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Mises and Hayek also argued that because this knowledge is structurally dispersed, contextual and tacit, it cannot be aggregated by government planners and regulators (nor, it’s worth noting, by private actors).

So one problem facing regulators is that they lack the knowledge necessary to know what people value and how much, so in deciding what to regulate and how, they are acting on incomplete and often erroneous information.  By trying to override the market, they are substituting a less informationally-rich system for a more rich one.

about 75% of antitrust cases are initiated not by the government but by private firms unhappy with how their competition has behaved.  Private actors constantly engage in lobbying and rent-seeking for regulations that will benefit them and/or harm their competition.

For me, as an economist, the argument against a great deal of regulation is precisely that it harms the least well off it is trying to help and provides unwarranted privileges for those who need them least. 

 Economic systems are inherent unstable, dynamically evolving things.   In studying them, we are always studying a moving target.  To my mind, that makes equilibrium models less generally applicable than is often held to be the case.

First, I think the danger of governmental regulation goes beyond the mere possibility of "capture" of the regulatory apparatus by the powerful. The threat is not just this, but that once the authority to regulate is well-established, the state can use this and other economic tools to "buy off" various constitutencies until the opposition to state authority becomes too weak to prevent a very dangerous concentration of power.

Second, there is also a purely moral, but non-consequentialist, argument against regulation.

That suggests that human institutions - complexity of parts notwithstanding - often exhibit various aggregate patterns of behavior that correlate with measurable variables, and that can be understood and predicted with reasonable degrees of confidence, and thus that the outcomes of various kinds of higher-level global interventions can similarly be predicted with some accuracy.

There is no fundamental theoretical difference between states and other large human organizations that would for some reason result in the inability of states to successfully regulate significant fields of aggregate economic behavior as a result of micro-level calculation problems.

I do think humans are motivated to daydream about extraterrestrial intelligence, and, to put a finer point on it, extraterrestrial "people." They are motivated to dream about beings very much like them, things tantalizingly exotic but not so alien as to be totally incomprehensible and discomforting. Maybe those imagined beings have more appendages or sense organs, different body plans and surface coverings, but they typically possess qualities we recognize within ourselves: They are sentient, they have language, they use tools, they are curious explorers, they are biological, they are mortal - just like humans. Perhaps that's a collective failure of imagination, because it's certainly not very easy to envision intelligent aliens that are entirely divergent from our own anthropocentric preconceptions. Or perhaps it's more diagnostic of the human need for context, affirmation, and familiarity. Why are people fascinated by their distorted reflections in funhouse mirrors? Maybe it's because when they recognize their warped image, at a subconscious level that recognition reinforces their actual true appearance and identity.

The first pessimistic take is that the differences between independently emerging and evolving biospheres would be so great as to prevent much meaningful communication occurring between them if any intelligent beings they generated somehow came into contact.

The second pessimistic take is that intelligent aliens, far from being incomprehensible and ineffable, would be in fact very much like us, due to trends of convergent evolution, the tendency of biology to shape species to fit into established environmental niches.

It stands to reason that any alien species that managed to embark on interstellar voyages to explore and colonize other planetary systems could, like us, be a product of competitive evolution that had effectively conquered its native biosphere. Their intentions would not necessarily be benevolent if they ever chose to visit our solar system.

The third pessimistic scenario is an extension of the second, and postulates that if we did encounter a vastly superior alien civilization, even if they were benevolent they could still do us harm through the simple stifling of human tendencies toward curiosity, ingenuity, and exploration.

Right now reaching low-Earth orbit generally comes at a cost somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000 per kilogram, depending on which launch vehicle is used. This creates an enormous barrier to making profitable ventures in space or building major space-based infrastructure. It also engenders further high costs in the design, fabrication, and testing of most spaceflight hardware, which due to the high cost to orbit must be made as lightweight and reliable as possible.

If launch costs fall well below $1,000 per kilogram, a host of economic activities that were previously prohibitively expensive should at a stroke become cheap enough to be readily profitable.

