Utopia, you are standing in it!

Introductory

Somewhat overshadowed by the Wightman saga, and the unscheduled Conservative leadership demarche, the UKSC decision in the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Legal Continuity)(Scotland) Bill compatibility reference was handed down in the same week in December. It will be argued this decision contains more of lasting constitutional significance which lies both  in the court’s approach to Parliamentary sovereignty, and in the likely consequences for the territorial constitution/devolution settlement in the aftermath of Brexit.

In its basic intent, the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Legal Continuity)(Scotland) Bill (“the Continuity Bill”) occupies some of the same ground as the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, though both were bills at time the battle was joined. It will be recalled that at the time of publication of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill (“the Withdrawal Bill”), the Scottish and Welsh governments took a common position against the provisions so far as relating…

In response to my post yesterday, my friend and economist/nuclear engineer (great mix) Laurent Béland pointed out that the Father-Sons mobility figures in Chetty et al. are depressing. Yes, at first glance, they are (see below – the red line). 

But, at second glance, it is not as terrible. Think about family structures with the 1940 birth cohorts. The father works and, in most likelihood, the mother is a stay-at-home father. Most of the earnings come from the father who probably works 45 to 60 hours a week.  If my father earns 40,000$ at 60 hours a week or earn 40,000$ at 40 hours a week, the line remains at the same height, but we are not talking about the same living standard in reality. Chetty et al. do not account for hours worked to achieve income.  The steep decline – faster than the baseline of household-size adjusted decline…

There was a news story a few years ago in which some academics were reported as suggesting that pretty much everyone of West European descent alive today was descended from Charlemagne, first Holy Roman Emperor.   That he had 18 children, legitimate and otherwise, only increased those probabilities.  35 generations back we each have about 34 billion notional ancestors and yet the total population of north-western Europe back then was only about 20 million.

I didn’t give the story much thought until last week.  For the last few months my 12 year old daughter has been hard at work tracing family trees, with a bit of help from Dad.   I was mostly interested in the last couple of hundred years, but she has been keen to trace every line possible as far back as we could go.  We’ve put in some intense effort over the holidays and last week…

No one was really sane, everyone on the point of a total numb shock, of hysteria, a madness that shrinks have only now begun to diagnose. (p.98)

The times

Page is a legendary figure about whom legends were weaved during the climactic years of a war which itself became the stuff of legends, during the legendary 1960s.

I read Michael Herr’s book of journalism from the war, Despatches, which features Page as a central character, when it came out (1977), and bought this book when it was new in 1983. I saw The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) in cinemas when they were released, and in 1980 went hitch-hiking across the USA, getting a long lift through the mid-West from a Vietnam vet who’d had a leg amputated and was stoned all the time. In Boston I hung out with a would-be rock band which featured ‘Weird…

People were encouraged to transform themselves into what the communists called ‘New People’. Everywhere, in government offices, factories, workshops, schools and universities, they were ‘re-educated’ and made to study newspapers and textbooks, learning the right answers, the right ideas and the right slogans. While the violence abated after a few years, thought reform never ended, as people were compelled to scrutinise their every belief, suppressing the transitory impressions that might reveal hidden bourgeois thoughts behind a mask of social conformity. Again and again, in front of assembled crowds or in study sessions under strict supervision, they had to write confessions, denounce their friends, justify their past activities and answer questions about their political reliability. (p.xiii)

For three-quarters of the twentieth century China was the site of enormous turmoil, war, famine, tyranny and suffering. Frank Dikötter is a Dutch historian, professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong, formerly of the School…