In Jessica Treadway’s novel Lacy Eye, a young girl, upon receiving a diagnosis of a lazy eye, hears instead the words “lacy eye,” a much prettier sounding condition. The error comes to symbolize the novel’s major theme: our sometime preference not for the truth but for what we’d rather be true. Though easy to state but difficult to adopt, a…
“What I had to do, was, to turn the painful discipline of my younger days to account, by going to work with a resolute and steady heart. What I had to do, was, to take my woodman’s axe in my hand, and clear my own way through the forest of difficulty, by cutting down the trees until I came to…
One of the seminal concepts in history is Property, and the most influential expounder of that concept is John Locke. His conception of property, and the rights it bestows on individual citizens, became central to 18th century British and American law ― a tradition that spread widely and endures. In what we refer to as his Second Treatise of Government,…
In a prior post, I shared Economist Adam Smith’s point that wealth consists of goods and services ― the food, shelter, clothing, medicines, vehicles, appliances, and technology available to buy. According to this view, a people who produces more or better things grows wealthier. Will there ever come a day, then, when we’ve achieved sufficient wealth and can stabilize production?…
“Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat,” is the old magician’s line, a sleight of hand designed to amaze and entertain us. But what if such tricks were real? What if, for example, you could transform a mouse’s immune system into a human one? That is what they’ve done at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company known for creating…
In his essay “Conversation,” Samuel Johnson wrote that “we are willing to be pleased, but are not willing to admire.” I hope this is not true, or at least not generally so. With respect to what’s produced by others, his observation raises an interesting question: Do we admire those who create the products and services that please us? Of course,…
If necessity is the mother of invention (as the old saying goes), perhaps human intellect is the father, and hard work is the midwife.
There is a natural order to the universe, in which all effects have causes, and things operate by knowable laws. But from the perspective of human survival, there is a natural disorder to the universe too, that absent our productive action, forces both animate and inanimate would make of our world an unlivable chaos. One summer long ago I worked…
In the opening passage of one of the first American constitutions, George Mason wrote that the rights of the people of Virginia are the “basis and foundation of government … which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity, namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of…
At his death, a debate arose about what exactly Steve Jobs had done for Apple Inc., the company he co-founded and led as CEO for many years. Some even wondered whether he had contributed much of anything, and therefore might be getting too much credit for Apple’s extraordinary success. After all, he hadn’t produced the drawings for the iPhone or…