I'm an American citizen, so I will focus my comments on the American space program and the American political system. I'm sad to say that in this country, the most powerful nation presently on the planet, space science, exploration, and development are treated as fringe issues at best. Too many politicians, if they consider these issues at all, treat them in one of two ways: Dismissively, as things to be joked about, or cynically, as little more than pork-barrel job programs for their districts, things to be defended purely for the status quo and only given token lip-service when absolutely necessary.

And who can blame them? Look at what happens to politicians when they try to talk seriously and ambitiously about space today. They are lampooned and ridiculed by the media and by their political opponents as starry-eyed idealists who are disconnected from everyday realities.

Curiously, even among those who claimed to know at least a little about the situation, a majority of 57% didn’t believe news outlets’ economic woes limited their ability to produce quality coverage.

Consumers are sending a message: They want the same quality of news they’ve always known, not excuses, and they’ll punish news outlets that fail to meet that standard by taking their business elsewhere.

Therefore, the United States has, in spite of recent statements, not militarily committed itself to the Syrian crisis, and when the French intervened in Mali the United States played a supporting role. The intervention in Libya, where France and the United Kingdom drew the United States into the action, was the first manifestation of Washington's strategic re-evaluation.

The issue is not whether the United States would intervene to protect Israel's existence; save from a nuclear-armed Iran, there is no existential threat to Israel's national interest. Rather, the question is whether the United States is prepared to continue shaping the dynamics of the region in areas where Israel lacks political influence and is not able to exert military control.

To put it differently, the Israelis' understanding of the American role is to control events that endanger Israel and American interests under the assumption that Israeli and American interests are identical. The idea that they are always identical has never been as true as politicians on both sides have claimed, but more important, the difficulties of controlling the environment have increased dramatically for both sides.

The problem for Israel at this point is that it is not able to do very much in the area that is its responsibility.

But the most shocking thing to Israel was how little control it actually had over events in Egypt and the future of its ties to Egypt.

But the power of the military will not be the sole factor in the long-term sustainability of the treaty. Whether it survives or not ultimately is not a matter that Israel has much control over.

Syrian President Bashar al Assad is a known quantity to Israel. He is by no means a friend, but his actions and his father's have always been in the pursuit of their own interest and therefore have been predictable. The opposition is an amorphous entity whose ability to govern is questionable and that is shot through with Islamists who are at least organized and know what they want.

Indeed, the hints of American weapons shipments to the rebels at some point concern Israel as much as no weapons shipments.

The Iranian situation is equally complex. It is clear that the Israelis, despite rhetoric to the contrary, will not act unilaterally against Iran's nuclear weapons. The risks of failure are too high, and the consequences of Iranian retaliation against fundamental American interests, such as the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, are too substantial.

It will continue to get aid that it no longer needs and will continue to have military relations with the United States, particularly in developing military technology. But for reasons having little to do with Israel, Washington's attention is not focused on the region or at least not as obsessively as it had been since 2001. 

Like Israel, the United States has realized the limits and costs of such a strategy, and Israel will not talk the United States out of it, as the case of Iran shows. In addition, there is no immediate threat to Israel that it must respond to. It is, by default, in a position of watching and waiting without being clear as to what it wants to see. Therefore it should be no surprise that Israel, like the United States, is focused on domestic affairs.

 Israel has lost the initiative and, more important, it now knows it has lost the initiative. It has looked to the United States to take the initiative, but on a much broader scale Washington faces the same reality as Israel with less at stake and therefore less urgency.

What Stockman is most worked up about is that for almost a century, economic policymakers have ... um ... made policy, and that's led to cheap money, high indebtedness, and econo-moral turpitude.

Stockman insists that the market should work out its failures without all these meddlers trying to fix them (there must be "a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy"); no government investments in industry; central banks shouldn't mess with the money supply, and so on.

