In the summer of 1914, all the world’s major economies were quite well run by governments that understood the benefits of industrialization and free markets. There were also no major ideological conflicts — the two most ideologically extreme countries, the socialist democracy of France and the still quasi-feudal autocracy of Russia were locked in a […]

Paul Ehrlich, the biologist and environmentalist who died last week, in 1968 wrote “The Population Bomb” forecasting mass starvation by the 1980s if global population, then 3.4 billion, was not brought under control. He has since been much mocked by anti-environmentalists, who point out correctly that global population has since soared to 8.3 billion, yet […]

The global economic distortions caused by China’s state-driven economic model are becoming more severe. China’s investment has been raised to economically unprecedented levels and the country has embarked on a manic subsidized export drive to keep its GDP growth rate around 5%. That policy is reaching its limits, both through uncollectible debt in the economy […]

President Trump’s military campaign against Iran raises a most urgent question: what kind of successor regime is possible, and how will that regime attain legitimacy? Only with a legitimate, economically rational regime can Iran prosper, yet the triple temptations of Islamism, authoritarian socialism and hopeless government corruption may well seduce an inexperienced electorate into error, […]

Around a third of U.S. equities are now owned by index funds or by institutions mimicking index funds and the percentage so owned is steadily rising – passively owned institutional equities recently overtook those actively managed. This is a negation of capitalism; if investors are not making rational decisions about their investments, the market’s sorting […]