Artificial intelligence (AI) is now unavoidable. If it isn’t someone telling you what great investment opportunities the recent advances in AI have opened up, it’s someone else warning you of the serious threats posed by this technology. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Terminator (1984) is almost 40 years old. But the idea of computers running out of […]
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The doctrine known as “effective altruism” (EA) is very recent. It was introduced around 2009 at Princeton University by Matt Wage, a graduate student of the controversial moral philosopher Peter Singer. The ideas behind EA spread like wildfire, arriving in Oxford University in 2011, where Will MacAskill founded the Centre for Effective Altruism. What is […]
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Book Review: Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. Boston: Beason Press, 2022. 303 pp. $26.95. Rebecca Giblin holds a Bachelor of Laws degree and a PhD, both from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently a […]
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Book Review: Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence, by Vivek Ramaswamy. New York: Center Street/Hachette Book Group, 2022. 275 pp. $29.00. Nation of Victims is a strange book. By turns heartwarming anecdote, personal confession, history lesson, economics treatise, policy position paper, potted history of the highlights […]
18 min read
Who is RFK Jr.? Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (b. 1954) is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. His uncle was assassinated in 1963. His father was assassinated in 1968 while running for US president. RFK Jr. was 14 at the time.. RFK Jr studied law at […]
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I. Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) has always had grand ambitions. But those ambitions used to be regarded as more science fiction rather than science. That is now changing. In recent years, a spate of news stories has been published about novel types of brain implants, robotic suits, and other devices, which have allowed, among other […]
20 min read
I was raised in a politically conservative family in Texas, back in the 1950s. My first experience with electoral politics occurred at the age of 12, when my grandparents took me to hear a stump speech by Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater during his 1964 run for the Presidency against the Democratic incumbent, Lyndon B. […]
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Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. New York: Knopf, 2018. xvi + 288 pages. $26.95. Overview This book is an engaging, ground-level, journalistic report about a world hidden in plain sight. The author calls it “MarketWorld.” What is MarketWorld? MarketWorld is hydra-headed monster consisting of a physical space, a […]
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Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, with Foreword by George Gilder. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2022; xvii + 547 pages; $34.95. The central thesis of Superabundance is very simple: Malthus was wrong! What does this mean? Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) […]
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We all reflect the times in which we live—even the most influential and powerful among us. It is just that most lives whisper in 8-point type, in keeping with a modest place in the scheme of things, while the makers of history shout in 72-point size. For this reason, the study of “parallel lives” from […]
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Peter J. Boettke is one of the most influential members of what one might call the “fifth generation” of Austrian economists—an academic cohort that is currently at the peak of its intellectual power and influence, both in this country and around the world.(1) Austrian economics, as a school of thought, holds that the free market […]
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Barbara Oakley, who earlier in life was a self-confessed “mathphobe” now describes herself as an “educator, writer, engineer.” She excelled at humanities courses in high school and college, but failed at math and science. Yet, when the occasion arose much later in her life in which she needed to acquire basic technical competency, she set […]
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