In civilized society,’ wrote Adam Smith, an individual ‘stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friend...
Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes.
Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes. The habitat in which...
He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organised religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist. I...
Google has likewise turned itself into a trial-and-error company, by encouraging employees to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own projects.
For barter to work, two individuals do not need to offer things of equal value. Trade is often unequal, but still benefits both sides.
Cities, marriage, language, music, art – these manifestations of culture all change in regular and retrospectively predictable ways, but in ways that nobody did predict, let alone direct. They evolve.
California was especially enthusiastic about eugenics. By 1933 it had forcibly sterilised more people than all other states combined. So when the Third International Congress of Eugenics gathered at t...
Besides, we now know that virtually all the evidence purporting to show how parental influences shape our character is deeply flawed. There is indeed a correlation between abusing children and having...
Before Medicaid and Medicare existed, writes the American politician and former doctor Ron Paul, ‘every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate, and free me...
As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth.
And even modern governments have an element of the crime syndicate about them. Police forces repeatedly harbour criminals all over the world: the US Department of Homeland Security is only a little mo...
A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, th...
A Californian firm called Morning Star Tomatoes has been experimenting with ‘self-management’ for two decades. The result is that Morning Star is the largest processor of tomatoes in the world, handli...
The first century of the US Federal Reserve’s existence has been a failure. Not only has there been incontinent inflation since 1913, the year the Fed came into existence (8 per cent in the preceding...
The diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. This is also a hallmark of civilisation.
If sympathy allows you to please yourself by pleasing others, are you being selfish or altruistic?
If life needs no intelligent designer, then why should the market need a central planner?
All gods and all superstitions emerge from within human minds, and go through characteristic but unplanned transformations as history unfolds. Thus even the most top–down feature of human culture is a...
When I write or speak about falling child mortality in Africa today, I can be sure I will get a response along exactly these Malthusian lines: but surely it’s a bad thing if you stop poor people dying...