There are two ways to tell the story of the twentieth century. You can describe a series of wars, revolutions, crises, epidemics, financial calamities. Or you can point to the gentle but inexorable ri...
The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions.
The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. Malthus’s
So who does run a company these days? Not the shareholders or the board. They largely find out after the fact that things have gone well or badly. Nor are firms cooperatives. Anybody who has tried to...
La extraordinaria difusión del psicoanálisis entre 1920 y 1970 se debe más al marketing que a los éxitos terapéuticos. Al hablar con los enfermos sobre sus infancia, los analistas ofrecían una humanid...
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and the United States made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public fundi...
In short, there is no question that a country can run a stable paper currency without a gold standard, a central bank, a lender of last resort, or much regulation; and not only avoid disaster, but per...
If, as a professor, you ask four men and two women each to wear a cotton T-shirt, no deodorant and no perfume, for two nights, then hand these T-shirts to you, you will probably be humored as a mite k...
If culture consisted simply of learning habits from others, it would soon stagnate. For culture to turn cumulative, ideas needed to meet and mate.
I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and bea...
Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so.
Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.
Friedrich Hayek’s, with his prescient warning in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that socialism and fascism were not really opposites, but had ‘fundamental similarity of methods and ideas’, that economic p...
Depending on whose estimate you choose, and how you correct for inflation, the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the...
An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, th...
A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why?
We all enjoy making other people happy. How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happin...
Men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety-seven times more often – than women have killed women.
Book is a piece of digital information, written in linear, one-dimensional and one-directional form and defined by a code that transliterates a small alphabet of signs into a large lexicon of meanings...
What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it.