The Rest Is History
Published 3 Feb 2025Enough of the Princeps, what remains to be described, is the monster …
The Roman emperor Caligula endures as one of the most notorious figures in not only Roman history, but the history of the world. Famed as a byword for sexual degeneracy, cruelty and corruption, the account of his life written by the Roman historian Suetonius has, above all, enshrined him as such for posterity. Throughout the biography there is a whiff of dark comedy, as Caligula is cast as the ultimate demented Caesar, corrupted absolutely by his absolute power and driven into depravity. Born of a sacred and illustrious bloodline to adored parents, his early life — initially so full of promise — was shadowed by tragedy, death, and danger, the members of his family picked off one by one by the emperor Tiberius. Nevertheless, Caligula succeeded, through his own cynical intelligence and cunning manipulation of public spectacle, to launch himself from the status of despised orphan, to that of master of Rome. Yet, before long his seemingly propitious reign, was spiralling into a nightmare of debauchery and terror …
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the most notorious emperor in Rome: Caligula, a man said to have slept with his sister, transformed his palace into a brothel, cruelly humiliated senators, and even made his horse into a consul. But what is the truth behind these horrific legends? Was Caligula really more monster than man …?
00:00 A mysterious emperor
05:18 Why are the stories about Caligula so bad?
08:40 Germanicus: the best man in Rome
16:20 Caligula is the heir
19:30 The death of Tiberius
20:55 Caligula’s cynical intelligence
22:50 Caligula’s skill playing to the gallery
28:39 Caligula’s turn to evil (according to Suetonius)…
31:35 Caligula as Suetonius’ monster
37:22 Caligula confronts the senate
45:10 The conspiracy against him moves
48:14 Did all this actually happen?
58:43 Did he make his horse a consul?Producer: Theo Young-Smith
Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett
Video Editor: Jack Meek
Social Producer: Harry Balden
Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor
July 21, 2025
Caligula: Was He Really Mad?
QotD: The parasitic classes
A parallel case may be found in the “civil” services, regulating authorities, non-profits, &c. Jobs in these areas, which command high salaries and pensions, and present delicious opportunities for graft, are outwardly the opposite of productive. They parasitically consume, on a colossal scale, the resources of the productive.
Look into almost any kind of “charitable” activity, such as social work, and one will find that only a tiny proportion of the cash “trickles down” to the characteristically desperate “clients”. And when it does, they use it to buy not only drugs and licker, but truly useless things, such as lottery tickets.
“Education” systems, in the modern West, exist chiefly to enrich semi-literate, unionized schoolteachers. In many parts of Ontario, for instance, a teacher will make at least double what the average parents make, and therefore feel justified in sneering. The teachers naturally consider that the little ones belong to them, for they are the necessary source of their income. What rights should parents have to interfere in their upbringing?
My best argument for the parasite class (always granting that some may be sincere), is that they protect society from gathering excessive wealth, or living lives of too much ease. Without them, we might easily suffer from the vices associated with too much freedom.
How I preferred the deadbeat, layabout, very English London of the Labour Party, when I lived there in the ‘seventies — to the cosmopolitan, rich, over-swept London of the Thatcher years. There are some advantages to socialism.
And there are other arguments, too, for putting depraved Leftists in power, though on examination they reveal special pleading. For instance, teachers may claim to offer child-minding services, so that mothers, especially, can go to work. But it is because heavy taxation requires the dual income, or women to do horrible and demeaning paid work when their husbands run away, that these services were ever made necessary.
The government does, arguably, “create” employment. Among the most farcical examples are the tax lawyers and consultants. Taxpayers need these to navigate incredibly elaborate tax codes, for their own protection. Only a professional can find the loopholes. Whereas, a comprehensible, flat tax system would put all these “experts” out of business. It would shrink revenue departments spectacularly, and by extension, threaten to shrink taxes. To a professional politician, this would never do. It would shrink his power.
David Warren, “Answering to a ‘need'”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-06-18.
July 20, 2025
Generational differences about … ugh … talking on the telephone
As a late boomer — and unlike most of my cohort — I’ve always hated talking on the telephone to someone. I’m sure part of it is my innate shyness and social awkwardness: if I can’t see how the other person reacts to my verbal blundering, how can I correct myself in time to salvage something from the call? As a result, I’m rather more sympathetic to younger Millennials and Gen Z’ers who have a common generational aversion to telephone calls:
“Candle-stick phone with courtesy pay box” by CodeName47km is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
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I’ve been working to wean myself off the phone. I try to use it only when it feels necessary: we require an answer now, things are too complex to lay out in an email, or I want to be sure what I’m saying is received as I intend it. Sometimes these calls are spontaneous. Increasingly, I schedule them, or ask permission first.
