Do states act rationally?

It has become commonplace for American leaders to dismiss their foreign adversaries as “irrational”. At some point over the past twenty-five years, Saddam Hussein, Mahmound Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-un, and Vladimir Putin, among others, have been branded “irrational”, “illogical”, “crazy”, “delusional”, or “mad”, and in some cases they have been likened to Adolf Hitler, who is often portrayed as the poster child of irrationality.

Whether this imprudent habit is to achieve political propaganda or American leaders truly believe their enemies are most often irrational, their view has vastly influenced the academic circles of traditional international relation.

Typically, the word “Great” conjures notions of positivity.

Not so much in economics.

In the tumultuous realm of economics, its connotations are often far from uplifting.

From the seismic shockwaves of the Great Depression to the mercurial odyssey of the Great Inflation, history demonstrated that Great isn’t always that great.

Amidst these tempestuous chapters, one constant presence has loomed large: The Federal Reserve. As the custodian of monetary policy in the United States, the Fed has served as the linchpin in shaping the trajectory of these defining epochs. Good or bad, great or foul.

Blackmail is a crime.

Blackmail is a crime. Why though?

The mere act of revealing true information about others is not necessarily criminal, not even if it can cause harm, not even if it is disclosed with malicious intent. Likewise, the act of selling and negotiation does not inherently transgress legal boundaries. It is only when we combine the former and latter then it constitutes a crime. So why is something a crime? What philosophical justifications lie at the heart of our legal framework when we deliberate its formation and application?

The cryptocurrency boom ended in frauds and fines. The revolution in digital asset is grinding on nonetheless. Banks and institutional money managers have long been intrigued by the scope for efficiency gains from using the technology underlying crypto — the shared immutable digital ledger, or blockchain.

Blockchain. The term has frequented my perusal of news articles, creating the illusion of familiarity, although the precise extent of my comprehension remains elusive.

“You can’t blame someone who doesn’t know,”  a Chinese proverb asserted.

Except in fact, you can…

Wilful blindness first emerged as a legal concept in the nineteenth century. The English judicial authorities referred to the state of mind that accompanied one who “wilfully shut his eyes” as “connivance’ or “constructive knowledge”. Since then, lots of other phrases came into play – deliberate or wilful ignorance, conscious avoidance and deliberate indifference. What they all had in common is the idea that there is an opportunity for knowledge, and a responsibility to be informed, but it is shirked.

Things have changed.

There were no blaring sirens or flashing beacons to herald the change, nor were there thunderous drums or resounding trumpets to announce it, yet a discernable shift has indeed occurred.

Traditional notion of masculinity is no longer celebrated.

Men now find themselves operating within progressively narrower boundaries.

What defines human mind? How is knowledge attainable? What is reason? Is logic universal? What constitutes truth? Whence do moral values emerge?

These perennial inquiries have occupied the central stage of Western philosophy for centuries.

Philosophers, in grappling with these questions, have traditionally anchored their explorations in certain assumptions— namely, the conviction in our ability to comprehend our minds through introspection, the notion that our contemplation of the world is predominantly literal, and the belief that reason is both disembodied and universal.

Yet, the veracity of these bedrock assumptions finds itself under scrutiny in the face of established findings in cognitive science.

The mind is inherently embodied.

Thought is mostly unconscious.

Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Today’s Western civilization is usually envisioned as the culmination of past triumphs, tracing lineage from classical Greece and Rome as progressive leaps from the near Eastern palatial economies to Western Europe. Adopting this self-congratulatory perspective, contemporary institutions such as individualism and the security of credit and property contracts are traced back to classical antiquity as flawless, positive evolutionary developments, steering civilization away from what is labeled as “Oriental Despotism”.

Yet, the reality is that Rome’s predatory oligarchies waged five centuries of civil war to deprive populations of liberty, blocking popular opposition to harsh pro-creditor laws and the monopolization of the land into latifundia estates. But the dynamics that drove labor into clientage and ultimately into serfdom have been downplayed by modern historiography that focuses more on Rome’s military conquests and biographies of its leading consuls and emperors than on its struggles over debt and land tenure. The verdict is merciless: What impoverished the population of the Roman Empire bequeathed a creditor-based body of legal principles to the modern world.

