By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone.
It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion.
People increased their birth rate in response to high child death rates. Make them richer and healthier and they would have fewer babies, as had already happened in Europe, where prosperity had led bi...
Yet as soon as Greece was unified into an empire by a thug – Philip of Macedon in 338 BC – it lost its edge.
Today, of Americans officially designated as ‘poor’, 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent...
The truth is that the wild west was without much government, but it was very far from lawless, or even violent.
Fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.
The top four priorities would be food, fuel, clothing and shelter. Dig the garden, feed the pig, fetch water from the brook, gather wood from the forest, wash some potatoes, light a fire (no matches),...
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...
Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.
Every innovation to this day is the result of thousands of people exchanging ideas.
Letting good evolve, while doing bad, has been the dominant theme of history. That is why the news is full of only bad things being done, but we find when they are over that great good has happened un...
The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.
The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honour...
The more a country adopted central planning, the better its education system did, but the worse its economic performance – not least because, like Egypt, it churned out many would-be bureaucrats train...
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...
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...
Suppose you had said to my hypothetical family of 1800, eating their gristly stew in front of a log fire, that in two centuries their descendants would need to fetch no logs or water, and carry out no...
Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.
Let’s give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.
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