The World’s Greatest Idea

Ideas matter. They shape our experience of the world.

more than 1 in 10 people were fully enslaved in Medieval Europe, including many Slavic people who gave their very name to the practice.

remarkably foreseeing submarine

Interestingly, when America’s founders framed their Declaration of Independence, sometimes thought of as the starting point of modern democracy, not all of them focused on democratic ideals. They intended America to be primarily a republic that championed liberty and rights, not a democracy. ‘A democracy,’ wrote Thomas Jefferson, ‘is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.’

The oldest signs of wine-drinking have been found at Shulaveri in the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, where infrared spectroscopy has been used to identify wine residue in the form of tartaric acid on jars dating back to 6000 BC.

After the striking success of Keynes’s ideas in Roosevelt’s New Deal