I’ve done this because it’s how business communications work today, and I don’t like to remind people that I’m getting on. I also do it in deference to my colleagues, all of whom are much younger than me. They prefer email, texts, or the group chat.
The landline decision was forced by our acquisition of Fitzhenry & Whiteside, which has had the same telephone number for decades. F&W has many more authors than does Sutherland House, and a good number of them are over sixty. We’re trying to make the transition to new ownership seamless. We didn’t want people calling up to hear “this number is no longer in service”. So the newly installed phone sits on a stand beside the desk I share with Shalomi. I call it Shalomi’s phone and make her answer it when she’s around. Mostly it goes to voicemail and tells people how to contact us by email.
Accustomed as I’ve become to phone-free work, I was taken aback this week when I asked one of our interns to call a printer — we needed a quick quote — and she responded, “I don’t do telephones”. She looked at me bewildered. I responded in kind.
My mind was racing to figure out if I’d mishandled the matter. I’d just read that story in the New York Times about the “Gen Z stare”, the blank look given by a young person (usually in a service job) where a verbal response would be common. It is often interpreted as a freeze on the part of the starer, an inability or reluctance to engage, perhaps rooted in anxiety, perhaps a remnant of the pandemic’s social dislocations, although some insist the starer is telling their interlocutor “you’re in my space and you ought to back off”.
I heard from a number of people about that article this week, and while the Times had not mentioned phone usage and etiquette, my conversations did. Apparently there are a lot of young people who don’t know how to answer their phones. They see a call pop up on their screen and they stare at it, waiting for it to go away. Or they press answer and listen without saying anything. Some, I’m told, answer even scheduled calls from people they know with silence.
I’ve heard parents say they didn’t expect they’d have to teach their children to answer a phone. A university lecturer explained that journalism professors now demonstrate use of a telephone before instructing students on how to conduct an interview over it. Apparently, the same goes for rookie salespeople.
Poking around online, I found a BBC article reporting that a quarter of people aged eighteen to thirty-four never answer their phones, more than half of them interpret any unexpected call as bad news. CBS reports 90 per cent of Gen-Z are anxious about phone calls.
In fairness, a lot of adults are similarly leery of their phones. They don’t want to engage with spam dialers or scammers — they answer and listen for the brief pause that betrays a call centre. Some let every unrecognized call go to voicemail. The savvier ones have figured out that your iPhone, properly configured, will send calls from people not in your contacts directly to voicemail.
Back to our intern. Eventually, I recovered myself. This wasn’t an instance of Gen-Z awkwardness or anxiety around real-time conversations. She is bright, confident, and as socially adept as anyone in the office. I asked if she had a phone. She did. I asked if she used it for calls. She said only to speak to her mom, who pays for her phone. Perfectly reasonable. And it was her personal phone, not a company phone, so she was under no obligation to use it at work. So we suggested she make the call on the company phone, which she cheerfully did.
We spoke later about generational differences with regard to communications technology. She likes the control one has over email communication as compared to the unpredictable nature of phone calls. I told her about life when no one had phones, yet we could all somehow manage to show up at the same place and the same hour. I can hardly believe I lived in such times. Hearing this must have hit her like I was once hit by the reporter Ray Stannard Baker’s account of how he used to walk up to the White House, knock on the front door, and ask to speak with the president.
Day Eight – Can Charles de Gaulle Save France? – Ten Days in Sedan
World War Two
Published 19 Jul 2025Ten Days in Sedan continues as our WW2 Blitzkrieg documentary follows the first serious counterblow against the German spearhead. Colonel Charles de Gaulle leads the 4th Armoured Division in an attack against the German flank. De Gaulle’s units are understrength and his assault is improvised but he catches Heinz Guderian by complete surprise. Is this just a fleeting gesture of defiance, or a new kind of French resistance?
