Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.
Defenders of capitalism generally make three broad historical claims: first, that it has fostered rapid scientific and technological development; second, that however much it may throw enormous wealth...
Banks are institutions to which the government has granted the power to create money—or,
Wage-labor contracts in the ancient world were primarily a matter of the rental of slaves—a
If one accepts Jean Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucrati...
Here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.
What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: If 1 p...
There will always be at least a handful of people unscrupulous enough to take advantage of such a situation—and a handful is all it takes.
The burden of rights-scolding falls above all on the younger generations. In most wealthy countries, the current crop of people in their twenties represents the first generation in more than a century...
So what are people actually referring to when they talk about deregulation? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like. In practice this can refer...
Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play...
One of the central arguments of this essay so far is that structural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination. Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative...
It’s those who do not have the power to hire and fire who are left with the work of figuring out what actually did go wrong
If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other...
I always wonder how banks manage to go bankrupt at all considering they can just make up the money, and especially, what is stopping them from lending money to themselves.
As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say, in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.
Правительства требуют уплаты налогов, потому что хотят наложить руку на деньги людей. Но если Смит был прав и золото и серебро стали деньгами благодаря естественному функционированию рынка, который ни...
A negative correlation, as David Apter put it,55 between coercion and information: that is, while relatively democratic regimes tend to be awash in too much information, as everyone bombards political...
Why is it that languages always change? It's easy enough to see why we need to have common agreements on grammar and vocabulary in order to be able to talk to one other. But if that's all that we need...
We are used to speaking of the state as a single entity but actually, I think, modern states are better seen as the confluence of three different elements, hose historical origins are quite distinct,...