Academia

With collapsing stock markets, retirement portfolios, and consumer confidence, there is an all-too-human tendency to focus on the economic effects of tariffs by their critics: they are a tax on consumption, they will raise inflation, reduce efficiency, and reduce take-home income, etc. This is familiar. But this mistakes the full significance of a tariff-centric public […]

What is it that people desire when they desire riches? It may seem strange that once all basic needs are fulfilled, individuals would continue to strive for ever more, working ever harder, even at the cost of their own health. Why don’t they just enjoy life, with more time, and less stress, on their hands? […]

Yesterday Columbia University gave in to blackmail by President Trump (see here the letter [HT: NYT]) in order to allow to begin negotiations over the recovery of $400 million in research funding. Its unsigned letter (here HT: Leiterreports) leaves ambiguous which potentially sensible elements they were planning to do anyway (“parts of our comprehensive strategy”) […]

It’s been evident since Trump’s inauguration that the US, as we knew it, is over. I’ve been looking at some of the US-centred organisations and economic dependencies that will need to be rebuilt. But I hadn’t given much thought to the university sector, where I work, until I got an urgent email asking everyone at […]

Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A: Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke. […]

At the cutting edge of world history and industrial progress back when it was built in 1799, but now Ironbridge and nearby Coalbrookdale are bucolic backwaters where you struggle to get a decent phone signal.