Hmm, I don't know Charlie/hetermeles, it's been ages since I read Smith (or Ricardo, Marx, Mill et al.) but I don't this is the right way to characterise him.
I went looking for the Smith quote about cartels because it was the one I remembered, and found these instead:
"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." (Book I, Chapter XI, Part III)
"Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people." (Book I, Chapter IX)
"The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever." (Book IV, Chapter VII, Part II)
"To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers." (Chapter VII, Part III)
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." (Chapter I, Part II)
There are lots more at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adam_Smith.
So "the idea that politics is divorced from money goes back to the roots of economics" doesn't get much support if you look at Smith. I am not a historian of economic thought, but to the extent this idea is a real phenomenon, I think it's relatively recent, say 20th century or post-WWII. And (now I'm on familiar turf) it's far from universal in mainstream academic economics. The top economics journals regularly publish stuff on corruption, lobbying, regulatory capture, etc. I just checked the list of forthcoming articles in the American Economic Review (#1 journal in the discipline) and found one on lobbying and one on corruption and election fraud. Pretty mainstream, actually.
]]>It can in fact be shown that chemistry owes a lot to alchemy, not just in the physical apparatus, but in the ideas, but then alchemy wasn't magic, it was actually a proper testable hypothesis about how the world worked.
There are a lot of people who could do with reading up on the history of science.
]]>Regards Luke
]]>It's interesting to hear his perspective on "The Avengers", which he co-wrote.
As a person, the author must have been fascinating bloke, and it's a shame that his personal website has since gone down: the wayback machine has it here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110928181425/http://www.martin-woodhouse.co.uk/
]]>In the UK you get a strictly rationed number of party political broadcasts, and then it's basically campaign staff, leaflets and billboards. There isn't all that much to spend the money on. You certainly cannot buy TV or radio time beyond your allotted quota.
If you want to reduce the impact of money on politics in the USA, all you need to do is limit political advertising on TV and radio. Good luck with that though. Quite apart from the constitutional arguments, the media has a vested interest in maintaining an income stream.
]]>It's interesting to read how deliberate that was. And, for me at least, it's one of the reasons it remains more watchable than say, The Prisoner. It's a bit less surreal too, but it treats its central female character with a much more modern touch. The Prisoner always feels far more dated in how it treats all its women to me.
Although that's way, way off topic, even off the diversion of the topic that the discussion of Steed's sexuality was!
I did notice in your link discussion of them as swingers. I have no problem with the idea they both swing both ways, as I think I said - although I don't think you could find clear evidence in the shows. The F/m theme it talks about is much stronger and clearly displayed. But again way off topic.
]]>The idea that politics is divorced from money goes back to the roots of economics ... it's very hard to look back and figure out where the great divorce between economics and politics started in the first place.
And my point is that if you take Smith as the starting point for "modern economics", there's no divorce between economics and politics. They're quite happily married at that point.
I don't entirely agree with hetermeles about the current state of the economics discipline either: it's easy to find mainstream high-profile etc. counterexamples to the claim that "studying political economics doesn't seem to lend itself to the elaborate quantitative models that economists love", as I noted in my previous post. But I don't entirely disagree either.
I think the problem in the economics discipline (my day job) is actually two different problems. There is a tendency in modern economics, or perhaps I should say on the part of some economists, to ignore or simplify away the politics. But there's a second, more pernicious problem: some members of my tribe have a bad habit of pretending to do "positive economics" ("what is") when it's actually just a cover for "normative economics" ("what should be"). Too easy to find examples, sadly.
]]>I was listening to Radio 4, and they asserted that the original title of the subject was "Political Economy", i.e. the spreading your available resources efficiently within a greater number of political demands.
This was then shortened to "Economy", hence "Economics".
]]>It's a little hard to think of people of Steed's age being swingers, and homosexual activity would have been all sorts of problems though legality and security concerns.
]]>To put this in perspective, each side was trying to dominate the English Channel, and the MTB/MGB and German E-boats were too small for radars, too weak to stand and fight - they operated largely by night, and often at very close range. It was "knife-fight in a phone box" stuff - raiding, recce, landing and recovering SOE agents and officers.
]]>