In November, 1977, on a still-sticky evening along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek boarded a flight bound for Chile and settled into his seat in first class. He was headed to the Valparaíso Business School, where he was scheduled to receive an honorary degree.
There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying...
