What our politicians could learn about poverty from the first-hand experiences of economist Alfred Marshall
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FebFebruary 2021 at 1:24am
British economist Alfred Marshall s travels gave him insights his predecessors in the field did not have.
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He was an English economist (1842-1924) who changed the discipline of economics.
He was the originator of the famous diagram that depicts supply and demand curves.
His most famous student, John Maynard Keynes, eventually revolutionised economics in his own way, after the Great Depression of the 1930s.
But it was Marshall s work habits that contributed to his stature as a towering figure of the profession.
Last modified on Tue 9 Feb 2021 07.37 EST
An empty office building is a good place to shelter if you’re a rat in a crisis. It will be warm and dry and, if you’re lucky, one of the humans who hastily vacated before the last coronavirus lockdown will have left a half-eaten Pret flapjack in a drawer for you. Not that you’re fussy. The loss of your usual diet of commuter leftovers is a blow, but it’s not insurmountable. “Rats will always find something to eat,” says Richard Ashley, emeritus professor of urban water at the University of Sheffield. “Human waste is ideal, but any natural organic material will do. Houseplants are fine. Leather will do at a push.”
It’s a curious quirk of statistics that cats outnumber dogs in the UK, with 10.9 million to 10.1 million, despite there being more dog owners: 23% of households have a dog, compared to 16% with a cat. The reason, of course, is that a cat owner is likely to own more than one moggy, an impression borne out by a 2018 census by PetPlan. In almost every area of the country, it found, dog ownership far outpaced cat ownership and the further north you went, the more popular dogs were. The one area bucking the trend was London where 61% of pet owners in the metropolis owned a cat, a stark contrast to Northern Ireland and the North East where dog ownership amongst pet owners was as high as 78 and 75 per cent respectively.
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From the pages of novels such as
Oliver Twist, Dickens savaged the injustices meted out to the impoverished – and at the top of his hit-list was the infamous New Poor Law
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“Please, Sir, I want some more.” Charles Dickens’ portrayal of Oliver Twist approaching the master and asking him, timorously, for a second helping of gruel is surely one of the most famous scenes in all of 19th-century literature.
When Dickens wrote these words in the 1830s, huge celebrity and vast fortune still lay in the future. Instead the author was thinking of the here and now – in particular, the plight of the most impoverished Britons. Dickens was determined to savage the terrible injustices he saw unfolding around him, and did that so effectively that he soon secured a reputation as a spokesman for the poor.
Londonist 5 Fascinating Moments From London s Foodie History
In his book Borough Market: Edible Histories, Mark Riddaway takes us on a culinary journey through the surprising and downright bizarre stories behind Britain s most-liked ingredients. Here, he serves up five fascinating moments from London s foodie scene.
1. An Englishman eats a banana
John Gerard s depiction of bananas: not very good, is it.
In 1633, the first fresh bananas ever seen in England arrived in London on a boat from Bermuda. One of the recipients was Thomas Johnson, owner of an apothecary and physic garden near Smithfield Market. Johnson, a pioneering field botanist, had spent several years furiously revising The Herball a book published in 1597 by the Holborn-based herbalist John Gerard. This famous tome, he noted a little cattishly, showed up its author’s “want of sufficient learning”, and Gerard’s chapter on the banana certainly justified Johnson’s dig: Gerard had only ever seen a pic