The reader gets tons of invective against interventionists from FDR to Obama, but never a compelling explanation as to why America would have been better off if we did nothing to lessen the economic pain caused by the Great Depression or the Great Recession by applying Keynesian stimulus. Nor is there any analysis of why mainstream economics is wrong to believe, based on decades of empirical evidence from economies across the globe, that such stimulus, both fiscal and monetary, actually works.

If you want to get rid of central banks, you'd better come up with some other stabilizing mechanism a whole lot better than gold buggery. And I'm quite certain that would lead you right back to independent central banks.

Stockman never explains how a market failure such as underinvestment in such sectors would be overcome by simply not having the government help directly by subsidizing research and development or backstopping credit to offset the high risk premiums investors would otherwise demand.

When it comes to the confidence we have in our beliefs — what can be expressed in terms of probability — we can’t just make up any number we want. There’s only one consistent way to handle those degrees in beliefs.

In the strictest sense, of course, this requires a bit of mathematical knowledge. But Greenberg says there’s still an easy way to use this principle in daily life — and one that can be converted to plain English.

“It’s important to note that the idea here is not to answer the question in a precise way — like saying that it’s 3.2 times more likely — rather, it’s to get a rough sense. Is it a high number, a modest number, or a small number?”

“Much of the time people will automatically try to shoot down evidence, but you can get evidence for things that are not true. Just because you have evidence doesn’t mean you should change your mind. But it does mean that you should change your degree of belief.”

Greenberg also describes Representativeness Heuristic in which people tend to look at how similar things are.

Greenberg also says that we should shy away from phrases like, “I believe,” or “I don’t believe.” “That’s the wrong way to frame it,” he says. “We should think about things in terms of how probable they are. You almost never have anything close to perfect certainty.”

“Let’s say you believe that your nutrition supplement works,” he told us, “Then you get a small amount of evidence against it working, and you completely write that evidence off because you say, ‘well, I still believe it works because it’s just a small amount of evidence.’ But then you get more evidence that it doesn’t work. If you were an ideal reasoner, you’d see that accumulation of evidence, and every time you get that evidence, you should believe less and less that the nutritional supplements are actually working.” Eventually, says Greenberg, you end up tipping things so that you no longer believe. But instead, we end up never changing our mind.

Lastly, he also says that probabilities can depend on the observer — what is a kind of probability relativity. We all have access to different information, so different people should assign different rates of probability to different things based on different sets of evidence.

The first assumption was that the United States was the dominant political and military power but that such power was less significant than before, since economics was the new focus. The second phase still revolved around the three Great Powers -- the United States, China and Europe -- but involved a major shift in the worldview of the United States, which then assumed that pre-eminence included the power to reshape the Islamic world through military action while China and Europe single-mindedly focused on economic matters. 

Nothing is as it was in 1991.

Europe primarily defined itself as an economic power, with sovereignty largely retained by its members but shaped by the rule of the European Union. Europe tried to have it all: economic integration and individual states. But now this untenable idea has reached its end and Europe is fragmenting.

Germany wants to retain the European Union to protect German trade interests and because Berlin properly fears the political consequences of a fragmented Europe.

In the indebted peripheral region, Cyprus has been treated with particular economic savagery as part of the bailout process. Certainly, the Cypriots acted irresponsibly. But that label applies to all of the EU members, including Germany, who created an economic plant so vast that it could not begin to consume what it produces -- making the country utterly dependent on the willingness of others to buy German goods.

Europe can no longer afford pride, and it is every nation for itself. Cyprus set the precedent that the weak will be crushed. It serves as a lesson to other weakening nations, a lesson that over time will transform the European idea of integration and sovereignty.

Authoritarian nationalism is an old European cure-all, one that is re-emerging, since no one wants to be the next Cyprus.

It is nice to imagine expanded domestic demand, but in a country as impoverished as China, increasing demand requires revolutionizing life in the interior. China has tried this many times. It has never worked, and in any case China certainly couldn't make it work in the time needed.

