Don Boudreaux wrote, To live harmoniously with nature is to understand and accept natural forces. The greater this understanding and acceptance, the greater the harmony. Because we know so much more today than we did before about physics, chemistry, meteorology, biology, physiology, metallurgy, and on and on with our ologies and urgies, we live so

Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting

Another way to say this is that solving problems causes us to expand our definitions of them.… When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn’t actually gotten better at all. Progress, it

Between 1820 and 2015, the world population rose from 1.09 billion to 7.38 billion, an increase of 6.8 times.15 Over the same period, the world economy grew from $1.2 trillion to $108 trillion, or 90 times (the figures are in 2011 U.S. dollars).16 The population, then, grew at a compounded rate of slightly less than 1 percent per year, while GDP

Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and

As you read this book—indeed, as you go through life—remember all the different ways in which your mind is playing tricks on you. Recognize that you are a member of a species that’s always on the lookout for danger and that your predisposition toward the negative provides a market for purveyors of bad news, be they doomsayers who claim that

Constructive anger, Shellenberger wrote, can change the system, but nihilistic anger threatens a great deal of destruction.

Since ideas are not made of matter, the laws of thermodynamics do not apply. Innovations can thus create exponential new value.

Warren Buffett has remarked, “I look for three things in a person: intelligence, and a high energy level, and integrity. If they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you.”