“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan The tool being built today has a name: Pax Silica. The belief behind it is older. It is the faith that experts can manage what markets and democracies cannot. It is called technocracy. The movement emerged after…
“Woe to those who plan iniquity, to those who plot evil on their beds! At morning’s light they carry it out because it is in their power to do it. They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud people of their homes, they rob them…
“Where are you?” — Book of Genesis 3:9 I’m writing a book. Not just any book. The story. Call it An Odyssey, from antiquity to modernity. It began as a conversation between two parts of myself. One part spoke first. “I’m not very smart,” it said. “But I ask a…
“We have a tragic history of making tragic history, and then pretending it didn’t happen.” — James Howard Kunstler I’ve been reading Jim Kunstler’s World Made by Hand novels. For those who haven’t, they’re set in a not-too-distant future upstate New York after the total collapse of modern systems—peak oil,…
How a forgotten economist foresaw the crises we’re repeating today “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” — T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock In 2025, global debt hovers at levels unseen since the Great Depression. Inequality has…
“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value: zero.” — Voltaire Last week, I read Scott Bessent’s paper, “The Fed’s ‘Gain of Function’ Monetary Policy,” which presents a striking critique of the Federal Reserve’s unconventional monetary strategies. Bessent argues that over the past decades—particularly following the 2008 financial crisis—the Fed has engaged…
“We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support.”…
“Give me control over a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.” — Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812) A few years ago, my furnace went out on Christmas Eve. Last week, my water heater went kaput on the eve of Thanksgiving. Unlike the furnace, which took a good four…
My presentation went well, but not as well as I would have liked. I forgot to say certain things, and I totally blanked on my last critical sentence. “As Maya Angelou said…” I fumbled around searching for it in my head. “Oh goodness, she said…oh goodness, she said…” My slides…
“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”—Albert Einstein A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an Einstein lecture by Douglas Hofstadter. He researches how we create analogies and how they permeate our languages and creative thought processes in physics and mathematics. In his research, he found…