Bedouin from the late 1800's

Bedouin Man

Sheik

Bedouin Shepherds

Mothers and Children

The Keynes Vs. Hayek Rematch

Hayek’s apotheosis came in the 1980’s, when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took to quoting from The Road to Serfdom (1944), his classic attack on central planning. But while Hayek’s defense of the market system against the gross inefficiency of central planning won increasing assent, Keynes’s view that market systems require continuous stabilization lingered on in finance ministries and central banks.



Both traditions, though, were later eclipsed by the Chicago school of “rational expectations,” which has dominated mainstream economics for the last twenty-five years (Milton Friedman, anyone?). With economic agents supposedly possessing perfect information about all possible contingencies, systemic crises could never happen except as a result of accidents and surprises beyond the reach of economic theory.



The global economic collapse of 2008 discredited “rational expectations” economics model, and has since brought both Keynes and Hayek back into posthumous contention. The issues have not changed much since their argument began in the Great Depression of the 1930’s. What causes market economies to collapse? What is the right response to a collapse? What is the best way to prevent future collapses? READ: The Austrians Have it Right







For Hayek in the early 1930’s, and for Hayek’s followers today, the “crisis” results from over-investment relative to the supply of savings, made possible by excessive credit expansion. Banks lend at lower interest rates than genuine savers would have demanded, making all kinds of investment projects temporarily profitable.



Every artificial boom thus carries the seeds of its own destruction. Recovery consists of liquidating the misallocations, reducing consumption, and increasing saving.



--Project Syndicate

Diego Della Vale Pt. 2

Della Valle, 57, is in love with Italy’s most fabled region. He describes to me how he looks down from his helicopter when he is flying between Siena and Florence to find “total aesthetic perfection, a synthesis of everything that is beautiful about Italy”.

The understanding of material aspiration and, as he puts it, people’s “dreams” to be associated with high-quality products is central to Della Valle’s marketing vision. I ask him how and why certain products – the gommini, the D-bag – become fashion icons. “Because they are perfect: in aesthetic terms, their proportions, their quality.” Does he instantly recognise when a new product is destined for such status? “Yes, immediately. They are like thoroughbreds. You know they will last. And then it becomes a matter of maintaining coherence, with the re-editions, to make sure the DNA of the product is consistent.”



With all this talk of Asian resurgence, does he consider that the “Made in Italy” label will retain its lustre? “Yes,” he replies unhesitatingly. “Because it is still the maximum guarantee of high quality for products such as ours. It's like the Swiss for watches.” READ: Diego Della Valle Pt. 1



I ask how he divides his time, and he says that his decision to bring up his son Filippo in the same village, indeed in the same school that he himself attended, forces him to travel. There is a summer house in Capri, another house in Milan, another in Paris, another in New York, another in Miami. A boat to cruise the Mediterranean. Another boat that used to belong to John F Kennedy, moored in Capri. He recounts the list unostentatiously, professes his love of the simple life, and manages not to sound disingenuous.



We talk some more about the great Italian brands, and I mention Ferrari. “I just got one today,” he says with no ceremony whatsoever. In fact, he explains, he ordered it some time ago but has just received the phone call saying it was ready. Luca di Montezemolo, Ferrari’s chairman, is a close friend and Della Valle picked out the car with Filippo, customising it with his trademark colours



He tells me about the initials, DDD, that are written on his private jet, which stand for Dignità, Dovere, Divertimento – Dignity, Duty, Fun. Picking out a Ferrari, he says, belongs in the last category, “but it is important to respect the mixture of those three qualities.”



--Financial Times

Life Lessons from Churchill

The Churchill family always lived well

Winston had always contrived to be "well-mounted," a horsey term which he used to signify "able to maintain a comfortable existence in society." As he once put it: "All my life, I have earned my own living, so that I have always had a bottle of champagne for myself and another for a friend."

Indeed, Churchill practiced what he preached. There was a succession of first-class cooks. The cellars were ample. He nearly always drank champagne at mealtimes (as was normal among the richer politicians of his generation). His favorite was Pol Roger. Toward the end of his life he said the 1928 vintage, of which he bought a great quantity, was the best ever bottled. Madame Roger became a friend of his and named a special cru after him. In turn, when he formed a racehorse stable, he named a horse after the brand. He had a special room for his cigars, of which the Romeo y Julieta was his chosen Havana.

Text adapted from Paul Johnson's "Churchill"

The Futures of Civilization

On the glorious past and uncertain future of the West

Since classical antiquity, historians have tended to think that empires, like individual organisms, evince a discernible rhythm. They come into being, mature, and then, soon or late, decay and decline.



