If you’re not aware, ARIA is a new and exciting science funding agency in the UK. It has been allocated over £1 billion and is structured in such a way as to insulate it from the political pressures and bureaucratic proceduralism that it is argued – quite credibly, in my opinion – have slowed down scientific progress. For example, ARIA can distribute grants outside academia, peer review, and outside the UK. It is explicitly modelled on the success of DARPA, the legendary research agency responsible for funding such activities as the existence of the internet. One of the characteristic features of the ARPA model is individually empowered programme directors, who in ARIA’s case each control budgets of around £50 million.

It’s too soon to say whether ARIA will be a success, but the vibes are good. Our friends at Works in Progress made this cool video about them.1

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To the best of my knowledge, me and Neil messing around will be the first presence by ARIA in the Republic of Ireland. This follows a storied tradition in our friend group of pursuing random curiosities until one of us accidentally does something important.2

ARIA states that their goal with the innovator circles is to “support individuals who want to convene their own informal, self-organised, technical peer groups”. I gather the idea is that intellectual history has been disproportionately shaped by close-knit social circles of exceptional talent. Insofar as one can help such groups coalesce and thrive, it’s one of the most useful things you can do. And the UK government apparently thinks I am among the top ten most qualified people to do this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ARIA provides funding, a scientific network, and capacity to support our subsequent projects.

The Fitzwilliam AI Circle will live alongside the Fitzwilliam Maths Circle and Fitzwilliam Reading Group. The AI Circle won’t be about ethics, philosophy, or safety; those things are important, but this is not the right outlet for them.3

We intend this to be much more than just another reading group.4 Starting this month, we’ll be meeting regularly for two sets of meetups. The first will be a journal club anchored around a core curriculum; we were inspired both by Ilya Sutskever’s list and Elicit’s list of foundational machine learning texts.5 You can read a more detailed (but tentative) reading list on our AI Circle GitHub. The second session of the month will be more hands-on: pair programming, implementing papers, and building things. We will also be able to provide some access to compute and other resources for experiments.

Each month will have a theme. For April, the topic is Foundations. The reading group will be on Saturday, April 25th, from 3pm, and we will be discussing:

1. Vaswani et al. (2017), Attention is All You Need

2. Radford et al. (2018), Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training

3. Radford et al. (2019), Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners

4. Bonus: Andrej Karpathy, Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT

April’s technical lab will be on Thursday, April 30th, from 6pm, and we will be implementing GPT-1 from scratch.

For May, the topic is Scaling. The reading group will be on Saturday, May 16th, from 3pm, and we will be discussing:

1. Kaplan et al. (2020), Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models

2. Brown et al. (2020), Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

3. Hoffman et al. (2022), Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models

4. Bonus: Richard Sutton, The Bitter Lesson

May’s technical lab will be on Tuesday, May 26th, from 6pm, and we will be reproducing the scaling laws for GPT-2 using Andrej Karpathy’s nanoGPT repository.

These papers are complicated and difficult to read. If they don’t make sense, we recommend working through a textbook; Neil and I are fans of Bishop and Bishop’s Deep Learning: Foundations and Concepts.

Future topics will include ‘reasoning’, ‘learning’, ‘interpretability’, ‘agents’, and ‘creativity’. We’ll also have a string of special guests.

One of the topics Neil and I are obsessed with is how passive reading is as a learning method, and how rarely people apply genuinely effective pedagogical methods. We are planning to run ‘pair studying’ sessions, inspired by this video of Dwarkesh Patel watching how insanely thoughtful Andy Matuschak is about reading a textbook.

Our hope is that our group will converge on a shared research direction. But we’re open to going wherever it leads us. We’re also looking for people from different backgrounds. If you are working on a difficult problem – in business, research, or policy – and you are struggling to solve it with current AI, you could be a good fit.

The main reading group will take place in Dogpatch Labs in central Dublin, with some larger labs and talks happening at the Baseline coworking space and in Trinity College Dublin. Many thanks to these generous venues. Later this year, we’ll also be running some events in Belfast; never fear, British taxpayer!

The Fitzwilliam AI circle now has its own section on The Fitzwilliam homepage. We also have a GitHub here.

Finally, the Fitzwilliam community has grown to be quite large, and WhatsApp has become a bit unwieldy as a communication platform. So we’ll also be creating the Fitzwilliam Slack. This will be a server with channels for the reading group, maths circles, AI circles, and general chatter.

If you are interested in joining, please send an email to sam@thefitzwilliam.com with a brief bio, and we can add you to the mailing list, Slack, and GitHub. The extremely rapid progress in AI is, in many ways, very scary, but it’s also terrifically exciting. I don’t think there’s any other period in human history where I’d rather be a young person with too much time on his hands. I look forward to seeing many of you there!

Sam Enright is editor-in-chief of The Fitzwilliam, and Innovation Policy Lead at Progress Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter here or read his personal blog here.

Although our regular in-person events (reading group, maths meetup) are all in Dublin, I am always surprised by how much of The Fitzwilliam’s readership is outside Ireland. According to Substack’s analytics, we have 129 subscribers in New York, which to me seems like a lot.

The meetup will be on Thursday, April 16th, in The Folly, a bar at the intersection of Greenwich Village and SoHo. It will begin at 6:30pm, and I will stay as long as people are still interested in chatting.

The Folly also serves food, including some vegetarian options.

I’ve only been to New York once before. Despite that trip’s brevity, it greatly enhanced my reading of The Power Broker.

If you are bringing friend(s) who have no idea who I am, you may want to point them to the Milton Friedman conference and Notes on Taiwan as examples of two recent essays I’ve written that I’d be happy to talk about. I’m also happy to answer any questions about Progress Ireland (currently accepting donations!).

You can RSVP to the Partiful here. If you have any trouble finding us on the night, you can send me a DM.

The official title we gave it was ‘The Fitzwilliam Seminar on the History of Economic Thought’. It was hosted at the Quadrangle Club, a spiffy faculty club on the University of Chicago’s campus in Hyde Park.1

My idea was to invite around twelve of my favourite thinkers in economics, philosophy, and intellectual history to show up on a Saturday, for a full day of focused group discussions about the life and thought of Milton Friedman. The event was divided into six sessions, of which I led one.

This format is my favourite way to learn about new topics. It’s great to have a commitment device to force you to read intensely in a given cluster,2 and you make intellectual progress remarkably quickly in the sessions if you have a “no dumb questions” policy. When I sent him a picture from my Friedman event, a friend messaged to say that I already lead his ideal post-AGI life. I suppose I can choose to take that as a compliment that I’ve achieved Aristotelian eudaimonia, or an insult that I don’t do any real work.

To get everyone up to speed, I assigned both general background reading, and also session-specific readings. For general background, we read chapter two of Tyler Cowen’s book GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does it Matter?3 I also nudged people toward reading Jennifer Burns’s biography from 2023.

Overall, I’m happy with how the event turned out. But in future, I’d like to run meetups that are focused on narrower questions, or for which there is more of a cumulative progression throughout the event in understanding a particular text or thinker. Friedman’s life was a bit eclectic for this to work.

This post is made up of my personal notes and reflections from each of the sessions; the presenters wouldn’t necessarily endorse every word. Naturally enough, the programming at a conference is often secondary to getting interesting people in a room together and talking to one another. We had lunch and dinner at Hyde Park classics Medici on 57th and Ascione Bistro, respectively.

Before the event, Matt Teichman also toured me around the University of Chicago’s archives, which contain some of the most historically significant artefacts in the modern history of economics. Most big research universities have absolute gems gathering dust in ‘special collections’, which I strongly recommend visiting. I’ll include some photos I took during my visit there.

Views about Friedman at the event ranged from being broadly sympathetic, to seeing him as “my life’s vague opponent”. Regardless of what you think of his political views, we should all be able to agree that Milton Friedman led a fascinating life. He made major contributions to microeconomics, macroeconomics, economic history, and statistics,4 and shaped policy across many countries. Despite being so vertically challenged as to almost qualify as a dwarf, Friedman was undoubtedly an intellectual giant.

Even if you know nothing about Milton Friedman, I hope this post will still be interesting. I include a table of contents below, if you would like to navigate to the part that you are most interested in.

Table of contents:

1. Kadambari Shah: Friedman in India

2. Sam Enright: Friedman’s monetary thought in retrospect

3. Rebecca Lowe: Friedman’s philosophy of freedom

4. Robin Hanson: Radical mechanism design and the Chicago school

5. Agnes Callard: Milton Friedman as a public philosopher

6. Sebastian Garren: The Chicago Boys and other strange bedfellows

7. Conclusion: Friedman as GOAT?

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Kadambari Shah: Friedman in India

Readings: Friedman on India.

To prepare for this session, Kadambari told everyone to read a short book, which compiles two sources. The first is ‘Indian Economic Planning’, an essay that Friedman wrote after a two-month visit to India in 1963, at a time when he was studying monetary systems around the world. The second is a memorandum that Friedman wrote for the Indian government in 1955. He visited India that year as part of a delegation from the Eisenhower Administration, which was advising the government of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, about the Second Five-Year Plan. That delegation was organised by the U.S. International Cooperation Administration, the precursor to USAID.5

The purpose of Friedman’s 1955 visit was to have a more market-leaning force to counterbalance the left-wing economists who had been advising India, many of whom, like Nicholas Kaldor, were members of the Fabian Society. Kaldor – who every economics student knows from his namesake efficiency – advised Nehru on tax policy, and was a major opponent of Friedman’s monetarist views. (We will get to monetarism in section 2.)

We all thought that both of the texts did a pretty good job of diagnosing the problems with the Indian economy at the time. But to understand them, you need to know something about the economic philosophy of India at that time, which Kadambari did a great job of explaining.

The Five-Year Plans

Post-independence India structured its economic development through a series of Five-Year Plans. These were inspired by the five-year plans of the Soviet Union, which, despite many disastrous consequences, did achieve extraordinarily rapid industrialisation. India’s most recent Five-Year Plan didn’t end until 2017. China was similarly inspired to structure its development around Five-Year Plans, which it still does to this day.6

The economic analysis for the Second Five-Year Plan, which covered 1956 to 1961, was based on the Mahalanobis model. Nehru was widely criticised by Western economists for making such high-stakes decisions on the basis of an extremely simplified economic model, which assumed, for example, a closed economy. The export-oriented strategy that allowed the East Asian Tigers to achieve developed-country living standards was never even seriously considered for India.

Skipping over some details about how this model worked, Mahalanobis recommended extremely aggressive investment targets. The Second Five-Year Plan aimed to roughly double the investment-to-GDP ratio. It also recommended that around 60% of investment go to industry, up from 9% in the first plan.

Unless the savings rate increases, investment must be financed by borrowing from other countries. While there were efforts to increase the savings rate among the Indian public, they were nowhere near sufficient.

The new investments were financed through the monetisation of debt: The Reserve Bank of India (India’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve) purchased government bonds directly, which greatly increased the money supply and led to inflation. Debt monetisation is now banned in many countries, precisely because it is seen to create bad incentives for excessive inflation, as in India’s case.7

One of the few pro-market thinkers in India at this time was B.R. Shenoy, who was the sole dissenter on the advisory committee for the Second Five-Year Plan. Shenoy accurately predicted that the Second Five-Year Plan would lead to a spike in inflation, with prices increasing 30% over the course of the plan. This is compared with deflation under the first plan.

It almost goes without saying that Friedman thinks that this entire philosophy of economic policymaking is hocus pocus. P.C. Mahalanobis was a genuinely first-rate statistician: he founded the Indian Statistical Institute, the journal Sankhyā, and was close friends with R.A. Fisher. But when it came to economics, he was hopeless. It’s unclear why a government should target a specific investment-to-GDP ratio, and also unclear what would justify such a massive shift toward industry when agricultural productivity was still so low.8 Friedman writes of Shenoy with great admiration in both essays.

On the flip side, Friedman also writes disparagingly about Harold Laski, the socialist LSE economist who had a major influence on creating the Indian consensus in favour of central planning. Although he never travelled to South Asia, Laski was a mentor to Nehru and to V.K. Krishna Menon.

Beware cultural explanations

For much of the 20th century, India’s economic underperformance was regularly attributed to the legacy of colonialism, cultural factors, or an unfavourable climate. Friedman makes the point that an unfavourable climate could theoretically explain some of India’s underdevelopment in absolute terms, but it can’t explain why its growth had been so disappointing.9 Suppose, for argument’s sake, that due to unfavourable geography, a given country would ultimately stagnate at living standards 20% below those of countries at the technological frontier.10 That, by itself, is not a reason why said country can’t engage in catch-up growth to rapidly reach that (somewhat diminished) frontier. Raj Krishna famously dubbed the persistent failure of India to pluck the low-hanging fruit of catch-up growth “The Hindu rate of growth”.

The book we assigned had a short preface by Deepak Lal, in which he gets quite upset at Friedman for insinuating that the Hindu reverence for the cow is irrational. This is strange, because the original comment was made precisely in the context of Friedman arguing that Indian cultural particularities are not economically important. Agnes Callard pointed out an ambiguity here: there are two ways of reading the cultural critique;

1. Cultural norms are not significant.

2. Cultural norms are significant, but they are flexible, and downstream of policy.11

It’s still unclear to me which one of these Friedman believes. Just as Friedman didn’t really engage with race in his analysis of the US, his analysis of India doesn’t incorporate much about culture or caste.

In the session, I was contrasting this with how, in Ireland, people often say that one of the major obstacles to densifying is an Irish cultural attachment to homeownership. I’m inclined to think this is nonsense. For one thing, the Irish homeownership rate is frankly on the low end. For another, extremely strong price signals indicate that people would rather build and move into small apartments at much greater rates than they are currently allowed to. But I’m not sure whether the ‘cultural commitment to homeownership’ is toothless, or whether it is important, but is downstream of land use regulation.

The 1991 reforms

Why start a Friedman event with an India session?

For one thing, I have an inordinate fondness for thinkers who have random side interests in other countries, as with my essay about Keynes in Dublin.12 Tyler’s GOAT chapter about Friedman begins by considering his views on India. But this is idiosyncratic: Friedman’s writings about India are slim pickings. He would not have claimed to be an authority on the Indian economy.

But, more importantly, while Friedman on India is a tiny part of his intellectual influence, it’s a massive part of his practical influence. Maybe even the majority. That is because Friedman was perhaps the strongest international voice against the suite of economic policies adopted after Indian independence, including price controls, hefty tariffs, and restrictions on foreign direct investment. When the Indian government faced a balance of payments crisis in 1991 and had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, economic policy was rapidly reformed under Finance Minister Manmohan Singh in Friedman’s intended direction.

I don’t know how influential Friedman, in particular, was in India. Part of the point of a project that Kadambari works on at the Mercatus Center, the 1991 Project, is to disentangle the influences on that critical moment in modern Indian history.

I will also note that, like everything else in economics, the significance of the 1991 reforms to unlocking India’s subsequent economic success is debated. Ramachandra Guha, in his otherwise masterful history of post-independence India, wrote about it far less than I would have expected. Still, it’s poetic that this model of change aligned so closely with one of Milton Friedman’s most famous quotes:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

I’m with Milton. As an economist wanting to influence policy, you need to have endless patience for repetition, waiting until a crisis. When such a crisis occurs, policymakers reach around for whoever has the most clearly articulated and developed plan in the rough vicinity of what they believe. (I suppose if you’re really unscrupulous, you manufacture the crisis to begin with, as Noam Chomsky would no doubt accuse Friedman of doing.)

The 1991 reforms marked the end of ‘License Raj’ (or Permit Raj). The stated purpose of License Raj was to protect Indian industry and promote self-reliance (swaraj). In practice, it meant that operating a business required navigating a thicket of complicated licenses and regulations, and even honest people needed to rely on bribes and black markets to survive. Indian bureaucracy is still infamous today, as when my own tourist visa there was rejected on five separate occasions for reasons of arcane proceduralism. But I promise, it used to be a lot worse!

The term ‘License Raj’ was coined by Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (‘Rajaji’), one of India’s founding fathers. Among other things, Rajaji led the Swatantra Party, which was one of the only sources of opposition to Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party. Congress has led independent India for most of its existence, and, for most of that time, has been ruled by Nehru’s immediate family. But ironically, the 1991 reforms were themselves implemented by a Congress government.

The whole sequence of events which led up to the reforms was completely insane. Congress’s heir apparent, Rajiv Gandhi, was assassinated by the Tamil Tigers during the 1991 election. That convinced compromise candidate P.V. Narasimha Rao to delay his retirement, and he was rapidly elevated to the premiership. A balance of payments crisis coincidentally happened at almost exactly the same time as the election, and so, coming to power, Rao had immense leverage to implement a radical reform agenda. One of my pieces of advice for developing country governments is: If you’re going to face a major crisis, make sure it’s early in your term.

Although India’s case is not as extreme in either direction as China’s, about three hundred million Indians have escaped extreme poverty since 1991. And if it is indeed the case that the ‘spirit of 91’ is responsible for India’s subsequent decades of solid growth, then it is one of the most important events in modern history. Again, it’s extremely hard to work out how much of this is due to individual thinkers compared with straightforward pragmatism or something else.

A good rule of thumb is that Friedman’s views about almost everything were so cartoonishly extreme that his favoured policies were adopted essentially nowhere, ever. However, at the margin, many policies shifted significantly in his preferred direction during his lifetime. The shift was perhaps most extreme in the case of exchange rate policy. Many emerging markets shifted to freer exchange rate regimes in the 1990s. While the Reserve Bank of India still intervenes to smooth out fluctuations in the value of the rupee, it is much closer to a free market than the previous fixed exchange rate system.13

I was pretty keen to talk to Kadambari about the extent to which India has ever had a tradition of market thought. In The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen repeatedly talks about the interfaith dialogues organised by the Mughal Emperor Akbar. He uses them to argue against the Hindutva talking point that secularism is a Western imposition on India. Could something similar be said about an appreciation for the value of markets?

The intellectual father of the 1991 reforms is sometimes said to be the trade theorist Jagdish Bhagwati, who later featured in episode two of Milton Friedman’s TV show.14 If Bhagwati is the father, then Shenoy is the grandfather. But it seems that the number of individuals who kept the flame alive is very small.

In the final part of the session, we discussed Devesh Kapur, who is well-known for highlighting that India has surprisingly high state capacity in ‘big-ticket’ areas (mass vaccination programmes, running elections) while being shockingly bad at providing many lower-level services (clean water, toilets). The 1991 reforms are a perfect example of this: swiftly and successfully executed in a way that set many macro variables on the right track, while proper micro implementation lags to this day. Personally, one of the reasons why I found this session, and India in general, so fascinating is that India’s performance has such a spiky profile for a country at its level of development.

As with most of the things that he writes, I didn’t get much of a sense of how Friedman actually felt about India. Aside from the 1955 and 1963 trips, he visited once more, briefly, in 1979, when filming for his television series Free to Choose. We will get back to that.

Kadambari Shah is a researcher at the Mercatus Center, who also works on The 1991 Project with Shruti Rajagopalan.

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Sam Enright: Friedman’s monetary thought in retrospect

Reading: Ben Benanke, On Milton Friedman’s 90th Birthday

Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper.

Robert Solow

You couldn’t have a Friedman event without talking about money.

I felt quite underqualified to be covering such a broad and important topic in my session. In preparation, I worked through volumes one and two of Milton Friedman and Economic Policy Debate in the United States: 1932–1972 by Ed Nelson. As the first monetary economist to write such a book, he spends the first chapter grumbling about how previous Friedman biographers have allegedly misunderstood the field.

I ran this session in the same style as my reading groups: By writing up short discussion prompts with questions about topics that I think I would otherwise forget to bring up. You can see all my discussion prompts here.

Before we got to the meat of the session, I reminded everyone that measuring how much money there is is actually extremely complicated. In school, you might have seen money defined as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. But this definition is implicitly relative to a timescale. We all agree that cash is the most unambiguous example of money. But there is a spectrum of how quickly other assets can be converted into cash, and how much of their value they lose in the process of doing so.

Thus, there isn’t really a definition of ‘money’, so much as there is a series of concentric circles which depend on your preference for liquidity. Arguably, if your time scale is unlimited, then anything is money.15 Exactly how the ‘monetary aggregates’ are constructed that quantify these concentric circles is a bit technical for this post, but I’ll put some details in a footnote.16

The Great Depression

In 1963, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz published A Monetary History of the United States: 1863–1960. This book presented, for the first time, a continuous monthly and annual time series of the money supply over the previous century. That alone was a monumental achievement, and transformed Friedman into a giant in the field. Despite doing the majority of the empirical work, Schwartz got far less of the credit; Friedman’s frequent coauthorships with women are one of the themes of the Burns biography.

The Monetary History is more famous not for presenting data, but because of its arguments about what caused the Great Depression. Friedman and Schwartz argue in chapter seven that the primary cause of the Great Depression was that the Federal Reserve allowed the money supply to shrink by around a third following an economic downturn in 1929. They failed to act as a lender of last resort, leading to a series of bank failures in the 1930–33 period. This entirely preventable policy error turned what would otherwise have been at worst an ordinary recession into a catastrophic depression. That depression became global through the collapse of the gold standard system, the mechanism of which they also detail at length in the book.17

This was a departure from the previously popular explanations, like that the Great Depression was caused by a stock market crash or an escalating global trade war. Obviously, the Great Depression was caused by lots of things, but Friedman-Schwartz represented a major shift in emphasis – one which has come to be largely accepted by economic historians.

The first thing I said about the Monetary History is that I quite liked the way it was written. The book came long before the credibility revolution or modern causal inference, but it has a lot of focus on careful causal and counterfactual reasoning. As was discussed in the reading, Friedman and Schwartz really only have four historical episodes to analyse. This does not pass econometric muster by today’s standards. Would the most influential book in the history of monetary economics pass peer review today? I digress.

The hero of the Monetary History is Benjamin Strong, who was the Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Friedman wrote that “Much of the success during the twenties” could be attributed to Strong.18 During the Strong era, the New York Fed was a particularly influential branch within the Federal Reserve System, and he was personally so widely respected that his views held a lot of sway. Benjamin Strong was a pioneer in the Fed using open market operations (the buying and selling of government securities) to move the interest rate.19 Previously, the main instrument that the Fed had to influence the money supply was the discount rate, which is the rate at which they lend to commercial banks.

Strong had a number of long-term health problems that led to his untimely death in 1928. That unleashed a power struggle between New York and the other branches. New York lost that fight, and the Fed in Washington went back to the old way of doing things. That meant that when there was a series of bank runs in the 1930s, the Fed didn’t provide nearly enough liquidity for the banks to survive.

For this session, the reading I assigned was a speech that Ben Bernanke gave at Friedman’s 90th birthday party. That was in 2002, soon after Bernanke had been appointed to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. The party took place in (drum roll please) the Quad Club, the venue our event was in! However, the sources I read were inconsistent about whether Bernanke’s talk in particular was in that building or in a lecture hall nearby.

I cannot think of any greater way to spend one’s 90th birthday than at an academic conference with all the leading thinkers in your field, where they talk about how right you were all along. The final line of Bernanke’s speech became famous:

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

Who were the monetarists?

One of the labels that is sometimes applied to Milton Friedman is ‘monetarist’. It’s a vague term, but one way of thinking about it is that monetarists think that the quantity theory of money equation is extremely important. This equation, MV = PY, is just an accounting identity, which states that the money supply (M) times velocity (V) equals the price level (P) times GDP (Y). However, monetarists believe that velocity is either constant or predictable, which turns this tautology into a useful predictive statement. For example, if the velocity of money is constant, then increasing the money supply by k% will increase nominal GDP (PY) by the same amount.

This is the basis of what is probably Milton Friedman’s most famous quote: “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. Friedman thought that the MV=PY equation was so important that he had a custom registration plate made of it. You have to admit, this is extremely cool.

The evidence for whether the velocity of money is in fact predictable is mixed. The correlation between inflation and the growth rate of the money supply is much weaker than you might expect in the short run. There are a zillion complicating factors to the idea that “if you just print more money, inflation will go up”. For a good overview of the influence of this tradition, I recommend The Monetarists by George Tavlas.

In my understanding, monetarism is why Friedman was such a strong advocate of gradualism. Friedman’s preferred system of central banking was to replace the discretion of the Federal Reserve with a constant monetary growth rule, in which the money supply should increase by a constant k% per year. The actual value of k is less important than the fact that it stays constant; he suggested 4%.20

The idea is that, even though it is made up of well-intentioned, intelligent people, the Federal Reserve Board is fallible. Part of the point of the Monetary History was to argue that, in effect, a discretionary Fed is a failed experiment; there were fewer financial crises in the period between the Civil War and the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 than in the period between then and when Friedman’s book came out. The effusiveness of Friedman and Schwartz’s praise for Benjamin Strong is precisely to make the point that the monetary system relied on having the right individuals in place. And a system that requires having the right individuals in place is a bad system. The Fed, Friedman says, ought to be based on predictable rules.

The irony of this is that, in political culture, the term ‘monetarism’ came to be associated with extremely sudden and unpredictable monetary shocks. If you talk to anyone who remembers political discourse in the 1970s and 80s, they will immediately associate monetarism with the Volcker shock. This was a decision from 1979 to let interest rates rise as high as they needed to go to reduce inflation, which was then in the double digits. This predictably led to a recession in 1981–82.

The Volcker shock was implemented through directly targeting (at least in theory) monetary aggregates. This was a shift away from the previous regime of targeting interest rates and toward the Friedman paradigm. Although he supported the general principle of the Fed controlling inflation through directly targeting the money supply, Friedman thought the execution of the Volcker shock was a mess.

The Fed’s experiment with directly targeting monetary aggregates only lasted about three years. The evidence about the effects of this policy is complicated and mixed.

Friedman had a reputation as an extremist. But, in monetary matters, he was an outlier in how much he favoured predictability and gradualism.

The natural rate of unemployment

In the 1960s, Friedman experienced a meteoric rise as an iconoclast. His first brush with public fame came in 1964, when he served as an advisor to presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. As an eloquent and erudite defender of outrageous ideas, the media loved Friedman.

But in the early 1970s, events began to vindicate Friedman, in a way that made him a figure of mainstream respect. For one, the Bretton Woods system – a quasi-gold standard in which USD was pegged to gold, and all other major currencies had fixed exchange rates to USD – broke down in 1971. Friedman had been predicting this at least as far back as 1953. But his greater vindication was ‘stagflation’, which is a situation where you have both high inflation and high unemployment.

Generally speaking, there is a downward-sloping relationship between inflation and unemployment called the Phillips curve. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, the ascendant framework in economics was Keynesianism. Under Keynesianism, at least as interpreted by Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, the Phillips curve is a long-run enough relationship that it can be treated as part of a stable menu of policy options.21 Policymakers can decide whether they would prefer to have high inflation and low unemployment, or low inflation and high unemployment, however they see fit.

So under Keynesianism, stagflation is impossible. When it happened anyway, it was so much the worse for Keynesianism. The reason why stagflation could occur is that it turns out the Phillips curve is only a short-run relationship.

In the long run, unemployment is determined by its ‘natural’ rate. The natural rate of unemployment is the rate that would prevail if expectations about inflation were accurate. It is determined by real structural characteristics of the economy: the friction to finding a job, union power, minimum wages, and so on.22

Friedman outlined this view in a famous presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1967. He warned that the expansionary path that the Fed was on would require accelerating inflation in order to continue boosting employment to the same degree. Getting back to normalcy would require a painful adjustment period in which both unemployment and inflation would be high, i.e. stagflation.

If the above explanation didn’t make sense, the best introduction to the history of economic thought I’m aware of is Trevor Chow’s Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney parody tweet. Friedman coincidentally came up with this idea at a similar time to Edmund Phelps, and the Friedman-Phelps natural rate hypothesis is now widely accepted at least in broad outline.

Reading how Friedman responds to these episodes is interesting. I figured that the early 1970s would be a good period to look at from the standpoint of intellectual history. One of the pieces I found from around then was a February 1973 interview about monetarism and other topics that Friedman gave in (of all places) Playboy magazine. It’s surprisingly detailed, and touches on many of the themes from my session.

However, the text of Friedman’s Playboy victory lap was not available online. This may lead you to ask: Did I enter multiple eBay bidding wars in order to track down the right issue for the Friedman profile? Yes, yes I did.

The profile begins by framing Friedman as the most original economic thinker since John Maynard Keynes – and also his intellectual nemesis. It’s one of the most poetic images in the history of economics that Friedman and Keynes were inverses of each other on so many issues. You would not be the first to notice that Keynes, as a British promiscuous aesthete giant, was the exact mirror image of Friedman, an American monogamous philistine dwarf.

Rebecca Lowe: Friedman’s philosophy of freedom

Reading: Capitalism and Freedom, chapters 1 and 2.

I was very pleased when Rebecca Lowe published a blog post about her session at my event. She does a better job explaining her views than I can, so I recommend you go read her post.23 In it, she lays out the groundwork:

In the first chapter of Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman considers which kinds of economic and political arrangements can and do protect and further individual and societal freedom. He begins by stating his opposition to a standard view about the conjunction of freedom and societal arrangements. He describes this standard view as combining the following four claims:

1. that politics and economics are “separate and largely unconnected”;

2. that “individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem”;

3. that all political arrangements are compatible with all economic arrangements;

4. that democratic socialism is an example of this compatibility (e.g., that Russian-type socialist economic arrangements would be compatible with American-type democratic arrangements).

So the standard view, as Friedman presents it, consists of two big claims (1 and 3), and two respective examples (2 and 4).

Friedman focuses on the two big claims, and claims instead:

1. that there’s an “intimate connection between economics and politics”;

2. that some combinations of political arrangements and economic arrangements are not “possible” (and indeed that democratic socialism is an example of an incompatible combination, at least if democracy involves “guaranteeing individual freedom”).

The rest of the chapter is aimed at persuading us of the superiority of the Friedman view.

My first question to the group was: Does anyone really believe the ‘standard view’? Perhaps it was more common in the 1960s, when under Khrushchev the Soviet Union was beginning to allow greater political freedoms, and history had not ended yet so decisively in favour of liberal democracy. But to me, it seems self-evident that your choice of economic system has implications for your political system, at least on average. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In the reading, Friedman also has a ‘historical’ section, for which his main conclusion is that capitalism is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for political freedom. Rebecca gives various arguments against Friedman, which I would again encourage you to read.

A representative passage from the early sections in Capitalism and Freedom will have Friedman argue that socialism doesn’t leave room for political dissent in the way that capitalism does. It is true enough that many (most? all?) attempts at socialism have involved unacceptable restrictions on dissent. But what to make of the idea that, under capitalism, there will be such large accumulations of wealth that (say) billionaires can fund think tanks and media organisations to parrot their positions, or that businesses can bankroll political campaigns which favour their special interests? I am somewhat less concerned than many people are about the alleged role of money in politics, but this is because of a contingent body of empirical evidence and arguments from political science. I certainly don’t think that such concerns can be dismissed out of hand. But Friedman just doesn’t engage with serious arguments for why capitalism might stifle dissent.

I don’t think you can understand why Friedman loves freedom so much without understanding that he thinks that the universe has an entropic force that pushes toward tyranny. In the long arc of human existence, freedom has been extremely rare. Most of the time, it never really had the chance to get off the ground. In some cases, it has collapsed due to malice and power-seeking. But in the most tragically ironic cases, respectable, well-intentioned people have voted away their freedoms. Friedman had no problem with people living in the kibbutz, or other entirely voluntary forms of collectivist living that restrict freedom. The trouble is in not having those voluntary restrictions on freedom spill over and influence the rest of us.

Striking and suspicious convergence

My first opinion about this is that Capitalism and Freedom is a very vibes-based book. I am sceptical that a priori philosophical theorising can get us very far here. Friedman doesn’t hold himself to the standards of analytic philosophy, despite writing as though he’s trying to.

Before coming to a firm view on the topic, I would want to engage substantively with the empirical literature from political science on the relationship between political and economic freedom. If it turns out that literature is crap, then we can fall back on vibes. But Friedman doesn’t seem to think this is necessary.

My second opinion echoes Stefan Schubert’s argument that multiple-factor explanations should not appear one-sided. It’s common in academic writing for an author to give a long list of reasons why some phenomenon was likely to occur. But, for a complicated chain of causation in which approximately everything is correlated with everything else, then at least some of the factors should make the phenomenon less likely, even if on net it was still made very likely. Schubert takes aim at science popularisers like Jared Diamond, who will purport to be “explaining” something like why agriculture first arose in the Fertile Crescent. Diamond does not mention any reasons why agriculture might have been less likely to arise in the Fertile Crescent, even though such reasons almost certainly exist. This makes it hard to tell when someone is just cherry-picking.

In Friedman’s books, we hear lots of reasons why largely unfettered capitalism makes X more likely, where X is some desirable goal. But we don’t hear a peep about the ways in which capitalism makes X less likely. I frequently agree with him that, on net, capitalism promotes X. But the key word is ‘net’. Realistically, the world is extremely complicated, and market mechanisms can both promote and inhibit various goals.

Economic theory has its place, but, to paraphrase Matthew 4:4, man shall not live by vibes alone. I think that you do often just need to be familiar with lots of contingent empirical details to thoughtfully opine on how important different factors are. This is related to my feeling that memorisation has been systematically undervalued in education, and that ‘just knowing a lot of things’ is an underrated characteristic of intellectuals.

Friedman was an extremist, not just in the libertarian philosophy where he landed, but also in thinking that all roads lead to Rome; every consideration and argumentative strategy seems to lead us to the same conclusion. Even when I agree with where Friedman ends up, I don’t necessarily agree with how he got there.

We were talking about this striking and suspicious convergence with Ben Conroy, a philosophy PhD student at the University of Chicago. One explanation is that Friedman is a biased ideologue.24 But an alternative hypothesis, which logically would explain his views equally well, is that Friedman is just correct. In this case, it would just be that “reality has a well-known libertarian bias”. I leave the details of this as an exercise to the reader.

Efficiency versus equity

In economics, you’ll hear a lot about the equity-efficiency tradeoff. Intuitively, there are many cases in which helping resources be directed to their highest-value use (as measured by willingness-to-pay) will make particular groups worse off. Compared to philosophers, economists are incredibly vague about what they mean by the word ‘equity’. I take it to mean any goals we have about making the distribution of welfare more equal, separate from the absolute amount.

Essentially all of Friedman’s economic analysis is about cases where equity and efficiency happen to move in the same direction. For example, ‘Roofs or Ceilings?’ is a famous (ok, ok, “famous”) pamphlet he wrote with George Stigler, in which he argues that rent controls are bad for both equity and efficiency.

At some level, I agree that most people greatly overrate the equity-efficiency tradeoff. The benefits from the extra efficiency are frequently so large that the worse-off groups are small, if they even exist at all. There is some debate over what exactly Adam Smith meant by his ‘invisible hand’ metaphor, but at least one of its uses seems to me to be saying that equity and efficiency move together surprisingly often.

At the end of each episode of Free to Choose, there is a panel discussion, in which a group of distinguished guests debate with Milton Friedman in Harper Library at the University of Chicago. In episode five, his critics are probing into the tension between equity and efficiency. Even if we disagree about how often it occurs, it’s impossible to deny that there are some cases where equity and efficiency come into conflict; such cases seem like a worthy target for government redistribution. What to do then?

To Friedman, efficiency is almost synonymous with economic freedom. Freedom is fantastic at maximising the total amount of economic welfare. On the panel, Friedman’s critics eventually get him to admit that, if freedom led to increased inequality, then he would still favour increasing freedom. But he speaks of that as if it were a far-fetched hypothetical.25 They probe more about what to do in cases where you have to choose between freedom and equality, and he repeatedly dodges the question. He gets increasingly flustered, and eventually says “You can only serve one God”.

This was a funny quip. But as an actual philosophical position, it is completely stupid. Even Robin Hanson, the biggest contrarian in a room full of contrarians, was unable to defend it.

The idea that Friedman is philosophically naïve is perhaps the dominant view among the general public. Many people believe this, in that they believe Friedman was an absurd caricature who thought greed was somehow good, or that we should be unconcerned about helping the poor.

I sometimes joke with my friends that the worst people in the world are people who agree with you, but for different reasons. I think that Friedman’s philosophy is weak for reasons that are basically unrelated to popular perceptions about him. I had never really seen these weaknesses explored before, which is one of the reasons why I found this session (and event) valuable.

Rebecca Lowe is Philosophy Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center. You can read her Substack here or follow her on Twitter here. She is writing a book about what ‘freedom’ would mean in utopia.

Robin Hanson: Radical mechanism design and the Chicago school

Reading: Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, chapters 4 and 6.

