Most economists treat their field like physics. They draw curves that intersect at neat little points, write equations that pretend humans are billiard balls, and speak of equilibrium as if markets were calm ponds waiting to settle. They want economics to behave. They want it to sit still long enough to be measured. Joseph Schumpeter […]
Capitalism as Darwinism: Why Schumpeter is the Biologist of Economics Read More »
You wake up tomorrow morning and you expect the sun to rise. You expect your coffee to taste like coffee. You expect the floor to hold you up when you swing your legs out of bed. You expect your face in the mirror to be the same one you saw yesterday. Now here is a
There is a strange thing that happens the moment you say something out loud. The idea leaves your head, lands in the open air, and suddenly it is not just an idea anymore. It is yours. It has your name stitched into it. And from that second on, anyone who questions it is not questioning
Stop Defending Your Ideas and Start Attacking Them Read More »
In 1960, an economist at Columbia University did something that horrified polite society. He sat down and applied the same mathematical framework used to analyze refrigerator purchases to the question of why people have babies. His name was Gary Becker, and his paper “An Economic Analysis of Fertility” treated children as what he politely called
Children as “Consumer Durables”: The Cold Logic Behind the Global Birth Rate Collapse Read More »
Every few decades, an economic idea arrives dressed in new clothes and convinces us it has never been seen before. We greet it like a stranger at the door, marvel at its novelty, and forget that we invited its grandfather to dinner ninety years ago. Universal Basic Income is having its moment now. Politicians flirt
How Universal Basic Income (UBI) is Just Keynesianism for the 21st Century Read More »
There is a strange silence at the heart of modern education. We teach children the names of distant planets. We make them memorize the dates of wars fought centuries ago. We drill them in the periodic table, the parts of a cell, the rules of grammar in languages they will never speak. And yet, when
Economic Literacy: The One Skill Schools Refuse to Teach Read More »
There is a peculiar kind of cruelty in a system designed to be kind. It promises to catch you when you fall, and it does. But then, somewhere between the catching and the standing back up, the net tightens. It holds. It cradles. And eventually, it refuses to let go. This is the welfare trap.
The Welfare Trap: When the Safety Net Becomes a Ceiling Read More »
Auguste Comte spent much of his life trying to figure out how a society that had just thrown out kings, priests, and the old certainties could possibly hold itself together. He was watching France stagger through the aftermath of revolution, industrial upheaval, and the slow death of the medieval order. Something had to fill the
The Banker as Social Regulator: Comte’s Ideal Role for the Financial Class Read More »
Imagine Voltaire waking up in 2026. After the initial shock of indoor plumbing and oat milk lattes, someone hands him a smartphone. He scrolls through a feed where a stranger is screaming about lizard people, a celebrity is selling skincare made from snail residue, and a teenager is being publicly shamed for a tweet she
Voltaire vs. Social Media: Can Enlightenment Values Survive the Algorithm? Read More »
There is a strange moment when you read Plato’s Republic for the first time and realize the philosopher everyone calls the father of Western thought was, by any honest reading, sketching the blueprint for something that looks uncomfortably like a surveillance state. Not in the cartoonish sense of cameras on every corner, but in something
Plato’s Secret Police: Why the Ideal Society Requires Constant Surveillance Read More »