Археолог і антрополог Браян Фейґен автор дуже плідний: його бібліографія налічує близько сотні наукових статей та кілька десятків книжок. Причому не лише університетських підручників, за якими досі навчаються студенти по всьому світу, але й книжок, розрахованих передусім на широкого читача, написаних із знанням справи, на високому рівні. Інтереси ( Read more... )

As George Will explains in his latest column ("Why Doom Has Not Materialized"), "We were supposed to be pretty much extinct by now, or at least miserable. We are neither." He then asks, "So, what went wrong?" And responds (in the tradition of resource economist Julian Simon), "The modelers missed something - human ingenuity in discovering, ( Read more... )

http://blog.american.com/2012/05/sierra-club-goes-after-natural-gas/

Beginning in 1856, the Xhosa tribe in today's South Africa destroyed its own economy. They killed an estimated half-million of their own cattle (which they ordinarily treated with great care and respect), ceased planting crops, and destroyed their grain stores. By the end of 1857, between thirty and fifty thousand Xhosa had starved to death -- a ( Read more... )

What Paxo needed for the purposes of this first episode was postcolonial ingratitude. He got it from the chap in the Gezira club; he got it even more so from the Israeli woman who, as a 16-year-old Irgun terrorist, had scouted the King David Hotel, prior to the placing of the bombs that killed 91 in September 1946. Did she not, Paxo wondered, feel ( Read more... )

The United Kingdom joined the EEC on a false premise. In 1972, most British people believed that they were trading sovereignty for prosperity: in exchange for ceding a limited degree of democratic self-rule, they'd be joining a large and prosperous market. Does anyone still believe in that equation today? With every week that passes, it becomes ( Read more... )

It was at Bretton Woods that Keynes identified one of the key problems at the heart of international economics - that imbalances in trade are next to impossible to resolve in a fixed exchange rate system without surplus countries accepting that they have as much of an obligation to do something about them as the offending deficit countries. As the ( Read more... )

The Man Who Predicted the Race Riots by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 2002

The Royal Society is a joke

The unintentional irony of the witless Fabio Capello-bashers: ‘He must be racist, he’s an Italian’

GCSEs are about the worst dog’s dinner of an exam in the world, and the call from the Head of Eton to scrap them should not be ( Read more... )

'Germany's George Monbiot' turns climate sceptic - Telegraph Blogs

In blaming mankind for causing snow across Europe, Greens sound eerily like 16th-century witch-hunters - Telegraph Blogs

Six US states have introduced measures backing the teaching of climate scepticism,and government experts say they find half of teachers have come under pressure on the issue from parents, students, school administrators, or even their own families. The “pushback”, they add, is particularly strong in the conservative South and in areas with ( Read more... )