Why You Need More Than Tariffs To Win Zero-Sum Games On The Global Stage An essay about what it really means to be committed to growing domestic industry & enriching the middle class. A Summary of This Essay’s Key Points: The most intolerant wins: global supply chains force production to comply with the most intolerant buyers Europe therefore dictates the shape of regulatory compliance for global…
Or Why Tech Monopolies Are Actually Good For Society Hold on! Stow the pitchforks! Hear me out. Nothing lasts forever. All technologies have their moment in the spotlight — then the wheel of progress turns and a new challenger arises, one better adapted to the environment. Progress is a cruel master. Just because a given company managed to fundamentally advance the frontier of technology doesn’t…
How Elites Cause Crime By Acing Marshmallow Tests Some people think crime is caused by poverty. Some think crime is caused by criminals. Some even think crime is caused by the climate. Don’t swallow these easy-to-digest popular narratives — society is shaped by its elite, always has been, always will be. It all comes back to the marshmallows. A brief summary of what’s to come in this essay: Online…
Why Banks Always Explode And what to do about it I’m writing this essay the weekend after what was almost a financial apocalypse for Silicon Valley (note: publishing will be delayed because of said apocalypse). That so much drama could have been resolved within 4 days is a sign of the times. This is really two separate essays glued together, but they each draw from each other heavily. The first is…
What Really Drives Housing Prices — And Why Japan’s Haven’t Increased Since 1995 On a recent podcast , I noted that the world is uncertain, full of scientific studies that don’t replicate, an expert class that performs worse than prediction markets, and a complete lack of open data across all meaningful topics. If you’re a capable individual, the way to navigate this is to develop strong mental…
This is the final part of my essay Rehabilitating Machiavelli. Find Part I here , which deals primarily with the internal workings of a functional republic. Book Two: Expansion & Growth Book Two begins with some excellent introspection before turning its gaze outward and looking at ways to actually grow a republic: Men always praise ancient times and condemn the present, but not always with good…
Rehabilitating Machiavelli Imagine you’re an intellectual who lives and works in close proximity to your society’s elite. Imagine that your studies of history and politics have inspired a deep love of social liberty and republicanism: … a form of government in which "supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives". In republics, the country is considered a "public matter",…
How great nations are built on the backs of great companies — and what you can do about it Note: don’t start reading this one on your lunch break unless you can read 150+ words-a-minute. I’m torpedo-ing my shareability here by not breaking this up into bite-size sections to help the great algorithms. This essay is the outcome of a simple observation: you cannot build a massively successful nation…
Why You Should Play Games To Excess This week [0] , Xi Jinping’s government announced it was banning videogames — the latest salvo in a slew of attacks aimed at bringing China’s tech giants to heel and keeping the nation’s future tightly aligned with the CCP’s industrialist vision. source I have no further commentary on that national vision. I wish them good luck. But in the dark days to come,…
The Worldview Schism Fueling The Tech-Media Wars & Stunting Our Growth There’s a quiet worldview schism among today’s American elite, one I often shorthand as “New York” vs. “San Francisco” among my friends. But this schism is more fundamental than a mere city difference, and almost every part of our mainstream discourse is downstream of it. Does Finance drive the world, or does the world drive…
Note: While the “essay prompt” for this arose from today’s political climate, not a single word or image in here refers in any way to current affairs. I promise. There’s a TL;DR at the bottom, but this isn’t the sort of thing that gets resolved via a bullet-point summary. Some words associated with the Left-Wing & the Right-Wing: Maybe you disagree with me on some of these words? I threw some…
How The Present Was Built “ Unequal Growth ” describes the emergence of China, the growing economic irrelevance of Europe & Japan, and American dominance, using 30 years of public data provided by the World Bank. This essay began with one observation: In the first decade of the 2000s, the top 2 nations generated 31 % of all the Economic Growth. In the next decade, their share double to 60% of…
2010 was the year Silicon Valley lost the war in China. It took another 5-6 years for the rest of the playing field to realize the war was already lost ( shoutout Uber & Facebook ) , and most of the commentariat still don’t quite understand the Trillion-dollar nation-defining stakes that were, for a brief moment, in play. 2010 marks the date Google pulled out of China, conceding both the economic…
How Germany Is Able To Run The World’s Second Largest Export Economy In The Post-Industrial Era “ The Germany Shock ” describes European growth & the efficiency-maximizing centralization of European manufacturing activity after the launch of the Single Market and the Euro . Two questions sparked this: 1) why did Europe only adopt the Euro & the Single Market after its Cold War-era existential…
Why We Should Try To Tolerate Even The Worst Speech In Our Social Circles Note: This is my best crack at Steelmanning Free Speech as a broad concept — somewhat of a response piece to my earlier essay: Steelmanning Censorship: An Argument for the Removal of Content , but not actually challenging any of that argument. My hope is just to present a positive initial framework in support of “Free…
Why YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, & Reddit Need to Stand Against Intersectional Extremism Note: This is my best crack at Steelmanning Censorship as a broad concept, based on lively conversation with friends in SF. While the conclusion/subtitle is not my personal default position, many of the individual arguments are, which is why I find this argument’s structure persuasive. A different…
This is just the Recaps, a TL;DR of sorts, from my essay: The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier? The Full Stack in all its glory. I like to summarize my essays up-top for people with jobs and/or Social-Media-addictions, but they say a picture’s worth a thousand words so I made this instead. Note: UBI = Universal Basic Income Feudalism Recap I made this high quality…
Everyone I know In Real Life, and many I don’t, has told me my essays are far too long. Allow me to apologize: if I was smarter and had more time, I’d have written a shorter essay. As a compromise of sorts, I’ve broken this essay into 6 self-contained pieces, which can be easily read in 10-15mins and can be found here: Part I . If you’d prefer to read this all on a single webpage, keep reading!…
Everyone I know In Real Life, and many I don’t, has told me my essays are far too long. Allow me to apologize: if I was smarter and had more time, I’d have written a shorter essay. As a compromise of sorts, I’ve broken this essay into 6 self-contained pieces, which can be easily read in 10-15mins. If you’d prefer to read this all on a single webpage, you can read it here: The Full Stack of Society…
This is Part II. Find Part I here and Part III here . These Narratives don’t end with Feudalism! Where “Take and Tax” sufficed for thousands of years, technologies grew, the world shrank, and the realization that Wealth could be created from Trade led to new and more successful ways of building Wealth. (That bold part still manages to confuse many non-economists today) In the Mercantilist World,…