The Women’s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from “unpaid domestic servitude at home”.
Again, this is Straight Outta Engels, from 1884. Even back in 1970, we could all yell “Read another book!” Someone ought to rewrite The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State with a few quidditch matches in it; it’d be on the bestseller list until the sun’s a cinder.
Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do far more domestic and care labour than men.
I find this extremely hard to believe. So I checked their source, which is a very scientific-sounding site called “The Conversation”. You’ll just have to click it for yourself, since I can’t figure out how to screenshot just the little graphic they have, but if you do, you’ll notice a couple things straight off:
First, this data is from Australia. Which is bullshit, because look, y’all, I’ve seen the Mad Max movies, and nobody’s doing any domestic labor in Australia. Their main settlement is ruled by Tina Turner, for fuck’s sake, and the Prime Minister runs around in a thong and a hockey mask. Sweet cars, though, I’ll give them that.
The other thing you’ll notice is that the “Australian Bureau of Statistics” — I’m pretty sure that’s the motorized hang glider guy — has obviously been having fun with the scalar functions in whatever post-apocalyptic version of Excel they’ve got down there. The bars for “did no unpaid domestic work” look dramatic … but they represent a mere seven point difference. (And do you see what I mean? Apparently 29% of Australian men, and 22% of Australian women, do no unpaid domestic labor whatsoever. By my math, that’s a quarter of the country stewing in its own filth. I know, I know … I’m amazed it’s that low).
The bars for “5-14 hours”, though, show a fractional difference: Women do a whopping 0.3% more. And again, this is Australia, but even if we assume that “unpaid domestic labor” is stuff like “wiping the blood from the somehow intact windshield of the last of the V-8 interceptors”, 5-14 hours is what you might call “the outer limits of normal for a working stiff”. Admittedly I live in a two-bedroom apartment, not a house, but I’m a bit of a neat freak, and “an hour a day” is about all I do. Vacuum the floors and scrub the toilets on Sunday, that’s two hours tops. I’ll be generous and say I spend another 3-4 doing the squeegee thing to my shower walls after I bathe, and loading the dishes in the washer, and giving the counters a quick wipedown once or twice a week, etc.
The real difference comes in the “15-29 hours” and “30 hours or more” categories, and you have to be very, very Smart indeed to find that “problematic”, since those are stay-at-home moms. In other words, they do that “unpaid domestic labor” by choice. Because “the care and feeding of the next generation”, not to mention “the deep, primal satisfaction one gets from seeing a little life grow that you helped create” don’t really count as pay.
Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced?
Gosh, that IS a problem! And as the Australians have shown us, the answer seems to be “just stew in your own filth”. It’s a solution America’s single gals, at least, seem to have embraced with kamikaze-level enthusiasm. Back in the days, I’d always insist on taking a girl back to my place, because condoms don’t cover the entire body and her place was always, and I do mean always, a certifiable biohazard. I’d rather do a striptease in Chernobyl’s reactor core than do anything in an American woman’s bedroom, and their bathrooms are pits of unspeakable Lovecraftian horror.
Severian, “SJWs Always Project”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-08.
June 25, 2026
QotD: Division of domestic work, 1970s onward
June 7, 2026
Are “Dad books” in trouble?
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte views with (mild) alarm a recent Wall Street Journal article claiming that “Dad books” — the kind of books thoughtful kids give their fathers as gifts — are in steep decline:
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece last month on the death of Dad books, the Father’s Day specials — books about “some little-known chapter of World War II, the sweeping narrative of a shipwreck, perhaps the latest presidential biography”.
Here’s what it gave for evidence. Nonfiction book sales have declined for four years, including an 8 percent drop this year up to May 9.
Sales of Books about politics and current affairs are down 19 percent in those same four months and nine days in 2026. The article quotes, among others, former Simon & Schuster publisher Jonathan Karp saying that “this is a sea change and people should wake up and realize we’re living in a new world”.
The new world is one with “an endless supply of Substack newsletters, Netflix documentaries, YouTube videos and podcasts that offer the kind of fresh reporting, sharp analysis and historical perspective once limited doorstop-size books”.
Jonathan Burnham of Harper Group adds that all these alternatives to books make “the idea of sitting down with a 700-page Ron Chernow book less appealing. You’ve scratched that itch.”
The WSJ noted that Chernow’s recent biography of Mark Twain, published last spring, is underperforming his 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant.
There was an obligatory quote from Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt, who attributed the decline in serious nonfiction sales to the fact that everyday events are all-consuming: “The world is exceptionally interesting right now and when that happens the nonfiction reader is reading the news instead.”
As someone who publishes a lot of Dad books, i.e., serious researched nonfiction, histories and biographies, that sort of thing, I read the article with concern. In fact, I read it twice.
I felt much better after the second reading.
Let’s start with the chart. The first four months and 9 days of 2026 are doing all the work here. A decline of 1 to 2 percent in the years 2023 to 2025 is statistical noise. Circana BookScan numbers don’t include audiobooks, which have been rising steadily in popularity. The very slight decline in sales for the first three years might be entirely attributable to format shifting, hardcopy to digital audio. The 8 percent decline in the first four months of 2026 looks more ominous, but book sales figures are always lumpy, never a straight line. A four-month sample tells you nothing.
The greater problem with the chart is that it is counting adult nonfiction book sales, not Dad books. There are any number of ways to cut Circana BookScan data, but the broad adult nonfiction category contains a vast array of books. Books for men, books for women, books for everybody. Not only serious researched nonfiction, but self-help, how-to, study guides, business and personal finance, psychology and religion books, health and fitness books, parenting books, food and travel books, true crime, sports, military, essays, crafts and hobbies, memoirs, etc. There is no data cut for Dad books. So the story is backing its thesis for the death of apples with stats about oranges.