It is interesting to recall the extravagant claims about the future of Japan in the 1980s. Awestruck by growth rates, Westerners did not see the hollowing out of the financial system as growth rates were sustained by cutting prices and profits. Japan's miracle seemed to be eternal. It wasn't, and neither is China's. And China has a problem that Japan didn't: a billion impoverished people. Japan exists, but behaves differently than it did before; the same is happening to China.

Both Europe and China thought about the world in the post-Cold War period similarly. Each believed that geopolitical questions and even questions of domestic politics could be suppressed and sometimes even ignored.

Periods of prosperity, of course, always alternate with periods of austerity, and now history has caught up with Europe and China.

The greatest military power in the world has the ability to defeat armies. But it is far more difficult to reshape societies in America's image.

The United States has emerged into the new period with what is still the largest economy in the world with the fewest economic problems of the three pillars of the post-Cold War world. It has also emerged with the greatest military power.

Now, we are at a point where the post-Cold War model no longer explains the behavior of the world. We are thus entering a new era. I don't have a good buzzword for the phase we're entering, since most periods are given a label in hindsight.

First, the United States remains the world's dominant power in all dimensions. It will act with caution, however, recognizing the crucial difference between pre-eminence and omnipotence.

Second, Europe is returning to its normal condition of multiple competing nation-states. While Germany will dream of a Europe in which it can write the budgets of lesser states, the EU nation-states will look at Cyprus and choose default before losing sovereignty.

Third, Russia is re-emerging. As the European Peninsula fragments, the Russians will do what they always do: fish in muddy waters.

The deals they are making, of which this is a small sample, are not in their economic interests, but they increase Moscow's political influence substantially. 

Fourth, China is becoming self-absorbed in trying to manage its new economic realities.

And fifth, a host of new countries will emerge to supplement China as the world's low-wage, high-growth epicenter. Latin America, Africa and less-developed parts of Southeast Asia are all emerging as contenders

Its two great counterbalances are losing their ability to counter U.S. power because they mistakenly believed that real power was economic power. The United States had combined power -- economic, political and military -- and that allowed it to maintain its overall power when economic power faltered. 

And while China is reaching for military power, it will take many years to produce the kind of power that is global, and it can do so only if its economy allows it to. The United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War because of its balanced power. Europe and China defeated themselves because they placed all their chips on economics. And now we enter the new era.

Dozens of states have been considering legislation that would make it illegal to discriminate against the long-term unemployed. Some proposals would even allow unsuccessful applicants to sue under the same discrimination laws that apply to race or gender bias.

The Obama administration, for its part, has proposed a few other ideas, including training programs and tax credits for businesses that hire the long-term unemployed. (The latter were even included in the American Jobs Act that Republicans blocked in Congress.)

they broadly target bacterial cellular processes, like cell wall building, protein synthesis or metabolism.

Well, we know that antibiotic use in early life is associated with a greater risk of developing allergic conditions like asthma1 and irritable bowel disorders2 (IBS) in later life, which is a pretty good reason to care on its own.

Another problem is that your microbiome’s response to antibiotics may be quite different to mine, and at the moment we can’t predict how much.

The microbiomes of different people vary5, there’s no standard ‘set’, so while many groups of bugs share similar biochemical functions and niches, how they respond to antibiotics may differ considerably.

There is a concept in ecology which is useful to illustrate this: keystone species6. Removing a keystone species can create a domino effect where other species that relied on it will disappear, allowing only a few remainder species to dominate, or new species to invade.

There’s good reason to believe antibiotics change the microbiome permanently, and consequentially impact our health.

First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth.

Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries.

Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries.

The paper didn't disclose which years they excluded or why.

this weighting significantly reduces the average; if you weight by the number of years you find a higher growth rate above 90 percent.

Being a bit of a doubting Thomas on this coding error, I wouldn't believe unless I touched the digital Excel wound myself. One of the authors was able to show me that, and here it is. You can see the Excel blue-box for formulas missing some data:

This is also good evidence for why you should release your data online, so it can be properly vetted.

