My potentially unpopular opinion? I think this trend has been disastrous for the overall quality of economic history.

Over the past month, in writing a section of my book, I've become absolutely fascinated by the fact that for hundreds of years after the Black Death, the government imposed wage caps! Here are the caps for London in 1655:

We wanted to take our time to analyse the changes the Government has made to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Here's my take: The Bill remains a step in the right direction towards getting Britain building again. Replacing the broken status quo of site by site protections that delivered bat tunnels and fish discos with a more strategic approach to environmental recovery through Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs) is a good thing. It is reassuring that they remain part of the bill. *However* even before these amendments there was a risk that EDPs would be hard to implement. The new amendments will make EDPs harder, slower, and more expensive to prepare. Opportunities for legal challenge will increase. More often than not infrastructure projects won't be covered and will have to fall back on an unreformed status quo. With Natural England in charge of delivery without direct ministerial oversight, I remain concerned that the Bill will fail to consign the bat tunnels and fish discos to history. The Bill should have been a watershed moment for unleashing growth across Britain, but these amendments widen the cracks in the central pillar of the Government’s growth strategy.

This is indeed an interesting idea and something that @V_Delabastita @GibbsSpike and I looked at. An issue is that the enforcement of the Statute and Ordinance of Labour was inconsistent and the survival of documents is patchy.

Here's a fun study for an economic historian to do: Right after the Black Death, in 1351 workers' wages were capped by law. Those who exceeded the cap were fined. The collected fines were then set against each community's tax obligations, giving us all sorts of juicy records. The figures are usually used to show enforcement levels. BUT the number of workers paying these fines was HUGE. So what if they were simply treating the fines as a tax to pay so that they could access higher wages? If so, the fines might actually serve as an indicator of where demand for higher wages was at its strongest, and so where post-plague labour shortages were most acute. For example, the fines levied in Essex seem to have been much greater than in Yorkshire's North Riding.

@ExLibrisGroup your systems appear to be down - two libraries I use, which use your software, are not responding at all when trying to use the catalogue. Please fix!

Diplomatic history would work with something related to diplomacy, history of science with actual scientists, history of religion with actual clerics, etc. The core idea being that seeing how a given profession is done in practice will help provide practical imagination

Another fascinating and forensic post from Anton.

In case you missed it last week:

Three cheers for major accomplishments of civil engineering, which go mostly unnoticed because this neighborhood doesn’t *feel* like it is in the Meguro River floodplain.