Looking in my notebook:
1) A substantial piece on JW Mason’s Disgorge the Cash (as requested) and John Seddon’s Freedom from Command and Control
2) Two case studies on this post, and the House of Commons Defence Committee.
3) Steve Levitt, radical scepticism, and responsibility in economics (like so)
4) Someone wanted thoughts on 50 years of BASIC. This is interesting.
5) ‘Kippers. This contains some truth, but not enough, and a variety of pollutants.
6) Christopher Clark. I have three things to say about The Sleepwalkers but I suspect I’ve already said them.
7) So the Soviets built a third Kirov hull and weird combined nuclear and oil machinery, and instead of the weird 80s battleship, built a mammoth SIGINT listening post on top. After years swinging round the buoy, she’s just being scrapped now. If you read my series on Richard Aldrich’s book on GCHQ, you’ll know that the UK considered building such a ship in the 1960s, based on either a carrier or tanker hull, nuclear-powered, and accommodating the equivalent of one of their big overseas stations. Question: did we ever really intend to do it, or just to troll the USSR? Clue.
Owt else? Material, as always, is here.
Re the HoC Defence Committee. I was going to mention Hencke’s post about this after you quoted from Rory Stewart. I wonder where Hencke got the idea that Julian Lewis is anti-establishment or that Downing Street and the Tory Whips favoured Stewart.
From the list here, I’m most interested in your scarce time going on (1) as I think that Disgorge the Cash is one more important step in the “what really happened in the 70s and 80s” project…
From the delicious…
The MacroMania post – your comment and his reply seems to echo my ongoing “discussion” with Chris and Luis Enrique in the comments at stumbling and mumbling. (L.E. is a great proponent of “I see no evidence that “real economists” were arrogant; and Chris is a great proponent of “no one can know anything in economics”…) So naturally, I think there’s something important in all that.
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