(more…)
“[T]he job of a manager [is] to get all C Northcote on bureaucracy”
Tim Worstall discusses the recent announcements about the US State Department significantly reducing their staff levels — a “Reduction In Force” or RIF — that is being lamented by the Washington bureaus of all the surviving mainstream media as a world tragedy:
The Guru here, the epitome of the management science, is C Northcote Parkinson. Best remembered for Parkinson’s Law — work expands to fill the time available for its completion. But a deeper thinker than that aphorism.
The essential point being that the output of a bureaucracy is bureaucracy. There is nothing measurable that is being done, no financial value being put upon the work. Sure, sure, it might even be that what is being done is of value — we’ve not got a simple measure of it though.
Therefore a bureaucracy measures itself by the budget and staff count. The success of a bureaucracy — a bureau perhaps — is measured by increases in either or better both. Which really does mean that the output of having a bureaucracy is more bureaucracy.
In the private sector this occurs as well. That’s how the power skirts get to take over large corporations. Of course, at some point in that process the company runs out of money and goes bust — the land is cleared for the next attempt to actually add value.
With government that doesn’t happen. Which leads to one of my favourite little thoughts — every civilisation survives until it is parasitised, eaten from within, by its own bureaucracy. We’d probably prefer that this didn’t happen. Yes, anarchy is all very well in theory but no one does like it when the bins aren’t emptied and there’s no state left to keep the French at bay.
The result of this is that the state bureaucracy needs to be pruned. Always. The actual job of a minister is — should be at least — to muse on what shouldn’t be done any longer and who can we fire? As should be the waking thought of any CEO of course.
My preference — because I’m extremist, obviously — is that we just fire them all. Then hire back the 2% we actually do require in order to have a civilisation. Remember, the Empire ran India with 1,000 men. And, well, it’s not wholly obvious that it’s been run any better than that since then.
That’s therefore the job of a manager. To get all C Northcote on bureaucracy. Always and everywhere. If you prefer your phrasing a little more red blooded the answer to bureaucrats is the Carthaginian Solution. Not that anyone would buy them as slaves, not productive enough, but we can try, right?
What do you call 22,000 fewer civil servants in Washington? A good start:
Update: Fixed missing URL.
Star Trek and the New Frontier Story
Feral Historian
Published 28 Feb 2025Star Trek has been the “new frontier” story for so long that it’s become more retro than futurist. But that doesn’t mean the frontier story itself is dead, only that there’s a disconnect between the future we want and the visions of it that we have.
00:00 Intro
02:19 Time and Space
06:06 Inhabited Spaces
09:44 A story of the Past
QotD: Above all else, helicopter parents hate … helicopter parenting
If the kid gets anything less than an A-triple-plus in Zoom School, Karen is immediately on the horn to the teacher … and since all schools these days, even the rare physical ones, are all wired up with “classroom management software”, they can bombard their kids’ teachers with emails and text messages 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Helmets, knee pads … kids these days wear more safety gear than a mountain climber just to ride their bikes, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them kitted out like hockey goalies if recess ever becomes a thing again. Can the day be far off when every kid is trailed by xzheyr own personal injury lawyer, and parents are forced to sign waivers to let their kids use the bathroom?
Everyone knows how bad this is for childhood development, but if I told some kid with a scraped knee to rub some dirt on it, you’ll be fine, I’d probably get hauled up on child endangerment charges.
How can kids advance past age twelve, mentally and emotionally, if they’re never allowed to get hurt? To fail? To suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions?
I’m no developmental psychologist, but it seems obvious that such learning is time-limited. If you haven’t learned that X brings pain — and WHY — by the time you hit twelve years old, then on some fundamental level you’re never going to learn it.
Severian, “On Being Bad”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-12.
July 19, 2025
No issue is so important that we can’t have a proper debate on the merits
On Substack, Lorenzo Warby refutes the claim that some issues are just too important/too urgent/already decided:
One of the features of the “progressive” politics of the unaccountable classes — those who are just paid for turning up — is the demand that there be “No Debate” about various issues. The most obvious instances are “No Debate” about Trans and “No Debate” about climate change — hence demands that climate scepticism be outlawed.
All such “No Debate” claims are crap. First, any “No Debate” claim is presumptive evidence that what you are pushing is either not true or, slightly more subtly, is a mountain of bullshit erected on a molehill of truth. Robust cases for claims about the world are not afraid of debate.
Various moral urgency claims are mounted to support such “No Debate” claims. How do we determine moral urgency? From the evidence. If the evidence is clear, debate will not threaten that alleged urgency. On the contrary, it will reveal the urgency more clearly.
