Half of the American population agree with at least one conspiracy [theory] . . . Far from being an aberrant expression of some political extreme or a product of gross misinformation, a conspiratorial...
Government had degenerated into what has been called an ‘administrative’ or ‘managerial’ state, hierarchical and bureaucratic in its mode of operation, dedicated to generating ever more complicated re...
Fraught
First networked polity. ‘In no country in the world,’ declared Tocqueville, ‘has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America’:
Every one per cent increase in the Bank of England’s base lending rate correlated with a three per cent drop in government popularity.
Crisis seemed to vindicate the Soviet model. For, if Marxism-Leninism stood for anything, it was the prediction that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Now it seemed...
Confabulations
Cognate
By the second decade of the twentieth century the gap in living standards between London and Beijing was around six to one, compared with two to one in the eighteenth century.36
Billions of things linked to one another in myriad ways
As inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern history. Even more remarkably, despite the spectacular Argentine default - not to mention R...
Armed with an AK47 - a gift from Fidel Castro, the man he had sought to emulate. As the tanks rumbled towards him, Allende realized it was all over and, cornered in what was left of his quarters, shot...
Annus mirabilis
And ingenuous outsiders, like Groucho Marx.83
And growing need for fixed income securities, and for low inflation to ensure that the interest they pay retains its purchasing power. As more and more people leave the workforce, recurrent public sec...
Achievement to create the first modern insurance fund, based on correct actuarial and financial principles, rather than mercantile gambling.
Why exactly has social mobility declined in the United States in the past thirty years, so that the probability has more than halved that a man born into the bottom 25 per cent of the income distribut...
What had begun as a system of large-scale insurance had simply become a system of taxation, with today’s contributions being used to pay today’s benefits, rather than to accumulate a fund for future u...
Was there something distinctive about American civil society that gave democracy a better chance than in France, as Tocqueville argued? Was the already centralized French state more likely to produce...
To demonstrate that Western institutions have indeed degenerated, I am going to have to open up some long-sealed black boxes. The first is the one labelled ‘democracy’. The second is labelled ‘capital...