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, which Milton Friedman coauthored with his wife Rose (née Director), was the book adaptation of his TV series. From it, Robin assigned chapter four (social welfare) and chapter six (education). Conveniently, the chapters in the book have the same numbering as the episodes, so you can also follow along by watching episode four (‘Cradle to Grave’) and episode six (‘What’s Wrong with Our Schools?’). Friedman used to say that Capitalism and Freedom was “The Old Testament” and Free to Choose was “The New Testament”.26 Together, they give you a broad overview of his worldview.

We had a good chuckle about the fact that Free to Choose is more intellectual than almost any TV show I can think, and that it aired on PBS, a publicly-funded broadcaster. Of course, media production is dominated by the private sector, and there simply was not much market demand to produce more of this kind of content. As Robin put it, the people voted, and “the people wanted slop”.

The negative income tax

Friedman was an advocate of abolishing the welfare system. The arguments against it are well known: welfare produces a perverse incentive for society’s poorest to avoid working, since they typically lose access to benefits after doing so. The purveyors of welfare also impose paternalistic conditions on their support, which (it is argued) keep people trapped in a cycle of poverty. When welfare is distributed through in-kind benefits, like social housing, it concentrates the most vulnerable members of society into a confined area, increasing crime and other social issues.

Free to Choose also claims that one of the worst features of the welfare system is that it led to a collapse in support of private charity. He claims that rates of charitable giving in the 19th century were much higher than they were in the 20th. I suspected that this would be another empirically dubious Friedmanism, but the 19th century really was a remarkable era of charity. Before the government was expected to be such a gigantic force in our lives, many of its social protections were provided through religious associations, friendly societies, and other mutual aid organisations.

Friedman’s signature proposal to replace welfare was the negative income tax (NIT). It works like this: the government provides a minimum income for all citizens, even if they don’t work. When you start to earn money, your income tax is paid at first in the form of deductions from the minimum income allowance. This is done in such a way that, at every income level, people have a constant incentive to continue working – a far cry from the highly non-linear and confusing incentives you face under a graduated system. Eventually, you’ll reach a breakeven point where the government is neither subsidising nor taxing you. Past that, you will finance the ‘negative tax’ for poorer people.

This is why people sometimes say that Milton Friedman was a supporter of a universal basic income. You can design a negative income tax whose payouts are mathematically identical to any given UBI. But, arguably, they are quite psychologically different. Under a negative income tax, the government only sends out cheques to people who are below the break-even point. Under a universal basic income, the government conspicuously sends out cheques to everybody, and its uniformity is one of the arguments most favoured by its proponents.

The way that he talks about it in the TV episode is that negative income tax would be a temporary measure, in order to phase out our current welfare system. But in the book version, he vaguely makes it sound like some amount of negative income tax would still exist in utopia. He clearly thinks that, if we had more economic freedom, the number of individuals who are so destitute as to need governmental assistance would be much reduced. But we genuinely couldn’t figure out whether Friedman thought of NIT as a temporary or permanent measure.

In a panel discussion, Friedman also predicted that, since welfare contains the “seeds of its own destruction”, the introduction of NIT was inevitable. To me, this seems like a bad prediction.

Welfare is one of the areas in which Friedman had the largest concrete policy influence. Richard Nixon attempted to pass a negative income tax in the form of the Family Assistance Plan (FAP) in 1969. There were enough exemptions from a ‘pure’ NIT that Friedman ended up testifying in Congress against it. FAP passed the House but died in the Senate, killed by a strange coalition of rightists concerned that it was too generous and leftists concerned it wasn’t generous enough.

It’s quite remarkable how close the United States came to having (a form of) universal basic income, largely because of Milton Friedman. Negative income tax also influenced the design of the earned income tax credit, which came into effect in 1975. While the EITC has some characteristics in common, real negative income tax has never been tried.

Many of the problems that Friedman describes (inner city ghettos, long-term dependency on welfare) were indeed very bad in the 1970s and 80s. He takes this as a sign that the whole system is inevitably going to collapse. But instead… things got much better. The crime rate fell dramatically. Poverty went down. Welfare was reformed to exclude long-term reliance, and, empirically, welfare fraud is rare.27 I don’t think we fully understand why so many American social indicators started trending in the right direction after the publication of Free to Choose, but I think that the verdict on welfare ended up being less dystopian than what they outline.

School vouchers

Friedman was also an advocate of abolishing public schools. Public schools are a monopoly: they are insulated from competitive pressure to deliver a high-quality “product”. It’s unclear why the government would have a comparative advantage in being the organisation to do the day-to-day running of education, and why the goals of public education can’t be achieved in other ways.

Friedman’s signature proposal for education policy is school vouchers: publicly-funded vouchers redeemable against the tuition at any school the parents choose. His advocacy for this was also very influential, helping to birth the school choice movement. Under school vouchers, the state funds education, but doesn’t provide it directly. Schools, if you like, are ‘contractors’ to provide education.

It bothers me when people act as if the answer is obvious about whether various state-subsidised goods should be provided directly by the government, or through contractors. This is the subject of one of my favourite economics papers, by Andrei Shleifer.

A close historical analogy to school vouchers is the G.I. Bill, the legislation which financed many returning veterans from the Second World War to attend higher education. Interestingly, the G.I. Bill allowed veterans to spend their vouchers at religious and other private universities.

What came next in the discussion was us suggesting a series of reasons why the state should provide education directly, and Robin telling us why we were wrong.28

Maybe the purpose of public schooling is to instil common civic knowledge and responsibility in future voters? This is difficult to square with the fact that most voters are extremely unsophisticated, and don’t even understand the basic functioning of government. Public schools might also be more propagandistic than private ones.

Maybe some parents cannot be trusted with decisions about their children’s education? There may be something to that. But why be confident that the government is so much more trustworthy? Perhaps I’ll write about this some other time, but I believe my own public education actively pushed harmful and ineffective pedagogy.29 Educational psychology is in a poor state; insofar as we do know how to teach well, I don’t see indications that this knowledge is consigned to specially trained and government-certified educators.

Maybe the purpose of public education is just to ensure that the entire population is up to a minimum standard of literacy and numeracy? The Friedmans’ position shifted on whether this means that a school voucher system needs to be supplemented by compulsory attendance laws. In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman says that all children should be legally required to go to school, because literacy has such large positive externalities.30

But in Free to Choose, the Friedmans say they’ve changed their mind. As I understand it, their claim is that compulsory schooling laws are unnecessary, because the free market already achieved near-universal levels of literacy before compulsory attendance laws existed.31

They largely rely on statistics from Massachusetts. But as we know, New England Puritan settlers were sociologically extremely unusual. Taking people called Ezekiel with fourteen siblings who learned to speak Ancient Greek before the age of five as the comparator group for what would happen in a free market in education is out of line from Ole’ Milton.32 Also, whenever you see a statistic about how the rate of school attendance was surprisingly high in the 19th century, this is misleading, because the school year was a lot shorter (as were the individual days). Here is GPT-5 contra the Friedmans.

There is a tradition of pro-market thinkers arguing that compulsory schooling laws were not nearly as effective as you might expect in raising literacy, numeracy, or educational attainment. The Friedmans are not claiming that the laws had no effect – just that a sufficient level of literacy to sustain a free and democratic society was achievable without them.

There is, of course, much to be said about all of this. Particularly spirited in this session was the economist Muireann Lynch. She also brought her fourth child, a sixteen-month-old, who was a big hit. I have faith that Muireann will eventually start a Substack and fulfil her destiny of becoming Irish Emily Oster.

Some of the disagreement between Muireann and others centred around whether the state has an obligation to provide a good, even if we somehow knew that all or almost all the same people would still receive that good under a free-market system.33 There does seem to be something virtuous about the state providing a guarantee of education, even if only a small number of individuals would make use of it.

I often wonder about how much time we should all be spending in discussions that feel like they are bottoming out in intractable differences in intuition. This was one such discussion. Agnes Callard once told me that the conversations that are most socially difficult can be the most intellectually fruitful. I suspect I’m a wee bit hasty to move on from topics if it doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere.

Finally, Robin summarised all of Friedman’s arguments about social policy in the following way:

Where’s the beef?34

Where is the actual argument for why there needs to be a welfare bureaucracy, instead of a guaranteed minimum living standard? Where is the actual argument for why the state needs to control education? To those of the Friedmanite persuasion, we can achieve acceptable living and educational standards without government control. And, if we don’t need it, why should we have it?

Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University who writes Overcoming Bias. You can follow him on Twitter here.

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Agnes Callard: Milton Friedman as a public philosopher

Readings: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue Show

I was first made aware of Agnes Callard by a three-hour shockingly entertaining philosophy seminar that she ran with her ex-husband Ben on “the philosophy of divorce”.35 It turns out that one of the topics over which she can bond with Ben is a mutual interest in Milton Friedman.

The first assigned reading for this session was probably Friedman’s most infamous essay, a New York Times editorial from 1970 in which he argues that the only ‘social responsibility’ that businesses have is to maximise profit. The piece is often cited as the apex of greed, neoliberalism, and anti-government demagoguery.

The opening lines of the editorial are legendary:

WHEN I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in a free‐enterprise system,” I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at, the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life.36

Friedman’s position seems to be that a corporation having any goals other than profit-maximisation is actively unethical. Now, there are certainly lots of reasons to be sceptical of corporate social responsibility. Sometimes, companies fund nonprofits that are engaged in political activities that benefit their industry (disguised lobbying). Other times, they do it to deflect attention away from their immoral or illegal behaviour. I think it’s also fair to say that excessive engagement by corporations in social causes has had negative externalities (the dreaded ‘woke capitalism’).

But still, if a company chooses to donate 10% of its profits to GiveWell, then I think that is fantastic. Quite likely, they will get outcompeted by a less ethical company, so it may not be sustainable. But Friedman seems to think that even this would be actively bad. How?

Much of this session consisted of us trying to reconstruct Friedman’s argument. But ultimately, I do think that it’s muddled. It’s not clear to me whether Friedman knows what Friedman is saying. There is evidence that he wasn’t happy with how the piece turned out.

Here is one attempt: Society is based on contracts, and you have a moral responsibility to uphold contracts. There may also be a ‘social contract’ or other contracts you have agreed to implicitly, but we won’t go there. Corporate social responsibility violates the contracts the business has both with the employee and with the shareholders, both in spirit and (if it were actually enforced) in the letter of the law.

Suppose I’m working for a startup that paid me largely in stock. I signed up on the assumption that the CEO would maximise my returns to the best of his or her abilities. Even something that sounds benign, like funding carbon offsets for the company’s activities, is violating the spirit of what we agreed to.

Why then, can’t we just have more specific contracts? Why not have an employment contract in which your employer will do their best to maximise profit, only after their carbon offsets? My sense is that employment contracts rarely have these kinds of specific carve-outs for corporate social responsibility. One of the challenges of the modern workplace is navigating that my employer may sacrifice an unknown amount of profitability to support social causes I may or may not agree with.

There are some interesting legal issues at play here. Fortunately, Anup Malani, who is a professor at the UChicago Law School, was able to explain a lot to us. There is a widespread urban legend that a board of a company has a legal responsibility to maximise shareholder value; some people even think that Friedman’s essay is partly responsible for this belief.37 In principle, the board can do whatever it wants, including firing the CEO for any reason. It’s common for shareholders to bring lawsuits against the board, but these need to be framed in terms of alleged fraud or negligence, not that the company generated insufficient returns.

What’s interesting is that, since the 1970s, the court system has been increasingly generous to the board and executives about how much charity and social responsibility they are allowed to engage in before it is considered negligent. If you sue the board of a company you own shares in because the CEO is squandering away all your profits donating to PlayPumps International, you are extremely unlikely to win. But, to the best of my knowledge, the underlying law (at least in America) hasn’t really changed.

I think it’s reasonable to be annoyed about this: companies play a very specific role in society and the legal system. Charities also play an important role. But in practice, we’ve been exploiting a legal ambiguity to partially outsource (particularly low-quality?) charity to corporations.

One of the difficulties is that it’s often unfalsifiable whether corporate social responsibility was actually profit-maximising after all. Signalling your allegiance to various charitable ventures might attract new customers, or employees who are willing to be paid less through a compensating differential. So I would expect the law surrounding corporate social responsibility to remain ambiguous.

Agnes’s eventual conclusion was that Friedman is burying an implicit normative judgement in this piece. Without admitting to it, he regards it as a virtue to “stand up for business itself”. Another moral intuition that kicks in for him is his hatred of the idea of spending other people’s money. When the CEO decides to forgo profit for social goals, he is not making an admirable personal sacrifice; he is making a decision on the shareholders’ behalf. That has the same issues as using taxation to support charitable causes. The fact that the cause is worthy is almost beside the point.

The case against Friedman’s “other people’s money” argument is that corporate social responsibility is priced in. If we say that a business is engaged in charity to the extent that it voluntarily forgoes some of its profitability, that should result in lower stock prices. The shareholders thus implicitly agree to corporate social responsibility, insofar as they bought the stock for a lower price than they otherwise could have. I’m not sure what Friedman would say in response to this.38

Friedman versus Smith

There are some peculiar turns of phrase in the NYT essay. Friedman says that businesses have a moral obligation to maximise profit “while conforming to the basic rules of society”. What are the basic rules of society? Doesn’t this just shift the buck, where corporate social responsibility is justified not by the particular relationship between the company and the shareholders, but between the company and society?

However, the remark we spent longer trying to understand was Friedman’s use of Adam Smith’s quote in The Wealth of Nations that “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good”. The original context of the quote is extremely specific: he’s talking about merchants lobbying for trade restrictions, while claiming that such restrictions benefit the national interest. It’s not some kind of general argument against corporate social responsibility, which is how Friedman seems to be quoting him.

Friedman studied Smith closely, and certainly knew the original context of the quote. Is he trolling? Is he saying that all attempts at ‘trading’ for the public benefit are ‘affected’, i.e. insincere? Is he saying that even sincere attempts to trade for the public good are bound to be counterproductive? We couldn’t quite figure it out.

In fact, one of Agnes’s most valuable contributions was in comparing Friedman to Smith. Adam Smith is an incomparably deeper and more sophisticated thinker. I’m not sure I can easily explain exactly how, without just encouraging you to read his original works and the write-up of my Smith conference. Smith manages the rare feat of being incredibly highly rated while still being underrated. I could believe that he is the GOAT.

The Modigliani-Miller theorem

In the next part of the session, we thought about corporate social responsibility in the context of a ‘market for altruism’. Anup happens to have a great paper on this topic from 2009.39

For background, he had to explain to us the Modigliani-Miller theorem. Stick with me here.

The Modigliani-Miller theorem says that the total valuation of a company doesn’t depend on the particular split between debt and equity financing. The basic intuition is that if a company leverages up (takes on more debt), the equity becomes riskier, because debtholders get paid first when the company makes money. But, in an efficient market, the expected return to equity holders increases to compensate for that extra risk. The two effects exactly offset, so the weighted average cost of capital doesn’t change. And the weighted average cost of capital is the rate at which future cash flows are discounted in the calculation of a firm’s value. Thus, the value of the company stays the same.

The Modigliani-Miller theorem rests on some strong assumptions; like most economic theory, the focus is on how reality differs and why.40

By Cowen’s second law, there is a literature about how to explain corporate social responsibility through the Modigliani-Miller theorem.

The basic idea is that investors get utility from two sources: personal consumption and a charitable “warm glow”. When you buy stock in a company that does corporate social responsibility, you are purchasing a bundle good: part financial investment and part charitable donation.

One paper about this proves that, if individuals view corporations and non-profits as equally competent suppliers of “warm glow”, then a change in a firm’s social policy will induce exactly offsetting changes in individuals’ personal donation decisions. Just as there is no effect on firm valuations by leveraging, there is no change in the aggregate supply of “good works” by corporate social responsibility. Capital structure is irrelevant because investors can choose how leveraged to be, and the “philanthropy structure” of a firm is irrelevant because the shareholders can do their own giving.

This analysis is considerably more sophisticated (dare one say more Chicagoan?) than Friedman’s original essay. And it might be completely the wrong model of why people support corporate social responsibility. It could instead be a commitment mechanism. I might find it difficult to build up the willpower to donate 5% of my income to charity every year. It may be psychologically easier for me to instead take a job in a more socially conscious company, that pays 95% of the wage.

The final comment I made about this was that, if Friedman were alive today, it would be interesting to hear his thoughts about the effective altruism movement. Many clever young people at some point get sucked into the libertarian blogosphere, when they have an epiphany amounting at some level to “the government sucks”. Many of those same people later get sucked into the effective altruism blogosphere, when they have an epiphany that “charity sucks too”.

The “government sucks” crowd make some good points, but, to my mind, they also have an unjustified faith in the efficacy of private charity. Not once did I come across a hint in Friedman’s writing that the charities that would supposedly spring up to provide services to the poor if his favoured policies were chosen might suffer from many of the same institutional problems as governments themselves.

Friedman’s public image

In Agnes’s session, we mostly focused on the NYT article, but the Phil Donahue interview she assigned is a gem. Friedman was absurdly quick on his feet, and talented at dealing with the media. Free market principles have never had such an eloquent defender on video and radio. He’s also a fine writer, if a bit plain.

In the Donahue clip, Friedman is always smiling and impeccably polite. In many of the Free to Choose clips, he’s funny and has the audience in the palm of his hand.

It’s hard to imagine any economics professor being as famous today as Milton Friedman was. Free to Choose was the #1 bestselling book in America. The TV show received millions of viewers per episode. The reason why I asked Agnes to run this session is because of her experience with and reflections upon public philosophy. If you want to understand ‘public economics’, you must understand Milton Friedman.

Agnes Callard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. You can follow her on Twitter here or read her Substack here.

Sebastian Garren: The Chicago Boys and other strange bedfellows

Reading: Notes on the Drama of Chilean Economic History

When we decided to host an event about Milton Friedman, one of the topics I wanted to cover was Friedman’s alleged influence on Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile. This is one of the most infamous things about him, and is a reason why he was often protested or even physically threatened in the latter part of his career. His acceptance of the Nobel Prize was also interrupted by protesters of Pinochet.

I am indebted to Sebastian for reading up on this topic in so much detail in order to present it to the group. He went above and beyond, and wrote up an excellent blog post recounting the economic history of Chile in preparation for the event. Sebastian also very kindly wrote about the Friedman conference in his annual letter. As a polyglot who teaches Latin and Greek to the students at his middle school in St Louis, Missouri – now enrolling! – Sebastian even brushed up on his Spanish for the purposes of our conference.

Sebastian started the session by asking us: Who are the dictators that are so bad that you wouldn’t advise them? If Xi Jinping offered you a job as his economic advisor, would you take it? What about Putin? Kim Jong-un? If Western academics entirely refuse to steer objectionable regimes in a better direction, won’t they get even worse? Who is helped by that?

On the other hand, won’t prestigious Westerners advising for a regime legitimise their cruelty and despotism? Is this, in fact, what Friedman did for Chile?

Pinochet’s coup

Everything I know about Chile’s coup d’état on September 11th 1973 comes from the Rest is History podcast series about it. In their account, it’s inaccurate to say that the CIA supported the coup. They had no idea it was going to happen. It’s true that the CIA supported “coup-like conditions”, as they did in many places. But Augusto Pinochet was widely regarded as a loyalist to Salvador Allende, the Marxist president who had been elected in 1970. There was a previous coup against Allende that Pinochet had been responsible for stopping, and as such, the CIA believed that Pinochet would actually thwart any coup they attempted. Pinochet was persuaded to participate in the coup only a few days before it happened, but quickly discovered that his personality was well-suited to being a dictator.

In a small detail which is revealing of the lack of attention people pay to recounting this story, almost everyone pronounces Pinochet’s name incorrectly: the ‘t’ is not silent!

The culture of the Allende regime was bizarre and fascinating. Allende’s promise of a Republic of “endless wine and empanadas”, along with a compliant central bank, resulted in annual inflation of over 500%. The finance minister, Fernando Flores, launched Project Cybersyn, an attempt to apply cybernetics to centrally plan the economy on a handful of IBM mainframes.41

In none of the critiques of Friedman’s alleged role in Chilean economic history did I see it mentioned that what Pinochet was replacing was a largely forgotten techno-utopian mathematised vision of communism. Flores’s cybernetic methods were cut from the same cloth as Leonid Kantorovich’s linear programming methods, which had led to a measure of success in calculating more sensible production targets in the Soviet Union. You have no idea how much I want someone to write a Latin American version of the novel Red Plenty about this.

After the coup, Flores was imprisoned by Pinochet’s military junta. When he was released three years later, he enrolled in a PhD in the philosophy of language from Berkeley under John Searle. He then co-authored an influential trade book about symbolic AI with the namesake of one of the most historically important tests of language model reasoning, before becoming a Chilean politician again. And he’s still alive! In retrospect, I wish I had invited him to our event.

The Chicago Boys

Sebastian told us that essentially everything that is commonly believed about Friedman’s influence on Chile is completely false. When I hear people bring up this example, they are usually not interested in the details of Latin American history. Rather, the story is used to score ideological points in one direction or another, typically aligning with some American culture war.

There is a garbled version of the story of Friedman’s role in Chile, which goes something like this:

The CIA funded a coup against Chile’s democratically elected socialist president in 1973. They (the CIA? The Nixon Administration? UChicago faculty? It’s never quite clear…) then dispatched a cadre of economic advisors – the ‘The Chicago Boys’ – who had been taught by Milton Friedman to set the economic policies for Pinochet. The Chicago Boys imposed unfettered capitalism/neoliberalism/the Washington Consensus on the people of Chile. Poverty, inequality, and violence resulted.

There are equally garbled right-wing versions of the story, but we will get to that…

The name ‘Chicago Boys’ makes it sound like Chile’s economic reforms were written or imposed by Americans. But love or hate the economic reforms of the Pinochet regime, they were implemented entirely by Chileans. The Chicago Boys were a group of around 25 to 30 young Chilean economists led by Sergio de Castro. They had been undergraduates at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, who then received graduate training in economics at the University of Chicago under an exchange programme. The exchange was organised by the International Cooperation Administration (the precursor to USAID), and largely funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

Ironically, Friedman was not even the most influential economics professor at the University of Chicago on this group. That title undoubtedly goes to Arnold Harberger. Harberger personally mentored many of the Chicago Boys, heavily promoted the exchange programme, and even married a Chilean. Yet few people outside economics have even heard of Harberger.

As a general rule, if inflation in your socialist Latin American country is 500%, and Henry Kissinger is whispering in the ear of Richard Nixon, the writing is on the wall that your days in power are numbered. As such, in December 1972, some old navy hands commissioned a group of economists to write a plan for how the military should manage the economy if they decided to take over.

In response, de Castro and his boys wrote El Ladrillo (‘The Brick’), a monograph which provided a roadmap for market reform.42 It recommended the elimination of price controls and tariffs, a floating exchange rate, and the establishment of central bank independence. The Chicago Boys unsuccessfully tried to get the conservative opposition to Allende to adopt El Ladrillo.

After Pinochet’s coup, the military junta immediately devolved into factional infighting. Much of the leadership was strongly opposed to privatisation and to ending price controls.

That is where Friedman enters. He visited Santiago in 1975, during which he gave some talks to businesspeople and military officers. The visit was organised by Rolf Lüders, who was the only Chicago Boy with whom he had a personal relationship. Friedman and Harberger also met Augusto Pinochet for 45 minutes – a visit that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Soon after, Pinochet decided to put the Chicago Boys in charge of running the economy, and appointed de Castro as Finance Minister.

The McKinsey theory of change

Friedman’s visit seems to have been just the push that Pinochet needed to put the Chicago Boys in charge of running the economy. Sebastian’s blog post is filled with bangers, and I strongly recommend reading the whole thing:

Like a CEO who wants to change the org chart and operational structure but first wants someone from McKinsey to tell him to do it, Pinochet and his military apparatus needed the little push from this famous outsider to hand over the keys to economic reform to Sergio de Castro and his American educated colleagues.

There are differing views about whether Friedman really was so important. Tyler Cowen agrees with Sebastian’s assessment.

At the event, we took to calling this general theory of the way that prestigious Westerners can have influence ‘the McKinsey theory’. The McKinsey theory is related but distinct from the crisis theory of political change we discussed in the India session. A prestigious outsider can break the deadlock between rival factions within an organisation.

As for whether Chile’s economic reforms were a success, that’s a complicated story. Noah Smith has a post arguing that Pinochet’s economic policy is vastly overrated. The record of economic performance under the dictatorship is poor. Chile has been relatively successful since the transition to democracy in 1990, but this can arguably be mostly explained by a copper-exporting boom.

Friedman made one further visit to Chile, for a meeting in 1981 of the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of free-market intellectuals. During that time, Chile was going through a severe currency and banking crisis as a result of an overvalued exchange rate. The economic woes of the early 1980s are often blamed on Friedmanite economics, but I don’t buy it. Despite earlier writing papers in favour of a free-floating rate, Sergio de Castro, for unclear reasons, hard pegged the peso to the dollar in 1979. Friedman, of course, strongly opposed this, and criticised de Castro in his memoir.

The first book to really get all the details of this story right is The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism by Sebastián Edwards. Edwards is a Chilean who studied at the University of Chicago, is close friends with Harberger, and was persecuted under the Pinochet regime. His credentials are impeccable. Edward’s book goes into detail about how much the Chicago Boys were aware of or participated in the tyranny of the regime. One argument against is that the head of the secret police, who was responsible for thousands of extrajudicial executions, was gathering intelligence on the Chicago Boys and was clearly looking for any excuse to kill them.

The legacy of the Chicago Boys is being debated once again in Chile. The current president-elect of Chile is the right-wing José Antonio Kast, who won the 2025 election against a communist. José is the younger brother of Miguel Kast, who was one of the Chicago Boys and President of the Central Bank under Pinochet. Like the rest of us, Chileans live in a world shaped by Milton Friedman.

Sebastian Garren is the founding director of a middle school in St. Louis, Missouri, where he specialises in ancient languages, mathematics, and ethics. You can read his blog here.

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Conclusion: Friedman as GOAT?

For someone who lived such a remarkable life, Milton Friedman could be rather unreflective. His memoir, Two Lucky People, which he coauthored with Rose, is extremely unilluminating. Milton was so tone-deaf that he likely had congenital amusia, which he does not think merits a mention. Two Lucky People has also fueled a lot of misconceptions about the evolution of Friedman’s policy views, such as a poorly phrased passage which makes it sound like he was previously a Keynesian. In Jennifer Burns’s account, Friedman’s free-market views cohered early: in the mid-1930s, when he was still in graduate school. On Tyler Cowen’s podcast, Jennifer Burns said one of the reasons why she ended up writing a biography was to “undo the damage” caused by Two Lucky People.

There were many other contributions made by Friedman which we didn’t have time to even mention at the event. Our least excusable omission was a discussion of the permanent income hypothesis. This is important enough that I’ll put some detail in a footnote.43 We also didn’t get to:

• Friedman’s influential campaign to abolish the draft and switch to a volunteer army.

• His work with Simon Kuznets (he of ‘Kuznets curve’ fame) on the effects of occupational licensing.

• His two other TV shows, in one of which you can watch a young David Brooks being converted to conservatism in real time.44

• His involvement with party politics, and advising of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.45

• His occasionally successful efforts to push for constitutional limitations on expenditure and taxes in various American states.

• His mentors in the ‘first generation’ of the Chicago school, such as Henry Simons and Frank Knight.

Friedman died in 2006, at the age of 94. Because he lived so long, he forms a remarkable link in the chain of the history of economic thought. He worked on creating a system to report economic statistics during the Great Depression,46 and was also interviewed by Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast.

In the book chapter I assigned, Tyler Cowen considers whether Milton Friedman should count as the greatest economist of all time (GOAT). Spoiler alert, but Cowen ends up dividing the GOAT title three ways, depending on whether you think of GOAT as the best economist qua economist, the best all-around thinker, or the most historically foundational economist. Friedman wins the award for the greatest economist of all time in terms of his technical contributions to the profession.

Despite Tyler’s praise, I find Friedman’s overall quality of reasoning extremely patchy. Friedman’s popular writings are peppered with empirical sloppiness, selective readings, and incuriosity. There were several great contributions to monetary economics, but they have only partially stood the test of time.

Friedman just isn’t nearly as interested in the details of how institutions work as I want him to be. In GOAT, Tyler recounts an anecdote about meeting Friedman in person and questioning him about certain empirical results that weren’t very favourable to school vouchers. He reports that Friedman brushed him off and essentially changed the topic of conversation back to clean economic theory. We were all unsurprised to read this.

On the other hand, the attempt to tar Friedman by association with the Pinochet regime is a smear. We don’t know for sure what Friedman and Harberger said in their meeting with him, but I would be shocked if it wasn’t just the exact same advice he had already given in public a thousand times. The legacy of the Chicago Boys is extremely mixed, as Edwards’s book documents at length. But it’s just false to claim that Friedman was particularly involved, other than during the brief 1975 visit.

My single biggest conclusion from reading Friedman’s monetary economics is that he was an iconoclast even in his core areas of expertise. It would be a well-trodden path for a serious economist who has made technical contributions to also have weird libertarian views about social policy and other topics basically unrelated to their research. But Friedman’s views on money were also fringe. Many turned out to be more right than wrong, but others (e.g. the k% rule) nobody takes seriously today.

The exploration reminded me of Scott Alexander’s essay Rule Thinkers In, Not Out. You can make an argument that public intellectuals are better evaluated not for the quality of their average opinions, but for the quality of their best opinions. There are a number of authors of boring airport books that I would feel relatively comfortable voting for to be president, or to be in a leadership position in an important company, even though they seem unwilling and/or incapable of escaping middlebrow. One attendee bemoaned that the University of Chicago used to be much better at producing high-variance thinkers, and that that vibrancy within economics has largely transferred to George Mason University.

What exactly is the point of events like this, where no one is expert enough to make a frontier contribution to the world’s understanding of a topic?

For one thing, with the passage of time, old thinkers might become relevant in new ways. Rebecca told us about what she has been thinking about the overlap between AI and the price system. Economics is the study of how decentralised systems adjust to changes, and we are about to, uhm, see a lot of that. We all thought it curious that Friedman emphasises the information-aggregating attributes of markets less than his contemporary F.A. Hayek.

For another, while I have found most ‘cross-disciplinary’ academic conferences I have been to have not lived up to their potential, if you make sure people are familiar with a core canon, it can work extremely well.

We would like to run more Fitzwilliam conferences in the future. Based on the feedback of the participants, I made lots of notes about how to improve. I have another one, about the early history of artificial intelligence research, planned for later in 2026. Long live the teeny tiny conference!

Sam Enright is editor-in-chief of The Fitzwilliam, and Innovation Policy Lead at Progress Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter here or read his personal blog here.

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was a half-Greek, half-Irish writer who grew up in Dublin, then learned his trade in the US before moving to Japan in 1890. He was extremely popular in his day – in the words of one commentator:

Hearn’s writing from Japan more than any other to this day has shaped Western perception of the country, taking on such a life in the early years of the [twentieth] century that it returned to Japan by way of the looking glass of the West and became determinative in shaping even Japanese perceptions of Japan.1

In the West, Lafcadio Hearn has been largely forgotten. If a non-Japanese has heard of him at all, it is likely as a meme historical figure that prefigured the reputation of white boys for having inordinate fondness for East Asia. Hearn was recently catalogued as ‘the first weeb’ on Noah Smith’s Substack. But in Japan – where he is known under his adopted name of Koizumi Yakumo – Hearn remains a standard part of the Japanese school curriculum as an important cultural figure in Meiji history.2

The marriage between Lafcadio Hearn’s Irish Protestant father and his Greek mother collapsed before he was seven. Young Lafcadio was shuttled between distant relatives and eventually crossed the Atlantic alone as a young adult, ending up homeless in Cincinnati before being taken in by a patron who encouraged his literary ambitions and helped him become a journalist – first in Cincinnati, and then New Orleans.

His early journalism was florid ‘true crime’,3 but in New Orleans his attention shifted to culture. Deeply interested in creole culture, language, and voodoo, he even published a collection of Creole proverbs and the first-ever published Creole cookbook. He embraced the Romantic belief in the wisdom and value embedded in folk culture, which at the same time was giving rise to the Gaelic Revival in Hearn’s native Ireland. He robustly defended policies that would help preserve ‘old-fashioned manners and customs’, such as pro–French language policies in Louisiana (a few years before the Gaelic League was founded to promote similar approaches).4 He brought the same attitude to Martinique and then Japan, where his prose tightened and his ‘sketches’ of the country became Westerners’ favourite source for understanding Japanese society.

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Hearn first travelled to Japan in 1890, on assignment for Harper’s Magazine. He soon broke with them, and his Japanologist mentor Basil Chamberlain arranged for him to get a job as an English teacher in Izumo in Shimane Prefecture. The Japan he arrived in was in the middle of perhaps the most rapid transformation of any in history – from isolated agricultural society to industrialised great power in barely a generation. Unlike Creole society in New Orleans, Japanese society was newly emboldened, confident, and powerful.

But Hearn approached this very different society with the same lens he had developed in New Orleans. He would later recall that on arriving in the country and first taking in his new home, his impressions were not of social change or industrialisation, but rather of Romantic ‘wonder’ and ‘delight’ at the natural beauty of ‘Japan as seen in the white sunshine of a perfect spring day’. Of course, it was inevitable that he would notice the rapid changes happening around him. But he continued to focus on the beauty and simplicity of what he called ‘Old Japan’, a culture that he idealised and that he worried was, like Creole culture in New Orleans, disappearing even before his very eyes. ‘What is there, after all, to love in Japan,’ he once wrote to a fellow Japoniste, ‘except what is passing away?’5

Among the exotic aspects of Old Japanese culture that Hearn ‘sketched’ for Western audiences were its traditional dress (which he himself adopted, along with a Japanese name); its class system with samurai and daimyo; its customs and sense of honour and morality; and its martial arts. One particular essay on this last topic used ‘jiujutsu’ as a metaphor for the way Japan had begun to compete against Western powers using Western knowledge and industrial techniques:

What Western brain could have elaborated this strange teaching, never to oppose force by force, but only direct and utilize the power of attack; to overthrow the enemy solely through his own strength, to vanquish him solely by his own efforts? Surely none! The Western mind appears to work in straight lines; the Oriental, in wonderful curves and circles.

The idea that there was an essence of eastern culture, standing in opposition to uniform western culture, could reasonably be called orientalist. But it wasn’t much different from the essentialised distinction between Anglophone and French culture that Hearn had used in his journalism in Louisiana,6 or the essentialised distinction between Saxon and Celtic culture that was developing in Ireland at the same time. It was all part of a broad Romantic approach to culture that was widespread throughout nineteenth-century Europe and America.

Although Hearn praised the Japanese for their ability to compete against the West using the West’s own tools, he was apprehensive that a focus on competition might lead the Japanese people to conclude that ‘there can be no development if we continue to follow our ancient morals and manners’. So, like collectors of fairy-folklore in Ireland, part of his mission was finding ‘survivals’ from the old culture: as Naoya Shiga put it, ‘Hearn interpreted Japanese things which have been forgotten by Japanese themselves…’7

It should be obvious that Japanese culture is more complicated than the Romantic cliché; and, when he was at his best, Hearn appreciated some of that complexity.

One of Hearn’s best essays, ‘A Conservative’, is a portrait of a member of the samurai class living through the arrival of Western trade, the opening of the country, and the Meiji Restoration. Faced with a whirlwind of cultural change, he begins to learn more about Western culture and becomes deeply impressed with what he sees as its scientific and commercial superiority. He begins to abandon his Old Japanese habits and customs, and even briefly converts to Christianity. But as he spends more time in the West and comes face-to-face with the squalor and poverty of industrial cities, he comes to believe that Western scientific and industrial might could not compensate for the moral emptiness of Western society.8

Hearn’s protagonist then formulates a new synthesis. Given the competition it faced from expansionist Western empires, ‘Japan would have to learn the new forms of action, to master the new forms of thought, or to perish utterly. There was no other alternative’: certainly not a return to isolationism. But Japan could try to compete in a way that maintained or even strengthened Old Japanese ‘ideas of right and wrong, of duty and of honour’. Japanese culture would have to change, but that change did not necessarily have to involve a repudiation of the deepest moral values embedded in that culture.

Having formulated this new creed, Hearn’s conservative returns to Japan again for the first time in many years; and upon seeing his homeland from the ship, ‘the lips of the man murmured again, with sudden new-found meaning, the simple prayer of the child.’

In ‘A Conservative’, Hearn clearly described a phenomenon that some of his other writings oversimplify. In late Meiji Japan, an emerging conservative nationalism sought to synthesise modernisation and tradition – to guide Japan’s rapid development in (what they thought of as) a distinctive Japanese way. Hearn grasped that the conservatives could simply preserve the old culture; what they were aiming to preserve was the old culture’s core values.

