Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden show in their new book Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000-1800 that the Dutch preindustrial history of growth, trade, and reliance on markets for their daily bread changed well before the mid-1600s.
Joakim Book
Joakim Book is a writer, researcher and editor on all things money, finance and financial history. He holds a masters degree from the University of Oxford and has been a visiting scholar at the American Institute for Economic Research in 2018 and 2019. His works can be found at joakimbook.com and on the blog Life of an Econ Student.
Politicians Talk; Entrepreneurs and Scientists Do
What has long troubled climate policy deliberations also contains within itself its own public-choice solution.
Woke Mob vs. Joe Rogan: The College Educated That Never Grew Up
Undereducated journalists have “fact checked” things they’re not qualified to understand, “misinformation” now seems to mean “words by anybody who disagrees with me.” With the Joe Rogan debacle, it all falls into place.
Navigating The World’s Problems Through An Evolutionary Lens
We should all be very careful with overruling long-standing advice given to you by culture or encoded into your genome, and be very careful when you meddle with complex adaptive systems that you don’t fully understand.
The Only Question That Matters: Is It Correct?
To overthrow an argument or evidence or a consensus we must still show that said argument is wrong, regardless of the motives that fueled its proponents.
Review of Ray Dalio’s “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail”
Ray Dalio analyzes five centuries of markets, currency collapses, and changes to the world financial and political order.
The “Fortune of the Commons”
Why are there still wild blueberries in the fields held in common?
Books: Niall Ferguson’s “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe”
“The lesson of history,” Ferguson eagerly argues, “is that biological and political contagions often coincide.”
What in the World Are You Teaching Kids?
Imbue your child not with the dangers of the world, but with the factful progress of the world.
Yuval Noah Harari’s Terrifying Pandemic Future
It is a scary world into which Professor Harari wants us to “live.”
Planning An Escape Hatch In Case Your Government Goes Full On Socialist
Escape hatches are crucial when things go wrong. When rule by the people becomes rule over the people, when slight authoritarianism becomes tyranny, you want a way out.
“Sustainability” Misses the Point
Growth, trade, economic well-being and yes, fossil fuels are the best protection we have from a nature that isn’t nice – so in the name of sustainability, let’s have more of those things.
“Bubbles” and the Grand Selection Mechanism of Financial Markets
Whenever accusations of “bubbles” are thrown about, I think of these extraordinary stories and the grand selection mechanism that is financial markets.
Jacob Goldstein’s “Planet Money”: Snarky, Inaccurate, and Oddly Incomplete
Every step of the way, Goldstein’s account is mistaken.
Climate Catastrophism vs. Capitalism and Human Flourishing
For years, people like Naomi Klein, the author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, have said that their goal is to destroy capitalism ‒ and climate change just happens to be the best tool and best argument she has found.
Who Funded That?
The truthfulness, or “factfulness,” of a proposition does not depend on the biases of the person uttering it – psychologically, ideologically, pecuniary, or otherwise. It depends on the nature of the evidence.
Deep Impact: Free-Markets are the Best Response To an Economic Crisis
When the world suddenly changes, we want an economic system that adjusts and reflects our updated knowledge and desires. That requires prices to move, quantities to change, bankruptcies to occur and a whole lot of profiteering – whether in our world or in fictional worlds.
Is the Amazon Forest Really a Market Failure?
The vast majority of Amazonian deforestation happens on land directly controlled by Brazilian states or the federal government.
Three Books on Solving The Climate Crisis: False Alarm, Apocalypse Never and Green Market Revolution
Joakim Book contrasts and compares Bjorn Lomborg’s “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet”, Michael Shellenberger’s “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All”, and Christopher Barnard and Kai Weiss’ edited book “Green Market Revolution: How Market Environmentalism Can Protect Nature and Save the World.”
The Economic Performance of Coronavirus Sweden
The full judgement of the Swedish experiment must wait a while.
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