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Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future
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History of ideas

Reimagining balance

In the Middle Ages, a new sense of balance fundamentally altered our understanding of nature and society

Joel Kaye

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Economic history

Credit card nation

Americans have always borrowed, but how exactly did their lives become so entangled with the power of plastic cards?

Sean H Vanatta

A street intersection; a wall is painted with the word Soulsville in large letters with peeling paint
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Economic history

The southern gap

In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy

Keri Leigh Merritt

Close-up of an orange Mercedes car with the focus on the front tyre, which is inscribed with ‘In Crypto We Trust’
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Economics

The cruelty of crypto

Selling itself as the new American dream, crypto exposes the vulnerable to fraud and scams, and loads risk onto the poor

Rachel O’Dwyer

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Economics

Finance as alchemy

Finance fraud is not a deviation from an essentially rational system but a window onto the reality-distortion of markets

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

An older man stands proudly in front of his house near Leipzig, east Germany after reunification in 1990. A German flag hangs from a ground floor window.
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Economic history

Deservingness

In post-communist eastern and central Europe, history is intensely personal and economics is saturated with moral feeling

Till Hilmar

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Global history

The polycrisis

Is this the word we need to describe unprecedented convergences between ecological, political and economic strife?

Ville Lähde

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Art

Why European artists shifted their focus from power to peasants in the 16th century

5 minutes

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Environmental history

Masts like a forest

How the trees of China – fir, camphor, ironwood and nanmu – were used to build an empire that lasted for centuries

Ian M Miller

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Economic history

A gospel of enjoyment

The French idea of the good life doesn’t always make rational economic sense. So much the worse for traditional economics

Charly Coleman

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Earth science and climate

Deep warming

Even if we ‘solve’ global warming, we face an older, slower problem. Waste heat could radically alter Earth’s future

Mark Buchanan

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Economic history

Matrimony and the market

The sexual revolution promised new norms of intimacy based on egalitarianism. So far, only the rich have cashed in

Daniel Tutt

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Economics

The empty basket

Economics is the language of power and affects us all. What can we do to improve its impoverished menu of ideas?

Ha-Joon Chang

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Education

Hitozukuri

Japan’s Cold War education policy used religion to ‘make’ the ideal humans needed by its nascent economy. Did it work?

Jolyon Baraka Thomas

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Economic history

The golden fuel

Asia’s rise to economic power and food security has been powered not by rice but by American maize, the ultimate flex-crop

Peter A Coclanis

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Economic history

Jesuits in the boardroom

As corporations struggle to survive in a more uncertain world, they should look to the success of the Society of Jesus

Paolo Quattrone

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Global history

Ever more land and labour

Centuries of capitalism saw the global countryside ruthlessly converted into cheap commodities. But at what cost?

Sven Beckert & Ulbe Bosma

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History of ideas

Peter Singer charts the path from Hegelian philosophy to Marxist revolution

43 minutes

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History

History by numbers

Is history a matter of individual agency and action, or of finding and quantifying underpinning structures and patterns?

Claire Lemercier & Claire Zalc

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Demography and migration

The ungreat replacement

Workers in the West have indeed been repressed – but not by immigrants. The policies of their own governments are to blame

John Rapley

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Anthropology

Primitive communism

Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong

Manvir Singh

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Ethics

The Midas Disease

Corruption is a truly global crisis and the wealth addiction that feeds it is hiding in plain sight

Sarah Chayes

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Economic history

The perilous lives of the ‘climbing boys’ who swept chimneys in 19th-century London

5 minutes

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Economics

The worldly turn

After generations of ‘blackboard economics’, Berkeley and MIT are leading a return to economics that studies the real world

Tom Bergin