This distinction, between culture itself and the deepest moral values embedded into it, is helpful for understanding conservative nationalism anywhere. But Hearn all-too-often lost his grip on it, which hurt his understanding of Japanese culture. When Hearn wrote about watching ‘jiujutsu’, for example, what he was actually witnessing was judo – a martial art so recently-developed that it had not yet been widely accepted as distinct (hence the naming confusion), and which Hearn was learning about from the man who had invented it. To be sure, judo drew from traditional and ancient martial arts, but it was also something genuinely original; Hearn had the intellectual resources to understand this combination of old and new, but he found it too easy to fall back on Romantic clichés.

A more politically serious example is the ‘Emperor System’ that developed during the Meiji Restoration, when power was transferred to the previously-enfeebled emperor, and absolute loyalty to his sovereignty was stressed throughout Japanese life. Hearn missed its novelty entirely, writing about it as ancient – a logical outgrowth of Shinto ancestor-worship, whereby ‘[t]he power of the ruler was unlimited because the power of all the dead supported him.’

Losing track of these subtleties led Hearn into a few genuinely embarrassing blunders. Believing love of the Emperor was ancient and that modernisation was eroding it, he claimed that ‘the ignorant, blind indifference’ of the educational system was failing to ‘nourish the old love of country and love of the Emperor’ – in the face of all the evidence of Meiji Japan. Basil Chamberlain had to politely correct him with examples of newly-developed practices: ‘What of the prostration at New Year before the Emperor’s picture? What of the students’ military drill? What of the creation of such festivals as the Emperor’s birthday, the late Emperor’s anniversary, the 11th February?’9

How could Hearn have blundered like this? Part of it is that he just never became fluent in Japanese. This severely limited his research abilities, and meant that he largely relied on educated English-speakers for his information: as part of the conservative nationalism of the period, these Japanese elites generally stressed the ancient roots of modern Japanese institutions. But ‘A Conservative’ shows he could think more subtly; he was smart enough to have been more sceptical, had he felt the need.

But too often Hearn didn’t feel the need, because doing so would have meant questioning his foundational theoretical framework. If Hearn had one big idea, it was his belief that all social norms and ethics emerged out of a kind of ancestor-worship.

It would be easy to psychoanalyse Hearn’s obsession with the idea of ancestor-worship as a kind of overcompensation for the fact that, having been abandoned by his parents, he had little connection with either of his own sets of ancestors. You could also see an indirect influence from the great Irish political theorist Edmund Burke, whose defence of tradition in Reflections on the Revolution in France was rooted in the idea that society was a contract ‘between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born’.

But the more direct influence came from the English thinker Herbert Spencer. To modern readers who go back to his works, Spencer seems quite weird: his ‘evolutionist’ theory united biological and cultural evolution, but it gives the strong impression of being the brainchild of someone who had only heard the vaguest outline of what Darwin argued.10 But in his day, Spencer’s attempt to unite all the human sciences (history, philosophy, sociology, economics) in a grand synthesis was extremely influential, and Hearn was not alone in believing him to be the world’s greatest thinker.

Hearn was so in awe of Spencer that, when Spencer recommended that Japan should limit interracial marriage and bar the children of foreigners from citizenship, Hearn repeated these recommendations – despite having a Japanese wife.11

When Herbert Spencer speculated about the earliest, ‘savage’ state in human evolution, one thing he emphasised was the relationship between the living and the dead:

the savage, conceiving a corpse to be deserted by the active personality who dwelt in it, conceives this active personality to be still existing, and that his feelings and ideas concerning it form the basis of his superstitions.12

Spencer argued that savages feel an ‘unqualified’, religious deference to the ghosts they superstitiously believe in. As such, ancestor-worship forms the basis of savage law, morality, culture, and religion: ‘law, whether written or unwritten, formulates the rule of the dead over the living’. Spencer thought that this ‘tacit ancestor-worship’ persisted in some form in more ‘advanced stages of civilisation’, but that in higher and higher civilisations it gradually weakened through the ‘modifying of old laws and making of new ones’; the ‘highest’ civilisations inevitably tended away from ancestor-worship and towards a philosophical worship of ‘the Unknowable’.13

Lafcadio Hearn’s understanding of culture, religion, and morality was all rooted in this Spencerian theory. But Spencer’s ‘evolutionism’, which suggested that survivals from minority cultures were all so much cultural detritus to be cast away by progress, was in serious tension with the Romantic beliefs he had advanced in New Orleans. The tension came to a head in Japan, where he encountered a society that practised a form of literal ancestor-worship, which the Romantic in him implicitly wanted to protect but which Spencer seemed to predict would inevitably be cast aside by progress.

Hearn tried to resolve this tension by drawing on another of Spencer’s ideas, ‘organic memory’ or (as Hearn and others often called it) ‘race memory’. The idea is that each person, in a Lamarckian fashion, inherits unconscious ideas and knowledge from the experience of their ancestors. Hearn strongly emphasised the importance of this kind of unconscious interpersonal memory, and used it to justify ancestor-worship:

When we become conscious that we owe whatever is wise or good or strong or beautiful in each one of us, not to one particular inner individuality, but to the struggles and sufferings and experiences of the whole unknown chain of human lives behind us, reaching back into mystery unthinkable – the worship of ancestors seems an extremely righteous thing. What is it, philosophically, but a tribute of gratitude to the past – dead relatively only – alive really within us, and about us.14

Ancestor-worship was thus not primitive but an example of ‘the most powerful of all impulses’: the ‘race feeling’ by which ‘the dead become the masters, and the living only the instruments’. At times he argued that the forces of historical progress actually tended towards the wider spread of ancestor-worship. More often, he agreed with Spencer that historical forces could be hostile to ancestor-worship, but he insisted that this was a bad thing, and that it could and should be resisted by Japanese statesmen, like his celebrated ‘Conservative’.15 Ancestor-worship appears early in civilisational evolution, not because it is savage, but because it is foundational to culture and ethics and religion; culture must change and evolve, but we must try to ensure that this foundational principle is kept at its heart.

This big idea about ancestor-worship is at work repeatedly throughout Hearn’s writings. His last book, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, which essentially just passes the greatest hits of Japanese cultural history (the origins of Shintoism, the arrival of Buddhism, the severe Tokugawa legal system) through a Spencerian filter, declaring that ‘almost everything in Japanese society, derives directly or indirectly from this ancestor-cult’.

Hearn’s deep obsession with this one big idea (and with Spencerianism more broadly) often compromised his judgment about Japan, and explains many of his seeming oddities. Because Hearn thought that (along with ‘almost everything in Japanese society’) the emperor’s authority was rooted in a form of ancestor-worship, and he felt forced to believe that it must be ancient, a part of ‘Old Japan’ that would be lost in ‘New Japan’ if not carefully safeguarded.

What’s potentially surprising is that, in the Japan of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hearn’s arguments from ancestor-worship actually helped his reputation. He insisted that centralised imperial power was at the heart of what it meant to be Japanese, or downplayed the importance of Chinese influence on Japan as merely an ‘amplification and elaboration’ of existing ancestor-worship – in line with the key themes of conservative nationalism in the period. One commentator has suggested that ‘[t]here is very little in Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation… that would seem out of place in the works of the leading Japanese nationalist writers of the day.’16 And, in turn, Hearn felt sympathetic towards Japanese conservatism: he thought conservative nationalists shared his imperative, to defend the principles of ancestor-worship from the ‘revolutionary’ impact of modernisation and industrialisation. When Hearn’s work was translated into Japanese, this perceived fit with the political Zeitgeist was a big part of what made him popular.

Hearn’s interest in ancestor-worship had a religious as well as a political dimension. Like many who were influenced by Romanticism, Hearn looked positively on ancient paganism, and was amazed to arrive in Japan and find people building ‘pagan’ temples in the real world, rather than merely erecting them ‘[i]n some untrodden region of my mind’ (as Keats had resigned himself to). In response, and not that long after Madame Blavatsky and Paul Carus, Hearn was among the first to attempt a synthesis of Eastern religion with Western philosophy – in his case, reading Shinto ancestor-worship in terms of Spencer’s analysis of savage religion, and analysing Buddhist reincarnation as a ‘foreshadowing’ of Spencer’s theory of race memory. The Westernising of Japanese Buddhism would become a major trend in twentieth-century religious thought, and Hearn was genuinely there first.

But while both of these helped make his reputation at the time, they also hurt it in the long run, at least in the West. Hearn’s proto-New Age speculation is often as meandering and faux-deep as the New Age itself, and in today’s world doesn’t even stand out for uniqueness.17 And the implications of his politics would become increasingly worrying. In ‘From the Diary of an English Teacher’, Hearn describes himself telling one of his students that ‘it is your highest social duty to honour your Emperor, to obey his laws, and to be ready to give your blood whenever he may require it of you’. His advice to the Japanese people was that they should cultivate the ‘least amiable’ aspects of the national character, develop their ‘capacities for aggression and cunning’, and not let the country be ‘ruled by altruism’; this was the only way to protect the deepest values of Japanese culture from Western competition. In the 1890s and 1900s this may have seemed harmless enough; by the 1930s and 1940s, Hearn was increasingly dismissed as a useful idiot for Japanese imperialism, or as someone who had ‘gone native’ in the worst possible way.

Lafcadio Hearn first met Koizumi Setsuko (‘Setsu’) when he was working as an English teacher in Izumo. He had previously been married to a biracial women born into slavery in Kentucky, although not much is known about their relationship.18 Blind in one eye, Hearn had requested that a samurai’s daughter come be his live-in housekeeper, to manage his affairs and teach him local customs. She was 18 years his junior and, like thousands of other families, had been impoverished by the Meiji economic reforms that broke up the samurai class. Given his proclivities, it is no wonder that Hearn requested his home help be a window into Old Japan.

There is a case to be made that what followed is the most well-documented interracial romance of the 19th century. Setsu never learned anything beyond rudimentary English, and the couple eventually learned to converse in a broken pidgin: ‘Hearn-go’. A decade after his death, Setsu wrote a moving memoir about her husband, and last year a well-received drama series about them on Japanese TV received millions of viewers.

In 1896, by being adopted by Setsu’s parents and taking her name, Hearn became arguably the first foreigner in Japanese history to be naturalised. This involved revoking his status as a British subject, and meant that their four children would have legal status and be able to inherit property.19

Becoming a citizen was apparently not enough to save Hearn’s job as professor of English at the Imperial University of Tokyo, the apex of his teaching career. The university dismissed its foreign faculty in 1903, in line with the ‘Japanisation’ reforms that were phasing out the role of Western advisors in building up Japanese industry and academia. In the university, Hearn lectured his students on the works of Swift, Burke, Yeats, and Synge, and inspired the creation of Irish literary societies in Tokyo and Osaka.20 His replacement was the esteemed Natsume Sōseki, whose novels are still widely read and acclaimed today for capturing the ‘spirit of Meiji’ and its complicated tradeoffs in a way that Hearn couldn’t or wouldn’t.

If writers like Sōseki did such a better job at capturing that spirit, then what is the point of Lafcadio Hearn? If both his political and religious theories are of little interest to modern readers, and if he all-too-often subordinated his judgment to them, should we conclude that Hearn is justly forgotten in the West today?

I say no. There is a version of Hearn’s ‘big idea’ that still resonates. As Japan became more familiar, he turned from his direct impressions of the country to folk tales – perhaps inspired by the Gaelic Revival, he was trying to save some of the Old Japanese culture that he believed was dying. He was particularly fascinated by kwaidan: ghost stories.21

The flip-side of the idea that you ought to venerate and follow the wishes of your ancestors, is the idea that something might go wrong if you don’t. Hearn, just as much as Spencer before him, emphasised that the evolutionary process that gave rise to ancestor-worship also produced humankind’s near-universal belief in (and fear of) ghosts.22 Chamberlain said that ‘no one could understand Lafcadio Hearn who did not take into account his belief in ghosts’ – or, more accurately, his belief in the belief in ghosts.23

Hearn would ask Setsu to scour the country and its bookshops for Japanese-language ghost tales. She would then retell the stories to him, often in bed where he would react with great verve and fear, which egged her on to make the material her own – gauging Hearn’s reactions to emphasise some parts of the story and downplay others. Hearn then took the stories she had told him and made his own changes, finally writing them down in the English prose style he had honed.24

Given this process of Chinese whispers, the stories are often not worth much in the way of cultural preservation. But that’s not the point: the point is that they are good stories. Hearn’s ghost stories are sometimes scary, sometimes bloody, but always weird and unsettling, inflected with his own distinctive personal voice, which often butts into the narrative at opportune moments.

Hearn’s ghosts are rarely to be welcomed. His own authorial voice states in ‘Of Ghosts and Goblins’ that ‘the coming back of the dead is never a thing to be desired. They return because of hate, or because of envy, or because they cannot rest for sorrow.’ Outside of his kwaidan writings, Hearn encourages proper reverence for the dead as the foundation of all ethics and social order. But in ‘The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi’, the ghosts of the Heiké clan, who compel a blind bard to perform a song relating their story night after night, are draining his life force. The living have to respect the power of the dead, but also resist it. In the same story, the Heart Sutra is used as a magical talisman to ward off the ghosts – a far cry from Hearn’s official analysis of Buddhism, that it represents an embrace of our ‘race-memory’ of the dead.

The process by which they were written imbued Hearn’s kwaidan with all of the personal and intellectual concerns of Lafcadio Hearn himself. His interest in the stories was driven by nationalist assumptions about Japanese society, Gaelic Revival–style Romanticism, and Spencerian beliefs about evolution and ancestor-worship. But they were also filtered through his personal relationship with his wife and his own reactions of fear and excitement, and they were written in his own words with his own style.

Hearn’s work was filled with strange points of tension. He was a singularly individualistic freelance writer who insisted that the living should entirely submit themselves to tradition; an internationalist ‘citizen of the world’ who came to ally himself so deeply with nationalist politics; a believer in social evolution who nonetheless prized more ‘primitive’ traditions. In his own work, Hearn filtered all of these tensions through his ‘one big idea’, the fundamental question of how the living should relate to the dead. And only in his ghost stories is reverence for and worship of the dead properly balanced with fear of their power, of the dead hand of obligation and resentment.

Precisely because Hearn put so much of himself into the kwaidan, they (perhaps paradoxically) feel less burdened by his own assumptions and preoccupations. He allowed these stories to reflect the tensions that he himself felt with his ‘one big idea’, which he couldn’t put on show in his more analytical writings; and this diversity and open-endedness means they rely less on Hearn’s context and idiosyncrasies. His tightened prose style, his sense of horror and fear, and his deep concern with the ideas behind ghost stories all came together to produce tales where (as one critic put it) ‘the interactions between the living and the dead were determined not by some detached, metaphor-making sensibility but by the unruly passions of the dead themselves.’

And so the part of Lafcadio Hearn’s work that is still living – that has been adapted into a classic Japanese horror movie25 and given a Penguin Classics reissue – is that which is also most about the dead. His ambition was to interpret Japan for the West, and in this he largely failed: his Spencerian framework led him to mistakes that his contemporaries corrected and that history has not been kind to. But in the ghost stories, his rigid framework buckled under the weight of the tensions he was exploring. They remain genuinely uncanny, and absolutely worth reading.

Peter McLaughlin is associate editor of The Fitzwilliam and an Emergent Ventures winner. He writes the blog Her Fingers Bloomed. You can email him at peter [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com.

This is the story of how Ian Paisley tried to open an American front in 1985, just months before the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and why it failed in one small New Hampshire town.

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Early in September 1985, the Telegraph had gotten word that Ian Paisley was coming to town to support the newly established Londonderry Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which was led by a young pastor from North Carolina, Rev. David Brame.1 Londonderry was my beat. I’d just come back to the state after six months as a research intern for ABC News in London, writing briefs on Soviet arms talks and global famine, so the regional editor, John Haywood, deemed me qualified to do the initial reporting.

I was born in Nashua and grew up in nearby Hudson, so I knew my beat well. I was not raised in any church or synagogue, but I’d been to friends’ churches (Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox) on occasion. And so, when I arrived to interview Brame, I was both a reporter and in my usual mode of a curious, respectful visitor. I was naturally interested in the competing Presbyterian churches as well as the obvious question: why was Paisley coming to our little town when all the action was across the ocean? Was his visit really about a new church?

I thought that my articles from this time were lost to history, but I rediscovered them in the midst of a recent office move. They are being shared here, for the first time – a Fitzwilliam exclusive. You can read more of my reporting from that era on my substack Anecdotal Value. That piece also contains the full text of the articles quoted here.

The first story I filed about Paisley was as straightforward as I could make it. Just the facts:

Controversial minister in town only ‘to preach the Gospel’

September 12, 1985

LONDONDERRY – Ian Paisley – member of Parliament, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland and Presbyterian minister – will be speaking in Londonderry this month. The controversial fundamentalist is on a restricted visa and will not be allowed to make any political statements or answer questions about politics in Northern Ireland. He is here, according to the Rev. David Brame of Manchester, “to preach the Gospel.”

…Brame admits that Paisley is a controversial figure and that it is difficult to separate the political man from the religious man. “Dr. Paisley’s political involvement is with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland – that is a completely distinct thing from the Free Presbyterian Church,” Brame says. “They are not mixed, but very often that issue is clouded in this country.”

The small towns on my beat were all an hour or so drive north of Boston. Many families took the liberal Boston Globe instead of the more apolitical Telegraph or the cranky right-wing Manchester Union Leader. Boston politics mattered in part because of sports: in Southern New Hampshire, you root for the Red Sox, the Bruins, the Patriots, and the Celtics.2 Locals followed the Troubles just as we’d followed the ugly Boston busing riots in the 1970s. Everyone knew that down in Boston, Irish bars passed the hat for “the cause”, including support for the Irish Republican Army via NORAID. Boston’s own Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, was at the centre of a powerful Irish-American political machine.

O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Hugh Carey, the “Four Horsemen” of Irish-America, had formed the Friends of Ireland caucus in 1981. Andrew J. Wilson’s Irish America and the Ulster Conflict is a good book about the American political dynamics that were at play. Violence after 1969 and the hunger strikes in the early 1980s had disturbed Irish America. The Friends of Ireland used statements on the floor and hearings on aid to Ireland to push a line of constitutional nationalism, to condemn NORAID, and push the Carter and then Reagan’s State Departments to oppose arms sales to the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Their goal was peaceful reform in Northern Ireland.

New Hampshire was Reagan country. Everyone noticed that the year before, Reagan made a trip to Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, his ancestral home. In Washington, the trip signalled that Reagan was willing to treat Northern Ireland as a serious issue, to keep Irish-American leaders on side. Now safely in his second term, he needed congressional support for a new big tax reform bill he hoped to pass. More to the point, Reagan needed Tip O’Neill’s support. In 1985, Reagan’s team coordinated with O’Neill and Moynihan on supportive public statements for the emerging Anglo-Irish framework, even as they reassured Margaret Thatcher that the Special Relationship came first.

The Four Horsemen supported proposals for peace which involved giving some advisory role in Northern Ireland’s affairs to the government in Dublin. Whether Reagan had been persuaded by the Taoisearch Garret FitzGerald’s case for an “Irish dimension” during his 1984 visit or whether the Four Horsemen pulled him there afterwards can be debated. The Friends of Ireland used their leverage in Congress to argue that Washington should back a formal British-Irish agreement that preserved British sovereignty but gave Dublin an advisory role, and the White House signalled that such an arrangement would be welcomed in public when and if London and Dublin agreed on the text.

Thatcher was already moving in that direction in late 1984, despite her earlier dismissal of such proposals with her “Out, out, out” press conference in November. By late summer 1985, the document that would become the Anglo-Irish Agreement was being hammered out behind the scenes.

All of this meant that, by 1985, Paisley had good reason to feel a shift in political winds. Wilson’s book describes how unionist leaders came home from their Operation U.S.A. tour in 1982, admitting failure and bemoaning the “all-pervasive influence” of Irish nationalists in the American media and on Capitol Hill. London and Dublin were negotiating over unionists’ heads, with Reagan’s support. The usual combination of parliamentary obstruction and street pressure would likely no longer be enough.

So, in what seems like a Hail Mary play of desperation, someone decided to organise some political theatre in a small New Hampshire town.3

Ian Paisley was a global figure by the mid-1980s, but he wasn’t very well known in New Hampshire, except as someone vaguely right-wing, outspoken, and anti-Catholic. I’m not sure I could have told you much about the Democratic Unionist Party, which he had founded in 1971. In those pre-internet days, I learned what I could in the local library, and I called up my friends at ABC News. Paisley had made a career of saying “No” to any initiative that involved bringing Northern Ireland and the Republic together. He had helped sink the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974.

Why Londonderry, New Hampshire? Because Londonderry was settled in 1719 by Ulster-Scots emigrants from County Londonderry. Nearly every small town in the region reflected its heritage, and Londonderry was Scots-Irish. But Nashua was a mill town filled with French Canadians who had come down to work in the mills along the Merrimack and Nashua River. I grew up seeing signs reading “On parle Français ici” in Nashua into the 1980s. You might see that in Pelham, but you wouldn’t see it in Londonderry or nearby Derry. Derry is Robert Frost country, the poet of “good fences make good neighbors”, whose mother immigrated from Scotland and whose father was a descendant of leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from the 1630s. Apparently, someone sold Paisley on the idea that Londonderry would be welcoming soil.

In New Hampshire, Derry and Londonderry are separate towns. But it was darkly poetic that the town Ian Paisley chose shares its name with a city subject to Northern Ireland’s most infamous naming dispute.

The theory, in retrospect, was simple. The “Irish-American” identity of St. Patrick’s Day parades, green beer, Tip O’Neill, and the Kennedys was Catholic and urban. Paisley’s people believed there was another history. They wanted to activate the descendants of the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who had settled frontier America, fought in the Revolution, and then disappeared into the generic category “WASP.” Unionists had kept the spark alive in Orange lodges and Scotch-Irish societies in places like Pennsylvania. There were small groups that put on Twelfth of July parades, wrote letters to the editor insisting there was no discrimination under Stormont, and tried to counter what they saw as an anti-unionist bias in American coverage of the Troubles. None of this ever amounted to an organised constituency, but there was enough activity to suggest the idea that a hidden Ulster Protestant America was still out there. Londonderry, New Hampshire, looked like promising ground for that revival.

If those communities could be reminded of their Ulster roots and make the public case that the Friends of Ireland spoke only for only some Irish, a new diaspora political constituency might come into being: one that backed Ulster unionism, and could lobby Washington to give Thatcher reason to rethink, rather than push her toward Dublin.

In 1951, as Brame told me, Paisley had founded the hardline evangelical Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. He met Bob Jones Jr. in 1962 at an anti–World Council of Churches conference in Amsterdam. They were both Cold War fundamentalists, fiercely anti-Catholic and anti-communist. Paisley preached at the Bob Jones University Bible Conference in 1964 and came back to Greenville, South Carolina, often. Over the next twenty years, he built a small North American network, with the Rev. Alan Cairns running an extension of the Free Presbyterian theological hall in Greenville and training American ministers who went on to plant churches in other states. By the mid-1980s, there were congregations in Florida, Georgia, Arizona and California.

After meeting Brame, I went to see what Roland Westerveldt, the pastor of the other Presbyterian church, the Londonderry Presbyterian Church, had to say. My piece on that conversation appeared the same day:

Paisley’s Londonderry visit ‘an insult’

September 12, 1985

LONDONDERRY – “Paisley speaking here is an insult to the people of Londonderry,” says Roland Westerveldt, pastor of the Londonderry Presbyterian Church. “I’m sorry to see this happening.”

…“Paisley’s speaking here during our 250^th celebration is probably a coincidence,” admits Westerveldt, “but if it wasn’t, I would resent it.” Westerveldt said he didn’t think Paisley’s presence in town would affect the mood of the celebration, and he hasn’t decided whether he’ll speak out from the pulpit against the Northern Ireland minister.

“I may read something about our work in Northern Ireland. We support a retreat center, Cory Meela [sic], in Northern Ireland, where Roman Catholics and Protestants work and talk together about solving problems.”

Not having any affiliation with a local church benefited me in getting everyone to talk.

I understood that Paisley had been having visa problems, which had only recently been solved. The State Department had long seen Paisley as trouble. In late 1981, Séan McManus and the Irish National Caucus, backed by the Friends of Ireland in Congress, lobbied Alexander Haig to revoke Paisley’s visa, calling him a preacher of “the gospel of bloodshed” and warning that his tour would inflame sectarian hatred. The State Department eventually ruled that his presence would be “prejudicial to the American public interest” and cancelled the visa, which provoked editorials across the United States defending his right to speak.

But the Reagan administration, always keen to contrast with the Soviet Union, was aiming to promote religious freedom abroad. Turning away a visiting Protestant minister might undermine the rhetoric.

By 1983, a compromise was reached: a narrow, religious-only visa. Paisley could come to Bob Jones University or to a Free Presbyterian church, he could preach, but he could not legally use the visit to make the unionist case or raise money. It was under these constraints that he came to Londonderry.

Over the few days following my story, pressures were mounting. The Highlander Inn and Resort cancelled a block of reservations for Paisley’s meetings “without explanation.” When I called for comment, the manager did not return my calls.

The Catholic Diocese of Manchester stepped in too. The Rev. Francis J. Christian, the diocesan chancellor, issued a statement. “It is our fervent prayer that Ian Paisley’s presence in New Hampshire, and the foundation of a community which subscribes to his misguided principles, will have no lasting negative impact upon the citizens of our state.”

On Sunday, September 15, I attended services at the new church. I was determined to get an interview with Paisley. I also seem to have done some good reporting that week. I spoke to the FBI and must have spent time in the library researching Paisley’s past U.S. visits. I filed this on Friday the 20^th, the day before Paisley’s arrival:

Minister hopes Paisley visit will be trouble-free

September 20, 1985

LONDONDERRY – “We’ve been fortunate so far,” said the Rev. David Brame during Sunday’s church services. “Let’s pray things continue to go smoothly.”

Members of Londonderry’s newest church, the Free Presbyterian Church of [Ulster], hope that the Rev. Ian Paisley’s four-day visit to this area does not spark any trouble… [C]hurch members have been wary of Londonderry’s proximity to largely Catholic South Boston and any protests the visit might cause.

FBI spokesman John J. Cloherty said nothing had come to the bureau’s attention about any problems stemming from Paisley’s visit.

I was walking a fine line, reporting on the past but not presuming anything about the future. I recall driving around, scouting the sites, figuring out where protesters would be, if they showed up. The venue had moved to a tent on the property of prominent local attorney Henry Paul, on Litchfield Road, in Londonderry.

Sunday, September 22, was the first sermon, under a white tent on Paul’s property.

“They have shaken hands with the devil”

Monday, September 23, 1985

LONDONDERRY – Nearly 100 protesters chanted, sang, decried and swore outside the “old-time Gospel tent” on Litchfield Road where fundamentalist Ian Paisley preached the first of his four scheduled religious services.

The protesters, some of whom traveled from Boston, New York and Canada to voice opposition to Paisley’s religious and political beliefs, were kept apart from those in the tent by half of the Londonderry police force, who maintained a strong presence throughout the evening.

Carrying placards and waving flags, the crowd, many calling themselves supporters of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, harassed those who came to hear Paisley speak, broadcasting their hostility through bullhorns before and during the one-hour service.

“There is a terrorist among you!” cried one protester. “Next you’ll be inviting Hitler and then Idi Amin to speak here!”

“Ian Paisley is the greatest bigot in the world,” said Nashua resident Mike Conway.

“He spews hatred and is responsible for the continuing bloodshed in Northern Ireland,” said Conway, a native of Limerick, Ireland.

Paula Cunningham, who was raised in Belfast, shook with rage as she spoke of her loathing of Paisley. “Every Irishman and Irish-American disagrees with Ian Paisley and disapproves of America granting a visa to him. They have shaken hands with the devil.”

Buses had arrived from Massachusetts and New York. Most demonstrators were Irish-American. Some carried the Confederate flags and banners linking Paisley to the Ku Klux Klan and South African apartheid. Police tried to keep the two groups apart; two men were arrested.

Outside, I took notes on chants, signs, and conversations. Inside the tent, I allowed myself to experience the raw power of a revival meeting.

Under that tent in Litchfield Road, the mood was electric. Paisley’s voice rose and fell. Hands went up. People shouted responses and sang with gusto. The protesters’ megaphones were audible from a distance, but inside the tent, they were part of the background noise rather than the main event.

I was there as a reporter, but I was also watching and half-participating in an unfamiliar form of worship. I was approaching the story as a kind of Method reporter, acculturating myself to the room that I was in, seeking to understand. I note now, however, that I did not get to know any protesters beyond quoting their slogans.

I did, however, talk to the town leaders I’d gotten to know all week:

Officials walk the yellow line

Monday, September 23, 1985

LONDONDERRY – Town officials walked the yellow line on Litchfield Road between protesters and worshippers last night during services conducted on the property of Henry Paul by the Rev. Ian Paisley.

“And that about tells our color,” quipped Selectman Norman Russell, who, like other town officials, had “no comment” about most of Paisley’s or the protesters’ views.

“The U.S. government gave him the visa,” said Town Administrator David Wright, discounting the protesters’ claim that Londonderry was responsible for Paisley’s presence. “The town had nothing to do with his visit here.” He added that the town had nothing to do with the protesters’ visit either.

“This is what democracy is all about,” said Russell, saying the protester have a right to protest and Paisley has a right to preach.

“True,” agreed Wright. “But it’s going to result in a lot of excessive expense.” He cited the cost of the extra police on duty and the other safety precautions.

On Monday, I was invited to meet Paisley at Henry Paul’s house after his second sermon. I suspect my earlier coverage made me seem safe to his circle: I was seen as interested, not hostile, and willing to quote people at length. I hadn’t asked any questions about the larger political context.

The visa restrictions meant Paisley could not hold a press conference or make any political statements in public. And so, sitting in a private living room with a respectful local reporter, I knew I was a vehicle for him to get a different message out. At the time, I still wasn’t fully grasping what his goal was. It was clear that whatever Paisley was selling, there were few buyers. I had, of course, wanted to bring up Reagan and Thatcher and peace. I also wanted to bring up Robert Frost, and I’d memorised ‘Mending Wall’ while driving around, hoping to work it into the conversation somehow. But I did not. Flipping past the notes I’d taken an hour before, I simply let him speak, asking for clarification, writing down his banter with his hosts.

My story was the lead headline the next day:

Paisley fires own charges: Explains stand in interview

Tuesday, September 24, 1985

LONDONDERRY – The Rev. Ian Paisley laughs at protesters who accuse him of fascism.

“Fascism is the child of Roman Catholicism,” he said. “Hitler and Mussolini were both devout sons of the Roman Catholic Church.”

The fiery Northern Ireland pastor and political leader also criticized those who are protesting his series of sermons here, and rapped the World Council of Churches as “shot through with Marxism.”

… In the relaxed atmosphere … Paisley spoke freely about his religious and political positions.

…Paisley said the Free Presbyterian Church of [Ulster] was founded because the Irish Presbyterian Church and other once-fundamental churches were becoming too “liberal.” He said that his objective as a minister of the Free Presbyterian Church, as a Member of the British Parliament [and] for the European Economic [Community] is to stop the spread of liberalism and the weakening of Reformation principles, and to speak out against the Roman Catholic Church.

Ian Paisley was first elected as a Member of European Parliament in 1979, and served there until he stepped down in 2004.4

“I know lots of people don’t like me,” he said of his leadership role in Ulster as a member of Parliament. But I received the largest vote – a quarter of a million people voted for me – the largest vote ever recorded for a British politician living or dead.”5

…Paisley said he draws a lot of criticism for his views, and takes many unpopular stands. “I’m anti-liquor and against the liquor shops,” he said as an example. “I believe the consumption of intoxicating liquor destroys men’s homes, their families and their minds. Drink is a curse.”

…Paisley spoke of being imprisoned by Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill6 for protesting the general assembly of the Irish Presbyterian Church. He said he had been protesting a series of pro-ecumenical, pro-Catholic resolutions being put before the assembly.

It was as a result of being put in prison that he got into politics7 and won the seat in Parliament that once had belonged to O’Neill, he said.

Paisley also spoke of the Free Presbyterian church’s disassociation with the World Council of Churches. He said the church had pulled out of that organization and the International Commission because the groups are part of a trend toward liberalism and away from the teachings of the Reformation.

…Paisley said that the liberalized Protestant churches are falling prey to the Roman Catholic Church. He said the Church of Rome is losing out very rapidly in many areas of the world, but is more powerful in Presbyterian areas where the teachings of the Reformation are weakening.

“The Roman Catholic Church here (in the United States) is powerful because the ecumenical pastor is willing to do everything the priests tell him to do,” Paisley said.

He asserted that many representatives of the World Council of Churches are Catholics from behind the Iron Curtain, and said the council is “shot through with Marxism.”

…After mention of the two protesters, Paisley asked Paul whether they could go to the Police Department and ask that charges [for disturbing the peace] not be pressed. “They did it in ignorance,” said Paisley.

“Civil and religious liberty is basic to the Presbyterian church,” he said.

…Paisley, Paul and Cairns discussed the fact that no Roman Catholics had come out and protested the protesters, most of whom they said appear to be supporters of the Irish Republican Army.

“They should condemn them,” said Paisley.

“By their silence, they have supported the IRA,” said Cairns.

…“You have brought a murderer to Londonderry,” cried Paisley to Paul, mimicking the cries of the protesters and teasing his hosts.

Beyond weighing how I might pose a question about global politics, I was thinking of the ugliness of what I was seeing and hearing. Nobody I knew spoke the way he did about other people’s religions. I understood bigotry, of course. But what I was hearing in Henry Paul’s living room was so far out of the local norm it was hard to process. And so, I barely pressed him. I recorded what he and his hosts and supporters said and tried to get it onto the page accurately. I did not challenge his historical claims about fascism, Catholicism, or the World Council of Churches. I did not ask what it meant for a man on a restricted religious visa to use a local newspaper to make his case.

The next day, I also filed a story of the sermon he preached, before the interview, and the protests.

Dozen protest second Paisley service

Tuesday, September 24, 1985

LONDONDERRY – About a dozen protesters showed up last night to voice opposition to the second of Ian Paisley’s four scheduled religious services.

The protesters, armed with an accordion, a drum and a tambourine and many loud voices, kept up the chants of “Paisley out, peace in!” during most of the service, but seemed disillusioned as their ranks diminished and the crowd inside the tent grew.

Francis Curran of Methuen said it was important they show opposition to Paisley. Another Methuen man said, “We think he’s raising money for the Ulster volunteer force.”

…Following a number of hymns and a talk by Dr. Bill Woods, a missionary from Brazil, who spoke about meeting Ian Paisley 25 years ago, Paisley rose to speak.

He said another Protestant had been killed last night, shot dead by a member of the Irish Republican Army. He also said 18 churches had been bombed, burned and destroyed this year by the IRA, and added, “That same spirit is outside this tent.”

Paisley spoke for nearly an hour, calling on Jesus Christ to “Dispel the power of the enemy.” He spoke of the Lamb of God, and said “All have sinned and came short of the glory of God.” Paisley also condemned those who take part in religious rituals, and said God calls the rituals “filthy rags.”

“God is not a rag merchant,” he boomed.

“You don’t get to heaven by paying silver and gold to any priest,” he continued, and challenged that today’s religion is “Subjective instead of objective.”

… “If you look inward, you’ll be miserable. If you look around, you’ll be more miserable,” he said, with a glance toward the protesters, which caused the crowd inside to chuckle. “You have to look to Jesus,” he intoned.

The weather was not in Paisley’s favour. Heavy rains turned the tent site on Litchfield Road into mud, forcing the final service on September 25 to be relocated to the Londonderry Baptist Church on Mammoth Road. The next day, Paisley departed, and the story shifted from theology and Irish history to police overtime. On September 26, I filed “He brought trouble, God’s word,” and on September 27, “Paisley’s gone, but Londonderry won’t soon forget.” Town Administrator David Wright told me the visit had cost $2,375.10, mostly in extra police duty.

At a Board of Selectmen meeting, there was a brief discussion about whether to pass an ordinance limiting protests at religious services. In the end, there was no appetite for it. Instead, on October 1, I reported that Londonderry had decided to send the Free Presbyterian Church a bill for the $2,375.10 and to issue commendations to police officers who had “demonstrated exceptional professionalism during the four days of protests.” The motion passed unanimously.

And, as expected, the Free Presbyterian Church refused to pay.

There is virtually no record of Ian Paisley’s visit to Londonderry, NH, in the standard history of his role in the events leading up to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. I found one wire report from 1985 that incorrectly stated that Paisley “refused to talk with reporters after the sermon.” Wilson’s book ends in 1995, characterising Operation U.S.A. as a propaganda defeat that left unionists enraged, convinced that Irish nationalists had fully captured the American media and Congress. Wilson notes in a footnote that Paisley later preached in Londonderry, New Hampshire, prompting a symbolic campaign to rename the town “Derry.” I saw no evidence of that.

