Chronology

1007 Æthelred buys off the Danes for thirty-six thousand pounds of silver; forty-eight thousand in 1012.

1086 William the Conqueror’s commissioners compile the Domesday Book, the first great inventory of what could be taken.

1215 English barons force King John to seal Magna Carta. No free man may be stripped of his possessions “except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land,” and no royal official may take corn, horses, carts, or timber without payment or the owner’s consent. The Pope annuls it within ten weeks; it is reissued after John’s death.

1377 Ibn Khaldun sets down the arc of taxation and decline in the Muqaddimah: “at the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments.”

1427 Florence’s tax officials record the wealth of every household in the city. Six centuries later, matched by surname, the descendants of the richest tenth still show “a 5% increase in earnings” over the descendants of the poorest, and “a 12% difference in real wealth.”

1580 Montaigne publishes his essay on gain and loss: “the profit of one man is the loss of another.”

1600 Martín González de Cellorigo warns that Spain, its treasure fleets arriving yearly, is growing poorer; to his contemporaries the Indies had become “nothing but the ruin of our greatness.”

1620 English settlers at Plymouth begin farming in common.

1623 Bradford abandons the common course and assigns each family its own parcel. The famine ends.

1624 The Statute of Monopolies lets an ordinary inventor own his invention.

1651 Parliament passes the Navigation Act. Three Anglo-Dutch wars follow.

1664 Thomas Mun sets out the balance-of-trade doctrine: “sell more to strangers yearly than wee consume of theirs in value.”

1688 England’s constitutional settlement makes the crown’s promises credible. Government borrowing multiplies.

1714 Mandeville scandalizes Europe with The Fable of the Bees and its subtitle, “Private Vices, Publick Benefits.” Smith will give a chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments to refuting it, judging its tendency “wholly pernicious.”

1748 Montesquieu sets down the pattern of doux commerce: “peace is the natural effect of trade.”

1776 Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” The Americans declare independence. Paine publishes Common Sense.

1791 The Fifth Amendment is ratified on December 15: “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

1798 Malthus publishes his Essay: “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.”

c. 1800 The line that had never risen begins to climb, and has not stopped since.

1814 Constant publishes The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation: war and commerce are “only two different means to achieve the same end, that of possessing what is desired.”

1817 Ricardo proves comparative advantage in On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.

1820 Britain’s average tariff on manufactures stands between 45 and 55 percent. Roughly three in four human beings live in extreme poverty.

1821 Ricardo adds a chapter, “On Machinery,” to his third edition, and reverses himself: “I am convinced, that the substitution of machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers.”

1831 Tocqueville, traveling the Ohio, reads the difference between the two banks.

1845 Bastiat publishes the candlemakers’ petition, seeking protection from the sun.

1846 Britain repeals the Corn Laws, the grain tariffs that kept bread dear. Peel, resigning, hopes to be remembered where men “earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food.”

1848 Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto: the bourgeoisie “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”

1850 Bastiat names legal plunder and sets its test — “examine whether the Law takes from some what belongs to them to give to others what does not belong to them” — and tells the parable of the broken window.

1867 Marx publishes the first volume of Capital: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour.”

1886 Henry George publishes Protection or Free Trade: “what protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”

1900 An hour’s work buys what five hours bought in 1800: light falls to a fifth of an hour per thousand lumen-hours.

1909 American tariffs reach a height not matched again until 2025.

1913 The Federal Reserve is created. A dollar saved this year will buy about three cents’ worth of bread today.

1923 Weimar Germany’s prices rise by nearly thirty thousand percent in a month.

1929–1933 Stalin forces the Soviet peasantry into collective farms and seizes their grain. In Kazakhstan the famine claims “the lives of 1.5 million people, a quarter of the republic’s inhabitants.”

1930 In May, 1,028 American economists petition against the Smoot–Hawley tariff; it is signed on June 17. Paul Douglas, four decades later: “all our predictions came true.” Bertrand Russell names the mechanism of envy. The one factory in Marienthal closes.

1931–1932 Researchers live in Marienthal from November to May, recording what long unemployment does to a community.

1932–1933 Famine in Ukraine kills roughly 3.9 million.

