If you read this Substack, you know that last week I posted the last chapter of Part I of my planned book. As it turns out, I’ve already finished Part II. And beyond that, since the first part alone is composed of some 150,000 words, and the second part is even longer, I’ve decided to break the book up into two companion books, titled Our Human Inherita…

Read more

This chapter will focus on the basics regarding our current understanding of how the physical universe works. Since everything in the universe operates according to the laws of physics, there can be no more fundamental understanding of underlying reality than an understanding of physics. As Jim Al-Khalili writes in The World According to Physics:

[T]he w…

Read more

The last few chapters aimed to dispel some common modern-day myths that inaccurately cast history as solidifying past oppression instead of expanding liberties in ways that inculcate in young people a false sense of helplessness instead of a hopeful appreciation of opportunity. Later chapters will explore America’s education system and examine how it he…

Read more

The last chapter explored how widening context in the historical analysis of slavery reveals just how misleading the “black versus white,” identity politics approach to the issue is. The misleading nature of other identity politics approaches to other aspects of world history is the subject of this chapter.

Cesar Hidalgo, in his book Why Information Grows

Read more

Claims of “systemic racism” are usually associated with claims regarding a “legacy of slavery” in the form of enduring social, economic, and psychological consequences of the transatlantic slave trade. Such claims are often made from a “black versus white” perspective, in order to promote racial preferences, but the legacy of slavery, in context, is far…

Read more

Chapter 12 explored Stephen Nowicki’s book Choice or Chance: Understanding Your Locus of Control and Why It Matters, in which he describes the effects on well-being of people’s views regarding the extent of control they have over their own lives:

If we see ourselves as governed by fate, luck, chance, or powerful others, we are externally controlled, or “…

Read more

While disparities in outcomes among people grouped by race or sex can be explained by many things other than racism and sexism,[1] racism and sexism will always exist to some degree everywhere, in part due to our tribal nature. But how significant is racism and sexism today, in America? And whatever its significance, does it justify continuing to group …

Read more

Other than exaggerated claims of climate catastrophe, as explored in the previous few chapters, the other major drivers of current popular angst are claims that America is permeated with “systemic racism” or other forms of oppression embedded into American culture and law. As will be explored in Chapter 21, such claims, if believed, can significantly af…

Read more

Current “green energy” policies are counter-productive in many ways. For example, California’s regulatory limits on fossil fuels hasn’t diminished its need for them, and its use of them. As the Wall Street Journal writes, “Refiners say [California’s] burdensome regulations … make it uneconomic to operate older facilities. As a result of refinery closure…

Read more

It’s important to understand that fossil fuels are today, and will continue to be for many decades to come, the essential foundation for civilization as we know it in the world today. Bringing that point home is the subject of this chapter.

We should first note how the fossil fuels we get from the ground were made. As Brian Villmoare writes in The Evolut…

Read more

In a 2024 survey of over 15,000 U.S. youth ages 16 to 25, 60% said they were very or extremely worried about climate change and its impacts on people and the planet, 43% said that climate change impacted their mental health, and 38 said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily lives. Other polls reflect similar reactions, with…

Read more

Previous chapters explored the sorts of things that are most associated with greater well-being. But there’s another major influence on well-being beyond family and friends, work, religion, and health. It’s the general sense of having control over one’s life.

It seems like common sense that the more one feels “in control,” the greater one’s sense of well…

Read more

The ancient Greeks believed in three goddesses whose spindle and thread connected each person to the heavens. While there’s been an increase in the percentage of Americans without religious affiliations or with weak affiliations, the percentage of Americans with strong religious affiliations and who pray multiple times a day, has tended to remain steady…

Read more

Fabric is made with two types of thread: warp (the lengthwise threads) and weft (the crosswise threads) that are passed through the warp. Together, the warp and weft are much stronger than their individual parts. The same holds true for families with two parents, who together weave a safety net for their children far stronger than what could be woven by…

Read more

We saw in Chapter 10 how the threads of free markets created a huge variety of products and services that have made people’s lives much easier, and made those products and services more widely available to people than ever. Since America is the world’s center of free market innovation, one might think its people would be the happiest. But as Arthur Broo…

Read more

In the Introduction to this book, a Greek myth was recounted in which two gods, Athena and Poseidon, offered gifts to the Greek capital city, and the gift that the citizens decided had the most value would gain the right to be the city’s patron. Athena gave the gift of the olive tree, which not only produced olives, oil for cooking and lighting, and woo…

Read more

So we’ve seen what happens under socialist and communist regimes when government suppresses free markets and cuts the threads that connect voluntary transactions and create price signals for everyone. What are the results when government lets price signals propagate in a free market?

Not only does the free market sort and thread itself, but its threads s…

Read more

As we saw in the previous chapter, Karl Marx incorrectly assumed that all the wonderful things we have now as a result of a free market economy would still be there forever under a socialist or communist system, just redistributed more fairly. But we know now that’s not true, having seen the results of various tragic experiments with socialism and commu…

Read more

As we saw in the last chapter, free markets allow threads of information to connect individual sellers everywhere to individual buyers everywhere, creating an intricate tapestry of price signals without the need for any master weaver. It happens spontaneously as a result of untold numbers of voluntary decisions. But there’s a different idea of organizin…

Read more

Why do free markets work so well at producing more and better things for people, and at ever-decreasing prices, all without being directed by government officials? They work because the lessons learned by the decisions of entrepreneurs competing to provide the best products and services at the lowest prices are passed along as price signals that indicat…

Read more