The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

Poverty, to an economist, is mostly an abstract matter. Just like GDP is a number and unemployment is a number, the poverty rate is also mos...

Finance is not generally considered a stirring subject. Interesting, maybe. Remunerative, certainly. Complicated, definitely (and don't ...

Last time I tackled the question of exit, we talked about the feasibility of secession , and how I thought that scenario would play out (sh...

I love National Portrait Galleries (plural). I had previously written about the British version here - it's a wonderful example of the ...

So in France in 1789, they were well on the way to upending centuries of glorious tradition in favour of terror, slaughter, and anarchy. But...

So Canada elects another Trudeau , the son of the last one. Meanwhile America ponders electing either its third Bush in 30 years or its seco...

How strange it is, the extent to which one’s thoughts depend on geography and circumstance. In theory, one could pause and take stock of o...

The two broad political ways that reactionaries talk about changing one's circumstances are voice (influencing the political environment...

So, we're about at the halfway point since I made the following prediction , half in jest, as my version of the Julian Simon bet : Sho...

The current Syrian refugee crisis in Europe is a tragedy. Should that sentence strike regular readers as a little trite, bear with me. I ...

Sometimes people are surprised when I say that I consider my biggest personality fault to be that I'm too self-centred.* Okay, not eve...

Colonialism, in the eyes of the great and the good, is responsible for all of the third world's ills. This hypothesis is obviously abs...

I cannot be the only one who thinks that the pace of leftward social change seems to have increased of late. I find it interesting to t...

Tell me what you infer about Chilean government from this photo. My answer below the fold

In the context of the Strangeloop contretemps , it is worth being clear about what the aim is (in my view). I think it is a rhetorical mis...

I worried, but secretly knew, that this day would eventually come.  So, I strongly suspect, did he. It seems that the political retribu...