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I don’t recall exactly when it was that I learned that it took a bit more than eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach us here on Earth. Sometime before high school, I think. Anyway, that pedestrian fact made a deep impression on me. I knew that light traveled at a fixed speed and that its operation wasn’t (quite) instantaneous, although in our quotidian lives, it seemed almost so. But the fact that the sunlight we see all about us is eight minutes old made a deep and disconcerting impression on my young self. Who knows what might have happened to the Sun in the meantime? I began researching this phenomenon

Elon Musk recently became the world’s first trillionaire, and the prevalent hostility to great wealth found its largest object yet. The claims: he is too rich and too powerful for our democracy, and his wealth should be redistributed to others. But Musk’s personal wealth is not the most socially salient fact about him. He demonstrates how private wealth not only improves markets and consumer welfare but also democratic civilization. However large his net worth, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and related ventures have produced far more value for consumers, employees, shareholders, and the public than Musk himself possesses. The Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus has estimated that

For all my life, I have given little thought to how I get my electricity. That is true for most people. You flip a switch, and it is there, on demand, no questions asked. A big storm might hit your neighborhood and knock out power, but if that’s a concern, one has the option of installing a natural gas-powered backup generator. Speaking of natural gas, most people heat their homes with natural gas. It provides comfortable and reliable heating. As far as transportation goes, you probably don’t think much about that either. If you are like me, you stop into a gas station when you see that you are running