23rd Selected Links

Some links to things I've been reading that you might also enjoy:

1. In 1988, The Economist invited Karl Popper to write an article on democracy. Here it is.

2. 'Large-scale cooperation in small-scale foraging societies', a preprint of the new Boyd and Richerson paper.

3. During the summer of 1942, as Nazi Germany rained the Baedeker Blitz upon a string of British cities, a fifty-nine year-old Maynard Keynes and a forty-two year-old Friedrich Hayek spent a night alone together on the roof of King's College Chapel in Cambridge. Armed with shovels, they were charged with sweeping incendiaries off the ornate Gothic roof. We don't know what they discussed, but doesn't the vignette make a great premise for a play? Someone has had the idea already: Eric Samuelsen's Clearing Bombs was performed in Salt Lake City in 2014. (For mine, I would have titled it "To Beat The Gun", with a nerdy nod to fans of Chapter 12 of The General Theory.)

4. 'The Moral Foundations of Progress', an excellent summary of Tyler Cowen's book Stubborn Attachments by the blog Applied Divinity Studies.

5. A story of Pericles' magnanimity from Chapter V of Plutarch's The Life Pericles: "[H]e had been abused and insulted all day long by a certain lewd fellow of the baser sort, he endured it all quietly, though it was in the market-place, where he had urgent business to transact, and towards evening went away homewards unruffled, the fellow following along and heaping all manner of contumely upon him. When he was about to go in doors, it being now dark, he ordered a servant to take a torch and escort the fellow in safety back to his own home."

Have a nice weekend,


Joe