McCloskey summarised by Scheidel

I have recently been reading Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel. Scheidel himself summarises the arguments in this book in this piece.

Better yet, Scheidel also provides (pp.489-490) a very short summary of Deidre McCloskey’s very long trilogy about how the bourgeoisie ignited the Industrial Revolution:

Deirdre McCloskey has advanced a bold thesis that places values at the center of modernization and the Great Escape. In her telling, “liberal ideas caused the innovation” necessary to sustain this process. By 1700, talk and thought about the middle class began to change. As “general opinion shifted in favor of the bourgeoisie, and especially in favor of its marketing and innovating commerce and investment in human capital expanded as a consequence of this shift, rather than precipitating it. This led to a sweeping “Bourgeois Revaluation” embodied in a new rhetoric that protected the pursuit of business: whereas aristocratic-inflected discourse had previously stigmatized it as a vulgar pursuit, it now garnered acceptance and even admiration. This new mode of thinking permitted the bourgeoisie to join the ruling class and to infuse and enrich it with innovative and competitive traits. In the final analysis, the idea of liberty and dignity for ordinary people was the principal driving force behind this change.

According to McCloskey, this process unfolded in a series of steps. The Reformation together with the growth of commerce, the fragmentation of Europe, and the freedom of their cities enabled the Dutch bourgeoisie to enjoy freedom and dignity. Over time, Dutch influence that encouraged emulation of their practices regarding trading, banking, and public debt converged with the spread of printing and English liberties in similarly liberating and dignifying the British bourgeoisie, whose efforts subsequently unleashed modern economic growth.

Thus, “the Four Rs” – reading, reformation, revolt (in the Netherlands), and revolution (in England in 1688) culminated in late seventeenth-century England in the fifth and ultimately decisive “R,”the revaluation of the bourgeoisie, an “R-caused, egalitarian reappraisal of ordinary people.” Democratic church governance introduced by the Reformation emboldened the populace, and northern Protestantism encouraged literacy. McCloskey regards political fragmentation as vital to these processes: these forms of improvement worked better on a small scale. But political ideas, and ideas more generally, took the lead: “rhetorical change was necessary, and maybe sufficient.” She consequently documents at great length the emergence of a pro-bourgeois rhetoric in Britain during the eighteenth century.

As one who has struggled to plough through all of McCloskey’s three books, I am very grateful to Seidel.

I have dipped extensively into the McCloskey trilogy, and my guess is that if I joined up all my dippings, so to speak, I would conclude that these books are long on illustrated assertion but short on actual arguments to the effect that what is asserted is right rather than just asserted. As it happens, I share McCloskey’s admiration for the bourgeois virtues and I think she is right to believe in their transformative importance in British and global economic history. But if I didn’t already agree, I don’t believe that these books would do enough to convince me of much besides how strongly McCloskey believes what she believes. And what I actually believe also, but for other reasons.

Email problems: EIG2BA

I am suffering email problems just now. I can send them, but I can’t receive them.

As of now, I am relying on The Guru to ensure that …:

… which it surely will, eventually.

Meanwhile, the only other thing I did here today was to add a publication to this list of Chris Tame writings that I had missed. Political Notes 148: The Case Against a Bill of Rights. (My thanks to Professor Bryan Niblett for pointing out this omission.)

LATER: Email sorted. Thank you The Guru.

A House of Lords speech defending women and defending the English language

This bit of video, lasting just under ten minutes, which I recently came upon here, is surely likely to get a lot more attention than it’s got so far:

I like it because it is suffused with the very courtesy (a House of Lords feature) that he is asking for in the debate about trans rights. I am of the opinion that upholding trans rights should not be done by undermining the rights of women, as is the Noble Lord, Lord Hunt, or Philip Hunt as was. I am also of the opinion that Twitter mob bullying of anyone by anyone is to be deplored.

Will this speech prove to be a game-changer? I fear that this is a game that it will take more than one speech to change. But this speech is certainly, to use another common phrase of praise, a step in the right direction.

I’ve not looked at my Twitter feed since I watched this speech a few minutes ago, but I expect this to get many mentions there. If not, I just might break my Twitter silence. But like I say, I would be amazed if that were to be necessary.

LATER: Claire Fox, also in the House of Lords. says similar things, and tweets the videos.

Being offensive is not an offence and a public falsehood about the content of the law from a police force is worse than mere confusion

This:

I, and many others, found this sign very offensive. Which means that it was “being offensive” and it broke its own rule. Some of those many others complained and Merseyside Police retreated:

Merseyside Police said it “apologises for any confusion this may have caused,” adding “hate crime is an offence and will not be tolerated”.

Any confusion? These people are there to uphold the law. The law as it actually is. How about apologising for making a very public, very clear and very false statement about the content of that law?

At least they got a very public kicking on social media.

“We believe passionately …”

Mick Hartley comments on the statement by Julie Birchill’s ex-publishers about why they cancelled her book:

And you can almost guarantee that if someone states how they “believe passionately in freedom of speech”, it’s a prelude to an act of censorship which proves that, actually, they don’t.

It’s the word “passionately” that is so nauseating, in this context. What this actually means is: “Somewhat less than before this row happened, which we are going to give in to.”

Little, Brown didn’t actually use the word “but” in their statement, to signal the reversal. But, if they had, it would have changed nothing of importance.

It looks and tastes like conventionally-produced chicken

A new restaurant is opening up in Tel Aviv:

At a new restaurant in Tel Aviv called The Chicken, the chicken on the menu is grown from cells in a bioreactor in an adjacent pilot plant visible through a glass window. Diners don’t pay for their meals; instead, SuperMeat, the startup making the “cultured chicken” meat, is asking for feedback on its products, as it prepares for large-scale production of food that it thinks can transform the industry.

