The 1841 census was the first to include an individual’s place of birth. It also collected detailed household information not previously collected. Last week there was much excitement among the genealogical fraternity when this census went up on the internet. The Ancestry website now has the seven censuses from 1841 to 1901 available online.

But the world is running away from us faster than we can catch up with it. Each morning planes take off from Heathrow every 30 seconds dispatching armies of investment bankers to the far corners of Europe armed with plans to restructure companies and even entire industries. Estimates fluctuate wildly about how much pollution this produces. The airline industry tells us that British planes only contribute a tenth of one percent of global emissions. But others claim that aviation accounts for thirteen percent of British greenhouse gas emissions. Because of the boom in cheap flights this is also the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases…and hence a big problem.

One reason for the discrepancy is in the class of planes selected. Then there are theories that carbon dioxide causes more damage when released at high altitude…while others argue that planes hopping from London to Frankfurt don’t actually go up very high. There is also talk about the non-CO2 effects of aviation so environmentalists include Uplift Factors in their emission calculations of between two and three…though there is no scientific consensus about this.

It is easy to see why the City of London has so enthusiastically embraced European integration. In the first place the banks themselves are more European than twenty years ago when the City was still dominated by banks such as Barings, Schroeders and Warburgs. They may have had the German-sounding names of their immigrant founders but they were quintessentially English and impossibly grand in a way that only an English institution can be.

But today many of the biggest employers in the City really are German…such as Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank…or Dutch or French. And the people who work for them…or for the big American banks…are likely to be called Frederico or Raul or Anne-Marie and to be armed with doctorates and MBAs from the best business schools. There are thousands of ambitious multilingual graduates now seeking their fortunes in the Square Mile.

But the Europeanisation of the City is more than just a matter of personnel and brass name-plates. The business has changed. Twenty years ago the business of the City was still primarily focused on the domestic market…a legacy of decades of exchange controls that ended only in the early 1980s. Investment research was organised along national lines and corporate financiers relied for much of their income on domestic mergers, acquisitions and capital raisings, backed up by fat fees from a more clubby era. Europe was hard work with different accounting standards, little respect for shareholder rights, unfamiliar stock exchanges and differences in currencies and language.

Nowadays every bank regards Europe…and not just Britain…as their domestic market. All the big banks organise their research along European lines. Companies like BP and GlaxoSmithKline are compared with European competitors while fund managers invest across national borders. The truth is that the City has done extraordinarily well out of European integration. In fact it has the feel of a boom town. It has ridden out the millennium bear market and last year it hit new records for Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Companies from every part of Europe including prospective European Union members like Ukraine and Turkey are clamouring for the prestige of a London listing.

This has led to a rather peculiar situation. While the City of London has embraced the single market and persuaded the British Government…though not the British people…to throw open the country’s borders to the free movement of people, goods and capital, other countries in the European Union continue to refuse to play by the rules and look for ways to protect their domestic companies from overseas competition. The worst offenders are the countries thought to be the most pro-European like France, Germany and Italy. The Italian Government for instance refuses to allow foreign-owned banks to buy local banks. And Germany still allows listed companies to ignore the views of investors.

A year ago an article in The Spectator reckoned it was clear which way things were heading. ‘The City has financial muscle on its side, it has EU law on its side, and it increasingly has the EU Commission on its side too. ..That is why national governments are increasingly dismantling some of their most extreme anti-business laws…such as France’s 35-hour week and Germany’s oppressive business taxes…while as a rearguard action, still calling on Brussels to resist the spread of Anglo-Saxon Capitalism.’

Our money came in from NCAB just before the May Holiday Weekend so today in my little corner of the world of globalisation my principal task was to clear William Franklin & Sons’ payables by disbursing two thousand pounds to the translators who had worked on the project. As PCHut was still waiting for its broadband connection I had planned to take the train to Ashford. But at eight o’clock a call came in from Francoise asking for help with some computer glitches. So I ended up going into Hastings instead and making my connection to Barclay’s ibank from the Hastings Public Library. Afterwards I went in search of a good internet café in Hastings and discovered Mahavi’s.

