In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a bold prediction. By now, he said, we’d all be working about 15 hours a week. Three hour workdays. A perpetual long weekend. Technology would make us so productive that we’d meet all our needs in a fraction of the time, leaving us to wrestle with the […]
The ‘Bullshit Job’ Economy: Why Keynes Predicted We’d Invent Fake Work Read More »
Most people know Ayn Rand as the woman who made selfishness sound like a good thing. Fewer know that her ideas, controversial as they remain, offer something genuinely useful for anyone trying to build something from nothing. You don’t have to worship at the altar of Atlas Shrugged to extract practical wisdom from her work.
5 Lessons from Ayn Rand for the Modern Entrepreneur Read More »
ou’re scrolling through your feed, nodding along to every post. Everyone agrees with you. It feels good, doesn’t it? Like sitting in a warm bath of validation. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: that warm bath is boiling your brain. John Stuart Mill, the 19th century philosopher who wrote On Liberty, had something radical to say
Stop Agreeing: Why “Echo Chambers” are Making Us Stupider According to John Stuart Mill Read More »
You can’t put Gregorian chant on your resume. Knowing the difference between Doric and Ionic columns won’t get you promoted. Being able to name all the moons of Jupiter doesn’t increase your earning potential. Yet people spend enormous amounts of time acquiring exactly this kind of knowledge. Why? The economist Thorstein Veblen had an answer,
You have 247 friends on social media. Twelve people wished you happy birthday last year in person. Three of them you actually wanted to hear from. This isn’t about being antisocial. It’s about recognizing a pattern that shows up everywhere from your closet to your career, and yes, in your contact list. Most things in
Why Most of Your Friends Don’t Actually Matter (According to Vilfredo Pareto) Read More »
Everyone who’s ever sold something on Etsy or posted a “CEO of myself” caption on LinkedIn thinks they’re an entrepreneur. We live in a time when the word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore. Side hustles, passion projects, freelance gigs—we call all of it entrepreneurship. But if we transported a French
Three words. That’s all it took for Murray Rothbard to ignite a philosophical war that still rages today. When the economist and political theorist declared that taxation is theft, he wasn’t making a throwaway comment at a cocktail party. He was lobbing a grenade into the foundation of modern civilization. The phrase seems absurd at
Before LinkedIn influencers discovered the power of personal branding, before TED Talks became the currency of intellectual prestige, there was Marcus Tullius Cicero. Standing in the Roman Forum around 63 BCE, he wasn’t just another lawyer arguing cases. He was building something we’d recognize today: a media empire based entirely on the monetization of ideas.
The Original “Thought Leader”: How Cicero Monetized Intellect Read More »
Picture two economists standing at opposite ends of a bridge, both claiming they want to help poor people cross to the other side. One wants to give everyone a ticket, rich and poor alike. The other wants to pay only for those who cannot afford the crossing. They’re both talking about cash transfers, but Milton
UBI vs. Negative Income Tax: Through the Lens of Milton Friedman Read More »
Francis Bacon never had to sit through a business meeting where someone proposed building a moat around the office to improve security. But if he had, he would have recognized something familiar. The same mental traps that plagued 17th century natural philosophers still plague us today. We just dress them up in better PowerPoint slides.
The Anatomy of a Bad Idea (And How to Kill It According to Francis Bacon) Read More »