But beyond that, looking through the data and how much it can collapse because of this or that assumption, it becomes quite clear that there's no magic number out there. The debt needs to be thought of as a response to the contingent circumstances we find ourselves in, with mass unemployment, a Federal Reserve desperately trying to gain traction at the zero lower bound, and a gap between what we could be producing and what we are. The past guides us, but so far it has failed to provide evidence of an emergency threshold. In fact, it tells us that a larger deficit right now would help us greatly.

Most airstrikes from these aircraft use Hellfire missiles, which cause less collateral damage.

The modern battlefield -- and the ancient as well -- has been marked by anonymity. The enemy was not a distinct individual but an army, and the killing of soldiers in an enemy army did not carry with it any sense of personal culpability. In general, no individual soldier was selected for special attention, and his death was not an act of punishment. He was killed because of his membership in an army and not because of any specific action he might have carried out.

Open insignia is fundamental to the rules of war. It was instituted after the Franco-Prussian war, when French snipers dressed as civilians fired on Germans. It was viewed that the snipers had endangered civilians because it was a soldier's right to defend himself and that since they were dressed as civilians, the French snipers -- not the Germans -- were responsible for the civilian deaths.

In a method of war where the individual is the prime unit and where lack of identification is a primary defensive method, the conduct of intelligence operations wherever the enemy might be, regardless of borders, follows. So do operations to destroy enemy units -- individuals. If a country harbors such individuals knowingly, it is an enemy. If it is incapable of destroying the enemy units, it forfeits its right to claim sovereignty since part of sovereignty is a responsibility to prevent attacks on other countries.

If we simply follow the logic we laid out here, then the critics of unmanned aerial vehicle strikes have a weak case. It is not illegitimate to target individuals in a military force like the jihadist movement, and international law holds them responsible for collateral damage, not the United States.

since al Qaeda tried in the past to operate in the United States itself, and its operatives might be in the United States, it logically follows that the United States could use unmanned aerial vehicles domestically as well. Citizenship is likewise no protection from attacks against a force hostile to the United States.

The first is that the outrage at targeted killing is not, in my view, justified on moral or legal grounds.

The second is that in using these techniques, the United States is on a slippery slope because of the basis on which it has chosen to wage war.

The broader the engagement, the greater the perception of U.S. hostility to Islam, the easier the recruitment until the jihadist forces reach a size that can't be dealt with by isolated airstrikes.

In the long run, it is not clear that the cost is so little. A military strategy to defeat the jihadists is impossible. At its root, the real struggle against the jihadists is ideological, and that struggle simply cannot be won with Hellfire missiles.

As I'll explain below, regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset can be the foundation on which you build a compelling career.

Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that's both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101.

They start by painstakingly developing rare and valuable skills—which we can call career capital. They then leverage this capital to gain rare and valuable traits in their career. These traits lead to a feeling of passion about their working life.

The reality I'm proposing is less glamorous. It argues that passion takes time and hard work—harder work than most people naturally invest in their jobs. It's also less certain in the sense that you cannot predict in advance the details of the compelling career you're cultivating. But it compensates with clarity.

The French government understood that the only way to achieve lasting and sustainable economic growth in France was by ensuring a stable peace with Germany.

Its immediate goal was to create a customs union, which would eliminate trade restrictions between member states and establish a common external tariff for trade with the rest of the world.

It would also seek the consolidation of a common market, to allow the free movement of people, goods, capital and services.

Finally, it would seek the progressive coordination of social and fiscal policies among its members.

The rationale behind the European Communities was that if countries gave up sovereignty in specific areas, over time a greater amount of national prerogatives would be transferred to the supranational institutions.

In other words, the process of European integration would progressively weaken the nation-state and its strategic interests.

However, the remarkable growth of the European project did not bring about the abolishment of the nation-state that many analysts predicted.

EU institutions tend to generate their own agendas, which often go against the national strategies of some member states. As a result, the clash between national and supranational interests is often unavoidable.

