Private owners of capital used the state to force peasants – who, in the 14th century, worked about a quarter of hours that the average person does now – to work 12 hour days in factories.

We’re supposed to believe that a peasant working in a subsistence economy works 10 hours a week are we? Assuming a 40 hour working week now.

Or given the average working year in the UK of something like 1500 hours, a peasant worked 375 hours a year? 7 hours a week, not even one full day’s labour?

No, I think we can call bullshit on that one, don’t you?

Several years ago, a group of leaders from the Chinese church came to England on a holy pilgrimage. They had followed in the footsteps of one of Christianity’s great missionaries in the Far East, travelling for days to worship at the hallowed birthplace of their religious teacher.

When they reached their destination, the church leaders got down on their knees and prayed. “This truly is a sacred place,” they said. Canterbury Cathedral, perhaps? Westminster Abbey, or Stonehenge? Not quite. It was a branch of Boots. In Barnsley town centre.

The spies were then given a choice of betraying their Nazi leaders or facing the firing squad.

For hanging was the punishment at the time.

A firing squad is, when used, a military punishment, not one for civilian spies even in time of war.

Update: so, someone dares to contradict me in the comments, eh?

Yes, one was shot in the Tower.

All of the others were turned or hanged after civilian trials.

Yah Boo!

The fact that no remedy has seemed to work has had remarkably little impact on policy. During the Depression Milton Friedman’s call for an increase in money supply proved ineffective when that increase was merely hoarded by stricken banks. Thus pumping up the banks is exactly what the Bank of England is doing today: to the same minimal effect.

During the Depression Friedman was a newly minted MA. He wasn’t calling for and certainly no one would have been listening to any such calls. His great innovation of the period was in fact the invention of with holding (or PAYE as we call it) for income tax. Something he came to regard as a very large mistake in fact.

And, err, the Fed didn’t pump up the money supply at the time and the banks didn’t hoard the money.

It is his work with Anna Schwartz, published in the 60s, which actually analyses what was done and what should have been done and leads us to thinking that we should pump the banks full of money in such circumstances.

You might think this is all pedantry but it’s really rather important. If the banks had been pumped full of money and we’d still had the Depression then that would indicate that pumping the banks full of money was not a solution for falling into a Depression. Thus not a solution for us now. However, they weren’t, so it still might be: we’ll obviously have to wait and see whether it’s a sufficient solution.

Likewise in the 1920s and 1930s governments that forced national budgets into balance through austerity saved their banks, but exacerbated stagnation and slump.

Nope, banks fell over all over the place. Austerity, along with that not expanded money supply, helped cause this.

Sweden nationalised, divided and recapitalised its banks.

And, let us remember, promptly privatised them again.

Yes, shareholders should lose everything when their management screws up. That’s capitalism. But get the banks back into the private sector: otherwise all lending decisions are going to be about who you know in politics: one of the fastest known methods of entirely corrupting the entire political system.

The question is not what history says but who is listening.

Erm actually, I think it’s that Santayana thing: who actually remembers it. For mis-remembering it is really quite dangerous….you know, thinking that in the 30s the money supply was hugely expanded but the banks just sat on hte money for example?

There have been periods in Britain’s history – the famine of the 1340s, followed by the Black Death – when there were colossal falls in living standards,

No, the Black Death caused, for those who survived of course, a massiove rise in living standards.

It was a Malthusian economy, see? Fewer people, same amount of land and production from it, higher living standards.

As Kentucky-based Sawyer, 58, points out: “I scarcely think Jesus could have overturned the tables of the money-lenders and driven them from the temple if he was a wimp. The model I use for my paintings is a surfer guy who’s built like a brick shithouse.”

Historically, it would be very odd to think that someone who was a carpenter, in a time when it was all hard manual labour, was a wimp.

One of the little stories I’ve heard (yes, ancedata) to illustrate this is the cuirasses worn by the Household Cavalry. I think I’ve got that right, the metal chest and abdomen armour worn by them. They’re all old gear, originally made for the Georgian and Victorian sons of the soil who made up the regular troops. They’re big: not tall, but wide and deep. The sorts of chest created by a life on the farm, the hard physical labour of mucking out, ploughing, reaping, baling, beats anything you’ll see nowadays except on the largest of prop forwards.

