samuel_wade ,
@samuel_wade@mstdn.ca avatar

Today I learned that line, bar, area, and pie charts were all invented by the same person, a Scottish secret agent called Playfair who masterminded the covert sabotage of France’s currency. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Playfair

sinabhfuil ,
@sinabhfuil@mastodon.ie avatar

@samuel_wade How accurate the Playfair Cycle is too

Playfair cycle The following quotation, known as the "Playfair cycle," has achieved notoriety as it pertains to the "Tytler cycle": :...wealth and power have never been long permanent in any place. ...they travel over the face of the earth, something like a caravan of merchants. On their arrival, every thing is found green and fresh; while they remain all is bustle and abundance, and, when gone, all is left trampled down, barren, and bare.
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    • + Npars01
    Npars01 ,
    @Npars01@mstdn.social avatar

    @sinabhfuil @samuel_wade

    @AbandonedAmerica has a lot of poignant photography about exactly what happens to places and people once the money goes away.

    After everything that can be extracted has been removed, it leaves scars on both people & places.

    AbandonedAmerica ,
    @AbandonedAmerica@mastodon.social avatar

    @Npars01 @sinabhfuil @samuel_wade thanks Nicole! You're absolutely right. Nature does its best to clean up our messes but the scars remain for so long nevertheless

    Npars01 ,
    @Npars01@mstdn.social avatar

    @samuel_wade

    Not the 1st time a UK citizen crashed the French economy - John Law.
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_France

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_French_Revolution

    https://www.britannica.com/money/Mississippi-Bubble

    Niall Ferguson in his series the "Ascent of Money" describes how a financial crash appears to trigger revolutions and violent regime change within a few years of each other.

    The British Empire concluded a war in the Americas with France & triggered a recession when they implemented a tax on tea. American Revolution.

    samuel_wade OP ,
    @samuel_wade@mstdn.ca avatar

    “Playfair headed to England to apprentice with the engineer James Watt, whose streamlined steam engine design would soon kickstart the Industrial Revolution … He was sued for libel, nearly jailed for fraud, and eventually forced to flee France, where he had settled in 1787, after sending some of the country’s aristocrats to settle on American land tracts he didn’t actually own.” https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-scottish-scoundrel-who-changed-how-we-see-data

    jbenjamint ,
    @jbenjamint@mastodon.scot avatar

    @samuel_wade I mean, could there be a better Wikipedia bio...
    > He was in turn a millwright, engineer, draftsman, accountant, inventor, silversmith, merchant, investment broker, economist, statistician, pamphleteer, translator, publicist, land speculator, convict, banker, ardent royalist, editor, blackmailer and journalist.

    His nephew went on to build the college I studied in, where the fabulous Playfair Library is.

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