There is a quiet scandal at the heart of modern thinking about money. We have somehow arrived at a moment in history where earning a profit is treated as morally suspicious, while losing money is seen as evidence of pure intentions. A nonprofit that burns through donations and produces nothing measurable gets a respectful nod. […]
Descartes sat by a fire in 1637 and tried to doubt everything. His clothes, his hands, the room itself. He stripped away every certainty until only one thing remained standing. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Thought, the stubborn thing left over after the great demolition, became the foundation of selfhood for the
I Like, Therefore I Am: The Shallow Cartesianism of the Attention Economy Read More »
There is a popular story we tell about the Enlightenment. It goes something like this: a group of brilliant European thinkers finally decided that reason was better than superstition, that science was better than dogma, and that all men were created equal. Then they wrote some declarations, started some revolutions, and the modern world was
The eighteenth century had a project. It was ambitious, optimistic, and slightly drunk on its own confidence. The project was called the Enlightenment, and its promise was simple: human reason could figure out everything. God, morality, politics, the natural world. Give us enough time and enough thinking, and we will hand you the blueprint of
Hume vs. The Enlightenment: The Man Who Broke Reason Read More »
There is a recurring fantasy in democratic politics. It goes something like this: somewhere out there, a small group of extraordinarily wealthy people are sitting on mountains of cash, and if we could just reach into those mountains and redistribute the gold, most of our collective problems would dissolve. Schools would be funded. Healthcare would
Taxing the Rich Is Taxing the Future: The Uncomfortable Math of Productive Capital Read More »
Adam Smith is mostly remembered as the man who explained markets. The invisible hand, the pin factory, the butcher and the brewer pursuing self interest while accidentally feeding the nation. Most people who quote him have not read him, and most people who have read him stopped at The Wealth of Nations. That is a
Why Adam Smith Loved Small Talk: The Social Capital of Everyday Interaction Read More »
You are reading these words right now. Light bounces off the screen, enters your eyes, and your brain assembles the message. The whole process feels seamless, almost automatic. You see the world, and the world is there. End of story. David Hume, the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher who terrified Immanuel Kant out of his “dogmatic
Descartes sat alone in a heated room in 1637, doubting everything he could think of, and arrived at one stubborn truth. He could not doubt that he was doubting. Therefore he existed. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Almost four centuries later, we have updated the formula. We do not need to think
I Post, therefore I am: The belief that life did not happen unless it was shared Read More »
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 »
Jean-Baptiste Say never heard of Universal Basic Income. He died in 1832, long before anyone seriously proposed handing every citizen a monthly check just for existing. But if you could resurrect the French economist and sit him down with a pamphlet on UBI, his reaction would probably land somewhere between a polite cough and a