In the 1880s, British trained Indian scientists- most notably J.C Bose & P.C Ray- started making original contributions in STEM subjects. Sadly, there were more than a few duds- like Sarojini Naidu's dad who had a PhD from Edinburgh but whose brains rotted away in Hyderabad. Indeed, he took to conducting alchemical experiments.
Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, the father of the founder of India's current ruling party, was a distinguished mathematician who received an MA degree in Maths & Physics from Calcutta University. His 1886 paper- "A Note on Elliptic Functions"- gained international recognition when he was 22. He took to the law and made a lot of money before being elevated to the Bench. He, together with two other wealthy Bengali lawyers, created a new Dept of Physics at the Calcutta University Science College in 1916. C.V Raman, S.N Bose, and Meghnad Saha were three young members of the 6 member faculty. Within about one decade, three extraordinary discoveries came from these young men---Saha ionization equation in 1920, Bose statistics in 1924, Raman effect in 1928 (for which he got the Nobel Prize).
In the case of Bose, there is a story that he had approached Ganesh Prasad- who had established good relations with leading German mathematicians- with a view of doing a PhD in Math. But Prasad, who was from U.P, was a difficult man to get along with. Thus Mukherjee's new Physics Dept saved Bose from unemployment. Saha & Bose worked well together. Both soon produced first rate papers. Bose's 'deduction of Rydberg's Law from quantum theory of spectral emission' was published by the Philosophical Magazine in 1920. Bose was just 24 years old.
His next big break was the offer of a Readership at the new Dacca University Physics Department which enabled him to get away from the overcrowded Dept in Calcutta. It is also said that he had a spat with Sir Ashutosh. Sadly, in Dacca, he was informed that his contract would not be extended because of a dispute as to funding between the provincial and the Central government and higher than expected construction costs. It appears this was resolved by the University agreeing to funding a 2 year travel sabbatical in return for the acceptance of revised pay scales. Then, once again, he got lucky. His 2024 letter to Einstein- which fully explicated the doctrine of indistinguishability for quantum particles which had been anticipated by Władysław Natanson in 1911- opened the door to a two year sojourn in Europe after which he got a full Professorship in Dacca. Sadly, he was not able to make any progress on the two problems Einstein set him- viz. whether the new statistics implied a novel type of interaction between light quanta; and second, how the statistics of light quanta and transition probabilities would look in the new quantum mechanics. Bose believed one could separate the propagation of a quantum of light energy (a photon) from electromagnetic influence. It was a reasonable belief at the time. I suppose, one could say that if Bose had done a Math PhD under Ganesh Prasad, his approach might have been different. Perhaps he too would have done Post-Doctoral work in Germany and thus would have been abreast of all the latest developments. Still, the fact is, Bose built a successful academic career and, quite unexpectedly, actually got into the history books. Bosons are named after him just as Fermions are named after Fermi. Not bad at all for a lad who had once contemplated working as a clerk in the meteorological department! Einstein's support meant Bose could become a full Professor even though he lacked a PhD. It must be said, there were plenty of 'Senior Wranglers' and blokes with European PhDs cluttering up Indian Universities.
Though viewed, at a later time, as the veritable arsehole of the Turd World, Calcutta, at one time, was an important commercial city and this remained the case even after it ceased to be the capital of British India. Its University, founded in 1857, maintained quite high academic standards even up to the Sixties. The British had set up an 'Indian Education Service' in 1896 so as to raise standards and to spot and support outstanding students (like Srinivas Ramanujan). IES officer, like W.A Jenkins- Bose's head of dept in Dacca- had official standing and could protect promising young scholars from the Police (which, being recruited from non-graduates, was considered an inferior cadre).
Sadly, as India became democratic, standards fell. The Education Service stopped recruiting in 1924. India was not able to maintain momentum in STEM subjects. Smart people emigrated. If they returned, they mouldered away without intellectual companionship or stimulus. By contrast, Japan- which had got into modern Science some four of five decades after the Indians- went from strength to strength. So did the Chinese who preferred elite Universities rather than democratic 'degree mills' where students spent their time agitating.
Aeon has an article on S.N Bose, by Soma Bannerjee who teaches in Tennessee. It maintains that 'The life of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose illuminates how scientific genius can emerge from the most unexpected quarters'. This is odd. The British called Calcutta 'the second city of the Empire'. Bose wasn't at 'the periphery'. He was a subject of the King Emperor and there was a dedicated cadre of British civil servants in India whose job it was to encourage people like him. Moreover, very influential people- like Justice Ashutosh- were backing him. There were wealthy Indian landowners and industrialists keen to invest in STEM subject research. Sadly, Indians were more interested in a stupid type of politics rather than getting ahead through the application of science and technology. We may say, Saha, Bose & Raman wanted to develop indigenous institutions. If so, they failed. As Bose described himself- they were 'comets' who appear once and seem to herald great things but which then vanish without trace.
Soma writes-
Bose was a true polymath, fluent in multiple languages and immersed in literature and philosophy, and a dedicated teacher who believed science should be accessible to everyone, not just an elite few. Crucially, he achieved all this while working under the British Empire,
What was the name of the Mayor of Calcutta in 1924 (the year of his letter to Einstein)? It was Chittaranjan Das- hardly an English name. The fact is, India could have got from the new Labour government in London, what Ireland & Egypt & Afghanistan had got two years earlier- i.e. independence. Soma is being disingenuous. He is trying to make out that Bose was a darkie working in the cotton fields under the lash. Viceroy would frequently sodomize him. Yet he managed to learn foreign languages and mathematics and physics and so on. The truth is, he was taught by JC Bose & PC Ray, both of whom had studied under the best savants in Britain in the 1880s.
facing the hurdles of a colonised scientist:
He was free, not 'colonised'. While the Brits were around, Hindus could teach safely in Dacca University. When they departed, the Hindus had to run away.
limited resources,
sufficient resources.
isolation from international peers,
because the Brits refused to let Indians to write letters to European scientists. Indeed, Bose's letter to Einstein was smuggled out up Mahatma Gandhi's bum.
and the pressures of life under foreign rule. Acknowledging Bose’s context doesn’t diminish his achievements;
It explains them. You had really smart older Bengalis pushing younger Indians like himself. This had the backing of the Brits and the Indian landlords and industrialists.
instead, it casts them in a more illuminating light.
But Soma won't supply that light. He won't say that people like SN Bose or Amartya Sen's daddy were only safe in Dacca while the Brits were around. Both relocated to Calcutta from Dacca university when the Brits departed. Otherwise they may have been killed by Muslim mobs.
His groundbreaking work was not the result of mythical serendipity alone,
He was doing what he was trained to do. Unlike a lot of his European contemporaries, he hadn't had to fight in the Great War. Britain had lost 900,000 of its young men. France had lost 1.3 million. Germany lost more than 2 million. India lost 74,000 but virtually none of them belonged to the 'educationally forward' castes. Meghnad Saha was exceptional because he was from an 'untouchable' caste. Bose wasn't.
but rather the culmination of perseverance, intellect and a willingness to think differently from the heart of a colonial world.
Post-colonial. Already there was Dyarchy- but only because Gandhi unilaterally surrendered in 1922. Tagore was smarter. He warned the Hindus that they would lose lives and property in East Bengal if the Brits ran away.
Incidentally, Bose wasn't 'thinking differently'. He was thinking in the same way as others of his cohort. He just didn't move on to the next stage (QMT) preferring to return to India to do 'institution building'. Sadly, Partition destroyed that building- at least as far as Hindus in Dacca were concerned.
The popular telling of this episode often casts Bose as a lucky outsider
he was picking cotton in a Southern plantation whose trees bore 'strange fruit'.
whose discovery was a fluke elevated by Einstein’s patronage.
Physicists were naturally interested in the possibility of a new state of matter- though this could only be empirically confirmed seventy years later. I suppose if the technology had been better at that time, Bose would have focussed on empirical work. Like his dad, he had no objection to getting rich by inventing cool stuff or mass producing stuff embodying STEM subject discoveries.
But Bose’s real story is actually far richer.
and sadder. He had to run away from Dacca. India turned into a bureaucratic shithole. Students wanted degree certificates. They didn't want no edumication. Everybody wanted to do crazy political shite or pose as a Gurudeva or Mahatma or Imam-e-Hind.
His life and career reveal a complex, deeply human scientist who navigated intellectual passions and colonial-era challenges
there were none. The challenge was staying alive while running away from Muslim mobs. Tagore's 1916 novel ends with such mobs raping, killing and looting Hindus. It is no wonder that Sir Ashutosh's son founded the pro-Hindu BJP. If they don't get elected in West Bengal, Hindus will soon have to run away from there.
By the early 1920s,
the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over. Had India not needed the British umpire, it would have become independent in 1924.
quantum physics had emerged as a radical new field, offering Bose intellectual freedom from colonial strictures.
Forward caste Hindus- particularly Kayasthas & Baidyas- gained intellectual freedom from the Brits. Back in the 1820s, many such defied caste and religious taboos. But that tended to mean alcoholism and getting syphilis. By the 1850s, young Bengal preferred the straight and narrow path of trying for academic excellence and then rising through the law courts till, like Amartya Sen's grandfather, you were appointed a Judge. The civil service, however, tended to become less lucrative as corruption decreased.
As I argued in my book The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India (2020), embracing the quantum
which Bose didn't do. He preferred to focus on statistical foundations. I think this is because the Indians had a strong 'sankhya' statistical tradition which was useful for administrative purposes. Indeed, the only non Western Institution imitated by Western academia was Mahalanobis's Indian Statistical Institute. But this reluctance to do 'interpretation' was a weakness. At a later point, D.D Kosambi started proving the Reimann hypothesis by statistical means! My point is, if a smart dude remains in India, his brains turn to shit- Marxist shit in Kosambi's case.
provided ‘a great intellectual escape from the hegemony of scientific colonialism’
Mahalanobis liked 'scientific colonialism' (i.e. racialist anthropology) so much that his first paper, in 1922, was titled 'Anthropological observations on the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta'. It was his influence which caused Tagore to very foolishly opine that India had a race problem- not a problem of religion. I should mention Mahalanobis & Tagore were tall, fair skinned & had 'sharp features'. They thought they were the pure Aryans. Eurasians were filth who had absorbed the worst qualities of both the Europeans and the Asiatics. This is why Gandhi said India & Britain should separate and maintain a proper distance from each other. The alternative was the bumping of uglies and the perpetuation of an evil, mongrel, breed.
that defined the British-dominated scientific establishment in India,
There wasn't a single White in his Department. I suppose Europeans were too busy slaughtering each other in the trenches at that time.
which focused on teaching classical physics in universities and exploring applied science that benefited colonial interests.
i.e. the interests of the people of the colony. If they get richer, the administration has more money to play with.
