Oil is a curse. “When a resource is easy to control and extract, whoever does the controlling also does the ruling, and they don’t need to share it with anybody. Well, just enough to keep people quiet and content. So… Read More »The Future of Petrostates After Oil
Socialism in action. “The government opened grocery stores and sold staples below the cost we sold them to the government. In theory they used petro oil money to lower grocery prices. Our regular grocery outlets were forced out of business.… Read More »Venezuela’s Excrement
Mointains make you alive but also poor. “High altitude and lots of rainfall together make for big population centers that are poor, because the mountains make transport very hard and expensive, which means there’s very little trade and very little… Read More »Egypt vs. Ethiopia
Montains matter. “Arguably, civilization would have had a much harder time developing in the Americas if the land had been much flatter and low-lying. It’s not a coincidence that the Incan Empire was a mountain empire and was the only… Read More »Why Warm Countries Are Poorer
Being rich is not always good in long term. “Saudi Arabia is burning a huge share of its revenue in subsidizing its population, either directly, or indirectly via unproductive public jobs.All this work performed by millions of people… You can’t… Read More »Saudi Arabia’s Ordeal
Geography to the rescue. “If you notice, there are two very different types of regions here, the mountains that catch water, and the plains that emerge around their rivers. The mountains are hard to rule, but defensible. The plains are… Read More »How Did Islam Spread So Fast?
Automation and its downsides. “In competitive markets, an automating firm captures the full cost savings from replacing workers but bears only a fraction of the resulting demand destruction. In a market with twenty competitors, each firm feels one-twentieth of the… Read More »The Dead Economy Theory
This industry is just weird AF. “My first task was to read a conversation between a user and “the assistant,” one of the major large-language chatbot models. Using a “bible” that dictated how the assistant should respond, I was to… Read More »I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI
Avoid dogma. “There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don’t use the word “heresy” to describe them, but structurally they’re equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that… Read More »Heresy
Extremism and partisanship hurts everyone. “Roughly speaking, we have three major political movements — the MAGA right, the socialist left, and the “woke” left. But none of these seems especially interested in the kind of smart, reasonable policies that would… Read More »America’s political economy is pretty bleak right now