I'm in the storytelling business […] And if you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page […]

This [personal] story always makes me cry a little bit. Two million people die of Aids every year. It never has the same effect.
[“Empathy’s Failures” in I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That]

Before long, doctoresses, or hakimas, began graduating from a school that would have been unthinkable in Paris or London, let alone post-independence Athens. The school resonated with French and other European proto-feminists, who began descending upon Cairo in the mid-1830s to study medicine and social care. And it was not just a flash in the pan. The progression of women continued, in parallel to further economic development, during the reign of Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail Pasha, who ruled from 1863 to 1879.

There is a time and a place to resemble chameleons, Yango. But there is also a time and a place to take a stand. When you actually see the fascists, they will be breaking down our door. At that point, you won’t be able to blend in – unless you join them. But, then, you will be a jackal not a chameleon.

Liberalism’s fatal hypocrisy [...] was to rejoice in the virtuous Jills and Jacks, the neighbourhood butchers, bakers and brewers, so as to defend the vile East India Companies, the Facebooks and the Amazons, which know no neighbours, have no partners, respect no moral sentiments and stop at nothing to destroy their competitors. By replacing partnerships with anonymous shareholders, we created Leviathans that end up undermining and defying all the values that liberals [...] claim to cherish.
-Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

Furthermore, a state-backed merchant capitalism gave rise to an imperial expansion which could provide protected markets for the products of industry. Thus, India was incorporated in the empire during the 18th century and in the 19th the Lancashire cotton industry became largely dependent on the Indian market.

Merchant capitalism was not, however, as closely linked to the growth of capitalist production as these connections would lead one to suppose. It was domestic rather than overseas demand that lay behind the growth of capitalist production in 18th-century Britain.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned […]

Actually, class interests offer only a limited explanation of longrun movements in society. The fate of classes is more frequently determined by the needs of society than the fate of society is determined by the needs of classes. Given a definite structure of society, the class theory works; but what if that structure itself undergoes a change? A class that has become functionless may disintegrate and be supplanted overnight by a new class or classes. Also, the chances of classes in a struggle will depend upon their ability to win support from outside their own membership, which again will depend upon their fulfillment of tasks set by interests wider than their own. Thus neither the birth nor the death of classes, neither their aims nor the degree to which they attain them; neither their cooperations nor their antagonisms can be understood apart from the interests of society, given by its situation as a whole.

One man alone perceived the meaning of the ordeal […] No thinker ever advanced farther into the realm of industrial society than did Robert Owen.

[…] an avalanche of social dislocation, surpassing by far that of the enclosure period, came down upon England; that this catastrophe was the accompaniment of a vast movement of economic improvement; […]

At the heart of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century there was an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production, which was accompanied by a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people [“satanic mills”]. […]

Writers of all views and parties, conservatives and liberals, capitalists and socialists, invariably referred to social conditions under the Industrial Revolution as a veritable abyss of human degradation. […]

The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was utterly materialistic [“economic improvement”] and believed that all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities [see: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World]. […]

Social not technical invention was the intellectual mainspring of the Industrial Revolution. The decisive contribution of the natural sciences to engineering was not made until a full century later, when the Industrial Revolution was long over. To the practical bridge or canal builder, the designer of machines or engines, knowledge of the general laws of nature was utterly useless before the new applied sciences in mechanics and chemistry were developed. […] The discovery of economics was an astounding revelation which hastened greatly the transformation of society and the establishment of a market system, while the decisive machines had been the inventions of uneducated artisans some of whom could hardly read or write. It was thus both just and appropriate that not the natural but the social sciences should rank as the intellectual parents of the mechanical revolution which subjected the powers of nature to man.

The Ten Hours Bill of 1847, which Karl Marx hailed as the first victory of socialism, was the work of enlightened reactionaries.

The [British] laboring people themselves were hardly a factor in this great movement the effect of which was, figuratively speaking, to allow them to survive the Middle Passage. They had almost as little to say in the determination of their own fate as the black cargo of Hawkins’s ships.

With this in mind, what is the “Austrian” view of the rentier [rent-seeker]? First, it should be pointed out that the rentier participates in voluntary exchange, thereby benefiting not only himself but also others. Second, due to his relatively low time preference, the rentier can amass a large amount of capital. This capital is then invested and used to increase the productivity of workers, thus contributing to higher wages and a higher standard of living. Contrary to Keynes, then, the rentier, far from being a villain, is actually (in the spirit of Walter Block) a hero. [Source: https://mises.org/mises-wire/keynes-a...]

That Becky’s world shouldn’t create roadblocks in Desta’s (through trade restrictions, domestic agricultural subsidies, and so on) is also obvious and proximate. What is neither obvious nor proximate – the elusive bird we would all wish to catch for Desta – is for communities in her world to discover how to shape new avenues to do business with one another so as to increase their inclusive wealths. [Emphases added]

Why didn’t the poor world take advantage of their resource endowments to enrich themselves in the same way?

Colonization is a possible answer. Historians have shown that, from the 16th century, European powers have extracted natural resources from the colonies – including cheap (read, slave) labour – but have mostly invested the proceeds domestically. Of course, one should ask why it is that the Europeans managed to colonize the tropics; why colonization didn’t take place the other way round. As noted earlier, Jared Diamond has offered an answer. That said, many of the most prominent of those ex-colonies have been politically independent for decades now. During that time real income per head in the rich world has increased over and over again. With the exception of a few striking examples in South and South East Asia, though, most of the ex-colonies have either remained poor or become poorer still. Why? [Emphasis added]

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.