In 1921, a few years after the First World War, Bose left Calcutta to join the physics department at the newly founded University of Dacca (present-day Dhaka in Bangladesh). The move was strategic. Dacca University, established by the British in 1921, offered state-of-the-art laboratories and better access to international journals than crowded Calcutta could provide.
No. Kayasthas & Baidyas thought it would be less Brahmin dominated. Amartya's grandfather, a retired judge, was the first bursar of the University. But Calcutta was richer and had better access to everything.
Bose’s reputation as a top student had preceded him: Dacca’s vice-chancellor, Philip Joseph Hartog, personally invited him to take up the post. In his new role, the 27-year-old Bose taught advanced physics courses.
This was a familiar phenomenon. New Departments or Colleges could get in talented youngsters who actually taught students. Older men were lazy and preferred to spend all their time on office politics. One reason young lecturers were preferable is that they sought a simpler way to present material knowing that investing a little time on this would mean they could give the same course for the next forty years. Bose was trying to give a cleaner derivation for Planck black-body radiation. With help from Einstein, he succeeded. But his true interest was 'institution building' as well as practical applications- e.g. extracting helium from hot springs in Odisha. Nothing wrong with that at all. If a country makes money out of science, it will have more and more scientists. If politics is the path to wealth, you will have too many politicians.
(Bose) first submitted his manuscript, ‘Planck’s Law and the Light Quantum Hypothesis’, to the British journal Philosophical Magazine.
edited by J.J Thompson who was a champion of classical mechanics. 'When his son, G.P. Thomson, proved that electrons behave as waves (electron diffraction) in 1928, J.J. saw it not as proof of the new quantum mechanics, but as confirmation that the electron had a complex structure consistent with classical mechanics'.
It was met with silence. Perhaps the editors in London did not know what to make of this audacious paper from distant Dacca, or maybe it was an example of the biases that colonial scientists often faced.
Why not ask Grok or Copilot or whatever? The fact is J.J Thompson's prejudices were well known.
Undeterred, Bose took a remarkable step.
He wrote to Einstein. Why? Bose was part and parcel of a 'bhadralok' network active across Universities in Europe & America (particularly true of the Jugantar revolutionaries). They compared notes. Britain had too many great, but rather old, Professors attached to classical methods.
Still, the fact is, lots of people were writing to Einstein at that time. Since he was a Swiss citizen, he was the bridge between German science (brought into disrepute by the Great War) and the 'civilized' world. Also, Einstein was very productive. Hilbert thought he could beat him to a tensor representation of the General Theory. Einstein got there first. What is more he was right. Hilbert got the math wrong.
Bose wasn't that interested in 'pure' theory though, at Einstein's behest, he did his best. Still, the fact remained, Bose was a Professor in a poor country. The one good thing you could say about it, was that it was peaceful, well administered, and could do 'catch up growth'. Bose used his two year research sabbatical to Europe to firstly study with de Broglie in France. But Bose wasn't interested in 'pilot-waves' or what would later become Bohm type mysticism. He was concerned to learn the latest techniques in X-ray spectroscopy and crystallography. In other words, this guy was less interested in gaining fame than doing something useful for his country. Amartya's father did his Phd in soil silence in London. Why? Soil science is important for a big agricultural country like India. Getting tenure at Harvard for stupid shite, even if one is a darkie, doesn't help India at all.
Interestingly, in his second year, when Bose moved to Germany, he worked, amongst others, with Michael Polanyi. I believe their political and economic ideas were similar. Polanyi, later on, was close to T.S Eliot while Bose was close to Tagore.
The tale of Bose’s 1924 breakthrough is often told with Einstein as the hero who ‘rescued’ an obscure Indian physicist.
Einstein was the greatest physicist of his generation. Bose was a good man but not in the same league.
While it’s true that Einstein’s support was invaluable, the reality is more nuanced.
The reality is that Bose was a collaborator of Einstein rather than the independent discoverer of anything important. With Fermi-Dirac statistics you have a collaboration of equals. Not so with Bose-Einstein.
Einstein engaged deeply with Bose’s work not out of charity but because Bose had solved a problem Einstein genuinely cared about.
Einstein saw that Bose's simplification (ignoring the density of the field) removed a needless complication. What is more it had predictive value. Bose thought the way forward involved separating the propagation of the quantum of energy from any electromagnetic influence. Would this have been the case if he'd done a PhD in math?
Their exchange was a meeting of minds across continents, a collaboration that demonstrated how science could bridge the divide between empires, races and cultures.
They were irrelevant. Physics in Calcutta is the same as Physics in Copenhagen.
Einstein, an outsider in European society (a Jew in 1920s Germany),
Foreign Minister Rathenau was a Jew. Einstein was Swiss. True, by virtue of being a Professor in Berlin (and hence a 'beamte' civil servant) he was also a citizen of Germany. But the Swiss were not outsiders- Jewish or otherwise.
perhaps felt a kinship with Bose, who hailed from the colonial ‘periphery’.
Which had remained peaceful while Europe tore itself to pieces. The German government said that over 700,000 Germans had starved to death during the Great War. Germans who had been interned in India thanked their lucky stars.
And Bose, for his part, was no supplicant; he approached Einstein confidently, as an equal in enquiry.
If Einstein says 'you've got it right', you know you are on to something. The fear is he will say 'Professor X proved this last year.'
I describe Bose’s stance as a form of ‘local cosmopolitanism’,
i.e. he lived in a particular locality. He wasn't diffused across the cosmos.
rooted in his Indian context yet fully capable of engaging with the global scientific community as a peer.
Because he was a Professor of Physics. He wasn't a fucking monkey.
The Bose-Einstein partnership exemplified how knowledge can flow in multiple directions.
By then, Germany was better at Sanskrit philology than India. But this had become true before Bose was born.
A discovery in colonial Asia could revolutionise physics in Europe,
Only if 'colonial Asia's' physics had previously been revolutionized by Europe.
just as ideas from Europe could inspire breakthroughs in Asia.
Japan- sure. But smart peeps would end up in America. Eistein moved there. So did C.V Raman's nephew.
Their story is a powerful rebuttal to the old notion in the history of science that science moves only from a civilised centre to a passive periphery.
It really isn't. Some Bengalis- like PC Ray & JC Bose- moved to Europe in the 1880s to study science. They returned and taught some other young Bengalis who got funding for research sabbaticals in Europe. The periphery was passive because this early sign of promise didn't lead to very much. Japan and then China, however, stopped being the periphery. They became part of the 'core'.
Yet, despite Bose’s global connections, he could not totally transcend politics at home.
Nor could Einstein who had even better 'global connections' but still had to run away to the US. Bose too had to run away from Muslims in Dacca. His 'local connection' to Hinduism in India meant that he could resume his teaching career in West Bengal.
Throughout his career, the backdrop of colonial India’s struggle for independence was ever present.
The Indian struggle had to do with whether Hindus would continue to be safe in Dacca. The answer was not after the Brits transferred power.
Like many Indian intellectuals of his generation, Bose had to navigate a complex relationship with British rule.
Not really. His work was good. He hadn't taken part in Jugantar or the later Non-Cooperation movement. Might he be a Communist? That was the only concern.
On the one hand, the colonial government had established the institutions that educated him, and he benefited from the laboratories, libraries and funding that came with that system.
No. Indians took the initiative- at least in Bengal. Macaulay was only repeating what Dwarkanath & Roy told him to say.
On the other hand, he was keenly aware of living in a nation that was subjugated.
He wasn't stupid. He understood what Tagore was telling his people. Muslims were an existential threat. It would be nice to take power from the Brits but Hindus couldn't be sure of kicking Islamic ass the way the Brits did.
Bose was determined to contribute to India’s intellectual self-reliance and disprove the notion that Indians were incapable of high scientific achievement under their own steam.
The Brit kept saying 'Indians are hella smart. They can be great mathematicians or scientists. What they can't do is govern themselves. This wasn't true. But Partition had to happen first.
Bose’s personal choices reflected this delicate balancing act. Early in life, he consciously decided not to join the elite Indian Civil Service,
You can say he chose not to try to join it. Similarly, I chose not win the Fields medal by reading Spiderman comics in Math class.
the prestigious administrative cadre of the Raj. The British partition of Bengal in 1905, a divide-and-rule policy that sparked widespread protests in Bose’s youth, left a deep impression on him.
It was reversed in 1911. Then the Hindus realized they would be subject to Muslim tyranny unless it was reversed- which is what happened in 1947.
It steeled his resolve to avoid serving the colonial regime.
which kept him safe from Muslims
Instead, Bose chose the path of science and education, where he could excel and uplift his fellow citizens without directly bolstering imperial rule.
or directly bolstering indigenous rule. The guy could have joined the administration of an Indian Prince or the Maharaja of Nepal.
(In this, he mirrored his father, who had left a government job decades earlier.)
to go into private enterprise which was more risky but also more profitable. Had Bose been a revolutionary, he would have ended up studying at Berkeley or Columbia before shifting to Germany or Bolshevik Russia.
During the 1920s, Bose quietly kept company with nationalist and even revolutionary circles. He was associated with the Anushilan Samiti,
which inspired the creation of the Congress Seva Dal and the RSS. Hardikar & Hegdewar were medical students in Calcutta before the Great War. But, by the Twenties, it was obvious that the real threat to Hindu Bengalis was from Muslim Bengalis.
a revolutionary organisation in Bengal, and maintained contacts with Indian activists abroad, such as Abani Mukherjee.
a Communist in Soviet Russia who had been put in charge of an 'Indian Military School'. The idea was to invade India through Afghanistan & maybe also Tibet.
Unsurprisingly, these connections drew the suspicion of colonial authorities.
as they would the suspicions of the American or British or French or Italian authorities with respect to their own purely White citizens.
In 1924, as Bose was preparing to travel to Europe, the British Indian police feared his trip might be a cover for political activity rather than scientific research.
They didn't arrest and beat him till he 'confessed'. India, at that time was under the rule of law. The Mayor of Calcutta was a pal of Sir Ashutosh who was Bose's patron.
They pressed Dacca University to cancel his sabbatical.
thus covering their backs
Bose’s burgeoning scientific renown, however, came to his rescue.
No. It was in the interest of Dacca University to stand up for their man. Otherwise they would come under increasing scrutiny.
The French author Sylvain Lévi
the French had handed back Savarkar & neutralized Aurobindo in Pondicherry. The had just as much reason to fear uppity niggers
wrote to vouch for Bose’s bona fide scholarly intentions. Likewise, Dacca’s vice-chancellor Hartog defended him. Largely thanks to Lévi’s intervention (and Einstein’s postcard, which underscored Bose’s standing in the scientific community), the authorities backed down.
