The Perverse Incentives Dominating Our Lives
Perverse incentives are funny things. Even though we know they’re harming us, we can’t stop pursuing them because the refusal harms us, too, as…
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We Can Discern Cycles and Waves, But Not the Outcomes
We can discern cycles and waves in the past and posit them in the present, but not the outcomes. A great many phenomena follow…
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Channeling Napoleon and Chou En-Lai
Recent events call two quotes to mind, one from Napoleon Bonaparte and one from Chou En-Lai. Napoleon: “Do you know what amazes me more…
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The Demise of Credentials
Back in 2013, I published The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy, which I subtitled The Revolution in Higher Education because the book…
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Pretense, Staging, Expediency: the “Solutions” That Implode the Whole Shebang
We all know how this works: the business is failing and the divorce papers have been filed, but the optics are ugly, so the…
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Everyone’s a Lender Now: Shadow Banking USA
Everyone wants to lend us money now, even though they’re not banks: the insurance company Progressive offered us a loan, PayPal offers us a…
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The Trajectory of History 2026-2033
Although the progression of events over the next eight years cannot be predicted, we have enough in hand to project The Trajectory of History…
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The Good News Is People Are Realizing We’re On Our Own
The Good News is people are realizing We’re On Our Own and starting to take action accordingly. This article describes how people in one…
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My Christmas Letter
Dear friends and family: I’m writing this Christmas missive while my court-appointed lawyer trades cryptocurrencies on his phone. He was recently laid off by…
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The New Nobility and Neo-Colonial Exploitation of the Home Citizenry
Context matters, for context establishes cause and effect and what’s elevated to important / consequential. Context is tricky for two reasons: 1) we only…