Think the past had poorer people, but stronger families? The reality was often much darker. @Chellivia explains how domestic violence, economic necessity and drastically limited choice shaped family life before modern prosperity.

Editor's Pick of the Week: It’s time to end Britain’s licence raj @JohnPenroseNews argues that Britain has recreated the kind of bureaucratic system that once held India back – and that replacing endless upfront permissions with clear, predefined standards could help get the country building again.

The fantasy of a simpler, better pre-industrial past is just that: a fantasy. Hunger. Famine. Open sewers. Extreme deprivation. Violence. @Chellivia explains why both reactionary nostalgia and the degrowth movement badly misunderstand the world before economic growth.

🧵A generation ago, when Asia’s leading tiger economies were places like South Korea or Singapore, India was the region’s teenage disappointment. ✍️@JohnPenroseNews

How do we tear down Britain’s versions of the dams that used to hold back India’s entrepreneurial energy and dynamism?

🧵Since 2008, an understandable desire to avoid another taxpayer-funded bank bailout has developed into a broader ‘precautionary’ approach in which almost every risk is treated as something to be mitigated. ✍️James Mackenzie Smith

Critically, ministers must also defend those trade-offs when things go wrong, providing political air cover to the regulators and other bodies. Otherwise, every adverse outcome risks being treated as a scandal, and the system simply reverts to precaution.