Month: March 2026

Believe the Barbarity of “Bygone Backwaters”

Critics of modern civilization think humans have lost a Golden Age we once had in the distant past. Closer to the truth was Hobbes’s observation that life in the distant past was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” An earlier entry in this blog shows a photo of an ancient skull-cup dug up by archeologists in England.

(p. R3) . . . while the fearsome Scythian hordes who stalked the Eurasian steppe might show you some hospitality by inviting you to dinner, Herodotus warned that you should be prepared to have your drink served to you in a human skull.

For millennia, sensational accounts like these were all that was known about these bygone backwaters of the ancient world. But according to Owen Rees, they are more a reflection of their writers’ bigoted imaginations than the truth. In “The Far Edges of the Known World,” Mr. Rees, a researcher at Birmingham Newman University and the lead editor of badancient.com, a website that fact-checks common claims about the ancient world, seeks to remedy these misapprehensions.

. . .

While Mr. Rees is keen to dispel the myths ginned up by imperial writers, he doesn’t prevaricate when the evidence shows that their fears may not have been entirely unfounded. Though he makes a heroic effort to show that the Scythians were not the one-dimensional brutes the Greeks believed them to be, he also admits that recent excavations in present-day Bilsk, Ukraine, seem to show that they really did drink from human skulls as Herodotus said.

For the full review see:

Michael Patrick Brady. “Meeting Ancient Strangers.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 11, 2025): R3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 10, 2025, and has the title “‘The Far Edges of the Known World’ Review: Ancient Strangers.”)

The book under review is:

Rees, Owen. The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2025.

Arthur Diamond’s “Scientific Knowledge Can Lie Beyond Language” Posted at The Institute of Art and Ideas Web Platform

My agreement with iai allows me to separately post my article, which I plan to do in a future blog post. The title as it appears on the iai platform was chosen by the iai editors. I preferred a title that emphasized the implications of unarticulated knowledge for practice, not just for science. I had the right, if I objected strongly to their title, to veto it. I chose not to veto.

Arthur Diamond’s “The Innovative Entrepreneur” 2018 Presentation on YouTube

I presented “The Innovative Entrepreneur” at the Create “N” Festival at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota on Sept. 19, 2018 to an audience that was open to the general public, but consisted mainly of undergraduates. At the time of the presentation, I was wrapping up the writing of his book Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism that was published by Oxford University Press in June 2019. The topics of the presentation overlap with some of those in the book–on how innovative entrepreneurs make our lives better, and on how the challenges faced by innovative entrepreneurs can be hard but rewarding.

Technology Was Democratized When Standardization of Parts Enabled Simplification of Manufacture and Maintenance

There’s a lot to like about Steward Brand. His Whole Earth Catalog was quirky unpretentious fun. His How Buildings Learn, has a wonderful chapter on the ramshackle, unnamed, disrespected building on the MIT campus where quirky innovators were given space to create. His essay on Xerox Parc explained how the technology being developed there could liberate individual creativity. When Steve Jobs at Stanford delivered what is widely believed to be the best commencement address in history, he ended by quoting Stewart Brand’s final message in the 1974 Whole Earth Catalog: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

In the review quoted below, highlights that the simplification of production enabled by standardization of parts promoted the democratization of technology maintenance (and we might add, helped to democratize innovation too). Major simplification goes against the Theory of the Adjacent Possible which claims that technology develops toward greater and greater complexity.

(p. C7) Read front to back, “Maintenance” tells a coherent story of civilizational progress. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most machines were one-off creations, built by artisans to their own quirky specifications. But the technological age increasingly demanded standardization. Weapons led the way. If a cannonball jammed in an imprecisely bored barrel, the cannon might explode, killing its crew. On the other hand, if the parts of a flintlock rifle were interchangeable, a soldier could repair his weapon without the need for a gunsmith.

The manufacturing techniques that enabled this kind of precision gradually spread to other technologies. The same tools developed to bore cannon barrels were then used to improve steam engines. But standardization had its enemies, Mr. Brand notes, especially among gunsmiths and other artisans. During the French Revolution, the sansculottes rebelled against the new industrial techniques. “Craft was extolled; uniformity was deplored,” Mr. Brand writes. France’s technical progress was set back 50 years.

A century later, the early automobile industry faced a similar split. The original Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, Mr. Brand writes, “was manufactured as a bespoke, unique vehicle, meticulously crafted by a dedicated team.” Henry Ford’s Model T, by contrast, was a crude but ingeniously simple machine. Ford made sure each part was manufactured to unvarying specifications, “perfect enough” that it could be installed by a moderately skilled worker on a moving assembly line. No fine-tuning needed.