This friction did not begin with the current economic crisis. In 1965, the French government withdrew its representation in the European Commission in protest of a plan that would give more power to Brussels in the management of the Common Agricultural Policy. To resolve the crisis, the Europeans reached an agreement under which a de facto veto power was given to member states on issues that were considered crucial to national interests. This agreement (commonly known as the Luxembourg Compromise) was designed to protect the intergovernmental nature of the European Communities and virtually froze the process of supranational integration in the 1970s and 1980s, until the Single European Act in 1986 introduced new mechanisms for qualified majority voting.

On top of the traditional tensions between national governments and supranational institutions, in times of crisis member states also tend to distrust each other.

Governments must find a balance between their foreign policy objectives, pressure from the European Union and their desire to be re-elected -- which means decisions that may make sense for the future of the European Union (such as fiscal consolidation efforts) would probably not be made if governments consider them too unpopular among voters.

Other institutions, such as constitutional courts, often threaten to block decisions accepted by national parliaments. The recent investigation by the German constitutional court on the validity of the European Stability Mechanism and the decision by the Portuguese constitutional court to block some austerity measures promoted by Brussels and implemented by Lisbon are examples of this situation.

The deep unemployment crisis in the eurozone adds yet another complication to this problem. The European elites are still largely pro-European, and most of the voters in the eurozone want to keep the euro. But with the European Union's promise of economic prosperity weakening, its members have begun to rethink their strategies. Fidelity for the European project is not unbreakable. Nor is it strong enough to support an indefinite period of extremely high unemployment.

Non-eurozone countries in Central and Eastern Europe have also begun to think of a more independent foreign policy. They remain formally aligned with the European Union and NATO, but the pursuit of closer ties with Russia is no longer taboo. And for most of them, joining the eurozone is no longer a priority.

Like most economies in Mediterranean Europe, France's has lost competitiveness since the creation of the euro, and the common currency has led to a constant trade deficit with Germany. France will seek to change its relationship with Germany without breaking it (as Paris is still interested in containing Berlin), but Paris is increasingly aware that the European project should be remodeled.

The Germans are interested in preserving their alliance with France and protecting the currency union because it benefits its exports to its neighbors and out of fear of the immeasurable financial consequences of a breakup of the eurozone.

Europe's main challenge will be to prevent these frictions from paralyzing the bloc. The European Union will also face the test of mitigating the alienation of its eastern members and closing the gap between eurozone and non-eurozone countries. In the meantime, Brussels and national governments will have to find ways to alleviate the bloc's corrosive unemployment crisis before it leads to dangerous levels of social unrest. In all these challenges, the European Union is running a race against time.

Stories depicted in the Bible include rape, incest, master-slave sexual relations, captive virgins, and more. Now, just because a story is told in the Bible doesn’t mean it is intended as a model for devout behavior. Other factors have to be considered, like whether God commands or forbids the behavior, if the behavior is punished, and if Jesus subsequently indicates the rules have changed, come the New Testament. 

Polygamy is a norm in the Old Testament and accepted in the New Testament.

Concubines are sex slaves, and the Bible gives instructions on acquisition of several types of sex slaves, although the line between biblical marriage and sexual slavery is blurry.

In the book of Numbers (31:18) God’s servant commands the Israelites to kill all of the used Midianite women who have been captured in war, and all of the boy children, but to keep all of the virgin girls for themselves.

The nuclear family model so prized by America’s fundamentalist Christians emerged from the interplay between Christianity and European cultures including the monogamous tradition of the Roman Empire.

Bible believers, even those who think themselves “nondenominational,” almost all follow some theological tradition that tells them which parts of the Bible to follow and how.

for the past eight years or so I've been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I'm going to write, even whole books.

There's no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy--just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I've managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file.

Now, the spark file itself is not all that unusual: that's why Moleskins or Evernote are so useful to so many people. But the key habit that I've tried to cultivate is this: every three or four months, I go back and re-read the entire spark file.

But this kind of inventory doesn't quite convey the most interesting part of the experience, which is the feeling of reading through your own words describing new ideas as they are occurring to you for the first time. In a funny way, it feels a bit like you are brainstorming with past versions of yourself.

