Banknotes (which originated in seventh-century China) are pieces of paper which have next to no intrinsic worth. They are simply promises to pay (hence their original Western designation as ‘promissor...
Any investor unwise or patriotic enough to hang on to gilt-edged securities (consols or the new UK War Loans) would have suffered inflation-adjusted losses of -46 per cent by 1920. Even the real retur...
American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will b...
Young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated ‘modules’, not narrative...
We shall quickly find ourselves about as important to the algorithms as animals currently are to us.
Vested interests that financed their election campaigns. In August 2011, as Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya was falling apart, a BBC correspondent in Benghazi spotted some remarkable graffiti on a w...
They felt a genuine distaste for the institution of slavery. But of at least equal importance was a sense that the Confederacy was not a good credit risk (after all, the Confederate president Jefferso...
They are the key components of our civilization. I want to show that inside these political, economic, legal and social black boxes are highly complex sets of interlocking institutions. Like the circu...
Splenetic
Poor or the owners of small capitals enjoy scarce any, but are liable, under the pretence of justice, to be pillaged and plundered at any time by the inferior mandarins, the quantity of stock employed...
Parece seguro que esta decadencia relativa continuará en un futuro inmediato. Para muchos estadounidenses, la principal importancia de Europa no es la de ser un rival estratégico sino un destino turís...
No man prepar’d for it; no man consider’d it would come like a Thief in the night, exactly as it happens in the case of death.’74
Fettle
Codicils,
An unlikely champion of minority rights. His name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – Stalin (‘man of steel’),
With good reason, Joseph Goebbels described radio as ‘the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state’. Stalin might have added that the telephone was God’s gift to eavesdroppers.
When we speak of ‘populism’ today,1 we sometimes mean nothing more than a politics that is audible as well as intelligible to the man in the street – or, to be precise, the man and woman slumped on th...
There is in fact no such thing as the future, singular; only futures, plural. There are multiple interpretations of history, to be sure, none definitive – but there is only one past. And although the...
The task assigned to the RAND* researcher Paul Baran in 1964 was to develop a communication system that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack. Baran suggested three possible structures for such a syst...
The rationale for the FDA’s rigid standards is to avoid the sale of a drug like thalidomide. But the unintended consequence is almost certainly to allow many more people to die prematurely than would...