Modern philosophers who aspire to rise above the sordid economic reality of the world would do well to recall that this trade made possible the cross-fertilisation of ideas that led to great discoveri...
Market failure is a favourite phrase; government failure is not.
Lectures, says Minerva’s Stephen Kosslyn, are ‘a great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn’.
It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carr...
It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick.
I forecast that the twenty-first century will show a continuing expansion of catallaxy – Hayek’s word for spontaneous order created by exchange and specialisation.
Henry’s novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin’s idea of female choice as a force in evolution.
Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.
Founded in the 1960s by an Italian industrialist and a Scottish chemist, the Club of Rome is a talking shop for the great and the good, devoted to the worship of Malthus, and meeting behind closed doo...
For more than two hundred years, on the topic of human population, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, basing itself on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimagina...
Female monkeys, unaware that they are slaves to cultural stereotypes, like things with faces. Male monkeys, unaware that they are doing the bidding of human sexists, like things with moving parts.
All that determinists are asking you to accept is that there cannot be effect without cause.
Time always erodes advantage.
The market system makes self interest into something thoroughly virtuous.’ This is the extraordinary feature of markets: just as they can turn many individually irrational individuals into a collectiv...
The Australian economist Peter Saunders argues, ‘Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism...
Story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend.
Each person ‘intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many oth...
Yet to define genes by the diseases they cause is about as absurd as defining organs of the body by the diseases they get: livers are there to cause cirrhosis, hearts to cause heart attacks and brains...
With increasingly money-based interactions among strangers, people increasingly began to think of neighbours as potential trading partners rather than potential prey. Killing the shopkeeper makes no s...
This is not a book about the Human Genome Project — about mapping and sequencing techniques - but a book about what that project has found. Some time in the year 2000, we shall probably have a rough f...