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 […]

Several times this column has wished for a sharp decline in global population, which with the advent of superior robotics could lead all of us to live like 18th Century Whig lords, in lavish parklands manned by robot servitors. Yet I have now learned that the original Whig Supremacy of 1714-60 led to a half […]

The chilling in relations with China since 2017 and the discovery that China may well have been responsible for the release of the COVID-19 virus is forcing the world to accept that the globalization and free trade world of 1991-2015 is no more. Instead, with China an authoritarian Communist society that seeks domination and does […]

Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” was published in 1957, yet its atmosphere is that of the late 1930s (when much of it may have been in first draft). Trains are the overwhelmingly dominant means of transportation and coal the main source of energy; everywhere outside the United States is run by dictatorships and the overall impression […]