The report of a 19 percent drop in the narrower category of politics and current affairs also looks ominous, but this is one of the most notoriously cyclical genres in existence. And, again, we’re discussing a short period of four months and nine days. The new Trump era was less than a year old at the start of that period. It generally takes longer than a year to get new books from commission to sale. Ten days after the end of the period under discussion, Andrew Weissmann released Liar’s Kingdom: How to Stop Trump’s Deceit and Save America. It was an instant number-one New York Times bestseller. In so specialized a category as this, Liar’s Kingdom alone might have been sufficient to right the ship.
The only other evidence presented to support the decline in Dad books is poor Ron Chernow’s journey. His Mark Twain, with 119,259 hardcover sales, is underperforming his Ulysses S. Grant, with 381,604 sales.
I don’t know where to start. The Grant book has been out for almost a decade, Twain for a year. Not surprising that it has sold less. Also, you can’t compare major political biographies to major cultural biographies. David McCullough’s biographies of Truman and Adams far outsold his book about American artists and writers in Paris. And while I’m a fan of Chernow, his Twain book isn’t his best work. He received polite and generally positive reviews, but they noted that the book is overly long — the word “exhaustive” surfaces repeatedly — and that he doesn’t entirely succeed in bringing Twain to life. Grant is a superior book, and the more enjoyable read, too, if customer reviews are anything to go by. The Twain sales prove nothing.
So we don’t really have any evidence at all that Dad books are in trouble, that they’re getting swamped by podcasts or current events, and certainly not that there’s been “a sea change” and that we’re living “in a new world”.
Amusingly, the literary world was flooded with hot new Dad books coincident with the WSJ‘s declaration of their death.
June 2, 2026
Judging Javier Milei’s work by the numbers
Thanks to automated translation from the original French on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Laurent outlines what he sees in the data from Argentina before and after Javier Milei became president:
I’ve been wondering for a while now about the (provisional) balance sheet of Milei in Argentina. You read everything and its opposite. So I stopped reading the commentary and looked at the raw numbers.
Argentina is the full-scale experiment that economists have been waiting for for 50 years. Same country. Same people. Same culture. We change ONE variable: the economic method.
Before: decades of statist and Peronist management, “redistributive”. The concrete result? 211% inflation, 42% poverty, a state in permanent deficit that funds its lifestyle by running the printing press.
Then Milei arrives. The opposite method, brutal, acknowledged: we cut, we deregulate, we stop printing.
Two years later ([snapshot] at his arrival (end of 2023) vs today):
Annual inflation: 211% → 31%
Monthly inflation: 25% → ~2%
Public deficit: −5% of GDP → +1.8% (surplus)
Growth: −1.6% → +4.4%
Poverty: 42% → 28%No debate. Judge for yourselves.
And the essential point: these gains don’t go “to the rich” or “to the markets”. They go first to the poorest.
Inflation is the most unjust tax that exists — it hits those who have no assets to protect themselves. Dividing it by 7 is giving back purchasing power to those at the bottom. And 14 fewer poverty points means millions of people, not an Excel line.
For a century, Argentines were told that the state would protect them by spending more and more. Result: one of the richest countries in the world in 1910, ruined. We’ve just reversed the method. Look at the result.
At some point, you have to accept what the facts say: on the economic front, the liberal method has delivered in two years what decades of socialism promised without ever delivering. And it benefits the most modest first.
You can hate Milei’s style — the chainsaw, the excess, the improbable outbursts, he’s nothing like a classic statesman. But you don’t judge an economic policy by the style of the one who leads it. You judge it by what it does to people’s lives.
And the numbers have spoken.
May 31, 2026
Canada slips into recession: state media rally to attack official opposition
Even before they became explicitly subsidized presstitutes for the Liberal Party, the Canadian mainstream media have always been far more critical of conservatives, so this pivot to defend the government after official statistics show the country is in a technical recession is very much on brand:
Stuart, this is exactly the problem.
You’re acting like annualized quarter-by-quarter numbers are some exotic partisan invention. They aren’t. That is one of the standard ways GDP is reported and understood.
And the “reporter’s narrative” point is weak. The reporter framed the question as if calling it a recession was irresponsible, even though the numbers show real weakness: contraction, stalled growth, falling investment, weak productivity, and Canadians losing ground.
Pierre did what more politicians should do: he challenged the frame.
Because the frame matters.
When Conservatives warn about decline, it’s “doom”.
When Liberals preside over decline, it’s “complex global headwinds”.
When Canadians get poorer, it’s “resilience”.
When GDP shrinks, it’s “not quite the word we’d prefer today”.
Give me a break.
Canadians do not live inside a Statistics Canada footnote. They live inside rent, mortgage renewals, grocery bills, job insecurity, and taxes. Pierre is speaking to that reality.
The press gallery can massage the vocabulary all it wants. The country is weaker, poorer, less productive, and more expensive.
That is not a narrative.
That is the room.
The Liberals are getting great value for their money — well, our money — as even though the economy is tottering, media-massaged messaging is reflected in polls (feel free to doubt the accuracy of polls like this if you like):
May 2, 2026
“… a New York Times bestseller!”
I thought this was well-known years ago, but it still apparently surprises people to learn that the famous New York Times bestseller list is … not actually in any way a valid measurement of book popularity and sales:
For those of you not familiar with the total scam that is the NYT bestseller list, as a NYT bestseller myself, it’s utter bullshit. It’s not an actual list of bestsellers. It’s “curated editorial”.