The Police backed down. But they had already covered their backs.
Upon returning to India in 1926, Bose continued advancing science while contributing to his country’s intellectual emancipation.
by the British
He firmly believed that science should be accessible to the masses in their own languages.
It was the British who promoted vernacular languages like Bengali and Tamil
Unlike many of his contemporaries who published exclusively in English, Bose frequently gave public lectures in his native Bengali and wrote essays about science for general readers in Bengal.
Because his association with Einstein had made him famous. Otherwise, nobody would have cared.
He believed that educating people in their mother tongue
which was done under British auspices.
was crucial for fostering a scientific culture in India,
Clearly, he was wrong.
particularly in a nation striving to shed its foreign dominance.
By trying to get jobs in the British administration or Army or Educational establishment. Also there was competition to get into the new British created Legislative Assemblies.
This commitment to science in the vernacular was a subtle yet powerful form of resistance to colonial cultural hegemony,
just as it was a subtle yet powerful form of resistance to being an unemployed 'ghar-jamail' living off the charity of his in-laws.
On the other hand, it must be admitted that the fact that Bose's mother tongue was Bengali rather than Swahili represented significant resistance to Homophobia and bigotry against lesbian goats in Ludhiana.
as well as aligning with the broader Swadeshi ethos of self-reliance.
Which is why, instead of going to France or Germany, he travelled to Bihar and Odisha in order to study Physics. I suppose, if Dr. D.M Bose had not been interned in Germany during the Great War, more advanced ideas would have circulated for younger men like Bose & Saha- i.e. Calcutta Physics would have been more autonomous. Some say that Bose couldn't do much in Dacca because of the poor quality of the students there. But, without a PhD, it would have been difficult to get a Professorship in Calcutta. There is a hilarious story that D.M Bose was giving a speech in which he mentioned his having been invited to the Cuomo Conference in 1927. S.N interrupted to say DM was invited by mistake. The invitation was meant for SN. This reminded the audience that the older, richer, better educated man hadn't worked with Einstein. The younger, poorer, fellow- working in Dacca- had done so. This showed that Bengal was progressing. DM had leant SN some books after returning from Germany. SN brought glory to Bengal by beavering away in the boondocks. DM was delighted with this outcome. A nation makes progress when the older people take pride in the greater advances made by their juniors.
It is true that Bose, being a perfectionist and having many other interests, was not as productive as Saha, Raman or Sir K.S. Krishnan. But, thanks to the 'boson', his name will be remembered when others are forgotten.
In the late 1940s, the geopolitical landscape around Bose underwent a dramatic shift.
No. The geopolitical landscape shifted when Japan invaded Burma and menaced India. The Brits were no longer prepared to remain even at the centre (provincial autonomy had gone through in 1937. The result was famine in 1943 and ethnic cleansing in 1946. Hindus in East Bengal understood they would have to run away to the West.
The partition of India in 1947 split Bengal into two parts, with Dacca falling in the newly created East Pakistan, and Calcutta remaining in India.
Hindus insisted on the partition they had previously opposed in 1905
Bose, a Bengali with deep roots in Calcutta, decided to return to his hometown.
because he didn't want to be killed by Muslims
Even before partition, he had accepted an offer in 1945 to become a professor of physics at the University of Calcutta.
Which was more prestigious than Dacca Uni.
Returning to a free India, he helped rebuild and develop the country’s scientific infrastructure after the end of colonial rule and division.
He didn't achieve much.
In the history of physics, Bose stands as a reminder that great science can emerge from
teachers with PhDs from the top schools provided they teach in big commercial cities like Calcutta rather than Dacca. Even then, great science needs the imprimatur of the Professors working at wherever the current scientific Mecca happens to be.
unexpected quarters.
Dacca was a new university (though its precursor did educate Saha). That's why it had some smart, ambitious, young people teaching there. But Aligarh University once had Andre Weil on its Math faculty.
His work on quantum statistics was pivotal; it underpins much of modern physics,
His is the most inconsequential name in a list which includes Planck, Einstein, Fermi, Dirac, Pauli, Von Neumann & Feynman.
from the behaviour of electrons in solids to the properties of stars and the expanding Universe. And yet, remembering how Bose made those contributions is just as important.
Sir Ashutosh & two other Bengali lawyers funded a new Physics Dept. They paid Bose & Saha & Raman so they could stick with science rather than become clerks in the civil service.
He achieved his 1924 breakthrough not in a Cambridge or Göttingen, but in a modest laboratory in colonial India,
India under 'dyarchy'. Indians were the Mayors of both Calcutta & Dacca. The Education Minister- responsible for funding Universities- was Indian.
with no large research team or sophisticated equipment at his disposal,
Einstein was a fucking patent clerk between 1902-09. Compared to him, Saha & Bose had it easy. Also, because of the War, a lot of Germans- even Professors- were malnourished. Bhadralok Bengalis were both safe and well fed.
and initially without the validation of the Western scientific establishment.
Nonsense! British Professors were part of the 'Western scientific establishment'. There were British people in the Indian Educational Service who ensured that Indian public Universities taught to an acceptable standard. Herzog, the VC of Dacca, was a chemist by training.
His success was a triumph of intellect and determination over circumstance,
No. It was the product of the circumstance that some Indian lawyers were so rich, they could fund Scientific research and instruction. Guess who created the legal system under which they operated. Was it lesbian Zulus? Yes. It wasn't British dudes wearing Solar Topees.
a testament to creativity flourishing in an out-of-the-way locale
which the Brits had put on the map.
through sheer force of will.
That's a description of the British. It isn't a description of a bunch of guys who blessed the day Clive saved them from the Muslims.
However, Bose’s life demonstrates that he was no one-hit wonder,
Half a hit. The other half was Einstein.
but a multifaceted thinker and institution-builder.
i.e. he was provincial. Nothing wrong in that. What matters is when he had a good idea he sought to bring it to the attention of those who could make best use of it.
Bose was not a mythologised figure of serendipity, nor merely Einstein’s sidekick;
No one says he was. They say 'a young Physics Professor in Dacca had an idea which Einstein appreciated'. They don't say 'Bose was a street urchin from Dacca. One day, by chance, he saw a foreign Professor writing some equations on a black board. He became curious. He studied the equations. Suddenly, inspiration came to him. He wrote out the solution at the bottom of the board. The foreign Professor chanced to return at just that moment. He caught the urchin by the hand and said 'who wrote that solution? Tell me, or I will hand you over to the police!' Since the Professor was Einstein, he spoke in Yiddish. By serendipity, the urchin had been brought up in a Lutheran orphanage and thus could speak a bit of German. Thus he was able to understand Einstein and convince him that it was he who had found that solution. Einstein immediately married his own daughter to the urchin and took him to live with him in a big Palace in Berlin. Fortunately, the boy was able to escape and return to India but not before discovering Higgs's boson- the God particle. After that the boy dedicated himself to imbibing milk of spirituality from pulpy breasts of Mother Ind. GoI granted him title 'Einstein-choddh' on him though he had not in fact fucked Einstein- just his slut of a daughter.
The other story is that when Einstein donned Batman's cape, he choose Bose to be Robin. Sadly, this tale involves paedophilia and thus NSFW.
he was a complex individual who combined curiosity, creativity and a strong sense of identity.
In other words, he never got confused and thought he was actually a goat.
He helped lay the groundwork for scientific research in a country that, during his prime years, was fighting for its independence.
Some were fighting for Congress domination. Others were fighting against it.
He proved that being at the periphery of political power
He wasn't. He could have stood for election and become an MLA or even a Minister in India or an MP or a Lord or a member of the Privy Council in England. After 1937, he could have become the Premier of Bengal. After 1950, he could have been the head of State of the second biggest republic in the world. The Bengali Kayasth wasn't at the periphery of shit
did not mean being at the periphery of knowledge.
No smart person with access to a library need be any such thing. The fact is, he became a Lecturer at the age of 20. Einstein was 30 when he got his first academic position.
In the years following independence, Bose became a symbol of his nation’s scientific potential.
No. He was a symbol of India's retreat into Gandhian stupidity. The country would soon become unable to feed, let alone defend, itself.
Apart from Amal Kumar Roychaudhuri. Hawking & Penrose highlighted his contribution in the Sixties. Foreign interest in his 1955 paper emboldened him to try for a Doctorate. Wheeler, his external examiner, praised his work. Only then did he get academic employment. The lesson was not lost on the younger generation. Do your BSc & MSc in India by all means. Then get the fuck out.
His forward-looking emphasis on education and science outreach in the local language was decades ahead of its time,
No. It built on Raja Ram Mohan Roy's polemics in the 1820s.
and it remains a model for scientists in developing countries today.
The model is get the fuck out of shitholes.
Celebrating Bose now is not to indulge in hagiography but to recognise
he was a darkie. Black Lives Matter! Students in Tennessee should hear the story of a little darkie plucking cotton in Calcutta- in between being beaten and sodomized by Viceroy Sahib- who resolved to learn Bengali and thus become a great scientist.
his life’s larger lesson. In a world where science is increasingly global yet still shaped by inequalities,
e.g. the fact that the dude who wrote this is as stupid as shit which is why he had to switch from Physics to Grievance Studies
Bose’s life speaks to the possibility of creativity under constraint.
His students may be too stupid to tie their own shoelaces. Nevertheless they can show creativity by doing some finger painting- using their own faeces- to protect against Donald Trump.
He was not just ‘Einstein’s Indian collaborator’,
correspondent. The collaboration failed.
but a thinker who saw science as a universal human endeavour.
As opposed to one confined to clever Yids.
Whenever we speak of bosons
which is seldom
or marvel at a quantum technology,
or watch the Marvel movie- Quantumania
we are invoking his intellect, context, and enduring place in the story of modern physics.
Nonsense! Bose was a good man as was Sir Ashutosh. They showed dedication and public spirit. They didn't spend their time whining about Whitey. They wanted India to develop into an affluent, industrialized, country. Sadly, Indians preferred talking bollocks and playing politics.
The truth is STEM subjects cost money and effort. It is patriotic to spend money and expend effort on their burgeoning. It is unpatriotic and politically mischievous to allow non-STEM whining to crowd out worthwhile scholarship.