The Londonderry, NH moment is little known because, in the grand scheme of things, nothing happened. Paisley’s Hail Mary effort to spark a new American front in the Northern Ireland conflict failed. The people of New Hampshire were more interested in co-existence than co-conspiracy.

The strategy depended on three assumptions: first, that there was a dormant Ulster-Scots “identity” in New England that could be reactivated. Second, that American fundamentalist Protestants would, if given an invitation, treat Paisley as an ally. And third, that a carefully managed “religious” visit could get around his visa constraints.

I did not interview Henry Paul at the time; he died in 2009. His obituary tells the story of a WWII veteran who stormed the beach at Normandy, served under Patton, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. After the war he married, became a devout Christian, taught the Bible, served on the Board of Directors for Bob Jones University, and raised five children, the youngest of whom married the pastor David Brame. I found and reached out to Rev. David Brame last month, who said politely that he was “not really interested” in a conversation about those four days. I respect his right to move on.

My reporting shows how from the beginning, the local Presbyterians saw the whole thing as a matter of outside agitators disrupting a long planned 250^th celebration. The comparison of Rev. Westervelt’s language of bridge-building, interfaith cooperation, and community relations with Paisley’s rhetoric about Rome, Marxism, and fascism couldn’t be clearer.

Yes, there were people worshipping energetically under the tent, but none of this translated to political action. The only political voices were the protesters who saw Paisley as a bigot. The FBI and the town leaders saw him as a costly problem. My articles ran in a regional paper; the national press never picked them up. There was no national uproar.

Seven weeks after he left New Hampshire, Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough Castle. Paisley responded with the “Ulster Says No” campaign and a mass rally at Belfast City Hall. That was his real arena.

I’ve been thinking about those four days for the last forty years, wondering if I could have done more with the access I had. Looking back now, I think that simply chronicling what happened – and how it blew over so quickly – had its own value.

Hollis Robbins is a professor of English at the University of Utah. You can subscribe to her Substack here or follow her on Twitter here.

三年一小反, 五年一大亂

Every three years an uprising, every five a rebellion.

—Xu Zonggan (1796–1866), governor of Taiwan

Earlier this year, I went to Taiwan for two weeks. It was my first time in East Asia.

I received a warm response when I posted my travelogue from South India, so I thought it would be a good idea to also write one for Taiwan. We deemed it to be of enough general interest to run it on The Fitzwilliam instead of my personal blog.

I made sure to have layovers in mainland China on either side of the trip, in Shenzhen and Beijing. They were a fascinating few days in their own right, but I will save my notes about them for a future time when I have, I hope, a longer China trip to write about.

I went to Taiwan to work as an instructor for the Asian Spring Program on Rationality. The title ‘instructor’ is a farce; among other things, the students were only a few years younger than me.1 They were also a great deal more intelligent; an appreciable fraction have medals from competing in international mathematics and science olympiads. Insofar as I can defend my presence there at all, I’m reminded of Steven Pinker’s description of the purpose of nonfiction writing: Write not because you think you are smarter than your audience, but because there is something you have seen that, for whatever reason, they have not yet come across, and you wish to share it with them.

At ASPR, I taught ‘morning classes’ about causal inference and an area of philosophy called anthropic reasoning. I also ran various afternoon and evening activities, including a Miles Davis listening salon, a tutorial for my spaced repetition system, an overview of Newcomb’s problem,2 a Tang dynasty poetry reading,3 a logic puzzle competition, and a workshop about why so many episodes of The Simpsons have covert mathematical interpretations.

People sometimes ask me what these ‘rationality camps’ are actually about. I am reminded of that old quip about how to define mathematics: ratcamp is that which is of interest to ratcampers.

Those of you who read my lecture notes at the time might be wondering why it took me nine months to prepare this travelogue for publication. Concretely, I got massively sidetracked by finishing university, having a job, and other projects. But, at a deeper level, it took me so long to finish this for the same reason I am not more productive in the other spheres of my life: I can’t stop going down Wikipedia rabbit holes about Chinese history.

In preparation for the trip, I read Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan by Jonathan Clements.4 I found that via Russell Hogg’s podcast, where he often discusses East Asian history and culture. Another recent writer of a Taiwan travelogue is the author of Pimlico Journal, who was a source of helpful recommendations.

I also read Oliver Kim and Jen-Kuan Wang’s excellent paper reassessing the conventional wisdom (popularised by Joe Studwell and others) that land reform was absolutely central to Taiwan’s postwar economic boom. The first draft of this essay contained a gigantic tangent about that, which I partly relegated to Links for February.

For obvious reasons, Taiwan often comes up in the news. I assume that Taiwanese get sick of their home only being brought up by Westerners in the context of Cold War 2.0 and/or thermonuclear annihilation. This is one reason why some of the other travelogues I read rubbed me the wrong way. For my trip, I hoped to surface some of the lesser-appreciated aspects of Taiwan in the West. Here are my notes on that attempt.

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Getting to Taiwan

Logistically, travelling to Taiwan is as easy as anywhere I’ve been. Travel to mainland China and to Taiwan is currently visa-free for Irish citizens for 30 and 90 days, respectively.5 The flights are not unreasonably expensive either; now is a good time to visit. It’s much easier for me to go to Taiwan than it is for Chinese citizens, who require a special permit.

This is in contrast to Taiwanese people, who can visit the mainland relatively freely. One of the topics that sometimes comes up on Drum Tower, The Economist’s China podcast, is the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party to sponsor Taiwanese tourism and other cultural efforts aimed at ‘soft reunification’. But, as we will see, the question of how unified China and Taiwan ever were to begin with is a fraught one.

Taipei’s nearest major international airport is in Taoyuan, which is to the southwest of New Taipei City. New Taipei is mostly postwar sprawl, and as such is less interesting than Taipei proper.

Taoyuan Airport is completely bizarre. The gates all have different themes, often including video games or other popular media, such as Hello Kitty. It is explained well in this Instagram video. I waited while sitting in a canoe (!) at a gate themed around Taiwan’s indigenous population.

At first, I was cynical about this, but Taoyuan is just about the only airport I’ve been to that was meaningfully differentiated from the others. The gift shops were also unusually high-quality, and I picked up some nice chopsticks for my friend.

Once I arrived, I had fast internet anywhere I went on the island, with help from an eSIM serviced by Chunghwa Telecom. This is, of course, a far cry from mainland China, where every service essential for navigation and communication has been banned and/or is inaccessible without a VPN.

Demographics and identity

Taiwan has a population of about 23 million. Of those, 97% are Han, which is the ethnic group that makes up around 90% of China itself. Despite this, Taiwan is quite diverse by Chinese standards. People have settled in Taiwan in successive waves from all across China, and it breaks down approximately as follows:

• 70% Hoklo: Descendants of immigrants from Fujian province, who speak Taiwanese Hokkien. If someone refers to the ‘Taiwanese’ language, they probably mean the Taiwanese dialect of Hokkien.6 Migration from this community picked up in the 17th century.

• 15% Hakka: People from the Central Plains of China, especially Henan, who speak Hakka. They arrived slightly later than the Hoklo and settled more in the mountainous and interior regions.

• 12% Wàishěngrén (外省人): ‘Blow-ins’, the descendants of the Nationalist army and their families, who retreated to Taiwan in 1949. This group numbered about 2 million. They are more likely to speak Mandarin and are contrasted with the pre-existing běnshěngrén (本省人) population. You’ll be hearing much more about them later.

• 2% Indigenous groups: The ethnically Austronesian people who dominated the island until the 17th century, after which they were gradually displaced by Chinese immigrants.

• 1%: Other.

It is interesting to speak with young Taiwanese about which of these groups, if any, they most identify with. Much like Hong Kong, Taiwan’s history has led many people to selectively exaggerate or downplay certain aspects of their ethnic and cultural heritage. For example, 64% of Taiwanese nationals now identify only as ‘Taiwanese’, as opposed to ‘Taiwanese and Chinese’ or just ‘Chinese’.

Interestingly, everyone I spoke to (Taiwanese and non-Taiwanese) was under the impression that the Wàishěngrén are a much larger group than they actually are. Some people at camp guessed that over half of the Taiwanese are descendants of retreating soldiers from the Chinese Civil War. I assume this is yet another example of how people are terrible at estimating the relative sizes of salient population groups, like how Americans think there are literally 15 times as many Jews as there actually are.

On not speaking Chinese

In Taipei, you can get by only speaking English, but it becomes tougher the more rural you go. About 30% of Taiwanese people speak English to some degree, but fewer than 10% are fluent. The use of English has also been actively promoted by the Taiwanese government through the 2030 Bilingual Nation campaign. This is in contrast with China, which has been putting less emphasis on English in education recently. Proficiency in Mandarin is almost universal, although ~85% of families also speak Taiwanese Hokkien or another dialect at home.

The use of the term ‘dialect’ in China is farcical. As the old saying goes, a language is a dialect with a navy, and the Chinese government has a significant political incentive to downplay linguistic diversity. Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka are not mutually intelligible. It is indeed unsurprising that the group which has made up between a third and a fifth of all human beings, depending on the century, speaks many languages.

All of which is preamble to saying: Probably the biggest effect of this trip for me personally was to make it salient how much I really wish I knew how to speak Chinese. Most of the time, when I hear someone tell me about the ostensible benefits they got from learning a language, they justify it with Whorfianisms about how ‘language shapes how you think’ which I think has been convincingly refuted by modern psycholinguistics. But Chinese really seems different. Owing to the censorship, the internet has not necessarily had the same homogenising effect on Chinese people as it has had elsewhere. Even with rapid machine translation, there is an enormous amount that still feels incomprehensible about China without being able to chat with people. It depresses me that it supposedly takes over 2,000 hours for an English speaker to learn Chinese, and it depresses me even more that I would have gotten half of the way there in the time I spent playing Team Fortress 2 as a teenager. On the other hand, the latest generation of AirPods has a real-time translation feature, so it seems like the value of language-learning is falling precipitously.

The Chinese for ‘thank you’ is xièxiè (which to me sounds like ‘sheh sheh’). This is one phrase where Taiwanese have a distinctive pronunciation, and when Nancy Pelosi visited the People’s Republic of China in 2015, she pronounced it in exactly the Taiwanese way, inspiring pearl-clutching and fury from Chinese nationalists online.7 A week in, I was still being self-conscious, and cluelessly saying ‘thank you’ to people who didn’t speak a lick of English. Jinglin Li8 roasted me: “Sam could probably tell you when the Ming dynasty was down to the year, but has been here a week and still hasn’t figured out how to say ‘thank you’.”

I have a bizarrely disproportionate number of Western friends who speak Chinese to a reasonable level of proficiency. I recently had a friend stay over whose last name is ‘Zhang’, who is being helped in brushing up on her Mandarin by her white boyfriend, which is perhaps a sign I’ve been spending too much time in the Bay Area. It is utterly incomprehensible to me how they learned it, and it seems that only complete immersion would work. I have considered when and if my medium-term life goals are achieved – Ireland has abundant housing supply and/or we have aligned AGI, whichever is easier – applying to the Schwarzman Scholarship, and moving to Beijing. (If you feel strongly that this would be a good or a bad idea, email me.)

The great linguist of our friend group, Oisín Morrin, has also been trying to convince us to start a Fitzwilliam Mandarin study club. I’m sure the thought will please those of you bemoaning that our meetups about international trade economics and recreational number theory aren’t niche enough.

Divided by a common language

The first thing I noticed after I arrived in Taipei was that the English language versions of the street names are written confusingly on Google Maps. It seemed that different streets, which I thought represented the same concept or location, were being transliterated differently.

You might innocently ask: ‘Why?’ Like everything about Taiwan, understanding the answer will require a monstrously complicated digression.

It would be great if there were one universally agreed-upon way of phonetically converting the sounds of Chinese into the Roman alphabet. This is helpful for foreigners, who can track when the same concept is being referenced and know approximately how to say it. It also allows Chinese people to type on a Western-style keyboard. It would be impossible to have enough keys to represent all of the thousands of characters in the Chinese writing system, in which one character represents one morpheme.

Since 1958, the main way of doing this has been a system called Hanyu Pinyin.9 There are different tradeoffs with transliteration systems; pinyin was designed primarily to promote literacy within China, and is actually quite unintuitive for English speakers (why are there so many x’s?!).

The creation of Hanyu Pinyin was an example of that rarest thing in history: Chairman Mao actually doing something good. The adoption of pinyin allowed Chinese people to type in a standardised way, and thus the introduction of keyboards and the computer wasn’t complete chaos. If you’ve noticed Chinese names having different spellings in old books (e.g. Mao Tse-tung vs Mao Zedong) and/or containing suspiciously many apostrophes (e.g. T’ang dynasty vs Tang dynasty), it is because the previously dominant romanisation system was Wade-Giles.10 [Edit: I originally gave ‘Peking’ as an example of a Wade-Giles name, but a commenter points out that it comes from an earlier tradition. Using the Wade-Giles rules, ‘Peking’ should be ‘Pei-ching’. While pinyin also uses apostrophes, they mean a different thing; a pinyin apostrophe sometimes disambiguates where a syllable begins, like in Xi’an, while a Wade-Giles apostrophe means that the preceding consonant is aspirated.]

The problem, according to the Taiwanese government, is that pinyin was made by commies. And commies are evil. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) instituted pinyin in the same year as the Great Leap Forward, a man-made famine which led to over 30 million deaths. It would have been deeply embarrassing to admit that, on this one particular issue, Taiwan had something to learn from its bigger neighbour.

My tour guide in Taipei was Juan Vazquez. When he whipped out his phone, I was stunned: the keyboard in Taiwan looks completely different to the keyboard in China. That is because Taiwan still uses the Zhuyin system. The goal of Zhuyin is the same as pinyin, but the symbols are derived from sounds associated with existing Chinese characters, rather than a foreign alphabet:

Zhuyin was introduced in 1918 and was the way that all of China phonetically represented characters until the communists won the Chinese Civil War. However well it might work for typing, a standardised romanisation system is still undeniably helpful. And so, in the 1990s, a new system was developed specifically for Taiwan called Tongyong Pinyin, which became the standard in 2002. This was criticised by many for creating a confusing and inconsistent standard for the benefit of ~2% of total Chinese speakers.

The two main political parties in Taiwan are the right-wing nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and the left-wing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).11 Originally, as the self-appointed guardians of Chinese culture, the KMT was reluctant to give up Zhuyin, and opposed the introduction of Tongyong Pinyin. The KMT were the losing side in the Chinese Civil War – which, again, we’ll get to soon – but, ironically, are now the more pro-Beijing party.12 As such, when they came into power in the late 2000s, the KMT abolished Tongyong Pinyin, and switched to Hanyu Pinyin in 2009.

(Ironically, the name ‘Kuomintang’ is itself in Wade-Giles. Some sources will use their Hanyu Pinyin name ‘Guomindang’, which confused me a great deal for the first few hundred pages of Ezra Vogel’s biography of Deng Xiaoping.)

So how does this relate to my trip? Well, names are sticky, and (unlike India!) Taiwan also has a presumption against renamings. The renamings that do occur are often politically motivated. So, when you hover over a location on a Taiwanese map, the name could be in:

• Wade-Giles, if it’s an old name that has become iconic and no one wants to change it. ‘Taipei’ is an example; it should be spelt ‘Taibei’, with a b, in pinyin. Nowadays, people also drop the apostrophes and hyphens from writing Wade-Giles names, even though they are an essential part of the system, and if you ignore them, you get an inaccurate impression of how the word is supposed to be pronounced.

• Tongyong Pinyin, if the street opened between 2002 and 2009 and/or is in a strongly DPP constituency, e.g. Jhongli District.

• Hanyu Pinyin, if the street opened after 2009, and/or is in a strongly KMT constituency.

• Some place names mix systems within the same word, e.g. the name ‘Taichung’ mixes Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles.

• There are some older romanisation systems, other than Wade-Giles, that have influenced modern spelling. Eventually, I gave up on trying to understand this, because it was getting too complicated.

To translate this into Irish terms: It’s a bit like if, instead of being unable to agree on what we’re supposed to call Derry, we got upset about how ‘Derry’ should be represented in the alphabet for a language that we don’t even speak. The whole thing seems unbelievably petty to me, but I also kind of love it.

My friend was caught out by a Chinese flight website, where you have to type in Taibei, with a ‘b’, to go to Taipei. I assume this bamboozles enough Westerners to significantly hurt their sales, but they do it anyway, because China has political reasons to promote Hanyu Pinyin as the one true romanisation.

But probably the more consequential orthographic difference between Taiwan and the mainland is that the mainland uses ‘simplified’ Chinese writing, while Taiwan uses ‘traditional’. Simplified Chinese is another Mao-era piece of social engineering, this one introduced in 1956. Completely unlike, for example, the marvellous Korean alphabet, Chinese writing is one of the most insanely complicated systems ever designed by humans. Simplified Chinese pared down the number of strokes significantly, with the goal of improving literacy. This also caused lots of characters to merge into one, with the meaning being determined by context. Even if the Taiwanese leadership had agreed with the goals – and there are debates about Simplified Chinese to this day – it would have been politically impossible to switch Taiwan to Simplified.

I saw a child reading a book next to me on a flight from Shenzhen to Taipei, which is when I realised that this is more complicated than I thought. Taiwanese books are read up-to-down and then right-to-left, unlike books published in the mainland, which read left-to-right and then up-to-down. However, if a portion of text contains any English text, such as a brand name, then the entire paragraph will switch to the mainland system, before switching back.

The Generalissimo

You might wonder how I noticed the strange romanisations from the previous section. It’s because, on my first day in Taipei, I started by walking around the Zhongzheng District downtown. It is named after Chiang Kai-shek, who was the leader of the KMT from 1925, and dictator of Taiwan until his death in 1975. If you’re wondering how on earth you could get ‘Zhongzheng’ from that, it is because ‘Chiang Kai-shek’ is the romanisation of his name translated into a completely different language: Cantonese.13 ‘Jiang Zhongzheng’ is the Hanyu Pinyin of his ‘courtesy name’, which is the Chinese tradition of giving men new names (!) when they turn 20. By today’s standards, Chiang’s given name should be spelt ‘Jiang Jieshi’. If you use Wade-Giles but don’t make the strange decision to first translate into Cantonese – a language Chiang didn’t even speak – then you get ‘Chiang Chieh-shih’.

I would not have guessed in a million years that all these names are referring to the same person. In the West, his ubiquitous nickname since the 1920s was ‘The Generalissimo’.

At the heart of the Zhongzheng District is one of Taiwan’s most iconic buildings: The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. Underneath, it has a great museum.

Admittedly, having the centrepiece of your city be a giant monument to a dictator sends a questionable message. The square that the memorial is in used to be called Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Square, and then the Democratic Progressive Party changed its name to Liberty Square in 2007. When the KMT got back into power, they restored various symbols associated with Chiang, although never went so far as to change the name of the square back. It is still a Taiwanese culture war to this day. Like Tiananmen Square, but with a happier ending, the most famous student protests for democracy took place on Liberty Square.

Taiwan is one of a kind

What kind of a thing is Taiwan? There are obviously lots of border disputes around the world, and the question of how many countries there are depends on who you ask. Nevertheless, there is a strong case to be made that Taiwan’s status is sui generis. As such, there isn’t really a general principle of international relations that would cause you to take one side or another on its history. Here is the relevant timeline:

• 1912: The Qing dynasty is overthrown in the Xinhai Revolution, and Sun Yat-sen becomes president of the newly declared Republic of China (RoC).

• 1916: China descends into chaos, and different provinces come to be ruled by rival warlords.

• 1924: The Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party form the First United Front to end the Warlord Era.

• 1937: The KMT and the Communists form the Second United Front, to fight in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Although they despise each other, they hate the Japanese even more. In my opinion, this is a more defensible date to consider as the beginning of World War II than 1939.

• 1949: Mao Zedong’s communists win the Chinese Civil War, and they declare the new People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chiang Kai-shek and two million refugees retreat to Taiwan, which they insist is temporary and strategic. Chiang claims to be ruling the Republic of China in exile.

• 1950: The United Kingdom recognises the PRC as a legitimate state, and not just a rebellious province of the RoC. Most countries take much longer.

• 1971: The PRC is recognised as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations”, and replaces the RoC as a permanent member of the Security Council.14 Taiwan essentially ceases to be considered a country by the international community. The US outwardly opposes this, while behind the scenes, Henry Kissinger is negotiating with Zhou Enlai to shift American support to the PRC.

• 1979: The United States recognises the PRC, stops recognising the RoC, and opens an embassy in Beijing.

After 1971, many countries were slow to switch their recognition from the RoC to PRC as the ‘true’ China, and some still haven’t done it. Taiwan has a dwindling number of embassies around the world, which is now down to twelve, in Belize, Eswatini, Guatemala, Haiti, Vatican City, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Tuvalu. A cynic would say that Taiwan bribes tiny island nations with generous foreign aid packages to take policy stances on issues that they don’t actually care about, although there is more nuance to it than that.

Most major countries have a ‘Taipei Representative Office’, which de facto acts like a Taiwanese embassy for the purposes of diplomacy, trade, and so on. But if you change even a single word in its name to remotely insinuate that it actually is an embassy or a consulate, then China will sanction you, as Lithuania has recently discovered. The official policy that almost every Western country subscribes to is ‘One China, Two Systems’, which is the idea that the government in Beijing is the only diplomatically legitimate representative of the Chinese people, but that Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau are governed differently owing to their unique historical circumstances.

Add to this China’s five autonomous regions, thirty autonomous prefectures and one hundred and twenty autonomous counties, and I am losing track of how many systems this ‘One China’ is supposed to have.

One of my closest friends is an economics professor, and he has told me that the single most common complaint he’s gotten in his entire career has come from Chinese students, after he has shown GDP statistics or other graphs which insinuate that Taiwan is a separate country. Even Chinese students at prestigious Western universities get upset about this.

The general norm is that whenever a country has a civil war, we wait a tasteful period of time, and then recognise whichever side won as the legitimate government. It is much rarer for the losing side to continue thriving indefinitely in a defined geographical area, without coming to any formal agreement about partitioning the country. It’s rarer still for that breakaway area to be so clearly superior from the perspective of human flourishing and international development. I think it’s genuinely unclear what one should do in such a situation.

I came across an example of this strangeness in the wild when I was trying to learn how I should refer to Taoyuan – is it a city, county, etc.? Taipei, New Taipei, and Taoyuan are special municipalities (直轄市), which are areas administered directly by the central government. That is one of three categories of national-level jurisdictions, the others being counties and ‘provinces’. Bizarrely, Taiwan is itself considered a province of Taiwan. That is a vestige of the Republic of China’s claim to be the One True China, of which Taiwan is (geographically) only a small part. After Lee Teng-hui’s 精省 (‘streamlining’) reforms of 1998, there is no longer any apparatus for administering these ‘provinces’. That was but one step in the gradual admission that the RoC will never retake the mainland.

The Taiwanese constitution still claims sovereignty over Beijing. This is absurd, but it’s also the third rail of Taiwanese politics: if you touch it, you die. Just about any change in Taiwan’s status could be interpreted as a move toward a declaration of independence and provoke Comrade Xi to invade. As with many things about Taiwan, the current setup is completely crazy. But any change would make things so much worse.

The 2020 redesign of the Taiwanese passport has tried to deflect attention away from these issues with an ingenious diplomatic strategy known as “putting the word Taiwan in a really big font”. If you can’t understand Chinese characters, all you can read is TAIWAN PASSPORT in obnoxiously large text, and ‘Republic of China’ written in a circle that you have to squint to see. The Chinese text only says Republic of China (中華民國).

These kinds of constitutional figleafs are not uncommon: Dublin didn’t formally recognise Northern Ireland as being part of the United Kingdom until 1998.

There are some other points of confusion about what exactly constitutes the ‘Republic of China’. For example, the Kinmen Islands and Matsu are controlled by the RoC, but are not part of Taiwan. This is a headache for Taipei, because (a) the population there is much more pro-Beijing, and (b) they are only a few kilometres away from the city of Xiamen on the mainland, and so can easily serve as the basis for an invasion. This actually sort of happened during the Quemoy crisis in 1954, over which the United States Secretary of State was actively drafting plans to nuke China. Believe it or not, the fate of these islands (which I’m confident <0.1% of Americans could identify on a map) was one of the key issues discussed in the 1960 presidential debates between Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy. While the declining calibre of presidential debates has been widely noticed, could you even imagine a presidential candidate today discussing the geostrategic significance of Fujian province?15

I tried to visit the Kinmen Islands to see for myself, but unfortunately had to cut my trip short to go home and take an exam.

Depending on how pedantic you want to be, the Republic of China inherited many border disputes by purporting to be the successor to the Qing, but they don’t recognise the subsequent bilateral treaties with the People’s Republic resolving many of said disputes. This leads us to an amazing piece of pub quiz trivia that the place with the largest number of disputed borders in the entire world is… Taiwan! Strictly speaking, the Republic of China doesn’t even recognise the existence of Mongolia (?).

Sun Yat-sen

I mentioned that Sun Yat-sen16 was the first president of post-imperial China. He only lasted a few months before being ousted in a deal with a northern general who still had the loyalty of much of the military. Sun was the founder of the Kuomintang, the ancestor of today’s political party.

After Sun Yat-sen died of cancer in 1925, there was no longer any widely respected moderating figure between the communists and the KMT. Two years later, Chiang began brutally purging leftists in the April 12 Incident. This de facto ended the First United Front and was the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. The tragic irony is that previously, the Kuomintang was intentionally ideologically diverse and contained many members sympathetic to communism. But they were an obstacle to Chiang's centralising power.

Since he died before that rift, Sun Yat-sen is basically the only historical figure that nationalists, communists, Chinese and Taiwanese people all agree was good. That is true to this day; Sun Yat-sen is widely commemorated in both polities. Sun is on the $10 coin for the New Taiwan dollar. How many cases do we have in history of two rival regimes, with opposite ideologies, both claiming the same person as their founding figure?

I was in Taiwan not long after the Lunar New Year. I was shocked to see that the new year banners didn’t say 2025; they were in the Minguo calendar, in which the formation of the Republic of China in 1912 is considered Year 1.

I tried to go inside the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, but it was closed for renovations. It’s not as cool as the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, but it’s still cool.

Attitudes to colonialism

One of the topics where I was keen to sample the views of young people was colonialism.

The first Europeans to settle in Taiwan were from the Dutch East India Company, who established a base there in 1624. The Portuguese had been aware of its existence since the 16th century, and they called it Ilha Formosa (‘beautiful island’). Formosa has been a beloved moniker for Taiwan ever since.

At that time, the population of the island was dominated by the indigenous population. Then, in 1662, a general for the recently overthrown Ming dynasty called Koxinga kicked out the Dutch East India Company and established an ethnically Han state in Taiwan.17

This is remarkable for two reasons. First, it means that, in some sense, Taiwan was ruled by white people before it was ruled by Chinese people. Second, the reason why Koxinga was interested in Taiwan was so that it could be a successor state to the Ming, and eventually retake the mainland. After a civil war that might have killed a third of the entire population of China, the Ming fell to ethnic Manchu invaders in 1644, which was the beginning of the Qing dynasty.18

If I had a nickel for every time that Taiwan has claimed to be the rightful successor of a deposed Chinese regime, which insisted that Taiwan was only a rebellious province, in a way that became a geopolitical flashpoint threatening Western interests because of the region’s trade and control over strategic resources… I would have two nickels. But it’s weird that it happened twice!

Of course, the much more salient example of colonialism to Taiwanese people is Japan. Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945. Taiwan was among the spoils of victory that went to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War. I was interested in how much ill-feeling there still exists toward Japan today. Are people still mad about the Japanese occupation, the way they are in Korea?

My sense was that it’s much more muted. For one thing, the possibility of being de facto ‘colonised’ by mainland China is much more salient. For another, there is an acknowledgement of the Japanese role in boosting infrastructure and agricultural productivity, in a way that arguably laid the foundation for their subsequent success. For example, the engineer Yoishi Hatta is so respected for his role in creating Taiwan’s irrigation system that he has literally become a god in Taiwanese folk religion.19 The Japanese were also responsible for introducing many public health and sanitation measures to the island for the first time. And in recent times, Japan hasn’t done as much to pointlessly damage its relationship with Taiwan as it has with Korea, the way, e.g. Abe Shinzo did to Korea by visiting Yasukuni Shrine.20

Postage stamps

A quirk of Taiwan’s history is that there was a 151-day gap between the Qing dynasty giving up on Taiwan in 1894, and the Japanese taking control. The government declared independence in that period, leading to the creation of the Republic of Formosa.

What is much less widely known is that the Republic of Formosa was financed by the brief mania in the late 19th century for postage stamps. Rare postal stamps saw extraordinary increases in value around this time, and the new cash-strapped Formosan government started selling off stamps with their national symbol of the tiger. The records aren’t good enough to know how big a deal this was as a fraction of government expenditures, but I guess the closest modern equivalent is if an independence movement was funded by issuing bored app NFTs.

A few years ago, the National Postal Museum in Tainan – which was the capital of Formosa – started selling some of the original Republic of Formosa stamps. One of my missions while I was in Taiwan was to buy one of the original Formosa stamps. I thought it would be a really cool gift; who wouldn’t want to own the speculative asset class that financed Taiwan’s only brief existence as an independent country?

Alas, I wasn’t able to make it to Tainan in time to confirm the rumours I saw online. But after much perusal in the world of philately, I have now bought two of these stamps. I have pinned down a book that I think will help me identify whether they are genuine Republic of Formosa stamps, but it’s out-of-print and untranslated. I’ve also been unable to get in contact with either Jonathan Clements or Russell Hogg. Long shot, but if any of you have expertise in the late Qing postal system and want to go on a side quest with me, please email me.

Mazu the sea goddess

For many reasons, organised religion never really caught on in China. But of the forms of folk religion practised in Taiwan, the most famous example is probably worship of Mazu the sea goddess. Different aspects of Mazu worship have been incorporated into Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. My taxi driver seemed impressed when I was able to identify the Mazu statue 10 minutes out from the venue where I was staying. We drove past it on my ‘rest day’ halfway through my trip, in which staff were encouraged to leave camp and travel around a bit to avoid burnout.

Two years ago, Drum Tower ran a story about the Taiwanese government encouraging belief in Mazu as part of a campaign to encourage a more distinctively Taiwanese identity in contrast with the mainland.

Mazu is so salient in Taiwan because, when the ethnic Han population first came to work on the Dutch colony 400 years ago, they prayed to Mazu because so many of their ships had been destroyed by stormy weather in the strait. In Hakka and Hokkien, the Taiwan Strait is called ‘Black Ditch’, in reference to how perilous it can be to cross. This is crucial context for understanding the difficulties that would be faced, hypothetically, by an amphibious invasion of Taiwan.

If there were a Taiwanese version of The Fitzwilliam (is there?), I’d be interested to read an equivalent of our essay about Protestant magic. What are the origins of the way these folk myths are currently practised? How have they influenced the way that Taiwanese youth think about themselves? Are many of the details surprisingly recent fabrications?

Other cultural differences

To the casual observer, Taiwanese culture is an even mix between Japanese and Chinese. The Taiwanese seem to have inherited strong norms of cleanliness and politeness. My friend who went to Taiwan last year told me about how he couldn’t get his eSIM or payments working, and so a stranger took 40 minutes out of his day to bring him to a phone shop and then to an ATM to make sure there were no issues. In China, it felt more like every man was for himself.

Nowhere is the Japaneseness of Taiwan more apparent than in the queuing culture. I’ve never been to Hong Kong, but I’m told by those who have that the difference between the style of queuing on the HK side compared to the chaotic Shenzhen side is readily apparent; among other things, the departing British imparted their love of orderly queuing. Something similar seems to have happened in Taiwan.

In Taiwan, it also goes without saying that you’re not supposed to wear shoes indoors (always a culture clash when an Irish person hangs out with East Asians). At our venue, the shoes lived in the ‘shoe territory’, for no rack would be sufficient to contain us. There was a designated ‘shoe bandit’ tasked with recovering shoes outside the territory, and causing mischief to the person responsible. As a result, I went over 48 hours once without putting on a pair of shoes, which is probably the longest I ever have since childhood.

After his extensive travels, one of Matt Lakeman’s hypotheses about human culture is that politeness and friendliness are negatively correlated. In Japan, people have impeccable manners, but you can live there for years, speak the language, and still be treated like a complete outsider. In Sub-Saharan Africa, you will often have random people shout rude stuff at you on the street – I speak from some experience – but it also won’t be long before someone offers to let you stay in their home, or otherwise engage in a genuinely costly signal out of warmth to you. I don’t think one point on the spectrum is inherently superior to another, although I think it does tell us something about why quiet noise-sensitive nerds like East Asia so much.

Martial law and democracy

As late as the 1970s, Chiang Kai-shek was still outwardly professing a desire to raise an army and retake the mainland. His one-party rule in Taiwan was justified on the basis of martial law being in place, a holdover from the Chinese Civil War.

Chiang died of natural causes in 1975. The vice president at the time took over, but it was widely understood that Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, held the real power. Chiang the Younger became president in 1978, but was less authoritarian than his dad. Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law in 1987, which allowed for opposition parties. Until it was overtaken by Syria, Taiwan held the unenviable record of the longest amount of time a place had ever been ruled by the military. The Democratic Progressive Party had previously been an underground organisation, but the KMT had eventually lost the energy to continue suppressing them. In 1991, Chiang’s successor, Lee Teng-hui, ended the ‘Period of National Mobilisation for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion’, which had justified many expansions in state power since 1948. This was essentially a formal admission that the civil war was over, and that a democratic government needed a constitutional basis. Taiwan had its first free and fair parliamentary elections the following year. From what I could tell, President Lee was genuinely moved by the scale of student protests for democracy, and is more responsible than anyone else for turning Taiwan from a dictatorship into a liberal democracy. From the Chinese nationalist perspective, Lee got softer and softer with time, and he eventually resigned from the Kuomintang in 2001.

The most famous of the pro-democracy activists of the 1980s was Nylon Cheng. He published a dissident magazine and commemorated historical events whose existence was censored by the Kuomintang, such as the 228 Incident.21 When a warrant was issued for his arrest in 1989, he barricaded himself in his office and self-immolated. You can now visit his remains in northern Taipei, or see a reconstruction (as I did) in the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall:

Cooking your own food is a policy failure

Here is a thought I have on a daily basis: Why aren’t there more intermediate options between eating in a sit-down restaurant, and cooking your own meals?

I realise this is going to sound incredibly naive, but: Why do you even save money by cooking your own food? Shouldn’t there be massive economies of scale in cooking larger quantities? And shouldn’t some people be naturally more skilful and efficient at it than others? How can it possibly make any sense for a skilled worker to spend hours in a day procuring food, when it is so clearly not to their comparative advantage?

There is a magical place with plentiful such options, and it’s called Taiwan. In Taiwan, you can affordably eat out for practically all meals, and they will consistently be delicious. This is despite the fact that GDP per capita in Taiwan is $33,000 – it’s richer than Spain!

One of the reasons why it can be so cheap is that many of the stalls or buildings you will order food from are not full-time restaurants. A Taiwanese grandmother might earn some extra income on the side by cooking noodles for a few hours in the afternoon.

Abi Olvera recently wrote about how America could easily have such businesses, but zoning makes it illegal. The partial exceptions that exist, such as food trucks, are bedevilled by permitting and regulation, such as the legal requirement that every food business have at least three sinks (?). The Anglosphere system of land use regulation that tries to shoehorn specific uses into specific plots of land is a bad fit for the Taiwanese market. Also, fixed capital and licensing costs for food and beverage businesses in the West have been creeping up for decades. In Japan, which also has affordable, delicious food despite high labour and land costs, you can cover all the fixed costs to open a tiny restaurant for $2,000.22

Whenever this contrast is brought up in Western policy conversations, you hear the usual hysterics about how any loosening in safety regulation would be catastrophic for health. But despite its much more permissive system, in most years, Taiwan doesn’t record a single death from food poisoning. We have regulated out of existence a large category of human social and culinary life, for possibly non-existent benefits, and… nobody seems to care?

Putting aside political rants, another reason why you might be particularly keen on eating out in Taiwan is that food gets mouldy remarkably quickly. It’s hot, humid, and historically a breeding environment for disease. In Taipei, I met up with Lily Ottinger, an American woman who has lived there for three years. She is the producer of the ChinaTalk podcast. When I asked her about the biggest cultural differences between her and her Taiwanese husband, the first thing that came to mind was that Taiwanese people eat popcorn with a spoon. They also eat Doritos with chopsticks, and take pills in such a way that avoids them ever coming in contact with skin. Taiwanese people also freeze their compostable waste (!) before bringing it to be collected. Perhaps as a result, being a bin collector seems like a relatively prestigious profession in Taiwan. Juan tells me he’s never met a Taiwanese bin collector who doesn’t speak good English. It would be interesting if Taiwan is a case of food safety regulation being superfluous, because the cultural norms around it are already so strong.

