Chicken factory farming profits financed the founding of the Institute of Economic Affairs

Evidence

Fisher made his wealth by introducing the factory farming of chickens in Britain. He established Buxted Chickens, the country’s first and largest manufacturer of prepackaged, factory-produced poultry, after his visit to the Foundation for Economic Education in New York in 1952. F. A. Harper, who had taught economics at Cornell University, advised Fisher to visit the university’s industrial project for the production of chickens. The profits from Buxted Chickens financed the creation of the IEA (Frost 2002). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1990

Categorization

• CANDY: A fun trivia fact: the UK’s flagship free-market think tank was bankrolled by the man who industrialized British chicken.
• XREF: connects to: British neoliberalism was incubated outside academia by the Institute of Economic Affairs — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 419