Socialdem. 21st Century

So once again Europeans have seen another vicious, grotesque terrorist attack in the heart of Europe. Even one picture here speaks a thousand words about this monstrous horror.[embedded content]See here and here. If things go on like this, it seems France may well face a permanent state of emergency. If it gets much worse, it will be more like low level civil war in a major European country. As Europe descends into chaos, even millennial cultural leftists and other regressive left lunatics...

TheIllusionist recently wrote this interesting analysis of millennial cultural leftists and the current political situation in the comments section, as follows:“LK,I fear that the identity stuff will actually proliferate more and more [sc. amongst millennial cultural leftists]. It probably won’t take over the economic radicalisation that is occurring. I think that will stay. But it will greatly impair their ability to govern. They will hold fast to fringe causes that will alienate the rest...

See here.Amongst the graphs is this one here:[embedded content]As we can see, the really significant fall in the birth rate in Western nations like Germany and Britain happened from c. 1875 to the early 1920s.This was long before the social and cultural revolution of the 1960s. So what caused the fall from the late 19th century?

That is, youth unemployment defined as the number of unemployed people from 15 to 24 years old as a percentage of the youth labour force.Have a look at the figures for European nations in 2015:Greece | 49.8% Italy | 40.3% Spain | 48.4% Portugal | 31.9% Slovak Republic | 26.4% France | 24.7% Belgium | 22.1% Finland | 22.0% Ireland | 20.9% Poland | 20.8% Sweden | 20.3% Hungary | 17.3% Luxembourg | 17.3% Slovenia | 16.4% Latvia | 16.3% Austria | 10.6% United Kingdom | 14.6% United States |...

Here is one called John Wright in 1785:“The minister cannot be ignorant that an alleviation of duties on India muslins and callicos, or giving encouragement to them by laying a heavier tax upon the cotton goods of this country, especially upon the infant manufacture of muslins and fine callicos, must depress and discourage the industry and ingenuity of our manufacturers at home, and have the strongest tendency to promote the sale of such foreign fabrics, in preference to those of Britain;...

From the late 17th century, Indian cotton textile imports – such as white calicoes, muslins, printed and striped cotton goods – flowed into Europe in ever larger volumes.Local manufacturers, seeing the lightness and superior nature of cotton, started to create new cotton textile industries.But they faced a serious problem: they could not compete with the Indian imports in terms of price or even quality (Parthasarathi 2011: 89). The centre of the world’s cotton textile production was in India...

Here he is talking before the UK general election of 23 February 1950:[embedded content]In this election the Labour party won 1.5 million more votes than the Conservatives and received more votes than in the 1945 election, but owing to the first past the post system only won a majority of 5 seats.A priceless anecdote from David Hunt, Private Secretary to Attlee:[embedded content]

It was undoubtedly Enoch Powell’s hateful, race-baiting “Rivers of Blood” speech, delivered on 20 April, 1968 to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham, as spoken in full below (but not by Powell):[embedded content]To be perfectly clear: I don’t like Enoch Powell or the politics he represented, but surely people on the left can look carefully at this piece of history and learn something from it.It seems pretty clear that to me that the...

I find this fascinating, and important for studying the Old Left:[embedded content]

The Norwegian heterodox economist Erik S. Reinert, author of the excellent book How Rich Countries Got Rich, and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (New York, 2007), talks about his career and about heterodox development economics in the videos below. Informal but very enjoyable discussion.One point, however: in the first video Reinert says that Ricardo’s comparative advantage argument assumes diminishing returns. Surely, he made a slight mistake here: the argument assumes constant...