While getting on the escalator at the London underground station tonight, I noticed a sign reading: STAND ON THE RIGHT HOLD THE HANDRAIL NO STROLLERS DOGS MUST BE CARRIED Well, I was standing on the right, I was holding the handrail, and I certainly had no stroller. But I wasn’t carrying a dog! Luckily, no one noticed. But I’m thinking of getting
Many science textbooks contain similar one-or-two-paragraph histories of how modern science miraculously emerged from the dark swamp of ignorance we call the Middle Ages. The main problem with such stories is that they are almost entirely false. Let’s compare the picture painted above with the current understanding of scholars studying the history
Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years is a fascinating and quite readable speculation on the relationship between geography and history. He has assembled a cornucopia of interesting facts and plausible insights concerning the course of events over the last 13,000 years. The result is
In this essay I want to draw attention to a period in the history of science that, I believe, will be of interest to supporters of Austrian economics. The episode in question is almost unknown to those only familiar with the accounts of scientific history found in works intended for the general public or in science textbooks, because it doesn’t
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.