1933 Executive Order 6102 requires Americans to surrender their gold.

1944 Hayek publishes The Road to Serfdom.

1945 Korea is divided at the 38th parallel for reasons that are not economic.

1946 Hungary’s pengő sets the record that still stands: prices doubling about every fifteen hours.

1950 The census puts the median American house at $7,354.

1958 Leonard Read publishes “I, Pencil,” in which the pencil boasts that “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

1958–1962 Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Mass starvation follows from 1959 to 1961; Yang Jisheng’s father starves in 1959.

1961 The Berlin Wall goes up, after some three and a half million East Germans have already left.

1962 Buchanan and Tullock publish The Calculus of Consent, founding public choice.

1964–1965 Seventy-five mechanical tomato harvesters are sold in California, then two hundred and fifty. Within five years they bring in 95 percent of the crop.

1968 Hardin publishes “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Ehrlich publishes The Population Bomb: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Pakistan becomes self-sufficient in wheat.

1970 Borlaug receives the Nobel Peace Prize. Schmitz and Seckler publish the tomato-harvester arithmetic. Venezuela is the richest country in Latin America.

1971 Nixon closes the gold window. Rawls publishes A Theory of Justice. The first ATM is installed.

1973 A second American price freeze empties the shelves and the pumps.

1974 India becomes self-sufficient in cereals.

1975 Okun gives redistribution its lasting image: “the money must be carried from the rich to the poor in a leaky bucket.”

1978 Eighteen farmers in Xiaogang sign a secret pledge to divide the land: “If any of us are put in prison, the others will raise his children until they are eighteen.” In December, China’s Third Plenary Session turns toward markets.

1979 In January, farmworkers sue the University of California over the tomato harvester it built with public money. By their own accounting, mechanization “eliminated 32,000 picking jobs in California.” The University wins on appeal in 1989.

1980 Simon and Ehrlich make their wager. Inequality begins its long rise.

1984 Fifty-seven percent of the Forbes 400 hold wealth mostly inherited.

1987 Michael Milken’s pay for the previous year becomes public: some three hundred million dollars.

1989 East German productivity has fallen to about a quarter of the West’s. The Wall comes down.

1990 Simon wins the wager; all five metals have fallen. Milken pleads guilty to six felonies. Twelve rich democracies still levy a tax on net wealth.

1991 Manmohan Singh’s budget speech opens India to the world: the government “inherited an economy in deep crisis,” with reserves enough “to finance imports for a mere fortnight.”

1994–2018 The wealth taxes are repealed one by one: Austria, then Denmark and Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Iceland and Luxembourg, Sweden, and finally France.

1997–2001 Mobile coverage reaches the Kerala coast, and the fishermen begin calling the markets from the water.

1999 Hugo Chávez takes office in a country still near the top of South America.

2000 Milton Friedman is asked, in a television interview, why free markets and freedom are inseparable.

2003 Glaeser and Gyourko measure what American houses cost to build, and find the shortage is legal: land is dear “not due to some intrinsic scarcity, but because of man-made regulations.”

2008 Zimbabwe’s prices double daily in November. The financial crash follows.

2009 Elinor Ostrom wins the Nobel Memorial Prize for showing how commons are governed.

2013 Piketty publishes Capital in the Twenty-First Century: “the entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor.”

2015 Rognlie answers Piketty: “the net capital share has increased since 1948, but once disaggregated this increase turns out to come entirely from the housing sector.”

2016 Auckland upzones about three quarters of its residential land. Six years on, rents for three-bedroom homes run “between 22 and 35% less than those of the synthetic control.”

2018 Safeguard tariffs on imported washing machines take effect in January.

2019 Greta Thunberg addresses the United Nations: “all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

2023 Chinoy, Nunn, Sequeira and Stantcheva publish their study of zero-sum thinking. The European Parliament hosts “Beyond Growth” in May.

2024 In May, a second American president quadruples the tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. Tesla books $2.76 billion in regulatory credits against $97.7 billion of revenue.

2025 In January a president calls tariffs the most beautiful word in the dictionary. On April 2 the “Liberation Day” walls go up. In the autumn Tesla’s shareholders approve a pay package that could make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

2026 On February 20 the Supreme Court holds that the emergency statute conferred no such power: “IEEPA does not authorize” tariffs of this kind.

A Note on Dates The figures, prices, and court outcomes in this book are current to September 2026. Chapter 15, which reports on events that were still in motion as it was written, should be read as a record of that month.