“The passion of foreign dignitaries to see [Disneyland] was so intense that once it even triggered an international incident.” pic.twitter.com/khkL7PdYP5
— Devon ☀️ (@devonzuegel) January 4, 2019
Stories about state visits to Disneyland
06 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
06 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
Potted biography
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair to a civil servant in India in 1903. The family moved back to England in 1907 and sent young Eric, first to prep school near Eastbourne, then to Eton, where he met other boys who were to be among the literary luminaries of his generation. In other words he was brought up to be the toffiest of the toffs. However, unlike most of his literary contemporaries, Eric decided not to go on to Oxford or Cambridge but instead enlisted in the Indian Imperial Police and returned to Burma. Here he served from 1922 until 1927, wielding great responsibility for large provinces and huge numbers of ‘natives’.
Slowly he lost his faith in the Imperial mission, and came to dislike his role. One contemporary said he had an unusual sympathy for the natives and went to the unprecedented lengths of learning their language…
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Black Ivory (2) by James Walvin (1992)
06 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
Without the slaves there would have been no sugar and without sugar there would have been no national addiction to coffee and, later, to tea. (p.4)
I bought Walvin’s book 20 years ago, read and found it as unsatisfactory then as I do now. He uses a thematic approach to grouping the material in order to loosely follow the slave experience. Thus the opening chapters describe the ways slaves were seized in Africa – in war or expressly for slavery – marched to the coast, he describes the coastal slaving forts, the Atlantic crossing, the slave auctions in America or the Caribbean, and then life and death on the different types of plantation.
It’s a valid approach but the downside is it is very bitty. It creates a kind of magpie effect, picking out dazzling facts and incidents from Barbados in 1723 or Georgia in 1805 or Jamaica in 1671…
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Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin (2012)
06 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
Empire – as the assertion of mastery (by influence or rule) by one ethnic group, or its rulers, over a number of others – has been the political rule of the road over much of the world and over most of world history: the default mode of state organisation. (p.7)
This is a much more sober, earnest and thoughtful account of the British Empire than Niall Ferguson’s popular blockbuster, Empire. Whereas Ferguson references popular myths and preconceptions in order to puncture them in the manner of a swashbuckling columnist, Darwin is the cautious scholar, thoughtfully engaging with the voluminous literature of other historians on the subject – which makes his book a much denser, more challenging, but hugely more rewarding read.
The medieval origins
Ferguson’s account starts with the Elizabethans establishing plantations in Ireland and America at the same time as they set up their own offshoot of the…
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The Hunt for Red October (1/9) Movie CLIP – Another Possibility (1990) HD
06 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
in movies
Steven Pinker: Human nature and the blank slate
06 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economic history, economics of education, economics of information, economics of media and culture, gender, human capital, occupational choice Tags: Steven Pinjer
The Injustice of Corporate Welfare
06 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, industrial organisation, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking, sports economics, survivor principle Tags: industry policy, picking winners
John Tooby on Socialism and Human Nature
06 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, development economics, economic history, economics of information, health economics, industrial organisation, Marxist economics, poverty and inequality, survivor principle Tags: evolutionary psychology
Are you, really you?
06 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, health economics
Why is it so Easy to be Thin in Japan?
06 Jan 2019 1 Comment
in health economics, industrial organisation, survivor principle Tags: Japan
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