Vilfredo Pareto

My Dinner With Vilfredo Pareto

My list of historical personages I"€™d invite to a dinner party doesn’t include any of the obvious choices. Who really wants to eat dinner with Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar? They’d probably make beetle brows at each other and have atrocious table manners. These sort of lists often ...

Google as Fat Elvis

Every company"€”no matter how trendy or cool, no matter how many Goth girls on rollerskates they employ, no matter how many simpering genius autistics in silver pants they have on the payroll"€”every company eventually reaches the point where it becomes a cubicle Jonestown devoid of anything ...

Miss…or Mr. America?

The 2011 Miss America contest provides an object lesson in the decline of American femininity. Consider the winner: This poor little girl has so physically abused herself at 17 years of age, she has to wear a wig. This sad little girl has a lined and troubled face more like a 30-year-old who has ...

Standing Up to the Oligarchs

Much ink has been spilled scapegoating the various newfangled nerdy types known as "€œquants"€ for the financial apocalypse. As a journeyman member of the breed, I"€™m considerably dismayed. As I see it, a bunch of Ivy League banker morons are blaming their misdeeds on the quiet boffins ...

When Man Invented Science

Pope Benedict’s trip to Ole Blighty is over, and that sanctimonious gasbag Dawkins didn’t manage to arrest him in the name of secular humanism. While I’m not a believer myself, I often wonder at such professional atheists who cover themselves in the mantle of ...

AskMen.com’s Top Babes: Ravishing or Roadkill?

Every year, AskMen.com comes out with a list of the “top 99 most desirable women.” They are allegedly chosen democratically: they claim six million votes were tallied for this contest. I have to wonder at this, as, well, my tastes differ. Either I’m a madman in need of ...

Stuff White People Like

A Genealogy of Morals One of my fundamental beliefs about culture and humanity is that morals and folkways are subject to natural selection. You need not believe in sociobiological bilge to share this belief; you merely need to agree that some ideas confer advantages over others. The classic ...

The Dawn of Decadence

One of the wheezes I get from my leftist friends in Berkeley is how highly evolved their sense of morality is, as if 21st-century Berkeley were some New Jerusalem of higher moral thought. These are folks who calibrate their exquisitely sensitive moral barometers with a protractor made from ...

The Myth of Technological Progress

Many of you will still be alive in 50 years. It’s interesting to think about what life will be like in 50 years technologically and otherwise. Predictions are risky, especially when they’re about the future, but I believe we can make some pretty good guesses. To predict a predictable ...