There are two main reasons why this assumption is wrong. First, once basic material needs have been met, there is very little evidence that pursuing financial prosperity generates much extra happiness for individuals or for nations. Second, by blindl...
Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict---its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, i...
I had a dream about you where you were an economic hero. So is the real life you like the dream you? Answer this question: If Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke were about to die, and they only had 59 seconds left, and you could only save one, would you t...
Instead of engaging in cutthroat competition, we should strive to create value. In economic terms, this means a transition from a consumer economy - the mad rush for ownership and consumption - to a constructive economy where all human beings can par...
One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an ins...
What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listl...
In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social cond...
... economists recognize that, other things equal, cuts in tax rates reduce tax revenues in percentage terms by less than the tax-rate reductions. Similarly, tax-rate increases do not raise tax revenues by as much in percentage terms as the tax-rate ...
I need some beef and broccoli before I face any more Mr. Darcy. It's a truth universally acknowledged that if you watch too much television on am empty stomach, your head falls off." "If your head fall off, " Tessa said, "the hairdressing industry wo...
Byproduct of the circulation of commodities, human circulation considered as a form of consumption, tourism comes down fundamentally to the freedom to go and see what has become banal. The economic planning of the frequenting of different places is a...
Why do people stay together? Putting aside ‘for the sake of the children’, and ‘the habit of years’ and ‘economic reasons’ as lawyers’ nonsense – it’s not much more – if one really does try to find out why it is that people don’...
The thing I got to thinking about,' he said, 'is--what are the conditions that lead to larger portions of society being generous, humble, and selfless? While we have the conditions for economic opportunity here--and that is a blessing--do we have the...
While the popular understanding of anarchism is of a violent, anti-State movement, anarchism is a much more subtle and nuanced tradition then a simple opposition to government power. Anarchists oppose the idea that power and domination are necessary ...
At the time, most bodies worked on by anatomists were cold indeed. They were brought to Edinburgh from all over Britain -- some came by way of the Union Canal. The resurrectionists -- body-snatchers -- pickled them in whisky for transportation. It wa...
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal eased but did not end the country's economic ills, a trio of leftist radicals - Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana; the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the Detroit radio priest; and Francis Townsend in California - enj...
Death shows no favor. He is very fair: exacting the same advantages to all. Age, race, gender, or economic status does not cause discrimination within the company of Death. Of all marketing companies on the Earth, Death has surpassed them all: ensuri...
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will rema...
The truly terrible thing about the war spirit, about the fear and hate hysteria it generates, is that it forces us to think and talk and feel in terms of abstractions—those "communists" this time, those "fascists" last time. But those we are fighti...
We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned o...
[T]he strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian ch...
Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows a...
