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.
They had stumbled on what Friedrich Hayek called the catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by a growing division of labour.
These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose.
The phenomena we refer to as intelligence may be a byproduct of intergenomic conflict between genes mediating offense and defense in the context of language’, write Rice and Holland.
The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic F...
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...
Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.
Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.
Malthus’s poor laws were wrong; British attitudes to famine in India and Ireland were wrong; eugenics was wrong; the Holocaust was wrong; India’s sterilisation programme was wrong; China’s one-child p...
Like Milton Friedman, I notice that ‘business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger.
Just like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience, even – perhaps especially – in th...
It is just possible that the predators and parasites will actually win altogether, or rather that ambitious ideological busybodies will succeed in shutting down the catallaxy and crashing the world ba...
In other words, cooking encourages specialisation by sex. The first and deepest division of labour is the sexual one.
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.
Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong. The history of human science is not encouraging. Galton's eugenics, Freud's unconscious, Durkheim's sociology, Mead's culture-driven anthropology, Skinn...
Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place.
Falling consumer prices is what enriches people (deflation of asset prices can ruin them, but that is because they are using asset prices to get them the wherewithal to purchase consumer items). And,...
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...