Intellectual curiosity not only matters for the book choices of individuals, it is—more importantly—also essential for the progress of society. People who keep on learning every day are the ones who create new technologies by trial and error and make our lives better. This curiosity-driven tinkering creates wealth in a positive-sum manner and is on... See more

two deceptively simple notions anchor this book. First, trade is an irreducible and intrinsic human impulse, as primal as the needs for food, shelter, sexual intimacy, and companionship. Second, our urge to trade has profoundly affected the trajectory of the human species. Simply by allowing nations to concentrate on producing those things that the

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It doesn’t mean that governments have no role to play—quite the contrary. But my overall impression is that we’ve witnessed a sharp reversal in who has the capacity to explore, discover, and deliver. In the past, only governments could break the constraints and pull it off at a large scale. Now it looks like governments (at least in the West) are s

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I’d wager the farm, the house, the 401(k), and the tasseled loafers on the following proposition: that the sum total of human effort can add up to not merely more, but to better. What if commerce, companies, and trade can make us better off in bigger, more enduring, more human ways than simply having? What if the great challenge for enterprise in t

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