“If I were in that march, and these racist lunatics were waiving [sic] guns at me, I’d like to think I’d rush them and beat their brains in. And I wouldn’t apologize for it for one goddam second” — Jerry Taylor, President of the Niskanen Center () Think about it for a second. Wouldn’t it Read More
The art of crisis PR is saying as little as possible in as many words as you can. The intent is to obfuscate and blur meaning until all that’s left is a vague sense that something is being done (it isn’t) and that great contrition is felt (ditto). In the event that an employee commits Read More
You can’t not read. That’s the trick of it. Your eyes see ink arranged into the shape of letters, and your brain descrambles the image, assembles the words, and deciphers their meaning without you even having time to think about it. You can’t stop it if you want to. It is entirely unconscious, automatic, always Read More
Newspapers across the United States are tying themselves into knots justifying the decision to capitalise ‘Black’ while keeping ‘white’ lowercase. The Chicago Sun-Times provides a useful illustration; its new approach capitalises ‘Black’ and ‘Brown’ but retains ‘white’ in lower case as “a wider descriptor of people of numerous origins”, resulting in the curious conclusion that Read More
The debate about the appropriate way to handle the 19th century compensation of slave-owners is likely to rumble on for a while, so I thought it would be useful to put together a quick post pulling together the main facts in the debate: how much was paid to end slavery, when it was paid, who Read More
Over in the Spectator, I summarised the better economic history research on whether slavery and sugar made Britain rich. While the answer is a clear and resounding “no”, I thought it might be useful to briefly expand on what did make Britain rich here. In his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, John Maynard Keynes wrote Read More
Here’s a neat bit of terminology coined by Garett Jones: the ‘Everest regression’. I’m going to assume you’ve come across the term ‘regression analysis’ before, but if you haven’t, it’s a way of estimating the relationships between a set of variables; finding out what happens to Y if we increase X by a little bit, Read More
This is a radical. This is a nested radical. This is an infinitely nested radical; it goes on, and on, repeating itself. You may now be asking yourself two obvious questions: (a) what has this got to do with me, and (b) is this going to end up in a joke about political radicals saying Read More
Over on Twitter, the excellent Tom Chivers (find his book here) is curious about how the human brain works: “Is there a specific name for the cognitive bias that makes us remember weather forecasts the few times they’re wrong… but not all the times when it’s right?” Good question, and one I embarrassingly can’t think Read More
Until relatively recently, you may have been under the misapprehension that preventing people from breaking the law was somehow part of the job of a police officer. If current events had not quite managed to disabuse you of this notion, then you can ask Chief Constable Ben-Julian Harrington: officers at Black Lives Matter rallies dedicated Read More