Welcome to Consilience

The American Heritage Dictionary defines "consilience" as "The agreement of two or more inductions drawn from different sets of data."

Here at Consilience: Prosperity and Posterity, we -- Owen, Norian, and Chris -- will synthesize elements of political science, moral philosophy, economics, geography, and biology with the hope that our findings in each field will complement the others.

This blog will run parallel to the political science course in which we are enrolled, POLS1150: "Prosperity: The Ethics and Economics of Wealth Creation," taught by John Tomasi, Jason Brennan, and Mark Koyama. Most of the issues we will tackle here find their origins in our course. We will look at questions like:

• "Why do some societies grow rich while others remain poor?"
• "What does it take to deserve to succeed?"
• "Is prosperity good for humans?"
• "What is fairness?"

Our exploration of these and other questions will generally take the form of a discussion between the authors. We encourage you -- our faithful readers -- to leave comments liberally, as this will help enliven and deepen the conversation.

Stay tuned! The thought-fest will kick off shortly.