I’m a fan of ultra-ambitious History of Everything books that try to explain the whole world in terms of the author’s pet ideas, such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Michael H. Hart’s Understanding Human History, and Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms.

So, I was surprised to stumble upon one such book that I’d never heard of: Raymond D. Crotty’s When Histories Collide: The Development and Impact of Individualistic Capitalism. The lesson appears to be: don’t die before your book tour. Crotty died in 1994 with the manuscript unfinished, and it took his son until 2001 to get it published. It was barely reviewed anywhere and doesn’t appear to have been released in the U.S.

Still, the fragments that are available through Google Books are thought provoking, to say the least. Crotty presents in the early chapters what could be called a lactose tolerance theory of why capitalism arose in Europe.

Is he correct? Beats me, but from what little I’ve seen of the book, it stands comparison to Jared Diamond’s huge bestseller.

Crotty was an Irish farmer in the 1940s and 1950s, who then became an economist. He’s best known in the Republic of Ireland for having filed a landmark lawsuit as a private citizen protesting the Irish legislature’s assumption that it could vote to join and further give up sovereignty to the EU without referendums. The Irish supreme court agreed with Crotty’s case, and ordered that referendums be held on EU treaties.

As a historical theorist, Crotty resembles Victor Davis Hanson, whose experience as a warm-weather farmer in California gave him important insights into the development of warfare among Ancient Greek farmer-soldiers. Crotty’s similar troubles making a living as a cool weather farmer in Europe gave him insight into the development of Northwestern Europe’s unique historical accomplishments. After all, most people down through history have been farmers, but not many recent books have been written by farmers.

As an economist, Crotty’s experience as a farmer made him a fan of Henry George, the late 19th century American economist whom contemporary economists seem to assume has been decisively refuted, but nobody can ever remember just how George was debunked. Crotty tried to bring capital intensive farming to rural Ireland, but he never seemed to make any more money, despite working twice as hard, as his neighbors, who just let some cows graze on the fields while they saved their money to buy more land. To “encourage agriculture,” the Irish government taxed everything except land. So, as Henry George would have pointed out, it didn’t pay to invest in your land. It just paid to buy more of it. And, as real estate salesmen point out, they ain’t making anymore land, so aligning all the incentives to encourage buying land didn’t create more of it, it just meant the Irish economy stagnated decade after decade

She doesn’t mean much to me personally, but, objectively, Meryl Streep is one impressive person:

• Oscar nominations: 14
• Children: 4
• Husbands: 1
• Rehabs: 0

The Scientific American has declared war on Occam’s Razor.From Scientific American’s May issue:

Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain

Deep within our subconscious, all of us harbor biases that we consciously abhor. And the worst part is: we act on them

By Siri Carpenter

“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Jackson’s remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.

Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.

Such bias is far more prevalent than the more overt, or explicit, prejudice that we associate with, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis.

Oh, sorry, my mistake — that’s not Rev. Wright, that’s former Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) who wants the Libertarian nomination.

Back during the Clinton impeachment, when blacks loved the Clintons and hated Barr for helping get Bill impeached, black radio talk shows would be flooded with calls saying things like, “Barr is passing. My cousin told me he’s his cousin’s cousin.” And if that’s not proof, I don’t know what is.

Barr must be kicking himself now over the fact that he didn’t hop on this whole mixed race = racial reconciliator shtick decades ago instead of just positioning himself as another boring white guy.

Charles Murray has a New Criterion piece called The age of educational romanticism, the thrust of which is that despite a thousand movies about inspiring teachers, you can’t inspire kids to be smarter than they are. This is the same point made by Steve Sailer in Why “No Child Left Behind” Is Nuts, and more recently in Alchemists Can’t Turn Lead Into Gold, Educrats Can’t Eliminate IQ. (But Lead Is Useful Anyway).

Or to put it as I put it with regard to another subject

The primary message of conservatism is this: “Life is not like that.”