Driving Dixie Down In May 1863, two years into the American Civil War, Major-General Ulysses S. Grant captured Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, and forced the Confederate army under Lieutenant-...
Complexity is not cheap; on the contrary, it is very expensive indeed. The administrative state has found an easy solution to the problem of increasing the volume of public ‘goods’ without making comm...
Como Keynes dijo una vez, cuando los hechos cambian uno debe cambiar de opinión.
Bonds, as we saw in Chapter 2, are no more than promises by governments to pay interest and ultimately repay principal over a specified period of time. Either through default or through currency depre...
Because of preferential attachment, most social networks are profoundly inegalitarian.
«Se supone que estamos salvando a estas personas y es obvio que aquí no nos ven como sus salvadores. No les podemos gustar mucho. Si llegamos a una aldea nadie agita banderas, ni corre a echarnos flor...
Specified confidence intervals (for example, the statement that 40 per cent of the balls in the jar are white, at a confidence interval of 95 per cent, implies that the precise value lies somewhere be...
Rumours can go viral without sophisticated information technology.
Democracy’, we are in fact referring to a number of different interlocking institutions. People sticking pieces of paper into ballot boxes, yes. Their elected representatives making speeches and votin...
By the second quarter of the twentieth century one in nine German doctors was a Jew, and one in six lawyers. There were also above-average numbers of Jews working as newspaper editors, journalists, th...
An unlikely champion of minority rights. His name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – Stalin (‘man of steel’),
Actuarial
Two epidemics swept the world in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, th...
Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet.
South Slav (Yugoslav)
Se ha demostrado de modo convincente que una de las principales razones para la creciente desigualdad internacional en los años setenta y ochenta fue en realidad el proteccionismo en los países menos...
Pure monetary theory, however, cannot explain why in one country the inflationary process proceeds so much further or faster than in another.
It is not the fault of the mirror if it reflects our blemishes as clearly as our beauty.
In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?
In a pre-Internet campaign, certainly, he would have struggled to match Clinton,