Rachel Laudan

  This is one of the family milking stools.  Yes, it’s as short as it looks, just about twleve inches high, just right to reach a cow’s udder. By the time I was growing up, no one milked by hand any more.  The cows lined up for the rank of Alfa-Laval milking machines.  The dairy [...]

Note. If you’ve been to this page before, I’ve now (pm 5 december) edited the figures. Many thanks Larry.   I’ve just been reading E.A. Wrigley‘s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution which I highly recommend if you are interested in the transformation wrought by fossil fuels. In passing, he gives these figures for the [...]

Megan McArdle at the Atlantic, following Arnold King, asks this. Why hasn’t rising inequality resulted in in the much-predicted oligarchy?  Or to put it as he does: with so many unemployed, and income increasing faster among the affluent, why aren’t people hiring more servants?   Or to put it more personally, would you hire a [...]