I Googled “Worldly Philosophers” and came up with the book by Robert L. Heilbroner and his Wikipedia entry.
My first major professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Myron L. Good, said, “If you are not a Liberal when you are young, you have no heart; if you are not a Conservative when you are old, you have no head.”
Charles Krauthammer started as a liberal. Over three decades, he evolved into “the most influential conservative commentator.” In his book, THINGS THAT MATTER, I counted 88 entries. The book’s subtitle is “Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics.” The population should be of the order of 3x10x50 = 1500. 88/1500 = 0.058666667. The first decade might be sparse. 88/1000 = .08800. So Krauthammer’s Things That Matter consisted of 5 to 9 percent of his Things.
Krauthammer’s book contains “A WORD ABOUT ORGANIZATION AND METHOD”. I wish all commentators had to subscribe to Krauthammer’s practice of preparation.
Wikipedia says Robert L. Heilbroner was an outspoken socialist for nearly his entire career. However, Heilbroner famously wrote in a 1989 New Yorker article prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union:
"Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won... Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism."
He further wrote in Dissent in 1992 that "capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure" and complimented Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises on their insistence of the free market's superiority.
Heilbroner emphasized that "democratic liberties have not yet appeared, except fleetingly, in any nation that has declared itself to be fundamentally anticapitalist." However, his preferred capitalist model was the highly redistributionist welfare states of Scandinavia; he stated that his model society was "a slightly idealized Sweden."
Worldly philosophers who never leave the academy never grow old.
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