Technologies come and go. The world remains a world of squares and towers.
Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi, who burned himself to death in front of the governor’s offices in the town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010.12 Bouazizi killed himself precisely one hour after a policewoman, ba...
Somehow no really terrible Western ideas like, say, witch-burning or communism ever get mentioned, though they seem just as plausibly the products of Judaeo-Christian culture as the spirit of capitali...
Some S&Ls bet their depositors’ money on highly dubious projects. Many simply stole it, as if deregulation meant that the law no longer applied to them.
Since de Soto published The Mystery of Capital, revolutions in countries like Tunisia and Egypt have provided compelling evidence in support of his approach. He sees the ‘Arab Spring’ primarily as a r...
Rothschild houses had capital in excess of £35 million on the eve of the First World War, all of it family money; it was the job of the partners to manage this huge portfolio. A large part of it they...
Pero los intereses estadounidenses podían también verse satisfechos porque la ocupación de países extranjeros reportaba beneficios (al cabo de un tiempo extraordinariamente breve). Sobre esta base, er...
Outlandish ideas stand a better chance of success if they come with royal approval.
Meanwhile, property prices roughly trebled between 1963 and 1979, while consumer prices rose by a factor of just 2.5. But there was a sting in the tail. The same governments that avowed their faith in...
Many historians still tend to assume that the spread of an idea or an ideology is a function of its inherent content in relation to some vaguely specified context. We must now acknowledge, however, th...
Los profesores que otrora habían abrazado las doctrinas nazis ahora abrazaban las de la OTAN; la mayoría conservó su trabajo. La primera evidencia importante de cambio cultural fue el surgimiento de u...
Large numbers of under-capitalized banks were a recipe for financial instability, and panics were a regular feature of American economic life - most spectacularly in the Great Depression, when a major...
Japan. So successful was the Japanese ‘welfare superpower’ that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. But that, combined with a falling birth rate, has produced th...
In the 1990s the world’s population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out.
In most history, success is over-represented, for the victors out-write the losers. In the history of networks, the opposite often applies. Successful networks evade public attention; unsuccessful one...
Hoy, Estados Unidos sigue siendo el mayor contribuyente individual de la ONU, como lo ha sido desde los inicios de esta. Más de un quinto (22 por ciento) del presupuesto bienal normal de 2.540 millone...
From the point of view of most African-Americans, American independence postponed emancipation by at least a generation.
From 1500, anyone in China found building a ship with more than two masts was liable to the death penalty; in 1551 it became a crime even to go to sea in such a ship.21 The records of Zheng He’s journ...
For the majority of mortgages continued to enjoy an implicit guarantee from the government-sponsored trio of Fannie, Freddie or Ginnie, meaning that bonds which used those mortgages as collateral coul...
Era el principio constitucional (el derecho del Parlamento británico de aprobar impuestos a los colonos americanos sin su consentimiento) la verdadera manzana de la discordia.