The underlying philosophical dynamic underlying “No Debate” claims is Critical Constructivism — the claim that reality is socially constructed; that all statements and knowledge claims are, in fact power claims; and that the righteousness of a claim can be determined by their (alleged) effects on (morally differentiated) social groups.
The underlying social dynamic is the use of affirmed beliefs to determine and display righteousness. If affirming X shows one to be one of the righteous, then not believing X shows one to be of the unrighteous. This is typically expressed in various terms of moral abuse (racist, Transphobe, Islamophobe, etc) whose use in media and academe has soared since 2014.
This is not because Western societies have become more bigoted — on any reasonable measure they have become far less so over time — but because the politics of Righteous Affirmed Belief has dramatically surged and so has therefore the stigmatisation of dissent.
To claim that affirming X shows ultimate moral propriety requires stigmatising not-X. For something is morally proper — indeed morally trumping — only if the opposite is morally improper. Thus is moral propriety is enforced by stigmatisation. Hence silence is violence — one must profess righteousness. Hence also words are violence — if affirmation of belief is the ultimate marker of righteousness then expressed disbelief becomes the ultimate marker of abusive malevolence. These dynamics lead to a great deal of preference falsification — people publicly affirming, or at least not opposing, claims that they do not privately believe.
Old and tired: the Overton Window … New and hot: the Trump Door
In The Line, Mike Colledge considers how Trump has managed to change the political environment that used to be fairly well described by the Overton Window:
Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons
The Overton Window, named after Joseph Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, is used to explain how policy ideas gain acceptance and move from idea to policy. The “window”, as Overton saw, could include a wide range of ideas from those with little to no support to those that have matured, gained public traction, and could be supported by the public as legitimate policy options for governments. The “window” was not static. It could — and did — shift, expand, or contract based on social movements, economic pressures, cultural trends, and/or the actions of leaders in the public and private sectors.
Those who wanted to push ideas into the window and gain acceptance and support usually had to spend considerable effort — and sometimes years — promoting and making the case for their cause and moving it into the mainstream. Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth and Greta Thunberg’s ongoing efforts to push for action on climate change are examples of leaders using their profile to push and keep climate change action in Overton’s Window.
Lately, though, it feels like the Overton Window has been replaced by the Trump Door. While Overton observed and studied what was happening, Trump is more of an active participant. Overton provided us with an analytical framework; Trump’s door is more of a tactical approach.
And this is a big change. The world moves much faster than it did in the mid-90s when Overton first created his “window”. The democratization of communications and the speed of communications means anyone can comment, report, or share an opinion instantly (and often without considering the consequences). Increased polarization means that leaders looking to act and to reinforce support for their desired policies do not have to wait for a majority to support a given policy before they act. They merely need a vocal plurality of their own supporters to move forward with an idea.
Trump hasn’t so much smashed the window as he has replaced it with a large swinging Western saloon-style door. He has shown no interest in framing and positioning an issue for the public’s consideration in hopes of building support from a majority. He is throwing ideas into and out of the public-consideration saloon as fast as possible. Some ideas he throws in as distractions. Others he throws in as announcements of his intent regardless of the public’s perspective.
To those of you saying in your head “I don’t think Trump thinks this deeply about what he is doing,” you could be correct. But the net impact of his actions is the creation of a Trump Door that, unlike a window, is not transparent and, again unlike Overton’s Window, is not about building public acceptance. It is a tool to achieve his goals as fast as possible. When obstacles require a shift in policy — given there is no need to engage the public — he simply throws another idea into the saloon.
Trump administration records huge increase in tariff revenues
Oddly, most of the coverage on the US government’s surge in tariff income fail to emphasize two relevant facts: first, that the money is largely being paid by American consumers and second that it’s a surge driven by the fact that higher tariffs will kick in soon. J.D. Tuccille reports:
I have no idea where I saw this meme, but it makes me laugh
Last Friday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took a victory lap as his department reported an unexpected increase in receipts from tariffs. The revenue undoubtedly came from a surge in imports to the U.S., which led to payments that filled federal coffers. It would seem to be a win for an administration that has staked an awful lot on waging a trade war with the entire planet to (take your pick) redress wrongs done to America, raise revenue for the government, and encourage domestic manufacturing and employment. But that victory lap comes too soon; the tariff windfall more likely represents efforts by U.S. firms to accumulate inventory before tariff rates rise even higher.
