A "New History of Capitalism"

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.--Epicurus




Mrs. McGraw will need several months of resting her injured knee. Then they will consider maybe replacing it.
I had my very first chicken thighs last night with a very good pasta.

Over the last 37 years, women have earned 13.7 million more college degrees in the US than men, and 6.1 million more bachelor’s degrees. It’s perhaps the most remarkable academic success story in US history. And yet colleges and universities continue to pretend that women are so inferior to men academically that they need a disproportionate share of campus resources including women’s centers and women’s commissions, and female-only scholarships, fellowships, initiatives, awards, clubs, and camps.

"...popular mythology insists that matters are exactly the reverse of what they are in reality. We are told that we have meaningful voice when we don’t, and that we don’t when we do.
The market gives to the plumber, the pipefitter, and the political-science professor each a real and meaningful say in how his or her life proceeds. The young man who chooses to pursue a career as a physician need not persuade 51 percent of his fellow citizens to endorse his choice; that choice is his and his alone. Likewise for the woman who chooses to delay having children in order to work full-time as an attorney: the decision is hers, and it’s a decisive one.
Unlike in politics, each person’s individual decisions outside of politics are typically decisive." --Bordeaux (changed a bit)

Great book title:  Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality

 In 2018, the California Supreme Court in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court forged ahead with such a reform by unanimously holding that drivers who worked for a firm that supplied nationwide courier and delivery services should be classified by law as employees and not as independent contractors. It has been estimated that reclassification of Uber and Lyft drivers as employees in California alone will cost the two companies an average of $3,625 per driver per year for a combined annual bill of nearly $800 million per year.

Jack Letts, dubbed "Jihadi Jack", the British convert to Islam who travelled to Syria in 2014 to join ISIS, has been stripped of his British citizenship. The former dual-national, whose British mother and Canadian father stand by their son, exchanged his picturesque hometown of Oxford for Raqqa, to join the ranks of ISIS. He is currently awaiting his fate in the custody of Kurdish forces.

On this day in 1580, the English seaman Francis Drake returned to Plymouth, England, in the Golden Hind, becoming the first British navigator to circumnavigate the earth.
On December 13, 1577, Drake set out from England with five ships on a mission to raid Spanish holdings on the Pacific coast of the New World. Only the Golden Hind survived the trip.
Queen Elizabeth I knighted Drake during a visit to his ship. The most renowned of the Elizabethan seamen, he later played a crucial role in the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The explorer died off the coast of Panama in 1596 at the age of 56.

                         A "New History of Capitalism"

Studies on the "New History of Capitalism" [NHC] are appearing that attempt to connect slavery with capitalism. This seems to be a mixture of shoddy thinking and simply ideologically driven pamphleteering. The NYT is devoting an entire campaign to the concept. They do not declare their alternative suggestions but we can guess. I'm sure this time they promise to be gentile.

This is from the conclusion of the paper "Cotton, Slavery, and the New History of Capitalism" by Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode.

"There are good reasons why slavery remains a topic of keen interest. Slavery’s pervasive impact on American society, the misery it caused, and its toxic effects on American’s troubled history of race relations are all legacies of the nation’s original sin.  Slavery and the war that ended it led to an impoverished South.  It was in this backward, largely rural and agricultural setting, that freedmen and women, lacking education and capital, and often surrounded by hostile whites, had to start new lives.  For too long there was a general acquiescence to a southern revisionist version of slavery, the causes of the Civil War, and the subsequent southern white supremacy governments and policies. The NHC has rightly highlighted past injustices and their ramifications.   However, to recognize the pure evils of the slave system, does not mean that slavery was “absolutely essential” for U.S. economic growth, for the Industrial Revolution, or for world development.  Neither the NHC’s evidence nor its methodology supports such deterministic conclusions.  If slavery had been abolished nationally in 1790, we still would have had the Cotton South, and we still would have had an American Industrial Revolution.  The British Industrial Revolution was already underway, and it would have continued.  The slave system did increase the scale of farm size in the South, made many slave owners rich, and oppressed blacks.  It also impoverished many whites who existed on the margins of the more stratified, less urbanized, and less educated society that slave system created.  The riches of slave owners were not essential for national development, and the policies that this elite imposed on local, state, and national governments were on balance detrimental to development.  The slave system was an effective way to produce cotton, but hardly the only way.  Slavery was a national tragedy that inhibited economic growth over the long run.  The three foundational books in the NHC literature examined here all make serious errors of scholarship.  Perhaps most significantly, all mistakenly assert an essential role for cotton and slavery in the emergence of modern economic growth.  There is little understanding of the fundamental technological and production realities of the plantation cotton economy.  On this latter issue, all three books fail to recognize and come to grips with the significance of biological innovations in reshaping the American cotton slave economy and the worldwide implications of these innovations.  As the NHC matures, it might embrace the enduring strengths of traditional historical scholarship, including citing sources correctly, conducting close (and accurate) readings, drawing inferences that are actually supported by the evidence, and integrating its findings into the broader historiography.  It should also stop making stuff up."