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what was the prime mover, the dislodged stone that set this eventful cascade in motion? It was, perhaps, the invention of weapons — an event that let human ancestors escape the brutal tyranny of the alpha male that dominated ape societies.

The two principal traits that underlie the human evolutionary success, in Dr. Hill’s view, are the unusual ability of nonrelatives to cooperate — in almost all other species, only closely related individuals will help each other — and social learning, the ability to copy and learn from what others are doing. A large social network can generate knowledge and adopt innovations far more easily than a cluster of small, hostile groups constantly at war with each other, the default state of chimpanzee society.

the answer to how humans became unique lies in exploring how human societies first split away from those of apes.

society is devoting an ever-growing share of its resources to financial wheeling and dealing, while getting little or nothing in return.

How much waste are we talking about? A paper by Thomas Philippon of New York University puts it at several hundred billion dollars a year.

the share of G.D.P. accruing to bankers, traders, and so on has nearly doubled since 1980, when we started dismantling the system of financial regulation created as a response to the Great Depression.

if Uber and its ride-sharing competitors succeed, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see many small and midsize cities become transportation nirvanas on the order of Manhattan — places where forgoing car ownership isn’t just an outré lifestyle choice, but the preferred way to live.

“In many cities and even suburbs, it’s becoming much easier to organize your life car-free or car-lite,” said David A. King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University who studies technology and transportation. By car-lite, Dr. King means that instead of having one car for every driver, households can increasingly get by with owning just a single vehicle, thanks in part to tech-enabled services like Uber.

car-sharing services like Zipcar and bike-sharing services have already led to a significant net reduction of car ownership among users.

Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders has said he will show cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a TV slot allocated to his party.

The cartoons were shown at an event in Texas last month which was attacked by two gunmen. Mr Wilders was a keynote speaker at the event.

Mr Wilders, who leads the Party for Freedom (PVV), has often expressed his distaste for Islam and mass immigration and has called for the Koran to be banned in the Netherlands.

Historically, inequality was not something that academic economists, at least in the dominant neoclassical tradition, worried much about. Economics was about production and allocation, and the efficient use of scarce resources. It was about increasing the size of the pie, not figuring out how it should be divided.

“Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and…the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”

Stiglitz argues, what we’re stuck with isn’t really capitalism at all, but rather an “ersatz” version of the system.

“Everybody should understand that we are living in a totally different world than two years ago,” said Alexander M. Golts, an independent Russian military analyst.“In that world, which we lost, it was possible to organize your security with treaties, with mutual-trust measures,” he said. “Now we have come to an absolutely different situation, where the general way to ensure your security is military deterrence.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

“The Russian Army is returning to normal combat activities and training,” said Igor Korotchenko, the editor in chief of National Defense, a monthly Russian magazine. “We are doing exactly what our Western partners are doing.”

From a Western point of view, Russia shattered the postwar, and certainly post-Cold War, European order by seizing Crimea and destabilizing Ukraine with a not-terribly-covert military program. That left former Soviet client states next door feeling vulnerable.

the glory days of publicly traded companies dominating the American business landscape may be over. The number of companies listed on the major domestic exchanges peaked in 1997 at more than 7,000, and it has been falling ever since. It’s now down to about 4,000 companies, and given its steep downward trend will surely continue to shrink.

the stock market is becoming little more than a place for speculators and algorithms to compete over who can trade his way to the most money.

What the market is not doing so well is its core public function: allocating capital efficiently.

What I find striking is the background assumption that whether the United States military has a role to play here is taken to be a simple function of how much we care about other people's suffering. One obvious answer is that caring or not caring simply doesn't come into it: That the function of the U.S. military is to protect the vital interests of the United States, and that it is for this specific purpose that billions of tax dollars are extracted from American citizens, and for which young men and women have volunteered to risk their lives. It is not a general-purpose pool of resources to be drawn on for promoting desirable outcomes around the world. A parallel argument is quite familiar on the domestic front, however. Pick any morally unattractive outcome or situation, and you will find someone ready to argue that if the federal government plausibly could do something to remedy it, then anyone who denies the federal government should act must simply be indifferent to the problem. My sense is that many more people tend to find this sort of argument convincing in domestic affairs precisely because we seem to have effectively abandoned the conception of the federal government as an entity with clear and defined powers and purposes. We debate whether a particular program will be effective or worth the cost, but over the course of the 20th century, the notion that such debates should be limited to enumerated government functions largely fell out of fashion. Most people—or at least most public intellectuals and policy advocates—now seem to think of Congress as a kind of all-purpose problem solving committee. And I can't help but suspect that the two are linked. Duties and obligations may be specific, but morality is universal: Other things equal, the suffering of a person in Lebanon counts just as much as that of a person in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Once we abandon the idea of a limited government with defined powers—justified by reference to a narrow set of functions specified in advance—and instead see it as imbued with a general mandate to do good, it's much harder for a moral cosmopolitan to resist making the scope of that mandate global, at least in principle.

