The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are...
The real cause of poverty today – now that it is avoidable – is the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights, says William Easterly.
The influence upon our intelligence of events that happened in the womb is three times as great as anything our parents did to us after our birth.
The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella).
The Planned Parenthood Foundation was founded in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, who thought philanthropy would ‘perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents’. The orga...
The Great Man theory lives on as strongly as ever in one field of human endeavour: big business.
Studies of criminal records of adoptees in Denmark revealed a strong correlation with the criminal record of the biological parent and a very small correlation with the criminal record of the adopting...
So if gangsters become governments, does this mean that governments began as gangsters?
Snaží-li se muž získat ženu, nepošle ji svůj výpis z účtu, ale daruje jí perlový náhrdelník. Nechlubí se svou lékařskou kartou, ale mezi řečí prohodí, že každý týden uběhne patnáct kilometrů a nikdy n...
Sisyphean
Sexual relations are driven not by what is good, in evolutionary terms, for men or for women, but for their chromosomes. The ability to seduce a woman was good for Y chromosomes in the past; the abili...
Religions always and everywhere insist upon the argument from authority. You should do this or that because the Pope or the Koran or the local priest says you should. For centuries most of the world c...
Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less,’ he
One survey shows that throughout the world and throughout history, from thirteenth-century England to modern Canada, from Kenya to Mexico, men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety...
Nobody ever saw a dog make fair and deliberate exchange of a bone with another dog.
No, what really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you’re good at, I’ll do what I’m good at, and we’ll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside...
Nancy Wexler fears that science is now in the position of Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes.
Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past. A Shakespeare play is about motives and predicaments and feelings and personalities that are instantl...
It is an extraordinary fact, unremembered by most, that in the Anglosphere people live by laws that did not originate with governments at all.
Giving money to poor people is not a sustainable solution to poverty. So how do you help poor people? Do you instruct, plan and order their lives with expertise and lots of government, or do you get t...