Ideas Matter

Where Communism Still Lives

Around the world, pockets of communists still cling to power. They're either smaller regimes run by a cadre of strongmen, or they have evolved into what has come to be known as "state capitalism." In this latter form, cronyism is considered a feature not a bug. The question for me is: will these pockets of communism linger? Or will they linger for a while, but eventually evolve into another form? And is state capitalism becoming the dominant form for the globe?

Matt Ridley Dishes Up Rational Optimism

Are we going to run out of food, resources and green space? Does trade make one party worse off? Is inequality the root of the world's problems? Is the world going to overheat and cause catastrophe?

Matt Ridley answers these questions and more in the best writing on the relationship between resources, markets and well-being since Julian Simon. What's superb about Ridley's work is that he not only slays the doommongers with flair, but he explains the beautiful processes set in motion by people serving each other creatively.

So why are people so pessimistic?

Caine's Arcade: Beautiful, Bottom-up Community and Entrepreneurship

If you aren't moved by this video, check your pulse. This is the stuff community is made of. That we're living in an age in which millions of us can appreciate it? Well, it's just staggering.

But what I want to point out about this beautiful piece -- and the people who came together to make it -- is that it's completely bottom up. That is the nature of community and of entrepreneurship--especially in the 21st century.

Sweating the Small Stuff (and Other Lessons from Big Advertising)

Rory Sutherland is always a delight to listen to. (Well, by my lights anyway. Value is subjective.) If you've ever been interested in the psychology of advertising -- and if you love liberty, perhaps you should be -- then you could do much worse than Sutherland, one of the top brains at Ogilvy.

What's always fascinating to me is that while a few of us Mises and Hayek lovers are busy trying to learn a few tricks from Madison Ave., Sutherland and Co. are determined to learn a thing or two from the Austrian economists (and the behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman). So what does this cross-pollination yield?

Kurzweil on the Not-so-distant Future

The stuff Ray Kurzweil is talking about is getting ready to hit the mass market. We're already seeing movement interfaces in game consoles like the Kinect for XBox. Eyewear displays are ready to hit as soon as the next calendar year. All these technologies might be on different tracks now. But they're getting ready to converge in really interesting ways.

James Q. Wilson dies at 80

James Q. Wilson, the great political scientist, died today at 80.

In this video he discusses the influence of genes on one's political disposition. (As you can read here, I agree.)

John Mackey: Can Capitalism be "Conscious"?

Is the purpose of a business to maximize shareholder value? Yes and no. Obviously profit is one side of the coin. But as John Mackey of Whole Foods reminds us, purpose is the other. Both having and expressing that deeper purpose makes for a more holistic understanding of an organization and it's surrounding ecosystem. Ironically, that makes companies more profitable.

Entrepreneurs who understand both sides of the capitalist coin will create long term value and make the world a better place. But some people think that John Mackey's "conscious capitalism" is too squishy -- that it's really just good branding.

The Nature of Altruism

Are people basically self-interested or basically altruistic? The answer is not so simple. If you get through the ten minute Leavitt and Dubner (Freakonomics) video above, you might ask whether it's better to be altruistic or to seem altrustic -- a question that goes back thousands of years.

Then, you might enjoy this excerpt from an article I wrote in The American magazine on the subject of the Ultimatum Game and wider implications for questions about envy and equality:

Thomas Sowell on The Anointed and Respectable Conservatism

You'll forgive the rather harsh assessment of both left-liberalism and conservatism. But in this video, Thomas Sowell really captures a) what's wrong with the liberal left and b) the only respectable form of conservatism. 

Jazz and Emergent Order: Listen While You Read

You may not like jazz. But the next time your friends tell you that art just has to have heavy public subsidy, tell them that jazz is America's sui generis artform. It got virtually no public subsidy as it began to spring up from the streets of New Orleans, New York and Chicago. And yet it thrived in the the spaces -- between work and love, pain and happiness.