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...
Today we are still in thrall to Great Man history, if only because we like reading biography. American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and inco...
Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.
This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and...
The truth is that the wild west was without much government, but it was very far from lawless, or even violent.
The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology.
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 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...
The internet, in other words, may be the best forum for crime, but it is also the best forum for free and fair exchange the world has ever seen.
Thanks to a newly perfected technology, the camel, the people of the Arabian Peninsula found themselves well placed to profit from trade between East and West.
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...
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...
Let’s give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.
Just as a white man has different skin color from a black man, so it is quite possible that he also has a somewhat different mind. But given what we know of evolution, it is not very likely. The evolu...
It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, rather than being driven from outside; it has no goal or end in mind; and it...
Europe was, in Joel Mokyr’s words, ‘the first society to build an economy on non-human power rather than on the backs of slaves and coolies’.
But until the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, we did not know what we now know: that all life is one; seaweed is your distant cousin and anthrax one of your advanced relatives.
Blockchains for all What are these enthusiasts on about? The ‘blockchain’ technology behind bitcoin could prove to be an ingredient of an entire new world of technology, as big as the internet itself,...
Arguably, the orang-utan, being devastated by the loss of forest to palm oil bio-fuel plantations in Borneo, is under greater threat from renewable energy than the polar bear is from global warming.