As in, stuff they like gets on there, and stuff they don’t like doesn’t. Or stuff they like places higher, and stuff they don’t like but obviously sells too much to deny its a bestseller gets on there lower.
I still tell people I’m a NYT bestseller because most regular normies think that actually means something impressive, and it’s just quicker to say that to establish that you’re a certain level. Within the actual publishing industry its fairly meaningless and everybody knows it.
In reality I made it on there a couple of times early on in my career before they realized who I am and what I’m into (the totally wrong politics, loudly!), because then it was like a post it note got stuck on the wall there saying FUCK THIS GUY, because after that no matter how many copies I sold, even if I was mud stomping half their list in actual sales, I wasn’t getting on there ever again.
Everybody is aware of this scam. The key to getting on the list is the NYT wanting to promote you. They don’t actually track all book sales. They track certain “reporting stores” (which are supposed to be secret but we all know how they are). But then the NYT takes whatever reality is and massages it to fit their narrative.
It isn’t just to keep wrong thinking pariahs like me off there either. I’ve got friends who are apolitical or even mildly liberal who still make the list, but who get bumped down a bunch of spaces from what they should be because there’s somebody else with a new book out the NYT wants to fluff.
Even when the NYT isn’t putting its finger on the scale, it also only measures velocity, as in how many books sold that week. So if you sell 20k copies that week, but never sell another book again, you’re a bestseller. But a guy who sells 1k copies a week every week for an entire year, is not.
Also, I don’t know if it is still this way, because I quit paying attention to what makes the NYT list years ago after I understood what a joke it was, but it was only for physical books, not ebooks, not audio. And there are authors who crush it in ebook who sell very few physical copies in stores. I don’t know if this is still the case on what they claim to track or not today.
So basically it is a biased list of what one small part of the industry sells in a short period of time that the NYT then tweaks to ignore reality if they feel like it anyway. And this isn’t just my opinion as a disgruntled former NYT bestseller, this has gone to court. Authors have sued the NYT which is where the “editorial” thing comes from.
This gets some attention periodically when somebody really famous raises a stink about it. A couple years ago it was Elon. Before that it was Mike Rowe. Etc. But then regular people all forget and go back to thinking the NYT‘s bestseller list isn’t as full of shit as everything else the NYT does.
March 30, 2026
QotD: The Revenge of the Archaeologists
Before we dive into the evidence, I want to speak briefly to the nature of the evidence for these topics. “Historian” is often an odd sort of field because while there is a core discipline and skill set that basically all historians are going to have (focused on reading texts critically and assessing arguments and evidence), beyond this almost all historians end up acquiring other skill sets, often from other fields, depending on what they are investigating. I, for instance, work on military history and so I need to have some mastery of military theory, whereas an intellectual historian might instead have some training in philosophy.
It is thus relevant that over the past half-century or so, it has so happened that effectively all ancient historians have had to develop a strong grasp of archaeological data; we don’t all necessarily learn to do the excavation work, of course (that’s what archaeologists do), but pretty much all ancient historians at this point are going to have to be able to read a site or artifact report as well as have a good theoretical grasp of what kinds of questions archaeology can be used to answer and how it can be used to answer those questions. This happened in ancient history in particular for two reasons: first, archaeology was a field effectively invented to better understand the classical past (which is now of course also used to understand the past in other periods and places) so it has been at work the longest there, but also because the sources for ancient history are so few. As I like to say, the problem for the modern historian is taking a sip of meaning from the fire-hose of evidence they have; but the challenge of an ancient historian is finding water in the desert. Archaeological data was a sudden, working well in that desert and much of the last two decades of ancient history has been built around it. Other fields of history are still processing their much larger quantity of texts; why dig so deep a well when you live next to a running river?
The result, in ancient history, has been what I tend to refer to as “the revenge of the archaeologists”. Not, mind you, revenge on medievalists, but in fact revenge on a very specific ancient historian and classicist, Moses Finley. Moses Finley was, from the 1950s to the 1980s, one of the most prominent classicists and his work touched on many fields, including the study of the ancient economy. Finley, writing in the 1960s was generally skeptical of the ability of archaeology to provide useful answers about the ancient economy (he preferred to understand the question by probing the mentalities of the Greek and Roman elite). Archaeology, Finley thought, was frequently over-interpreted and could never give a representative sample anyway; as he quipped in his 1965 article “Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World”, “we are too often victims of that great curse of archaeology, the indestructibility of pots”, a line for which, as far as I can tell, he is still quite unforgiven by some archaeologists.
As if in response, the archaeologists have spent the subsequent almost-six-decades proving again and again the tremendous value of their discipline by, among other things, utterly burying Finley’s The Ancient Economy (1973) under a mountain of archaeological data. It turns out the mentalités of aristocrats who largely hated merchants were not a good barometer of the activities of those merchants.
But you may now guess how this is going to play out in the discussion of Late Antiquity. The ancient historians come to the question ready to think in archaeological terms and ask what archaeological data can do to clear up these questions. Scholars of Late Antiquity trained as medievalists on the other hand, may or may not be well versed in archaeological methods or data (to be clear, some medievalists very much are versed, including prominent voices on the “change and continuity” side of this debate! But it is also very possible to be a “pure text” medievalist in a way that I don’t think I know a “pure text” ancient historian younger than sixty) because their field has not been forced, by dint of the paucity of sources, to revolve so heavily around archaeological data and because the archaeological data on the Middle Ages is not yet as voluminous as that on Classical Antiquity.