Ford’s embrace of standardization allowed his Model T to be built quickly and inexpensively. But standardization had another, paradoxical effect: It allowed nonexperts to repair their own vehicles and other equipment. A farmer who owned a Model T didn’t need a forge or metal lathe to fix his engine; he could simply order a replacement part—or cannibalize one from a wrecked car in a junkyard.

The French revolutionaries feared industrialization would depersonalize society by marginalizing skilled artisans. Mr. Brand shows that, instead, standardization democratized access to technology. With a few tools and a little gumption, anyone could learn to maintain and repair the machinery of daily life.

For the full review see:

James B. Meigs. “Fixing the Future.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 6, 2025): C7.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 5, 2025, and has the title “‘Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One’: Making the Future.”)

The book under review is:

Brand, Stewart. Maintenance of Everything: Part One. South San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2026.

An earlier Brand book that I praised in my opening comments is:

Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built. New York: Viking Adult, 1994.

Thomas Jefferson Thanked Edward Jenner for Advocating Vaccine

As a classical liberal, and an advocate for faster innovation, I am sympathetic to much in the health freedom movement. But I think some in the movement are making a mistake in being opposed to all vaccines. Some vaccines have done some harm, but overall the best vaccines are some of the greatest advances in medicine. I like Thomas Jefferson’s statement in the passage from the review quoted below.

(p. C8) In the 1780s Thomas Jefferson was serving as a diplomat in France when the Marquis de Lafayette brought him a message of unwelcome news from Virginia: His young daughter Lucy had died of whooping cough. The letter did not spare the absent father the grim truth: “Her sufferings were great.” Jefferson ultimately buried four of his children (including two girls named Lucy). He knew what he was saying when he wrote appreciatively to Edward Jenner, the English physician who discovered vaccination, that “medicine has never before produced any single improvement of such utility.”

For the full review see:

Kyle Harper. “Sickness And Civilization.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Jan. 24, 2026): C7-C8.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 23, 2026, and has the title “‘The Great Shadow’: Sickness and Civilization.”)

The book under review is:

Bauer, Susan Wise. The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026.

Frank Knight on the Leader of the V-Formation of Ducks

I write this on Thurs., Feb. 19, 2026. Yesterday evening, I was reading a section of Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose on the Negative Income Tax, as part of my revising a paper I have submitted to The Independent Review. As I was reading, I was surprised and numbly elated to serendipitously run across information that I had been seeking, off and on, literally for decades. Every so often I had occasion to tell a story that I was sure originated with Frank Knight. I wrote the script on Frank Knight for an audio series on Great Economists. (The current owners of the series refuse to pay me the royalties that I am owed, but that is another story.) So I thought I knew something about Knight, and own many books and articles by him. Every once in a while I spent an hour or so looking for the quotation, always failing. I even emailed Ross Emmett who many view as the current leading expert on Knight. He said he knew nothing of the quote I sought.

Buddhists who are totally at peace do not carry around with them the annoyance of unanswered questions, so if they run across an answer, it means nothing to them. Maybe this helps understand what Pasteur meant when he lectured that “chance favors only the prepared mind” (1854). The prepared mind carries around unanswered questions, unresolved contradictions, flaws in the world that could use improving. Then that mind stays alert for answers to the questions, resolutions to the contradictions, fixes for the flaws. The mind that pulls us forward is not a mind at peace.

[As an addendum, my discovery of the quote in Milton and Rose Friedman’s most famous book, after many searches in much more obscure places, reminds me of what Gertrude Himmelfarb said in a lecture at the U. of Chicago when I was a graduate student many decades ago. She searched the dusty archives long and hard, but the material most useful for her book on Harriet Taylor’s influence on Mill’s On Liberty, was hiding in plain sight in a volume written by F.A. Hayek on Mill’s correspondence with Taylor.]

Here after decades of occasional search and constant alertness, is the testimony of Milton and Rose, two former students of Frank Knight, showing that my memory of the Frank Knight duck V-formation story was not a dream or hallucination:

Our great and revered teacher Frank H. Knight was fond of illustrating different forms of leadership with ducks that fly in a V with a leader in front. Every now and then, he would say, the ducks behind the leader would veer off in a different direction while the leader continued flying ahead. When the leader looked around and saw that no one was following, he would rush to get in front of the V again. That is one form of leadership—undoubtedly the most prevalent form in Washington.

Source of Milton and Rose quote is:

Steve Lohr. “A.I. Is Poised to Put Midsize Cities on the Map.” The New York Times (Mon., December 30, 2025): B1-B2.

The Himmelfarb book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill. New York: Knopf, 1974.

The Hayek book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Hayek, F.A. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951. [Some citations to the book have the word “Correspondence” substituted for “Friendship.”]