How culture improved the lot of mankind

George Mason University economist Donald Boudreaux expounds on an interesting fact about human existence – the role of culture in improving the human condition.

Boudreaux explains in a column in the Pittsburgh Tribune that modern human beings have existed for at least 70,000 years, but that it’s only been in the past two centuries that ordinary men and women have attained a standard of living significantly and consistently above subsistence.

This startling fact – especially given how startlingly different our lives are today from those of the vast majority of our ancestors – demands a compelling explanation.

Elderly woman shuts down Georgian Internet

The information highway is apparently more like a two-lane dirt road in parts of the former Soviet Union.

A 75-year-old woman single-handedly cut off Internet connections in Georgia and neighbouring Armenia when she hacked into a fiber-optic cable while digging for scrap metal, the Georgian interior ministry said Wednesday.

The elderly pensioner was arrested after she cut the cable, which runs through Georgia to Armenia, and forced many thousands of Internet users in both countries offline for several hours late last month, according to Agence France-Presse.

“She found the cable while collecting scrap metal and cut it with a view to stealing it,” Georgian interior ministry spokesman Zura Gvenetadze told the wire service.