My first lunch in Taipei was in 豐盛食堂, a restaurant with no English name and no menus, where the day’s food is printed on movable wood blocks. I have no idea what anything was called, but it was amazing.

I get dehydrated easily, and generally am known among my friends for drinking large quantities of water with most meals. It’s not unusual for the only drink at a Taiwanese meal to be tea. It’s possible I drank more tea, especially red oolong, in two weeks in Taiwan than in my entire life up until that point. When Juan asked for water with lunch in a restaurant recently, the staff found it to be such an odd request that they brought it to him in a bowl, since they didn’t own any glasses.23 When you do get water, it’s warm. I could live the entire rest of my life in East Asia, and I would never stop finding that unpleasant.

When I was younger, my travel to more ‘exotic’ locations was limited by my severe food allergies – which I have, happily, largely grown out of. Still, an allergy to peanuts remains, and apparently, the Chinese for ‘I am allergic to peanuts’ is ‘我对花生过敏’. I still have a photo of this translation favourited in my photos app, since I had to show it in so many restaurants.24 The fact that I’m a vegetarian and allergic to peanuts, and still love Chinese food as much as I do, is a testament to how excellent it is.

It’s sad that most Westerners only get exposed to (a certain inauthentic interpretation of) Cantonese food. Chinese food is extraordinarily diverse, arguably more diverse than all European food combined. My favourite type is Sichuanese, but Yunnan province and its use of mushrooms is also extraordinary. In Taiwan, a lot of the food comes from Fujian and from the colonial influence of Japan (you will see a lot more bento and sushi than you would in China). The national dish is beef noodle soup (牛肉麵).

But if you count drinks, Taiwan’s most successful culinary export is probably bubble tea. It’s also called boba, which is based on Taiwanese slang for ‘big breasts’ (!). Bubble tea is a good example of manufactured Taiwanese traditions. On the Canadian version of Dragon’s Den, a company selling bubble tea recently got in trouble for allegedly culturally appropriating from Taiwan, despite the fact that boba was invented in the late 1980s.

Sue me, but I prefer high-end Chinese food in the West to Chinese food in China – precisely because it is more likely to be vegetarian. A lot of the time, my options were fairly limited. One of the stranger experiences of my life was participating in a two-hour podcast with Tyler Cowen specifically about Chinese food, so if you are interested in more of my thoughts on this issue, I would direct you there. In our conversation, Dan Wang bemoaned the ‘hotpotification’ of the subtle glories of Chinese cuisine. He may be saddened to learn that by far the most popular dinner among the students was on hotpot night. And the most popular drink, of course, was bubble tea.

Baseball

While wandering around Taipei with Juan and Lily, I learned something surprising: Taiwanese people are obsessed with baseball. While it is popular in parts of the Caribbean, I was unaware that any other region of the world cared at all about baseball.

In Taipei 101, formerly the world’s tallest building, the observation deck is now the Taiwan Baseball Hall of Fame. One of the things Taipei 101 is famous for is its tuned mass damper: it has a gigantic pendulum inside, which dissipates the force from earthquakes and prevents the building from collapsing. On the mass damper, they were projecting a highlight reel from the career of Shohei Ohtani, who… is Japanese. Like Scottish football, the Taiwanese passion for baseball runs ahead of performance.

As you might expect, Taipei 101 is a tourist trap, but I had such limited time there that I paid for the view anyway. It is right near Xiangshan (‘elephant mountain’), a popular hiking spot. One of the coolest things about Taipei is that, because of its hilliness and inhospitable building conditions, skyscrapers are a half an hour walk away from what is basically jungle. That also means the surfaces are really mossy, which gives everything a futuristic post-apocalyptic feel.

How Juan ended up in Taipei is itself a funny story: He was at ASPR the previous year, during which he found out that he’d have to move out of his flat in Dublin. He liked Taiwan so much that he decided he might as well stay to work remotely. I am not sure the students were aware that “permanent relocation to Taipei” was one of the possible outcomes of the programme. When I was there, he was living with a group of exclusively Mongolian women – is it offensive to call them a ‘horde’? – whose house party I failed to procure an invite to.

The indigenous population

Most of the time I was in Taiwan, I was staying in an area primarily inhabited by the Atayal indigenous group. With all the intermarriage there has been, I was not able to visually distinguish them from Han Chinese. I saw a young Atayal boy in a village I hiked to, who was so bored that he was setting beer bottles on fire.

If you go back far enough, all Austronesian people originally came from Taiwan. The expansion of humans out from Taiwan to the Philippines and beyond started around 4000 BCE. That also means that all Austronesian languages (Malay, Tagalog, Maori, etc.) are descended from a proto-language spoken in Taiwan. Of the 10 branches of the Austronesian language family, all but one are found exclusively in Taiwan. Most of that diversity has gone extinct in practice, as the indigenous population was assimilated into speaking Mandarin. The surviving languages, such as Ataya,l are mostly spoken in mountainous areas and other places far from the administrative arm of the state.

So, from the perspective of anthropology and historical linguistics, Taiwan’s influence on the world has been gigantic. I’m not sure if many Chinese people realise that Taiwan was the gateway by which humans first reached much of the Pacific, from New Zealand to Madagascar.

But what most struck me is how similar the imagery around Taiwan’s native population is to that of Native Americans. As with baseball, Taiwan is conspicuously pro-America. And as with the gate at Taoyuan Airport, Taiwan’s relationship with its native population has borrowed from the ‘cowboys and Indians’ aesthetic, despite that making no geographical or historical sense.

Interestingly, the area where I was staying was strongly pro-Kuomintang. In fact, indigenous peoples are considered a core voting bloc for the KMT, despite the fact that they were responsible for forcibly wiping out much of their language and culture under martial law. Some local villagers claimed to us that the DPP government had closed the only school in the area, because they thought they wouldn’t vote for them anyway.

Semiconductors

After WWII, Taiwan very successfully rose up the value chain in an export-oriented development strategy. Before it was known for semiconductors, one of the main reasons Americans would know about Taiwan was as the source of their Christmas decorations. On the plane to Taiwan, I was reading Ezra Vogel’s collected essays about the South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee. The similarities with Chiang Kai-shek are striking. Both countries experienced remarkable growth pursuing similar economic strategies over the same time period, and then peacefully transitioned to democracy within a few years of each other. In both cases, the places were subsequently led by their children, and the dictator in question has a complicated legacy today because their regime had many undeniable successes. South Korea seems like a much better mental model for understanding recent Taiwanese history than mainland China.

Within Taiwan’s economic strategy, one of the most fateful decisions was the establishment of the Industrial Technology Research Institute in 1973. The purpose of ITRI was to attract foreign direct investment and incubate startups with the help of overseas talent. In the 1980s, a former executive and semiconductor engineer from Texas Instruments called Morris Chang was recruited to lead it. Chang was born in Ningbo, China, in 1931. He left ITRI after a year, but ended up founding one of its spinoffs: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Today, TSMC is quite possibly the most important company in the world.

Up until 2018, TSMC dominated the semiconductor industry because of its high volume and great unit economics. But since then, neither China nor the US have been able to replicate the most advanced chip designs produced by Taiwan. There are perennial rumours that the TSMC fabs are boobytrapped, and would be sabotaged in the event of an invasion so that China couldn’t use them. A monopoly on the most advanced chips could give China a decisive military advantage.

In Situational Awareness, Leopold Aschenbrenner has a line about how the fact that Taiwan ended up as the global frontier in production for such a geopolitically significant good is about as insane as if, during the Cold War, the majority of the world’s uranium deposits had coincidentally been in West Berlin. It is scarcely believable that this is the world we ended up in.

For a recent meetup of my reading group, we discussed Karina Bao’s bootleg translation of The Autobiography of Morris Chang. The first volume was published in 1998, and then the second volume – twice as long! – was published in November last year. Neither volume has been officially translated from traditional Chinese into English (hence the bootleggery).

Morris Chang is a national hero in Taiwan, and his autobiography is genuinely extremely interesting. He is still alive and active in Taiwanese public life, aged 94. You can even watch his recent appearance on the Acquired podcast.25 If I go to Taiwan again, I would like to visit the TSMC Museum of Innovation. I am told it consists mostly of bizarre hero-worship of Morris Chang.

The former president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, famously called TSMC the ‘silicon shield’. There is a widespread sense that TSMC, and quite possibly Morris Chang personally, has prevented a Chinese invasion.

My visit to Taiwan provided me with no additional insight into the semiconductor industry, or anything else about geopolitics, really. For obvious reasons, semiconductor companies are not inclined to give tours. But Morris Chang’s autobiography can be found in all good Taiwanese bookshops:

The mood in Taiwan

The mood I sensed in Taiwan was gloomy. The Taiwanese I talked to were desperate to get green cards to move to the United States. There is a major culture of sending your children abroad for university, so that it will be easier for them to emigrate subsequently. If you’re a male with only a Taiwanese passport when shit hits the fan, you are definitely getting drafted.

Possibly related to this, the total fertility rate in Taiwan is an abysmal 0.87, compared to mainland China’s 1.2.26 Taiwan has tried the usual pro-natalist policies for a greying East Asian nation, to minimal effect.

Taiwan is noticeably more chill than the rest of East Asia. Lily said that when her Korean friends visit, they find it much easier to relax, and don’t feel (for example) oppressively high beauty standards. Even in the luxury shopping centre in Taipei, everyone is wearing tracksuit bottoms and t-shirts. I could imagine myself living in Taipei and being somewhat accepted. There are lots of tourists, it’s not unusual to see non-Asian people, and nobody stops or stares the way they do in China.

The explanation I heard for this equanimity is that Taiwanese people are so used to worrying about their continued existence that they don’t have the mental effort to also worry about day-to-day interactions. But I worry this is an over-interpretation. I heard someone say that the reason why Taiwan’s large airport is in Taoyuan, with only a small one (Songshan) in the city, is to make it more difficult for the Chinese to land planes in Taipei in the event of an invasion. But, for various reasons, I now think this is an urban legend. Having one large airport outside a city, and then a small one centrally for VIPs, shorter flights, or military, is a very common pattern! A lot of things in Taiwan are related to being a small island militarily threatened by its much larger neighbour. But not everything.

The omnipresent force of 7-Eleven

Everybody knows that Western brands have penetrated deeply into the East Asian market. Walking around, you see a lot of Starbucks and McDonald’s. But the sheer dominance of the supermarket chain 7-Eleven is extraordinary. I think I literally never left the line of sight of a 7-Eleven the entire time I was in Taipei.

In America, a 7-Eleven is a horrible ‘convenience store’ that sells junk food. But in Taiwan, they’re actually really nice, and sell delicious takeaway and microwavable meals (which you can heat up there). Despite having started in Texas, 7-Eleven is now owned by a Japanese parent company, although it has much less of a presence there.

7-Eleven is so important in Taiwan that it has unofficially become a quasi-governmental organisation. 7-Elevens stay open 24/7, including during hurricanes and other natural disasters. There is an (entirely believable!) urban legend that 7-Eleven has officially been designated as part of the ‘national infrastructure’. A large fraction of the population now pays their bills, prints documents, picks up packages, accesses banking, and buys their phone and mobile data from their local 7-Eleven. They are also just about the only place where you can find a bin. Without them, the nation would grind to a halt.

Hot springs

On my second-to-last day, I greatly enjoyed my visit to the Luofo Hot Springs, which has a great view of the mountains on each side. It was pretty much the perfect choice of decompression activity for a group of people who obviously like each other, but had just spent two weeks living in a confined space, followed by a brutally honest feedback session. I have no idea if alternating between boiling hot and freezing cold water is actually good for you physiologically, but it feels good for the soul.

Juan keeps running into and befriending people at the hot springs whose jobs sound ridiculously important to the global semiconductor supply chain, so I think Karina and I need to pay them another visit. The hot springs are another example of both China and Taiwan seeming like nice places to be old. I was smiling at friendly old people in Daan Park with their friends, who were playing mahjong, singing, practising tai-chi, and so on. They all had remarkably little self-consciousness. In contrast, in the West, it seems like we have totally failed to provide social institutions for the elderly to remain socially and physically active.

The National Palace Museum

On my last day in Taipei, I visited what has become my favourite museum in the world: the National Palace Museum. It is where the historical artefacts are stored that Chiang’s retreating army brought to Taiwan in 1949 for ‘safekeeping’. As such, it contains some of the greatest cultural treasures from all over China.

The most famous piece (the Jadeite Cabbage) wasn’t on display when I was there, but I did see the Meat-Shaped Stone, which is an uncanny jasper sculpture from the Qing dynasty:

Chiang made many of the cynical decisions you might expect of what to bring with him: Thousands of families were bereaved because of the alleged lack of space on ships to Taiwan, but there was enough space for the confiscated jewellery of anyone accused of being a leftist (you can see chapter eight of Rebel Island for more detail about this). The National Palace Museum opened in 1965, the year before the madness of the Cultural Revolution broke out on the mainland. This was a major propaganda coup, framing the KMT as the guardians of Chinese culture and tradition.

The National Palace Museum is, fittingly enough, located right next to the Ministry of Defence.

My favourite pieces there were the jades, but there are incredible bronze sculptures and ceramics. I also loved the inkstone room. Inkstones are a tool for grinding solid ink into liquid for use in Chinese calligraphy, and creating inkstones itself is an art form. In particular, we got to see the famous inkstone collection of Mi Fu, a calligrapher from the Song dynasty.

Ancient Chinese history gets murky before the Spring and Autumn Period (8th to 5th century BCE). That came before the Warring States Period, which was itself before the Qin dynasty unified China for the first time. That means that many of the objects in the NPM collection are attributed to dynasties that might be fictional.

I went to the NPM with Jinglin, who, like all rebellious children of Chinese immigrants, knows nothing about Chinese history. She spent most of the day asking me basic questions, but, like most zoomers, I found it difficult to hold her attention.

From the landscape painting collection, I spent most of my time looking into the Qing orthodox school. Within that tradition, the most famous painters are called the ‘four kings’, which is a joke because they all coincidentally share the surname Wang (which means king). Like many people, I’ve long wondered why Chinese names come from such a concentrated distribution. It’s not quite as extreme as Korea, where 20% of the entire peninsula is called Kim, but it seems to be so concentrated to the point of being actively inconvenient for the purposes of unambiguously identifying individuals. How many people in America must be called ‘Kevin Wang’? What you will usually hear from Chinese people when you ask about this is that almost all Chinese names supposedly derive from an original set of eight clan names in ancient China. However, modern versions of Chinese surnames relate to these original clan names in a highly non-trivial branching structure that I eventually gave up on trying to understand.

Interestingly, one of the few people to have a name which comes directly from the Eight Great Surnames is the basketball player Yao Ming. There is something poetic about the culmination of the development of the ancient Chinese clan system being to become a millionaire businessman in America.

There was also an exhibit of artefacts related to The Dream of the Red Chamber, which probably few people in the West have heard of, despite it being the sixth most widely read book in human history. In principle, it’s the kind of book I would like to have read, but it’s so absurdly long and complicated that even figuring out how long a translation is supposed to be is an active area of debate. You can also watch the 27-hour TV adaptation, which is honestly on the shorter side by the standards of adaptations of Chinese classics.

Between European and Japanese imperialism, and the convulsions of the 20th century, it’s something of a miracle that China or Taiwan still have any historical artefacts at all. Their preservation was only possible through an elaborate network of smuggling and heroic museum curators.

The core of the collection was evacuated from the Forbidden City in Beijing in the 1930s and 40s. It is basically the Qing court’s collection, and the selection of artefacts reflects their view of the world. I noticed that many of the objects bore the signature of the Qianlong Emperor, one of the most significant of the Qing rulers. He was the one who famously rejected the idea of trade with Britain under the Macartney Mission, saying that China had no need for British goods, and that they wouldn’t impress a Chinese schoolchild. At that time, the pointless gizmos invented in Britain included ‘the steam engine’, so this was yet another self-own by the Qing.

Same-sex marriage

In 2019, the DPP government under Tsai Ing-wen legalised gay marriage. Until the recent decision by Thailand, Taiwan was the only place in Asia where same-sex couples could get married.27 Yet another reminder of how unlikely and precious Taiwan’s existence is.

When he found out that I was going to Taiwan, my cattiest gay friend messaged to encourage me to visit the LGBT neighbourhood in Taipei, saying that “They like white boys”. Alas, for me, that was not competitive with spending more time in the museum, but it reminded me of a hilarious tweet from a few years ago when someone accidentally (?) flew the post-1912 Republic of China flag in the San Francisco Pride Parade. Gays against the Qing dynasty??

Night markets

In case the National Palace Museum was too cultured, that night my friends and I engaged in some debauchery at the Raohe Street Night Market, which I was told is less touristy than the Ningxia Night Market. We also united with a Czech engineer with whom I was in a WhatsApp group, who had clearly been looking for any excuse to go to Taiwan.

Mostly, it was disappointingly repetitive, although there was a cool temple at the end. We did have some bizarre interactions, including briefly appearing on the livestream of a Taiwanese sex worker (by accident!).

The highlight was my friend getting his astrological fortunes read by some old Taiwanese ladies. The first turned him away because, supposedly, it’s impossible to read the fortune of someone without a Chinese name. The other soothsayer had a more flexible policy. Everything she said was a vague platitude about how he will soon find love or face difficulties. Everything, that is, until her demeanour changed completely, and she made one ominous final comment, which translated to “The retaliation for Xinhui will be stronger than the retaliation for Fuxing!”

I still have no idea what that means.

The night markets were the last thing I did before flying to the UK the next morning. The flights were smooth, but my immune system was run down and I caught the flu. Once I was home, I spent the next 1.5 days in a state of semi-consciousness, while having a terrible fever dream in which my family was being tortured in the Cultural Revolution.

I can only hope I showed Taiwan the proper respect, and I was not being cursed by the retaliation for Xinhui. I hope Formosa will have me back many more times.

Sam Enright is editor-in-chief of The Fitzwilliam, and Innovation Policy Lead at Progress Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter here or read his personal blog here.

an innately indigenous understanding that prioritises nature and the land above all things … [with] magic that our ancestors perceived in the natural world and the otherworldly realms that surround it.

In line with this view of the land and the magic embedded in it, last month (at an unconventional memorial service) Magan’s ashes were scattered at the Hill of Uisneach, the supposed ‘sacred centre of Ireland’.

The immense popularity of Magan’s books is in line with the widespread presence of this set of ideas in Irish culture. We are all so used to it, even if we don’t know what it is. This vision is of Ireland as fallen from ancient wisdom that we might return to; the idea of an inherently Celtic spirituality, or a deep connection to the land that is embedded in our language (and particularly the Irish language) and our way of life.

Yet these ideas don’t come directly from explorations in our ancient mythology or Old Irish literature, nor ‘deep’ traditions from our Celtic ancestors. Surprising as it might be, these ideas were generated in the nineteenth century, arising from the status anxieties of Irish Protestants in the face of Home Rule. This strange marriage of occultism and national identity has become a powerful but all-too-often missed aspect of Irish culture.

The logic of Protestant magic

In a 1989 lecture, the historian Roy Foster1 made a major contribution to understanding Irish cultural history when he came up with the concept of ‘Protestant magic’. He described a set of:

Marginalised Irish Protestants … [often] stemming from families with a strong clerical and professional colouration, whose occult preoccupations surely mirror a sense of displacement, a loss of social and psychological integration, and an escapism motivated by the threat of a take-over by the Catholic middle classes…

The Protestant minority in Ireland, making up around 20% of the island’s population in the Victorian era,2 had historically been the elite ‘Ascendancy’ class in Ireland. But from the late nineteenth century, the power of the Protestant Ascendancy declined and Catholics gained political and economic status. With Home Rule looming on the horizon, many Protestants felt increasingly ill at ease with their place in Irish society. What Foster observed was that this feeling was increasingly given outlet in esoteric, occult, and supernatural ways. Foster mostly focused on the literary products of this way of thinking, including Gothic supernatural novels like Dracula and Uncle Silas. But Protestant magic wasn’t just a metaphor: in the face of the Victorian-era decline in Christian belief, occultism became a real phenomenon among Irish Protestants, rooted in class anxieties and sectarian division but leading to real practice and real belief.

Ireland was not completely isolated here. Occultism took off in nineteenth-century Britain, especially at the end of the century, and the roots of modern neopagan religions like Wicca and Druidry can be traced back to this. But Ireland didn’t follow exactly the same trends as England. Irish Protestants shaped magic and the occult in their own ways, ways that were specifically Irish and – upon close inspection – specifically Protestant. The clearest example (and Foster’s own focus) was William Butler Yeats.

As well as a poet, Yeats was a regular practitioner of ritual magic, a dabbler in (sometimes drug-induced) mystic experience, and a student of esoteric literature. He was for a time a senior member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most important of the many societies that branched off from Freemasonry in the nineteenth century and expanded its basic concepts into elaborate rituals, garb, and ‘high’ magic. And for a time, he devoted himself to creating a specifically Irish order of ‘Celtic Mysteries’ inspired by the Golden Dawn. Later in life, he would spend untold hours ‘channeling the spirits’ with his wife George, and credited these spirits with many of his richest metaphors and ideas.

None of this existed separately from his better-known role as a poet of Ireland and Irish nationalism; Yeats thought these two facets of his life were deeply interconnected.3 His 1892 poem ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ is essentially a manifesto for Protestant magic. Yeats declares that his standing as a national poet isn’t undermined by his concern with the occult and esoteric:

Nor may I less be counted one

With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,

Because, to him who ponders well,

My rhymes more than their rhyming tell

Of things discovered in the deep,

Where only body’s laid asleep.

Certainly, there were indeed people who doubted that Yeats was ‘authentically’ Irish. But these doubts (and Yeats’ own related anxieties) were because Yeats was a Protestant!4 Ritual magic didn’t have a whole lot to do with it.

Yet the way Yeats reacted to this suspicion was to swap Protestantism out for occultism. Now, rather than his Protestantism being ‘un-Irish’ when compared to Catholicism, he was suggesting that Catholic theology might actually be ‘un-Irish’ when compared to an ‘authentic’ occult Irish spirituality, which he described using Rosicrucian symbols. Ireland has been ‘a Druid land’ since time immemorial, or so Yeats claimed.

Yeats hoped for a future where ‘the thoughts of Ireland’ would brood once more upon the esoteric. But his hope for this future was rooted at least in part in the dynamic of being from a Protestant background, being anxious about status in Catholic and nationalist circles, and feeling the need to ‘authenticate’ his Irishness.

Those are the basic elements of Protestant magic. We have an interest in occult, mystical, or magical spirituality; an argument that this type of spirituality is authentically Irish; and, in the background, a status dispute over the place of Irish Protestants in the new, emerging social order of post-Famine Ireland. Foster pointed out, with a wide range of examples, that this was a general pattern among many Irish Protestants.

‘Ancient traditions’ and modern corruption

Many Protestant writers were inspired by the not-quite-a-historian Standish J. O’Grady, son of a County Cork minister. In 1878, O’Grady published a book that tried to reconstruct the supposed bardic tradition about Ireland’s pre-Christian ‘heroic age’, which he believed could be seen – albeit ‘overlain and concealed’ by later accretions – in medieval Irish literature.5 Unlike modern scholars,6 he was confident that he could figure out what was genuinely bardic and what was mere accretion, using the classic methodology of vibes.

‘[I]n order to be faithful to the generic conception’ of Irish culture, O’Grady declared, ‘one must disregard often the literal statement’. He defended himself by saying that bardic traditions are all about vibes:

[L]egends represent the imagination of the country; they are that kind of history which a nation desires to possess. They betray the . . . ideals of the people, and, in this respect, have a value far beyond the tale of actual events.

Importantly, talking about ‘the imagination of the country’ did not necessarily require hewing closely to what the country’s (majority Catholic) inhabitants actually thought. Language revivalist (and future President) Douglas Hyde, also a minister’s son, had warned in 1892 that Ireland had ‘ceas[ed] to be Irish’, and the body of the people had to be treated like ‘a corpse on the dissecting table’ until the Celtic spirit returned. Outsider revivalists like Hyde might actually be in a better position than Catholic peasants to pick out the traditions that were ‘most smacking of the soil’.

You’d be right to worry that, given this much freedom, folklorists and revivalists could discard anything inconvenient in old traditions and literature as ‘corruption’, and ‘find’ whatever they wanted to find.7 In turn, many Protestant folklorists subconsciously wanted to find evidence of native occultism, which could break the link between Catholicism and Irishness, and might justify their place in Irish culture. And so this is exactly what many of them ‘found’: remnants of a deeper ‘pagan’ spirituality, often concerned with fairies and supposedly founded in a profound Celtic connection to the land, that had been buried beneath peasant ‘ignorance’ and Catholic dogma. Yeats insisted that, while everybody had the potential for spiritual visions ‘if you scratch him deep enough’, fairy lore demonstrated that ‘the Celt is a visionary without scratching’.8

This is not to say that there weren’t uniquely Irish spiritual or fairy traditions. It’s just to say that Protestant folklorists weren’t uncovering these traditions so much as they were creating new ones.

Possibly the most famous expression of belief in occult Irish spirituality came in a letter to Yeats from the mystic and artist Æ in 1896:

The gods have returned to Erin and have centred themselves in the sacred mountains and blow the fires through the country. They have been seen by several in vision, they will awaken the magical instinct everywhere, and the universal heart of the people will turn to the old druidic beliefs. I note through the country the increased faith in faery things. The bells are heard from the mounds and sounding in the hollows of the mountains . . . Out of Ireland will arise a light to transform many ages and peoples.

Æ was born George Russell to a northern Protestant family, but became a Theosophist with a deep interest in mysticism and Eastern religion. Russell was not some weird figure treated with suspicion; he was right at the heart of Dublin’s literary and cultural scene for decades. He came to believe that his role was to fan the flames of mystic religion, both in his art and in his practical activities.

In 1897, still filled with manic energy and frustrated at those who opposed his mystical ‘revival’, Æ wrote to Yeats: ‘I came home last night big with radiant ideas and full of wrath over the priests’; it is notable that he himself made the connection. Foster’s lecture described how many Irish Protestants in the late nineteenth century felt ‘caught between the threatening superstructure of Catholicism, and recourse to more demonic forces still, against a wild landscape which they have never fully possessed’.9 And as the era came to a close, many chose to see that which orthodox Protestantism viewed as ‘threatening’ and ‘demonic’ as actually offering spiritual insight that should be embraced.

The spread of Protestant magic

Whatever the origins of Protestant magic, it didn’t stay within the Protestant minority for long. Even if people weren’t going looking for the occult and the magical, these ideas permeated much of the literary culture of Ireland during the Gaelic Revival. And so, as Revival ideas of Irishness spread, so too did Protestant magic, a subterranean current.

Of course, for those who discovered a taste for it, there was an explicitly occult or mystical tradition in Ireland, kept alive into the twentieth century by works like James Cousins’ 1912 The Wisdom of the West, which (roughly) argued that Irish fairies are avatars of Hindu deities.10 But increasingly, works that emphasised the occult and religious nature of these ideas were less important to their spread. Thanks to its presence in the works of great creative writers, Protestant magic had a certain slipperiness, and could metamorphose from literal belief to literary metaphor and everything in between. This was what allowed it to diffuse throughout Ireland, as a set of ideas that were often simply stored in a different part of the mind from religious dogma. This was especially important as the number of Protestants in the newly independent Irish Free State sharply declined; going forward, Protestant magic would be disconnected from its origins.

Another feature of Irish culture contributed to this. As the historian Richard Bourke has put it, in Ireland ‘there’s been a relative dearth of what you might call dedicated intellectuals and, by comparison, a dominant role played by the image of the writer, in a more traditional literary sense.’ In Irish culture, the lines between different writerly vocations are blurred, much more than in England or America: novelists write historical essays, journalists write literary memoirs, historians analyse poetry, literary critics survey political discourse.

On the one hand, this has aided interdisciplinary creativity, and led to some works of genuine brilliance. But on the other hand, it means that we tend to conflate different standards of judgment, and rank books based on the wrong thing: whether that means judging literature or history according to the standards of contemporary politics, or else judging theology or philosophy solely on its creativity and literary merits, ignoring whether it is true or well-argued. This has created conditions perfectly suited for Protestant magic to thrive. Because it has the weight of the Revival behind it, it has been able to embed itself in our culture without very many people ever looking at it straight-on, and shaped the way we think about key issues. I will look at three examples: the environment; religion; and the Irish language.

Protestant magic and the environment

The Kerry mystic John Moriarty was a great example of Bourke’s description of the ‘writer’. After a relatively unsuccessful period in the 1960s and 70s as an academic, Moriarty was ‘discovered’ by the RTÉ broadcaster Andy O’Mahony in the mid-1980s, and published a dozen volumes in a great burst of activity between 1994 and his death in 2007. His first 1994 book, Dreamtime, was launched at the Clifden Arts Festival by future President Michael D. Higgins; in 1997, he was given his own RTÉ miniseries.

Moriarty relied heavily on self-presentation and tone. In books and lectures, he would deploy a rapid sequence of unexplained references to religious and philosophical texts, to give the impression of deep esoteric knowledge and quickly unfolding ideas running one into the next. But lifted out of the network of esoteric references, many of his reflections come to seem trivial or even comical: ‘In the last century . . . somehow, women have enfranchised themselves . . . I just want to say, why don’t we also go further and enfranchise the universe?’11

As this line might suggest, Moriarty’s particular preoccupations were very ecological and environmental. He presented readers a stark choice: ‘shape Nature to suit us,’ or ‘let Nature shape us to suit it’; and he comments that ‘everywhere there is evidence that we have chosen wrongly’.12 He blamed this on the Western ‘modern mentality’, but hoped that opening ‘the old pagan window’ and connecting with Ireland’s landscape and spirituality could overcome it.13

But when you look more closely at what Moriarty actually wrote about spirituality, there’s very little in there that’s all that Irish. As well as ecology and environmentalism, he drew heavily on Eastern religion, hoping that ‘bring[ing] together the two extremities of the Indo-European expansion’ could jolt Ireland out of Western modernity.14 He also developed his own idiosyncratic interpretations of Christian dogma, especially the ‘Triduum’ of Christ’s death and resurrection. And he owed maybe his deepest debt to the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger posited that the influence of science and rationalism disrupted the fundamental unity between human beings and the natural world, and called for an alternative form of consciousness, of ‘being in the world’. Moriarty’s references to Celtic myth provide colour, but the substance of his ideas come from elsewhere.

This contributes much to his sage-like slipperiness, where you have to chase down references to medieval Irish literature to understand any given paragraph – only to find that the references are pure window-dressing, and don’t matter for his argument. And, ironically, the fact that his Celticness is so surface-level is perhaps the most authentically Irish part of Moriarty’s work, because it shows him drawing on an entirely home-grown tradition: Protestant magic. Just like Yeats and Æ, Moriarty insisted that truly Irish spirituality is to be found in the esoteric and the mystical – Eastern religion, German philosophy, and a spiritual approach to the environment. And if you might worry that this doesn’t seem particularly Irish, Moriarty’s response is lifted straight from Protestant magicians of old: the actually-existing culture of Ireland is ‘in deepest gloom’, and the ‘[s]igns are that it has died’, because it’s lost its ecological unity. Only a ‘healer’ like Moriarty can identify that which is really Irish.15

The Celtic window-dressing was a huge part of what made Moriarty popular: by making an ecological sensibility seem both deeply spiritual and authentically Irish, Moriarty helped legitimate Irish environmentalism, just as that movement was growing in the late 1980s and 1990s. Among his best-known champions, alongside people like poet Paul Durcan and nature writer Tim Robinson, are popular figures like Tommy Tiernan; and through such champions Moriarty had a major, if oft-overlooked, impact on Irish writing and culture.

Protestant magic and religion

As might be suggested by the above mention of the Christian Triduum, Moriarty was also an exemplar of a second important trend: the reinjection of Protestant magic back into Christianity, in particular Catholicism. Decades after Yeats’ death, by which point the Gaelic Revival had become a key part of Ireland’s cultural inheritance, interpretations of Celtic spirituality that were rooted in a Protestant context and occult interests actually began to shape the practice and self-understanding of religious Catholics.

Back in the late nineteenth century, devout Catholics had been radically opposed to the ideas we’ve been discussing.16 This opposition only increased after independence, when the now world-famous Yeats began to position himself very explicitly as a defender of Protestant aristocracy and Protestant interests in the new Free State, with Catholic writers and newspapers linking the occult symbols in his poetry to Ascendancy culture.17

But by the midcentury, Christianity (both Protestant and Catholic) found itself pulled by all sorts of reformist tendencies, of which the ‘spirit of Vatican II’ was only the most famous. Many felt the need for new ways of expressing Christian spirituality, including a newfound interest in ‘Celtic Christianity’: the alleged traditions of Christianity in Britain and Ireland as they had existed before change was imposed from Rome.

The idea of Celtic Christianity had historically been a Protestant notion: the early modern Presbyterian thinker George Buchanan argued that the Reformation, rather than introducing anything new to Britain and Ireland, had merely been a return to a native Celtic Christianity that rejected Rome. But in the twentieth century, the reach of the idea expanded, especially after the 1960s republication of the Carmina Gadelica, a famous Victorian collection of prayers and hymns translated from Scottish Gaelic to English. In the following decades, many books were published in both Britain and Ireland, helping shape ‘Celtic Christianity’ at the same time that it was increasingly being practised in new Christian ‘communities’ and on religious retreats.

There is nothing wrong with an interest in medieval religion, of course. The problem was that most people who were interested in Celtic Christianity, both in Britain and in Ireland, were monolingual English speakers, and translations of key texts were rare and often out of date. There were certainly careful scholars who could read and write Old Welsh or Old Irish, and who did detect a distinctive religiosity in these texts, often focused on the Trinity. But such efforts were vastly outnumbered by books which relied on a small handful of English translations (like the Carmina or the ‘Breastplate of St Patrick’); all too often, the gaps where Old Irish scholarship should have gone were filled by modern assumptions and presuppositions.

And many – especially in Ireland – had assumptions about Celtic spirituality that were syncretic and occult. Inspiration was taken from Eastern religion; while few went as far as writer Shirley Toulson, who declared in The Celtic Alternative (1987) that Celtic Christianity ‘had more in common with Buddhism than with the institutional Christianity of the West’, nonetheless many communities inspired by Celtic spirituality began to incorporate a new type of focus on the self and new approaches to meditation into their religious practice. Relatedly, various spiritual practices inspired by the ‘New Age’ movement began to appear in Celtic Christianity, a phenomenon that was noted both by defenders and critics.

It might be assumed that the Catholic hierarchy would have resisted these trends. But the power of unspoken occult assumptions about ‘truly’ Irish spirituality, inherited from the Revival, meant that things ended up involving more negotiation. The writer John O’Donohue was the absolute exemplar of these trends. Ordained as a Catholic priest in 1982, O’Donohue’s developing theological ideas brought him into conflict with the hierarchy, and he stepped back from his duties in the 1990s. For O’Donohue, as with Yeats and Æ before him, the ‘Celtic tradition’ and folk Catholicism contained deep truths that orthodox Catholic theology ignored, especially around sex and the body.18 His bestselling 1997 book Anam Ċara used neopagan-esque language to try to reinvigorate Christianity, declaring that ‘Celtic spirituality hallows the moon and adores the life force of the sun’, and celebrating how ‘ancient Celtic gods were close to the sources of fertility and belonging’.19 Among its short chapters are stories about Zen monks, pieces of fairy lore, and at one point a chapter that is more than half taken up by a Yeats poem.

Yet, when O’Donohue died in 2008, four bishops and a ‘large number of priests’ from across Ireland attended the funeral. The fact was that in the intervening years, ‘Celtic spirituality’ and associated religious practices had become extremely popular among devout Catholics, especially via ‘retreats’ to religious centres or ecumenical communities. The ground had shifted within Irish Catholicism. It helped, too, that O’Donohue never felt the need to be clear about how far his use of neopagan and esoteric language was to be taken literally, and how much it was just literary ‘borrowing’. Celtic spirituality became popular, partly because it helped satisfy the desire for new forms of religious practice, but – equally importantly – also because it rhymed with the spiritual self-identity of many Irish people: a spiritual self-identity shaped by the influence of Revival occultism.

Protestant magic and language

As the previous section suggested, for many Irish people, the Irish language acts as a barrier to accessing their country’s religious and intellectual history. The resulting temptation is to see the language as a kind of ‘key’ to esoteric knowledge. When combined with Ireland’s wider conflicted stance towards the language,20 it’s not surprising that some people have come to believe that there is a kind of spirituality embedded into the Irish language itself: its vocabulary and grammar and structure, not just the stories and ideas expressed using it.

