Sublime

The history of the struggle for freedom in the West teaches an incon­venient truth: that there is no coherent view of human personality stripped of the imago Dei. Britain’s former chief rabbi, the late Jonathan Sacks, ex­plained that the “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence were anything but self-evident. “They would have been u

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Writes Gopnik, “What liberalism has in its favor are the facts. Liberals get nothing accomplished—except everything, eventually.”11 Liberals, he tells us, believe in reform rather than revolution because the results are in: it works better. More permanent positive social change is made incrementally rather than by revolutionary transformation. This

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Accordingly, liberalism was correct in counseling people to follow their hearts rather than the dictates of some priest or party apparatchik. However, soon computer algorithms might be able to give you better counsel than human feelings. As the Spanish Inquisition and the KGB give way to Google and Baidu, “free will” likely will be exposed as a myt

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everyone’s preferences, and feed all this data into a “single mind”—a giant economic optimization algorithm that would run continuously to “work out the implications”? Because, Hayek explained, that algorithm would never get all the data it actually needed; it could never “secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for

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Whatever your exact view of the Solow and increasing returns models, the logic of the increasing returns model will likely carry significant weight in our final evaluation. In many cases our best answer, given current knowledge, is that a given cost brings some probability of an ongoing growth effect (as in the increasing returns model) and some pr

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Obviously Reich’s influence went way beyond just me. Alongside other authors such as Anthony Giddens[411] and Jeremy Rifkin[412], he was instrumental in crafting the message of a new generation of progressive leaders that the era of the steady, lifelong job was over. In a more global and unstable world, lifelong education was the new key to providi

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Decades after the truce, John Locke—whose philosophy influenced the American founding fathers more than any other—wrote about human nature as if it were an “unknowable x.” He knew that disagreements over religion (Jerusalem) and over reason (Athens) were dangerous, so he declared the question of human nature an unfathomable idea that people would n... See more

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