Who Were the Sea Peoples?

The above nonsense claim is made as a part of a number of reformist economic proposals... such as  this one : "And unlike capital goods such as cars or computers, you can’t produce more land..." It is distressing to see someone writing on political economy who thinks that this blatant falsehood is an obvious truth. First of all, in the most simpleminded sense, it certainly is possible to create more land, and people have done so: just ask the Dutch, or the people who live in Battery Park City. But that is only the start of how one can "produce more land." Let's say we are living in a town along a river running through a desert. The town has been growing, and we are running out of room for housing. But stretching along the river there are many farms, relying on the water from the river for irrigation. If we extend our irrigation system further out into the desert, farms can move out there, and more housing can be built along the river. We have "prod...

James Connelly and I have begun serious work on our book, The Political Economy of the British Idealists . That means, as usual, my faithful blog readers get to see snippets of it in progress. Here is the start of the introduction: ************************* There has been a revival of interest in the ideas of the group of thinkers known as "British Idealists" of late, with a stream of books emerging discussing one aspect or another of their broad ranging thought. But this attention has focused chiefly on the metaphysical, ethical, and political philosophy of these figures. Nevertheless, many British Idealists paid a fair amount of attention to political economy. What is more, while they certainly did not think as a monolithic unit, when one views this body of work as a whole, a characteristic approach to political economy comes to light, featuring a rejection of one-sided abstractions and an attempt to see an issue holistically. And it is an approach that, in out troubl...