At some point after he became chief surgeon in Napoleon’s army, Dominique Jean Larrey started walking across blood-soaked battlefields to pick out those among the wounded who could still be saved, usually by instant amputation of limbs. In time, he developed a system of sorting and separating —…

Two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will keep us busy in 2022 as they did in 2021. One is plague — in our case the SARS-CoV-2 virus that keeps mutating. As I predicted in March, we’re in for a seemingly permanent struggle between us (science) and nature (evolution). We keep coming up with…

The world has been conducting an inadvertent socioeconomic experiment on young people, one that would in normal circumstances be prohibited for being cruel and inhuman. As part of their efforts to control the pandemic, many countries have for parts of the past two years closed schools. Some…

So here we go again. The coronavirus has mutated, as we’ve always known it would, and the new variant, called omicron, is spreading fast. Should we be scared or sanguine? Should we change our behavior and plans or carry on? To answer these questions, we need three pieces of information that we don…

Here’s a real-life trade-off I want you to ponder. Say you’re a policymaker and, like me, a classical liberal — that is, somebody who generally puts a premium on individual freedom. You’re now dealing with another wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections and looking at scenarios your advisors have placed…

As we collectively hurtle into the era of climate change, international relations as we’ve known them for almost four centuries will change beyond recognition. This shift is probably inevitable, and possibly even necessary. But it will also cause new conflicts, and therefore war and suffering. …

Is there any way this stand-off at the border between the European Union and Belarus can still end well? Put differently, how bad could it get? Unfortunately, the answer is: really bad. The scenarios include the death of the migrants, and even a wider war. A recap: The crisis was manufactured by…

Green finance, green banking, green investing — in a time of climate change, the capital markets obviously want to assist in the necessary transformation of our economies. Unfortunately, the state is increasingly interfering in these markets in a way that will prove counterproductive because it…

When exactly is something either fair or unfair? Whether the topic is taxation, pay and bonuses, government benefits, crime and punishment, or almost anything else, we just can’t seem to agree. The reason, it turns out, is that our intuitions about these matters are shaped not only by culture…

At first blush, Germany’s parliamentary election was a victory for moderates, and a clear defeat for extremists. The populist fringes — the Alternative for Germany (AfD) on the far right and the post-communist Left on the opposite side — both lost seats. The vast majority of votes went to one of…