The People's Economics

Ammonium chloride as an ingredient of an anti-rust paint? Levi knows

it is completely useless as I can state from first-hand experience because it was I who introduced it to the formula

The peak of the British novel? I can't remember much about it - but then I tend to remember what's wrong with a book.

Woolf has plenty of opinions on 19th Century Literature

Contains the short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Would you stay or would you walk away.

Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville and their son became Edward V – that is until his uncle Richard declared him illegitimate, on the basis that a marriage based on romantic love didn’t really count, This seems preposterous to me, but maybe people thought differently then. Have writers such as Sha...

One recommendation in Moral Thinking, Fast and Slow is that, in an argument, rather than countering the points our opponents are making, we should try to show that their mode of reasoning is faulty. Sauer expands on this in the book Debunking Arguments in Ethicsi. To me this seems to be what C.S. Le...

In the past many families would keep a pig, feed it on scraps, and then have it slaughtered to provide meat for the winter. Pigs are intelligent creatures, and I would expect that it was often treated much like a pet. But its meat was a vital part of the family’s food. In this case the line between ...

Some have claimed that slavery wasn’t as profitable as it was made out to be – that it would be cheaper just to employ people. This claim looks like it is trying to provide a justification for slavery. Adam Smith’s viewpoint was somewhat different, he thought that, yes, slavery may indeed be less pr...

At Henry George’s Oxford talk a Mr Conybeare claimed that Land Taxes were immoral. George took this as a personal insult, and demanded an apology. I was intrigued by this, and wanted to find out whether Conybeare was just expressing the predictable view of the landed classes, or whether he had other...

How well off were agricultural labourers in Britain in 1775? Adam Smith thought free trade had brought prosperity, whilst Thomas Malthus saw misery due to overpopulation. A century later it was the free-marketer Marshall who saw misery back then which had since been ameliorated by economic growth, w...