My reading of the month is Unearthly Powers by an Oxford historian Alan Strathern. It’s a very interesting and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended. There is much that I like in the book. Strathern avoids the ideological extremes that preoccupy today’s humanities, such as an ave

Branko Milanovic is not alone in his skepticism about whether private morality has a useful role to play in the capitalist system (see The Iron Logic of Gordon Gekko). The logic of the competitive model does indeed seem to suggest that if people can gain by breaking the rules when no

I spent several instructive days with Branko Milanovic at the Santa Fe Institute, but we did not discuss this interesting issue (see The Iron Logic of Gordon Gekko). It is worthwhile discussing it in this forum. What is ‘greed’ in the context of competitive markets? One plausible defi

Dear Peter, I am on my way to Moscow and just read the first three chapters of your book. Let me now give you my first reaction because I am afraid I might go back to the rest of the book only in a week or so (i.e., after Moscow, since my program in Moscow is quite hectic). I do not k