As I noted in the first post, beginning in the 1970s, what James O’Donnell calls the “reformation in Late Antique studies” launched a long overdue reassessment of Late Antiquity and the impact of the Fall of Rome – what we’ve called the “change and continuity” argument. I bring up all of this to note that the “counter-reformation” – what we’re calling the “decline and fall” argument – that really emerges beginning in the 90s is in many ways an extension of the “revenge of the archaeologists” in Classical studies (and especially the ancient economy) into the field of Late Antiquity. Indeed some of the scholars are the same (e.g. Willem Jongman) and many of them enter the debate on Late Antiquity as an extension of the debate about the Roman economy (in part demanding that “change and continuity” Late Antique scholars acknowledge things now generally considered “proved” by ancient historians about the earlier Roman economy).
In my own experience, particularly in more informal conversations, the methodological difference that interaction creates between ancient historians – for whom it has long been almost entirely settled that in a “fight” between archaeological evidence and effectively any other kind, the archaeological evidence “wins” – and medievalists for whom archaeology is a much less central part of their method (in part because their textual sources are more extensive) can lead to situations where the two sides of the debate talk past each other.
But when it comes to questions of demographics, economics and the conditions of life for the sort of people who rarely figure in our sources, archaeological evidence – although it is often incomplete and hard to interpret – offers the possibility of decisive answers to questions that otherwise would have to live entirely within the realm of speculation.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-02-11.
March 22, 2026
QotD: The treason of the scientists
Luca Barbato @lu_zero_
Research is not taking money and then creative-write whatever fits the political faction you align with.And that’s why there are at least some people, that value science a lot, that consider burning down or starve “institutions” the correct first step to amend course.
One of those people is me.
I can still keenly remember my first feelings of crushing disappointment back in the 1980s when I started reading the “scientific” literature on gun policy and realized how utterly fraudulent much of it was.
I had grown up loving The Science, thinking of research scientists as the best of humanity, carrying us forward into a better future with honesty and courage. Discovering that there were people who would violate this sacred trust to push a political agenda hurt me.
But it only started with the gun policy literature. Sociology, psychology, political “science”, climatology. Learning how far the rot had spread was deeply dispiriting to me.
And the worst of it wasn’t even the hacks and partisans. The worst was noticing the cowardice of the people who failed to oppose them. Because that part isn’t just an indictment of the successful activists and manipulators, it’s an indictment of almost all scientists, everywhere.
Which is why I now contemplate rude, ignorant populists proposing to burn down large swathes of research funding and find myself rooting for the populists, not the scientists.
Because the lesson needs to be learned. It’s not just about driving out the hacks and partisans. Scientists, as a culture, need to learn the hard way that cowardice has a price — that if you don’t call out politicization when it’s happening, you don’t deserve the trust of the rest of our society, or the funding and privileges that come with it.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-21.
Update, 23 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
March 15, 2026
Using US gun statistics to argue against Canadian gun owners
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Gun Owners of Canada respond to a troll post trying to confuse the legal situation for Canadian gun owners by using statistics from the US, where the laws are significantly different:
Typical. He blocked without further discussion.
But, he’s wrong.
There is a fundamental flaw in using that 1998 [US] DOJ literature review to argue the Stand on Guard Act will lead to more gun deaths. The claim relies on a completely broken comparison between U.S. and Canadian law.
Here is why applying that specific American data to this Canadian bill proposed by the CPC simply does not work.
The DOJ report relies heavily on American statistics where firearms kept for self defense are typically stored loaded and unlocked. That specific environment, meaning immediate and unrestricted access to a loaded weapon, is the primary driver for the increased rates of accidental shootings and suicides highlighted in those U.S. studies.
The Stand on Guard Act does not create that environment in Canada. Saying it does such is just fear-mongering.
This proposed legislation is strictly an amendment to Section 34(2) of the Criminal Code. It establishes a presumption that force used against a violent home invader is reasonable. The goal is to spare Canadians from years of legal limbo for defending their families.
Crucially, this bill does not amend the Firearms Act and it does not repeal Canada’s strict safe storage regulations.
A legally compliant Canadian firearm owner must still store their firearms unloaded and secured with a locking device, or locked inside a sturdy cabinet or safe. Ammunition must also be stored separately or locked up securely in the same safe.
The specific risks identified in the U.S. data, like a child finding a loaded gun or someone in crisis having instant access to a weapon, are mitigated by our existing storage framework.
Debating the merits of self defense thresholds is perfectly fair. However, importing U.S. data based on a completely different regulatory baseline to predict Canadian outcomes is a clear misapplication of the evidence. We need to ground this conversation in actual Canadian law rather than American statistics.
So, as a reminder — welcome to Canada — let’s buy Canadian, support Canadian and recognize Canadian facts.
March 13, 2026
The Raj – a cut-and-dried case of plunder?
