Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Drews, Robert, The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe Ca. 1200 B.C., Princeton Univ Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993. 252 pp.
[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]
With the kind intent of keeping my “To-Read” pile at Olympian scale, Lex recently brought my attention to this older book on the “Catastrophe” that hit the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean civilizations some 3,000 years ago.
I think an old parable explains why the professional subcultures of articulate intellectuals, such as academics in the humanities, artists and journalists, all experience such enormous pressures to conform to the same viewpoint.
In the parable, a king wants to buy some clocks and travels to the Bavarian village were the ten best clockmakers in the world keep their shops all along one street.
The AARP’s new TV ad campaign in which innocent little children earnestly lecture the audience about how “important it is to keep promises” fills me with a blind rage every time I see it.
[Note: This is one of my long comments at another site that I thought I would post here.]
I think our economic lives profoundly influence how we think about broader issues. The degree to which any individual can disagree with one’s superiors and peers without suffering harm to one’s career varies significantly from field to field. In turn, the degree to which mere human opinion plays a role in an individual’s success within a field determines how conformist to common opinion within a field an individual must be to succeed.
But here’s a picture (click for full-size version):
