Descartes never set foot in a shopping mall. He never scrolled through an online checkout at two in the morning, eyes glazed, finger hovering over a button that promised some small renovation of the self. And yet, when he wrote cogito, ergo sum, he handed us the most quietly devastating tool we have for understanding […]
I Buy, Therefore I Am: The Classic Critique of Consumerist Identity Read More »
There is something deeply strange about a country that discovers oil and then watches its people get poorer. Not strange in the way a magic trick is strange, where you know something clever happened behind the curtain. Strange in the way a fire extinguisher that sprays gasoline is strange. The mechanism that should fix the
Why Resource-Rich Countries Stay Poor: The Modern Dutch Disease Re-examined Read More »
Most people think of liquidity as a simple idea. You either have cash or you do not. Your assets either sell quickly or they sit there gathering dust. But two of the twentieth century’s sharpest minds saw something far stranger lurking inside this concept. One was a mathematician turned philosopher. The other was an economist
Alfred North Whitehead vs. John Maynard Keynes: The Process View of Liquidity Read More »
There is a quiet sentence Gary Becker wrote decades ago that still hits harder than most thrillers. He argued that crime, for many people, is not a moral failure or a psychological mystery. It is a job application. A rational one. The unskilled worker who turns to theft is not necessarily broken. He is, in
You already know who they are. You could name them right now. The coworker who generates 80% of your headaches. The client who eats 80% of your patience. The family member who causes 80% of the drama at every gathering. You have probably known for months, maybe years. And yet, somehow, they are still there.
Why Your Biggest Problems Always Come from the Same Three People Read More »
Most people lock their doors at night. They install antivirus software on their laptops. They check the expiration date on milk before drinking it. But when someone hands them an idea, they swallow it whole without a second thought. Karl Popper found this bizarre. One of the twentieth century’s sharpest philosophers, Popper spent his life
Intellectual Self-Defense: Popper’s Guide to Spotting Manipulation Read More »
There is a peculiar irony at the heart of Marxist thought that few people sit with long enough to feel uncomfortable. Karl Marx, a man who spent his life in libraries, who argued furiously with rivals, who wrote thousands of pages of dense theory, built a system that, when applied, tended to silence the very
You have been lied to about how learning works. Not maliciously. The people who told you were probably repeating what they heard from someone else, who heard it from a TED talk, who got it from a book that misquoted a study from 1993. But the result is the same. You have a picture in
Stop Chasing the Expert: Sun Tzu’s Rule for Rapid Skill Acquisition Read More »
There is a thought experiment that most people refuse to take seriously. Not because it fails on logic, but because it attacks something almost sacred. The idea is simple: what if the government did not run the police? What if it did not run the fire department? What if these services, like your morning coffee
Privatize Everything: Why Even the Police and Fire Departments Should Be Competitive Read More »
There is a strange ritual in modern life that nobody talks about honestly. A person works for years, builds something real, earns their place, and then stands before the world expected to look slightly embarrassed about all of it. The apology does not have to be spoken. A sheepish smile will do. A quick mention
The Guilt of the High Achiever: Why Society Wants You to Apologize for Your Success Read More »