Racism and Class
Anthropologist Benedict Anderson offers an interesting observation in his book Imagined Communities. Racism does not arise from distorted nationalism, as we are often inclined to believe — and as some…
Who Is the Utopian
“Naive young people have believed the promises of economic utopians and now want to nationalize public monopolies — transport, energy, water — impose taxes on millionaires, and introduce a ‘basic’…
Emotions Over Facts
You may have noticed that the United Nations’ international climate panel has quietly set aside its most catastrophic global warming scenario. We are not moving toward it, despite the fact…
When protests matter
When, over the course of three hours, you hear some forty repetitions of “we will stop this,” “we will never allow it,” “we will not tolerate it,” you eventually begin…
The Comfort of Certainty
In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of American social psychologists — Kuhn, Amsel, Brock, Lepper, Lord, and Ross — conducted a series of experiments designed to test how capable…
Property and Power
An interesting observation—or perhaps intuition—from Tomáš Baťa, the most important Czech industrialist in history, from the early 1930s. In his view, one of the central economic problems of the time…