In Civilization: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson has come along to tell us that it need not be this way. Taking the long view of history has not, however, inclined him to the cheerful Whig presumption that civilization “shall not perish from the earth.” The study of history — described by Auden as “breaking bread with the dead” — is presumably too melancholy an endeavor to justify such vain hopes. Ferguson’s prodigious communing with the dead has led him to believe that not only will the forces of composition yield to those of decomposition, but they may do so with dramatic speed. If at times history appears to have a cyclical quality, he reminds us that it is actually far more haphazard.



Intimately acquainted with chaos theory, the author probes a sobering question: “What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic — sometimes almost stationary, but also capable of violent acceleration?”



Ferguson has long been a firm advocate of hypothetical or “counterfactual” history — replete with “What if?” questions — on the grounds that history cannot be understood without appreciating that what we call the past was once the future. He stays loyal to this (unfairly maligned) method in Civilization, and harnesses it to superb effect. He maintains that without developing — or, if you like, downloading — these crucial innovations, civilization never would have climbed to its present height. It is impossible not to notice that the profusion of economically destitute and politically repressive states around the globe owe their status to the absence of one or more of the “killer apps.” What’s more, the undeniable decline of former leading states is largely attributable to their losing them or, as the case may be, casting them off.

It is hard to quarrel with Ferguson on this score; it is a simple fact, for instance, that the scientific revolution owed scarcely any debt to the non-Western world. One further fact assists in pointing up the contrast between the West and the Rest: In 1500, the future imperial powers of Europe were minor entities, accounting for about 10 percent of the world’s land surface and at most 16 percent of its population. By 1913 eleven Western empires controlled nearly three-fifths of the world’s territory and population and more than three-quarters of its economic output. So much for a universal civilization.



Ferguson is especially canny, however, on the imperial impulse that sought to make civilization universal. This will come as no surprise to those familiar with Empire, his illuminating work that painted the British imperial system as Oliver Cromwell asked to be painted: warts and all. Ferguson's Empire offered a subtle argument--that no better substitute had been evolved to promote freedom and prosperity in the world.

Indeed, as the son of a defunct Western empire, he seems to recognize the stench of decay. And it is not obvious that his nostrils are leading him astray. The only consolation to be found is in the fact that the future is, as Ferguson knows very well, no sure thing.

--Source

Edwardians in Colours

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Horsemaning

Horsemaning was a fashionable photography trend in the 1920s. But it seems that now fake beheading is experiencing a revival. (See more)

Moscow in colour, 1956

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Old pictures of Michael Jordan

Michael Jeffrey Jordan (born February 17, 1963) is a former American professional basketball player, active businessman, and majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats. His biography on the National Basketball Association (NBA) website states, "By acclamation, Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time." Jordan was one of the most effectively marketed athletes of his generation and was instrumental in popularizing the NBA around the world in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Candid Portraits of LA Drivers

Andrew Bush's Vector Portraits  series, which was shot in the ’80s and ’90s, documents people from all walks of life driving cars in and around Los Angeles — complete with incredibly detailed captions. From a guy engrossed in his book while flying down Interstate 5 at 64 mph to a couple caught mid-kiss at the intersection of Cahuenga and Hollywood boulevards. [via]

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Old photos of Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.

A childhood portrait of Albert Einstein and his sister Maja

Albert Einstein on his 75th birthday, March 15, 1954, in Princeton, New Jersey

Einstein visiting the observatory of Mount Wilson, which at that time operated the largest telescope

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Color photography of America in years before World War II [more...]

Bayou Bourbeau plantation, a Farm Security Administration cooperative. Vicinity of Natchitoches, Louisiana, August 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

African American’s tenant’s home beside the Mississippi River levee. Near Lake Providence, Louisiana, June 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

A crossroads store, bar, “juke joint,” and gas station in the cotton plantation area. Melrose, Louisiana, June 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Boys fishing in a bayou. Schriever, Louisiana, June 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Fish saler. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

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Color photography of America in years before World War II

Faro and Doris Caudill, homesteaders. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Connecticut town on the sea. Stonington, Connecticut, November 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Farm auction. Derby, Connecticut, September 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Children gathering potatoes on a large farm. Vicinity of Caribou, Aroostook County, Maine, October 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Trucks outside of a starch factory. Caribou, Aroostook County, Maine, October 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

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Classic Humorous Photos from Life Magazine [P.II]

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