Shorter Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations, Book III

This section is a whole lot of sweeping generalizations with little in the way of supporting facts and figures, but it does provide a useful window into how the educated classes saw things in the 1770s.

Chapter I: Agriculture develops before industry, which develops foreign trade, and any place which allows foreign trade to take the lead in powering its economy is WRONG.

Chapter II: Laws and customs that allow land to be kept off the free market and farmers from acting as free men are wrong too.

Chapter III: Peace and stable institutions are good for towns.

Chapter IV: Towns benefit the countryside by creating a market for produce. They further benefit each other by providing larger and larger markets. When people accumulate too much wealth for their money to do anything useful, they waste it on fancy parties and luxury goods.

So there you at least get a taste of the zeitgeist in which the Founding Fathers set up a government which was supposed to privilege agricultural landowners over everyone else. Appropriately enough, the next book is going to be about politics.

The bar is low these days

Per the New York Times, here's what makes LinkedIn the best social network of our time:

Considering its size and social footprint, LinkedIn has been a notably minor character in major narratives about the hazards of social media. The site hasn’t proved especially useful for mainstreaming disinformation, for example, nor is it an obvious staging ground for organized harassment campaigns. It is unique among its social media peers in that it has not spent the last five years in a state of wrenching crisis.

And perhaps even more importantly, LinkedIn is not, in the popular imagination, a force for radicalization, a threat to democracy, a haven for predators, an environment that encourages mob behavior, or even a meeting place for pot stirrers.

I really should start posting stuff there occasionally.