Celina considers the claim that the period of British rule over India was a period of British plunder of Indian resources:
The historical evaluation of the British Raj has increasingly become a battleground for competing political and academic narratives. In the 21st century, the discourse has shifted significantly toward an oppression narrative that characterises the period from 1757 to 1948 as one of singular depredation. This perspective, popularised by public intellectuals such as Shashi Tharoor and economic historians like Utsa Patnaik, posits that British rule was defined by systematic deindustrialisation, engineered genocide, the intentional dismantling of educational systems, and the looting of wealth on a scale that defies standard economic modelling.1 However, when subjected to the rigours of aggregate statistical data, comparative institutional analysis, and a sense of historical proportion, these claims frequently reveal themselves as founded on misleading anecdotes and founding myths rather than objective economic realities.2 To accurately understand the trajectory of India under British influence, it is essential to move beyond evocative stories, such as Winston Churchill’s peevish marginal notes and examine the underlying population trajectories, industrial output figures, and the structural transition from a traditional to a constructed capitalist economy.3
“Political Map of the Indian Empire, 1893” from Constable’s Hand Atlas of India, London: Archibald Constable and Sons, 1893. (via Wikimedia)
Chronology and the Context of the Great Divergence
A critical assessment must begin with a precise periodisation of Indian history. The interaction between Europe and the subcontinent can be divided into four distinct phases: the pre-European period (before 1505), the era of initial coastal contact and Portuguese outposts (1505–1757), the transition under the East India Company (1757–1818), and the era of English domination and formal Raj rule (1818–1948).4 The central contention of modern critics centers on the final period, arguing that India’s share of the global economy collapsed from approximately 24.4% in 1700 to roughly 4.2% by 1950.5
While these proportions are grounded in data, most notably the work of Angus Maddison, the interpretation of this decline as evidence of absolute impoverishment is a fundamental statistical fallacy. The decline in India’s share of world GDP was not the result of a shrinking absolute economy, but rather the consequence of the Great Divergence. During this period, Western Europe, North America, and eventually Japan experienced explosive, intensive growth through the Industrial Revolution, while India remained largely stationary.6
Between 1850 and 1947, India’s absolute GDP in 1990 international dollar terms actually grew from $125.7 billion to $213.7 billion, representing a 70% increase.7 The stagnation in per capita terms, GDP per capita was approximately $550 in 1700 and $619 in 1950, reflects a classic Malthusian trap.8 The unprecedented population growth stimulated by the introduction of Western medicine, increased land cultivation, and the relative political stability of the Raj absorbed almost all economic gains.9 Far from being genocided, the Indian population expanded from 165 million in 1700 to nearly 390 million by 1941.10
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor%27s_Oxford_Union_speech
- https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/tharoor-inglorious-empire/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l9nve2/he_peevishely_wrote_on_the_margins_of_the_file/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_India
- Ibid
- https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/tharoor-inglorious-empire/
- https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/
- Ibid
- https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/tharoor-inglorious-empire/
- https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/
March 8, 2026
The comfortable illusions Canadians tell themselves about the criminal justice system
L. Wayne Mathison describes how far too many Canadians see crime in Canada and how their pleasant imaginings depart from reality:
Let’s talk about the fairy tale we keep telling ourselves about crime in this country.
If you listen to a certain very loud and very sheltered crowd, you would think our justice system is basically a giant vacuum cleaner wandering the streets accidentally sucking up innocent people who somehow tripped and fell into a robbery charge. Apparently every person behind bars is just a tragic first-timer who made one bad decision on a difficult Tuesday afternoon.
That story collapses the moment you look at the numbers.
Statistics Canada shows something much less romantic. Our prisons are not packed with unlucky amateurs. They are filled largely with repeat performers. If someone is standing in court for a property crime, there is about an 80 percent chance they have already been convicted of doing the exact same thing before. For a lot of these offenders, theft is not a moment of desperation. It is a routine. Court is not a moral reckoning. It is paperwork.
Breaking into garages, lifting bikes, stripping catalytic converters. That is not chaos. It is a job description. Getting caught is just an occupational hazard.
Meanwhile the public is told to take a deep breath, retreat into their “inner Stoic,” and accept that having your property stolen is just part of modern urban weather. File the police report. Replace the lock. Pretend the system is working. It takes real mental gymnastics to watch the same small group of chronic offenders rack up dozens of charges while experts patiently explain that we simply need more empathy.
Look at what happens when these people are actually caught. Most walk out with bail conditions that amount to a polite note asking them to please behave. Unsurprisingly, a huge chunk of new convictions in Canada are administration-of-justice offences. That means breaching bail, skipping court, ignoring probation. They break the rules almost immediately. The revolving door barely slows down.
We do not need some grand philosophical rewrite of the social contract to fix this. We just need to stop pretending the public cannot see what is happening. A very small group of highly active repeat offenders causes a huge share of the damage in our communities.
Until the justice system stops treating career criminals like lost lambs who simply wandered off the path, the rest of us will keep paying the bill.
December 30, 2025
Tariffs are an economic burden, even when you claim they’re paid by foreigners
At the Foundation for Economic Education, David Hebert responds to a recent pro-tariff puff piece from financial columnist, Matthew Lynn:
As Lynn acknowledges, “the tariffs are a tax”. Because they are a tax, they are going to be paid by someone in some form. You can’t have money flowing into the Treasury without someone paying that extra money in some way. Broadly speaking, we can divide the potential payors of American-imposed tariffs into three camps: American consumers, American importers, and foreigners.
One of the oft-cited effects of a tariff is to reduce the amount of imports coming into America. This makes sense and is in fact one of the numerous goals administration officials have pointed to. Insofar as American consumers and importers end up paying the tariff, they will buy less of the now-more-expensive foreign products. We’re already seeing this happen in the US, which Lynn alludes to throughout his article.
If foreigners pay the tariff, they’ll sell less of the now-tariffed goods to the US. This will, as President Trump and others have correctly identified, hurt their bottom line. To offset at least some of this, these countries will try to sell more of their products to their domestic consumers or consumers in countries other than the US. This is exactly what we have seen and what we are seeing, as other countries around the world are securing new trade deals with one another and deliberately excluding the United States from said deals.
So, Lynn is correct to point out that foreign corporations have incurred costs because of the Trump tariffs. However, despite his repeated implication to the contrary, this is not money that goes to the US Treasury. Volkswagen, for example, has raised the price of its 2026 models by up to 6.5 percent, largely due to tariffs, and has indicated that this is just the beginning. That’s more money coming out of American consumers’ pockets. At these higher prices, American consumers are purchasing fewer Volkswagens than last year. Volkswagen’s losses from the tariffs include an almost 30 percent decline in profits from auto sales. Importantly, sales that do not happen count toward the reduced profit that Volkswagen reported but generate no tariff revenue for the Treasury to collect. That Lynn, a financial commentator, does not understand this distinction is deeply troubling.
