In the pre-modern world, workers got little education and had low productivity. In the modern world, workers get much education and have high productivity. Productivity (and education!) keep going up. If formal academic training isn’t the main reason, what is?
Tag: world
Words Poorly Used #133 — Invention/Intervention
Intervention is taking that which belongs to someone else. Invention is sharing a new idea for the good of its beneficiaries. You cannot coerce people to adopt an invention, since to do so makes it an intervention.
Back Alley Regulation
If you think a regulation is a bad idea, you should probably prefer regulations that target the most humanized humans involved. Why? Because when the law orders people to harshly punish sympathetic targets, law enforcement looks for excuses not to enforce the law.
Statism’s First Casualty Is the Truthful Use of Language
States engage not only in conquest, plunder, and oppression, but also—in order to create conditions in which the populace is rendered less likely to resist a state’s abuses or rebel against it—in pervasive bamboozlement. Those who support the state ideologically tend to engage in chronic misrepresentation of what the state does and how it does it. So, not only war—the characteristic state action—but statism in general makes truth the first casualty of its claims, proposals, programs, and projects.
Who’s Afraid of Russian Propaganda?
If we believe the people who claim to be so concerned about Russian Facebook activity, we really ought to be concerned about something much deeper: the apparent fragility of American society. For if the Russians can strike a propaganda blow comparable, as some have ludicrously said, to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, isn’t that also true for any number of domestic websites across the political spectrum?
“We Must Do Something!”
Every time something horrible happens, whether as a result of malice or bad luck, there will be a number of people clamoring for “government” to propose some new legislative solution. Rarely does it do any good, and often it makes things worse. But most people would rather “demand” some pointless measure, than face the fact that there is a lot about the world that is simply unpredictable and uncontrollable.
When Academics Describe the World
In economics, theorists will tell you “public goods” like lighthouses can’t ever be supplied by private, profit-seeking ventures. Meanwhile, right outside their window there are private lighthouses, provided in ways too varied and ingenious for the academic mind to comprehend, and too skin-in-the-game trial-and-error intuitive for the entrepreneur to even know how to explicitly describe.
The Promise of Economic Equality
In a world where individuals always differ enormously in personal attributes and circumstances, in personal conduct and social constraints, it is difficult to think of anything more unfair than ensuring that in spite of all these differences, everyone ends up with the same income or wealth.
Feed the Greatness of Others
If you have climbed any height successfully, your words and opinions have power with other climbers. You have an opportunity to counter the self-criticism and doubt in a way that actually means something to someone. You can provide the much-needed second opinion.
Educated: A Must-Read
From the first page, I was captivated and, cliché as it is, I truly couldn’t put it down. I read the book swiftly, entranced by Westover’s vivid depiction of growing up in rural Idaho in a religious fundamentalist, survivalist family. School was where the devil hides, often clothed as socialists, or so her father said. In piercing prose, Westover offers an eloquent illustration of conviction blurring into paranoia, ideology into lunacy. She describes how fragile those lines can be.