[…]
That mention of “higher prices on imported goods paid by US consumers and firms” deserves to be emphasized because it highlights the fact that tariffs are taxes on Americans. Ultimately, most of the burden of high rates is shouldered by companies and individuals within the U.S. As the Tax Foundation’s Alex Durante pointed out in February, “rather than hurting foreign exporters, the economic evidence shows American firms and consumers were hardest hit by the Trump tariffs”.
The Yale Budget Lab agrees, estimating in May that “the price level from all 2025 tariffs rises by 1.7% in the short-run, the equivalent of an average per household consumer loss of $2,800” in 2024 dollars. In particular, the Yale economists found “consumers facing 15% higher shoe prices and 14% higher apparel prices in the short-run”.
Even Walmart, which had vowed to absorb as much as possible of the tariff burden, conceded two months ago that prices would have to rise because of the trade war.
This week, the Federal Reserve Bank’s “beige book” noted that “in all twelve Districts, businesses reported experiencing modest to pronounced input cost pressures related to tariffs” and that “many firms passed on at least a portion of cost increases to consumers through price hikes or surcharges”.
Penn Wharton’s concerns, mentioned above, about “lower economic growth” are shared by the Tax Foundation and by the Yale Budget Project. The Tax Foundation’s Erica York and Alex Durante forecast that the Trump administration’s tariffs would “reduce US GDP by 0.8 percent” before taking foreign retaliation into account. Yale economists see a similar GDP reduction of 0.7 percent.
If the courts issue a final ruling against Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs, that will reduce the negative effects on the economy. But it will also take a chunk out of the revenues the administration expects to collect.
So, Secretary Bessent’s victory lap on tariff revenues was a little premature. And so are hopes that the trade war won’t damage commerce and the U.S. economy.
Pineapples – The Most Expensive Fruit in History
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 18 Feb 2025Mini tarts with a buttery crust and syrupy pineapple and wine filling
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1736For hundreds of years, the pineapple was a status symbol for the very wealthiest of European royalty and nobility. A single pineapple could cost $10,000 in today’s money, and pineapples turned up in architecture, tableware, paintings, clothing, and accessories. Many knew what pineapples looked like, but few had actually tasted one.
And that’s a real shame, because these tarts are absolutely delicious. The crust is good, but the real showstopper is the filling. Pineapple is the main flavor, but the wine gives it a wonderful complexity. You could even make just the filling and serve it with some whipped cream or ice cream and it would be amazing. If you have any leftover syrup, it would go great in some cocktails.
To make Paste. From Mrs. Peasly.
…If you would have a sweet Paste; then take half a Pound of Butter, and rub it into about a Pound of Flour, with two or three Ounces of double-refined Sugar powder’d, and make it a Paste, with cold Milk, some Sack and Brandy. This is a very good one.To make a Tart of Ananas, or Pine-Apple. From Barbadoes.
Take a Pine-Apple, and twist off its Crown: then pare it free from the Knots, and cut it in Slices about half an Inch thick; then stew it with a little Canary Wine, or Madera Wine, and some Sugar, till it is thoroughly hot, and it will distribute its Flavour to the Wine much better than any thing we can add to it. When it is as one would have it, take it from the Fire; and when it is cool, put it into a sweet Paste, with its Liquor, and bake it gently, a little while, and when it comes from the Oven, pour Cream over it, (if you have it) and serve it either hot or cold.
— The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director by R. Bradley (6th Edition), 1736
QotD: William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery movement
There was some hard-muscle enforcement that accompanied the new law: the Royal Navy announced that it would regard all slave ships as pirates, and thus they were liable to sinking and their crews to execution. There had been some important court decisions: in the reign of William and Mary, Justice Holt had ruled that “one may be a villeyn in England, but not a slave,” and in 1803 William Osgoode, Chief Justice of Lower Canada, ruled that the institution was not compatible with the principles of British law. But what was decisive was the way Wilberforce “murdered” (in Metaxas’ word) the old acceptance of slavery by the wider society. As he wrote in 1787, “God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners”.
