Not like the league rigging a player allocation to the Seattle Sounders is without precedent. share.google/a7ql6JkkGnX2...

I let the French Revolution historiography for Cities get out of control! Now I see why the Russian Revolution breached 100 episodes! Anyway, thank you for your work, you inspire others, hope you and Alexis start the pod up again!

If you like what you read, subscribe to my Substack! You will get at least one longform deep-dive a week, centered on the book I'm covering on the podcast. Season 1 is A Christmas Carol. Season 2 will be A Tale of Two Cities.
linktr.ee/livinglitpod

If you like what you read, subscribe to my Substack! You will get at least one longform deep-dive a week, centered on the book I'm covering on the podcast. Season 1 is A Christmas Carol. Season 2 will be A Tale of Two Cities.
linktr.ee/livinglitpod

I asked the curator at the Morgan Library if this was an intentional choice, and he said yes, this is the page they wanted people to see.

You may recognize the Morgan's stacks from various movies and tv shows. It's quite moving.

This is the man that Dickens used as a model for Scrooge's politics: The poor are poor because they lack virtue, and if they die, well, get on with it because the surplus population is taking food from the virtuous wealthy.

Malthus also beefed with William Godwin, the utilitarian and anarchist philosopher who was married to early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose daughter later became Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Malthus thought "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" would lead to famine.

Malthus was controversial in his own lifetime. In "An Essay on the Principle of Population," Malthus said that Rousseau's views on income inequality and romantic individualism defied the mathematical logic that population increases exponentially while food supply only increases linearly.

...they should have avoided all the vice and wastefulness that put them in this situation. And if that led to mass death, well, that's just the "surplus" population. Their own vice and wastefulness dictated their own fate, and they would be judged accordingly by God.

Not that Malthus didn't have views on economic policies: He thought the Poor Laws created inflation, which hurt the virtuous well-off, and he supported the Corn Laws, which taxed grain imports and spiked the price of bread. If the poor died because they couldn't afford food, well....

For Malthus, this created a spiritual problem: If population growth *thwarts* social progress, it's imperative for a nation to impose standards of virtue on its people. Being poor and hungry was the result of individual vice and wastefulness, not national policies or macroeconomics.

This line is an allusion to the works of English economist The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, whose work became known as the "Malthusian Trap": The idea that increasing a nation's food production would, eventually, lead to a living standards because the population growth would lead to shortages.

This is also the page where the charity gentleman says "many would rather die" than go to the debtors prisons, to which Scrooge says, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." This line is thrown back at Scrooge when he asks if Tiny Tim will die.

Turns out, they opened it to one of my favorite passages: Two gentlemen are collecting money for the poor, and Scrooge asks them if the Poor Law is "in full vigor" and whether there are "plenty of prisons" and "Union workhouses in operation."

6) The most racist policy of the Theresa May prime ministership that cost her Home Secretary her job, 7) The best street-vendor jerk chicken outside the Caribbean, and 8) The cheapest stereo decks in the mall at Montgomery Ward.