It may be that some other young man, without a PhD- i.e. without the blinkers imposed by older supervisors (Natanson's supervisor was J.J. Thompson and he was in his late fifties when he formulated something like 'quantum indististinguishability)- would have got to Bose statistics sooner or later. But facts are facts. It was Bose, in Dacca, who made the breakthrough. Perhaps, if he had stayed on in Europe, he could have fleshed out other ideas he had- e.g. re. photon spin- but the 'opportunity cost' would have been the loss to students in Dacca- more particularly those who wanted to work on X-ray applications or other such technological fields. I suppose subsequent generations of Indian Science professors did not have as strong a motivation because students were less interested in doing path-breaking research and more concerned with getting a job and acquiring power and influence. Alternatively, they felt the old men who ran things would not let them get ahead. The other side of the equation was that Indian scientists became increasingly sought after in the West as budgets for Scientific research greatly expanded. In India, the feeling was that 'pure' Science was a luxury and, in any case, smart people would emigrate. Perhaps, Trump will turn out to be the Messiah of Indian Science as the country retains more talent and benefits to the economy start to flow in more ample measure.
Politics is about solving collective action problems. It isn't about talking paranoid bollocks. Coase's Theorem states that private parties can efficiently solve externality problems (i.e. benefits or costs received outside the market) through bargaining, if property rights are well-defined and transaction costs are zero, regardless of who initially holds the rights.
This means making property rights hazy or creating 'hold-out' problems create obstacles to solving collective action problems. Polities where this occurs may sink relative to those which make it easier to strike deals and stick to them because they are 'incentive compatible'- i.e. self-interest dictates the provision of remedies to rights holders.
Consider eighteenth century France as compared to Britain. France was richer and more populous. It was more centralized. It was a great military power whereas England was marginal. It's one advantage was that it could concentrate on transoceanic commerce and naval power. This meant that the King was dependent on Parliament for money and, because money could buy Parliamentary representation, the country could do sensible things such that there was a virtuous circle whereby increased Government spending caused Incomes to rise more than proportionately. Moreover, much of this spending could be financed by borrowing- i.e. there was no 'front-loading' of the burden on tax-payers (i.e. less 'disincentive effect'). Since there were non-convexities in transoceanic trade & Empire, 'Ricardian Equivalence' did not arise. There was little 'crowding out' of the private sector by the public sector. Indeed, at Sea, the two were complementary- e.g. the issuance of 'letters of marque' to the Merchant Marine meant that they effectively become part of the Royal Navy. Other countries did this too but, it was obvious, non-convexities meant that one naval power would emerge supreme. Indeed, a Pareto law might apply such that even a coalition of all the others could not prevail over it. Thus Catherine the Great's 'League of armed neutrality' could not have prevailed by might even if it allied with France, Holland & the new US of A. But, diplomatically it was a success unlike the second League which was swiftly defeated by the Brits at the Battle of Copenhagen.
Still, under Napoleon, it did look as though the French army could dominate Europe. Indeed, Napoleon's finances looked sounder than Pitt's because the former could use Church land & tribute collected from conquered countries to defray expenses. It must be said, post 1797, French finances were sound thanks to the thrifty French peasant and the diligent, hard headed, notary. Britain was off the gold standard between 1797 and 1819. The difference was England was doing sensible things. Napoleon was trying to turn his brothers into crowned heads. Thus the smart money- e.g. that of the Rothschilds- was with the Brits. At a later point, 'consols'- i.e. perpetual government debt instruments- played a very good role in portfolio choice and increasing liquidity in financial markets. Thus, the two big French reparation payments of the nineteenth century turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Indeed, one reason Germany went to war in 1914 was that French financial power could, in some occult manner, pull the rug from under their feet. (Germany had only been able to go on to gold after extracting reparations in 1871).
Stupid people, from pre-historic times, have regarded usury, credit creation, indeed financial instruments of any type as evil ju ju. The thing is 'unnatural'. Society is bound to collapse if people take loans or lend money. Cats will marry dogs. Sodomy will prevail in the streets. God will send a second flood to obliterate a species which tolerates Banks and Joint Stock companies and, blasphemy of blasphemies!, a National Debt.
In this connection, Catherine Nichols- who, to her credit, appears to have no academic credentials in Econ or History, has a foolish artice in Aeon titled-
Landholder vs stockholder
Landholders were also stockholders. To own stock just means you hold a debt instrument on which you get interest. Whether you own Government debt (stock) or a mortgage or a debenture (loan to a company) you are earning money in exactly the same way. The difference is that if a guy defaults on his mortgage, you can take over his property. If the Government defaults or a company goes bankrupt, you are screwed. But nobody is forcing you to lend. If land is a secure investment whereas the Government is unreliable, the interest rate on mortgages will be lower than that on gilts (Government stock). However, if the Government is doing sensible things and is reliable then the lowest risk attaches to gilts because the Government can always raise taxes on landowners and companies and so forth so as to pay interest on its debt. Thus, in practice, in a well managed country, gilts are 'riskless' and the yield on them is the prevailing interest rate. There will be a premium reflecting risk & liquidity (ease of turning into ready money) on other loans. This makes 'portfolio diversification' easier. Savers aim to have some riskless, fully liquid, investments, some moderately risky investments, some safe but less liquid mortgages or other assets, and, finally, some very risky but very profitable equity holdings.
Landholders might take mortgages and invest in such riskier ventures. They may also lend to other landholders using mortgages. If the dude defaults, you end up with more real estate. Indeed, this is how some people became landholders in the first place.
In 1752, David Hume
who thought of himself as belonging to the ancient landowning aristocracy. He hated the City of London where humbly born men of little education had grown very rich and thus had been enabled to buy themselves vast country estates. Indeed, some of them were getting titles and marrying into the English aristocracy. Hume often wished that England would lose its Empire and go bankrupt just for the pleasure of seeing these wealthy merchants reduced to penury.
discerned that wealth was becoming untethered from land. Here lies the origin of our political divisions
Hume wasn't really stupid. He was pretending to be stupid because he wanted people to think he was an aristocrat rather than the son of a lawyer.
Describing the political map in terms of Left and Right
wasn't an Anglo-Saxon practice. Religion or regional interests were more important.
is an accepted convention all over the world,
by shitheads. So what?
almost to the point of cliché. Yet it is surprisingly complicated to explain whose interests lie on each side of this spectrum.
It is easy. The politics of your country is easy to understand.
For example, if the Left supports the interests of workers over the interests of employers,
They may say they do if they get money from the Trade Unions. The problem here is that it is in the interests of the workers that employers do well rather than go bankrupt.
why are Left-leaning regions of the United States and elsewhere in the world among the richest?
Affluence may be related to more liberal attitudes. One meaning of the word 'liberal' is 'generous'. If you pretend to be generous, people may think you are rich. This may actually help you become rich.
When Japan and South Korea sought to become economic powerhouses in the later 20th century, they adopted Leftist policies
Not South Korea. There was a military dictatorship of an authoritarian type. Students and Trade Unions were severely repressed.
such as strong public education,
that is Nationalism of the late nineteenth century type. An educated soldier is worth more than an illiterate yokel. Japanese peasant families only started sending their sons to school after Japan won a war with China and secured reparations in gold. This showed that the path to fortune was through education and the Army.
universal healthcare
this was introduced in 1961 in Japan. Why? Productivity. It rises when workers are healthy. South Korea made health insurance mandatory for big companies in 1977 and transitioned to universal health care in 1989. This was after industrialization had taken off.
and increased gender equality
Neither Japan nor South Korea did very much in this direction. India had female CEOs before Japan or South Korea.
– if countries seeking to compete in capitalist arenas adopt broadly Leftist policies,
Leftist policies may mean universal health care which is universally shit and free education which is shit and gender equality which consists of members of the ruling party raping anything in a skirt.
then how do we explain why Leftists are always talking about overthrowing capitalism?
Politicians lie. Are their lips moving? If so, they are lying.
And if the Left is somehow both the party of workers’ rights and the party of material wealth, then whose interests are supported by the Right?
Those the Left wants to fuck over and vice versa. That's how politics works even if political parties are based on religion or
Given such contradictions, how did these terms become so central to modern politics?
They didn't. Guys who do politics don't bother with such shite.
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, where the combatants used the medieval estate groupings to define their battle lines.
No. People who supported the Ancien Regime sat on the Right while those who wanted revolutionary change sat on the Left. This was like what had happened in England before the Glorious Revolution when the Tories remained attached to the King, even if he was Catholic, while the Whigs wanted to replace him with his Protestant daughter
According to their writings, land-owning aristocrats (the Second Estate) were the party of the Right,
some were, some weren't. The Duke of Orleans, 'Phillip Egalite' sat on the Left.
while the interests of nearly everyone else (the Third Estate) belonged to the Left.
No. Some were monarchists and later there were the Feuillants who wanted a constitutional monarchy of the sort later delivered by Louis Phillipe.
This Third Estate included peasants working for the landowners but also every other kind of business owner and worker.
But the poor weren't directly represented by people of their own sort.
Decades later, Karl Marx offered a different analysis of capitalism: he put owners of both land and businesses together on one side (the bourgeoisie), while grouping workers from fields and factories on the other side (the proletariat) in a single, world-wide class struggle.
There were the property owners who employed people and there were those with little or no property who sought employment.
The trouble with both these ways of parsing Left and Right is that voting patterns never seem to line up with class.
Which is why only fools gas on about ideology.
Both historic analyses leave us with questions about the contemporary world – and not just the paradox of why so many Left-leaning places are so rich.
Some countries used competitive markets to rise in terms of productivity which is why they are rich. Other rich countries had lots of oil or other natural resources. No country which stuck with communism is rich.
Why, for example, do working-class conservatives appear to vote against their material interests, year in and year out, across generations?
They don't. In the UK, 'working class conservatives' bought their Council Houses and invested in Privatized industries under Mrs. Thatcher in the Eighties. Immigration is an important issue for them. Sadly, neither Left nor Right has really delivered on this issue. I suppose there will be a return to a 'guest worker' system.
The 18th-century philosopher and political theorist David Hume had answers to these questions,
No. He needed to make a bit of money for himself to live comfortably and so he wrote a History of England which was almost farcically biased towards the Tory party.
though he was writing decades before the French Revolution. While his essay ‘Of Public Credit’ (1752) was a warning about the dangers of Britain’s increasing reliance on debt financing,
It was foolish. The charitable explanation was that the ambitious Scot was writing shite which he thought would win him patronage from the stupid Southern Squirearchy. But he overegged the pudding. Still, he was marvellously readable. Apparently, eating plenty of porridge is good for your English prose style.
his apocalyptic vision of the future turned out to describe some features of our current political map surprisingly well.
Fuck off! The plain fact is, there were plenty of Governments which were defaulting on debt back in Hume's day. But England had been solvent for 80 years. Bourbon France, however, would default in 1759, 1770 and 1788. Hume knew that the City of London had more control over the Crown in Parliament and thus British fiscal policy was quite sensible. What he could not have anticipated (and what made Scottish gits like him & Adam Smith jealous) was that England's investments in the East India trade would begin to pay-off spectacularly.