Who Really Pays the Tariff?
Lynn’s central argument rests on a fundamental confusion between what economists refer to as the “legal incidence” and the “economic incidence” of a tax. Legally, because tariffs are a tax on imports, it is the US importers who must write the check to Customs and Border Protection. But this says nothing about who actually pays the tariff.
For example, when landlords’ property taxes go up, who pays? The landlord will obviously write the check to the county assessor, but unless Lynn thinks that landlords are running charities, that cost gets passed on to tenants in the form of higher rent, less frequent maintenance, or fewer included benefits (utilities or access to designated parking, for example). The legal incidence falls on the landlord, but the economic incidence falls disproportionately on renters, i.e., young Americans already besieged by high housing costs.
Tariffs work the same way. US Customs and Border Protection bills the American importer directly, which is the legal incidence of the tariff. But the economic burden gets distributed among American consumers, American importers, and foreign exporters, depending on the particulars of the individual markets.
Lynn cites the Harvard Pricing Lab finding an approximately 20 percent “pass-through rate,” meaning that American consumers are only paying about one-fifth of the tariff costs. He treats this as a permanent feature of the tariff regime and as proof that foreigners are footing the bill. But the question isn’t who writes the check today, it’s who bears the cost over time. And here, the evidence directly contradicts Lynn’s fables.
As we have seen, pass-through rates are not static, but evolve over time as markets adjust. And every piece of evidence suggests that the pass-through rate has been and is continuing to rise rapidly. Goldman Sachs and the Council on Foreign Relations tracked the evolution over just this administration. Their findings are stunning: In June, US businesses absorbed about 64 percent of the tariff costs, American consumers about 22 percent, and foreign exporters about 14 percent in the form of reduced profits. Just four months later, American businesses absorbed just 27 percent, while American consumers absorbed 55 percent and exporters absorbed 18 percent. Projections for 2026 continue the trend with consumers absorbing 67 percent, exporters 25 percent, and importers just 8 percent.
The logic behind this is simple and has been echoed by President Trump and Scott Bessent themselves. In the initial months following Liberation Day, American importers could not quickly shift to alternative suppliers, giving them little leverage to demand price cuts from existing foreign vendors. Many American importers also believed (or hoped?) that the tariffs were simply a negotiating tool that would be bargained away. Having built up inventories before April, they were able to avoid raising consumer prices, with the belief that the “temporary pains would be worth the long term gains.”
That’s no longer the case. As the BLS notes in its latest import price index report, the price of imports has barely changed. This matters because US importers, not foreign sellers, are legally required to write the tariff check. American buyers pay the foreign company’s price, then pay the tariff on top of it. If foreigners were truly absorbing the tariffs, they’d have to lower their prices to compensate, and we would see a decrease in the import price index. We haven’t. The index is flat, which is evidence that the burden of the tariff is, as economists warned, being paid disproportionately by Americans in one form or another. As the Council on Foreign Relations analysis points out, by October, importers have “had time to seek alternative suppliers, giving them a bit more negotiating leverage.” More importantly, the “trade deals” that the administration has inked have made it clear that substantially higher tariffs are here to stay. All of this gives importers and retailers good reason to continue passing more of the costs along to consumers.
We are already seeing evidence of this happening. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s survey of small and medium-sized businesses, for example, confirms this dynamic. Firms expecting tariffs to persist for a year or longer plan to pass through three times more of their cost increases to consumers than firms expecting short-lived tariffs. As of August, over 45 percent of affected businesses expected their costs to be impacted for longer than a year.
But how does all of this compare to the pass-through rate felt during the 2018–2019 tariffs? The Harvard Pricing Lab — the same data that Lynn cites — actually undermines his entire argument. After just six months, the 2025 tariff pass-through rate is indeed around 20 percent. But if we compare this to the 2018 tariffs, the difference is night and day. After Trump’s first-term tariffs, the pass-through rate stayed under 5 percent after a full year. This isn’t evidence that these tariffs are working. It’s evidence that these tariffs are hitting consumers harder and faster than the previous round.
December 13, 2025
Misunderstanding the causes of wealth
As most economists could point out, there’s no point asking what are the causes of poverty, because poverty is the default condition. Getting people out of poverty, that is a much more interesting discussion. Tim Worstall responds to a recent video from someone who clearly doesn’t understand where wealth comes from:
From this video here. Given that Grace [Blakeley] herself posts it she must approve the content.
Because the way that capitalism generates prosperity for some is by generating misery for others. You cannot have universal prosperity in a capitalist system. Just think about, like, this phone. What has happened for me to be able to hold this phone in my hands right now? A bunch of kids in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at gunpoint, have been sent to scratch coltan out of the ground …
So, first thought. If the world, the economy, is a zero sum game then yes, we can only have some prosperous if others are not — some can only have more pie if others have less. On the other hand if we know how to bake the pie bigger then all can have more at the same time.
So, do we know how to make the pie bigger?
That source of Brad DeLong means yes, this is correct. Where’s that inflexion point, that bend in the curve? About where we start doing capitalism with free markets. As Marx, K himself pointed out capitalism is really very productive.
OK, so we know how to increase the size of the pie, it is possible for all to gain. It is not necessary for some to get less in order for others to gain more. The central contention is wrong. Provably, obviously, wrong.
