Lynne Kiesling Lynne’s snark of the morning: If President Obama doesn’t know who invented the automobile, perhaps he should take my Western Economic History class this spring (hint: the inventor of the automobile was German). My spring class is already full and has a waiting list (which I find gratifying), but I’d make room for …
Lynne Kiesling At the Atlantic’s newish business web site, Greg Clark has a very good post on the history of government spending in Britain. He starts in the early post-Magna Carta period: In England, for example, from the Magna Carta of 1215 until the Glorious Revolution of 1689, public debt was always tiny — a …
An Economic History Lesson on Fiscal Responsibility Read More »
Michael Giberson Thanksgiving Day should be remembered not just as a day when we give thanks for our abundance, but more deeply and historically why we have this abundance. In our Thanksgiving Day celebrations, let us therefore tell one another the true origins of the thanksgiving and the great economic lesson that the Pilgrims hoped …
Lynne Kiesling Even those unaffected by this economic downturn are changing their consumption behavior, a pattern seen in prior economic downturns. This New York Times article by Alex Williams gives some details on the forms that these adjustments are taking among the wealthy: “The era of conspicuous consumption, at least for the foreseeable future, has …
Lynne Kiesling [Yes, I am truly in real-world issue avoidance mode …] I love the occasional Wired articles on technology history, and this one is near and dear to my heart … on 11 November 1856, Henry Bessemer received a U.S. patent for his steel production technology. The article also gives appropriate credit to American …
This Week in 1856: Bessemer Becomes Man of Steel Read More »
Lynne Kiesling When Steve Horwitz says that we have to control the narrative in the wake of the bailout plan’s approval, here’s one example: following up on a link to a 2004 UCLA press release, I found this paper: “New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression: A General Equilibrium Analysis” Harold Cole …
Lessons from the Depression: Emergency Policies Can Prolong Weakness Read More »
Michael Giberson Up the Yangtze, a documentary by Yung Chang, examines changes along the Yangtze river in China due to the construction of the Three Gorges dam through the stories of two Chinese youth who took jobs on a cruise ship. The cruises are called “farewell tours” because they offer the chance to see parts …
Michael Giberson Free Press columnist Ed Shamy offers “a stroll through The Burlington Free Press archives about gasoline prices,” beginning January 16, 1974, continuing to today: Jan. 16, 1974: Gasoline in short supply in Vermont. Entire communities without a single open filling station. And gasoline is obscenely expensive, an average of 48.7 cents per gallon …
A Longer View of the Retail Gasoline Experience in Vermont Read More »
Michael Giberson I was out in West Texas this past weekend and had a little spare time available Saturday morning. What better for an energy policy geek to do than visit the American Wind Power Center in Lubbock, Texas? The AWPC is a museum showing off about 150 years of windmill technology. Most of the …
Lynne Kiesling I like Wired’s “This Day in Tech” feature. Today’s feature is this day in bridge history: March 4, 1890, the opening of the Forth Bridge across the Firth of Forth, north of Edinburgh in Scotland. Three 330-foot towers went up, each atop four separate foundations. The towers cantilevered out toward one another, not …
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