Ben Southwood
@bswud • 21,777 subscribers
Founder & editor, https://t.co/AdNuyGyLll @stripe. Fellow, @createstreets.
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Inflation destroys civilisations. Extremist politics follows high inflation. It comes up again and again in the historical record: • In Rome, debasement to pay soldiers led to rapid inflation. Diocletian blamed profiteers in the Edict on Maximum Prices in 301 AD, introducing price caps. • New world gold drove up Spanish prices. By the 1600s, 1/2 of adult men were rent-receiving: soldiers or priests. • Hyperinflation destroyed trust in the Weimar state, making it ripe for extremist takeover. Empirical studies find more antisemitism in places hit hardest. • 1960s and 1970s price hikes led to protests and massacres in the USSR. • The postwar consensus in Anglosphere countries was scrapped after 1970s stagflation. Listen to the latest episode of the Works in Progress politics, in which Mark Koyama, Pieter Garicano and I discuss why people hate inflation so much, discuss the striking historical cases where inflation caused instability, and speculate on how inflation-induced low trust in the state is making us all worse off. Spotify: Apple: Youtube:
Ben Southwood84,973 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
Does the British public really value bats at £300,000 a pop?
Ben Southwood40,148 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Issue 23 of Works in Progress should arrive with subscribers later this week (or early next). In it, we tackle the big questions: - How does a woman's fertility really decline (and why are we so wrong about it)? - How did Australia actually stop the boats? - How did Britain go from being an early adopter of cheap nuclear power to a place that builds it slower and more expensively than anywhere else? - Was ASML the product of successful industrial strategy? - Why did it take so long to invent the first bus? - Are autonomous vehicles going to cause gridlock on streets? - What makes neotraditional Hindu temples so cool? Pieter Garicano, Aria Schrecker and I sat down to give you a sneak preview of all this and MORE coming in the upcoming next issue of our magazine.
Ben Southwood30,541 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Local government allows more building because it makes it work for locals. In the UK, it has been nearly completely broken, and elections today will often be decided on national issues. In the US, cracks are showing, with property tax revolts like those that slowed the Californian growth machine. Housing, power plants, and data centres get blocked by neighbors who don't share in the upside. When they do share in it, as Loudoun County does with data centres, or as French communes did during the nuclear build-out, local residents become powerful forces in favour of development. I got a lot of my views on this from Judge Glock, so I invited him on the Works in Progress podcast to discuss why local government is the "missing layer" for cheaper housing, more energy, and better infrastructure. We discuss: - Why a northern Virginia county loves data centres - How 1970s school funding reforms made local governments stop wanting nuclear power plants - Why Main Streets died, and whether Business Improvement Districts can bring them back - How American cities cleaned up their water with no help from Washington - How local government built the Golden Gate Bridge in four years - Whether Thatcher was right to gut British local government Spotify: Apple Podcasts: YouTube:
Ben Southwood10,773 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
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