Simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity.
Fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.
They had stumbled on what Friedrich Hayek called the catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by a growing division of labour.
The mind drives the body, which drives the genome.
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...
Societies that chose ‘normative monogamy’, or an insistence upon sex within exclusive marriage, tended to tame their young men, improve social cohesion, balance the sex ratio, reduce the crime rate, a...
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...
Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.
In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37.
Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs. Once again, notice that this is not policy.
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...
Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’.
Doomed every four years to disappointment when a demigod turns out to have feet of clay, when the most powerful man in the world turns out not to have much power to change the world, the American peop...
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.
[...] the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone.
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...
This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production.
This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production. Make one thing, use lots.