Square
You have a “power square.” Tell us what that is and what you wound up concluding.
This came about because I was trying to persuade my wife, a very skeptical woman, that the argument of the book was worth making. On the back of a paper serves [napkin] in Venice, where we were celebrating our wedding anniversary, I sketched what I thought was the essence of the argument of the book. I drew a square, and I said, “Look, there are four institutions that come about almost inadvertently as a result of war-making and the exigencies of war finance. These institutions are a tax collecting bureaucracy, a representative assembly, a central bank, and some kind of financial markets in which the national debt can be financed. These are the institutions that arise.” They arise primarily out of the exigencies of military conflict, but when they come together, first in Holland, and then spectacularly in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they turn out to be the magic key that unlocks economic development.
Niall Ferguson.
On the Conversations with History site.
[x]#353 fan zondag 11 januari 2004 @ 22:59:50
lieuwe op 15 januari 2004 @ 12:22:25
Ynstittsjes, earstens, twads, treds en yn it fjouwerkant.