The main item on the menu, the Chicken Burger – a crispy cultured chicken fillet served on a brioche bun with toppings – looks and tastes like conventionally-produced chicken. “The burger has a juicy chicken flavor, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside,” says Ido Savir, CEO of the startup. “Feedback from multiple tasting panels was consistent that it was indistinguishable from conventionally manufactured chicken, and simply a great-tasting chicken burger.”

So not really a restaurant as such, more an exercise in handing out free samples. But still very interesting. Although “feedback”, in this context, sounds like someone’s been sick.

Human guilt about the way we treat animals has been building for quite some time. Which means that as soon as we can stop maltreating animals so that we can then eat them cheaply, we will. In the same sort of way that we largely did away with slavery as soon as some of us felt that we could.

I learned of this story from the endlessly informative Steve Stewart-Williams, my favourite tweeter by a considerable margin. He has supplied me with many a story for my Fridays here, when I like to reflect upon and giggle at and about animals and their complex relationships with each other and with humans, from mutually supportive to horribly cruel. And there could not be a more important animals/humans story than this one, because it will surely utterly transform how animals are treated by humans. (Next up, animals won’t be allowed to eat each other either. They too will only eat “cultured” meat. Think about it.)

Sadly for many animals, the choice they have is between being reared by humans, maybe cruelly or maybe not, and then being eaten by humans, or not being reared at all. Life as food, or not life at all.

On a cheerier note, watch the heads of veggies explode when they realise that the fastest food is now also the most veggie food.

And yes, if you’re thinking I must have prepared this earlier, as they say, you are quite right. I wrote this, apart from this, last Monday.

I’m pretty sure that’s not the problem

I made my trip (see below) to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and the trip had the effect of making the state I was in, i.e. the reason I went, worse. Any posture is uncomfortable for me just now. Even just sitting in a moving bus is a bit of an ordeal. So the X-raying was no fun, especially when I had to lie down. They wanted my toes pointing inwards, for some reason, and that was, it turned out, particularly uncomfortable. But they were very nice and didn’t waste any time, and here I am back home.

But not in any state to post more than one quota photo, of a sign, in the cubicle where I went to get changed beforehand:

As of now it is unclear what is/are the cause/causes of my present bodily discontents. For more about that, I must await the X-ray results. But I think we can cross that one off the list.

This did make me worry that I was in a seriously wrong place, though. No matter how much they smother a big and busy place in signs, if you’re visiting it for the first time, you get things wrong. I still don’t know if I committed any violations of a woman’s right to a safe space. I encountered no angry women, so no harm seemed to have been done.

Is this duck the same weight as Amey Coney Barrett?

This duck has been in the news recently:

The Babylon Bee did a piece just over a week ago about how Senator Hirono, also to be seen in the fake-photo above, brought a duck with her to the Congressional Hearing concerning whether Amey Coney Barrett should be allowed to become a Supreme Court judge. If the duck weighs the same as ACB, then she’s a witch!

Facebook disapproved of this mockery of their preferred political team, saying it incited violence, taking it down and taking various economic measures against the Bee, while telling the Bee to say nothing about having been thus admonished. But the Bee’s Seth Dillon took public exception. Twitter also got in on this attempted censorship.

The Babylon Bee is wise not to base its business model on never publicly disagreeing with Facebook and Twitter and the rest of the Woke Social Media Platforms. By not depending on them and by never begging them for permission to do its business, but rather by mocking these social media all they like whenever these platforms try to screw with them, the Babylon Bee has turned the wokist workforce of these social media entities into a Streisand effect salesforce for the Bee and its various jokes and fancies.

Quack.

At least they seem willing to end Lockdown

From this tweet, concerning a piece behind the Telegrap paywall (thankyou Adriana Lucas) …:

It’s rather reminiscent of Medieval physicians, attributing any sign of recovery to the effectiveness of bloodletting; any deterioration to insufficient application of leeches.

… I found my way to this thread, which summarises the case against the Plague policies of most governments around the world, the case that I have been passing on here, and the case which I hope will become the orthodoxy concerning this ghastly episode. The Plague was not that bad. The overreaction to it has been one of the great public policy blunders of all time.

However, if Johnson, Hancock and their equivalents elsewhere are thinking that they can now end Lockdown, because Lockdown has worked, I’ll take it, for now. The right thing getting done for the wrong reason, is surely better than the wrong thing continuing to be done for some other wrong reason. The argument to the effect that Johnson and Hancock and their ilk are off their chumps and should be dustbinned as major politicians can then proceed in a more relaxed fashion.

LATER: It seems that I may have underestimated their willingness to end Lockdown. Hancock is still threatening more Lockdown. But the government is rapidly losing its own backbenchers, who may soon compel a return to normality, because of all the reasons I’ve been going on about here. At which point, the government may then be allowed to declare their failed policy to have succeeded, just so long as they stop doing it any more. The backbenchers will maybe then go along with this charade, to avoid humiliating their own government more than is absolutely necessary and in order to get something resembling normal life back again, even though lots of them already think that Lockdown was a total failure rather than a good policy. Like I say, I’ll take that.

How London is protecting itself against the threatened Second Wave of The Plague

A friend (the one whom I refer to here as GD2S) iPhone-photoed this photo two nights ago, in Soho, London:

The Plague is now over. The only thing London is now scared of is the damn “Temporary restrictions”. Who the hell knows how long those are going to last?