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matthewraskob.bsky.social
scrambled egg globalist
@matthewraskob.bsky.social
740 followers 580 following 3.6K posts
Sweetness & light. | “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.“ | Mostly literature & history, for now.
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matthewraskob.bsky.social
from the same article, which I was re-reading today:
bev.berkeley.edu/ipe/readings...
If large increases in poor law outlays were primarily caused by the growth of seasonal unemployment insurance, there is no reason to believe there were significant work disincentive effects. A second causal gap is shared by both stories—a failure to focus specifically on the type of relief that sought to create employment for the unemployed. Public works projects, the employer subsidies, and workfare jobs were all efforts to deal with a growing problem of rural unemployment, and they all faced the classical dilemma involved in "make work" projects. When public agencies create employment specifically with the goal of making recipients work in exchange for relief, supervisors usually find it difficult to elicit high levels of work effort because recipients know that they are not working in a real job." On the one side, the threat of being fired does not have the same credibility as in an ordinary employment relation. On the other, there is no particular reward for hard work since there are no prospects for promotion or greater employment security. These difficulties can be somewhat mitigated if recipients can be persuaded that success in this activity will lead to some form of real employment. But when the unemployment problem is structural and intractable, "make work" efforts are likely to be accompanied by declining morale among recipients. Many of the specific complaints in the historical record about the corrosive effects of the Poor Law actually center on "roundsmen" or others who were engaged in these kind of "make work" activities.
November 29, 2025 at 12:34 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
November 28, 2025 at 11:31 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
as we like to say…many such cases.
is common for social scientists to complain that public policy is made with insufficient attention to history and social theory. In this article, however, our argument is that for both discussions of guaranteed incomes and welfare policy. a particular and tendentious reading of social history has been given far too much weight by policy makers and policy intellectuals. This is particularly the case because over the past forty years, economic and social historians have produced a large and impressive literature that has reanalyzed the English Poor Law in general and the Speenhamland period in particular.
November 28, 2025 at 7:04 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
Ja, ik ben Nederlands. Ja, ik ben dik en een burger.
“Yeah, I’m Dutch. Yeah, I’m fat & a burgher.” The painting is “The Burgher of Delft & His Daughter,” by Jan Steen, 1655.
November 28, 2025 at 3:38 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
“You’ll be visited by three spirits.”

The three spirits:
Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, & Norman Mailer.
November 28, 2025 at 3:12 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
read theory, etc.
Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans. R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927).
November 28, 2025 at 2:18 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
how have I never seen this before. good lord.
November 27, 2025 at 11:23 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
he cooked here, ngl.
"When you speak of the necessity of protecting agriculture, do you mean the necessity of protecting the mere turning up of the ground? or the necessity of protecting the procuring of food for the people? If you mean the first, show us, if you can, any reason for desiring to procure food by turning up the ground, when we can procure more with the same quantity of labour in any other way. But if, by protection to agriculture, you mean protection to procuring food, there is no dispute about that. We are as desirous as you are, to afford protection to the procuring of food; provided always, that the procuring of food needs protection. But what is this contrivance of yours for protecting it? Simply this: to force the people to obtain ten bushels of corn by turning up the ground, when with the same degree of labour they might obtain twelve by growing it in their looms and in their cotton mills. If this be protection (which it is not, but privilege) it is protection only to the owners of the ground. A prohibition of gas-lights might be called, without any great impropriety, protection to the oil-companies; but would the oil-companies be permitted to term it protection for lighting? Yes; if lighting be protected by being rendered more expensive and more difficult. No, if this be, as it evidently is, the very reverse of protection. If agriculture means only turning up the ground, it deserves no protection. Turning up the ground is not a bonum per se. If it means procuring food, it is protected by excluding cheap corn, precisely in the same manner as the lighting of the streets of London would be protected by imposing a heavy duty upon gas."
November 27, 2025 at 6:14 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
A great long (well, by our standards) sentence:
November 27, 2025 at 3:10 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
~HIGH HIGH HOPES FOR A LIVING~
November 27, 2025 at 2:45 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
truth nuke.
