Imagine if you had to be completely self-sufficient (not just pretending, like Thoreau).
Even allowing for the hundreds of millions who still live in abject poverty, disease and want, this generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes,...
These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.
So – as animal experiments have suggested – oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb.
Richard Dawkins that ‘money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism’ –
On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us? THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both.
Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones?
The beauty of commerce is that when it works it rewards people for solving other people’s problems. It is ‘best understood as an evolutionary system, constantly creating and trying out new solutions t...
The world’s cities already contain half the world’s people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world’s land area.
The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, ‘because they endlessly seek to govern by design a world that is best organized spontaneously fro...
The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of...
On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Adam and God touch fingers. To the uneducated eye it is not clear who is creating whom. We are supposed to assume God’s the one doing the creating, and much of th...
It is the customer who determines what a business is.
In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37.
I am just a node in a huge network of knowledge, trying to capture an ethereal and evolving entity in a few inadequate words.
He asked the question: ‘What kind of company do we want this to be?’, and the answer built upon three principles: that people are happiest when they have personal control over their life; that people...
The economist John Bell Condliffe, saw what was happening, and warned presciently in 1938: ‘We face a new and more formidable superstition than the world has ever known: the myth of the nation-state,...
Firms are temporary aggregations of people to help them do their producing in such a way as to help others do their consuming.
We are told that we are sinning (by emitting CO2), that we have original sin (human greed), which has banished us from Eden (the pre-industrial world), for which we must confess (by condemning irrespo...