14th Selected Links

Some links for your weekend perusal:

1. 'Why Y?' During this week's podcast, I asked Lord Robert Skidelsky why Keynes used 'Y' to denote income. Here is the answer.

2. 'When did growth begin?', new paper by Paul Bouscasse, Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson.

3. 'You cannot take our honour', Otto Wels' 1933 speech against Hitler's Enabling Act.

4. 'The Rhetoric of Irrationality', article by Lola Lopes.

5. Pericles' Funeral Oration (from Richard Crawley's translation of Thucydides). It sums up the Athenians' spirit of community and sense of the common good. Here is the best bit: "We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation, each carried to its highest point, and both united in the same persons."

Have a nice weekend,


Joe