Oh, sure, sure, it could work out that we take stuff off others in order to feed some. You know, say taxing child carers in order to pay train drivers massive salaries, as we do. But it’s not in fact necessary.
We can also check this another way:
So, lots and lots have become better off in this period of capitalism. Sure, sure, we should do better as a civilisation, we want all to do so. But while so many have got better off no, it is not possible to say that this has been done at the expense of those in extreme poverty. Because extreme poverty itself is set at the subsistence level. If you take stuff off the extreme poor then they die — that’s what subsistence level means. So that majority of humanity has not got rich by nicking it off the extreme poor. Because if they had there would be no extreme poor as they’d all be dead.
So, the overall claim is simply wrong. But it’s also wrong in specifics.
December 4, 2025
Don’t put a lot of trust in the “surging Canadian GDP stories” they’re pushing
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Stephen Punwasi put together an interesting thread on the latest “rosy scenario” GDP numbers the state media have been making such a big deal about:
2/ What do we see? Imports contributed 0.7 points out of 0.6 points of Q3 GDP growth. The rest of the economy was a net drag.
Imports contribute to GDP as a part of net exports: exports minus imports.
Smaller imports boost net exports. Imports made the biggest drop since 2022.
3/ What we’re seeing is a phenomenon called import compression: the balance was boosted by falling imports.
It’s a superficial improvement due accounting mechanics. The only growth is actually weakness.
We figured it out. But wait — how do they get import/export data? 😬
4/ Let’s start with imports. I recalled reading about the CBSA’s new customs & revenue management (CARM) platform.
Totally normal bedtime reading for weirdos, I know.
CARM delayed data to StatCan, who had to estimate on trend & revise. I can’t recall the issue being resolved.
4/ I contact StatCan. Delays have improved but recent data is heavily impacted.
They warn to expect larger than usual revisions to September — a third of Q3. 😅
It gets funnier: 🇺🇸’s gov shutdown means 🇨🇦 can’t get data for ~75% of its exports. Trend estimate again.
5/ so all GDP growth was imports, which fell faster than exports.
Imports & exports are estimates based on trend.
But wait — what exactly is a trend? It’s based on seasonal adjustments — smoothing predictable variation.
In 🇨🇦, that means suppressing summer & boosting winter.
6/ non-predictable variations to consumption like recession & trade wars can’t be filtered out.
The adjustment over/understates. e.g. 🇺🇸 Fed research shows this overstated recovery & lengthened the financial crisis. Ditto with COVID.
It can’t be fixed until years later.
7/ let’s put this together:
– 🇨🇦’s GDP grew exclusively due to the trade balance.
– import compression — a weakness that overstates growth
– trade had to be inferred via trend
– trend overstated by irregular shock
Yup.
8/ just to clarify — none of this is StatCan’s fault.
They’re tasked w/a deadline over the past year & 🇨🇦 decided to overhaul its trade data during a trade war.
They told me Dec 11th will be when revisions for imports come in & we’ll get an update on CARM.
9/ Bonus fun facts for the pros:
– by pushing it back to the 11th, this overstatement helps suppress yields for the GoC cash management program
– the 11th is after the last auction data is provided to dealers
Fascinating combo while 🇨🇦 is asset cycling for short-term optics.
10/ anyway, full write up, direct quotes from StatCan, & a fun bonus GDP fact for the kiddos.
Also, follow @BetterDwelling if you found this interesting.
We take research & insights reserved for deep-pocketed investors & give it away to normies w/plain english explanations.
November 20, 2025
QotD: What happened to the “Lucky Country” when the luck ran out?
Without thinking too deeply about it, I sensed we had inherited some of the best British qualities: we understood that a batsman should walk when he knew he was out, regardless of the umpire’s decision; and that the best hangover cure began with a cup of tea.
We ridiculed our friends because there was no greater compliment than offensive humour, but didn’t overdo it because brevity was the soul of our wit. (Google it, Abdul.)
Then I discovered that the British colony in Australia was founded 12 years after Americans declared that all men (not just American ones) are created equal, and with certain inalienable rights, and realised that their belief in liberty, too, was part of our precious heritage.
By developing in lockstep with them and marching to every subsequent war alongside them, we had been imbued with Americans’ rugged individualism, but cleverly managed to avoid their gullibility for life’s more superficial panaceas.
For a while, we even gave the Americans a run for their money in the pursuit-of-happiness caper. Our island continent had more room, stranger animals and nicer cities, and we had a bigger middle class, which confirmed to us that egalitarianism, the bedrock of our culture, worked.
Then, in 1983, the crew aboard the Australia II yacht showed the New York elite that their unlimited money was no match for our gritty ingenuity.
What a time to be alive! How brilliant were we! We were six-foot-four and full of muscle, and we thought it would last forever.
That it hasn’t is partly our fault. We constantly called ourselves The Lucky Country, conveniently forgetting that Donald Horne coined the name as a warning, that one day the luck would run out. That’s what luck is: it changes.
We revelled in our prosperity and mocked the idea, fundamental to our founders, that prosperity is a two-way deal.
And we lazily imported “vibrancy” instead of building on the sophisticated western civilisation, going back to Socrates and Aristotle, we were unbelievably fortunate to inherit.
But for all our complacency, at least we never deliberately sought our own demise, which, it is now clear, is what our own government is doing with grim determination and sinister skill.
As a free and prosperous nation with unlimited resources, Australia should have the pick of the richest, cleverest, most urbane migrants in the entire world. Instead, it has opened the door to millions of low-skilled peasants from Third World countries who aren’t even slightly interested in assimilating, if they don’t outright hate our culture and want to subjugate us.