The latter goal we would now formulate as “changing the culture” — which is what he did. The film of Amazing Grace shows the Duke of Clarence and other effete toffs reeling under a lot of lame bromides hurled by Wilberforce on behalf of “the people”. But, in fact, “the people” were a large part of the problem. Then as now, citizens of advanced democracies are easily distracted. The 18th-century Church of England preached “a tepid kind of moralism” disconnected both from any serious faith and from the great questions facing the nation. It was a sensualist culture amusing itself to death: Wilberforce goes to a performance of Don Juan, is shocked by a provocative dance, and is then further shocked to discover the rest of the audience is too blasé even to be shocked. The Paris Hilton of the age, the Prince of Wales, was celebrated for having bedded 7,000 women and snipped from each a keepsake hair. Twenty-five per cent of all unmarried females in London were whores; the average age of a prostitute was 16; and many brothels prided themselves on offering only girls under the age of 14. Many of these features — weedy faint-hearted mainstream churches, skanky celebs, weary provocations for jaded debauchees — will strike a chord in our own time.
“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” remarked Adam Smith. England survived the 18th century, and maybe we will survive the 21st. But the life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising. What we think of as “the Victorian era” was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce which he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We, children of the 20th century, mock our 19th-century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it’s because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a “social conscience”: in the 1790s, a good man could stroll past an 11-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill. By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages. It is amazing to read a letter from Wilberforce and realize that he is, in fact, articulating precisely 220 years ago what New Yorkers came to know in the Nineties as the “broken windows” theory: “The most effectual way to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller.”
Mark Steyn, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, 2014.
July 18, 2025
The Napoleonic-era Royal Navy
David Friedman on some of the aspects of Britain’s Royal Navy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century which may be incomprehensible to modern readers who encounter it in works of historical fiction (like the books of C.S. Forester or Patrick O’Brian):
“HMS Victory in Portsmouth Harbour”
Painting by Charles Edward Dixon (1872-1934) via Wikimedia Commons.
I have read and enjoyed several series of novels set in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, most recently one by Naomi Novik that departs a little further from history than its predecessors by providing the British and their enemies with dragons. The internal structure and the associated rules and customs of the navy seem very strange to a modern eye, yet it was a strikingly successful institution.
One feature likely to catch an economist’s eye was prize money. If a naval vessel captured a legitimate prize, an enemy warship or merchantman, and brought it back to port, the vessel and its contents were sold and the money distributed among those responsible. One large chunk went to the captain, another was distributed among his officers, a third among the crew, a fourth to the admiral under whose orders he was operating.
Another feature of the system was the role of patronage, political influence both within the navy and outside it in the career of an officer, especially a young officer. The critical step of promotion from lieutenant to captain depended in part on performance, in particular on the opinion of the captain under whom a lieutenant was serving. But it depended also on things that seem, to us, irrelevant.
One of Patrick O’Brien’s novels contains a conversation between Maturin, one of his protagonists, and a friend, a young officer of aristocratic birth. The officer has been having an affair with the separated wife of a high naval official and wants to know whether he should live openly with her. Maturin’s response is that, moral issues aside, it might be imprudent for him to offend a powerful official and so risk his future career. His friend replies that he has considered that matter but his family controls a significant number of seats in both houses of parliament and he thinks their influence will be sufficient to balance that of the man he will be offending.
Neither party sees anything strange in either the assumption that giving personal offense to someone within the bureaucracy will make it harder for a competent officer to be promoted or that having a politically influential family will make it easier; that is just part of how the system works. It was a system that produced extraordinarily successful results, a navy that, from the late 18th century to the early 20th won almost every ship to ship or fleet to fleet battle it fought at anything close to even odds.1
A third feature was the seniority system. Once a lieutenant was promoted to captain, his future rank depended only on how long he survived. His name was on the list of captains, the list was ordered by strict seniority, and the next captain to be promoted to admiral would be the one at the top of the list. When two or more captains were working together it was the senior who commanded. That provided an unambiguous rule for allocating command, since every captain knew where he was on the list and knew, or could readily find out, where any other captain was. But it was a rule that had nothing to do with the relative competence of two officers of the same nominal rank.
Promotion beyond captain was entirely determined by seniority; what the officer got to do with his rank was not. An insufficiently competent captain who made it to admiral would end up as an admiral of the yellow, an admiral without a fleet, effectively retired on half pay. A sufficiently competent captain could be assigned particularly important duties, including the command of a group of ships with the temporary position of commodore — provided none of the other captains in the squadron was senior to him. A sufficiently incompetent captain could end up without a ship, on half pay with no chance of prize money. In peacetime, when there was no shortage of competent captains, a minor failing might do it.
