“Participation in capitalist markets and bourgeois virtues has civilized the world. It has ‘civilized’ the world in more than one of the word’s root senses, that is, making it ‘citified,’ from the mere increase in a rich population. It has too, I claim, as many eighteenth-century European writers also claimed, made it courteous, that is, ‘civil.’ ‘The terrestrial paradise,’ said Voltaire, ‘is Paris.'”
—Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues
Recent
Responsible Statecraft tends to have a more common sense approach to the profligate spending on the part of the American defense establishment. The retirement of the entire ICBM arm and cancellation of the Sentinel successor would save enormous amounts of money wasted...
Threats are easy. Supply chains, deterrence math, and real endgames are not. We dive into the rising talk of U.S. strikes on Venezuela and why public saber-rattling can lock leaders into dangerous escalations they can’t control. From leaked authorizations to carrier...
Power doesn’t just show up in elections; it builds laboratories. We dive into how New York City became a proving ground for a fusion of finance, philanthropy, and policing that later spread across the country—then map how that same logic now shapes narratives around...
