Argonautica

Let me take you back to the Stone Age. When the sun rose our Neanderthal ancestor would awake and make a crucial decision of his own free will: he would weigh up whether it was safe to leave his modest limestone cave and venture out into a wilderness that contained dangerous predators, like bears, hyenas and sabre toothed tigers, all of which posed a serious public health risk. Remaining in the cave would always be safer, but the caveman needed to hunt and gather, otherwise he would eventually run…

Until recently, we have been in a bull market which no one wanted to ban. Now after losing their clients a lot of money, we hear some fund managers joining the usual suspects in announcing that short selling should be outlawed, as if shorts have spread a virus. Suddenly it is unfair that share prices go down as well as up. There is no evidence that short selling destroys good businesses or is currently damaging the UK economy. Companies go bust not when their share price falls but when they run…

We are under house arrest. We are all now at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, Prisoners of the Pandemic. Criminals entering jail for the first time are advised to “know a bit of slang”, “share a cell with the right person” and to “brace yourself for re-entry”. Incarceration causes our minds to easily drift to fantasy: of daily allowable outdoor exercise, or perhaps an illicit tryst at a local speakeasy. We are now less active than a three-toed Sloth. This is a strange war: we are its inaction heroes. This…

In 1348 the Black Death arrived in the UK. It would go on to kill over one third of the population and the whole of Bristol, at the time its second largest city. Its economic and social consequences were profound: the disappearance of much of the labour force meant that wages more than doubled for freemen, whilst villeins were able to dictate much better terms from their landlords, eventually leading to the demise of the feudal system. Edwardian Historian G.M. Trevelyan would claim that that the…