Stipulate, purely for the sake of argument, that Americans do have some collective obligation to prevent suffering elsewhere in the world, and that this obligation is properly met, at least in part, via government. (Perhaps because governments are uniquely able to remedy certain kinds of suffering—such as those requiring the mobilization of a military.) Given that we have finite resources, surely the worst possible way to go about this is by making a series of ad hoc judgments about particular cases—the "how much do I care about Steve?" method. The refusal to consider whatever global duty we might have holistically is precisely what leads to irrational allocations—like spending billions to protect civilians and rebel troops in Libya when many more lives would be saved (again, let's suppose for the sake of argument) by far less costly malaria eradication efforts. Unless there's an argument that we have some specific or special obligation to people in Libya—and I certainly haven't seen it—then any claim about our obligation to intervene in this case is, necessarily, just a specific application of some broader principle about our obligation to alleviate global suffering generally. The suggestion that we ought to evaluate this case in a vacuum, then, starts to seem awfully strange, because if we are ever going to intervene for strictly humanitarian reasons (rather than to protect vital security interests), then the standard for when to do so has to be, in part, a function of the aggregate demands whatever standard we pick would place on our limited resources.

We all know that individuals often make quite different choices on a case-by-case basis than when they formulate general rules of action based on a longer view. We routinely make meta-choices designed to prevent ourselves from making micro-choices not conducive to our interests in the aggregate: We throw out the smokes and the sweets in the cupboard, and even install software that keeps us from surfing the Internet when we're trying to get work done. Faced with a Twinkie or a hilarious YouTube clip, we may predict that we will often make choices that, when they're all added up, conflict with our other long-term goals. Marketers, by contrast, often try to induce us to make snap decisions or impulse purchases when, in a cool hour of deliberation, we'd conclude their product isn't the best use of our money.

Is income inequality holding back the United States economy? A new report argues that it is, that an unequal distribution in incomes is making it harder for the nation to recover from the recession

The fact that S.&P., an apolitical organization that aims to produce reliable research for bond investors and others, is raising alarms about the risks that emerge from income inequality is a small but important sign of how a debate that has been largely confined to the academic world and left-of-center political circles is becoming more mainstream.

“Our review of the data, as well as a wealth of research on this matter, leads us to conclude that the current level of income inequality in the U.S. is dampening G.D.P. growth,” the S.&P. researchers write

President Obama rolled out a package of executive actions on guns this week. The changes included clarifying rules meant to broaden the use of background checks by private sellers, allocating money for mental health treatment, and adding more staff at the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to help enforce existing regulations.

A new CNN-ORC survey of 1,000 Americans finds that the public supports Obama's plan by a 2-to-1 ratio: 67 percent of respondents favored the executive actions, while 32 percent opposed them. Even more striking, a similar share of people in gun-owning households -- 63 percent -- supported the measures.

The actions would be supported by an "overwhelming majority of the American people, including gun owners," he said Monday.

Germany offers a health insurance model that, like Canada’s, results in far less spending than in the United States, while achieving universal, comprehensive coverage

this model, pioneered by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883, was the first social health insurance system in the world. It has since been copied across Europe and Asia, becoming far more common than the Canadian single-payer model.

Germans are required to have health insurance, but they can choose between more than 100 private nonprofit insurers called “sickness funds.” Workers and employers share the cost of insurance through payroll taxes, while the government finances coverage for children and the unemployed.

Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with the climate crisis and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right

An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.

Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and complain that Green New Deal proponents confound the fight to preserve the planet, to which all right-minded individuals should agree, with a more controversial agenda for societal transformation. On both accounts the critics are wrong.

It’s remarkable: A number of polls suggest that Democratic voters now consider climate change to be a top-tier issue, as important as health care

That revolution’s main objective: achieving a “100% clean energy economy” in the United States by the year 2050. It’s an ambitious goal, both more stringent and longer-sighted than what the previous Democratic White House—which Biden unfailingly calls the “Obama-Biden administration”—pledged under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Today Inslee debuted a plan to reenter the Paris Agreement and enshrine climate at the center of U.S. diplomacy. It runs more than 50 pages single-spaced.

