The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.
The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few.
The odds of the average American being shot to death are 1 in 314. But he or she is even more likely to commit suicide (1 in 119); more likely still to die in a fatal road accident (1 in 78); and most...
The life of a hunter-gatherer is indeed, as Thomas Hobbes said of the state of nature, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
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 New York Times detected the sexual dimension of Turkish policy, reporting that ‘the Turks frankly do not understand why they should not get rid of the Greeks and Armenians from their country and t...
Sometimes, as in the case of the American Revolution, crucial roles turn out to have been played by people who were not leaders but connectors.
Some of the network graphs that Able Danger produced were twenty feet long and almost wholly unintelligible because the print was so small.8 Krebs himself concluded that there would be no substitute f...
Significantly, Smith singled out its socially regressive character. First, wages for the majority of people were miserably low: Though the wealth of a country should be very great, yet if it has been...
Si la espada cae sobre Estados Unidos al cabo de ochenta años, la hipocresía levanta la cabeza lamentándose de la muerte de esos asesinos que han hollado la sangre, el honor y los lugares sagrados de...
Power, let us not forget, is not just about being able to buy whatever you want; that is mere wealth. Power is about being able to get whatever you want at below the market price.
Portuguese craftsmen such as Agostinho de Goes Raposo, Francisco Gois and João Dias perfected the construction of nautical instruments. The Portuguese caravel – and its successors the great nau (1480)...
Or, to reassure the bond market, does it cut expenditures in some other area, upsetting voters or vested interests? Or does it try to reduce the deficit by raising taxes?
Latin American republics were among the first to discover that it was relatively painless to default when a substantial proportion of bondholders were foreign.
La carrera de Morgan es el clásico ejemplo del modo como se inició el imperio británico, empleando a individuos emprendedores así como fuerzas regulares.
It nevertheless remains true that, in most countries for which long-run data are available, stocks have out-performed bonds – by a factor of roughly five over the twentieth century.
In 1800 seven out of the world’s ten biggest cities had still been Asian, and Beijing had still exceeded London in size. By 1900, largely as a result of the Industrial Revolution, only one of the bigg...
Financial market data – specifically, movements in the prices of government bonds – strongly reinforce the impression that the war came as a surprise to the people who had the biggest incentive to ant...
European sense. No one can predict how it will end because there is no precedent for it.
En la frase más célebre de su obra maestra, Sobre la guerra, publicada en 1832, Carl von Clausewitz consideraba la guerra «no meramente un acto de política, sino un verdadero instrumento político, la...