The shortage of cotton also drove up the price and hence the value of the South’s cotton-backed bonds, making them an irresistibly attractive investment for key members of the British political elite.
Today, banking assets (that is, loans) in the world’s major economies are equivalent to around 150 per cent of those countries’ combined GDP.
The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a partnership between the present generation and future generatio...
Roughly two fifths of the world’s population is effectively outside the financial system, without access to bank accounts, much less credit.
So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerabl...
World War I saw the birth of total war, in the sense that it was fought between societies as much as armies.
Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aest...
If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well...
Apposite
The striking thing is that the transatlantic divergence in working patterns has coincided almost exactly with a comparable convergence in religiosity. Europeans not only work less; they also pray less...
The problem is that the ISIS network defies conventional counter-terrorist tactics. Contrary to popular belief, this is not because its relies on ‘lone wolves’, who by their very nature are hard to de...
As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.
All these people want is a chance for the future, a chance they will follow with a strict consequentness [sic]. They will resent pity, they will be suspicious of oversolicitousness. They have seen man...
Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.
Figures must be adjusted downwards to take account of the cost of living, which has risen by a factor of nearly seven in my lifetime.
No serious writer would claim that the reign of Western civilization was unblemished. Yet there are those who would insist that there was nothing whatever good about it. This position is absurd.
In a time of chaos, it is the micro-manager who ascends
I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.
Hemos olvidado profundamente en todas partes que el Pago Monetario no es la única relación entre seres humanos... No es el único nexo del hombre con el hombre'—Thomas Carlyle
Facebook relayed the bogus story that Trump had been endorsed by the Pope.