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.
[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings] Jacob, Margaret C. and Larry Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire 1687-1851, Harvard University Press, 2004. 201pp. This book is a small gem. Well-written, modest in size, and tightly focused for the general reader, it describes the deep ties between Anglosphere civic culture and the … Read more
[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings] Instapundit has a post up on a book about the Medici and Italian banking: SO I’VE BEEN READING TIM PARKS’ Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. It’s a pretty interesting book, with a juxtaposition of prejudices against sodomy and usury (both seen as “against nature”) as a background … Read more
[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings] From comedy troupe Monty Python’s Life of Brian: REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? XERXES: Brought peace. REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up! As described by the … Read more
Western technological superiority has deep historical roots, and can only be understood – if at all – by an analysis that is willing to look back centuries, even millenia. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches, quoted on David Cosandey’s very interesting Rise of the West site (about which more later, I hope).