Public more likely to return wallet containing larger sum of money, global study finds Here’s a moral dilemma: if you find a wallet stuffed with bank notes, do you pocket the cash or track down the owner to return it? We can each speak for ourselves, but now a team of economists have put the […]
James Lovelock at 100: the Gaia saga continues
Tim Radford reassesses the independent scientist’s groundbreaking body of writing. Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence James Lovelock Allen Lane (2019) [He developed] a sustained and developing argument, in the face of sometimes dismissive criticism, that recast Earth as, in effect, a superorganism. Lovelock’s Gaia theory states that, for much of the past 3.8 billion years, a […]
The real Adam Smith
He might be the poster boy for free-market economics, but that distorts what Adam Smith really thought The invisible hand was invoked not to draw attention to the problem of state intervention, but of state capture Smith argued, ordinary people were forced to accept inflated prices for shoddy goods, and their employment was at the mercy of […]
Canada among Global Conflict Broker’s Toughest Gigs
Adam Kahane helped bring peace to Colombia, but says ending our climate stalemate may be harder. “That’s because in Colombia, in South Africa, in Thailand, in Sudan, everybody agreed that [their situation] wasn’t working and if they kept going the way they were going they were in real danger. The thing that makes [resolving] issues, […]
Was the Rise of Neoliberalism the Root Cause of Extreme Inequality?
Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the […]