To a certain extent, it may be that the inflexion that occurred with Renaissance was necessary and even unavoidable. For hundreds of years, the human body was not only ignored but even repressed to the advantage of our spiritual nature. Against the background of the rediscovery of Greek spirituality, da Vinci, Michelangelo and the other coryphaei of Renaissance restored the value of the human body and, in part, they restored its dignity as well.

This article is a brief and tentative overview of the economic history of the Jewish people. The story starts with Cain and continues with Abraham, Melchizedek, David, and Solomon, the prophets, Talmud and cabalist rabbis, up to our times. We attempt to capture the main economic tenets of the Jewish people, the provenience, explanations and their effects, in particular their special relationship with money, land, work, richness, property and life

Today, there is a fruitful dispute between secularists and those who argue the compatibility between Christianity, with its religious precepts and intrinsic system of ethical values, and the liberal democracy. The second group is however hopelessly wrong, as much as the first. This endeavor is epistemologically wrong and the argument is pretty simple. The institutions of divine right, such as the Church or family, shall be subject to the single principle

Recently, more and more use is made from book production as a measure of the long-run development of human capital. However, its relation with technology and growth is often found to be small and changing over time. In this paper we try to establish the link between book production and the spread of "ideas" as proxied by patents both over time and between regions. Two mechanisms may be distinguished. First, in the initial phase of economic development,