Modern physiques simply rattle around in them, they have to be padded out to make sure they don’t slip and slide all over the place.

Another little piece of anecdata: those prop forwards. It wasn’t all that long ago, only a few decades, that places like Hawick (the farmers) and Cambourne (the miners) were known as having the biggest and beefiest front rows. To say nothing of the Welsh front rows of the time, miners all.

Bernard Levin, all those years ago, called it exactly, to the moment, when the Soviet system came tumbling down.

At one point, the crowd defending the White House was called upon to disperse. Along the lines of “This is the KGB, we order you to go home” or some such.

And the crowd laughed.

And then that was that. You can’t rule people through fear if they don’t fear you.

Or as PJ O’Rourke put it about the Berlin Wall:

I say, Shut-up you egghead flap-gums. We’ve got the whole rest of history to sweat the small stuff. And those discredited peace creeps, they can zip their soup-coolers too. They think Mikhail Gorbachev is a visionary? Yeah, he’s a visionary. Like Hirohito was after Nagasaki. We won. And let’s not anybody forget it. We the people, the free and equal citizens of democracies, we living exemplars of the Rights of Man tore a new asshole in International Communism. Their wall is breached. Their gutstring is busted. The rot of their body politic fills the nostrils of the earth with a glorious stink. We cleaned the clock of Marxism. We mopped the floor with them. We ran the Reds through the wringer and hung them out to dry. The privileges of liberty and the sanctity of the individual went out and whipped butt.

From his earliest days, George Lascelles was blessed with an extraordinary ear for music and interest in facts about music, an eccentricity which prompted his uncle, the Prince of Wales (later the Duke of Windsor), to remark: “It’s very odd about George and music. You know his parents were quite normal — liked horses and dogs and the country.”

And this shows quite how near a long time ago can be:

At his christening, held at his parents’ home, Goldsborough Hall in the North Riding of Yorkshire, his godparents included King George and Queen Mary, Princess Alexandra, and General Sir George Higginson, a noted veteran of the Crimean war, then aged 96.

The godfather of a man who died this week fought in the Crimean war, 160 years ago.

On this subject, the last US civil war pensions were still being paid out in 2003 and 2004.

“One of the judges, [biographer] Brenda Maddox, simply said ‘this book changed my life – I think differently about the 20th century than I did before. Why didn’t I know about this?’ We feel we know who the villains of the 20th century are – Stalin and Hitler. But here, fully 50 years after the event, is something we did not know about. It’s a testament to the power of non-fiction, that it can rock you back on your heels.”

Seriously? You had to wait until 2011 to work that one out?

In the late 1940s every government on the continent ran postwar reconstruction as it had run its war effort, as a national mobilisation with the state as the prime planner, arbiter and coordinator. Ministries of planning were not confined to the Eastern bloc, and their achievements across the continent were impressive.

This is complete nonsense. Entire argle bargle.

The most impressive growth economy of the period was the West German one. By far the most impressive. And that was based on Ehrhard’s reforms of 1948.

On that same Sunday the German Bizonal Economic Council adopted, at the urging of Ludwig Erhard and against the opposition of its Social Democratic members, a price decontrol ordinance that allowed and encouraged Erhard to eliminate price controls.

Erhard spent the summer de-Nazifying the West German economy. From June through August 1948, wrote Fred Klopstock, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “directive followed directive removing price, allocation, and rationing regulations” (p. 283). Vegetables, fruit, eggs, and almost all manufactured goods were freed of controls. Ceiling prices on many other goods were raised substantially, and many remaining controls were no longer enforced. Erhard’s motto could have been: “Don’t just sit there; undo something.”

It wasn’t planning that grew the West German economy: planning was what they did in East Germany. No, in West Germany they deregulated the economy.

Damn near over night too, certainly in a matter of a few months. They abolished, near entirely, the state as the arbiter, prime planner and coordinator of the economy: that’s why it grew so damn fast.

Yes, indeed, comment is free but recall the second part of the phrase: facts are sacred. You just don’t get to go round inventing history to fit your arguments.

