In an article for CapX last week, I discussed Johan Norberg’s new book, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. As Norberg notes, over the last two centuries, humanity has made massive improvements in terms of nutrition, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, literacy, environmental quality, political freedom and child labour. Today, I want to discuss […]
It was Giles Wilkes, now of the Financial Times, who said that the New Economics Foundation should stand for “Not Economics, Frankly”. And reading today’s Guardian, I could see what he meant. The paper carries an op-ed by Anna Coote, a senior fellow at the think-tank. She’s making the remarkable claim that as productivity rises, […]
The Belgian region of Wallonia was once called the crossroads of Europe. It sent arms to Spain in medieval times, then became the first place on the continent’s mainland to have an Industrial Revolution, aided by an influx of English industrialists. Wallonia was famous for making fine lace and chocolate, using cocoa imported from colonial holdings […]
Extending the length of human life has long held a natural fascination for us all. Arguably our earliest surviving work of literature, “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, dating back to 2100BC, tells of the search by the King of Uruk for the secret of eternal life. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have seen lifespan increase dramatically, with life […]
In October 2007, having resigned earlier that year as Prime Minister, Tony Blair gave a speech at Blenheim Palace in which he said: The real dividing line to think of in modern politics has less to do with traditional positions of right versus left, and more to do today, with what I would call the […]
The response of much of the Western media to the demolition of the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais has been a symphony of sympathy. There have been heart-tugging pieces about the desperate refugees who were forced to accept this pallid substitute for a home, and have now lost even that. There have been stories of children, […]
Islamic State have claimed their second major suicide attack in Pakistan in the space of three months. In the early hours of the morning, 60 police cadets in the western city of Quetta, the capital of Blaochistan province, were killed as they slept. Three suicide bombers had made their way into the barracks, gunning down the cadets […]
It is perhaps an understatement to say that we live in an era of great pessimism. This pessimism, while not distributed evenly across the world, appears to be felt most acutely in many Western countries, including the United States. Some two-thirds of Americans, for example, feel that the United States is heading in the wrong […]
It’s not exactly news that capitalism has an image problem. Say the word “capitalist” and the image that comes to mind is of a rapacious, self-interested robber baron – less Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett, more Charles Montgomery Burns. Among young people, the problem is even more severe. For the generation who came of age […]
A couple of years ago, I commissioned a study in which 1,000 Swedes were asked eight questions about global development. On average, every age group and every income group was wrong on all eight questions – because they all thought the world was in bad shape and getting worse. Large majorities, for example, thought that hunger […]
Everybody hates neoliberalism. The term has become a term of abuse, mostly by those who consider themselves anti-neoliberals. Critics also allege that the world is currently run under neoliberalism. In George Monbiot’s words, it is “the ideology at the root of all our problems“. But the world is in a pretty good state, and since the introduction […]
In this week’s column, I am delighted to introduce CapX readers to a new project that we have developed at Human Progress which maps how on every major metric people’s lives have improved around the world over the last 50 years. It is called Your Life in Numbers, and it allows users to see how countries […]
This article was taken from CapX’s weekly briefing email. Sign up to get the most interesting stories of the day delivered straight to your inbox This week on CapX, we’ve been arguing about inequality. Are the global rich pulling away from the global poor? And if they are, how do we stop it? We’ve had contributions […]
Since the first Presidential Debate, there has been a lot of hue and cry because Donald Trump had the temerity to declare that he paid no income taxes. More specifically Hillary Clinton said, about his refusal to make his income tax statements public: “There is something he is hiding. Or maybe he doesn’t want the […]
There is no standard definition of what makes a country viable as a country. What are the materials, the history, the culture, the institutions that allow a territory to grow into a something more than just a geography of resources? What are the building blocks of an accountable and democratic state? Whatever these ingredients are, we know […]
Allow me to be the first to congratulate Theresa May on becoming Britain’s longest-serving Prime Minister. It’s a bit presumptuous, I know, given that Sir Robert Walpole’s record can only be beaten in 2037. Yet May now faces an easy run to the title – thanks, in large part, to John McDonnell. The Shadow Chancellor […]
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