by Henry Oliner | May 3, 2018 | Philosophy, Politics, Progressivism
A book review: Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg In Suicide of the West Jonah Goldberg begins with Deirdre McCloskey’s recognition that the last 250 years of progress in the context of the 400,000 years of the appearance of man, or even the last 5,000 years...
by Henry Oliner | Apr 1, 2017 | Economics
The main problem, though, as I said, is that the insights of poets and taletellers and historians and philosophers from the beginning into what human man happiness actually is have simply been bypassed. “Happiness” viewed as self-reported mood is surely...
by Henry Oliner | Mar 1, 2017 | Economics
Admittedly, myopic pessimism, from the right or left, sells. The late Allan Bloom’s right-wing pessimism, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), sold half a million copies merely in hardback. Shortly afterward, at a little conference we both attended, Allan...
by Henry Oliner | Feb 6, 2017 | Economics, History
The concluding paragraphs of Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity- Why Economics Can’t Explain The Modern World: Yet innovation, even in a proper system of the virtues, has continued to be scorned by many of our opinion makers now for a century and a...
by Henry Oliner | Feb 1, 2017 | Economics
The clerisy’s anti-innovation and antimarket and antiliberty rhetoric in the years since 1848, though repeated down to yesterday, misapprehends the scientific history. The clerisy says that every spillover in the environment justifies world-governmental control....
