This year marks the 150<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the publication of Count Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, arguably the greatest of all novels. Among the book’s central motifs is the fragility and contingency of human knowledge, and the subsequent futility of trying to create a social science. In an eternal warning to central planners everywhere, Tolstoy portrayed human beings as existing in a world of contingency and immediacy, continually forced to answer to events entirely unheralded and unexpected. Ultimately, humans need to be guided by something deeper than what can be found through an examination of the empirical world. Gary Saul Morson, writing in The New Criterion, shows how Tolstoy used his literary gifts to show the absurdity of what would become known as scientism, or any other reductionist account of the human.
Javier Milei Makes Fools of the “Experts”
As it began looking like Javier Milei might actually be elected President of Argentina, more than 100 leading international economists warned that this “far-right” political “wrecking ball” would “cause ‘devastation,’ spike inflation, expand poverty, and unemployment.” But as David Harsanyi relates in the Washington Examiner, Milei has tamed inflation, balanced the budget, shrunk the bureaucracy, deregulated the economy, driven down poverty and repaid billions in U.S. loans. And now, Harsanyi notes, Argentina is starting to boom.
