There is a strange new ritual happening in offices, classrooms, and kitchens around the world. A person types a question into a glowing box. The box responds with confident, polished prose. The person nods, copies the text, and moves on with their day. No verification. No second source. No raised eyebrow. We have, in record […]
Don’t Let Your AI Deceive You: Learn from Descartes’ Doubt Read More »
There is a French economist most people have never heard of who figured out something about money that most people still do not understand. His name was Jean-Baptiste Say. He lived through the French Revolution, watched empires rise and collapse, and somewhere in the chaos, he landed on an idea so simple it almost sounds
Everything is a Trade: Why Money is Just a Temporary Placeholder for Your Productivity 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
Most people know Adam Smith as the father of free markets. They know the invisible hand. They know the pin factory. They know his deep suspicion of monopolies and government granted privileges. So it comes as a genuine surprise to many readers when they discover that Smith, the great champion of competition, actually defended one
The Invention Dividend: Why Smith Advocated for Intellectual Property Rights Read More »
There is a particular kind of person you meet at parties, usually somewhere between their second drink and their third existential crisis, who will tell you with great solemnity that they are “on a journey to find themselves.” They have quit their job. They have bought a one way ticket to somewhere with mountains. They
Why Finding Yourself is a Waste of Time (You Should be Building Yourself) Read More »
The help came, and the help made it worse. That is the sentence the Henry Nowak case keeps returning to. A young man was bleeding to death on a street. The people sworn to protect him arrived. And they reached for handcuffs instead of a bandage. You can debate the reasons for a very long
Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that your brain is not really a brain at all. It is a factory. A small, wet, surprisingly demanding factory sitting on top of your shoulders, running three shifts, churning out ideas, decisions, memories, and the occasional regrettable text message. The product is thought. The output is your life.
Your Brain as a Bio-Factory: Why Say Would View “Focus” as the Most Scarce Raw Material Read More »
Adam Smith walked into a pin factory one day and changed how we think about work forever. He noticed something peculiar. One man drawing wire, another straightening it, a third cutting it, a fourth pointing it. Ten workers, each doing one tiny task, could produce 48,000 pins in a day. A single craftsman doing all
The Intellectual Division of Labor: Why Specialization is Harming Public Discourse Read More »
Imagine you are the worst person on your team. Not in one thing. In everything. You write slower than the intern, you code worse than the new hire, you sell with all the charm of a damp napkin. By every reasonable measure, your colleagues should fire you, replace you with a houseplant, and enjoy the
John Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government in 1689, a time when the idea of a nation receiving millions of newcomers in a single decade would have struck him as somewhere between unthinkable and absurd. England in his day had a population of about five million people. The notion of a state absorbing that
Is Mass Migration a Lockean Dissolution of Government? Read More »