Hume was writing because he believed that debt financing had the power to upend Europe’s traditional power structure and culture by creating a new source of money divorced from tradition or responsibility: stocks and bonds.
This had been a problem even in England at an earlier period. But the slogan 'no taxation without representation'- i.e. a Parliament with final say over 'money bills'- militates for fiscal prudence. Spain and France and so forth had recurring financial crises which did indeed enrich speculators and people like John Law (who was Scottish). Smith & Hume knew a lot about France but London looked down on them as porridge eating provincials. Still, the Scots wrote well- probably because they needed the money.
Unlike land, anyone with some cash could buy war bonds
Anyone could buy land in England
and get an immediate passive income in the form of interest.
You could buy land and get an immediate rental income. Indeed, you could buy a 'rotten borough' and get a seat in parliament.
This was the thin end of the wedge caused by the debt financing that Hume believed was destroying every part of society.
Yet England was thriving and would continue to thrive. Debt financing enabled it to beat France and emerge, for a century, as the mistress of the Oceans and the greatest financial, industrial and Imperial power in the world.
The governments of antiquity, Hume argued, saved money to use in battle and then waged wars in self-defence, or else to expand their territory.
He was wrong. What's more his readers knew he was wrong. Caesar borrowed a lot to finance his first conquests. As I said, Hume overegged the pudding. The Tories needed to know that his man would tell stupid lies in return for a bit of money- i.e. he was dependable.
But the British had invented a new form of warfare that Hume saw no precedent for, even in the merchant states of Nicollò Machiavelli’s Italy: war for trade, funded with money borrowed from private stockholders.
This is hilarious! Everyone in the City of London knew that Edward I had borrowed a lot from the Lombards of Lombard street to finance his wars. Edward III borrowed from Florentines. Clerks in counting houses in the City heard stories about this in their teens just as they had heard the story of Dick Whittington and his cat when they were children growing up in the countryside.
Hume acknowledged the potential for riches in securing trade routes overseas, but the debts worried him. Of the many downsides to the practice of borrowing money in pursuit of empire, possibly the most interesting is that Hume foresaw what the historian Richard Whatmore in The End of Enlightenment (2023) describes as ‘an addiction to the idea of liberty among the populace and politicians’. Once Hume realised the connection between liberty and debt financing, he lost his taste for the philosophical concept entirely.
No. Hume needed Tory patronage because, as a Scot, he naturally would want to defend the Stuart Kings.
The connection between liberty and debt financing isn’t obvious at first
If Parliament approved the budget it is less likely to be shite than if some corrupt courtier sold it to the King. But if the budget is sensible, then Government borrowing is likely to be repaid. By contrast, if some greedy tax-farmer bribes the King's mistress and thus gets the King to commit to some crazy scheme, then the Crown is likely to default. Liberty, at that time, meant free enterprise rather than forced labour, forced loans, price controls, 'Tudor monopolies' etc.
– it could easily seem like a coincidence that the concept of liberty became so popular among Enlightenment thinkers during the same period that their governments began habitually borrowing money.
If Kings are profligate, people want Parliaments to have power over the budget. Also, the don't want some fucking Duke or Marquise to send the to jail under a lettre de cachet. More generally, a 'liberty' was a place which was self-administering and took the 'law merchant' as its legal code. In return, the 'liberty' paid a fixed annual tax to the feudal lord.
To see the connection as Hume saw it, we need to understand the contrast between these new economic practices and what had come before.
No. We need to understand that Hume wasn't stupid. He was merely choosing to appear so for a strategic reason.
Through the centuries leading up to Hume’s time, the majority of British people undertook the same kinds of work as their parents, and the primary source of wealth was land.
For the 80 percent who were rural- sure.
Most landowners had inherited the land from their fathers, passing down responsibility and identity through the generations.
In Hume's case, yes. But their modest estate was acquired in the 16th century. They were a cadet branch of one of the big aristocratic families.
Other classes had similarly unchanging patterns of life; peasants and tradespeople lived as their parents had lived, or with slight variations depending on the education or marriages that parents were able to secure for their children. There was little social mobility, and most forms of wealth were concentrated in the oldest generation of each family, giving them power over younger generations. Hume pointed out that the occasional merchant might get rich enough to buy land, but the necessity of caring for the land and its inhabitants would soon transform even a risk-loving merchant into the same boring, responsible personality as his land-holding neighbours. All of British society was structured around landholding, and the shapes of life and character that were most compatible with it.
To be fair, Hume was not a statistician or an expert in 'political arithmetic'. Urbanization had tripled over the previous 150 years and this was an exponential trend.
Still, one thing was obvious. England had been more revolutionary in 1650 than 1750 when it was more 'traditional' and less urbanized. This silly bint may not be aware of this historical fact.
Hume viewed the sale of government debt to private citizens in the form of bonds as a profound threat to this social structure, because the passive income it generated them offered a means of opting out of social responsibility.
Hilarious! The guys who had replaced peasants with sheep and then who had taken over the land belonging to charitable Monastic orders were paragons of 'social responsibility'! This is like saying the slave owner had a tender care for the slaves he was whipping and raping.
Young aristocrats who didn’t want to wait to inherit, and anyone else who wanted to live differently from their parents – for the first time, these people had access to another source of income, disconnected from tradition, lineage or obligation.
Spendthrifts had been mortgaging their estates for centuries.
For Hume, this threatened to spell the end of ‘all ideas of nobility, gentry, and family’.
He invested the money he made from his History in Government stocks. So did the Tory Squire and the Whig aristocrat and the prostitute who had made good.
The change was not just political, it would be felt in personal relationships at every scale: every tie that composed a stable society was at risk.
But Government bonds were riskless. A landed Estate was all very well but a desirable parti was one with a goodly sum invested in the Funds.
While Hume was aware of the commercial stock market growing up alongside the government debt market, he was more concerned with government debt because the interest that accrued on government bonds came from taxes. Effectively, taxpayers all over the country were paying the interest going into the pockets of these stockholders, who could then enjoy themselves living in London or any other great city in the world without concern for anyone’s needs but their own. There was nothing to prevent a British stockholder from deciding his money would be better invested in the French government, say, even if the two countries were at war. Everything that tied a landholder to a particular place and a lifelong role in their community was reversed among stockholders, who could increase their profits by buying and selling rapidly and investing internationally.
The rejoinder was obvious. Stockholders have an interest in ensuring that the Crown in Parliament doesn't do stupid shit. This means they will be politically active- buying rotten boroughs etc. The French and the Spanish and so on will try to get into British Gilts because their own Monarchs were profligate.
Hume was not the only person to notice the vertiginous rise in public debt and its potential to disrupt social order – just over 40 years earlier, Jonathan Swift,
a Tory
writing about the new system of public finance in The Examiner, said that ‘power, which … was used to follow land, is now gone over to money’.
so, this was a familiar tune. But nobody was going to turn the clock back to before the Glorious Revolution.
Yet Hume’s fears for the future of Britain are especially interesting in our current times
is this dim bint talking about immigration? Hume didn't like darkies.
because of how clearly he described certain dynamics that still drive global politics to this day. Hume identified three threats that seem particularly prescient, and were also tied to the growing mania for liberty.
There was no 'mania' for liberty. Nobody wanted to go back to the days of the 'Diggers' & 'Levellers' & Barebones Abraham.
First, there was the disconnection between money and traditional responsibilities, whereby older generations would lose their power over younger ones,
this happens through a process called 'death'.
and individualism would prosper over generational fealty.
this happens when people move to the city or emigrate
Second, while the economy of London might not suffer, rural populations would get no benefit from the taxes they paid into these interest payments.
Rural folk earn more when they can sell more bacon & beef and beer & bread to city folk.
The wealth of landholders had always been tied up with the wellbeing of rural people,
Not in Britain where 'sheep ate men'.
but that wasn’t so with stockholders who could spend their money as they pleased.
So could landowners. The absentee landlord or the one who turned his fields into pleasure gardens attracted the censure of poets- e.g. Oliver Goldsmith's 'the deserted village'.
The interest involved was not a small proportion of the tax income, either: by the end of the 18th century, debt service would reach as high as two-thirds of the total British tax revenue.
Because of the war with France. Britain won. It made money on the deal. The French lost valuable possessions and then had to pay reparations.
The third threat arose because the indebted government depended on the good will of stockholders, and so even a monarchy was no longer truly ruled by the monarch.
Because it was 'the Crown in Parliament' which was sovereign. The English had chopped off the head of one King and kicked out another.
As long as the borrowed money could be withdrawn at any time,
how? You can sell gilts to some other dude who wants them. You can't cash them in at the Treasury.
stockholders essentially had the power to send British troops wherever they wanted to enrich their own companies.
No. Parliament could do that. Thankfully, lots of members of Parliament also owned shares in enterprises like the East India Company and so Britain's military expenditure ended up yielding a very large dividend for the country. This meant that the debt servicing ratio fell. This is why, at a later point, there was a 'widows & orphans' argument for issuing gilts. The notion was that vulnerable people should be able to buy a riskless asset and thus have an assured income. But, as Samuel Butler pointed out, by the second half of the Nineteenth Century, selling gilts and buying Railway Shares meant that, without added risk, you doubled your income and your capital.
At the time Hume was writing, British troops had been sent to Bengal to defend British trade interests, and we know that the expansion of the British Empire would only increase this kind of military engagement.
Which was very profitable.
Hume feared the loss of control among the establishment, the impoverishment of rural areas, and the loss of power a king had to defend or expand his territory.
In other words, this essay of his was as stupid as shit. But, he must have believed it would advance his interests.
Each of these objections connects stockholding to the concept of liberty: to the freedom to enjoy a passive income in any café in Europe;
which you have if you have money- gained, it may be, by mortgaging your ancestral estate. Stockholding is irrelevant.
the freedom from paternalist authority;
which you have if you have money and are of age
and from a king’s absolute rule.
which you can only get by emigrating from places ruled by absolute monarchs.
Each increase in one person’s liberty equated to the loss of another’s power.
Mummy had the power to keep this dim bint from sleeping around when she was a baby. Then she learned to walk and gained liberty. Mummy cried and cried.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Hume was right:
No. We can see he was wrong. Gilts are good for a nation's financial system because they create a class of riskless assets whose price falls or rises in line with the interest rate. Keynes has explained how this relates to the speculative demand for money.
an entire economy was forming around stockholders invested in both commercial and government debts. The new economy wasn’t limited to the stockholders themselves, but also to the businesses they founded and financed. As the economic historians Jaume Ventura and Hans-Joachim Voth have shown, the factories and railways of the Industrial Revolution grew from the new debt-financed economy.
