Money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It...
Fight over scarce resources (food and fertile women)
Actuarial
You ask professors to study things, but you never put them in charge of anything.
Why, to give another suggestive example, did it take an American journalist sixty-five days to get official permission (including, after a wait of up to five weeks, a Food
When making their loans, the bankers should have thought more carefully about how easily they could call back the money - essentially a question about the liquidity of the loan.
The risk was spread across the globe from American state pension funds to public health networks in Australia and even to town councils beyond the Arctic Circle. In Norway, for example, the municipali...
The key point is that not all sets of institutions, when you add up the sum of the parts, are equal. There are good and bad combinations. In some sets of institutions, people can flourish freely as in...
The great thinkers of the eighteenth century were also pioneering tourists
The first paradox of Illuminism, then, was that it was a network that craved an elaborate hierarchical structure, even as it inveighed against existing hierarchies. In his 1782 ‘Address to the newly p...
The Hollywood version of the War of Independence is a straightforward fight between heroic Patriots and wicked, Nazi-like Redcoats. The reality was quite different. This was indeed a civil war which d...
The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe...
Primeiro, a atual população mundial corresponde a aproximadamente 7% de todos os seres humanos que já viveram. Há muito mais mortos que vivos, em outras palavras, 14 para 1, e ignoramos a experiência...
La administración británica de las finanzas egipcias tuvo mucho en común con una misión del Fondo Monetario Internacional, o más bien con el modo en que una misión del FMI operaría si pudiera llamar a...
Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political physics with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility...
After 1500 not all roads led to Rome
Why, when its causes today seem so numerous and so obvious, were contemporaries so oblivious of Armageddon until just days before its advent? One possible answer is that their vision was blurred by a...
Well as illiterate, unhealthy and bloody. I admire contemporary social scientific work that distinguishes between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ sets of institutions,18 but as an historian I find that distinctio...
Welfare state is not part of democracy as the ancient Athenians conceived of it. In bee terms, the welfare state seems to create an ever increasing number of dependent drones whom the worker-bees have...
Then resold their loans in bulk to Wall Street banks. The banks, in turn, bundled the loans into high-yielding residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and sold them on to investors around the wo...