The idea is that Irish, especially in its vocabulary relating to the natural world and spirituality, can make distinctions and subtle observations that are awkward or impossible in English, which reflect a special Irish outlook on the world. The recently deceased Manchán Magan, who was something of a disciple of Moriarty’s, has been the greatest and most successful contemporary exponent of this argument, most famously in his 2020 book Thirty-two Words for Field which became an explosive bestseller. (As I write these words, Magan is still on the bestseller lists with his follow-up volumes.) But he was drawing on a much longer stream – a stream that, to some degree, goes all the way back to Douglas Hyde.21

Like many in this tradition, Magan himself knew the language quite well as a speaker, but his understanding of its history and deeper structure was weaker. The effect was compounded by writing in English for an anglophone audience: the job of rigorous fact-checking was left to anonymous bloggers – who duly found a whole host of errors after publication.

Magan’s understanding was at its weakest when comparing Irish with languages that he didn’t speak, especially Indian languages. But he made the effort of comparison anyway, because he wanted to prove that Ireland and India retained traces of an earlier Indo-European consciousness that had been gradually eroded away elsewhere. As Magan put it, he wanted to show that ‘Gaelic and Hindu culture are manifestations of the same spiritual and cultural past.’

In response to this, a different perspective on the Irish language might point out how unique and unlike other languages Irish is; how rapidly the language seems to have departed from its Celtic and Indo-European roots, experiencing rapid vowel shifts, a division between ‘broad’ and ‘slender’, and the introduction of a complicated and almost-wholly-unique system of mutations, all in a period of barely 200 years: the last Ogham inscriptions in ‘Primitive Irish’ have obvious similarities with other Celtic and Indo-European languages, but only a short while later, we have ‘Old Irish’ that looks radically different from anything else. This is objectively extremely interesting, and might make a good subject for a popular book.

But it doesn’t fit with the dubious notion that the language embodies deep wisdom, stretching back into the misty Celtic past: these changes to the Irish language happened centuries after the Celts settled Ireland, and maybe even after the arrival of Saint Patrick. That is to say, the language roughly as it now exists is barely older than the highly literate and literary culture of Christian monasticism. Certainly, there are still some elements of the Irish language that reflect older Indo-European roots – but then, exactly the same is true of English.

But Magan’s anglophone readers, in general, have been less concerned with the accuracy of this or that claim about vocabulary or history; in the tradition of O’Grady, what they instead are looking for is a vibe.

Magan’s popularity, and the fact that his way of thinking about the Irish language and its importance is so widespread, tells us little about the Irish language itself, but a great deal about the way Irish people think of themselves, their nation, and their spirituality.

Protestant magic today

When people write about the impact of the Gaelic Revival on Irish culture, the focus is often on its relationship with politics: whether that’s to do with the lead-up to 1916 and the war of independence, or with the legacy of Revival nationalism in Irish economic policy. In more recent times, more and more people have been looking to different sides of the Revival, and especially its religious and esoteric dimensions, many influenced by Roy Foster. But it’s still underappreciated how this aspect of the Revival has lingered into the present day, and still conditions the way that many Irish people think about their nation, and about such vital cultural topics as land, religion, and language.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong – and certainly nothing un-Irish – about this. Indeed, Protestant magic, the unification of occultism with national identity, is an entirely home-grown tradition which has given rise to some of Ireland’s greatest literary gifts. But it’s not home-grown in the sense of genuinely ancient or authentically ‘Celtic’; it’s Victorian, it’s deeply modern, and it’s the product of a class (Irish Protestants) whose place in the national story is very far from simple and often deliberately downplayed.

Occult, magical, mystical, or spiritual ideas, outside mainstream religion, are often neglected when we think about cultural and intellectual history. But in Ireland, the occult ideas of Victorian Protestants have deeply shaped many people’s identity and self-understanding. Understanding this is important to understand the culture of the country, and also perhaps to help jolt us out of complacency about that culture; their origins help us see just how strange many of our ‘natural’ assumptions about land and religion and language are.

Peter McLaughlin is associate editor of The Fitzwilliam and an Emergent Ventures winner. He writes the blog Her Fingers Bloomed. You can email him at peter [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com.

The Fitzwilliam remains entirely free. However, Sam Enright’s Newsletter has now opened up paid subscriptions. Paid subscribers will support my work, have access to any subscriber-only bonus posts, and have priority for attending any space-limited events. We have disabled the ability to ‘pledge’ to support The Fitzwilliam, and encourage anyone who would have paid for a Fitzwilliam subscription to subscribe to my newsletter instead.

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We have been very pleased with how The Fitzwilliam Reading Group has been going. This month, we talked with Noah Smith about whether data centres are going to crash the economy. Next month, we’ll be talking with Gavin Leech about his new book with Dwarkesh Patel about recent progress in AI. In the new year, we will be discussing the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

However, there is only so much you can learn from just sitting around and talking. Indeed, one of the areas that struggles the most with reading groups is something that many of us wish we did more of: mathematics.

And so, The Fitzwilliam is starting a monthly maths meetup.1 The idea is that we will distribute problems before each meetup, everyone will try them, get stuck, and then we will gather together to learn in a fun and supportive environment.2 There’s no specific number of problems you have to have completed before the meeting; it’s more about trying your best to figure things out yourself before seeking help.

No one from The Fitzwilliam studied maths at university. As with almost everything I do, I am woefully underqualified for this. What I lack in experience, I make up for with infectious joie de vivre.

And to be honest, most of the heavy lifting here is being done by my good friend Neil Shevlin, who has recently joined the ranks of funemployment.

My vision here is that telling someone that you’ve never done maths for fun will be like saying that you’ve never listened to music or watched a film. While I would not dare to underestimate the lottery of fascinations, if you never do maths, there is so much of the human aesthetic experience that you are sealing yourself off from.

Our first meetup will take place on Saturday, November 29th, at 3pm. It will be in the Innovation Space of Dogpatch Labs, immediately adjacent to the Starbucks. It will be on the topic of induction, and you can download the problem set here.

The material is anchored by chapter 4 of Proofs: A Long-Form Mathematics Textbook by Jay Cummings. I strongly recommend getting a copy of the book and reading along. Unlike most maths textbooks, it contains actual sentences and paragraphs, which is a necessary condition for my wordcel brain to understand.

The second meetup will take place on Saturday, December 13th, also at 3pm in the Innovation Space. The topic is number theory, and you can download the problem set here. This is inspired by chapter 5 of Math History: A Long-Form Mathematics Textbook, and you can follow along with the relevant lecture slides from the author’s website.3 I would also recommend ordering a copy of the book.

We hope to have provided enough resources so that people with a wide range of abilities will be able to attend.

If any of this sounds appealing to you, please fill out the form to join here. [Edit: I ported this form over on 25/11/25. If you are reading this more recently and would like to join, please send an email to sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com with a brief bio.] As with the reading group, there will be announcement emails, and a WhatsApp group for chatter and sharing puzzles. You are welcome to sign up even if you have a low probability of being in Dublin on any given month.

The exact format will probably evolve over time. While reading groups are a tried-and-tested format, this is a bit more experimental, and you’ll have to be patient with us. I don’t know enough to say how similar this may or may not be to the historical phenomenon of “maths circles”.

While reading groups are somewhat common, meetups to learn mathematics as an adult not in university seem to be almost non-existent. In stark contrast to Ireland, when you visit the Bay Area, it’s not unusual for offices to have recreational mathematics groups that meet on evenings and weekends. Despite my significant misgivings, I admire how the people there pursue inherently challenging hobbies and side interests with utmost sincerity and dedication. I think that is one of the reasons why San Francisco is Mecca for nerdy Irish youngsters, and why emigrating there in connection with Patch is the Hajj. I am not entirely sure where our group will fit into this Islamic pilgrimage analogy, but we hope it will be a worthwhile contribution. Please join!

Sam Enright is editor-in-chief of The Fitzwilliam, and Innovation Policy Lead at Progress Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter here or read his personal blog here.

Sure, aren’t the Irish great? That’s us: big-hearted, generous people. A nation of philanthropists. The government certainly thinks so: in September 2025, the Tánaiste described Ireland’s foreign aid spending as ‘the embodiment of who we are and how we view the world’, and ‘a source of enormous pride’. The uniquely charitable ethos of the Irish people is chalked up to our experience of famine and British rule, and our history of generosity to those who need it.

It’s difficult to square these accounts with the fact that, in 2023, 55% of Irish development assistance never left the country, and was spent by the government on services at home. Genuine foreign aid makes up only a minority of Ireland’s reported ‘foreign aid’ spending.

This bizarre fact has been caused by several different issues: the outdated international system for measuring foreign aid; the war in Ukraine; and leprechaun economics, whereby tax-dodging international corporations artificially inflate our GDP and government revenue.

Usually, when so many problems intersect like this, you should expect a complete failure. But this is the even weirder fact: these different causes have all seemingly balanced out. Even when you adjust for bizarre accounting rules and exclude the ‘foreign aid’ that has never left the country, genuine foreign aid spending has been pretty unaffected.

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Mr Burns goes for a check-up, and the doctor discovers that he is the sickest man in America, with thousands of diseases—and yet, somehow, the effects of all of them have managed to cancel each other out.

Mr Burns: So, what you’re saying is, I’m indestructible?

Doctor: Oh, no, no: in fact, even a slight breeze could—

Mr Burns (leaving): Indestructible…

Irish Aid is not in quite as bad a state as Mr Burns. A slight breeze will probably not blow it over. But a reduction in corporation tax receipts, a new influx of refugees and asylum seekers, or a populist government might; and those are not black swan risks, but very plausible future outcomes. The government is already aware of some of the problems with how foreign aid is measured. But it can and should go further to change the accounting system for its own foreign aid targets, so that ‘foreign aid’ means foreign aid.

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Why foreign aid?

First things first: why care? What does it matter what we spend on foreign aid?

In the first place, it matters because Irish foreign aid spending can save lives. In the face of famine, war, disease, poverty, and ethnic cleansing, it costs relatively little money for the State to provide people with food or shelter or medical treatment that can make the difference between life and death. Some people argue that foreign aid is so wasteful and inefficient as to have a net impact of zero, or close to zero, lives saved; I can't argue the point here, but I think they are wrong, and foreign aid can save lives.

Of course, any government should prioritise its own citizens; that’s only right. But because it costs so much less to save lives in the developing world than it does to provide services in a developed country like Ireland, foreign aid can make a huge difference with only a small portion of the government budget. And even when it is prioritising its own citizens, the government has to take into account the fact that the majority of Irish citizens support overseas aid spending, with 30% wanting to see Ireland’s foreign aid spending increased and 39% wanting it to stay the same.2

How can money spent at home be ‘foreign aid’?

If any of the above is at all convincing to you, you might be quite concerned at just how much of Ireland’s ‘foreign aid’ budget never leaves the country. Of course, some amount always has to be spent on administration, like paying the salaries of people in Ireland who help ensure that our foreign aid is distributed overseas. But that couldn’t possibly account for 55% of all ‘foreign aid’ spending. And, indeed, it doesn’t. The most recent available data that Ireland has reported to the OECD breaks spending down into some big categories:

By far the biggest category of ‘foreign aid’ is spending on refugees and asylum seekers who are already living in Ireland. Refugee spending alone is more than half of all of ‘foreign aid’ spending!

Does this mean that Irish governments have been cooking the books, trying to mislead the OECD and other international bodies into thinking it spends more on foreign aid than it actually does? Not at all. In fact, labelling refugee spending as ‘foreign aid’ is a completely standard practice that international bodies are well aware of. Many countries’ ‘foreign aid’ budgets are actually substantially made up of at-home spending, largely on refugees.

The problem is in the international standard for measuring foreign aid: the OECD’s definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA). This definition explicitly allows governments to report the cost of hosting refugees as part of their foreign aid. Not all money spent by the government on refugees counts as Official Development Assistance: generally, countries are only allowed to claim costs associated with ‘subsistence’ such as food and housing, and only for the first twelve months after the person arrives. But subsistence—especially housing—is still a really significant part of state spending on refugees and asylum seekers, and thus, a really significant part of ‘foreign aid’.3

Things haven’t always been this way; the current rules only date from the 1980s. Back then, refugees tended not to flee very far from their home country; as such, given that most refugees come from poorer countries, and poorer countries tend to be near other poorer countries, refugee spending was mostly a problem for the developing world. Rich countries would sometimes provide foreign aid to refugees living in poorer countries, but the small amounts of money they spent on refugees within rich countries were, sensibly, treated differently. It wasn’t until 1988 that the OECD started allowing rich countries to count money they spent on refugees at home, as well as money they sent to poor countries, as ‘foreign aid’.

This never made a huge amount of sense. The rationale was that countries shouldn’t be ‘penalised’ for letting refugees in. But if a rich country’s government redirected some spending from refugees living overseas to refugees living within their own borders, there were no actual penalties; they just couldn’t report it as foreign aid for accounting purposes, because (after all) it literally isn’t foreign aid! Nonetheless, even if it didn’t make much sense, nobody cared that much about the change because it was incredibly minor. The number of refugees living in rich countries was quite low; the rule change was a marginal tweak that didn’t have a meaningful impact on the headline numbers on rich-world foreign aid spending.

That’s not the world we live in any more. The number of refugees is higher, and a larger proportion of them make their way to rich countries.

The amount of money spent by rich countries on refugees and asylum seekers is no longer marginal; it’s now a central and fiercely debated political issue. An accounting rule that had previously made a barely-perceptible difference has come to hugely distort foreign aid numbers, especially after huge numbers of Ukrainians made their way to rich European nations (like Ireland) in 2022.

The upshot is that, in 2023, out of every euro spent by rich donor countries on ‘foreign aid’, 22 cents wasn’t foreign aid at all.4 And in some countries, Ireland included, this discrepancy was far worse. It’s not sustainable to ignore this any more.

The ODA accounting rules have perverse consequences

The first problem with the ODA rules is simple. When the Irish government spends money on refugees living in Ireland, that is not foreign aid. That is not what the phrase ‘foreign aid’ means to most people. We should care about the meaning of words; we should care about accurate accounting.

Maybe you think I’m being pedantic. But there are other, more concrete problems.

Above, I highlighted one of the main reasons that rich countries should have foreign aid programmes: it is much cheaper to provide services in poor countries than it is in rich countries, and so even a small proportion of a rich country’s budget can make a huge difference in poor countries. Partly this is because a euro ‘goes further’ overseas because of differences in purchasing power. And partly it’s because rich countries and poor countries tend to face different problems: it is pretty cheap to provide people with polio vaccines; it’s not so cheap to help people who have fallen into homelessness in Dublin.

But neither of these rationales apply to money spent on refugees in Ireland: a euro obviously doesn’t ‘go further’ in Ireland, and the things that refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland need (housing, food, social support) are pretty similar to the things needed by many Irish citizens.

Overseas aid spending doesn’t have to be efficient, but in general it is. Refugee spending at home, by contrast, is no more inherently efficient than any other programme: the number of people helped is much lower, the cost of helping them is much higher, and the amount of budget required will fluctuate wildly over time with refugee flows. If spending on refugees comes to take up more and more of ‘foreign aid’ budgets, then a major part of the rationale for foreign aid spending is undermined.

This comes with political risk. It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to think about what would happen to Ireland’s foreign aid budget if a populist, anti-refugee government came to power, having been told that most ‘foreign aid’ was actually disguised spending on refugees and asylum seekers living in Ireland. But this is only the most dramatic scenario.

Ultimately, the real source of risk is that people don’t like feeling like they’re being lied to. And, in this case, Irish citizens kind of are being lied to! The foreign aid accounting standard isn’t intentionally deceptive—nobody’s setting out to lie to the Irish people—our government is just using the standard international definition exactly as intended. But that doesn’t change the fact that citizens who read about ‘foreign aid spending’ are labouring under a serious misapprehension, through no fault of their own.

I can try to imagine an argument against my view. If you think that rich governments should be spending money to support refugees at home, then you might think that folding this spending into ‘foreign aid’ could be a way to protect it from populist backlash, perhaps because rich countries have foreign aid targets and cutting refugee spending would make it harder to reach those targets.

The issue with this analysis is that refugee policy is so salient, and so controversial, that you’re not going to be able to distract people from it with a minor accounting change. And rich countries really don’t care all that much about their foreign aid targets. Tying foreign aid and refugee spending together won’t help save refugee spending; it just puts foreign aid at additional political risk.

And even if I were wrong about this—even if the ODA rules really did incentivise governments to spend more on refugees—this would still give rise to perverse outcomes. Under the ODA rules (as they were clarified in 2017), not all categories of refugee spending can be counted as foreign aid; you can only report money spent on subsistence (food, housing, etc.), and only for the first twelve months after the refugee fled their home. In particular, money spent on programmes to help refugees integrate cannot be declared as foreign aid under the rules. If policymakers were trying to hit their foreign aid targets above all else, this would incentivise them to accept huge numbers of refugees, provide them with basic subsistence for twelve months, but put no effort whatsoever into helping them integrate into society, and then stop supporting them completely after those first twelve months are up. I don’t think anyone, on any part of the political spectrum, wants that.

What is Ireland’s government doing?

Ireland is in a weird spot relative to all of this. Over the last few years, with the war in Ukraine, the percentage of its aid budget that has been spent on refugees has skyrocketed. In terms of in-country ‘foreign aid’ spending, we are now second only to Poland.

This is not just the result of a large number of Ukrainians coming to Ireland, although that’s a big part of it. 112,000 Ukrainians sought refugee status in Ireland; the highest number per capita of anywhere outside Eastern Europe.5 Ireland also has much higher costs per refugee than any other country, with the exception of the UK. (How costs got quite this high is a story for another day.)

You might expect that there would have been some drastic cuts to the rest of the foreign aid budget to find the money needed to provide for these large numbers of refugees. And yet, if you exclude all the in-country spending and just look at the amount of foreign aid spending that actually leaves the country, it’s actually been exactly the opposite: it’s been going up.

What’s going on here? There’s a simple answer: ‘leprechaun economics’. Ireland’s place as a haven for tax-dodging corporations has distorted our GDP statistics and, relatedly, brought in huge government budget surpluses via corporation tax. The result has been something of a spending bonanza in Ireland recently, as all sorts of different interest groups and campaigners start asking the government for additional funding for their pet projects, and the government—flush with cash—has found it increasingly easy to say yes for quick political wins.

And so, as part of this, many NGOs have been reminding the government of its commitment to eventually spend 0.7% of gross national income on foreign aid.6 And so, additional funding has been allocated to foreign aid over and above the increase in refugee spending. It’s not as much extra spending as the NGOs would ideally like, but it’s more than enough to allow the government to drop a mention of foreign aid into press releases. It’s all a part of the ‘when I have it, I spend it’ mindset that is so prevalent in Ireland.

That the majority of Irish ‘foreign aid’ money is actually spent on refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland is the kind of claim that populist politicians would have a field day with. The tweets write themselves: ‘money that should be saving lives in the third world is being used to put foreigners up in Dublin hotels!’. Although it sounds outrageous, this claim is entirely factually true. But dig a little deeper, and Irish foreign aid is on a materially better footing now than it was several years ago. The issue is primarily a data classification problem.

Like with Mr Burns, Ireland has caught a whole load of diseases: not just the terrible ODA accounting rules, but also the war in Ukraine, a consequent large number of refugees requiring state support, a higher cost-per-refugee than any other EU country, an economy that has been significantly distorted by multinationals looking to avoid tax, and politicians with bad spending habits. And yet, somehow, when it comes to foreign aid, all the errors have managed to cancel each other out.

The worry is just that, like with Mr Burns, our blind luck is misinterpreted and used as the grounds for complacency. Data classification problems are still problems.

The UK: a warning

Our next-door neighbours are an example of how things might go wrong with foreign aid.

British politicians also have terrible habits when it comes to fiscal policy. But unlike in Ireland, there’s no ‘cushion’ of corporation tax receipts; indeed, there’s been barely any economic growth at all over the last twenty years. And so, international investors have become increasingly concerned about the long-term outlook of lending money to Britain, and British governments have found themselves ‘boxed in’ by high borrowing costs.

Into this context came a large number of refugees and asylum seekers, starting in 2022, which placed further pressure on British government budgets in order to provide for them.

In this situation, the temptation for any policymaker who has heard about the ODA rules is obvious: why not just take money from existing foreign aid budgets to fund refugee spending? After all, announcing a cut to any other area of government spending to free up money for refugees is politically explosive. But if you use the money allocated to aid, you won’t even have to announce a cut. Maybe the few wonky think tanks and blogs that actually understand the accounting rules will figure out what you’ve done and get upset, but that’s it.

And in fact, this is exactly what the UK did. In recent years, British governments have taken the approach of reporting ‘anything that could possibly be reported’ under the ODA rules (without increasing foreign aid budgets in tandem) as a way to quietly redirect money. And while wonky think tanks and government watchdogs did indeed complain, the change otherwise slipped under the radar. It wasn’t until February 2025, when the government announced a cut to the overall ODA budget (including refugee costs), that the press or public noticed anything. But by that point, the amount of ‘foreign aid’ money that was actually leaving the country and being spent on development projects overseas had been declining significantly for years.

This is bad because foreign aid is good, and cuts to foreign aid cost lives. But it’s also bad because the UK’s unclear and opaque accounting practices have encouraged waste and inefficiency, undermining the whole purpose of this approach. For example: one part of the UK Government, the Home Office, has most of the responsibility for refugees and asylum seekers; but insofar as its spending can be reported as ‘foreign aid’, it can claim that money back from a different part of the government (the Foreign Office). This encourages officials in the Home Office, not to spend money efficiently, but to spend money in a way that allows them to report as much of it as foreign aid as possible. ‘Gaming the system’ like this has been a contributor to ballooning refugee costs.

In turn, when a government’s approach to foreign aid is to cut it as quietly as possible, this doesn’t naturally lead them to eliminate the least efficient or most wasteful programmes first. Instead, they’ll prioritise cutting the ones that will involve the least political confrontation. But this means that the simplest programmes with the fewest ‘stakeholders’ are often the first to go, and these can be the most efficient. Recent reporting suggests that, even as the UK has cut back on foreign aid, there are still plenty of wasteful projects receiving funding.

What next?

Ireland has, thus far, avoided this trap. The amount of genuine foreign aid has grown. To safeguard this, recent budgets have explicitly allocated most of this increased funding directly to the Department of Foreign Affairs, ensuring that it can’t easily be redirected to at-home spending. Irish Aid has even begun to separate out costs associated with Ukrainian refugees when talking about foreign aid spending. All of this should be commended; the eye-catching fact that most Irish foreign aid never leaves the country isn’t as worrying as it might seem.

But if spending on refugees and asylum seekers continues to grow, future governments may be tempted by the example of the UK and other countries, and exploit ‘creative accounting’ to de facto cut foreign aid as refugee costs rise. Alternatively, a populist government may use the high proportion of foreign aid that’s spent on refugees as an excuse to scrap the lot, perhaps inspired by the American example of DOGE. And given the threat posed by Trump’s tariffs to Ireland’s economic model, all types of government spending face political disruption over the next few years.

The simplest option is for Ireland to improve its accounting practices by following the approach taken by countries like Australia: just don’t report in-country refugee spending as ‘official development assistance’. Just because the government can report this money under ODA rules, doesn’t mean it has to; not all countries’ governments do.

This unilateral approach comes with some downsides, though. The nerdy complaint is that it makes international statistics which compare different countries less apples-to-apples, and so makes life harder for researchers. An issue that is more likely to prick policymakers’ ears is that this unilateral approach might make Ireland look worse: if we take a principled stand, but other countries don’t, we’d drop down the international rankings in foreign aid spending. We’d do a good thing, but look less generous because of it.

A different approach would be to build on the existing practice of separating out Ukrainian refugee costs, by separating out all in-country aid spending (or all except administrative costs and the like) when the government talks about its foreign aid budget. The government could still report the full amount to the OECD, to make sure that Ireland is treated fairly in international comparisons; but when compiling accounts, sending out press releases, and allocating budgets between departments, it should impose a strict distinction.

This kind of self-imposed discipline is hard for governments to stick to. So I will make a final suggestion that might help Ireland’s government stick to it. The government is aiming to meet the UN target of spending 0.7% of GNI on foreign aid, as defined by the ODA rules. Even when governments aren’t on track to meet their targets (and they rarely are), the targets still play an important role in policymaking, because they define the metrics that governments use to see how far short they’ve fallen and how much their policies are making a difference.

The government should therefore, on top of the existing UN target, set itself a target for the amount of foreign aid that Ireland actually spends overseas, excluding in-country spending.7 The exact level of this target will inevitably become a matter of haggling and political contestation, but if the government were smart about it, it might not require any changes to spending plans in the short term.

Ultimately, the number that is being targeted matters less than the fact that the target exists. Merely having a target will require the government to make an honest accounting of foreign aid, excluding refugee costs and other in-country expenses. This will keep future governments from being tempted to shuffle money around, quietly cutting foreign aid de facto without announcing any cuts. It will keep us away from the waste and inefficiency that have resulted from the UK’s attempts to game the system. And, ultimately, it’s just more honest. When the public hears ‘foreign aid’, they expect that it means foreign aid: money spent overseas to help people in need. They’re not stupid for thinking that. The government should respect that.

Peter McLaughlin is associate editor of The Fitzwilliam and an Emergent Ventures winner. He writes the blog Her Fingers Bloomed. You can email him at peter [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com.

He went on to co-create such iconic buildings as The Pompidou Centre, The Louvre, and also—of course—Fingal County Hall.

Born in Dublin, Rice was one of the greatest structural engineers of the modern era. He achieved so much in a short career, and his writings convey not just technical and creative excellence, but humanity and worldliness. Everywhere you go, you see signs of Peter Rice; he even designed the glass façade you pass every time you come to the Fitzwilliam reading group. He deserves to be a household name, and we would like to make a dent toward that.

And so, The Fitzwilliam is hosting a film screening, this Saturday, October 18th, at 2pm, of An Engineer Imagines, a 2019 documentary about Rice’s life and influence. It will be in The Savoy Cinema, on O’Connell Street in Dublin, and you can RSVP here.

The event is being organised by Oisín Moran, from the Éire Accelerationism (é/acc) community.1 Don’t read too much into the name; their tongues are planted firmly in cheek.

To my enormous regret, I (Sam Enright) am at a conference in America this week, and won’t be able to make it in person. However, I leave you in good hands. Oisín has extensive experience throwing great events in Ireland, including his entirely improvised musicals (not a joke!).

Hosting film screenings is a highly underrated activity. In April of 2023, The Fitzwilliam hosted the Irish premiere of We Are As Gods, a wonderful documentary about the life of Stewart Brand, created by Stripe Press.2 Renting out cinema screens is also surprisingly affordable, and attendance to our event is free.

If you are having issues finding the crowd on the day, you can email oisinjtmoran [at] gmail [dot] com. For any other issues or concerns, you can email sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com.

After the film, we have a section of the Parnell Heritage Pub booked out around the corner. We look forward to seeing you there.

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Today’s Ireland is experiencing significant ethnic and racial diversity for the first time in its history, and the country’s new look has undoubtedly made some Irish feel uncomfortable. As these anxieties unfold, it is worth looking at the history of Irish attitudes toward race and emancipation, with Douglass’s 1845 visit to Ireland as a window. History is not an infallible guide, but neither should it be ignored. The tale of Daniel and Frederick, and of 19^th-century Irish attitudes to slavery, offers us mixed lessons.

Nine years after my initial encounter with the Douglass story, I met with a group of Frederick Douglass Fellows in Washington DC. They were on the eve of their departure for Ireland as part of a programme co-funded by the Irish Government to honour the legacy of Douglass’s connection with Ireland.

Frederick Douglass was 27 years old when he arrived in Dublin on the last day of August 1845, having crossed the Atlantic from Boston to Liverpool a few days before. Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, and as a 20-year-old fled to Massachusetts, where he could live, albeit precariously, as a freeman. In 1845, he published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The risk that his high profile would make him a target for slave hunters caused him to take refuge across the Atlantic.

Ireland in the 1840s was fertile ground for Douglass’s abolitionist message. I saw evidence of that when I visited Frederick Douglass’s home in Anacostia near Washington, and was shown an elaborate address of welcome presented to him by Cork City’s anti-slavery societies. This means that a city of about 80,000 inhabitants had two abolitionist groups in the 1840s.

Douglass’s principal hosts in Ireland were members of the Quaker community, including his Dublin publisher, Richard Webb. Ironically, Webb developed a decidedly negative opinion of Douglass, seeing him as ‘absurdly haughty, self-possessed and prone to take offence’.3 This did not prevent him from publishing a British and Irish edition of Douglass’s Autobiography. Webb’s son, Alfred, went on to become a Home Rule MP and, in an illustration of the international sympathies to Ireland’s struggle, was invited to preside over the tenth Indian National Congress in Madras in 1894.4

Frederick Douglass lived in Ireland for four months, at the end of 1845. During his visit, Douglass delivered lectures on slavery and temperance in Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Wexford, Youghal, Limerick, Celbridge, Bangor, Lisburn and Belfast.5 His staunch advocacy of temperance caused him to strike up a friendship with Ireland’s chief temperance crusader, Father Theobald Mathew (1790-1856). They parted ways when Fr Mathew, on a subsequent visit to America, refused to condemn slavery. The American visitor cut quite a dash in Ireland, although residual undercurrents of racism can be detected in some of the newspaper coverage he attracted, which overall was very positive. He was described as “a fine-looking man, possessed of a full flow of natural eloquence” and as someone with “a manly dignity of manner”.

Douglass’s encounter with Daniel O’Connell was one of the highlights of his visit. By that time, O’Connell had gained international recognition as a fiery critic of slavery, which he saw as ‘a foul stain’ on America’s character. Even when it came to America’s Founding Fathers, O’Connell did not mince his words, accusing them of lacking the ‘moral courage’ to abolish slavery. His uncompromising stance put him at odds with many Irish Americans, including two powerful, Irish-born prelates, Archbishop Hughes of New York and Bishop England of Charleston, both apologists for slavery. Hughes dismissed O’Connell’s criticisms as unwarranted outside interference in American affairs and, in common with other prominent churchmen, he suspected America’s leading abolitionists of being anti-Catholic. O’Connell’s position also undermined the burgeoning support among the Irish in America for his bid to repeal the Act of Union. A number of Repeal Associations established in American cities dissolved themselves in response to O’Connell’s condemnation of slavery. In 1843, he decided to refuse financial support from those in America who supported slavery. His abolitionist fervour was one of the issues that came between him and the members of the Young Ireland movement, who thought it unwise to alienate America and Irish Americans on the issue of slavery. (The Young Irelanders were a more radical offshoot of O’Connell’s Repeal movement.)

When the two met at a Repeal meeting in Dublin, Douglass revealed that he had known of O’Connell ever since he heard him cursed by his slave-owning masters. Douglass recorded O’Connell’s stirring condemnation of slavery: ‘My sympathy with distress is not confined within the narrow bounds of my own green island. No – it extends to every corner of the earth. My heart walks abroad, and wherever the miserable are to be succoured, or the slave to be set free, there my spirit is at home, and I delight to dwell.’ Understandably, Douglass was mightily impressed with O’Connell, whose ‘eloquence came down upon the vast assembly like a summer thunder-shower upon a dusty road.’

When it came to Douglass’s turn to speak, he said that: ‘The poor trampled slave of Carolina had heard the name of the Liberator with joy and hope, and he himself had heard the wish that some black O’Connell would rise up amongst his countrymen, and cry agitate, agitate, agitate’. Although their encounter was brief, the ageing, ailing O’Connell left a profound mark on the younger man, who often referred to him down the decades that followed. When O’Connell died, Douglass lamented that ‘a great champion of freedom had fallen’, to be succeeded by ‘the Duffys, Mitchells, Meaghers and others – who loved liberty for themselves and their country, but were utterly destitute of sympathy with the cause of liberty in countries other than their own’.6

Douglass was gratified by the manner in which he was received in Ireland and was struck by the ‘total absence of all manifestations of prejudice against me, on account of my color. I find myself not treated as a color, but as a man.’ Some of Douglass’s descriptions of the level of tolerance in Ireland sound rather far-fetched, but he contrasted this with his lot in America: ‘The land of my birth welcomes me to her shores only as a slave, and spurns with contempt the idea of treating me differently’. Douglass came to Ireland right at the beginning of the Famine, when O’Connell was still a commanding political figure, who enjoyed a degree of fame and popularity unmatched in modern Irish history. O’Connell’s uncompromising condemnation of slavery may well have swayed many Irish people to share his views on a subject to which they might not otherwise have paid such attention.

There were certainly plenty of Irish people who participated in, strongly supported, and benefited from slavery. John Mitchell, author of the influential nationalist tract Jail Journal, was an undying supporter of slavery and became a fervent advocate of the Confederate cause during the US Civil War. On arrival in America, Mitchell said that all he wanted was ‘a slave plantation well-stocked with slaves’.7 Many among the Irish in America felt threatened by the influx of freed slaves into Northern cities, where they competed for opportunity on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. And of course, Irish-Americans in New York led the anti-draft protests that turned into a race riot against black residents in 1863. The violence unleashed against African Americans at that time prompted Douglass to describe the Irish as “among our bitterest persecutors”. Yet Douglass retained an affection for Ireland, and he paid a brief return visit in 1887, and met with the families of those who had welcomed him four decades earlier. On his return to the USA, he expressed his strong support for Charles Stewart Parnell’s Home Rule movement, describing himself as ‘an out-and-out Home Ruler for Ireland and … for this Republic. The right I am claiming for Ireland I claim for every man here – North and South.’8

Many decades later, as an independent state, Ireland sought to build on its anti-colonial heritage and became an active supporter of decolonisation during the 1950s and 1960s. This seems to me to be built on the legacy of 19th-century Irish attitudes. A positive reputation was established that has endured. I remember hosting three African Ambassadors in Berlin in 2011 at a commemoration of the 90^th anniversary of the first Irish delegation to come to Germany to build support for Ireland’s freedom struggle. My guests explained that they saw Ireland’s fight for independence as part of their history too.9 I had similar experiences as a diplomat to India in the early 1980s, when many Indians I met told me that they lauded the role Ireland had played as a pathfinder for other subject peoples.

Such positive feelings towards Ireland will not last forever. In 2020, they were probably a factor in Ireland’s election to the United Nations Security Council in the face of stiff opposition from Canada and Norway. It will be increasingly difficult for us to combine our interests as an advanced Western country with the values distilled from our history and the ageing yeast of our freedom struggle.

Is there a link between O’Connell’s rejection of slavery and Ireland’s 20th-century foreign policy traditions? Personally, I see a broad continuum in Irish political life from O’Connell’s time to the present day, which helps shape attitudes to contemporary international issues and encourages the Irish Government to take advanced positions on, for example, the plight of the Palestinians, exposing itself to the risk of retaliatory action from the USA. From the early 19th century, the Irish nationalist cause found most favour within the Whig/Liberal tradition – O’Connell sided with the Whig Lord Melbourne, Parnell with Gladstone, Redmond with Asquith. That positioned Irish nationalism at the liberal end of the spectrum in the politics of 19th and early-20th-century Britain. The anti-Imperial sentiment that prompted Irish support for the Boer cause during Britain’s South African war continued into the 1930s with de Valera’s support for sanctions against Italy over its invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). It reached full steam during the era of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s.

We can draw satisfaction from the fact that Douglass was so well received in Ireland. Burdened by a strong sense of grievance at the social and economic conditions that were the lot of the majority of the Irish people in 1845, there was a feeling of affinity with those who suffered under the yoke of slavery. Nonetheless, as Douglass made clear, the situation of the Irish, despite the deprivation and discrimination besetting them, was a far cry from what he had endured during his life as a slave in Maryland. Among other things, the Irish had the right to leave and seek new lives for themselves in the USA and elsewhere.

Douglass’s most recent biographer, David Blight, argues that he was ‘deeply affected, even changed, by Ireland and her people’ and brought away both a real and mythic sense of ‘the Irish people and their beautiful and terrible land’. Writing to the leading American abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, as he left Ireland, Douglass said that he had spent ‘some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country. I seem to have undergone a transformation. I live a new life.’10 Ireland has also been described as ‘a space of empowerment’ and ‘increasing ideological independence’11 for Douglass at the beginning of what turned out to be a long and outstanding innings in public life which saw him become one of the most famous Americans of the 19^th century.

