Share of US labor force working in agriculture: 1840: 64% 1880: 43% 1920: 27% 1960: 10% 2000: 1.5% What an amazing transformation over 160 years. Interesting to compare the USA’s numbers with these statistics from the CIA’s World Factbook on percentages of people employed in agriculture around the world, e.g., Afghanistan 78%, Kyrgyzstan 48%, Malaysia […]
Employment in agriculture: statistics Read More »
Links to my posts over the last three years on the causes of the crisis. This is an ongoing project, and I’ll add new items to the Financial Crisis page as they are posted. Ten posts: 1. What is the US economy? Introduction. Before blaming the economic crisis on either government regulation or free enterprise,
Collected posts on the financial crisis Read More »
Ending the year on a lighter note — my humor posts collected below and into one page: What I Have Learned about the History of Philosophy from My Students. Existentialism meets high-tech . From the Office of the Reproducer-General. Professor Walsh gives an “A” to a Jain monk. Computing’s environmental impact. The best footnote ever.
Philosophicalish Humor Read More »
The image is Raphael’s version of Hypatia, the astronomer, mathematician, and neoplatonic philosopher who was murdered by a religious mob in 415. Hypatia lived and died in Alexandria, Egypt, then a clashing hotbed of philosophical schools and rising radical religion. The rising radical religion of the time was Christianity. Hypatia’s nemesis was Cyril, Bishop of
Egypt then and now Read More »
An eyebrow raiser from George Gilder’s The Silicon Eye (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), a history of the development of the digital camera: “Leading-edge clean rooms at companies like Intel or National Semiconductor are ‘class ten’ or even ‘class one,’ meaning that there are between zero and ten such particles, making a microchip factory
High-tech cleanliness Read More »
Forthcoming in January 2012. Profiles in Liberty main page.
Profiles in Liberty — series trailer Read More »
In this third Socratic seminar on the Best Arguments against Free-market Capitalism, we take up three arguments: a) the paternalist argument that human beings are incapable of living freely, b) the collectivist argument that wealth is a social creation (at 11 minutes), and c) the religious argument that value is not of this world (at
Three more anti-free-market arguments (UFM seminar) Read More »