This unavoidable tradeoff between false positive and false negative errors is a well-known property of all statistical-prediction applications. Circling back to check all the factors involved in the problem might have helped the authors avoid this mistake.

How could an experienced journalist and a widely respected researcher slip up in so many ways? Some possible answers to this question offer insights for the would-be pop-statistics writer.

Commercial health clubs need about 10 times as many members as their facilities can handle, so designing them for athletes, or even aspiring athletes, makes no sense.

Next up, shake hands with that nice, buff guy in the “trainer” shirt, and confess that you really don’t have a clue how to use a gym but that you’re into outdoor sports and you want to stay fit enough to have fun on weekends. He’ll nod a lot and pretend to take notes. Then he’ll measure your body fat with some high-tech-looking device and ask you lots of questions, ultimately convincing you to hire him twice a week.

these days, it’s all about “functional fitness,” a complex integration of balance and stability and strength.

My conversion moment came in a garage-like industrial space next to an ATV rental yard in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was lying on a concrete floor, near puking, having just humiliated myself on the king of all strength exercises, the old-school back squat. “The best thing I can do for an athlete,” coach Rob Shaul said to me as I struggled to get up, “is to make him strong. Strength is king, and you’re fucking little-girl weak.”

I jumped on a plane, slept in a motel, gulped a crappy coffee, drove down a lonely highway, and presented myself. Beneath the Mountain Athlete banners, I saw nothing but dumbbells, barbells, iron weight plates, braided climbing ropes hanging off the ceiling, pull-up bars, and dip bars. No mirrors, no TVs, no music, no elliptical trainers, no weight machines, and, to my annoyance, absolutely no rubber bands or stability balls.

He ordered us over to the barbell racks, telling us to work our way up to the heaviest squat we could do once. I realized that I had never done this particular test in my life. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I’d never even done plain old squats. Wasn’t it far better to squat on a stability ball and get all that additional balance and core work?

The rest of the session — more barbell moves, along with push-ups, pull-ups, and dips — revealed more of the same. I was, in a word, weak. Not even middle-aged-lady weak — little-girl weak.

True sport-specific training, for literally everybody except elite athletes, isn’t sport-specific at all. It’s about getting strong, durable, and relentless in simple, old-school ways that a man can train, test, and measure. Nobody does crunches training this way, nobody watches television from the stationary bike, and 60-year-old women dead-lift 200 pounds and more.

Shaul’s guys out in Wyoming get massively strong and powerful on precisely three gym sessions a week, each lasting an hour and no more. Louie Simmons, the single biggest name in gorilla-style competitive power lifting, will tell you that 45 minutes is the max length of any smart training session.

Strength means how much you can lift once

Power is a more slippery term that means “speed strength,” or how much you can lift very, very quickly

Muscle mass can be a liability in sports like climbing, where it’s all about strength-to-weight ratio, but mass helps enormously with games like rugby and football, and it can support strength and power

Muscular endurance means how many times you can lift a given weight in a row without stopping

Down the road, if you’re like me, you’ll want to train multiple aptitudes at once: strength, power, and endurance.

Every serious strength-and-conditioning coach sticks to the basic barbell movements, because our bodies don’t operate as single muscles — they operate as a whole.

First: The human body adapts to stress. Throw us in ice-cold water every day and we’ll sprout subcutaneous fat for insulation; expose us to the desert sun and our skin will darken. What this means for getting in shape is that each week, you have to stress your body a little more than last time — lift a little heavier, run a little harder. Muscles weaken with exhaustion after a workout, but then they recover and typically, a few days later, go into what’s known as “supercompensation,” a fancy word that just means bouncing back a little stronger than before.

Finally, keep it simple; understand that variety is overrated. Variety does stave off boredom — it’s fun to mix in new exercises all the time — but a guy who hasn’t trained in a long time, if ever, will get stronger faster on the simplest program of squats, dead lifts, and presses, three times a week.

This simple formula is 90 percent of what you need to know, and you now officially know more than the buff 25-year-old doing your gym-membership orientation.