Then again, he is a septic, so why should we expect him to know anything about Europe anyway?

Is it any wonder that St Patrick enjoys such popularity in comparison? He’s a local boy made good, a saint the Irish can really take to their collective bosom.

Paddy wasn’t in fact Irish. A Romano-Brit, almost certainly Welsh, who was carried off by Irish slavers. Came home again, then got the bug to go convert the slavers.

A more modern example might be someone enslaved perhaps on the Amistad, sent back to Liberia, who then returns to American to convert them all to Akan.

You might know the banana story. During the second world war, Evelyn Waugh‘s wife managed to procure three bananas for their children. When she brought the fruit home, Evelyn sat down in front of the children, peeled the bananas, poured on cream and sugar, and ate them all.

Umm, well, that’s not the way I’ve heard it.

It was post WWII and the new Labour Government procured bananas, one for each child in the Kingdom. A celebration of it all being over. But Evelyn, being made of stern stuff, wasn’t going to have some damn socialists bribing his own children.

And quite right too.

Doyle quit after just one week at the factory where her picture was made famous.

And that’s how the war was won.

This thoughtful re-examination of the history of U.S. economic growth is built around a novel claim, that potential output grew dramatically across the Depression years (1929-1941) and that this advance provided the foundation for the economic and military success of the United States during the Second World War as well as for the golden age (1948-1973) that followed.  Alexander J. Field takes a fresh look at growth data and concludes that, behind a backdrop of double-digit unemployment, the 1930s actually experienced very high rates of technological and organizational innovation, fueled by the maturing of a privately funded research and development system and the government-funded build-out of the country’s surface road infrastructure. This substantive new volume in the Yale Series in Economic and Financial History invites renewed discussions on productivity growth over the last century and a half and on our current prospects.

If this is true (and as I say, I am already pre-disposed to believe that it is) then this has huge politico-economic implications.

For there are those who rather enjoy pointing out that the grwoth rates 1945-1980 ish were rather higher than those 1980ish to now. And that thus the times of planning, of social democracy, of high tax rates, are correlated with the times of high growth.

But, if the post war growth is in fact an artefact of the no or little pre war growth, while productivity and technology were still advancing, then it is indeed simply a correlation, not a causation.

I have a horrible feeling this book will either be ignored or trashed. For it will be politically uncomfortable for many.

A fossilised little finger discovered in a cave in the mountains of southern Siberia belonged to a young girl from an unknown group of archaic humans, scientists say.

The missing human relatives are thought to have inhabited much of Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago, and so shared the land with early modern humans and Neanderthals.

The finding paints a complex picture of human history in which our early ancestors left Africa 70,000 years ago to rub shoulders with other distant relatives in addition to the stocky, barrel-chested Neanderthals.

The new ancestors have been named “Denisovans” after the Denisova cave in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia where the finger bone was unearthed in 2008.

A “Denis” is thus a member of an archaic human subspecies.

OK. Works for me.

Why Frome is still cashing in on the Romans

Last April, a man who hated history at school unearthed the largest coin hoard ever found in Britain. But why had it been buried in a field in Somerset?

As a West Country boy myself I can answer this.

Because, whatever the century, you certainly don’t want to be carrying around your valuables if you’re anywhere near Frome.

But it is amusing.

And what was it that brought cheap, fashionable specs to the masses? Was it State ownership and control of the Opticians with billions of tax money thrown in, or was it just freeing the market and letting competition bring its benefits? Hmm I wonder.

This bloke.

One stick of bombs went across the avenue where the ancestral spires are: haveing looked at where the bombs fell, you can now see it, if you see what I mean. There are two post war houses in an avenue of Edwardian ones: the two new ones on opposite sides of said avenue. And the third of the stick landed on the tennis court in the middle, destroying the pavilion.

Hmm, OK, so the connection? In the fixing up of the house the builders have found that the window frames facing that tennis court have all been pushed in: in essence, we’ve had draughts coming through since 1942 as a result of the bomb blast.

Not a big or major problem, fixed with a bit of sealant. But the idea that I am sitting here listening to a builder repairing war damage from 58 68 (see comments) years ago (or, actually, listening to him drinking tea in between repairing such damage) is, umm, a little odd.