Economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens won the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” last week for their work on “real-world” experiments that drove a truck through market-driven economic theory. This was not surprising. Conventional wisdom among the “woke” intelligentsia is today a far more important driver of […]

This column recognizes that new products and services can have technical hiccups. Stephenson’s Rocket ran over a Cabinet Minister at its inaugural ceremony, killing him. The Hindenburg’s new transatlantic airship service burst into flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The first jet airliner, the Comet 1, kept blowing out its windows at high altitude. But the […]

“Every individual… neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many […]

China can claim to have invented in its Song Dynasty (AD 960-1279) the policy of easy credit that has led to its recent real estate debacle. Yet the Song’s use of paper money was much more careful than that of today’s China (or of its decadent Western competitors). In other respects: its respect for merit, […]

The August Consumer Price Index’s rise of 5.3% over the preceding year demonstrated that inflation is far from a transitory phenomenon. In these circumstances, it is likely that the Fed will attempt to hold rates close to zero for as long as possible, and then raise them too slowly to prevent inflation from accelerating further. […]

It is becoming increasingly clear that, at some time before AD 5,000 humanity will enter another Dark Age, in which life will be “nasty, brutish and short,” living standards will be abysmal, and both human potential and human knowledge will be very limited. If we are very lucky, we will eventually emerge from that dark […]

Charles Mackay’s 1841 classic “Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds” established the truth that crowds communicating with one another through the media can make “mad” decisions, in investment and other areas. Modern social media have immeasurably increased the amount and intensity of such communication; there are clear signs that it has also increased […]

This planet is becoming dangerous and unpleasant. The Covid-19 pandemic appears very likely to have been the result of biological warfare experimentation (albeit possibly released by accident.) Nuclear proliferation is becoming increasingly a threat, as too many nuclear powers come to have lunatic allies. While global warming is only a minor threat at most, the […]

In my researches into the Industrial Revolution, I have been looking at British canal building. There were three “canal manias” in 1766-75, 1786-93 and 1816-25, but only the first yielded truly attractive investments and economic gains, while the last wave lost money in general. This decline in returns for the later investments has lessons for […]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Physical Science report AR6, released August 9, raised the usual calls for panic and draconian action from that majority of the media and the left for whom this is a religion. Yet on examination, its statistics were decidedly unalarming, and suggest we can easily address the modest long-term problem […]