Events are shaped by history rather than vice versa.
[...] the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone.
Well, in our country, said Alice, still panting a little, you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing. A slow sort of country! said the Queen. Now, h...
Two economists recently concluded, after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is ‘a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator’. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes ju...
This provided an excuse for sidelining questions of independence – until the subject people were ‘ready’. Hailey got the Americans to go along with this, by suggesting a similar line on Southern segre...
This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.
This book argues that evolution is happening all around us. It is the best way of understanding how the human world changes, as well as the natural world. Change in human institutions, artefacts and h...
Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You
The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology. Why pay huge fees to spend three years on one campus, earning the right to be paid not very much more in the re...
The simple one-way relationship that so entrances our politicians and commentators – education spending in, economic growth out – simply doesn’t exist.
The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.
The police have come to resemble an occupying army who see the citizenry as the enemy.
The market is a system of mass cooperation.
The lesson of this study is that, on the whole, having to deal with strangers teaches you to be polite to them, and that in order for such generosity to emerge, costly punishment of selfishness may be...
The internet has no centre and no hierarchy. All the computers that use it are equal – ‘peers’ in a network.
The genome is littered, one might almost say clogged, with the equivalent of computer viruses, selfish, parasitic stretches of letters which exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at...
The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all. It is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry to put down dissent and...
Some are worse off than they were just a few months or years before. But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against...
So plants can withstand almost any loss, and regenerate easily. They are utterly decentralised.