I remember talking to, 40 years ago, one of the leading people in the government who was involved in arms control, pressing for arms control measures, détente, and so on. He's very high up, and we were talking about whether arms control could succeed. And only partially as a joke he said, "Well it might succeed if the high tech industry makes more profit from arms control than it can make from weapons-related research and production. If we get to that tipping point maybe arms control will work." He was partially joking but there's a truth that lies behind it.

If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market.

Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: 'What is the scientific status of the claims?' 'What social or ideological needs do they serve?'

To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.

Plainly elites in America don't want democracy. And why should they? Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.

I have no Facebook page or Twitter - I don't participate in it, and I don't like it particularly. I mean, it's a form of interaction, which strikes me as extremely superficial.

Why was the United States so afraid of an independent South Vietnam? Well, I think the reason again is pretty clear from the internal government documents. Precisely what they were afraid of was that the "takeover" of South Vietnam by nationalist forces would not be brutal. They feared it would be conciliatory and that there would be successful social and economic development - and that the whole region might work.