What happened to the Moon?
July 20, 1969… Fifty years! A lifetime ago, the Moon landing seemed like a new horizon. But it wasn’t. On the twentieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moo...
Category: Policy
Time to reassess eugenics?
Eugenics is an ancient idea with a terrible modern reputation. Is that reputation now irrrelevant? [A discussion paper for a talk I gave in 2015: ...
Free trade (not agreements) will make Britain great
To judge from most of the “progressive” press and my Twitter feed, there is a great deal of ruin in Brexit. I hear that Britain is so integrated into the ...
Trade blocs world
We will soon see the creation of the first global-scale trade-blocs: exclusive international trade zones. What will it be like? The short answer (if you w...
Draft history of ICC: final chapters
Last year, I completed the manuscript of a centennial history of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). It’s a long work: 400 pages, more or...
Can multilateralism be revived?
Shawn Donnan at the FT says that it needs a healthier life-style. Multilateralism is weaker than it has ever been. But, in trade, it has never been as...
The longevity of plain TeX
Microsoft Word was first released for MS DOS in October, 1983. Some five months earlier, Donald Knuth, a professor of computing at Stanford Universi...