What Does a Stick of Eels Get You?

I recently discovered Historia Cartarum and a fun article there about paying rent with eels in medieval England. So what does a stick of eels get you? Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee, medieval and cartographic historian, attempts to answer that question. Here's his intro:

A question that has come up several times in conversations with people about eel-rents concerns the value of a stick of eels.  The records tell us that X mill owed Y abbey Z sticks of eels per year…but what does that really mean?  How much value is the abbey actually getting in their taxes?  This is, unsurprisingly, a somewhat difficult question to answer.

There are very few handy charts telling us how much a stick of eels is worth, and it is difficult assessing this type of question from monastery records.  Part of the problem comes from the fact that there are often several centuries between records of payment types, meaning that it can be difficult to make assessments of eel equity when rents shifted to currency.  This is further complicated by the fact that eels had a specific value to monks that went beyond their more general market worth:  since they were not considered flesh, they could be eaten during Lent and during other Church celebratory days that banned meat.

However, there are places where the archive lets us make an educated guess, and so here is a back-of-the-napkin attempt at finding the value in a stick of eels.

Click over for the math. And if you decide to pay your Cornell U tuition in eels this year, he'll give you an idea of how many you'll need to bring to the bursar's office.

Market Theory of Value

The value of something is what someone is willing to pay for it, right?

You’re the cream of the academic world, with many years of study behind you. You're a graduate of Oxbridge, a leading red-brick or a pre-eminent international university. But sometimes academic excellence and a First or 2:1 degree don’t translate into just rewards. Now it’s time to put that right.

What will you be doing?
You’ve accumulated years of knowledge that you can now unlock as an academic writer. You’ll help Academic Minds’ clients with model essays and dissertations that they can use as a basis for their own studies. You’ll earn excellent money, too... from quick £50 projects to dissertations with fees into the thousands. At Academic Minds, we pay the highest rates in the industry, with some writers earning upwards of £4000 a month.

That's over eighty thousand dollars a year. That's at least double the potential earnings of these same people if they should go into actually teaching the students, instead of doing the work for them. But that's not all! Both adjunct faculty members and online/distance educators are subject to terrible working conditions and punishing realities that are totally absent here. You can work from home or anywhere you like, on your own schedule, no BS conditions, exploitative assignments, unpaid extra duties, or training.

All you have to jettison are a few principles, and the sky's the limit!

This would also appear to prove that, if we accept the market theory of value, it is more valuable not to learn than to learn.

Peasants.

It's the distiributor cap.

Dennis the Peasant beautifully deconstructs a post by Matthew Yglesias on what should be done with the banking industry:

He's under the hood of the engine of finance - pulling on wires and touching things - and all the while his readership, which knows even less about banking than he does (if that is indeed possible), is standing there waiting for some sort of reassurance. All they know is the engine isn't running and they can't do anything to change that situation themselves. And Matthew, being the bright boy that he is, has figured out about banking what I've figured out about cars:

Sometimes the important thing is to let others pretend you know what you're talking about.

As instapundit says: "Read the whole thing."

I am almost certain that this is Swiftian satire, but hey, discuss anyway.

NEWTON'S OPTIC: THE ANSWER to all our problems is staring us in the face. It may even be quite literally staring at you, right now, across the breakfast table.

So put the paper down, stare back and ask yourself a selfless question.

Does the woman in your life really need a job?

(via Instapundit)

It's a million dollars off!

Such a bargain!

Now, this is California after all, the land of excess, but who needs 4300 sq feet? And, those houses are ugly. Not just ugly, but fugly.

What. A. Mess.

THE MORALITY OF GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION

THE MORALITY OF GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION.

Brad Lips & Carrie Lukas have written a very serious article about the morality of government aid. You can read it here. This is an issue that our country needs to discuss seriously. Increasingly, the popular attitude concerning government aid is an unquestioning assumption that, as President Bush said, “When people hurt, government must move.” Our country needs a serious discussion about this assumption and conservatives must lead that discussion before the law of unintended consequences lead us down The Road to Serfdom.

The Great Fall of China.

Via Instapundit, this article from the LA Times, in which the World Bank reports that China's economy is smaller than recently thought. About 40% smaller.

"...China, it turns out, isn't a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed."

Wow. 4 trillion dollars just went poof. Just wow.