…