Here it is, the article you’ve all been waiting for: open.substack.com/pub/jackbm…

Vermont Lagerfest is my World Cup

smh Italy had lots of trillionaires before it joined the Euro.

On the one hand, revolutionary communist governments tend to repudiate all foreign and domestic debts incurred by the preceding regime, on the other hand U.S. public debt is roughly equivalent to the private wealth held by the top 0.5% of Americans

Some reading for today

that this is possible, is, perhaps, a reason to have a moral objection to trillionaires

How come nobody is a natural burgher. Who out here is born to break up guild privileges and sell fur futures.

I’m guessing the RCT proposal didn’t make it past the ethics review board

Minor methodological nitpick, but comparisons of the relative concentration of incomes throughout history ought to account for the frontier of possible inequality at a given per capita income level since the minimum individual allocation is ultimately subsistence.

The Mississippi versus UK thing is funny and I think it's worth discussing in a longer essay that I'm writing on Britain's decline, so I've removed the thread from yesterday for now. But for now here are the headline graphics.

“Got any weekend plans?”

It's the opposite. During the mid- to late-19th century, suits were the uniform of clerks and administrators. Those higher on the social and economic ladder — such as lawyers, doctors, and politicians — wore the more "gentlemanly" frock coat with a silk top hat. In fact, Labour Party founder Keir Hardie caused quite a stir when he showed up to work on his first day as a Member of Parliament while wearing a tweed suit to show his allegiance to his working-class constituents. The press was shocked, noting that he wore a "cloth cap in Parliament" (a tweed deerstalking cap, rather than the silk top hat). With time, everyone wore the suit. By the early 20th century, those who owned the means of production wore the same uniform as those who managed them. Blurring this distinction can seem meaningless today, but it was quite a big deal in the early 20th century. Even manual laborers who wore more utilitarian clothing to work — chambray shirts, blue jeans, chore coats, etc — had a suit for religious services on Sunday. Thus, the suit was not a symbol of domination, but rather hid class markers. To be sure, there were distinctions in how people wore suits and where they bought them. In London, businessmen could be distinguished by whether they bought their clothes from a "City tailor" or a "West End tailor" (the West End being the higher-grade option reserved for those with money). But these were relatively minor and only for the trained eye. Relatively speaking, class symbols today are significantly more obvious not only through the different grades of quality, but also logos and general aesthetics. Hence, to some degree, why fashion changes so rapidly today — people are constantly shifting their social position.

Paper 9 is Petra Moser asking whether patents really drove the IR. She tells us that Newcomen worked on Savery's engine for 10 years, and eventually succeeded in making in work (and not blow up)

Some Piketty (et al.) bangers to explain why he is so respected, even before Das Capital 2.0, and whatever AI-generated stuff he publishes in the newspaper today In the 1990s, he formalised theories of self-fulfilling preferences and redistribution. He showed us (1/4)