Douglass’s positive experiences in Ireland lands well with African Americans today, many of whom are happy to see themselves as part of a multifarious Irish diaspora whose heterogeneity is there to be recognised and celebrated. An African American Irish Diaspora Network was established during my time as Ambassador to the USA. I was present in October 2021 for the official opening of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge across Washington’s Anacostia River, when Mayor Muriel Bowser paid warm tribute to Ireland’s efforts to honour the legacy of Frederick Douglass’s fruitful encounter with our country.

The memory of Frederick Douglass’s visit will not soothe those who feel discommoded by the novel experience of demographic diversity, but it is a long-overlooked part of our backstory that has been rediscovered. It reminds us of the outstanding role that Ireland’s Liberator played, to the satisfaction of his Irish supporters, in the struggle against slavery, which in the mid-19^th century prompted the kind of passionate activism and heated exchanges that climate change or the plight of Palestinians in Gaza do today. Unexpected characters show up from time to time in Irish history. Frederick Douglass’s visit to Ireland is among the most surprising and revealing.

Daniel Mulhall is a retired Irish diplomat, who was formerly Ambassador to Malaysia, Germany, the UK, and the US. He is the author of Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey, and Pilgrim Soul: W.B. Yeats and the Ireland of His Time. You can follow him on X here.

TL;DR: The Irish Mathematics Olympiad (IrMO) is running extremely low on funds. What is essentially the only elite intellectual training for teenagers on the island of Ireland is about to be scaled back for lack of what is, for many readers of this blog, a trivial amount of money.1 The Fitzwilliam has a side project to save it, and you can donate here.

When I was in secondary school, my best friend and I signed up for just about every science, maths and academic extra-curricular it was theoretically possible for an Irish teenager to do. The one with the biggest logistical hassle, by far, was that I used to spend my Saturdays commuting five hours to University College Dublin for mathematics enrichment classes. This was to train for the Irish Mathematics Olympiad (IrMO), the national competition to decide which six teenagers will be sent to represent Ireland in the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO).2 I didn’t grow up anywhere particularly remote: the commute was so long because the classes only run in six locations on the entire island.

Even at the time, the enrichment classes seemed remarkably under-resourced to me. The point is not to moan about this blemish on my otherwise fairly idyllic upbringing. The point is that there are large swathes of the country from which these training classes are inaccessible. While science competitions can be good and worthwhile, the enrichment classes are, to the best of my knowledge, essentially the only elite continuous academic training for teenagers in Ireland.3 It’s not that I’ve ever been single-mindedly obsessed with mathematics: I think the classes were so impactful on me because it was a revelation to study anything rigorously.

To be blunt, the reason why the maths olympiad hasn’t expanded is that it is run by a bunch of mathematicians. They don’t know anybody, and they are terrible at asking for money.

Three weeks ago, I started reconnecting with my old contacts in that world, to see if I could help them. Around the same time, entirely by coincidence, their main sponsor withdrew. Thanks to my friend Mark Cummins, we raised enough to stop the existing programmes that students were already signed up to from being cancelled. But the operation is still extremely barebones.

The Irish Maths Olympiad is bizarrely under-resourced compared to similar programmes in other countries. It’s hard to get exact numbers, but I believe the British are spending at least an order of magnitude more per capita. When I mentioned some of Ireland’s current funding struggles at an event with several IMO medalists last week, at first they didn’t believe me.

I’ve heard a few people express scepticism of olympiads, because they think that pure maths research is not very socially important. If olympiads nudge even a tiny number of the brightest students away from entrepreneurship or other ventures toward entirely theoretical research, then the net effect on society could be negative. I won’t express a view on the social utility of mathematics research per se, except to say that there are so many steps between bright kids getting exposed to challenging mathematics for the first time, and becoming academics. Only one friend I made from my olympiad days is on track to become a mathematician. And at the very least, the olympiad classes are fun, and not the usual soul-sucking, creativity-draining experience of secondary school maths for students who have a natural aptitude for it (as well as those who don’t!). It also helps the students find friends and collaborators. As for whether saving olympiads is cost-competitive with the most effective giving opportunities, I don’t know. Groups like Open Philanthropy Project have donated to camps including ESPR, which recruits heavily from the world of olympiads. That suggests the effective altruists think highly of this kind of thing. It would also be great if the Irish olympiads served as a pipeline for us to get more applicants to Patch. I don’t have space to properly defend this view here, but every time I’ve looked into it, every claimed downside of gifted education seems like cope to me.

Personally, I feel that getting young people to sit still and take challenging in-person exams is more important than ever, now that an OpenAI model can win a gold medal at the IMO. If students don’t learn skills of deep focus when they’re young, when are they going to do it?

My sense is that the other olympiads, like for chemistry, informatics, and linguistics, are even more under-resourced. They don’t even have enrichment classes. But I still don’t know much about them, and there is less of an established institution there.4

If my old professors knew how bad I am at maths now, they would probably be embarrassed to be associated with me. However, one thing I do think I am extremely good at is having zero sense of shame about harassing people decades older than me to get them to do things I think are important. In this case, I successfully bullied the Irish Mathematical Trust to set up a page where you can donate directly. The IMT is the charity that coordinates IrMO and the enrichment classes.5

If you want to talk to them about becoming a sponsor, or are having issues with the donation button, please email irishmathstrust@gmail.com or neil.dobbs@ucd.ie. Donations above €250 may have significant tax benefits from Ireland’s charitable donation scheme. If you’re planning on donating €1,000+, it may be worth it to switch to bank transfer to save on processing fees. If I can be of help or if you want to keep me in the loop, please CC sam@thefitzilliam.com. Real estate on the t-shirts worn by some of Ireland’s greatest young minds will never be so underpriced!

Also: If you are someone in Ireland with teenage children, you should get them to try out for the olympiad! The deadline for maths teachers to sign up to run round 1 of the IrMO is next week, and you can get information about attending Junior and Senior Enrichment here and here.

Why isn’t this just supported by the government? The only state funding for maths olympiads pays for the flights for the participants to go to the IMO and the European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad. Gifted programmes would be funded under the “special needs” budget, which received €2.9 billion this year. I say “would”, because there literally aren’t any gifted programmes to make use of this rule.6 How special needs can receive so much government support, while gifted programmes receive essentially zero, is a story for another day.

I want to clarify that everything I have said in this post is in an entirely personal capacity. Perhaps the reason why this is close to my heart is that I was the marginal student: someone for whom the enrichment classes were very impactful, but who, if the programme were scaled down even more, wouldn’t have made the cut.7 To get the ball rolling, I have made a personal donation, as have core Fitzwilliam confidants Oisín Morrin, Neil Shevlin, Adam Kelly, and Karina Bao.

What will the extra money be used for? That is ultimately up to the IMT to decide, but I gather that the most immediate uses are:

• To expand enrichment classes to a larger number of universities, so that the commutes are less insane.

• Senior Enrichment (4th to 6th year, ages 16–18) only occurs in the autumn, and with some extra resources, the amount of content could easily be doubled, and classes also run in the spring.

• Junior Enrichment (1st to 3rd year, ages 12–16) has only existed for a few years, and could be expanded significantly.

• I would expect the instructors to continue to be volunteers, but there is currently no system in place to pay for (e.g.) hotels for a substitute instructor, or a guest speaker, etc. They make small payments to tutors, generally university students, who help out. I would expect that, at higher levels of student ability, it will become more difficult to find volunteer instructors with enough of a background in the relevant content.

• There is currently a residential camp for some of the strongest candidates for the IMO team to train with students from other countries. Only ~25 people get to experience that, and it is currently directly bottlenecked by funding.

Accounting for exactly how much the maths olympiad costs currently is a bit complicated, depending on how exactly you classify certain expenses. But, from what I understand, the entire budget for all olympiad-related expenses in Ireland is less than the salary of one modestly-paid full-time employee. That’s crazy!

My sense is that raising €100,000 would be a transformative amount of money for gifted maths education in Ireland, and has essentially been beyond their wildest dreams up until this point. Through some well-placed phone calls, we’re already about 20% of the way there. Their donation page is here, and perhaps you or someone you know will be able to help us reach the rest of the way. Many thanks to you all!

We will be back to your regularly scheduled programming soon…

Sam Enright is editor-in-chief of The Fitzwilliam, and Innovation Policy Lead at Progress Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter here or read his personal blog here.

Three weeks ago, I graduated from university.

And three days after that, I started a new job, as the Innovation Policy Lead for Progress Ireland.

To follow exactly what I’ll be up to in this role, I recommend subscribing to the Progress Ireland Substack. As part of getting back into the groove of more regular publishing, this year I am also a Blog-Building Fellow with the Roots of Progress Institute.

Progress Ireland is an independent think tank that launched in September 2024. To the best of my knowledge, we are the only non-government-funded think tank in the country. I was involved with PI from the beginning as a Non-Resident Fellow. Other Non-Resident Fellows include my friend Julia Willemyns, co-founder of the Centre for British Progress, and (as Senior Fellow) the incomparable Ed Walsh, founder of the University of Limerick. However, there was only so much I could do from afar while also finishing my degree.

If you go back far enough, you can probably trace the existence of PI to a cold Twitter DM about a Fitzwilliam post I received from our now Executive Director, Seán Keyes. When I first met him, Seán was a finance journalist, cruising for a normal middle-class Irish life with 2.1 kids in the suburbs. Now, all his friends are weirdo internet polymaths in their 20s. I often wonder what his wife must think of me.1

My job title is purposefully vague, but here are the areas I am most excited about working on in this role:

• Understanding the burgeoning field of metascience, and what we have learned about how to better manage the scientific production function. It’s ironic that, for a discipline based on experimentation, the organisation of scientific institutions has been subject to remarkably little experimentation. The two main funding organisations for science in Ireland, the Irish Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland, have recently merged into a single body, Research Ireland. Their new CEO, Diarmuid O’Brien, is, by all accounts, an imaginative and open-minded person. I would like to see more experimentation with alternatives to the traditional funding models for science and to peer review. (I’m pleased that I often get to discuss these issues with my friends at the Institute for Progress, Open Philanthropy Project and Renaissance Philanthropy.) Along similar lines, Ireland is one of the world’s major hubs for pharmaceutical production. Yet, very few clinical trials actually take place here. The ones that do face unnecessary delays and have their scientific value undermined by bureaucracy.2

• Although Ireland is often seen as a relatively pro-business environment, this perception largely stems from its favourable tax treatment of large multinationals. Ireland has poorly structured capital taxation rules – for example, we have no equivalent of the ISA – that make it difficult to save or invest outside of pension plans and housing. Irish startups are struggling, and SMEs’ value-add is weak.

• I am personally highly uncertain about AI policy, but I know that we all need to be thinking more about it. The EU headquarters of OpenAI and Anthropic are in Dublin, and Ireland and Irish diplomats have a track record of influence on policy relevant to technology companies that is off the charts in per capita terms. Yet, the number of people working on AI policy full-time in Ireland is approximately zero.

• Nuclear power is currently banned in Ireland. While I’m not optimistic that building a nuclear power plant will be politically feasible, it’s important that we unban it, and to lend our support toward it at the European level. I think successfully running such a campaign is well within our powers. In the best case, Ireland could lead the world by being a regulatory sandbox for the deployment of SMRs and other new nuclear technology.

• Irish foreign aid has received little serious scrutiny. The best efforts in global health have been extraordinarily successful,3 and Ireland is quite uncreative in how it spends its preposterously large budgetary surpluses. I am particularly excited about advanced market commitments and other market-shaping initiatives, including for the impending crisis of antimicrobial resistance.

If you are a subscriber to this newsletter, there is a decent chance you are on board with this mission. If you are already working on any of these issues and you think that I can help, let me know. But what can you do to help?

First, the range of topics I need to know about for my job is bewildering. If there is a reading group, seminar, class, or event you think I’d particularly benefit from, let me know. This is part of what I’ve had in mind with the Fitzwilliam reading group, but I feel I am still nowhere near the frontier of how quickly I can learn, and take input and advice from thoughtful scholars.

Second, if you can help me with any of this directly, please email sam@progressireland.org. Fortunately for my employer, I have no life, and am happy to meet any day and almost any time, Monday to Sunday.

Third, you can donate. If we have more money, we can hire more people, publish more, and have more influence. I honestly think the case for donating to Progress Ireland is extremely compelling. You can donate directly on our website, or, for a larger amount, email me, and we can share more information. Our donors are listed publicly, and we are transparent about where our funding comes from.

Naturally enough, there are only so many details that can be shared publicly, but let me just say: we already have a good track record of influencing national-level policy conversations. The clearest example of this is on seomraí (granny flats), which soon will no longer require planning permission. Our Director of Housing Policy, Seán O’Neill McPartlin, has also been pushing for a relaxation in Ireland’s extremely high and costly minimum apartment standards. (My own views on urbanism are a story for another day, but there are worse places to start than Bertaud’s Order Without Design.)

A friend with extensive experience in Irish politics once told me that he thought that the system is so conservative that the optimistic case for an outsider organisation is that it would take ten people working full-time for five years to have any meaningful impact. We managed it with four people in a year.

In addition to email, my DMs are also open.

Most of my closest friends have emigrated from this country, mostly out of frustration, mostly because of entirely preventable policy failures. We can do better.

Beir bua – onward, to victory. ☘️

PS We host a monthly ‘friends of PI’ meetup on the last Wednesday of every month. The next one is on July 30th (tomorrow!) at 6:15pm upstairs in The Duke. You can (optionally) RSVP here.

Sam Enright is editor-in-chief of The Fitzwilliam. You can read his personal blog here or follow him on Twitter here.

The subject matter sounds, and is, extremely niche. But if you think my interests are niche – and I say this with affection – you should have met the other guys.

This experience taught me the little-known geographical fact that Kentucky straddles two time zones. Fortunately, this resulted in me showing up an hour early rather than an hour late.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of what I said. You can also look at my slides here. My slides contain some bonus material I didn’t have time to get to about the French physiocrats and about why (and if) Karl Marx displaced Henry George as the dominant intellectual influence on the British left. Enjoy!

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Hello everyone. Thank you very much for having me. Today, I’m going to be talking about this man here:

His name was Henry George. I’ll be talking about the ideas he had toward the end of the 19th century about land tax.

I hope to convince you that considerations about the taxation of land are actually quite important when considering anyone active in the worlds of social and political thought at the time that Bertrand Russell was.

The context of how I got interested in this rabbithole is this passage in the first volume of Russell’s Autobiography:

My Aunt Agatha introduced me to the books of Henry George, which she greatly admired. I became convinced that land nationalisation would secure all the benefits that Socialists hoped to obtain from Socialism, and continued to hold this view until the war of 1914–18.1

This quote raises a few questions: What was Henry George saying such that Russell interpreted him as advocating “land nationalisation”? And why did he abandon this view in the 1910s?

I’m going to split this talk into four parts. First, I’ll give an introduction: Who was Henry George? What kind of influence did his ideas have? Then, I’ll talk about the direct references that I was able to find, by Russell, to Henry George. Then, I’ll mention a little bit about the Land Question in various countries – roughly, who should own the land and why? Then I’ll conclude with a few comments about whether Russell would have more naturally had a political home remaining a Georgist.

Henry George

Henry George was an autodidact political economist, born in San Francisco in 1839. His really big idea that he became famous for is the concept of a land value tax. A land value tax is a tax on the unimproved value of land. Property taxes tax the value of any buildings or improvements you have on top of land, and the land itself. But land value taxes only apply to whatever the land would be worth if the plot were empty. If you convert this into an annual rate, it’s called the implicit or imputed rent of the land.2 George argues that the land tax should be set at 100% of the implicit rental rate.

So, if the rent for empty plots where I live were 7% of the total selling value of the plot, then all seven of that percent would go to the state. George further thinks that this should be the only tax; that all government activities should be funded through the land value tax. So this is, of course, quite a radical idea.

He first proposed it in an obscure pamphlet from 1871 called Our Land and Land Policy. But in 1879, he wrote a book called Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Causes of Industrial Depression and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy. I’ve always been impressed by just how 19th-century this book title is, and how it manages to have two colons in it.

This book was an extraordinary success. It became part of a kind of working-class political and economic canon. You will sometimes see it written that Progress and Poverty was actually the most widely read book in the entire English language in the 19th century, after the Bible. We can get into this in the Q&A, but the bibliographic data from the 19th century is so terrible that I don’t really trust this claim.3 But it certainly sold millions of copies and was incredibly influential.

What George was aiming to explain with his advocacy of this Single Tax was: How is it possible that we have things like industrial depressions? How is it possible that we have both progress and poverty? (The book is undeniably descriptively titled.) How do we have more homeless people, and destitute poverty in the centres of cities, when there are such large and totally undeniable improvements in industrial technology?

George’s answer is that the value of these improvements gets captured by increases in rent. And so the only solution is to ensure that it’s no longer profitable to hold on to land without improving it.

I believe this photo is from Ohio in 1914, where somebody bought an empty plot of land just to sit on it and wait for the value of land to increase. And he did this specifically so that he could buy a billboard to promote the ideas of Henry George.

One question that you might have about all of this is whether George’s idea of a 100% land value tax, is that the same thing as land nationalisation? Russell seems to think so. This has been an enduring point of discussion for Georgists. If you have a tax of this kind, is this basically the same thing as the government owning all of the land, and merely deciding to rent it out to people? Personally, I still can’t tell whether this is an interesting question for political philosophy, or just a semantic quibble.

In volume two of the Autobiography, Russell writes about how Georgism was previously considered an “active competitor” to socialism, especially in his undergraduate days, especially at Cambridge. He calls George a “forgotten prophet”.

To give a sense of just how much his extraordinary level of cultural influence faded, there’s this poll, which can be found in the book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, that found that among early Labour MPs, Henry George was literally more popular than Shakespeare.4 Similarly, when Henry George died in 1897, over 200,000 people came to his funeral in New York, which was about 10% of the entire population of the city at the time.5

Another tidbit that you will come across if you ever go down this rabbit hole is that the board game Monopoly was actually created to promote the ideas of Henry George. Monopoly was based on an earlier game called The Landlord’s Game. There’s a fascinating and surprisingly complicated history there, but basically, the original elements of the game that promoted Georgism were removed, and the intended message was reversed.

Finally, I want to say a little bit about how Henry George has been treated in modern economics. An economist would say that the thing that’s special about land, that makes it fundamentally different from capital, is that land is perfectly supply inelastic. We can’t make any more land. There’s a fixed quantity of it; the supply curve of land is vertical.

George says that, even things like dredging land from the sea, like they’ve done in the Netherlands, is just transforming preexisting land. He says that’s not even a legitimate example of creating new land.

My sense is that modern economics has been surprisingly supportive of Henry George. Milton Friedman famously described land tax as the “least bad” tax. Joseph Stiglitz wrote an influential general equilibrium model in 1977 in which he showed that, under certain assumptions, the increase in aggregate rent will be at least as much as the cost of beneficial public investments. This is called the Henry George Theorem, and you can think of it as a kind of formalised version of the Georgist idea that improvements in amenities get eaten up by the rent increase.

Bertrand Russell on Henry George

Next, I’m going to talk about Bertrand Russell’s direct commentary on Henry George. So, Russell has this book from 1916 called The Principles of Social Reconstruction. It’s known as Why Men Fight in America. He says in this book that private property has no justification.

It’s sort of a historical accident that people have the property that they do. In his discussion of this, Russell is at his most explicitly Georgist. For example, he says that even though private property is unjustifiable, we should not abolish rent entirely. A system in which the government taxes people in accordance with how high their ‘free market’ rent would be, and then redistributes that money, has the benefit of penalising inefficient uses of land. If we abolish rent entirely, it will create a kind of lazy and conservative aristocracy out of the lucky few whose rent was high before the abolition. So in this, and in a couple of other ways, he’s basically hitting all of George’s talking points, in terms of having a land tax.

Jumping forward a bit, the next reference that I was able to find to Henry George directly in the works of Russell comes from this letter that he wrote to Constance Malleson in 1918, who was Russell’s love interest at the time. This one’s pretty hard to get a hold of, but I managed to find a copy in volume 14 of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell.

This is a short letter, but he makes a couple of interesting points in it. One is that he discusses Georgism as basically being a continuation of the classical tradition of political economy, particularly John Stewart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, and also, David Ricardo.

Ricardo has this idea called the Law of Rent. We don’t have time to fully get into it, but it’s viewed as a conceptual cornerstone of Georgism. Another thing I found that was very funny about this letter is that, possibly because he’s trying to impress a girl, Russell makes the very implausible claim that his friend Crompton Llewelyn Davies6 – who features quite notably in the first volume of the Autobiography – is the main reason why a Georgist-style land tax was featured in David Lloyd George’s budget from 1909.

Most of you are American, so maybe you don’t know this. But the 1909 budget is perhaps the most famous budget in British history. It’s known as the People’s Budget, and it caused a constitutional crisis that eventually led to the House of Lords losing its ability to veto legislation. One of the really interesting provisions was that it featured a land tax, but the land tax was on increases in implicit rent, rather than the level of implicit rent.

So if the unimproved value of land in a certain area had stayed exactly the same from a baseline level from 1909, then there would be no land tax. I haven’t been able to track down the full details of this, but Winston Churchill, who was then President of the Board of Trade and helped Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, draft the budget – Churchill said on many occasions that Henry George was irrefutable. So, presumably, they would have preferred a full land tax, but they viewed this one as more politically feasible. In chapter seven of the first volume of the Autobiography, Russell explicitly talks about the People’s Budget as a primary reason why he wanted to enter politics after the completion of the first volume of his masterpiece Principia Mathematica.

Here is a political caricature of an infamous self-assessment form called Form 4 and the logistical complexities that were involved in implementing the land tax.

The next reference, as far as I can tell, is in The Prospects of Industrial Civilisation from 1923. This is one that Russell co-authored, or is claimed to have co-authored with his second wife, Dora Black.7

Russell is moving away from George in this book. He seems to think that Georgism was kind of the logical next step in the development of liberalism. He believes that all of these terrible things flowed out of this historical accident of private property. But, communism clearly involves such a high level of coercion and despotism, such that, George is a kind of middle way between these. [Edit: Relevant context is that, in 1920, Russell published a book called The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, which was based on a trip he had made to Russia (during which he met Vladimir Lenin!). In that book, he disavows the Soviet Union, which alienated him from many of his friends like Sidney and Beatrice Webb.]

In Prospects, he’s talking more about Henry George as a historical development of a set of ideas, rather than it being something that he subscribes to himself. And I think that he’s more realistic about the kind of contradictions with this view. For example, he openly speculates about whether it’s actually possible to implement a Georgist land tax, without an unacceptable level of state coercion.

The next reference to George by Russell is quite a bit later. It’s in a book called Freedom and Organization, published in 1934. I think this one is called Freedom versus Organization to Americans, although even the British title has the American spelling of the word ‘organization’, which I’ve always thought was odd. [Edit: This comment garnered a few chuckles, because the first talk of the morning was about the differences between the British and American versions of one of Russell’s books.]

You might notice that the Georgist perspective on land has a very clear parallel with the idea of surplus value, from Marx. This talk is not about Marx. I know almost nothing about Karl Marx. But I understand the “surplus value” to mean something like, the difference in the actual price of things and the “socially necessary” amount of labour required to produce it.

And although Russell was of course not a Marxist, he views the concept of surplus value as more salvageable than other elements of Marxism. In Freedom, he explicitly contrasts the way Marx and George analyse certain problems, and says George is much closer to being correct regarding the “analysis of power of money”.8

So again we see Russell is moving away from Georgism. He sees it as something that has an element of truth, but isn’t really applicable to modern problems. There’s a recent book from Christopher England, which is the first proper intellectual history of the influence that Henry George had on New Deal liberalism in the United States, and on the Liberal Party – for example, in the drafting of the People’s Budget. That book has a section about Russell, which is a little bit simplistic. What he says is that even after he moved away from being a Single Taxer directly, Russell always had a soft spot for George because of how incredibly straightforward George is. Progress and Poverty, to be honest, is actually quite an unpleasant book to read, because he just hits you over the head with the same idea over and over again.

You can’t accuse George of being vague. He’s using terms like ‘rent’ and ‘capital’ and ‘land’ in extremely specific ways. For example, by ‘wages’ he actually refers to a proportion, not an absolute quantity.9 And as he’s using the terms, land is not wealth, and neither is money.

And Russell contrasts that with Marx, who he criticises for never consistently using terms like ‘rent’. Another important book, Alan Ryan’s study from 1981 about the political life of Bertrand Russell, says that essentially, Russell thinks that everything that’s salvageable in Marxist ideas of surplus value and exploitation is more articulately and rigorously stated in the Henry George critique of monopoly. We've been discussing his critique of monopoly in the context of landowners having a monopoly over land, but George certainly also wrote many things about antitrust and monopoly in a corporate context.10

Weirdly enough, the main way that you get a sense that Russell moved away from Georgism is that he mocks other people for holding the view. For example, he stayed at one point in Massachusetts in the home of a very eccentric tennis player called Fiske Warren. They never actually ended up meeting in person, but in the Autobiography, Russell calls him a “fanatic” on the Single Tax issue.11

Fiske Warren had established a colony in Andorra, as part of a hare-brained scheme to disprove the Malthusian theory of population by having Americans buy up a large fraction of the country and create a Georgist microstate. Russell similarly mocks Crompton Davies as being a “fanatical” Gorgist, and writes about it as if it were one of the enduring eccentricities of their friendship.

In the first volume of his Russell biography, Ray Monk takes umbrage at this latter description. He says that Russell, at the time that he was mocking Crompton Davies for being a Georgist, also says elsewhere in the book that he believed exactly the same thing at the same time, for the same reasons.12 So it’s quite unclear if this is just Russell being very, very sloppy in the way he describes his own beliefs, or what exactly is going on there.

The Land Question

Henry George is quite explicit that he thinks that one of the effects of a land tax is that it will cause people to leave the cities and basically go back to farmland. And he has a very different view on why cities exist in the first place compared to modern economists. He makes no mention of network effects or knowledge spillovers, which are two of the main concepts modern economists apply to thinking about cities.

George thinks that people are kind of coerced into the cities, through being unable to afford the rent due to land speculation. This is also what he thinks is the cause of “industrial depressions”.13 This is incredibly ironic, because I sometimes talk about Henry George with people in Silicon Valley, for example, where there’s been a major recent resurgence in his ideas. And they are often under the impression that Henry George is the godfather of high-density walkable urbanism, or something like this. But actually, he thinks that the effect of a land tax will be to move toward a more rural society, rather than to intensify land use!14

I bring this up because, in Russell’s writings about China from the 1920s, he does seem to have a lot of this anti-city, anti-industrialisation kind of scepticism. He definitely had a “victims of our own success” perspective on all of the effects that industrialisation has had on the West.

Russell worried a lot about whether China would be able to catch up on Western science without also adopting its values. From what I’ve read of Russell, this is really him at his most Malthusian. He says repeatedly that poverty and famine will be endemic in China unless they have a widespread adoption of birth control or other population control measures.

This is kind of interesting, because one of the primary motivations for Georgism is precisely to have an intellectually coherent way to refute Malthusianism. Book II of Progress and Poverty is all about refuting the work of Thomas Robert Malthus. Around 1922, it seems a bit like Russell is subscribing to both schools of thought.

There’s a much more direct Georgist connection with China. After he played a key role in overthrowing the Qing dynasty, the economic pillar of Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People was based on the economics of Henry George.15 After everything fell apart and China descended into the Warlord Era, Russell wrote articles and also in his book from 1922, The Problem of China, strongly in favour of Sun’s government based in Guangzhou. This was against national stereotypes: most Brits at that time were inclined to support Wu Peifu’s faction in the north. He shared his sympathy for Sun with another world-famous philosopher who lived in China at the time, John Dewey.16 Russell was even invited to dinner with Sun Yat-sen, which to his “lasting regret” he had to turn down. But I wasn’t able to find any evidence that this enthusiasm for Sun was related to his adoption of Georgism.

I think Georgist themes similarly shine through in Russell’s interest in Ireland. I’m actually from Dublin, which is a fact which might be almost undetectable in my accent by this point [pause for laughter]. Henry George had an enduring interest in Ireland, particularly in how Ireland could be something of a test bed for his ideas. He wrote a book about the Irish Land Question, and he was arrested when he came to Ireland in the 1880s, while reporting on a series of protests against landlords for The Irish World.

Russell wrote and spoke about the Irish ‘Land War’ on a couple of occasions. He mentions in his Autobiography, very proudly, once shaking hands with Charles Stewart Parnell, who was the president of the Irish National Land League. The Land League was greatly influenced by George and his outlook toward questions of Irish land use.

In the first volume of the Autobiography, Russell also writes about his friendship with Michael Davitt, who was the founding organiser of the Land League, and recruited Parnell to it. He recalls going on walks with Davitt when he visited Ireland, and talking about the ideas of Henry George. [Edit: Something that casts a shadow over Bertrand Russell’s interest in Ireland is that his grandfather, John Russell, was prime minister for most of the Irish potato famine.]

Should Russell Have Been a Georgist?

I still don’t feel that we have a clear answer for why it was that Russell turned away from Georgism. He’s not at all explicit about his motivations for why he no longer subscribed to the Single Tax idea after around 1916. There’s this famous quote from Russell about how his life before and after the outbreak of World War I was as different as “Faust’s life before and after he met Mephistopheles”.

But I guess there’s still different elements to tease out about how it changed in different ways. Something that I think is rarely remarked upon is that George is coming from such a different intellectual tradition from Russell. For one thing, Georgism is explicitly religiously motivated! I’m never quite sure how literal he’s being, but in Progress and Poverty, he thinks that people moving away from cities because of the land tax will bring them closer to God. George was raised Episcopalian, and he is coming from a kind of 19th-century American Protestant social tradition, which is very alien – well, it’s alien to me – but it was certainly alien to an atheist British analytic philosopher.

That’s everything I have for now. Thank you very much!

I wish that the world had more reading groups: outlets outside a university context for people to come together to discuss interesting papers, essays, books, and blogs. It’s really more difficult than it should be to find a social group to learn complicated stuff together with.

For this reason, we are starting a monthly reading group in Dublin. The readings will be an eclectic mix at the intersection of economics, science, and history. I also anticipate that we’ll have a regular stream of special guests to answer our questions about what they’ve written.

I ran a group like this for years when I lived in Edinburgh. Some highlights included discussing the history of the steam engine with Anton Howes, and reading The Merchant of Venice with Henry Oliver. My personal favourite meetups were probably from our series about classic papers of computer science, including Alan Turing’s On Computable Numbers and Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Communication. (If you live in or near Edinburgh and would like to join the group that I used to run, it is now in the capable hands of my friend Sean: sean [dot] brocklebank [at] ed [dot] ac [dot] uk.)

Two commonly reported problems with reading groups are that attendance dwindles over time, and that people don’t actually do the readings. None of my reading groups has ever had either of these problems. I think the key is to convince people that you will show up on time, prepared, even if nobody else does. So that is what I will do.1

The first meetup of The Fitzwilliam Reading Group will be at 2pm on Saturday, June 7th. It will be about the economics of trade and sanctions, and we will be discussing:

1. Ricardo’s Difficult Idea

2. What Do Trade Agreements Really Do?

3. Economic Sanctions: Evolution, Consequences, and Challenges

(I will note that all of these papers look longer than they really are because of the bibliography. Get reading!)

The meeting will be in Dogpatch Labs in CHQ Dublin, which is a five-minute walk from Connolly Station. In particular, it will be in the ‘Ideation Space’ right across from the main Dogpatch entrance, immediately adjacent to the Starbucks. We will have a sign. It’s a great venue, which is essentially perfect for an event like this, so I give my thanks to Dogpatch for letting us use it. We usually end up chatting for about 2.5 hours, although there’s no problem if you can only make it for part of that.

The July meetup will be on Sunday, July 6th at 2pm. It will also be in the Ideation Space. There will be a special guest in the form of Santi Ruiz, author of the Statecraft newsletter. We will be discussing:

1. How to Stage a Coup

2. How to Catch a Lab Leak

3. How to Save Twenty Million Lives

4. Bonus: 50 Thoughts on DOGE

You can join the mailing list here. [Edit: I ported over this list on 26/05/25. If you’re reading this more recently than that, email sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com to join the group.] The form also has an optional space to include your number for a WhatsApp group for general chit-chat. The normal disclaimers apply about how we expect people to be respectful. Everything official will be announced on both platforms. I encourage people to join even if they have a low probability of being in Dublin in any given month. Indeed, you’re welcome to join the mailing list even if you just want my monthly curated reading list (if that sounds appealing, you might enjoy my monthly links roundups).

If you have further questions, you can email sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com, or reply to this email. After the first meeting, we can also discuss the timing and reading for the August meetup. I look forward to seeing many of you there.

Keynes’s lecture was widely reported in the Irish press and has remained a subject of debate and interest ever since. It’s a glimpse into how intellectuals at the time thought about the predicament of how newly independent nations should develop. This is the context in which I first became interested in the lecture; to learn what the world’s most famous economist thought about Ireland, without the benefit of hindsight, is fascinating. What is particularly notable about the Finlay Lecture is that, at least on a first reading, it is surprisingly positive about the state that Ireland was in. Particularly widely reported was one comment: ‘If I were an Irishman, I should find much to attract me in the economic outlook of your present government towards greater self-sufficiency.’ This was astonishing. At the time, Keynes was one of the most influential intellectuals in the world, and probably the most famous economist to ever live. And Ireland was a backwater, pursuing a disastrous trade war with Britain. As far as economic orthodoxy is concerned, it was as if Paul Krugman went to Tajikistan, to praise the wisdom of their leaders in implementing price controls.

And another:

Keynes was infamous for reversing his positions. There’s an old joke that says that, in a room of twelve eminent economists, you’ll find thirteen opinions – and two of them will be Keynes. When Keynes started to publicly doubt free trade, it was a social scandal. Virginia Woolf and his close friends were horrified. ‘Maynard has become a Protectionist,’ she wrote to a friend in September 1930, ‘which horrified me so that I promptly fainted.’

You can read the whole piece on their website.

Sam Enright is executive editor of the Fitzwilliam. You can follow him on Twitter here.

It will be on October 20th, beginning at 3pm. 

We’re very fortunate to be hosting the event at The Interval, which is a beautiful space owned by the Long Now Foundation. The venue includes the prototype of the Long Now Clock, an experimental clock designed by Brian Eno and Stewart Brand that won’t chime for 10,000 years. (You can see some of the other quirky features of the Interval in this Twitter thread.)  

We’ve always had a disproportionate number of Californian readers, especially in San Francisco. And for good or for ill, my friend group is one giant pipeline of O1 visas (“every startup needs a soulful Irish boy whose job is empathizing with the users”). 

We will have several special guests, including the editors of Works in Progress magazine, and some other familiar bloggers and podcasters. Drinks will be covered.

I look forward to seeing you there. You can RSVP here. We only have a limited number of spots left, so if you can’t go anymore, please release your spot for someone else.   

In chapter three, Roodman traces the movement’s historical foundations. I was surprised to learn that the first person to recognisably engage in modern microfinance was… Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels. 

Swift pioneered a system of ‘loan funds’ that lasted for over a century and, at its apex, provided credit to a fifth of the Irish population. The whole story is surprisingly obscure, even in Ireland.1

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The Irish loan funds

Jonathan Swift was the Anglo-Irish Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and a public intellectual who wrote about a wide range of social and economic issues. Swift was already famous by the time Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726, which further boosted his fame across Europe. Gulliver’s Travels is a strange book, which satirises (among other things) the tall tales of travel writing from the time. It’s unsurprising that it has inspired so much literary commentary and analysis in the following 300 years (as well as an extremely stupid Jack Black movie). Three years after Gulliver’s Travels, Swift published A Modest Proposal, a satirical essay which proposes that poor people in Ireland should ease their financial woes by selling their children as food to the British. Meat from the children, he writes, will be “very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children”. 

Both through the sales of his books, and his position as Dean, Swift amassed substantial personal wealth – some of which he wanted to use to help the poor. At some point in the 1720s, Swift started a fund with £500 of his own money, and began making interest-free loans sized between £5 and £10 aimed especially at “poor industrious tradesmen”. Swift’s fund had two distinctive features, which made it structurally almost identical to modern microfinance. First, borrowers were expected to make partial repayments on a weekly basis. Second, in order to get a loan from Swift, you had to provide signatures from two people who knew you and attested to your good character. The primary account of these loans comes from a biography written by his godson Thomas Sheridan. Sheridan says that it was a “maxim” for Swift that, due to the co-signing mechanism, “any one known by his neighbours to be an honest, sober, and industrious man, would readily find such security; while the idle and dissolute would by this means be excluded.” The system succeeded: due to the high rates of repayment, Sheridan reports that Swift experienced minimal personal loss of capital. This was the case even though the loans required no collateral. It’s also notable that Swift made use of the court system, prosecuting both borrowers and guarantors if they failed to repay. 

