Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, burned Londinium to the ground in AD 61 – we can still find a layer of oxidized iron in the geological record attesting to her success. While Londinium was not a big city by modern standards – its population was probably about the same as today’s Poughkeepsie, with the same […]

Javier Milei, a libertarian economist favored to win next month’s Argentine election, was interviewed by Tucker Carlson last week. After proclaiming his adherence to Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, Milei announced that there should be no public sector layoffs initially, instead allowing the economy to recover before laid-off bureaucrats had to seek work. Bad […]

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was at first sight a splendid 21st century replica of the 18th century Country Banks that fueled the Industrial Revolution – it was local to Silicon Valley, supremely attuned to the major industry in its locality, and easy for that industry to deal with. So why did it fail? The answer […]

News came last week that Brazil and Argentina were discussing forming a common currency. Since Argentina’s inflation in 2022 was 95% while Brazil’s was only around 6%, this is unlikely to work well. However, so many Latin American countries are now run by market-hating leftists that a full-scale attempt at economic integration, to remove the […]

We learned last week that Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) is investing $10 billion in OpenAI for 75% of its profits, a stake that will drop to 49% when Microsoft has recouped its investment. Since OpenAI’s principal asset has become the artificial intelligence writing software ChatGPT, this indicates the perceived value of AI applications. Yet we have also […]

Moving into a new year, we naturally look for interesting anniversaries, from which lessons can be drawn. In 2023, there are no centenaries, bicentenaries or tercentenaries of interest, while I have written extensively recently about the 1970s, in which 1973 of the “Arab Oil Crisis” is the crucial year. However, 2023 is also the 150th […]

Imagine being a citizen of the Western Roman Empire early in the reign of the Emperor Honorius (ruled 395 to 423). You would know that the Emperor was not very good, and that the Empire was fighting off the barbarians only through the efforts of General Stilcho (c.359-408). Yet you would look back for better […]

The Industrial Revolution is traditionally held to have begun in the middle 1780s with James Watt’s invention of the rotary steam engine with condenser attached. (The condenser alone did not allow Watt’s engine to power machinery, since it still used the jerky Newcomen “beam” motion.) Yet there was another innovation, almost 20 years earlier, which […]

This column has not written enough about the economic damage done by excessive regulation, partly because most of that damage takes the form of new businesses snuffed out. Something that has been eliminated from existence is by definition difficult to write about. However, in my Industrial Revolution researches I have found an example of regulation […]

“The gates of Hell are open night and day Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies In this the task and mighty labor lies.” Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, translated by John Dryden, published in 1697 when poetry was poetry, is a useful window on China’s […]