Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 42

Are we Rome? Sallust on the decline of civilization

Following up on “The constant decline of civilization?” A favorite historian, Sallust (86– c. 35 BCE), on how his generation of Romans is so much worse morally than the preceding ones. In The War with Catiline, he writes: “Since the occasion has arisen to speak of the morals of our country, the nature of my […]

Fashion: white teeth — or black?

In Henry the VIII’s time, sugar became widely available in England. Those who could afford it used it on just about everything, and too much sugar causes one’s teeth to become black. But sugar was still expensive, so having black teeth came to be a symbol of wealth. Soon many of the English, women especially, […]

I too was an exploited worker

Piggybacking on economist David Henderson’s fun-with-a-point post, “I Was a Chinese Laborer,” about rules designed to limit how much overtime Chinese workers are allowed at Apple’s and other companies’ factories. The goal is “to bring its factories within China’s legal limits of 40 hours of work per week and 36 hours maximum overtime per month […]

Government debt as secular original sin

The US government’s debt: “102,984 for every person living in the U.S.”* How’s that for secular Original Sin? Suppose you’re an infant just born into this world. You haven’t done anything yet — but you’ve inherited the financial misdeeds of earlier generations and will spend the rest of your life paying for them. * Source: […]

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, Then and Now

From the still-hilarious files. Changing times. Rembrandt van Rijn (1653) and Michael Crawford (1992).

Entrepreneur and Un-entrepreneur characteristics

I’m a fan of Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz’s From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity. I wrote about it here. It’s about Economics 2.0, as they call it, one key feature of which is putting the entrepreneur front and center — in contrast to much of traditional […]

“Fascism—Borderless and Red” | Alexander Dugin | *Philosophers, Explained* series by Stephen Hicks

Episodes: The full playlist. About the Professor: Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, USA, and has had visiting positions at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the University of Kasimir the Great in Poland, Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College in England, and Jagiellonian University in Poland.

Gustave Eiffel and portrayals of great humans

Under the northwest leg of the Eiffel Tower tower is a bust of engineer Gustave Eiffel. Portraits of outstanding individuals are usually not made until they are old or even from memory after they are dead. As a result, those of us in later generations have a harder time grasping how those individuals were in […]

Appalling infant mortality rates, then and now

From Peter Gay’s brief biography, about the terrible brevity of life in Mozart’s time. Wolfgang Mozart “was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756, the seventh and last child of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart. Of his siblings, five died in infancy, and only one sister, four years his elder, survived … . This appalling […]

Anecdote: Warren Buffett and the power of corporations

One regularly reads or hears condemnations of the great power of business corporations in the modern world. Witness Warren Buffett. Buffett is currently the sixth richest man in the world and head of the powerhouse Berkshire Hathaway corporation. I’m not a fan of his political or economic views, but an anecdote about his power in […]