Deirdre McCloskey debates Zoe Williams on the question: Is inequality the root of all social ills? A slice from Deirdre’s remarks:
And yet you confuse poverty with inequality. Since 1800, never mind 1980, poverty has dramatically fallen, in Britain and worldwide. Equality of real comfort has therefore risen. My Irish ancestors starved. In 1967 Ireland was a very poor country. Now my distant cousins throng O’Connell Street in search of a thirtieth pair of trousers. You say that the poor are poor because of market forces, and their corruption by the rich, who take income from labour and give it to capital. No. In the United States until recently the share of labour was indeed falling. How far? From 63 per cent of GDP to 61 per cent. It is rising now.
Here’s the great Steve Davies on the most important invention that you (likely) never heard of.
Steve Horwitz bemoans the bemoaning of the demise of the American laundromat.
In this new video, Bob Murphy asks, and answers, the question: who bears the burden of government debt? (Spoiler alert: Paul Krugman gets this one wrong.)
Libertarians vs. conservatives.
Arnold Kling speaks about his Three Languages of Politics.
In this Cato Podcast, Steve Horwitz discusses Nancy MacLean’s fabulist tale, Democracy in Chains.
Speaking of Nancy MacLean and her error-ridden book about Jim Buchanan and public choice, here’s a new podcast from Reason; it features Mike Munger and Nick Gillespie. (I cannot fathom why MacLean, her publisher, and her Duke Department of History colleagues aren’t embarrassed to the point of wishing to withdraw her book from circulation. Were I to awaken to discover that I’d written and published a book that insisted in all seriousness that the fifth Beatle was really William Gladstone – who was, after all, from Liverpool! – I would be less embarrassed than were I to learn that I’m the author of Democracy in Chains.)
