Wherever farming took root, violence emerged as a more important feature of social life.
Violence is the ultimate boundary force on behavior; this, if you can understand how the logic of violence will change, you can usefully predict where people will be dropping or picking up the equival...
Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome.
When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people wh...
We live in the time of the computer, but our dreams are still spun on the loom.
Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings.
Because a hunter's labor did not augment the food supply but could only reduce it, one who heroically labored overtime to kill more animals or pick more fruit than could be eaten before it spoiled con...
The most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power is exercise...
Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the easy that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown ra...
When the payoff for organizing violence at a large scale tumbles, the payoff from violence at a smaller scale is likely to jump. Violence will become more random and localized. Organized crime will gr...