Factories and railways grew because of technological innovation and transoceanic markets. Any profligate prince can have a debt-financed kingdom.
Eric Hobsbawm likewise noted that many of the railroads in England were first built because there was a high demand for investment opportunities, rather than a direct demand for transit or shipping.
He had shit for brains. The reason there was a high demand for railway shares was because they were bound to be even more profitable than canals.
While modern people often make strong distinctions between government and commercial entities, in this case it’s not necessary. Both government and commercial debt financing contributed to the new economy.
New products or production techniques and new markets contributed to a new economy. The financial sector of the economy represents a 'service' which raises total factor productivity.
Much of this industrial development still lay in the future when Hume was writing, but he anticipated a lot of it.
No. He was harping on an old Tory theme. But he was singing for his supper.
He saw there was wealth to be made in this new economy, and that the power of landholders would diminish in concrete ways, meaning they would lose control of the government that had traditionally served their interests above all others.
Because they would diversify their portfolios. But this also meant that they would have more resources to raise the productivity of their land.
Although he was writing to warn his contemporaries about the dangers of financing debt,
which, those with money, understood better than he did
Hume ended up describing the early stages and trajectory of our modern global economy and political structure.
In the view of cretins who don't know shit about economics.
Beyond greed, there was another cause for the rise of debt financing that Hume would not have been able to see: namely, inflation. Evidence of a significant stretch of monetary inflation across Europe during the premodern period was first identified by the German historian Georg Wiebe in 1895, and later picked up by the American historian Earl J Hamilton, who theorised that its cause was the influx of silver that Spain brought over from the Americas.
It was first written about by Jean Bodin in 1568.
More recently, David Hackett Fischer in The Great Wave (1996) revises the date used by Hamilton and Wiebe to argue that there were roughly 180 years of inflation during the ‘price revolution’ of approximately 1470 to 1650, which raised the cost of living many times over all over Europe. Nothing like it had happened before in recorded history.
Because the Americas- with their silver and gold mines- had never previously been discovered and exploited.
In the 1750s, when Hume was writing ‘Of Public Credit’, inflation was on the rise again. Though there have been periods of stability since the price revolution of the 18th century, modern life has been characterised by at least some degree of monetary inflation in a way that premodern life was not.
Premodern life had debasement of the currency. What changed was the supply of specie.
Inflation rewards certain activities and makes others more expensive. To take an easy example: in a stable currency, if you buried coins in your yard, they’d have the same value when you went back for them years later.
No. If you buried gold or silver coins in your yard, you'd have greater value if there is positive inflation.
During times of inflation, this would become an expensive habit because the coins would lose value every day that they remained underground.
Bank notes would. A pre-1992 copper two penny coin is now worth more than two pence because of the rise in price of copper. If you had bought gold coins in 2016, you'd now have a tidy profit.
So we could expect that buried treasures would become rarer over those years.
They become rarer when Banks don't fail and you don't have the option of buying equities.
Another change: if you spent your coins on supplies to make consumer goods, then sold the goods when prices rose later, you would make a bigger profit during inflation than you would with a stable currency.
Not if the rate of inflation was fully anticipated.
If those goods were sold abroad, the value coming back to your own pocket would not only make you richer, it would make your entire national economy stronger.
Nonsense! If you sell to a country in recession, ceteris paribus, the opposite would be true.
Inflation thereby gives both individuals and nations new incentives to produce more consumer goods than they need to survive, and to trade the excess abroad.
It has no such magical property. Our incentive to produce more than we need is to get wealthier and thus have a better standard of living.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber
who had shit for brains
wrote about the changing role of labour in the religious lives of northern Europeans during the Reformation. He argued that Protestants laid the groundwork for modern capitalism by considering diligence at work a spiritual virtue and – importantly – by using money to create more money through investments and entrepreneurship.
Which Catholic Florence had done at a time when Protestant North Germany was pretty barbarous.
Weber’s theory and Adam Smith’s description of the division of labour
which began 10,000 years ago
and the advent of commercial society
which began 5000 years ago
are two of the most famous and influential explanations for the rise of capitalism between the 16th and 18th centuries,
that was the period when global markets rose
and neither of them mentions inflation.
Weber didn't understand that Germany's war debt was unsustainable. Thomas Mann, was influenced by Weber. He was foolish enough to buy German War bonds in 1917.
Still, knowing that these sea changes in labour and commerce happened at the same time as a price revolution,
bigger changes occurred during the nineteenth century which was a period of price stability or even deflation leading to a Pigouvian 'real balance effect'.
we can see that they were more profitable with the inflation than they would have been without it.
If so, the Spanish should have flourished during the sixteenth century because it had highest inflation. Instead, it lost competitiveness and had a series of Government defaults.
Further, these changes are versions of the same things we do now, though very much consciously, to protect our savings from sinking in value, so we can conclude that these early capitalist developments were not only profitable,
if capitalist developments aren't profitable, capital is destroyed.
they operated as adaptations to the new threats that came along with prolonged inflation.
The effect was cumulative. Rates were low by modern standards.
Many cultures traditionally put excess resources into building palaces, temples and tombs – or going to war to expand their borders.
Europe did all these things while industrializing.
It was very unusual in antiquity, as Hume wrote, to focus on manufacturing consumer goods and securing trade routes, as the English and the Dutch did in the early modern era.
And yet that is what the Phoenicians had done. The English and the Dutch were like them in that the private sector took the leading role. Spain and Portugal functioned more like Rome exacting tribute.
Contrast this with 16th-century Spain, which had everything that the emperors of antiquity could have wished for – land all over the world, enormous expansion of the Spanish language and the Catholic religion, untold riches, spectacular churches and palaces; and, with the Inquisition, they had obedient, religious citizens while suppressing dissent. And yet the Spanish government went bankrupt 13 times between the 16th and 19th centuries, and four of those bankruptcies came swiftly at the height of Spanish empire under Philip II.
He inherited a big deficit. Government spending was unsustainable. Yet, the path to riches was Royal favour. The Brits were determined to keep the gains from oceanic trade in private hands so as not to go down the Spanish path.
The traditional markers of strength had become economic liabilities,
No. Having a kick ass army & navy & a treasury bursting with gold (these are the traditional markers of strength) were assets not liabilities.
or at least they failed to protect even powerful kings against inflation.
Worse yet, powerful kings were not protected against syphilis. More shockingly, having lots of beautiful cathedrals does not protect your young people from the perils of masturbation.
In a sense, all of Europe became a laboratory for experimenting with methods to protect against the effects of inflation.
No. Parts of it had become a laboratory for experimenting with new weapons systems and techniques for raising productivity. When things become more expensive, there is a greater incentive to make more stuff in a less resource intensive manner.
Hume approved of the early waves of these changes in Great Britain because, as he wrote in ‘Of Commerce’ (1752), it was easy to see and understand the virtue of people working harder than they had before. The increases in productivity and in international trade seemed like a benefit to all. The changes didn’t stop there, though. Funding wars with national savings no longer worked the way it had for the nations of antiquity for many reasons, but significantly: the value of coins disappeared too quickly. Saving coins in a war chest was as bad as burying them in the yard.
Having a war chest is foolish unless you actually go to war. The question is whether you seize assets from the enemy or if they seize assets from you.
It’s hard to convey the level of experimentation involved in developing modern finance as a tool to manage inflation.
It is easy if you studied econ.
Part of the story is illustrated by the number of years that lapsed between the Swedish and British governments establishing national banks (1668 and 1694, respectively, with the French following in 1718) and the Spanish, in 1782.
A National Bank is not a panacea. Sweden only got a national bank after its first bank failed.
To show how far from obvious it was that countries would need some form of finance industry to stay solvent through the 18th century, consider Frederick the Great of Prussia, who tried to fund his involvement in the Seven Years War by debasing coins, even though producing these coins left him in parlous debt to the Dutch.
Prussia was too underdeveloped to have much of a financial sector. Fredrick did pursue reforms to attract investment and skilled entrepreneurs.
In modern times, we keep our money as cash briefly,
No. We don't receive cash. We get a bank transfer. Many of us have gone completely cashless.
and save using interest-bearing accounts to stay ahead of inflation.
No. The interest rate is too low. We buy equities or gold or property.
Banks raise money to service these savings by granting loans, and the interest rates on these loans is tightly controlled by national banks to protect their currencies and economies.
The Central Bank may raise interest rates to choke off inflationary pressure. But the Government may twist its arm to prevent this.
Without people financing their endeavours with debt, we would have no way of protecting our savings from inflation, on any scale – personal, commercial or national.
Nonsense! We could buy gold, property, foreign currency, equities etc.
This is a version of the situation Hume thought would destroy the stability of British society. He wasn’t wrong. The system does require a constant level of debt finance rather than direct saving throughout society: and that system did upend the power structure of Great Britain and beyond.
This is stupid paranoid shit. It turns economics into a morality tale. Why not just say 'the greed of the rich causes Capitalists to sodomize the workers while chopping off their heads?'
While Hume wanted to make a clean distinction between the hard-working manufacturers and the pampered stockholders, the brisk trade in consumer goods was central to the profit of both groups, and also to their ability to protect currency from inflation.
There is no such ability.
He was hardly the only one to try to make this distinction.
He was writing stupid shite to serve his own interest.
In Capitalism (2022), the historian Michael Sonenscher wrote that efforts to find alternatives to capitalism often focus on systems of ownership, but few people have developed utopian alternatives to the division of labour.
There have always bee utopian communes where everybody does some manual labour.
In most ways, Sonenscher points out, the connection between the division of labour and the 18th-century French word capitaliste – meaning ‘stockholder’ – seems incidental.
It isn't. The divorce between ownership and control is a division of labour. Those with money but no expertise running a business provide the working capital and take on the risk. Those with business expertise provide the management.
From the perspective of defending against inflation, however, the division of labour was an important step toward protecting currency by virtue of increasing the output of consumer goods to sell;
The division of labour exists even where there is no currency- e.g. the traditional, non-monetized, autarkic Indian village where 'service castes' receive a share of the harvest.
but the national banks and finance markets were even more effective at protecting the value of money by giving everyone access to the inflation-fighting power of business ownership,
This is nonsense. Banks and Stock markets don't give people without collateral, business experience, and a high credit score access to working capital so as to set up businesses.
whatever their jobs. The optics were bad, though. Stock traders were always in coffee houses and what they did was a form of gambling, beset by scammers and bubbles.
There were actual gamblers in taverns and casinos and gentlemen's clubs.
