Commentary
Back when Saturday newspapers were regularly threatening to cross the 200-page threshold, the one I worked at developed a robust section called “Ideas.”
We did that because I thought ideas were important things that had shaped our past and were about to carve out our future. At the time—around the turn of the century—the battle of ideas that had shaped the 20th century appeared to have come to a close. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama even famously and perhaps prematurely declared that we had reached the “end of history.”
Analyses of economies within the former Soviet bloc countries showed that central planning had generated far less productivity—about one-third—compared to that powered through free enterprise. That surprised many economists who had supposed the margin to be more narrowly in favour of free markets….