Food

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which famously buried Pompeii, had a less well known effect on Roman wine supply, which in turn, bizarrely led to a shortage of food. We can learn some importnat policy lessons from this catastrophe made worse by foolish human behaviour.

One reading of de Mandeville’s grumbling hive is that he was criticising hypocrisy. One could make an argument I think

Around the time that the great pandemic was starting to be taken seriously in Britain (March 2020), a book was