John Kenneth Galbraith died on Saturday at the grand old age of ninety seven. He was a child of his age though a generation ahead of his contempories and their conventional wisdom…a term he coined. Galbraith is the best-selling economist in the world…although with John Maynard Keynes as his mentor he was never eligible for the Ludwig Von Mises Nobel Prize in Economics awarded annually by the Swedish banking fraternity to Chicago University. But he should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Galbraith once remarked in the lightly ironic and self-deprecating style that so delighted his readers that he always put his manuscripts through the typewriter three times…first for sense, second for style and third for both. It showed. He was the author of over forty books. His method was to sort out the wheat from the chaff of Economic History and Theory and to popularize what emerged without dumbing it down. My generation trusted Galbraith. In an age of increasingly dodgy dossiers this was quite something. To believe or not to believe. That is the question for Our Age.

At Ottakars in Ashford on Saturday I paid £16 for a copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004 for Dummies. I have been in Meads Bookshop on Lion Street after closing time learning how book sellers go online. ABE Books is one answer. But Bookdealer Magazine has been running negative editorials about the amount they take from book sellers…a sales commission of 8% and then another 6% by insisting that members used ABE Books own merchant services. Despite this I will be recommending to Clive Ogden the Proprietor of the Meads Book Service that he signs up with ABE Books for £ 17 per month…but also marks up his antiquarian book prices by 15% to cover their commissions. But Meads Book Service should also have a website of its own…with back office systems and database integration.

The best book on Keynes is by Michael Stewart…the long-forgotten Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson’s administrations of the 1960s and 1970s. More than any other Labour politician he was responsible for ensuring that our generation never became embroiled in America’s disastrous Vietnam Debacle. For this alone I put Michael Stewart right up there with Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Edmund Blunden as one of the best of Christ’s Hospitals’ favourite sons. It was Tony Blair’s misfortune that he chose to surround himself with the Mandelssons and Campbells of this country’s political world instead of the Michael Stewarts and Michael Meachers of the Labour Party.

Keynes had said that there would be a time when society had to become accommodated to plenty rather than scarcity. Galbraith said this time had arrived and went on to argue that rather than constantly creating material wants through advertising the time had come to pay attention to the quality of life. The European Green Movement learned a lot from Galbraith’s liberalism...but he never believed in socialism as a method. For Galbraith socialism failed the only test that really mattered…the test of practical economics. Socialism didn’t and couldn’t work in the real world.

In Galbraith’s opinion American economists and politicians were still using the assumptions of a world of the past where poverty was nearly universal. He pointed out that America’s economy produced individual wealth but failed to address public needs. An oft-repeated Galbraithian phrase refers to Private Affluence in the midst of Public Squalor. He gave American liberals many of their sound-bites…and much of the language for debating issues of money, work and power. Galbraith revealed what other economists obscured by their obfuscating mathematical illiteracies…and uncovered what other politicians covered up by their rhetorical flourishes. By any measure he was a giant.

Planning is at the heart of what corporations do to create their managed markets and controlled oligopolies. Galbraith wanted Governments to do it too. Laissez-faire was never the Galbraith way…but nor was Soviet-style 5-year Planning. Galbraith had been in charge of Price Control in the Second World War and confessed afterwards that he knew the game was up when his enemies started to outnumber his friends. Galbraith wanted a better balance between the public and the private sectors. This is what he felt the Classical Economic Model fails to achieve.

One of my favourite Galbraithian remarks was his put-down of trickle-down theory so beloved of those of a right wing persuasion. ‘Trickle down theory,’ he wrote, ‘is the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.’ Another was his remark that there are two sorts of forecaster: those who don’t know…and those who don’t know they don’t know.

Before the Hitler War the young Fritz Schumacher was a world-famous expert on International Finance. So it made sense for him to accompany John Kenneth Galbraith into Allied Occupied Germany in 1946. In my article The Schumacher Enigma I remarked that Schumacher had worked closely with Galbraith after the war. I have yet to read any reflections by Schumacher on this period in his intellectual development. But it may be significant that he rarely touched on International Finance in any published writings afterwards. I wonder what the Schumacher Archives have to say on his time in Germany with John Kenneth Galbraith?