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“Ukraine” is basically Russia, and has been for centuries. “Russia” originated around the capital city of Kiev in 879-1240, or “Kievan Rus.” In those days, they fought many battles with Khazaria, which is certainly an interesting angle. Here was Kievan Rus in 1054: In 1240, the Mongols invaded Kievan Rus, reducing the remnants to vassal states. Here is a record of the Mongols’ path of destruction and subjection in the region: Some of the Rus fled the region and organized in the hinterlands around Moscow, from where they eventually drove out the Mongols from the Eastern lands. However, some of the Rus remained around Kiev. They eventually fell under the rule of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which drove out the Mongols from Eastern Europe. Lithuania later merged with Poland to form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (aka Polish Empire). Over the centuries, the Rus remaining in the region acquired their own ethnic character, a blend of Russian and Polish influences, and became “Ukrainian.” Here’s a map of the region in 1619, the maximum extent of the Polish-Lithuanian state. We can see that it extended well to the east of Kiev and the Dneiper river. Here we have a map of the expansion of Russia since 1300, as it slowly drove out the Eastern invaders. Already by 1657, Ukrainians fought against Polish rule, and signed the Treaty of Pereyaslav with Russia, asking for Russian protection of Ukrainians. This was accompanied by the Russo-Polish War (1654-1667), which ended with Russian control of Kiev and the lands east of the Dneiper, as shown in this map: Naturally, over time, this Eastern region became more Russified, while the Western region, still under Polish control, retained its Ukranian/Polish flavor. Note that the southern coast, along the Black Sea, was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on February 8, 2023.) In 1958, economist William Phillips wrote a paper which found a relationship between unemployment and wages. Less unemployment led to higher wages; more unemployment led to lower wages (or slower wage growth). People have been arguing over this ever since. The basic problem here has been distinguishing between “monetary” and “non-monetary” causes of “inflation” — a topic we wrote about extensively in our new book Inflation (2022), because we knew this was going to be an issue. You may have noticed the excessive use of quotes above. Unfortunately, even these words are rather vague, and I use them mostly because other people use them. “Inflation” to some people means a specifically monetary process (what we called “monetary inflation.”) For others, it means the change in some common price indicator like the Consumer Price Index, which can certainly be affected by “non-monetary” factors. Sometimes the same people go back and forth on these connotations from sentence to sentence. No wonder they are confused. In our book, we make the point that prices (like the CPI) can be affected by “monetary” and “nonmonetary” factors. We all know that some countries (today Venezuela or Argentina) can have even “hyperinflation,” and this is entirely monetary in character. Also, we know that sometimes the supply and demand of individual goods or services (today eggs) can change prices dramatically. If this sounds very obvious, it’s because it is. Sometimes you can have both factors simultaneously. They even interact to a certain degree. Economics today cleaves rather precisely along this “monetary”/”non-monetary” line. Unfortunately, this has left us with some people who insist that “inflation is always a monetary phenomenon,” and some people who tend to ignore monetary factors altogehter, and are wholly in the supply/demand framework, which

Today, we have the entirety of Part II, Book V, Chapter V of The Brothers Karamazov (1880), a famous chapter known as “The Grand Inquisitor.” It is basically a commentary on what we now call Socialism, and has much relevance even today. Chapter V.The Grand Inquisitor “Even this must have a preface—that is, a literary preface,” laughed Ivan, “and I am a poor hand at making one. You see, my action takes place in the sixteenth century, and at that time, as you probably learnt at school, it was customary in poetry to bring down heavenly powers on earth. Not to speak of Dante, in France, clerks, as well as the monks in the monasteries, used to give regular performances in which the Madonna, the saints, the angels, Christ, and God himself were brought on the stage. In those days it was done in all simplicity. In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris an edifying and gratuitous spectacle was provided for the people in the Hôtel de Ville of Paris in the reign of Louis XI. in honor of the birth of the dauphin. It was called Le bon jugement de la très sainte et gracieuse Vierge Marie, and she appears herself on the stage and pronounces her bon jugement. Similar plays, chiefly from the Old Testament, were occasionally performed in Moscow too, up to the times of Peter the Great. But besides plays there were all sorts of legends and ballads scattered about the world, in which the saints and angels and all the powers of Heaven took part when required. In our monasteries the monks busied themselves in translating, copying, and even composing such poems—and even under the Tatars. There is, for instance, one such poem (of course, from the Greek), The Wanderings of Our Lady through Hell, with descriptions as bold as

In 2022, I finished the Harvard Classics, a six-year project. I originally undertook this as a sort of homeschooling foundation. I fell into a group of ambitious homeschoolers, at tjed.org. They explicitly recognize the generational education deficit we have today, where parents have not been educated to the level that they would like their children to be educated. This deficit has to be remedied, with parental effort. Basically, you give yourself the education that you should have got when you were younger, but didn’t. Then, you can pass this on to your children. The TJ-ed people assert that it is not really possible to educate children to a level above or outside what you have yourself done. I think this is basically true, so, after doing it for several years, I agree that the “education deficit” view of things is valid. The TJ-ed people recommend that this deficit be remedied by roughly two hours a day of study, by parents, over a period of ten years. This can be done while the children are younger. I don’t think I met that lofty standard (more like one hour a day, on average), but nevertheless I got a lot done. The two-hours-a-day pace is suggested primarily for the stay-at-home Moms who are usually responsible for homeschooling. Also, there is a large cohort of adults today, mostly educated at the better universities, who nevertheless feel that they have not been sufficiently educated. They feel this lack. So, even if you don’t have any homeschool ambitions, but you would like an organized program of Liberal Arts education, the Harvard Classics is a good one. A lot of the contents I was not at all familiar with. I wondered if it would be worthwhile. I can say that every selection was worthwhile and rewarding. It

(This item appeared at Forbes.com on January 8, 2023.) For most of US history — 1789 to 1971, a period of 182 years — the United States embraced the idea of a currency that is stable, reliable, and definite. In practice, this meant a currency whose value was linked to gold, the best real-world way to achieve these goals. There was nothing very creative about this. Britain had done the same for hundreds of years prior, as did all the leading countries for many centuries. The result was that the US became the wealthiest country in the world, the US dollar became the world’s leading currency, and New York became the world’s financial center. As long as the US stuck to this principle, there was never an “inflation” problem. As we explained in our new book Inflation (2022), when currency values go down, prices rise to compensate. It’s funny that, in all the talk about “inflation” in every major outlet over the past year, this idea almost never comes up. In the book, we make the example of the Mexican peso. It used to trade around 3/dollar in the early 1990s. Today, it is around 20/dollar. Guess what — the CPI in Mexico has risen about 10x over that time. This surprises exactly nobody, especially Mexicans, who have lived all their lives with this kind of corrosive nonsense. That’s why most countries today — not including Mexico, unfortunately, but including El Salvador, which used to have the same problems, only worse — link their currencies to some external benchmark, usually the USD or EUR. Why do they do this? Because, they learned that having an independent floating currency, like the Mexican peso, tends to lead, over time, to a chronic pattern of currency depreciation. All along the way, their central