These days, nearly everyone claims to be democratic. I have even heard it claimed that the Chinese Communist Party is democratic. ‘Capitalist’, by contrast, is a word too often used as a term of abuse...
The torrent of verbiage comes about because professional politicians are more concerned with spin than substance, the media never cease to howl for ‘something’ to be done after every mishap, the lobby...
The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, mos...
The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few.
The performance of the American stock market is perhaps best measured by comparing the total returns on stocks, assuming the reinvestment of all dividends, with the total returns on other financial as...
The odds of the average American being shot to death are 1 in 314. But he or she is even more likely to commit suicide (1 in 119); more likely still to die in a fatal road accident (1 in 78); and most...
The more integrated the world’s financial markets become, the greater the opportunities for financially knowledgeable people wherever they live - and the bigger the risk of downward mobility for the f...
The masses long ago switched from stocks to investments having higher yields and more protection from inflation. Now the pension funds - the market’s last hope - have won permission to quit stocks and...
The first ‘networked era’ followed the introduction of the printing press to Europe in the late fifteenth century and lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. The second –our own time –dates fr...
The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen.
The Four Black Boxes 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...
The Crusades, like the conquests that followed, were as much about overcoming Europe’s monetary shortage as about converting heathens to Christianity.14
Stalin’s power consisted of three distinct elements: total control of the party bureaucracy, total control of the means of communication – with the Kremlin telephone network as the central hub – and t...
Sería más acertado hablar de «nihilismo islámico», o quizá «bolchevismo islámico», pues no debemos olvidar que en sus primeros años Lenin y Stalin fueron también terroristas. En
Power, let us not forget, is not just about being able to buy whatever you want; that is mere wealth. Power is about being able to get whatever you want at below the market price.
Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from ‘rags to riches’ in a generation. But today, if you are born to parents in the bottom income quintile, you hav...
MISCEGENATION
La Unión Soviética, a diferencia de anteriores aspirantes a la hegemonía, está animada por una nueva fe fanática, antitética a la nuestra, y busca imponer su autoridad absoluta sobre el resto del mund...
Is it better today to be in a network, which gives you influence, than in a hierarchy, which gives you power?
In their book Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson make a striking comparison between Egypt today and England in the late seventeenth century: The reason that Britain is richer than Egypt...