Before we offer up our substance to an allegorical idol, let us hear what title it has to our worship. What is this ‘agriculture,’ of which you speak? When you say that no country was ever prosperous without agriculture, do you mean, that no country was ever prosperous without procuring food? If this be all, the truth of the proposition is not very likely to be disputed. But if you mean that no country was ever prosperous unless it procured food by digging and ploughing, instead of procuring it by spinning and weaving, your assertion is altogether destitute of truth: since the Dutch republic, which procured the greater part of its food without digging or ploughing was one of the most prosperous communities which the world ever saw.”
November 26, 2025 at 10:12 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
[no comment.]
November 26, 2025 at 10:05 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
Elizabeth Gaskell, author of “Mary Barton” (1848) & “North & South” (1854-1855), works often described as “social problem novels.”
November 26, 2025 at 10:03 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
he had one correct take:
November 26, 2025 at 8:52 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
These were strong words. In his angry wish to show contempt, he denied the possibility of working out some pragmatic way to reconcile a set of legitimate but conflicting demands: of an increasingly urbanized population for pure water and access to places of natural beauty, of rural people for some security in their way of life, of cultivated people for peace and quiet, and of naturalists and historically minded people for continuity and variety in species and places. Ruskin's uncompromising position was consistent with his general attitude toward capitalist exploitation. Just before the Thirlmere threat, he had been carrying on a protracted feud with the Bishop of Manchester over the subject of Christianity and usury. However, there was some justification in the allegation that his attitude to reservoirs was of the "not-in-my own-backyard" variety. Had he not once enthusiastically promoted a scheme for damming an Alpine valley of the Rhone and turning it into "one Paradise of safe plenty" ? Some critics have suggested that his anger, and perhaps Carlyle's, was less purely environmentalist than it was anti-Manchester and what that city represented to so many professional middle-class intellectuals.
November 26, 2025 at 4:11 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
indeed.
Journalists tend to like tidy narratives, and early impressions often stick.
November 25, 2025 at 4:40 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
you know, if there is “some limited factual basis“ to “your client plotted to slaughter all the male inhabitants of an island of 87,000 people & take the women & children as sex slaves”…
November 24, 2025 at 3:34 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
You might guess that the longer the quote, the more likely it is to be right, but that does not seem to be the case. (Also, Dorothea Brooke does not have a comparable moment of doubt.)
November 24, 2025 at 12:52 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
In one of his boldest moves so far, Pope Leo met with a disgraced conductor & self-described “U-Haul lesbian”…
November 23, 2025 at 3:32 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
when he’s right, he‘s right.
November 22, 2025 at 11:42 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
November 22, 2025 at 3:27 AM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
Khrushchev & Nixon giving the world a vision of politics beyond communism vs. anticommunism is, if not historic, a genuinely novel development.
November 21, 2025 at 11:15 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
I'm often asking this.
November 21, 2025 at 11:06 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
currently reading (very slowly):
www.cambridge.org/us/universit...
November 21, 2025 at 10:45 PM
matthewraskob.bsky.social
extra credit: who wrote the following paragraph?
(answered in the alt text)
Thomas Robert Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed. (London: W. Pickering, 1836) "Theoretical writers are too apt, in their calculations, to overlook these intervals; but eight or ten years, recurring not unfrequently, are serious spaces in human life. They amount to a serious sum of happiness or misery, according as they are prosperous or adverse, and leave the country in a very different state at their termination. In prosperous times the mercantile classes often realize fortunes, which go far towards securing them against the future; but unfortunately the working classes, though they share in the general prosperity, do not share in it so largely as in the general adversity. They may suffer the greatest distress in a period of low wages, but cannot be adequately compensated by a period of high wages. To them fluctuations must always bring more evil than good; and, with a view to the happiness of the great mass of society, it should be our object, as far as possible, to maintain peace, and an equable expenditure."
November 21, 2025 at 10:42 PM