Sublime

idle,

Evolution seems to have struck a compromise, or perhaps just aggregated new systems on top of old. Homo sapiens are still tempted by food, but our oversized prefrontal cortices give us a limited ability to resist temptation. Not unlimited ability—our ancestors with too much willpower probably starved themselves to sacrifice to the gods, or failed t

brethren,

Our problem is whether the average man has increased his ability to control the conditions of his life. If we take a long-range view and compare our modern existence, precarious, chaotic, and murderous as it is, with the ignorance, superstition, violence, and diseases of primitive peoples, we do not come off quite forlorn. The lowliest strata in ci

The most influential pessimist in modern economic thinking has no doubt been Thomas Robert Malthus, an English pastor writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Malthus famously warned against trying to improve the lot of the poor, and even against the chances for long-term economic progress. He argued that following any rise in

During the 180 years from 1820 to 2000, world output per person increased roughly eleven times, leading to an equally dramatic fall in the global rate of extreme poverty—from around 90 percent in 1820 to roughly 10 percent as of 2015.

everyone’s preferences, and feed all this data into a “single mind”—a giant economic optimization algorithm that would run continuously to “work out the implications”? Because, Hayek explained, that algorithm would never get all the data it actually needed; it could never “secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for