Scottish economist Adam Smith, author of the monumental work “Wealth of Nations”, believed that little is needed to carry a state from the lowest barbarism to the highest degree of opulence, but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest would come

A good book that I read some time ago was “Collapse”, by Jarred Diamond, whose main argument was that communities which overexploit their environment tend to collapse as their territory becomes uninhabitable.Diamond did not focus on Jordan, but he mentioned that the Petra re

 The soothsayer who warned Julius Caesar to beware of the Ides of March was clearly Jordanian, and she was obviously thinking that March is the month when we dig deep in our pockets to pay our children’s school fees and prepare our tax returns for the April deadline.Tax coll

A few days ago, on March 28, Ahmed Kathrada, the great political and human rights activist, passed away. For those among us who have not read the obituaries, Kathrada was active in the passive resistance movement against apartheid in South Africa from the age of 12.&nbs

It is always a pleasure and a privilege to listen to intelligent people talk, because they often draw your attention to new aspects of an issue.One such talk was given by Professor Bernard Lewis during a visit to Amman. Asked to comment on the invasion of the Coca Cola cultu

During the revolution against Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi, a highly educated man assured me that the West conspired to instigate the uprising that toppled him because he was a genius, and this person quoted the commandant of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst at the time when

A sad fact of life in the Middle East is that, unlike Samuel T. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, we do not have water, water everywhere.

“You need to fill and sign this form, then go verify your signature at the bank, then the Ministry of Industry and Trade to certify that your firm’s affairs are in order, and the Income and Sales Tax Department to verify that you do not owe unpaid taxes, and then come back here t

Throughout human history, whenever a community would face a challenge beyond its ability to cope, two trends would develop: one seeking to revise the community’s systems and upgrade them in order to cope with the challenge; the other seeking a puritanical return to greater compli