There are quite a lot of economic history books mixed into the Library, particularly the sections on the third floor.
I started reading again and find that an initial decision to class non-fiction as not-Trash, and shelve it separately, is doubtful.
Clearly Michael Crichton is trash and goes under 'C'. But where do I put Stanley Jevons? Or parts of Jevons' corpus at least.
What about the coal question? Jevons argued it would rise in price and then run out, plunging the UK economy into a crisis.
The 1980s couldn't have been a bitterer lesson in the role of technology in economic change and the importance of economic resources and primary products.
Just as Jevons was wrong so too might the political interpretations of current wars be horribly mistaken; perhaps it's not the oil specifically but straightforward primitive accumulation, as 19th century a concept as could be asked.
Again, all the scientific work on climate change, I am assured, points to global warming. But I really don't care for the political interpretations being made and the politics of reducing large swathes of populations to serfdom, albeit at quite a high consumption level, in the name of saving the planet.
5 comments:
a lot of popular science could be classed as trash (dawkins maybe a case in point).
Lena, Golly, I look forward to reading the latest acquisition even more; the great thing about trash is it's an easy read.
Oh no, does that last remark mean I must reclassify hard reads as non-trash?
Could I have some classification contributions?
You are being very hard on Stanley Jevons and his rather misguided prediction on coal. He was doing as best he could with the information available in his time. What is unforgivable is that lots of economists today should use not the information currently available but their own outdated prejudice as foundation for their pronouncements.
Pispolo, I thought most economists were in the thrall of ...etc.
Moi, hard on Stanley Jevons? There are entire schools of venom devoted to being hard on Stanley Jevons and his neoclassical fellow travellers. I though he was a good example of a reasonable concern being twisted to push an elitiste consumption economic policy.
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