Given how ordinary people use the term, it’s not surprising that academic economists are a little vague about it—but you’ll be glad to hear that they know they’re being vague. A generation of economists have criticized their colleagues’ inability to specify what a “market” actually is. George Stigler, back in 1967, thought it “a source of embarrassment that so little attention has been paid to the theory of markets.” Sociologists agree: according to Harrison White, there is no “neoclassical theory of the market—[only] a pure theory of exchange.” And Wayne Baker found that the idea of the market is “typically assumed—not studied” by most economists, who “implicitly characterize ‘market’ as a ‘featureless plane.’

When we say “market” now, we mean nothing particularly specific, and, at the same time, everything—the entire economy, of course, but also our lives in general. If you can name it, there’s a market in it: housing, education, the law, dating. Maybe even love is “just an economy based on resource scarcity.”

The use of markets to describe everything is odd, because talking about “markets” doesn’t even help us understand how the economy works—let alone the rest of our lives. Even though nobody seems to know what it means, we use the metaphor freely, even unthinkingly. Let the market decide. The markets are volatile. The markets responded poorly. Obvious facts—that the economy hasn’t rebounded after the recession—are hidden or ignored, because “the market” is booming, and what is the economy other than “the market”? Well, it’s lots of other things. We might see that if we talked about it a bit differently.

the Bitcoin bubble should finally destroy our faith in the efficiency of markets.

Since the 1970s, economic policy has been based on the idea that financial market prices reflect all the information relevant to the value of any asset. If this is true, market prices are the best estimates of the value of any investment and financial markets should be relied on to allocate capital investment.

the efficient market hypothesis remains a background assumption of much central-bank and economic policy.

He is president of the United States, not the world. And the economic surprises in the rest of the world have been more favorable than those in America. The scale of upward revisions of growth forecasts for 2017 and 2018 has been higher in Europe, Japan, China and emerging markets broadly than for the United States. Many other stock markets have outperformed those here.

If Trump’s pro-business policies were driving the global economy, one would expect an increase in net capital flows into the United States, and so a stronger dollar. In fact, the dollar has weakened significantly in the past year, despite more Federal Reserve tightening than was anticipated at the beginning of 2017.

Complacency about the economy can be a self-denying prophecy when it leads to excessive valuations, lending and spending. We are surely closer to such a point than we were a year ago. Sooner or later, another downturn will come

The 2020 Census is set to take place at a time of political turmoil, when Americans are experiencing a crisis in confidence in federal institutions. Unfortunately, the census is likely to exacerbate that crisis, because the Trump administration has enlisted it in the work of maintaining Republican political control.

An accurate count of the American people is the foundation of much of our politics: Everything from the allocation of congressional seats to billions of dollars in federal funds is determined by how many heads are counted and where

The Trump administration’s attempt to game the census by adding a last-minute question about citizenship to the questionnaire may have the intended effect of intimidating immigrants who would otherwise turn out to be counted

The petition emphasizes that the decision “removes HUGE amounts of history”—eras that, while accounting for only40 percent of AP World’s total current course work, comprise some 95 percent of human history since the development of agriculture and set the trajectories of civilizations for thousands of years to come. That history includes the technological advancements and environmental transformation that arose during humans’ migration from Africa to regions around the world; the rise of the Persian empire, the Qin dynasty, Teotihuacan in modern-day Mexico, and the Puebloan People in what today is the southwestern U.S.; and the birth of some of the world’s major religions, including Confucianism, Hinduism, and Christianity.

This class “is probably the only real chance [high-school students] are going to get to learn the African and American and Asian history before European colonization,”

“It’s so cool for students to learn [the third period] because it’s the one time in history that Europe wasn’t the big dog—it was in the Dark Ages while the rest of the world was innovating.”

Sanders delivered a Washington speech explaining, in effect, that socialism is as American as a piece of frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese. Doing so, however, he demonstrated that “socialism” is a classification that no longer classifies.

What Sanders then offered as forward-looking socialism was a warmed-over version of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt advocated 75 years ago.

A young adult — a member of the demographic supposedly most sympathetic to socialism — who attended Sanders’s exegesis of socialism told the Times: “In America we embrace a lot of socialist policies already, like public education and parks.” This understanding of socialism as any government provision of public goods puts Horace Mann (1796-1859), an advocate of public education, and Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), designer of New York City’s Central Park, in the socialist pantheo

By 2050, there will be about 10 billion of us, and how to feed us all, healthily and from sustainable food sources, is something that is already being looked at

The Norway-based thinktank Eat and the British journal the Lancet have teamed up to commission an in-depth, worldwide study, which launches at 35 different locations around the world today, into what it would take to solve this problem

Their solution is contingent on global efforts to stabilise population growth, the achievement of the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement on climate change and stemming worldwide changes in land use, among other things