René Descartes sat alone in a room heated by a stove and decided to doubt everything. Every belief, every assumption, every comfortable certainty. He stripped away the world piece by piece until he was left with nothing but the bare fact of his own thinking. It was, by any standard, a radical act of intellectual […]
Intellectual Loneliness: The High Cost of Rationality in a Viral World Read More »
There is a strange moment that happens to almost every serious gamer. You are grinding through a dungeon, picking up loot, selling items at an auction house, and suddenly you realize something uncomfortable. The economy inside this game makes more sense than the one outside your window. That is not a joke. It is not
Why Video Game Economies Are More “Real” Than the US Dollar Read More »
There is a particular kind of confidence that belongs only to people who have never run a business. It is the confidence that says: we can decide what something is worth, write it into law, and the universe will simply comply. This is the confidence behind minimum wage legislation. And it is, to put it
The Minimum Wage Myth: Why You Cannot Legislate the Value of a Product Read More »
You have probably been told, at some point in your life, that you should be well rounded. Read widely. Learn to code and to cook. Pick up a language. Play an instrument. Get comfortable with public speaking. Maybe even start a podcast. The advice sounds reasonable. It even sounds noble. After all, Leonardo da Vinci
Stop Being “Good” at Everything: The Economic Cost of the Renaissance Man Read More »
Let us begin with a thought experiment. Imagine two countries. One is blessed with fertile soil, deep harbors, vast forests, and mineral deposits that glitter under every hillside. The other has rocks. Just rocks and some stubborn grass and a population with strong opinions about cheese. Common sense says the first country dominates trade. It
Why a Country With No Resources Can Still Win at Trade Read More »
In 1803, a French economist named Jean-Baptiste Say made a claim that most people ignored for about two hundred years. He argued that the entrepreneur’s real job was not to own land or accumulate capital. It was to combine knowledge, judgment, and imagination into something the world did not yet know it needed. He called
The Intellectual Entrepreneur: Why Ideas Are the Raw Materials of the 21st Century Read More »
There is a comfortable story we tell ourselves about the Enlightenment. It goes something like this: brave thinkers stood up against kings and priests, championed the common people, and lit the fuse that would eventually explode into democracy. Voltaire sits near the center of this story, usually holding a quill and looking defiant. The problem
Against “The People”: Why Voltaire Feared the Mob More Than the Monarch Read More »
Every week, someone publishes a think piece about how we are drowning in content. Too many podcasts. Too many newsletters. Too many blogs saying the same thing in slightly different fonts. The internet, we are told, has become an ocean of noise where nothing meaningful can survive. It sounds reasonable. It even sounds wise. But
Content Overload? Why J.B. Say Proves There Is No Such Thing as “Too Much Content” Read More »
You probably believe you are a good person because you have thought carefully about right and wrong. You have weighed your options. You have reasoned through dilemmas. You have arrived at conclusions about justice, fairness, and decency through the disciplined application of your rational mind. David Hume would like a word. The Scottish philosopher, writing
Morality is a Muscle Memory: Why You Do Not Think Your Way to Being Good Read More »
Carl von Clausewitz wrote a book so dense that most people who quote it have never finished it. “On War” runs over 600 pages of Prussian military theory, nested clauses, and ideas that fold into themselves like origami made of fog. It is, by almost any measure, the opposite of minimalism. And yet the man’s