August 06, 2004

• (.....hears the sound of one hand fapping.....)
• His comments on music history and theory appear spot on. (I had three years of this at university, so I feel qualified to comment). His economic observations are more than somewhat dubious and rely heavily on one or two sources. Casting aside my doubts about the explanatory power of Marxist analysis, bold claims are made without support: The society has become stratified, with a massively disproportionate amount going to those at the top of the society and those at the bottom receiving no more than was needed to keep them alive and working. The greater the surplus, the greater the disparity between the elite and those at subsistence level. According to Lenski (1966) in every known type of society the elite has appropriated virtually the whole of the surplus. ... while small details are demonstrably wrong. In Britain, a common pattern in the elite class was for the eldest son to inherit the title, the second to go into the army (n4) and the third into the church. The second and third sons were in effect downwardly mobile without seeming to be so. The second son stood a good chance of death on the battlefield (though with a gambler's chance of preferment), and if he left any offspring they would probably not be legitimate and would immediately enter the sub-class of expendables. The third son would also probably not leave any offspring because of the rules of religious life. As any Englishman should know, Anglican clergy can and do marry and reproduce, frequently with some success. Commissions in the Army could be and were purchased, and the suggestion that officers leave no legitimate heirs is just stupid. This site looks like a neat project, and it's a stimulating read, but there is much to challenge in it.
• Some meat to chew on... Unlike some other similar attempts, I think this guy can be perceptive. Althought, using the Wayback Machine, I see his first 2 sections have never been online since Sep, 2002. Thanks.
• I concur with zedediah's analysis. This is highly erudite fwappa-fwappa. If you want to crack your skull on long, difficult analyses of Everything, I suggest Immanuel Kant and/or Stephen Hawking.
• In other words, all left-wing solutions are illusory. This suggests that they are quite happy with a situation in which large numbers of people die in poverty and degradation through no fault of their own. Troll. A smart troll who can put words together and look intelligent. But still a troll.
• I glanced over the art sections. They are somewhat blase to me. If you want to read a brilliant *and* entertaining historical overview of big questions, check out "The Discoverers" and "The Creators" by Daniel Boorstin. Check out "Unpopular Essays" by Bertrand Russell for some zippy philosophical fun, in particular his "Outline of Intellectual Rubbish". Throw in Hofstadter's "godel, escher, bach" for some extra fizz. I guess what i'm really saying is Big ideas are fun to talk about and explore. Don't settle for anything less.
• Worthwhile resource for what? Haven't you your own g'damned head?
• Aaaaaand speaking of trolls...
• For the record, I meant a worthwhile resource for linking to. And maybe taking the time to read. And sharing with other monkeys.
• Well, just seeing what vitalorgnz has quoted, and being a graduate student in British history of the period he's talking about (vaguely 17-19th cen), with a focus on class relations, he's not totally off-base. The reproduction bit is just strange, but it is true that aristocratic (noble or gentry) second + sons would go down in social status - because the highest status you could have was to own an estate and to be the patriarch of a noble/gentle family. Of course, you would be outranked by the second+ sons from a better family, but their older brother would always out rank them (families of younger sons are actually called "cadet branches"). The younger sons might succeed and build their own estate through talent or inheriting from someone else, like a childless uncle, in that way establishing a new branch of the family. This wasn't that common - but that is not what mattered to the family. What mattered was keeping the estate together, and hopefully making it bigger so that at least one branch of the family would maintain their social status (this was often unsuccessful, of course - nothing like a disolute son to loose your family fortune). Interestingly, primo-geniture wasn't that popular among the lower classes of English - which is one of the reasons that in many places, their holdings became smaller and smaller. Now, about the stratification and inequality thing. Inequality (as shown by such measures as the GINI index) fell between 1700 and 1970, though I don't know the pattern inbetween. (Bigger GINI = more inequality - Incidently, it's gone up a bit in the UK and most of the developed world since circa 1970, which is not a good thing). But there is a caveat, in that I am talking about the GINI for England and Wales, not for the entire British economy. I don't know if anyone has ever worked out the GINI including the colonies, but there may be a case to be made that Britain became less unequal because they benefitted from the resources (and poverty) of the colonial possessions. (viz. Late Victorian Holocausts) I did have an interesting lecture this year in which the professor explained how unregulated market economies systematically work against subsistence farmers, in favour of those who are slightly larger. The example went this way: the theory of good business under a free market is to hold onto your stock when prices are low, to sell it when the prices are high. But let's say you have a bumper crop - but generally when you have one, so do all your neighbours, and the price drops. A larger farmer with some cash reserves can afford to hold onto his grain, to sell later. But the subsistence farmer must sell now - he has rent to pay, children to feed. He has more grain than last year, but there are lower prices, so he might not get anymore money. The next year there is a drought - and everyone's crops are bad. Now the poor farmer gets higher prices, but had little to sell, whereas the larger farmer can sell his surplus from the year before. I can imagine that this is analogous in many industries (but it was the farming that was explained to me). Being larger and richer allows the producer to whether the instabilities of the free market economy, while smaller producers go under. Large companies can go under, just like small can beat the odds and succeed to become large - but the overall push seems to be for producers to get larger and larger.