In December 2018, Donald Trump approved a new strategy for Africa that includes increasing US commercial ties with the continent. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s strategy “is part of a broader effort…to fight for global supremacy with Russia and China”. Geopolitical considerations aside, freer trade between the United States and Africa makes good […]
“If someone was ready to fork over $1 million to you to stop using the Internet – forever – would you do it?” Economics professor W. Michael Cox, who asked that question of his students, received an unambiguous reply. “You couldn’t pay me enough,” they answered. That answer speaks to just how priceless the internet […]
Donald Trump has repeatedly lamented the supposed decline of the American manufacturing sector. On the campaign trail, he asserted that Americans “don’t make anything anymore” and pledged “to restore manufacturing in the United States.” Yet there is no reason to think of manufacturing jobs as the gold standard in employment. The nature of work has […]
Slavery was once ubiquitous throughout the world. Today, it is illegal everywhere. Is that a sign of moral progress or a temporary accomplishment that’s bound not to last? Put differently, are human beings capable of evolving toward higher states of ethical behaviour, or must slavery, along with other forgotten cruelties, inevitably reappear? Some backsliding is […]
In a January 4 article in The Telegraph, Anne Hanley reminisced about her recent trip to Venice. “Venice’s inhabitants were outnumbered by visitors,” she observed. “Around 54,000 under-pressure locals shared their city with just over 62,000 incomers … [and] that, for La Serenissima, is a ‘quiet’ day,” she continued. The city, she concluded, is being […]
According to press reports, Saudi Arabian prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty for five of the 11 suspects who stand accused of killing The Washington Post contributing journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October of last year. Amnesty International notes that Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most prolific […]
Over the Christmas week, CapX is republishing its favourite pieces from the past year. This was first published on January 5. At the end of last year on CapX, I documented the constant stream of technological, scientific and medical breakthroughs that are improving the lives of billions of ordinary people. Given all this good news, […]
Throughout this year, I have looked at a plethora of indicators of human well-being, including growing abundance of resources, declining incidence of child labour, increasing years of schooling, elimination of famines outside of warzones, progress in the battle again malaria, winning the war on HIV/AIDS, and so on. In the final article of 2018, I […]
Human progress, as I attempted to show in a series of CapX articles over the course of this year, is dramatic and real. The fundamentals of human wellbeing, including life expectancy, income, nutrition, education and personal safety, have improved dramatically – especially over the last two centuries or so. The arc of those improvements, however, […]
Are we running out of resources? That’s been a hotly debated question since the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968. The Stanford University biologist warned that population growth would result in the exhaustion of resources and a global catastrophe. According to Ehrlich, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In […]
Child labour was once ubiquitous. Take, for example, ancient Rome. As Mary Beard noted in her 2015 book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, “Child labour was the norm. It is not a problem, or even a category, that most Romans would have understood. The invention of ‘childhood’ and the regulation of what work ‘children’ […]
Is overpopulation a problem? Are we running out of resources? Where did the concern over population growth and resource depletion come from? How accurate were the past predictions of gloom by people who were concerned about the two issues? Will we manage to combine rising numbers of people and higher standards of living with decent […]
In recent years, many US politicians and journalists have warned that the millennials are at the risk of ending up “poorer than their parents.” The evidence certainly suggests that the Great Recession has led to wage stagnation and high unemployment among young Americans, who have soured on the idea of achieving the American Dream. The just-released […]
One of the real markers of our progress in recent decades is the increased length of formal schooling and the amount of time people are spending in educational settings. That was not always so. Throughout human history, most people were illiterate and oblivious to everything except for their immediate surroundings. Not everyone is naturally academic, […]
Some people are dumping their smartphones and returning to old-fashioned hand-held devices. Eddie Redmayne did so in 2016, stating, “It was a reaction against being glued permanently to my iPhone during waking hours. The deluge of emails was constant.” “Flip phones… are back, with low prices, great battery life and some modern conveniences,” noted The […]
On Monday, William Nordhaus and Paul Romer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Nordhaus, the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, is best known for his work in economic modelling and climate change. Romer, who teaches at New York University, is a pioneer of endogenous growth theory, which holds that investment in human […]
Since becoming US President in January 2017, Donald Trump has pursued an aggressively protectionist trade agenda. Some hope that Trump’s tariffs on imports from overseas will force America’s main economic competitors, including China and the European Union, to lower their tariffs on US goods. Others worry that Trump is a dyed-in-the-wool protectionist who sees international […]
Barack Obama once referred to income inequality as “the defining challenge of our time.” Not terrorism, sluggish economic growth or the ballooning national debt, but income inequality. And, to be fair to the departed president, income inequality within countries has been increasing in recent decades. Some reasons for that increase, such as corrupt dealings between […]
The free market, some people allege, is incompatible with workplace safety. As Karl Marx asserted, competition drives down profits, forcing business owners to cut corners and expose their workers to growing risks. Yet, by historical standards, work-related fatalities are at an all-time low. Labour activism and government regulations deserve part of the credit for that […]
In 2015, malaria killed between 438,000 and 722,000 people, mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America. On top of all that human suffering, malaria seriously hampers economic development in poor countries. The disease reduces overall labour productivity, reduces agricultural output, discourages investment and tourism, and damages educational outcomes due to high degrees of absenteeism among […]
