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16 stories in the archive
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Economics
Do Gender Quotas Work?
Germany, France and, up to a point, the United States brought in quotas to raise the share of women in leadership. Did they work?
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People
Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard had a hard time of it in economics, for most of his life. He inspired a whole generation of people who love liberty all the same. Who was the man who wrote about 25 books, whom Javier Milei has named in 43 speeches of his presidency, and who got so many of his forecasts wrong?
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Economics
The Nature of the Firm
At 21 Ronald Coase asked why firms exist at all if prices organise an economy, and answered that using the market has a cost. The paper he published in 1937, at 26, lay largely unused for a generation and has since been cited more than 15,000 times. Set against its critics and against several hundred statistical tests, the question has held up better than the answer. The forecast often made in its name, that cheap communication would dissolve the firm, was never his.
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People
Frederick Winslow Taylor
A rich Philadelphian's son promised workers that improving manual work by scientific method would raise wages and profits together. His famous anecdote, the story of a labourer he called Schmidt, did not happen that way, and under oath he said that no firm used his system in full. Yet his claim stands to this day: method beats habit, and pay can rise with output.
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People
Max Weber
Max Weber is remembered for saying that Protestantism made capitalism. He called that thesis foolish in the essay itself, and one row of the school statistics the essay opens with adds up to 109 per cent. The tests of the past two decades find Protestants a little keener on work than Catholics, and no sign that they saved more or that their cities grew faster. What he told three hundred Austrian officers in Vienna in June 1918 has lasted better: that when the state takes over the economy, the officials rule, not the workers. He thought the trained official unbeatable at running things, and feared him for it.
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Germany
German Emigration
A record 288,579 Germans emigrated in 2025, three quarters of them graduates, and the country is losing its best people: so runs the claim. Nearly half of that record went to a destination the statistical office lists as unknown, and its own notes say many of those people never left Germany. What remains is real and about half the size. By the standards of its neighbours and of its own past few Germans leave, and far more graduates from abroad live in Germany than German graduates live abroad. Two things survive the check: the net loss of citizens is the largest since 2008, and no statistic records who is leaving.
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People
David Friedman
Milton Friedman's son took a doctorate in physics and taught economics and law without a course for credit in either. In 1973 he wrote a plain-spoken case for a society without a state. In June the president of Argentina called his visit historic. His sums on medieval Iceland, the stateless society whose civil war he found no deadlier than American murder, hold as he did them in 1979, though the comparison printed in his book has aged. On climate change he says nobody knows whether the effects of warming will, on balance, be bad or good. His own guess is that they will be good.
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Germany
A Scoop of Ice Cream
In 2004 Germany's environment minister said the renewables programme cost a household about a euro a month, as much as a scoop of ice cream. Twenty-two years and about €320 billion of subsidy later, Germany has the second-highest household electricity price in the European Union and electricity that carries ten times as much carbon as France's. The build-out is real. The bargain was not, and the environment has little to show for it.
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Science
Weighed, Not Counted
Germany has a word for the death of its insects, a law against it and a famous number: three-quarters gone in 27 years. The number is the weight of insects caught at 63 sites in protected areas, 57 of them in one federal state and 37 of them trapped in one year only. Where it was measured, the fall holds up. Nobody had measured the country as a whole when the number appeared in 2017, and nobody has since.
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Science
The Polar Bears Nobody Counted
There are probably more polar bears alive today than in the 1960s. But the 1960s figure was a guess, any rise came from curbs on hunting rather than from the climate, and for nearly half the world's subpopulations there is no usable trend at all.
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Economics
The Ten-Centimetre Fork
Germany's governments promise business less bureaucracy. On 1 October Potsdam began taxing coffee cups, pizza boxes and forks. The statute is three pages long; the city's guide to applying it has eighteen sections, three other cities read the same tax differently, and Potsdam did not check how much of its rubbish is take-away packaging. The one study with a control group found the bins no lighter.
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Society
Two Nights, 7000 Dead. At least.
Iran's uprising in 2025/2026 began over the price of a dollar on 28 December and was shot to pieces on the nights of 8 and 9 January, behind a switched-off internet. Nobody serious disputes that thousands died. The government says 3,117. A rights group lists about 7,000 confirmed dead. A broadcaster in exile says 36,500, and an American president said 32,000 eight days before going to war. Only one of those numbers comes with a list that gives places and dates. We counted it.
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Germany
The Party That Never Dissolved
In December 1989 the SED voted down a motion to dissolve itself, and the commission that later audited its money recorded a deciding reason: its property. Every renaming since has left the legal person intact, so the claim that Die Linke is legally identical with the SED rests on the German state’s own findings. That identity makes the party answerable for a balance sheet, which it has already settled. It does not make it guilty of the deaths at the Wall, and the reason is German criminal law.
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Economics
Nine Years for a Flat
Berlin froze its rents in 2020, and in the weeks that followed the number of flats advertised fell by more than half. Catalonia capped its rents the same year, and researchers found no sign that supply shrank. Stockholm has held rents down since the war, and the average wait for a flat there is now nine years. The evidence says rent control works as designed, for the people it was designed for, and sends the bill to everyone who has not arrived yet.
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Technology
Six Hours of Aviation
A Starship launch puts about as much carbon dioxide into the air as sixteen full transatlantic flights. Every launch the United States has so far authorised — three sites, 145 flights a year — comes to roughly six hours of world aviation. Methane and oxygen is the cleanest chemistry in rocketry, and the carbon it adds is negligible. The things that genuinely are wrong are all cheap to fix, and not one of them is the fuel.
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People
Carl Menger
Carl Menger came to economics through the newspapers, tutored a crown prince, fought the most famous battle over method in the history of economics, and left a body of work you could read in a fortnight. It contains the idea that value is a judgment people make, not a property of things, and an account of how money comes into being that economics had to rediscover a century later.