“Somewhere inside every man’s body,” Brown told me, lying in a La-Z-Boy, “there’s a weak link, a weak muscle waiting to fail. My job is to find that muscle and make it strong.”

two problems: First, if you have powerful prime movers from doing muscle-isolation machines at the gym but weak stabilizers because you rarely get to play a sport, you can’t access all your strength when you, say, bang off a mogul on a ski hill

Second, and worse still, the strength of the prime movers can shred your unstable joints.

He returned to the matters at hand, telling me that my weak knees and shoulder, my tight neck and spastic lumbar, were absolutely typical of a middle-aged recreational athlete with a desk job who spends all day slumped over and slack and then goes out and plays hard. Ignore this stuff, he said, and keep training, and I was guaranteed to get injuries that could set me back for a year. The good news, Brown told me, was that joint stability in each area could be traced to a remarkably small number of tiny stabilizer muscles. And while you could spend a fortune on physical therapists, trying to get them to tell you the same thing, you could also just start exercising those stabilizers. “I’m not reinventing the wheel here,” Brown told me. “This is just better-mousetrap kind of stuff.”

One book in particular, Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, inspired me to start with the very first of the Fundamental Four: strength. I liked the clarity of the word, and I liked the idea of keeping life simple, learning one aptitude at a time. Many pros will tell you that strength is the place to start, because once you’ve built pure strength, you’ll have no trouble adding power, size, and endurance. I decided to just follow Rippetoe’s bare-bones old-school program.

Before Starting Strength, I didn’t even know what a dead lift was, but my dead lift went from 135 pounds to 335. My bench press went well over my body weight. At age 42 — 6-foot-2 and gangly and 20 years into complaining about a bad back and bum knees, and right when any doctor or physical therapist would have told me it was time to embrace the low-impact elliptical — my back squat hit 275, going below parallel. My thighs got so big I couldn’t fit into most of my jeans, and I had to start shopping for new T-shirts.

We take our running water and dependable electric current for granted, but those are amenities missing from many countries and regions because of the lack of competent institutions to manage such infrastructure.

Of course, Americans may complain about poor rail service and deteriorating infrastructure and bureaucracies, especially in inner cities, but it is important to realize that we are, nevertheless, complaining on the basis of a very high standard relative to much of the developing world.

With all of their problems and challenges, the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary have not fared badly and in some cases have been rousing success stories.

The Balkans have been less fortunate, with bad government and unimpressive growth the fare in Romania since 1989, semi-chaos rearing its head in Albania and Bulgaria, and inter-ethnic war destroying the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s.

Russia, too, fits into this category. Its system of oligarchs is a telltale sign of weak institutions, since corruption merely indicates an alternative pathway to getting things done when laws and the state bureaucracies are inadequately developed.

The so-called Arab Spring failed because the Arab world was not like Central and Eastern Europe. It had low literacy, especially among women. It had little or no tradition of a modern bourgeois, despite commercial classes in some cities, and so no usable institutions to fall back upon once dictatorships crumbled.

Turkey and Iran, as real states with more successful urbanization and higher literacy rates, are in an intermediate category between southern Europe and the Arab world.

In many African countries, when taking a road out of the capital, very soon the state itself vanishes. The road becomes a vague dirt track, and the domains of tribes and warlords take over. This is a world where, because literacy and middle classes are minimal (albeit growing), institutions still barely exist.

Indeed, people lie to themselves and then lie to journalists and ambassadors. So don't listen to what people (especially elites) say; watch how they behave. Do they pay taxes? Where do they stash their money? Do they wait in line to get drivers' permits, and so forth? It is behavior, not rhetoric, that indicates the existence of institutions, or lack thereof.

Because institutions develop slowly and organically, even under the best of circumstances, their growth eludes journalists who are interested in dramatic events. Thus, media stories often provide a poor indication of the prospects of a particular country. The lesson for businesspeople and intelligence forecasters is: Track institutions, not personalities.