Since we know how the 19th century went, we know how much the spread of industry would go on to be funded by debt financing,
equity financing. People bought shares. True, a company might prefer to sell debentures so as not to dilute ownership but if they couldn't make the interest payments there would have to be a conversion of debentures into voting stock.
and we can see, as Hume could not, that industry and finance were connected all along, two sides of a new economy.
And the old economy. Strictures against usury go back to ancient Sumeria.
But from Hume’s perspective, the one group was hard-working, and the other was lazy and immoral.
Though hard working people diversify their portfolios, to reduce risk, by putting their savings into stocks and shares.
By the 1750s, Hume could see a future in which stockholders could have as much, or more, power than the landholders who defined the old political and economic order.
That was a good thing. If lots of people own gilts, they have an incentive to put pressure on the Government to remain fiscally solvent by pursuing sensible policies.
Smith voiced a similar fear in The Wealth of Nations (1776) but went into less detail about what might happen if it should come to pass. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty clear when the stockholder economy reached parity – at least – with the landholder economy, for in 1783 Great Britain’s government divided permanently into two parties, spurred by a fight over the terms of a bailout for the East India Company.
The King disliked Fox and promoted Pitt. The Pittites could be said to be the nucleus of the modern Tory party. The East India Company had been transitioning to full administrative control (Nizamat) which began in 1772 and was more or less complete by 1793.
In the US, the 1796 presidential election was the first with two parties – one representing the agricultural south, and one representing finance and the industrialised north, again spurred by a fight over national debt.
It was about 'States rights'. If the Federal Government consolidated and managed debt on behalf of all the states, it would have more power. Thus this was a battle between Federalists and Democrat/Republicans.
Of course, the French Revolution had many complicated causes, but one of them was the 1788 crisis over national debt, with the interests of landholders conflicting with the interests of stockholders,
Landholders could own stock. The suspicion was that the stock-jobbers had inside information and could manipulate things in order to unjustly enrich themselves.
which ended with parties representing a political Right and Left. In other words, within a single decade, all these countries’ governments split into two parties along the lines Hume had foreseen in the 1750s.
These were the same lines as that of the Cavaliers vs the Roundheads- i.e. Monarchists against Republicans.
On the Right, in each case, there was a traditional land-based agricultural economy and a political party representing its interests.
In that case, Jefferson was right wing and the Federalists were left wing.
On the Left, a party representing the stockholder economy, composed of the hodgepodge of practices and beliefs that had become profitable during inflation: manufacturing, finance, international trade, and liberty.
This is a paranoid view. Why not simply say that the Elders of Zion, in cahoots with the Freemasons, control both the Bolshevik Party and Wall Street?
If we take Hume’s analysis from the 1750s and apply it to current US politics, we see
the Banksters are in league with the Zionist Occupied Government which is trying to destroy our pure vital essence through vaccination. Did you know, just by drinking a litre of bleach a day, you can become immune to COVID, AIDS, Autism, Homosexuality, Rap Music and Wokeness?
two overlapping economies – the landholders’ and the stockholders’ – with some common ground and some points of enduring conflict.
Everyone who has a pension plan, is a stockholder. Few own vast agricultural estates.
Each economy has a full class structure with owners, bosses and various kinds of workers, so class alone can’t determine our political alignment, as Marx would have it, for example.
Sure it can. If you are poor, you don't care if income tax is raised. Thus those with higher incomes have a different class interest.
Furthermore, the two economies are not always in conflict. As Thomas Piketty argues in Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), inherited money blends well with the stockholder economy, growing even more significantly than wages.
There is no big difference between collecting rent from tenants and collecting interest from borrowers.
This is hardly the only way the two economies combine with mutual benefit. Land proximate to financial centres will command high rents, while taxes paid by industrial businesses can be used for farm subsidies.
So can taxes on rents.
The overlap between the two economies is what we call ‘capitalism’.
No. There is capitalism even if there is no land to speak off- e.g. Singapore or Hong Kong.
But it’s a mistake to elide the ways in which the two economies are still distinct and do not create a single, seamless global system.
It is a worse mistake to think they don't. The plain fact is, returns to agricultural land have fallen everywhere and under every sort of regime. If you see a rich guy gambling in a casino, you don't jump to the conclusion that he owns a big farm. You think he made his money in IT or Fintech or Private Equity.
For one thing, all the premodern traditional practices concerning property are still with us.
None are. When was the last time you picked up your bow and arrow and presented yourself for military service under your feudal lord?
People still inherit wealth and marry into it.
People still have sex and make babies. This proves that the Zionist Occupied Government is putting something in the water which is turning us all gay.
People still get jobs through family connections.
Most don't.
People still ask friends for help when they fall on hard times.
Most apply for and get Social Security.
Many people still depend on their grown children for care as they age.
Most rely on their pensions and State subsidized care homes.
There are very few ways in which the new stockholder economy has cut off these old traditions.
Insurance provides the safety net which, previously, was available to some through personal relationships, private charity, or the Church.
In all economic classes, people are still supporting themselves in premodern, relational ways rather than in the individualistic ways associated with the industrialised side of capitalism.
The opposite is the case.
In modern times, these are the modes of property transfer typically defended by the Right.
i.e. sensible people
Opposing inheritance taxes and no-fault divorce laws are each political bids to empower this economic structure, but it’s not hard to imagine a social version, also. Many people
in subsistence agriculture
make their primary financial and emotional investments in their children, and resent how little reciprocal obligation children might feel to live nearby and provide grandchildren.
more than half of all American States have 'filial responsibility' laws. But there has never been an obligation to 'provide grandchildren'. It is repugnant to think that a daughter must have babies. She should have the option of remaining single or becoming a nun.
Hume may be comforted to know that the old family power structures are still going strong,
Hume didn't give a toss. He never married.
even if they are not the only ways by which modern people live.
Very true. Many modern people sacrifice their first born to Hecate.
The other point to note is that people can change their alignments. They can align mostly with one economy and somewhat with the other. Someone who makes a fortune in the stockholder economy, for example, might then find meaning in the relational landholder economy as they age.
They buy a manor house and spend their time seeing to the welfare of their serfs.
Or vice versa.
You can sell your serfs and become a hedge fund manager.
Modern people generally have some blend of commitments to the landholding and stockholding economies, with some portion of money or social capital invested in each.
Very true. The guy delivering your pizza is also the Duke of Dorset.
And yet, even more than two centuries after the Left and the Right divided, even with countless defections from one side to the other, the differences between these two sides still do not collapse.
Because Dukes of Dorset deliver pizzas in their spare time.
Unlike religious or ethnic groups, there is nowhere in the world that the Left and the Right live together peacefully, without political strife.
Some religious or ethnic groups don't live together peacefully at all. What this lady calls 'political strife', they would call a very amicable conversation.
There is something insoluble at stake between the sides, and neither side has extinguished the other or found a lasting compromise. This is more evidence that we’re not living under a single system but two, with enduring differences.
Because the guy delivering pizza is also the Duke of Dorset. If he is late with your order it is because he had to take a detour to fight in the Crusades.
Then, there are the fights. A war like the US Civil War, for example, has a Left (those fighting to abolish slavery) and a Right (those fighting to preserve it).
This was the States Rights issue. The South was fighting for the right to secession. The North was 'Federalist'.
But while Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism (1983), and other scholars have argued that the transatlantic slave trade was a central feature of early capitalism and the pursuit of empire among Europeans, the people going to war against it later, inside the US, were more industrialised and less agrarian than the ones fighting to keep it. Under these circumstances, there is a dissonance in describing the Right as the party of capitalism or business owners, and the Left as anti-capitalist, since the Left has been fighting on the side of finance and industry all along.
Not really. Marxism sees Capitalism as an advance on Feudalism and Communism as an advance on Capitalism. This is dialectical, not dissonant.
While scholars such as Bruce Levine and Eric Foner might argue that the American north and south had meaningfully distinct economies, and others, including Sven Beckert, counter that they were only components of a single system of war capitalism – these arguments taken together illustrate exactly how two economies can overlap, sometimes to mutual benefit, and still remain distinct enough to cause strife.
This lady hasn't noticed that two people in the same trade belonging to the same family may still want to kill each other so as to inherit all the ancestral property.
It’s hard to maintain the idea that we are all living under a seamless unified capitalism when the differences between the landholder and stockholder economies drive US (and other national) politics to this day.
This simply isn't true. One could say that 'the divorce between ownership and control' led, in the Eighties, to a revolt by institutional investors which led to the emergence of 'corporate raiders' promising to raise 'shareholder value'. Private Equity and Management Buy-outs are another example. The demand for 'stakeholder capitalism' or 'a third way' was one response.
What about class (the primary Marxist lens for analysing material relations)? Inflation gives bosses extra incentive to force workers to produce excess goods.
Deflation does that. Inflation eases off any such pressure.
It also makes wages effectively drift downward until workers demand a reset.
This is 'downward stickiness of nominal wages'. Sadly, money wages can fall. Company Unions may prefer a 'growth & stability' pact whereby workers take a pay-cut to avoid 'last in first out' lay-offs which will leave the enterprise with an ageing workforce bound to become more and more uncompetitive over time.
However, the financialised economy also requires a constant stream of borrowers who want to buy houses, go to college or start businesses:
If you can't lend at home, you can lend abroad. It isn't the case that the Bank is dependent on the spendthrift.
in other words, it requires a pool of people with the ingredients for social mobility – education, opportunity, vigour – who are not already rich, to take out loans and repay them with interest.
Rich people take loans to finance specific investment projects.
You could say that the restlessness of modernity is very concretely the way we stay ahead of inflation.
You would only say that if you were brain damaged. High real interest rates are the way you squeeze out inflationary pressure.
Rather than imposing a new class system, the financialised economy requires more and more previously marginalised people to join the group of potential borrowers, becoming successful, socially mobile people, defined neither by class nor any other narrow social role.
No. It can get by perfectly well by just financing big technological projects. Household savings can be mobilized by the Government through Post Office Savings Accounts or Cooperative Banking or National Savings certificates. It was not obvious, even fifty years ago, that retail banks would find it worthwhile to cater to the working class.
Focusing on the myriad harms of class systems can muddy our perception of the economy we are actually inhabiting – one that thrives on our rejection of traditional roles of any kind. Once we add this element to the picture, a simple two-sided class struggle is not sufficient to explain the complexity of a modern economy.
It is misleading. It is obvious that bosses and workers need to cooperate. If they try to kill each other, there is no enterprise.
