[I]t is better on the whole for humanity to force creditors to accept losses than to allow those same creditors to inhibit overall economic activity, and thus the prosperity of millions, in pursuit of their right to be repaid in full. We cannot let the heavens fall so that their debts might be repaid.

I think we can all see the force of this. None of us would be prepared to undergo very much hardship for the sake of turning someone else’s bad debt into a performing debt.

On the other hand – there is always another hand – it is obvious that allowing people to borrow large sums of money and then write them off is not altogether an incentive to prudence or probity. If everybody could renounce his debts the moment he found it too inconvenient to repay them, the person who repays rather than defaults comes to seem naïve or foolish rather than upright. It would become normal practice to borrow without the slightest intention ever of repaying or meeting obligations. This too would constrict credit.

Nicolle was sentenced to death, but his advocate went to London to obtain a reprieve from the home secretary, who granted it on the grounds that Nicolle had in the past been mad. I quote now what I wrote about some of the evidence at his trial:

According to [his landlady], his behaviour appeared strange and completely inexplicable on a number of occasions. For example she had seen him beating the walls with his fists until they bled . . . One night he slept in a box in his room instead of on his bed. [She] had never seen him drunk, and said that he was known . . . as Mad Nicolle.

At the time of his madness he was learning his trade, which was that of—a hatter. Obviously, he was a mad hatter, but astonishingly and mortifyingly I missed this in my book. His symptoms, which fit no commonly seen pattern nowadays, were those of erethism caused by mercury poisoning. H A Waldron, in an article on the Mad Hatter in the BMJ in 1983 (BMJ 1983;287:1961, doi:10.1136/bmj.287.6409.1961), said the psychotic symptoms of erethism were excessive timidity, diffidence, increasing shyness, a desire to remain unobserved, and an explosive loss of temper when criticised.

….

How could I possibly have overlooked so obvious a diagnosis? But of course kind readers will point out that I have overlooked something in this article too.

There was something sinister about Watson and his acolytes. Watson himself believed that baby farms might be desirable, and regarded babies and children as infinitely plastic. He thought he could turn them into anything he wanted. For him human beings were but the sum total of their conditioning, and he ends The Ways of Behaviorism by answering the question of whether an adult can change his personality. The answer is maybe, though it would be onerous:

Possibly if we had absolute control over food, sex, shelter, if we had some great reconditioning laboratory where the individual could be brought for a year for rigorous study and experimentation, we might be able to undo for him in a year what home nurture had done for him in thirty years.

Among the evils of “home nurture” is mother love, every reference to which in this book is negative, being equated with smothering, stifling, and infantilising. Much better for babies to be in nice hygienic laboratories, where psychologists can blow air at their corneas and make sure that they develop no irrational fear of snakes.

Consciousness held no mystery for Watson, in part because he denied that it existed. All that mattered was behaviour, not what went on in minds (whose existence he also denied), though he does not explain why anything at all should matter if there is no consciousness and there are no minds.

An interesting experiment is about to be conducted in London. A public-housing authority has constructed exact replicas of elegant early-Victorian townhouses on one side of Union Square in Islington, of the kind much coveted by bankers and lawyers in the nearby financial center, the famed (or ill-famed) City. The authority will rent these houses to relatively poor families at a steep discount. The scheme is revealing from at least three points of view: architectural, social, and politico-economic…

In arguing here that vandalism such as French car-burning is an economic boon, Dalrymple is surely being sarcastic. But that’s not to say some government functionary somewhere doesn’t actually believe it. Regardless, the solution is more Bastiat.

Why? Why a fixation on an impossible chimera, equality of opportunity, and a complete disregard of a perfectly achievable end conducing to more opportunity for millions of actual people, namely teaching them to read and reckon with facility? The answer, I think, is that chasing chimeras is a source of endless job opportunities and bureaucratic expansion; trying to achieve limited, but achievable and invaluable, goals would demand painful change (and possibly even admissions of guilt). There is every reason why a child born to ignorant parents of degraded habits should not have the same life chances as a child born to wealthy and cultivated parents; but there is no reason why he should not learn – that is to say, be taught – to read and write.

There is no subject on which people so quickly lose their heads and contradict themselves as race. People who vehemently deny the scientific validity of the concept defend with equal vehemence the necessity for positive discrimination in favour of certain races which, presumably, they are able to distinguish one from another. Anti-racists collect statistics about race with a celerity and obsessional intrusiveness that would have put the apartheid regime to shame. The opposite of a racist is not an anti-racist but someone who does not think in racial categories at all.

Worldwide life expectancy between 1970 and 2010 rose at a rate of 3-4 years per decade, except for the 1990s, when the rate of improvement was considerably lower. In Asia and Latin America, the average age at death rose by 1 year every 2 years, a startling rate of improvement. But the greatest improvement in recent years has been in sub-Saharan Africa: life expectancy in Angola, Ethiopia, Niger and Rwanda has increased by 10 – 15 years since 1990…

Of course, it is easier to produce dramatic improvements starting from a low base; where infant mortality rates are high, it is relatively easy to extend life expectancy. And in fact the worldwide death rate of children under the age of 9 has fallen by nearly two thirds since 1970. This is in complete contradiction to the gloomy prognostications of that time, when many so-called savants predicted perpetual mass famine. If freedom from mortal disease is part of the good life, the world has been improving at an unprecedented rate.

Whose intolerance, exactly, is being appeased by the wretched locution? Not that of the religious: in the town in which I live, the Moslem-owned Indian restaurants are festooned with Christmas decorations, and the staff hand round little presents to the regular customers and wish them a Merry Christmas. The notion that every person with the slightest religious faith is a fanatic waiting to explode with rage at the first  indication that someone else has a different tradition or believes something different from him is absurd.