“…a scheme at once wild and dangerous.” “…a trick, too, of the clumsiest description…” I was hunting for the exact location of “Prince’s Tavern” in Manchester in 1833 when I stumbled upon an Economist article from March 30, 1844 addressing the “practical consequences” of reducing the length of the factory working day from 12 hours to 10. I am always fascinating by the profound and enduring hostility of a faction of employers — amplified by their mouthpieces in academia and the press — to the reduction of working time. I’m amazed how often their bile and zeal leads them to compound the error of biased, unfounded assumptions with boneheaded accounting mistakes. There is nothing so edifying as the sharp-eyed calculation of a businessman who has naught but
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“…a scheme at once wild and dangerous.”
“…a trick, too, of the clumsiest description…”
I was hunting for the exact location of “Prince’s Tavern” in Manchester in 1833 when I stumbled upon an Economist article from March 30, 1844 addressing the “practical consequences” of reducing the length of the factory working day from 12 hours to 10. I am always fascinating by the profound and enduring hostility of a faction of employers — amplified by their mouthpieces in academia and the press — to the reduction of working time. I’m amazed how often their bile and zeal leads them to compound the error of biased, unfounded assumptions with boneheaded accounting mistakes. There is nothing so edifying as the sharp-eyed calculation of a businessman who has naught but the most important boon (far beyond any amount of benevolent sympathy or charity!) to the moral and physical independence of the operative at heart!
I’m going to leave this snippet here and invite commentators to identify the egregious accounting error the author commits. Later, I will demonstrate another instance of the exact same error, performed some 27 years later by an employer. These people weren’t merely wrong, they were systematically and consistently mathematically illiterate and intellectually bereft. Frederic Harrison was on the mark when he called the purported “economic science” of his day “this magazine of untruth.”