While agricultural economies can operate with very little social mobility,
as can an industrial economy. When I was young this was called 'Dad's lads'- i.e. the notion that sons would be hired by the firm where their father works and would then receive training to do the same job.
a financialised economy does better on the back of public education, universal healthcare and elder care:
not if the Government runs an increasing deficit which leads to 'crowding out'.
the various social structures that allow people to leave the circumstances of their birth.
This happens anyway. My Mummy is now too old to carry me around even though I only weigh 90 kg.
Fights for the rights of the working class are, of course, hard won and necessary – yet they also benefit the entire stockholder economy,
not if real per unit labour costs rise thus making the enterprise uncompetitive. In that case its capitalized value goes down. There is 'balance sheet weakness' in the financial sector which makes it vulnerable. Real interest rates are now more likely to rise.
as we see among countries that voluntarily adopt these structures in order to financialise their economies.
This is like buying a crown in the the hope that you might become King.
The Left isn’t only a moral position concerning the needs of the needy,
there are always needier people across the border
it is also a series of experiments in living under conditions of relentless inflation.
Fuck off! The Left was strongest when there was deflation and mass unemployment.
The values of liberty, universal human rights,
e.g. the right to migrate to richer countries and to claim Social Security there
and experimentation with new social structures – all of these support the stockholder economy, and its conviction that better things are possible. This is how the Left can simultaneously be the party of finance and industry, and also the party that tries to overthrow capitalism.
Not to mention the party that champions free and compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all practicing male heterosexuals. Ban dicks. Dicks cause RAPE!
It’s also why Leftism has given us the best recipes humanity has so far developed for growing and consolidating wealth during inflation.
No. Raising general purpose and total factor productivity is the only recipe for higher income and wealth. Any sort of regime can do this. The Left has an exceptionally poor record in this matter.
So, to return to the question I posed at the start: are working-class conservatives voting against their interests?
No. Unskilled immigration really does harm them.
Not if we return to Hume’s concerns.
He was afraid Somalis would move in next door- right?
Social mobility, desirable though it may be under the rubric of ‘progress’, carries the risk of unstitching traditional family ties. People of all classes risk losing respect in their old age,
that happened long ago
or control over where their children settle,
see above
or what religion their grandchildren practise
see above
– every form of cultural continuity through generations, which many people value far more than money.
is this dim bint going to mention coloured immigration? That's what people are getting at when they talk about 'cultural continuity'. They don't mean that the pizza guy is also the Duke of Dorset and has to take time off to fight in the Crusades.
These imperilled values are generally championed by politicians on the Right who understand that even the richest people in the financialised world can’t make their adult children share their faith or politics, or care for them in old age.
Right wing politicians understand that they can get elected if they say 'immigrants will eat your puppy dog!'
The stockholder economy effects a significant and lasting shift in power toward the young,
Rising productivity does that. If it is falling, the young will have to move in with granny coz at least she gets a small pension.
which might explain why conservatives often vote against their apparent material interests.
More migrants may keep wages down but this may entail 'demographic replacement' at least in some areas.
Contrast this with traditional economies, where even people without wealth can exert significant control over their children and grandchildren, and that may legitimately be something more valuable than money to many conservatives.
Why is this crazy lady so obsessed with controlling kids and grandkids? That may have been a feature of the early agricultural or pastoral revolutions. It simply does not matter for advanced industrial civilization. It is obvious that our kids and grandkids will know more than we do about what is or isn't technologically feasible. We don't want to dictate their behaviour in advance because our solutions are bound to be sub-optimal, if not mischievous.
Finally, the global rise of the Right-wing.
Which could only have occurred over ten thousand years ago.
If we imagine the two economies as a Venn diagram,
we are saying they have well defined extensions (otherwise they aren't sets and no Venn diagram can be drawn).
we find a significant overlap where finance and industry can be used for the purposes of the Left or the Right.
So can walking and talking.
Both the Great Depression and the runaway inflation of the 1970s involved complicated interactions between the Right and Left within the arenas of finance and industry.
No. Both were purely monetary phenomena. Both Left wing and Right wing regimes could improve matters by restoring monetary stability.
However, the complexity of these interactions don’t seem to have changed the fundamental polarisation of the two economies, since Left-leaning areas remain richer than Right-leaning ones,
Where? Gulf monarchies are right leaning. Ba'athist regimes were left leaning. Their people are fucked. Still, it is true that North Korea is much more prosperous than South Korea.
and the political divisions seem to only grow. The 2008 market crash illustrates
nothing. The US bounced back. Europe's growth slowed. China, India etc. were scarcely affected.
something of the dual nature of the finance industry in contemporary times: on the one hand, individual bankers may take advantage of the system to enrich themselves and benefit their friends and families at the expense of the national economy and individual borrowers.
Irresponsible traders may have done so, short term. But bankers, as a class, lost out.
Deregulatory laws that encourage such behaviour are often considered ‘pro-business’. On the other hand, the purpose of a finance industry is to
transfer savings to their most productive use
safeguard an economy from uncontrolled inflation
that is the job of the Central Bank.
and other market shocks – and a narrow, Right-leaning understanding of ‘pro-business’ interests can prevent it from fulfilling that function, as it did spectacularly during the subprime mortgage crisis.
Subprime was caused by politicians pressurising Banks to lend to poor people who bought 'subprime' property- i.e. shitty apartments which were bound to lose value.
There is another face of the Right though: the edge of the landholder economy that Hume feared would be extinguished by the stockholder economy.
Pizza guy who is also the Duke of Dorset may return from the Crusades and expel the Jews and kill the atheistic Socialists.
Hume identified three groups of people who would lose power as the new economy ascended: rural people,
it turned out rural depopulation was a good thing. Hume & Smith were not greatly exercised by the plight of the Highland crofters. Packing them off to Canada was the best possible outcome for them.
ageing parents,
who go on cruises because they have great pensions
and people who want to annex land.
Putin?
When the US president Donald Trump first said that he planned to annex Canada and Greenland, many Americans treated these ideas as absurd,
if Trump loses the mid-terms, that is what history will judge them to be.
but we don’t have to look far to see modern nations going to war for their neighbours’ land just as they’ve done in the past. Indeed, the first step to waging this kind of war between nations
is invasion. Nothing else will do. Putin does have a substantial chunk of Ukraine. Trump has nothing.
like the US and Canada, for example, would be to attack the international web of economic interdependences of the stockholder economy – as Trump has done with apparently irrational tariffs and restrictions to foreign aid.
Foreign aid doesn't matter. Tariffs can be retaliated against. Let us see whether Europe has the balls to hit Trump where it hurts so as to ensure the Dems win the mid-terms. The problem is that it is easy to impose tariffs. It is difficult to lift them.
With global warming making habitable land ever scarcer,
Greenland may actually turn green. That's why Trump wants it.
wars over land
why go to war if mass migration can't be checked?
might once again become more common than wars over trade and influence. Climate change could easily disrupt the balance between the stockholder and landholder economies,
There are no such entities. Coase's theorem explains why who owns what needn't matter much. What climate change does is to change patterns of demand which in turn means those who are most productive and innovative in serving new markets rise relative to those who are slow or complacent.
making the risks of inflation less frightening than the possibility of running out of habitable land for one’s own family.
Very true. Nobody wants an apartment in a nice neighbourhood. They want ten acres and a mule so as to grow turnips to feed their families. Also, they want to ensure that the grandkids are trained from a young age to gather donkey dung in an efficient fashion. If little Tommy says 'Great news! I just got into the Stanford AI program!' Grandfather beats him and tell him to get back to dung gathering.
Disruption of this balance would likely manifest as a global rise of
nutters not necessarily
the Right-wing, as more and more countries scramble to control dwindling land resources.
and grandkids who show signs of wanting to get out of the dung-gathering business.
In fact, there is a built-in coalition that would welcome the destruction of the stockholder economy.
Because the dung-gathering economy is so much nicer.
If we look at Hume’s three groups of people disempowered by the rise of debt financing in the modern US,
The Virginia Company was formed in 1606. It borrowed money in London and had share and stockholders. It helped 'disempower' the indigenous people of America. In other words, 'debt financing' is what made 'Turtle island' modern.
they consistently vote for conservative leaders, even though the economy and job growth fare better under Democratic presidents.
Not Biden. He was shit.
First, electoral maps show that people who live in rural areas are more likely to vote for
politicians who protect farmers. China has figured out that hurting US agricultural exports (while doing a deal favourable to Canadian farmers) could cause Trump to lose the mid-terms. Even India is putting tariffs on US pulses.
conservatives than people in big cities. It’s the same with ageing parents, and people who want to preserve old power structures, including the family.
This lady's parents or grandparents keep pressuring her to quit her sophisticated urban lifestyle. Come back to the farm and get into the dung collection industry. Also, why aren't you barefoot and pregnant? Why not marry your drunkard cousin and raise up a brood of inbred nitwits?
Again, we see this in voting patterns ‘strongly associated’ (according to the Pew Centre) with age: younger people lean Left and older people lean Right. And finally, there are people who want to go to war for land. Right-leaning leaders are usually the ones to start invasions, and the protests against them are usually led by the Left.
So Andrew Jackson was Right wing. Henry Clay & Daniel Webster were Lesbian Communists.
There are many reasons for people aligning Right or Left, which is why analyses of class and material interests fall short of describing the realities of people’s politics.
But there are plenty of well paid political analysts who have a genuine, self-interested, reason to discover those realities. Stupid people with PhDs in shite live in a fantasy world.
Hume foresaw that these specific groups would resent the economic sea-change of the 18th century – and he was correct.
He was wrong. Instead of a 'Court v Country' polarity, the King promoted Pittites. Interestingly, it was the French who found his work interesting though he failed to predict their revolution.
Still, the power of the Right hasn’t doomed the Left
Unless the Right used power to do so. Iran isn't ruled by Democratic Socialists. Russia is not governed by Pussy Riot.
– no more than the Spanish Inquisition doomed the rise of the Left in 18th-century England
because it operated in Spain, not England
and France. As long as governments want to keep the value of their currencies from falling,
they will follow a 'tight' monetary policy
someone in their ranks will be using the methods of the Left and inventiveness that brought us everything from our banking system to gay marriage.
Very true. Janet Yellen married a transgender dolphin so as to help Kamala win by reducing the cost of living.
We don’t need to resurrect communism
of the sort that the US had under Nixon?
or focus narrowly on class, following Marx.
He's dead. Follow him into a crypt in Highgate cemetery by all means.
The experiments are far from over, and we should remember that the Left is generally where money comes from in modern times.
Perhaps she is being financed by Soros. But Soros was against the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
We give away too much power when we forget it.
Very true. I got drunk Christmas before last and gave away a lot of power to this Syrian dude I met at the pub. Now he is the President of that country. I only remembered this just now.
