In a recent Kaizen interview, Argentine entrepreneur Enrique Duhau discussed some of the challenges of doing business in a country with a politicized economy. I was reminded of Campante and Glaeser’s comparative study of Buenos Aires and Chicago, two cities that were very similar in the nineteenth century. They were similar in population size, with
Comparing Buenos Aires and Chicago — politics and economics Read More »
“Por que a arte se tornou feia?” Escrito por Stephen Hicks. Tradução de Ronaldo Bassit. Revisão de Matheus Pacini. Publicado: 29 Novembro 2013. Também: English, German [pdf], Korean [pdf], and Spanish.
Por que a arte se tornou feia? [Portuguese translation] Read More »
Following up on “European country data on the minimum wage,” here are the data for eighteen Western European countries in table form. Or here is the Excel spreadsheet. Sources: “List of sovereign states in Europe by minimum wage,” Wikipedia. “List of countries by unemployment rate,” Wikipedia. Both viewed 9 December 2013. Related: My video-lecture on
Table: Unemployment and Minimum Wages in Europe, 2013 Read More »
My colleague Shawn Klein is editing a new volume on Steve Jobs and Philosophy, to be published as part of Open Court’s Popular Culture and Philosophy series. For those interested in writing an original contribution to the volume, please see Dr. Klein’s Call for Abstracts with more information about the scope of the volume and
*Steve Jobs and Philosophy* (call for abstracts) Read More »
In Barron’s, Paul Theroux argues that 150 years of aid to Africa has not helped much — and may have hurt more than it helped. Theroux discusses the failure of several recent externally-generated efforts, including Jeffrey Sachs’s top-down Millennium Project and the long history of well-meaning “Telescopic Philanthropists,” as well as Africa’s internal problems of
Paul Theroux on ending aid to Africa Read More »
Researchers say the average woman speaks 20,000 words a day, and the average man speaks 7,000. Apparently, the Foxp2 protein is implicated. So we may now have an answer to this wry question from Austin O’Malley: “Why is the word tongue feminine in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French and German?” And this intriguing study of
Should Christians be socialists? Some data points: * Pope Francis delivered a strongly leftist apostolic exhortation, condemning free markets and endorsing some sort of paternalistic egalitarianism.[1] * C. S. Lewis argued in Mere Christianity that “a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist” — its economics would be socialist, no luxuries would be
Pope Francis, C. S. Lewis, and Christian economics Read More »
Noam Chomsky is a mixed bag intellectually, but I like this quotation forwarded to me by Edward Fox: “There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I
Chomsky on postmodernism Read More »