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judah-grunstein.bsky.social
Editor-in-chief of World Politics Review. Spent more than a year in Provence. Used to be an American in Paris. Currently bringing coal to Newcastle. https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/ @wpr.bsky.social
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Diving into Philip Curtin's Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, and it raised the question for me of whether and to what extent contemporary international trade is cross-cultural. Clearly the traders still are, but compared to early global trade, the products are much less so.

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

"The 'end of money' futurology is no more than a redescription of nineteenth-century liberals' misunderstanding of their monetary system and, implicitly, a repetition of their vain hope of a world without politics." Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Almost done with Ingham's Nature of Money, and I'm increasingly convinced that the political economy of money he talks about and its impact on monetary policy are both cause and expression of a lot of the higher-profile political shifts of the past decade, with much much more to come.

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

New meme just dropped.

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

There is a vague resemblance.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

An inchoate thought just crystallized for me, as so much of what's going on right now seems familiar from my current reading on bubbles, panics and crashes: We've entered the period between the first inklings that everything is inflated and the full reckoning with what that means.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

Very sobering but important thread on the UK university crisis. Multiple institutions are cutting into core function to save costs, putting themselves and possibly the entire system in a death spiral. Certainly the model that has driven its hyper-expansion for the past decade is a dead letter.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

New magazine cover indicator just dropped.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

A further thought. By banishing thought of the death of the body politic from our conceptual scape, we have come to implicitly assume its immortality. This makes it easy for too many people to believe “things will be fine” as dogma when in fact you have to exercise and eat your political vegetables.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

A book also functions as a historical record of the food I was eating while reading it, in a way that a Kindle just can't.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

My big problem right now is that I have four reading streams going on and am by nature impatient. So I need multiple brains operating in parallel to get through each stack. This is another way of saying my vacation suitcase is going to be weighted down with books I won't get through next week.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

There's a fine line between flailing and stalling, and the EU has made that ambiguity its brand.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

How the Bank of England stalled a bank run associated with the South Sea Bubble of 1720, described by Kindleberger (who suggests it could be apocryphal) in Manias, Panics and Crashes. We may end up missing those pennies when they're gone.

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

There's actually a good deal of social science research on these very claims with regard to social trust, which is not the same thing as social solidarity but is a close stand-in. None of it is conclusive, and it cuts both ways. 🧵

submitted 11 days ago • 6 comments