By Swift’s time, lending at subsidised interest rates had been established in England as a form of charity, which is probably where he got the idea. That idea is less obvious than it sounds: after centuries of religious hand-wringing about the evils of usury, it was unintuitive that making it easier for people to become indebted could be an effective response to poverty. You can think of Swift as attempting to improve upon the earlier model of a ‘friendly society’, which is a mutual aid group that provides services including loans and insurance. Before the welfare state, friendly societies were a huge deal; in 1905, there were 30,000 separate friendly societies in the UK, with 14 million members.2 

Other philanthropically-minded people in Ireland were inspired by Swift’s example. Two years after he died, in 1747, the Dublin Musical Society established a loan fund, in which the proceeds from its performances would be loaned out “upon the same system as Dean Swift”. The credit project came to dominate the Society: by the late 1760s, it was providing loans to more than 5,000 people. Note that these interest-free loans were de facto a subsidy to the poor, given the reality of inflation. The Musical Society scheme eventually fizzled out, but it inspired many similar ventures. 

Irish loan funds were opened on a much greater scale after 1823, when Parliament passed the Charitable Loan Societies (Ireland) Act. This allowed funds to charge interest, and it also exempted them from the stamp tax. (You normally needed to pay the stamp tax to make a contract enforceable by a Justice of the Peace, instead of the slower court of quarter sessions.) The new legislation gave the loan funds a big advantage over commercial lenders who hadn’t paid the tax.

One reason why this legislation was passed was that Ireland had suffered a potato famine the year before, and extending credit was seen as one way to help with the recovery. Everybody knows about the Great Famine, which began in 1845; fewer people know about the several earlier (though less deadly) potato famines across Ireland, including in 1822. Some of the loan funds were operated on a charitable basis, while others made a profit. The non-profit model was particularly prevalent in the wave of new funds in the 1820s. A London-based relief fund for the 1822 famine endowed the ‘Reproductive Loan Fund Institution’ with £55,000, which financed 100 new funds – the managers of which were prohibited from obtaining “any salary, allowance, profit or benefit”. 

Although more banks began opening in Ireland following financial liberalisations in the 1820s, they remained largely institutions for the rich. In his economic history of Ireland, Cormac Ó Gráda describes Irish banking during this time as dealing almost exclusively with the richest third of the population. When banks attempted to enter the market for small loans to the poor, they often lacked the local knowledge and community enforcement mechanisms that distinguished the loan funds. Several pejorative terms attest to the low reputation of Irish moneylenders at the time, being called ‘mealmongers’ or ‘gombeenmen’ (the latter evolved into the modern Irishism of gombeen man, i.e. somebody corrupt). 

Additional loan fund legislation was passed in 1836 and 1838. These bills established the Loan Fund Board, which collected information about the loan funds and disseminated knowledge about best practices. It also gave depositors more information about creditworthiness, making them more likely to invest. The number of loan funds spiked after the creation of the Board.

At its peak, these funds were making loans to over a fifth of households in Ireland – a much higher fraction than commercial banks. In the early 1840s, there were twice as many loan funds as there were bank branches. Essentially the only difference between these loan funds and the Swift system is that borrowers were paying interest. Since large deposits will, naturally enough, make up the majority of the total, the loan funds were still a relatively small fraction of total deposits by value: from the 1830s to 1840s, loan funds increased from 2% to 5% of the level of total bank deposits.3 

The charitable reading of the government’s treatment of loan funds is that they were helping the poor to help themselves. Until 1838, Ireland had no equivalent of England’s Poor Laws, which went back to Elizabethan times. The upper and middle classes bristled at the level of tax increases that would have been required to create even a minimal welfare state.     

Another way in which loan funds were modern was their then-revolutionary practice of lending to women. A fifth of borrowers from loan funds were women, most of whom were unmarried. A high rate of lending directly to women is one of the most notable characteristics of microfinance; 97% of borrowers from Grameen Bank are women. Although a fifth is far from gender parity, it was certainly an improvement on traditional banking in this regard.   

The decline of the funds 

After peaking in 1843, the Irish loan funds began a precipitous decline. One reason was the Great Famine, which followed the potato blight of 1845. Repayment rates tanked, and many of the one million people who emigrated in the wake of the famine did so while still indebted. Another reason was new legislation: in 1843, the Loan Societies Act lowered the caps on the funds’ interest rates from 13.6% to 8.8%.

Irish parliamentarians and those familiar with the loan funds system were almost unanimous in their opposition to the legislation. Irish newspapers were also generally against the change; the Freeman’s Journal wrote that “We do not conceive that the borrowers will be much benefited, but we think deposits will be limited in number by the operation of reduction [in the interest rate]”.4 The Act may not have passed if there had been a proper parliamentary debate, but it was rushed through as a form of ‘housekeeping’ and fewer than 40 MPs even showed up to vote on it. 

The interest rate cap was probably not motivated by a desire to prevent usury, or indeed by any of the usual arguments for price controls. Banks and other moneylenders were still allowed to charge far more than 9% interest. It was more likely motivated by the growing political influence of banks, which had been surprised by the levels of competition they faced from loan funds in the market for small and medium-sized deposits. The single individual who defended the Act in parliament, John Young, was a director of the Bank of Ireland.

It’s a particularly dark irony of history that the legislation which devastated one of the main financial services for the Irish poor was passed two years before the Great Famine. The 1843 bill is a stark contrast to the earlier legislation, all of which were aimed at encouraging Irish loan funds.5 

The number of loan funds in Ireland fell from a high of around 300 in 1843 to 50 by 1916. The final official report on the loan funds was released in 1914. It painted a bleak picture of a small amount of inherited capital, with apathetic managers and committee members. The weekly repayments had become payments once per month or even less often. 

The resilience of the loan funds was impressive: they provided credit to the poor for more than a century, during a period of frequent macroeconomic instability and emigration. A perennial dilemma for the funds was adverse selection: since there was no collateral required, those seeking a loan were in some ways negatively selected. Due to weak record-keeping and bureaucracy, even just administering the funds was challenging. Court records describe cases sometimes being thrown out because it couldn’t be proven whether the borrower was the same person who signed the contract.  

The legacy of Irish microfinance 

Were the Irish loan funds effective at reducing poverty? There were certainly reports of the many lives uplifted by the funds: Sheridan wrote “I have been well assured from different quarters, that many families in Dublin, now living in great credit, owed the foundation of their fortunes, to the sums first borrowed from [Jonathan Swift].” A report to the Loan Fund Board in the 1840s describes the effect which microcredit had on a village in Cork: 

Farmers by a command of money at a reasonable rate of interest… can purchase the best seed for the land. The fishermen living along the coast do not lose the chance of fish from want of boats and fishing gear, and the tradesmen are no longer idle from want of material to work with.

But ultimately, bad data quality and the lack of experimentation mean that it’s almost impossible to isolate a causal effect of the funds. Even today, with multinational organisations that keep extensive records, the same considerations mean that it’s extremely difficult to determine the effects of microfinance (Roodman again: “On the limited high-quality evidence so far available, the average impact of microcredit on poverty is about zero”).6

Aidan Hollis and Arthur Sweetman wrote a relatively positive history of the loan funds, which is well worth a read. Borrowing can help people escape a poverty trap, but poor people might also take on unsustainably high levels of debt, and there are also questions about what the enforcement mechanism is for repayment. As with any microcredit, how these net out is an empirical question. Hollis and Sweetman see certain features of the funds, such as being highly locally devolved and requiring signatures to attest to the borrower’s good character, as largely solving the problems inherent in encouraging the poor to take on more debt. 

There is a long history of pushing for credit expansion as a way to jumpstart prosperity. The government of British India began encouraging what would now be called microfinance through an act from 1904, following a recommendation from the Indian Famine Commission. After the enabling legislation was passed, non-profit financial institutions owned by their members (credit cooperatives) began to open across India and issue small loans. The presence of credit cooperatives was one of the reasons why Bengal was the location of the modern resurgence in microfinance beginning in the 1970s. Horace Plunkett had attempted to introduce credit cooperatives to Ireland (which were, like their Indian counterparts, inspired by the ‘Raiffeisen’ model in Germany), but they never took off.

It’s tempting to think that the problem with extending credit to those in poverty is that there will be high rates of default. But this is not so, according to Banerjee and Duflo’s classic paper The Economic Lives of the Poor. In the poorest countries, the rates of loan repayment are surprisingly high – in large part because there are informal social networks and enforcement mechanisms to make people pay. It’s easier to refuse to repay your loans to an impersonal institution than to people in your village. Generally, one of the most striking features of microfinance is that the rates of repayment are sky high (suspiciously so!). 

Is there reason to think that today’s microfinance is historically connected with the earlier Irish microfinance? Roodman thinks that the earlier microfinance efforts did affect the modern ones: “The ideas within [microfinance] are ancient, and their modern embodiments descend directly from older successes.”7 Microcredit is a sufficiently obvious idea that it will recur throughout history; it also has several other predecessors. But Jonathan Swift’s scheme is the earliest clear parallel I’m aware of. If only he had lived to see the invention of Substack, I’m certain he would’ve had his own grants program.

We called it The Fitzwilliam Seminar on the History of Economic Thought, and the focus was on Adam Smith, classical liberalism, and the Scottish Enlightenment.

The event was in Panmure House, which is where Adam Smith lived from 1778 to 1790 while he worked as a customs comptroller. Our main discussions took place in the drawing room, where it’s believed that he held dinners for the Oyster Club, a learned society that he ran with his friends David Hume and Joseph Black. 

When I say ‘teeny tiny’, I literally mean eight people. The close-knit and extremely focused nature of the group was my favourite part of the event. 

The event was somewhat of a milestone, as the first official Fitzwilliam event hosted outside Ireland. We’ve previously run a film screening, a retreat, a writers’ meetup, and a pub meetup.  

Why the history of economic thought?

For one thing, last year I enjoyed reading Tyler Cowen’s book Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time?, and I thought it would be fun to turn it into an event. Second, I had never read any Adam Smith directly before, and this was a less painful way to force myself to do it.  

Also, the opportunity to run an event in Adam Smith’s house was simply too good to pass up. We were given a tour, and we got to read and turn the pages in a first edition of The Wealth of Nations from 1776. I would have thought that you should use gloves when handling a book that old, but apparently, the oils in your fingers prevent the pages from clumping together.    

The format of the event was as follows: there were five sessions, each lasting a bit under an hour, chaired by an academic who guided a discussion about their chosen topic. You can see the schedule here. The rest of this post will be a summary of what we talked about in each of the sessions. The summaries have been written by me, so the attendees wouldn’t necessarily endorse every word.  

Overall, I felt the event went swimmingly, and I’m grateful to the attendees and to everyone who helped organise. It was honestly one of the most memorable and intellectually fulfilling experiences I’ve had.  

After the event, I brought everyone to dinner at one of my favourite Chinese restaurants, where we were served by a robot. Just as Smith would have wanted. 

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Stephen Kinsella: StephenGPT

Stephen Kinsella is chair of the economics department at the University of Limerick; you can follow him on Twitter here. 

When Stephen Kinsella was 23, he took a course called ‘Historical Foundations of Political Economy’ – his favourite from his PhD. For that course, he took extensive notes while reading Marx, Keynes, Smith, and other influential economic thinkers. For this session, Stephen uploaded those notes to train a GPT model to simulate himself at age 23. He then created a second model, using those notes and also his columns for The Currency and other public writings, to simulate himself at his current age (46). There are a few interesting directions you can take this in, for example:

• Use StephenGPT-23 to predict Stephen at 46, and see how accurate he is. In the general case: How predictably do people’s views shift over time? Should you be concerned if a large language model trained on your past self can predict your current view too accurately? 

• Compare the responses of StephenGPT-23 and StephenGPT-46, to see how his views are generally changing over time. The questions he prompted it with included “Has Smith or Keynes been more influential on Stephen Kinsella’s views?” 

• Write down predictions in advance for what you believed when you were young, then see how accurately you remember your previous understanding. 

Stephen is also using LLMs to great effect in a course he teaches called ‘International Economics’ at the University of Limerick. The winning formula seems to be creating a different GPT for each week of the course, which is trained on material only up to one week ahead of where the students are. If you train the model on all the course material, it’s too difficult to prevent it from bringing up later information which confuses them. He has been running A/B tests on whether these LLM teaching assistants are effective. The tricky part is that they are so popular that students are requesting to transfer into the tutorial groups which use them, messing up the causal inference.

A general theme of our conversation was that deep reading of texts and tracking how you struggle through them is an area that is particularly ripe for improvement with LLMs. It’s great to see Stephen running some experiments to this end.

Rebecca Lowe: Adam Smith as a radical egalitarian 

Rebecca Lowe is a political philosopher writing a book about the philosophy of freedom; you can follow her on Twitter here. You can see the abstract for the paper she’s writing about this topic here.  

Adam Smith was remarkably egalitarian. You might call him a hardcore ‘epistemic capacity egalitarian’, believing that we all possess equal potential to know how to lead fulfilling and ethical lives. This is the basis of his moral theory, especially as he outlines it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (his earlier book that focuses more on what we would now call psychology and moral philosophy). 

Amartya Sen, who wrote the introduction to my edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is an influential interpreter of Smith. He interprets Smith’s libertarian attitudes as being in large part about how, if the state is too powerful, it curtails people’s ability to fulfil their moral potential. Smith’s vision is one of individuals with extreme levels of self-respect.

‘Equal potential’ does not mean equal potential to the same level. Clearly, people have different talents and proclivities – and socialisation is not the source of all of those inequalities. But the differences are probably smaller than they seem. Smith says that rich people seem smarter than poor people, but this is because poor people spend their lives in drudgery and don’t have time for academic pursuits. 

In her contribution to a set of collected essays about Adam Smith, Elizabeth Anderson proposed a distinction between ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ egalitarians. Moderate egalitarians are people who just want to temper around the edges of a certain hierarchy, while radicals want to abolish that hierarchy completely. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the prototypical radical in this analysis, and Anderon presents him as the foil to Smith. Anderson paints Smith as a moderate, but Rebecca disagrees. 

Adam Smith was certainly a radical relative to the time that he lived in. For example, he supported universal public education. He views public education as necessary in part to compensate for the drudgery created by the division of labour. And it seems at least debatable that he might also have been a radical in Anderson’s sense. 

Shruti Rajagopalan: The East India Company

Shruti Rajagopalan is a senior research fellow at George Mason University and director of the Emergent Ventures India programme; you can follow her on Twitter here. You can see the paper this discussion was based on here. 

In the late 18th century, the British East India Company was rapidly expanding its control. By 1803, most of the Indian subcontinent had been colonised. 

Adam Smith was an early critic of the East India Company. His criticisms first appeared in the 4th edition of The Wealth of Nations, and were expanded upon in subsequent editions. 

There are two classic criticisms of the East India Company. The first is that colonisation in itself is wrong. The second is that the Company’s status as a monopoly led to abuses. Many critics of the East India Company subscribed only to the second critique: the MPs involved in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, for example, would not have disputed the rectitude of the Empire in general. This was a recurring topic: Every time the monopoly charter was renewed by parliament, there was a major associated debate. 

Adam Smith’s criticism was more nuanced than either the pure anti-colonial or anti-monopoly lines of thinking. I understood his criticism to have four parts: 

First, the East India Company was one of the first joint stock companies in the world, and Smith was sceptical of joint stock corporations in most cases.1

Second, Smith says that the company’s abuses stem from their mercantilist attitudes. Mercantilists advocated for maximising exports and minimising imports, especially of precious metals, which were seen to be the primary determinant of national wealth. He says these attitudes partly caused the 1770 Bengal famine, which led to the deaths of an estimated 10 million people. The Company held a monopoly on the distribution of many goods to Bengal, as well as a large quantity of the food supply – and, on both fronts, made a huge profit from the famine. The famine years brought in record revenues for the Company. (For more on the general history of the East India Company I recommend William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy.)

Notice that this criticism is different to being opposed to colonialism in general. If Britain had control over India, but didn’t grant a mercantilist monopoly to the Company, then it could have been in the self-interest of colonists to improve services and health, and collect a fraction of the resultant economic uplift.

Indeed, he says that the Company was not as rife with abuse when it still had to compete with the Portuguese, French and Dutch East India Companies. But after the Carnatic Wars, British dominance over the French in India became relatively clear outside small pockets.

Third, Smith argues that sustaining the monopoly causes a huge amount of corruption in Britain. The historian Dan Bogart has written about the extensive network of bribes in parliament which were required to sustain the East India Company’s monopoly charter. The Company was corrupting not just the colonised but the coloniser.   

Fourth, he writes about what we would now call principal-agent problems in the context of the Company. It was extremely difficult to align the incentives between officials in London and employees in Bengal. One of the major problems faced by the Company was employees trading under their own names, i.e. exploiting their position of influence in the Company to strike private deals, hoard food, and manipulate market prices.   

Smith’s writing about the East India Company is a historically significant and nuanced criticism. He gives an account of why you might oppose the Company and their policies, even if you weren’t opposed to the British in India per se. He shows that the militaristic nature, the corruption of officers, and the poor delivery of social functions were inherent to the incentives created. Shruti says that she’s not aware of any criticisms of the East India Company at remotely this level of sophistication and complexity until many decades if not over a century later. 

Anton Howes: A digression on coinage 

Anton Howes is a historian who writes the Age of Invention Substack; you can follow him on Twitter here. I hope you will be hearing more about this topic soon on his blog. 

There’s a section in The Wealth of Nations that approximately no one has read, in which Smith goes on what feels like an interminable tangent about silver prices and the history of coinage. For Anton Howes, that’s the best part. 

Monetary history is extremely underrated, and Anton has helped me to appreciate that. His session gave a broad overview of the context relevant to understanding intellectuals in Smith’s time writing about currency.  

The way that coinage used to work is that you would take your gold and silver to a mint counter, and they would be exchanged for coins with a corresponding value. Those coins would be made from a mix of metals, usually silver and copper (gold coins were rare and impractical). The ratio between the quantity of precious metals that you give to the mint and the amount of that metal they give you back in the form of coinage is set by the mint price.   

(By the way, some of these mints were privately operated. The state did not have a monopoly on money at this time. Even the East India Company could issue its own coinage, thanks to Charles II.)

By Smith’s time, the value of coins in Britain had become ‘by tale’, which is to say, their value came from the face value being legally enforced, rather than from their metal content. ‘Debasement’ refers to a situation where you alter the metal content in a coin to be less valuable while keeping the face value the same. A typical debasement would involve replacing silver with copper in coins. The usual motivation for debasement was that the government wanted to keep the extra precious metals as a way of raising revenue. This was a form of seignorage, which is the profit that a government makes from producing money. This was a huge deal: seignorage was historically one of the largest sources of government revenue. Rebasement is the opposite process, of adding more precious metals into coins.

Debasement is not a problem in itself. As you make coins out of less and less valuable material, in the limiting case currency would only be valuable because everyone agrees on the face value. That would just be fiat currency, i.e. the system we have today. The trouble comes from international trade. If you debase your currency but are still buying the same goods with it, the country you’re trading with will have less silver flowing into it – especially important if you are a mercantilist. The extent to which trading partners were debasing their coins was extremely politically sensitive. 

The funny thing about debasement is that you can’t easily tell when it’s happened. The mix of metals will be chosen such that the density and look are the same. You would need to assay the coinage to find out what metals are in it, which at the time was a relatively sophisticated chemical test. There were several examples of different countries debasing their coinage in secret. 

‘Aggressive’ debasement is when you debase your currency not in response to any other country, and ‘defensive’ debasement is when you change the metal content of your coins in response to someone else’s debasement. News or rumours of debasement could set off chain reactions of more debasements.

There was something of a black market in debasing your own money. Think about it: If coins are made out of silver, but the thing that gives them their legal value is the stamp on the top, then I will remove as much of the silver as possible without sacrificing the legal integrity of the coin. In fact, in various European countries, this was part of the design: There would be an outer part of the coin’s design corresponding to how it was issued, and an inner part which was the minimum amount you could have of the coin and still have it be accepted.  

A crucial piece of context is that Britain is historically extremely unusual for almost never debasing its coinage. The major exception to this was Henry VIII’s Great Debasement, which is how he got the nickname ‘Old Coppernose’. Coins had the King’s face on them, but after debasement, they became so low quality that, with use, the front part of the coin would wear away and you would start to see the copper peaking through Henry’s nose. Subsequently, one of Elizabeth I’s great domestic political accomplishments was to successfully rebase the coinage. 

Britain was tame on the coinage front, and Germany was the opposite. The Kipper und Wipper (the ‘see-saw time’) was a financial crisis in the Holy Roman Empire where different German mints started aggressively debasing, forcing other regions to defensively debase. 

Funnily enough, one of the most important scholars in this area was the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. He formulated what is now known as Gresham’s Law. Gresham’s Law says that ‘bad money drives out the good’: If you have different kinds of money in circulation with the same face value, the coins made from the more valuable commodity will begin to disappear from circulation. Gresham’s Law is one reason why defensive debasement was seen as necessary. 

An interesting question, which we didn’t have time to get on to during the event, is at what point monetary policy stops being governments just trying to maximise revenue, and starts to have an actual goal of price stabilisation. Sean Brocklebank (more on him in a moment) told us that, in pre-modern times, annual inflation or deflation could be enormous depending on the size of the harvest. Even if a medieval government were engaged in measures to target a stable rate of inflation, the year-to-year price changes due to how the staple crop was doing would have been so large that the general public probably wouldn’t even notice. 

In conclusion, I still haven’t read the part of The Wealth of Nations about coinage. Perhaps I never will, but at least now I have the context I need. 

Sean Brocklebank: Smith and behavioural economics

Sean Brocklebank is a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Edinburgh; you can follow him on Twitter here. 

Samuel Johnson once said that a dog who walks on his hind legs is remarkable not because he does it well, but because he does it at all. Sean asks: Are we just impressed that Adam Smith is engaged in contemporary and serious academic debates at all, rather than that he’s doing it well?2 

There is a cottage industry of people singing the praises of Adam Smith, and discussing all the developments and research findings that he allegedly anticipated (a key figure in this group is Russ Roberts of EconTalk). There’s a fun paper from the Journal of Economic Perspectives about all the different results from behavioural economics that Smith anticipated in his work. In some cases, more than two centuries elapse between a behavioural bias being written about by Smith and being seriously studied again. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he argues that behaviour is determined by a struggle between the “passions” and the “impartial spectator”, in a way that is strikingly similar to dual process models in psychology. He also recognisably discusses loss aversion long before Kahneman and Tversky would make it part of their academic programme. The paper has a nice list of ideas from Smith that the authors think haven’t been explored properly in psychology yet.  

Sean’s question is one part of the more general question of what the value is of reading old texts. Wouldn’t it be depressing if economists had made so little progress in 250 years that Smith could still make a contribution today? As my friend Pradyumna was recently savaged for asking on Twitter, physicists don’t read Newton’s Principia anymore – why read the classics in any other field?

It’s worth keeping in mind that economics is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum to history-obsessed philosophy, where you could probably get through an entire economics degree without reading a word from a single historically influential economist.

Personally, I have mixed thoughts about the value of reading old texts, but there are certain older books that I would read even if it were only for historical interest. It’s cool to see the development of ideas over time, and it can be fruitful to put yourself in the shoes of someone whose world was truly alien from your own. It raises questions like: If you didn’t take it for granted that colonialism and racism were wrong, what specific criticisms would you have had of Britain’s East India Company? Or: What might you have thought about the division of labour and the nature of work if you lived before the Industrial Revolution? 

Finally, since this is The Fitzwilliam, it would be remiss if I did not mention that we also had a brief discussion on Adam Smith’s thoughts about Ireland, regarding which he bizarrely praises the virtues of the potato-only diet: 

The chairmen, porters, and coalheavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be, the greater part of them, from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root [the potato]. No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution.3 

Sam Enright is executive editor of The Fitzwilliam. You can follow him on Twitter here. 

Despite how common they are, most Irish people will never set foot (or welly) into a bog. In the wider public imagination, they are picture-postcard places from a bygone era, often associated with backwardness and poverty. But for many in rural Ireland, boglands, and the peat derived from them, are a part of everyday life. The ‘saving’ of turf in the late spring and summer months is part of the social fabric of western and midland communities. The resulting harvest provides a cheap and sweet-smelling fuel that warms tens of thousands of homes during the winter. One in seven Irish households still burns peat for heat. 

The features which people value in bogs are not always compatible – a confusion which has also been reflected in public policy. But first, let’s define what a bog actually is.

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The geography of bogland

Peatlands, like swamps, marshes and turloughs, are types of wetland. Across the entire world, peatlands contain 10% of the planet’s freshwater. Almost 15,000 km² of the Republic of Ireland is covered by peat soils, around 20% of its total surface area.1 Northern Ireland has almost 3,500 km², or 25% of surface area.2

There are two main types of peatland in Ireland: bogs and fens. Fens are wetlands with a permanently high water level, which receive their nutrients from direct contact with surface or groundwater. Water slows the decomposition process of organic material, which eventually turns into peat.

Fens are the precursors to raised bogs. They are now very rare in Ireland, having transformed naturally or been ‘reclaimed’ for agricultural use.

In contrast to fens, bogs receive all their moisture through rainfall. There are two types found in Ireland: blanket and raised. Blanket bogs are shallow when in mountainous areas, at around two metres in depth, while in lowland regions they can reach up to seven meters.3

Raised bogs are mostly found in the midlands. Once enough peat accumulates within a fen, any additional groundwater is diverted around the perimeter. With rain now the only source of moisture, the peatland becomes increasingly nutrient deficient and sphagnum mosses begin to dominate. The ecosystem turns acidic. As sphagnum and other species grow and die off in the anaerobic conditions, they will turn into peat. This process is extremely slow, with each metre of bog taking a thousand years to grow. Raheemmore bog in east Co. Offaly is the deepest bog in Ireland at fifteen meters, although most do not exceed ten. Raised bogs are the rarer of the two. Ireland has more than half the European Union’s remaining area of Atlantic raised bog, which is one of the world’s rarest habitats. 

The waterlogged conditions of bogs are what lead to another of their celebrated properties: the ability to preserve, for thousands of years, organic material which would ordinarily decompose. Archaeologists have found bog bodies from as far back as 8000 B.C., which can still have preserved hair, nails, and internal organs. Our knowledge of the health and physiology of prehistoric people disproportionately comes from bogs.  

Turf-cutters, the bogs, and the state

Europeans have cut sods of peat (known as turf) for centuries. The earliest records of the use of turf for fuel are from the 7^th century. Ancient Irish legal texts contain evidence of the widespread use and regulation of turf. 

In the 19^th century, the Russian Empire initiated wetland drainage in Polesia, a region straddling the borders of Belarus, Ukraine and Poland, to encourage development in the ‘backward’ hinterland.4 Today, more than half of Belarussian peatlands have been drained, with almost three-quarters of the drained land being used for agriculture.5  Small-scale cutting has been closer to the centre of the Irish relationship with bogs than in Eastern Europe. By some estimates, 40% of Irish peatlands have been degraded as a result of domestic cutting, exercised through rights of  'turbary’.6

Turbary rights provide the legal basis to cut peat from a given bog.7 These are complex arrangements, and ownership is often difficult to prove. In my own research about bogs, I’ve found that those who visit their bogs infrequently can easily forget where their turbary actually is. 

Turf-cutting begins in spring, usually in the days and weeks on either side of St. Patrick’s Day. A tool called a sleán was used in the past to extract turf from the face of the bog. The bog was prepared beforehand by draining and removing vegetation; extraction consisted of several people, often families, labouring together. The freshly cut turf was transported via wheelbarrow to an area nearby known as a spread bank. 

Peat holds a tremendous volume of water. After it’s cut, it’s baked in the sun to dry (this part of the process remains the same today). As the turf dries, it is stacked in such a way as to enable the wind to aerate it until it is solid enough to be transported and stored in its owner’s home. This whole process is called ‘saving’ turf.

Turf is rarely cut by hand anymore. Instead, those with turbary rights hire local contractors to dig out their plot with an excavator. Turf-cutters continue to manually turn and stack their harvest, known as ‘footing’, until it’s dry, as they have done for generations.

Irish bogs have not just been subject to domestic use. Peat has been extracted commercially, with mixed results, since the mid-19^th century. 

Bord na Móna

From the 1930s, the semi-state company Bord na Móna (‘The Peat Board’) extracted peat from Irish bogs on an industrial scale. Bord na Móna was formally established under the Turf Development Act 1946, as the successor to the Turf Development Board, a state-owned company set up twelve years previously to oversee the development of Irish peat. The firm’s remit was to produce an indigenous source of fuel for the nascent Irish Free State, while employing people in otherwise underdeveloped parts of the country. It was a similar development strategy to the one pursued by the Russian Empire a century earlier. 

Bord na Móna evolved through a series of legislative changes and development programmes. The first involved the mechanisation of turf extraction. Cutting turf by hand was laborious and generally not commercially feasible. Large German-manufactured machines called baggers were first introduced to the Clonsast Bog Group, in east Co. Offaly, in 1939. Although efficient, baggers were prone to frequent breakdowns. At 35 tonnes, they were too heavy for the wet conditions in Ireland and frequently sank into the bogs.

Operations at Bord na Móna were expanded under the Turf Development Act 1950. This involved a transition to milling peat as the primary method of extraction. Baggers cut down into the bogs and extruded turf sods across its surface. But this new production method involved agitating peat on the surface of a drained bog – loosening it and exposing it to the air until it was dry. 

To transport peat, Bord na Móna owned and operated an extensive railway network. It used a 3ft narrow gauge, compared to the 5’3” gauge of normal Irish passenger rail. Bord na Móna’s tracks made up one of the largest industrial railway systems in Europe – and, at its peak, spanned more kilometres of track than all other freight and passenger railways in Ireland combined. The board used both road and rail to transport peat from bogs to the users.  

In addition to supplying the Electricity Supply Board (Ireland’s state-owned electricity company), Bord na Móna operated four briquette factories, a single power station, and three moss peat processing and packing plants. Briquettes offered retail customers a cleaner and more convenient alternative to turf sods. Bord’s last briquette factory, located in Co. Offaly, closed in June 2023. Moss peat, which comes from the upper layers of a bog, was sold into the horticulture market for use as a soil conditioner. Moss peat was a high-volume and low-profit enterprise, but one which arguably had the strongest economic viability of any product supplied by the board.

Another major Bord na Móna development programme commenced in the mid-1970s. The company expanded its operations into previously uneconomic peatlands in response to the global oil crisis. In so doing, Bord na Móna thought it was fulfilling its mandate to provide a secure supply of energy to Ireland. Yet this would lead to a financial crisis in the company during the mid-1980s as alternative energy sources once again became cheaper on the world market. This had major consequences for peat-dependent communities and the state itself, which would ultimately bail out the company.

The declining peat sector

In September 2019, in a court case brought by Friends of the Irish Environment, an Irish High Court judge deemed that peat industry regulations were incompatible with European Union environmental impact assessments. From that point on, extraction of peat on sites larger than 30 hectares was effectively banned. This ruling hastened the demise of Bord na Móna’s peat extraction activities, which were already slowing.

In January 2021, Bord na Móna announced that it would stop cutting peat entirely. This was met with a range of emotions. Environmental campaigners welcomed the end of the board’s environmentally damaging enterprise. However, by one estimate, it extracted peat from just 3.4% of Irish boglands.8 Turbary and land reclamation for agriculture has had a much larger negative environmental effect.

There were also widespread concerns about the people made redundant from peat production. The Irish government’s Territorial Just Transition Plan provides the most accurate estimate of the number of people affected: around 1,000 workers lost their jobs from bog closures between January 2019 and May 2021, with around 350 workers redeployed in short-term roles rehabilitating cutaway bogs (another name for bogs which have been extensively harvested for peat). These recent job losses are dwarfed by those let go from the mid-1980s onwards.

In his account of the Irish peat industry, former Bord na Móna secretary Donal Clarke provides historical data on the number of workers in the company. In 1983, peak employment was 7,171 across both seasonal and permanent workers. From here, job loss was precipitous. By 1992, just 2,767 workers were employed during peak production. This was the response of the managing director Eddie O’Connor to the financial difficulties that the company found itself in after overstretching its operations in the 1970s. Numbers employed only decreased slightly year-on-year until the present day. 

During the research for my PhD, one employee remarked to me that working for Bord na Móna, in his day, was “a very big identifier in [the midlands]. It gives people standing that you’re part of Bord na Móna – part of something bigger than yourself.” In the 1980s, O’Connor reconfigured employment practices in Bord na Móna to great effect, after he commissioned a comparative analysis which showed that Irish workers were only producing half as much peat as their Finnish counterparts.9 The new system offered more autonomy and gave workers rewards for increases in productivity. But ultimately, the economic challenges of peat extraction on ever-dwindling bogs were mounting. Around the same time, new visions were emerging for the future of bogs. 

Wasteland or wonderland?

The bogs as wastelands narrative which enabled their destruction began to be challenged in the latter half of the 20^th century. Bord na Móna employee Thomas A. Barry argued in 1976 that “At some future date unless prompt and resolute measures are taken, there will be no undrained bog left.”10 Barry’s advocacy led to the preservation of the aforementioned Pollardstown fen and Raheenmore bog. A survey in 1990 concluded that there were no completely intact raised bogs remaining in Ireland, and that degradation was occurring at a rate of 3,500 hectares per year.

The environmental role provided by bogland has since become widely known. Bogs contain a diverse range of specifically adapted flora and fauna including the carnivorous plants sundews and bladderworts. Red grouse, curlew, snipe, Greenland white-fronted goose, and hen harrier are just some of the rare birds found in peatlands. More recently, bogs’ carbon sequestration and storage capabilities have become widely discussed. It has been estimated that Irish bogs store over 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon, the equivalent of 36 years of emissions from Ireland.11 

Efforts to protect bogs for environmental reasons have proven contentious, hitting at the heart of urban versus rural tensions. The designation of some notable bogs as Special Areas of Conservation under the Habitats Directive in the late 1990s was a particularly controversial episode. Turf cutters were ordered to halt extraction with little notice and without the offer of compensation. They organised and resisted. The government relented and unilaterally gave those affected a ten-year exemption, effectively permitting a further decade of ecological destruction. 

The Irish government’s failure to enforce the Habitats Directive has brought it into conflict with the European Union. It’s hard to find a politically acceptable way to regulate peat. In 2022, the commercial sale of turf was banned by the state to protect air quality. This, again, was met with considerable controversy and pushback. Illegal turf-cutting to evade these regulations continues to some extent, but there recently has been renewed cooperation across government and turf interests to finally bring this to a close. 

The aftermath of industrial extraction

Bord na Móna has pivoted its operations towards more sustainable business practices as part of a strategy it calls Brown to Green. It commissioned Ireland’s first wind farm in 1992 and has continued to roll out renewable energy infrastructure on cutaway bogs since. But some local citizens’ groups have opposed the construction of new wind farms on boglands. Bord na Móna was initially granted planning permission for 24 wind turbines in Longford, but this was later overturned in a High Court challenge. As is often the case, Ireland gets in its own way in pursuit of environmental goals.

In addition, 33,000 hectares of cutaway bog are the subject of ‘enhanced’ rehabilitation under the European Union and Irish state-funded Peatlands Climate Action Scheme. The plan is to use advanced measures to stabilise and restore former industrial bogland for use as carbon sinks. 

Efforts have been underway in Canada, Germany and Belarus for over a decade to cultivate crops on peatlands. In a process called ‘paludiculture’, degraded peatlands are rewetted to reduce carbon emissions, and planted with commercially valuable species such as sphagnum moss.12 Its rollout in Ireland has been limited to just one project, the ongoing Farm Carbon European Innovation Programme. Further research on this technique is required in Ireland, but in any case, its widespread implementation on Irish bogs would come too late for the workers recently made redundant.

It turns out lots of people care about bogs.

Extraction has dominated Irish people’s interactions with bogs for centuries. Contemporary efforts to conserve what remains of them have clashed with tradition. Yet attitudes towards peatlands are subject to change. I’m optimistic that peat workers will accept new jobs that do not harm the environment, and that turf-cutters are willing to concede their carefully guarded turbary rights if they see themselves to be compensated fairly.

The Irish government’s response to the shutdown of industrial bogs has been rushed due to the sector’s abrupt closure. Over €300 million has been, or will be, invested by the Irish state, Bord na Móna and the European Union to rehabilitate these lands and (one hopes) offset economic decline in midland communities. 

These efforts may be belated, but there is still time for an equitable transition. The history of environmentalism offers the occasional grounds for optimism (like with acid rain, or CFCs). The potential for bogs is less widely known, but it is enormous. I do not know whether plans for the just transition of bogs will succeed – but I know that they can. 

Jamie Rohu lectures in environment studies at Dublin City University and holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin about the just transition of Irish bogs. You can follow him on Twitter here.