October 17, 2016 - Ordinary Times

/// October 17, 2016

TBC: Actually, facts do care about your feelings

Any individual fact (singular) is unlikely to be affected by your feelings, as long as it is a clear-cut statement. However, when you start talking about facts (plural), things get messy. The reason for...

Jon Rowe

/// October 17, 2016

American Creation: Ben Franklin Quotation that Typifies the Zeitgeist that Caused the Great Enrichment

Peter Thiel is fond of noting the incredible technological progress the modern world experienced starting around 1800 and ending, in his opinion, 1969 (with the moon landing, and the field of information technology excepted). Niall Ferguson recently gave a Ted Talk on what he views as “6 Apps” that caused modernity’s material progress. And most recently Deirdre McCloskey has written about this “great enrichment” that didn’t start to take off until around 1800 and arguably continues to this day (even if Thiel and others argue we stopped progressing as we should in 1969).

From: American Creation: Ben Franklin Quotation that Typifies the Zeitgeist that Caused the Great Enrichment

Holly Whitman

/// October 17, 2016

Brexit and the Temp Economy

Zero-hour contracts are somewhat of a Catch-22 in the UK. What impact will Brexit have on these temporary workers, and are there any parallels in the U.S.?