[…]
Consider the case of the pre-modern British navy. Prize money was a property solution. The admiralty wanted captains to have an incentive to capture enemy merchant ships, defeat and capture enemy warships, even at risk to their lives. Most of the relevant decisions were made by the captain, so he got the largest part of the reward, but other people, including the admiral whose orders determined what opportunities the captain had to earn prize money, got some of it. A pattern that shows up in the novels, and presumably in the real history, is an admiral who puts an unusually competent and aggressive captain in places where he is likely to encounter enemy warships not because he likes the captain but because he hopes to profit from successful encounters.
Allen argues that prize money was an imperfect property solution because capturing a warship was much riskier, more likely to get the captain killed, than capturing a merchant ship, but prize money was awarded for both. One puzzle he does not consider is why the navy did not solve the problem of misaligned incentives by lowering the prize money awarded for merchant ships or raising it for warships, which should have been easy enough to do.
Allen offers the imperfect alignment of incentives, such as the temptation for a captain in a fleet action to hang back and let other ships and their captains take the risk, as a reason why the property solution had to be supplemented with elements of the other two systems. The admiralty had detailed information on what a captain did through a system of three different logs, one by the captain, one by his first lieutenant, one by the sailing master, the ship’s senior warrant officer. A captain whose career showed him to be incompetent or too inclined to go after merchant ships and avoid warships might end up spending the rest of his career on shore with no ship, hence no opportunity for prize money. A captain who declined a clear opportunity for combat with a ship of the same class was subject to trial by court martial; one admiral ended up convicted and executed for failing to pursue the enemy fleet after an engagement.
1. With the possible exception of the War of 1812.
Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president
J.D. Tuccille says that Argentinian President Javier Milei may be the politician who has most successfully “defied the expectations of the chattering class” by not only winning the presidency but also by the completely unexpected turnaround of the national economy:
Drawing on official data, Reuters reports that Argentina’s “economic activity rose 7.7 per cent in April compared with the same month last year”. That was higher than expected and a welcome addition to news that the economy had grown by 5.8 per cent during the full first quarter relative to the same quarter the previous year. Early numbers put Argentina’s second-quarter growth at 7.6 per cent. By contrast, Canada’s economy grew at an annual 2.2 percent in the first quarter and the U.S. economy shrank a bit.
In equally encouraging news, Argentina’s “monthly inflation rate has fallen below two per cent for the first time in five years,” according to the Financial Times. That’s still high in North American terms, but Argentina’s governments have a history of wildly expanding the money supply to pay off debt and finance expenditures, resulting in inflation rates in the hundreds and even thousands per cent per year. Inflation slowed somewhat in recent years, but it was over 200 per cent in 2023 and Milei was elected on a promise to stabilize prices — even if it meant adopting the U.S. dollar as the country’s official currency.
Importantly, the poverty rate in Argentina has also fallen to 38.1 per cent of the population at the end of 2024 from 41.7 per cent when Milei took office. Again, that remains very high, but it’s an improvement in a country where politicians have long seemed committed to keeping people poor and dependent on the state.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. In a November 2023 open letter, over 100 economists warned that Milei’s economic “proposals, rooted in the economy of laissez-faire and which include controversial ideas such as dollarization and significant reductions in public spending, are fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful to the Argentine economy and people”.
The economists — including such academic luminaries as Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh — warned of havoc if Milei implemented his free-market plans. Voters weren’t impressed by the forecast of doom; they chose the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” economist and his upstart political coalition over the standard-bearer of the dominant Justicialist Party.
The Justicialists have been the strongest force in Argentine politics since their launch in the 1940s by Juan Peron. Peron served as a military observer in Europe and apparently combined the worst ideas he encountered into a peculiarly Argentine ideology he called “justicialism”, better known as Peronism. At its heart, the ideology drops the pretense of any practical difference between socialism and fascism and promotes a brutal mélange of statist economic schemes. This means that, while most property and business activity is in private hands, it’s subject to government dictates, distortions, and control.
HMS Canada / Almirante Latorre – Guide 389
Drachinifel
Published 25 May 2024HMS Canada / Almirante Latorre, a single dreadnought battleship of the British Royal Navy and Chilean Navy, is today’s subject.
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