common currency

Some medical devices don’t mean to be racist, but they are (Psyche)

And, inspired by this NOL discussion here,

A History of My Economic Opinions (Deirdre McCloskey)

This is a long, but enrapturing piece (I am not familiar with McCloskey’s work, which was also referenced en passant in another fresh NOL post). An excerpt:

I happened in 1958 to devour in the Andrew-Carnegie financed public library of Wakefield, Massachusetts the Russian prince Pyotr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) and the gullible American journalist John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). If I had instead come across Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom (1943) or Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) I suppose I would have gotten a better grasp of market pricing, earlier. Many market-loving classical liberals came to liberalism by that free-market path, and were never socialists. Yet the socialism-to-liberalism route is very common in 20th century political biographies, such as Leszek Kołakowski’s or Robert Nozick’s or, to descend a couple of notches, D. N. McCloskey’s. (The contrary route from market liberal to state socialist is vanishingly rare.)