Foolish Measures of Happiness

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...

Pessimism Sells

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...

Recouping Dignity

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...

The Clerisy vs History

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....