Vernon Smith and his colleagues have long confirmed that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption – haircuts and hamburgers – work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to...
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.
The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation – that is to say, in crime.’ Perhaps we have left all that...
The argument is not that exchange teaches people to be kind; it is that exchange teaches people to recognise their enlightened self-interest lies in seeking cooperation.
That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings.
Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable...
Is it not striking that the cost of food and clothing has gone steadily downwards over the past fifty years, while the cost of healthcare and education has gone steadily upwards?
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 history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no f...
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 think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheim...
Education is dominated by creationist thinking. The curriculum is too prescriptive and slow to change, teachers are encouraged to teach to the exam rather than to the pupils’ or their own strengths, t...
Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privat...
And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of...
A series of papers by the Princeton economist Dani Rodrik and his colleagues tried to shed light on the impact of policy decisions on economic growth, but found that ‘most instances of economic reform...
A handbook for users of the Arpanet at MIT in the 1980s reminded them that ‘sending electronic messages over the ARPAnet for commercial profit or political purposes is both antisocial and illegal’. Th...
A person who is free to make a $20,000 purchase of a car as a customer, might not be free to buy an office chair for $500 as an employee. Little wonder that big companies grow more slowly than small o...
Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.
Jeff Bezos’s favourite saying is ‘Start with the customer and work backwards,’ but it is repeated as a mantra so frequently by his staff that you cannot help thinking they start with the boss and work...
In Germany too the preservation of nature went hand in hand with the destruction of human life. ‘Ask the trees, they will teach you how to become National Socialists!’ read one Nazi slogan.