The environment that a child experiences is as much a consequence of the child’s genes as it is of external factors: the child seeks out and creates his or her own environment. If she is of a mechanic...
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...
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...
Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.
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...
Most aid is delivered by governments to governments.
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...
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.
The state has socialised the cost and privatised the reward. That
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...
Trying to replace the common law with a rationally designed law is, he jests, like trying to design a better rhinoceros in a laboratory.
The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology.
The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.
The new and crucial ingredient was not the availability of capital, but the advent of market-tested, consumer-driven innovation.
The influential 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica goes to the opposite extreme from the Encyclopédie: social history is buried within biography. So to read about the post-Roman world you mu...
The comedian Emo Philips once joked that he considered his brain to be the most fascinating organ in his body – until he realised who was telling him this.
So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else’s: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years. Yet,