Utopia, you are standing in it!

If there has been a staple of modern British history, one would surely be the Irish Question, which has recently returned to bite the Westminster backside once more.

It is tempting to rehearse a list of the manifold occasions that Irish politics has served to destabilise Westminster. For now, though, I want to focus on what was, potentially, the most serious one of lot, which convulsed British politics in the years before the Great War: what is usually referred to as the home rule crisis. It was a crisis that threatened the peace, the United Kingdom, and constitutional politics itself.

Back then, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. It had been since 1800. In reaction to the rebellion of 1798, Pitt the Younger forced through the Act of Union. Ireland’s parliament was abolished, and Ireland sent MPs to Westminster. In some ways, Pitt was emulating the 1707 Act…

In the olden days women fought for freedom

In the olden days, women’s rights campaigners fought for freedom.

Suffragettes fought for women’s right to vote. ‘Women’s libbers’ fought for equal pay an end to a life ‘tied to the kitchen sink’.

Tough women, like Sylvia Pankhurst, campaigned for equality and demanded liberty.

Nowadays, Modern Feminists have discovered that women are, in fact ‘vulnerable’. They have decided that the world is dangerous for women. Feminists want women to be supported and protected.

Sylvia Pankhurst campaigning on the streets of East London

#Hashtag Feminism

In olden days, Suffragettes chained themselves to fences and threw themselves in front of horses to fight for equal rights for women.

Today, Modern Feminists show their bravery in different ways. They loudly demand that the authorities protect women from adverts which show other women in bathing costumes.

The radical Feminists chain themselves to keyboards and hurl themselves into Twitter storms…

I just defended my habilitation, a rite de passage meant to evaluate an academic’s ability to develop a research program, to mentor graduate students and to hold a professorship. It’s a long process which begins with writing a thesis and ends up with answering two hours of questions from a peer jury. Part of the discussion looks like an unbounded meditation on the intellectual challenges ahead, with questions on methodology and future topics, yet the other is about navigating the financial and institutional constraints besetting the field, and they are especially critical in history of economics. The whole thing involves a deal of reflexivity and an insane amount of red tape.

 Below is the list of topics I wrote down when preparing the defense, those I wish to see historians of recent economics research in the years to come. It is more a wish list than an actual research program…

On 20 February, conservative lobby group Family First New Zealand launched a campaign called Ask Me First, in response to the “growing trend in both New Zealand schools and public places to allow men to enter women’s spaces — female toilets, showers, changing rooms, camp bunk rooms, and sports teams.” A key campaign video amplifies the voice of an 18-year-old high school student called Laura, who is concerned about female-only spaces being opened up to males on the basis of “gender identity”.

Laura explains that at her all girls’ high school early last year,

we got news that this student wanted to be in this school, this guy. And the school granted him access. As the year progressed, he wanted access to the female bathrooms. At that point, I was like “No, this isn’t right.”

Cue the liberal backlash. Journalists on the left are completely ignoring the implications to…

January 2017 – as one of his final acts in office, President Obama yesterday commuted the 35-year prison sentence of Chelsea Manning down to just four years with a scheduled release date of 17 May 2017. For supporters, it must have been an unbelievable victory, and for her critics, an outrage. For those that have known her, there’s an added dimension of anecdotes, personal interactions, and concrete memories of her conduct, all of which color the quality of that commutation. She is a hero to some, a traitor to others. Either she was an idealistic do-gooder who was intent on revealing state-sponsored human rights violations while exposing the darkest corners of the U.S. Government, or she was a coward suffering delusions of grandeur who invented enemies to blame, lashed out at her own country, and revealed nothing but her own self-sponsored narcissism.  Which one is accurate? Let me tell you a…

By David Paxton

To observe Owen Jones at work is to see somebody carefully negotiating difficult terrain. He has been the vanguard for this latest form of full-time campaigner-cum-party surrogate disguised as a commentator. People for whom purpose and credibility are at constant odds with each other.

Jones is both inside the tent and outside and does wondrous work trying to square the circle. “All commentators are biased it’s just that I’m honest about it” is the line and it’s a typically good one. But the tension many political commentators experience between having friends in the game, being a player yourself, and commentating on that game, has rarely been more obvious than it is with Jones. And so his output constantly resembles tactics far more than just a writer trying to make sense of the world from their particular vantage point. And it’s those contortions (see him on Brexit), the…

When a great thinker like Scott Alexander designates the strongest argument for a policy you oppose, you should certainly pay attention:

This strikes me as the strongest argument for the minimum wage and other job-killing labor regulations: that they are turning otherwise-miserably-employed people into unemployed welfare recipients.

It’s rare, and refreshing, to read arguments for the minimum wage that acknowledge even the potential for disemployment effects, let alone acknowledge them as a feature rather than a bug.  The problem with Alexander’s analysis is that, ceterus parabus, we would expect the minimum wage to disemploy workers in less miserable jobs.

Imagine an economy with two jobs for low skilled workers: elevator attendant and fry cook.  Let’s assume for simplicity that demand for fry cooks and elevator attendants is roughly equal.  However, since fry cooks have to slave over a hot grill rather than in an air-conditioned elevator, the supply of fry…