Martin Meenagh blog

  The Civil War: Coverage and Coherence  These lecture notes have been cross-posted to my wix account.    I: The nature of History   If we begin at the beginning of things, history the writing and pursuit of history itself is the obvious starting point. By History, I mean to convey the nexus of professional, non-academic, personal, oral, social, and archaeological evidence and dispute which constitutes our understanding of the past. As a proven lawyer, I should also note that by evidence I mean the testimonial, circumstantial, forensic, and expert interpretation of the accretion of events. Counterfactual and inductive histories, which proceed from what didn’t happen, and from analogy and the perception of the observer as to what they think happened, aren’t really history, though they can be fun, and I feel duty bound to exclude them.   History is often called the Queen on the Arts. This idea, which emerged in the setting of the English traditi...

The new JFK documents are not going to show some great clear documented conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy. They will confirm, for those who look, what we already know officially. Lee Oswald was extensively tracked and sponsored, whether he knew it or not, by sundry intelligence and arms-length schemes before and during, 1963. Mexico City and Montreal were the centres of CIA-KGB activity in North America. Circumstantially the assassination was a conspiracy gone wrong as well as, separately, an example of one or two gone 'right' accompanied by at least five different, panicked, cover-ups. These cover-ups, and the events which followed from Kennedy's death, as well as the assassination, mark the beginning of American decline. The people involved are fascinating at every level, from Oswald, Ruby, and their crowd, to Kennedy, Dulles, LeMay, Kostikov, the lot. One day, the best book which could be written about the US twentieth century will centre on the afterm...

  Income inequality arises when different consumers have different incomes, and different people have different talents. It could also arise because of the source of income or the value of the talents. For instance, employees might have different incomes from each other because of different marginal labour products, different factor returns to their labour, or different elasticities of labour. People might have different skills for which there is a greater or lesser need and employers, or the purchasers of labour might have different demands. Equally, entrepreneurs often take greater risks than others, and thereby expect and receive greater rewards than those who do not take risks. There might be different factor returns to capital or land, which result in various levels of profit, dividend, or rent, for those who do not live by the return to their labour value. A functional market would bring all these diverse groups together as suppliers and consumers and would match their c...

  Economic problems are not easily attributable to any one source in history. The wealth of a country represents the hard work and productivity of generations, but also the financial technologies, resources, and natural advantages or disadvantages of a territory. Sometimes, things go wrong, either because of cyclical, monetary, fiscal, or market-based triggers. It is a fallacy to think of such things as planned, linked, or controlled in any real sense.    Nevertheless, planned events do matter. In 2022, the UK was facing the escalation of a stagflationary environment. This came after over a decade in a local and global monetary expansion which had caused a great deal of speculative and bubble behaviour across western economies. Running alongside the monetary expansion, caused by quantitative easing (which had saved the west from collapse just as the financialisation of assets after 1975, and the invention of derivatives in the 1990s, had done) was a post-covid supply ...