Awed by the Amazing Twentieth? Is it unreasonable to ask people getting more than £80,000 a year to pay more tax?
Author: gwydionwilliams
Thinking about Troy and Homer
I’m working on a story, imagining an old Greek singer complaining about ‘Young Homer’ who has reinvented a fine old take, saying things that never happened.
In connection with this, I have completed a short essay on why the story as we have it is very unlikely to be true. Modern authors typically snip out the supernatural bits but keep the rest. But archaeology contradicts the standard version.
Priam’s Tragedy and the Wrath of Achilles is available here.
8th February 2017
Degraded Globalisation. What’s wrong with Neo-Liberalism, the dominant economics since the 1980s.
The Gap in Adam Smith’s doctrine
Why Profit Need Not Be Wealth-Creating. The flaw in Adam Smith’s arguments.
How National Economies Really Grow. The alternative system of Friedrich List, who recognised that real economics depends on nation-states.
Adam Smith’s Friends and the birth of Conspiracy Theory. His connections to several influential individuals, including James Watt and John Robison. Robison believed in a conspiracy of Freemasons behind the French Revolution. He had nothing to say about Jews, but the notion later evolved into anti-Semitic fantasies like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
My holiday in China
Doing a series of blogs on Quora about my holiday in China, see https://gwydionmw.quora.com/. More people would see it there than here, I suspect.
New historic article, May 2016
Why the sophistocated Chinese Empire could not modernise. Including details of the exceptional nature of European developments. And how Japan managed to modernise without uprooting its traditional culture. Also available as a PDF, Problems 21 – Imperial China.
2015 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 780 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 13 trips to carry that many people.
