Economics

In fact, most of the economic innovations of the last thirty years make more sense politically than economically. Eliminating guaranteed life employment for precarious contracts doesn’t re- ally create a more effective workforce, but it is extraordinarily effective in destroying unions and otherwise depoliticizing labor. The same can be said of... See more

My current favorite theory about what's gone wrong since the 1970s is that we stopped innovating to maximize performance and started optimizing for energy (and resource) efficiency. Imagine all the cool shit we're gonna build once we have abundant sources of clean energy...

Many people were outraged by what they regarded as his non-parliamentary use of medieval laws to raise money. The most notorious was ship money. This turned an old law, where coastal counties provided ships to the Crown, into a money tax levied on all the counties, including those inland.