There is more to this than Labor merely symbiotically importing freeloaders whose votes can be bought with unaffordable largesse. […]
As the brilliant Adam Creighton said on X last week, referring to our demographic transformation: “The Australia of your youth won’t remotely exist in 20 years. It will still have nice weather, at least”.
Our cultural suicide aside, this record intake of migrants reduces our already inadequate amount of available housing.
By how much? The Australian Bureau of Statistics isn’t saying. Its biennial Survey of Income and Housing was due out about now, but will not be released at all because of “data collection issues”.
In other words, ABS staff were unable to survey the people most affected by unprecedented levels of immigration because those people kept shifting between city laneways and homeless shelters.
Fred Pawle, “All They Can Manage is Decline”, Fred Pawle, 2025-07-21.
October 31, 2025
“NFL media is dominated by the nerds” and their “never-ending performance of Well, Actually football contrarianism”
Freddie deBoer discusses the way NFL media coverage has changed from the retired jocks of old to today’s emphasis on data nerd analysis and clickbait contrarianism:
Being a sports media professional means forcing yourself to have this kind of a reaction every time you’re on camera.
Screencap from Freddie deBoer
Consider how smart football journalism was supposed to be by now. Long the domain of ex-jocks ladling out evidence-free bromides about how you have to pound the ball and causation-flipping claims that time of possession is the ultimate metric, today NFL media is dominated by the nerds, analysts who proudly announce that they’ve never played the game and let their teenage resentments power their never-ending performance of Well, Actually football contrarianism. Experience is out! Numbers are in! Empiricism reigns! The bible was right: someday, the meek will inherit the earth, and it’s happening every Sunday on NFL Twitter, where it’s always time to re-prosecute high school.
And yet … The analytics revolution promised to graft rationality and context onto our game-day commentary, but when it comes to the most common and pernicious trend in NFL analysis — overreacting to small samples and short runs of good or bad performance — nothing has really changed. That’s because NFL new media conditions dictate that even the most temperamentally sober and judicious talking heads operate as 24/7 hype machines. This is not, to put it mildly, a new problem. In 2007, ESPN’s Kevin Jackson wrote that NFL media was “Overreaction Nation – a land where no sample size is too small for drawing conclusions, where the most common movement is the knee-jerk”. That description still fits the NFL media perfectly. Week after week, cable TV and podcasters spin wild narratives, proclaiming teams hopeless or superhuman after one game, seemingly embracing the idea that “no sample size is too small”. That this all comes from people who will tell you that they’re the keepers of the flame of Rational Football Analysis only makes it all more annoying.
Modern front offices have jumped on modern statistical analysis, with every team employing analytics departments and with more and more coaches regularly expressing disdain for yesterday’s conventional wisdom. This isn’t a secret; the Ringer, which has always employed its fair share of football nerds who heap contempt on the old ways, proclaimed back in 2018 that “football’s analytics moment has arrived”, pointing out the rise of modern tracking data and explaining how it gives teams an edge. But if we’re honest, even the Ringer was clear that football will never be baseball in statistical clarity: “Football will likely never be baseball, where statistics can basically explain anything,” Kevin Clark (now of ESPN) wrote – “there are too few games and too many variables”. In other words, the sport I love the most is inherently a beast of variance, full of noise. You’d think that message would temper the beat writers.
Instead, it seems the analytics evangelists and talking heads don’t trust their own analytic philosophy. They invoke “small sample size” as a scolding cliché if you dare overreact, but shamelessly turn right around and do it themselves. With every Monday morning comes a fresh rush of oversimplified hot takes. And time has proven that the ostensibly-objective analytics peddlers are no better when it comes to hype than their old school former player competition.
The Minnesota Vikings drafted J.J. McCarthy last year as their “quarterback of the future” only to lose him for his rookie season with a knee injury in the preseason. He started two games so far this season and got injured in his first loss and will only return to play this coming weekend. Bust? A lot of online fans certainly seem to think so, on the basis of a two-game sample, one of which included one quarter of amazing work earning him NFC Offensive Player of the Week. Fans are fickle at the best of times, but the NFL media hype juices that into a kind of sports schizophrenia.
Could Drake Maye be the next big thing? Sure. He certainly has the physical ability. Or he could be Daunte Culpepper. Could CJ Stroud and Jayden Daniels justify all of the hype from their rookie years? Of course! The point is that I don’t know, you don’t know, and neither do the NFL pundits. Neither does Ben Solak. And what bothers me in particular about this species of condescending NFL pundit is that they will endorse concepts like “small sample size theater” when it conforms to their narratives and then gleefully discard those concepts when they don’t. It’s quite frustrating.
Here are tropes to watch out for when it comes to the NFL hype train:
- One Game = Season’s Fate A single loss becomes proof a coach’s job is on the line, a single win means the team is a contender.
- Player of the Year (or Bust) in 48 Hours A QB throws two picks and the media declares him washed up; the next week he goes 25-of-30 and he’s an MVP candidate. NFL pundits alternate between funeral dirges and coronation ceremonies every Monday.
- Outsized Weighting of One Stat Analysts cherry-pick a percentage or grade and assign it cosmic meaning, AKA “going the full PFF.” (This is, not coincidentally, a big part of why so many ex-players despise PFF.)
- Vox Populi Misguided NFL analysis has a habit of looking an awful lot like chatter on Reddit; go look for a team’s subreddit and note the way that supposedly adult-in-the-room analysts ape the exact same hype and intensity of the Reddit squad. A lot of new media-style entities even straight-up quote random tweets as if they’re serious analysis. When you’re looking to backstop deeply irresponsible predictions, any evidence will do.