Poetry tells us that time “passes”, it moves like a river, inexorably dragging us with it, and, in the end, washes us up on its shore while it continues. Metaphor tells us time is money, a commodity for us to budget, invest, spend, or waste. Language tells us time has volition: it flies, drags, stands still. The verbs alone suggest that we have always understood time as subjective, something experienced according to individual circumstance.

Yet, between past and future, cause and effect, memory and hope, regret and intention … in the physics elementary laws that describe the mechanism of the world, apparently there is no such difference.

Clock time, is an illusion…according to Einstein.

Adam Smith. We’ve all heard of him and his invisible hands. Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy, the ultimate establishment figure of the early Scottish Enlightenment, and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism. In contrast, David Hume, though widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, during his lifetime was labelled as the Great Infidel, notorious for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to be teaching. Remarkably, these iconic thinkers were in fact best friends!

Benjamin Franklin’s observation to a woman that the United States was “a republic, if you can keep it” has become so ubiquitous that its original foreboding tone has almost been lost entirely. The phrase in our own day has become almost a cheerful maternal admonition. Yet, the Revolutionary generation that wrote the United States Constitution and shaped the American republic’s regime treated the phrase not so much as a kindly or triumphalist admonition, but as a threat with consequences that were near at hand.

The Mesopotamians knew their migraines; the Egyptians had a word for seizures. The Hindu Vedas have medical term for dropsy and a goddess specifically dedicated to smallpox. Tuberculosis was so omnipresent and familiar to the ancients that – as with ice and the Eskimos – distinct words exist for each incarnation of it. But even common cancers, such as breast, lung, and prostate, are conspicuously absent. With a few notable exceptions, in the vast stretch of medical history there is no book or God for cancer.

The Idiot is a book that manages like no other to plunge fearlessly into suffering while at the same time illuminating the enduring, almost unspeakable tenderness of the human—The body is a site of tenderness, but also a problem that can’t be solved, a fraught place of ongoing crises, wars, injustices, failures. The desire for comfort and the reality of isolation and are unresolved.

During WWII, as the Luftwaffe targeted culturally-rich cities in 1942, two economists, Keynes and Hayek, took their turn in fire-watching on the roof of King’s College chapel. This opened an account of the history’s greatest economic duel.

Misfortune is not injustice.

Yet, nowadays, the benevolent human emotion to help the less fortunate has led to a confusion of language in which “injustice” is becoming synonymous with “misfortune”. Calling something an “injustice”—unlike calling some thing a “misfortune”—suggests that societal remedial action is mandatory. This confusion would be merely annoying if it did not breed support for public policies that exacerbate rather than ameliorate problems. Pinpointing and explaining these unfortunate consequences of public policies is among Sowell’s chief talents.

The Code Book leads readers on a journey through the history of coding, cryptography, and codebreaking. From primitive to high tech, Singh effectively crafts a narrative that turns cyphers into living, breathing beings that mutate from their humble beginnings as ancient hieroglyphics, into complex mathematical equations, that ultimately land on the shore of Internet surfing — communication by email. The incessant tug-of-war between code-makers and code-breakers kept my eyes darting from page to page as every seemingly unbreakable, gradually more complex code was peeled back to its essence and disposed of resourcefully.

The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface. Fast forward to 2023, democracy’s discontent persists. Abetted by pandemic, hyper partisanship, recalcitrant racial injustice, and toxic social media, the discontent is now more acute than it was a quarter century ago— more rancorous, even lethal.

Undefined words have a special power in politics, particularly when they invoke some principle that engages people’s emotions.

“Fair” is one of those undefined words which have attracted political support for various policies. While the fact that the word is undefined is an intellectual handicap, it is a huge political advantage. People with very different views on substantive issues can be unified and mobilized behind a word that papers over their differing, and sometimes even mutually contradictory, ideas. Who, after all, is in favor of unfairness? And who, after all, dares to point out the fallacies of a belief as long as it carries the “intent” for fairness?