For Democracies to Collapse

"For democracies to collapse, people do not just need to believe the dictator. It is enough that they don't trust anybody."

- Yuval Noah Harari

Circular Firing Squad

"No party is more capable of creating of a circular firing squad than America's Democratic Party."

- Timothy Garton Ash, British historian, the man whose favorite formula is "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," which seems to me a wonderful approach. Think through, prepare for and defend against worst case scenarios and remain hopeful about the general direction of progress. 

Anthropic AI to Replace Jensen Huang at Nvidia

You can't make this up: Apparently Anthropic AI is on the short list of CEO candidates to replace Jensen Huang at Nvidia.

[Full disclosure. I did make this up, so indeed you can. But just because I'm making it up doesn't mean it's not true. It might be.]

The Transition from Knowledge Work to Entrepreneurship

In 1900, about 10% of American teenagers were enrolled in high school. By 2000, only about 10% were not.

Within the next 20 years, something similar will happen with the share of workers who become entrepreneurs.

For a generation or more, there have been two routes to financial prosperity. One was to become a knowledge worker with the right credentials: an engineering degree, an MBA, a law degree. The other was to become an entrepreneur, whether painting on a large canvas like the luminaries of Silicon Valley or working out of the limelight to build a business that quietly makes you a deca- or centimillionaire.

The percentage who take the second route today? Closer to 1900’s 10% than 2000’s 90%. That number is about to change, and so is the way people get there.

AI will do two things. It will make a career as a traditional knowledge worker more challenging, slowing or even reversing the growth in cognitive occupations. And agentic AI in particular will make it far easier to become an entrepreneur.

Which companies will become enormously valuable? The ones that realize they are no longer hiring and managing knowledge workers. They are building teams of people who combine their expertise with agentic AI to do what we used to call entrepreneurship.

What does an internal entrepreneur look like? Someone who finds a new market for an existing product, or creates a new product for existing customers.

What systems will support them? Picture companies regularly running their own version of Shark Tank: employees pitch initiatives, and sponsors inside the company, including fellow employees, decide whether to invest or pass.

In the 1900s, we built the norms, the institutions, and the investments that made education the default for young people. Successful companies and communities will now do the same for entrepreneurship, making it the default for the people we used to call employees.

Industrial equipment made manual work less necessary and knowledge work more necessary. AI will do the same to knowledge work and entrepreneurship.

You can be at the front of this parade or the back.

Four Americas Past and the Future America - a short video

 New Politics for the Next Economy high level ideas captured in 80 seconds of video.

Social Evolution, AI, and Human Possibility

 

A central idea within my new book, New Politics for the Next Economy.

Viral

 MAHA.

The folks who've made antivax go viral.

In Which Your Blogger Continues His Fascination With the Wildly Different Market Treatment of Nvidia and Tesla

The NASDAQ 100 has an average P/E of about 28. This table illustrates both the current reality of Tesla and Nvidia's share prices and what those stocks would be priced at today assuming their most recent earnings report was used to calculate current price at the typical P/E of 28.

Simply pricing the two stocks like every other NASDAQ stock would mean a drop in stock price of 93% for Tesla, and would mean a rise in stock price for Nvidia of 28%.

Snapshots of Possible Futures

Volatility in stock prices will be greater the wider the range possibilities. We're trying to value and define possible futures and those two tasks are entangled.

We look into the future through a device - our collective imagination, really - that behaves at times like a telescope and at other times like a kaleidoscope. One person looks into this market and sees utopia and another sees dystopia and another walks away with a black eye.

The market price is always just one snapshot in the ongoing, dynamic negotiation between possible futures. About the only certainty is that tomorrow's closing price will be different than today's. Every second the market has second thoughts about what it just paid and changes that price.

Bubbles to Bargains - Today's Closing Price of Selected Stocks

 

Bargains?
Micron & Nvidia

Discounted?
Alphabet - Google 

Fair price?
Coca-Cola

Over-priced?
Costco

Bubble?
Tesla

The older I get, the less I believe in the efficient market hypothesis. I think you just have to choose between the delusions and perceptions and then hope that the future no one knows about will tilt in your direction. 

More Than a Trillion Dollars In Value Liquidated

Nvidia has lost roughly $1.5 trillion in value in the last month.

Out of the roughly 50,000 companies publicly traded companies around the globe, only 10 are valued at more than one trillion dollars, and only 8 - including Nvidia - are valued as much as the $1.5 trillion Nvidia has lost in value since early October.

And yes, I have been very bullish on Nvidia.

Trump Broke the GOP

If Trump's political career had ended on January 6th when his people stormed the Capitol to halt the election, the Republican Party might have shared political power in DC for decades more. That is, if the GOP's response to Trump had been led by Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger rather than folks like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, the GOP would have had a chance to share power for another generation.

Given it did not, Trump has ended the GOP's influence as a national party. Having three times nominated him as the head of its party, the GOP's brand and philosophy is entangled with Trump's for the next generation. That will end its prospects for holding national power for decades. If it renounces Trump, it will lose his hardcore supporters, which will bar it from national victory. If it continues to praise Trump, it will lose the former Republican voters who are now so disillusioned by the man.

Given how out of synch Trump's worldview is with reality, there were three possibilities when he ran in 2016.

1. He could have destroyed his own political career in that run, dismissed as less a politician than a personality, someone closer to Rush Limbaugh than Ronald Reagan.

2. He could have be in power long enough to expose his worst policies and impulses, destroying the Republican Party brand as those policies made America worse, not greater, by which point Trump's reputation and the Republican brand were hopelessly entangled. Evidence for this would include Texas, which experienced a huge shift from red to blue in last week's election.

3. He could have permanently changed America, destroying its place as the hub of a vibrant global economy and a model of liberal democracy.

Ruin was inevitable. The only question is at which level: personal, political party or national. He seems to have ruined the Republican Party. I'm optimistic that he hasn't ruined the country yet, even if it will need repairs and remodeling once he is out of office.

Russia and Ukraine vs. US and Iran

Just one of the reasons a democracy is better than a dictatorship? A democracy doesn't have to lose half a million men before it changes policy.

Total Russian casualties from its invasion of Ukraine is approaching 1.6 million. In addition to missing or wounded, this includes nearly 500,000 killed.

Putin is a dictator. The fact that Russians may find this unacceptable has not led him to end this war.

Trump initiated a war against Iran that has killed about 25 Americans and wounded 865. Between that and what the war has meant for gas prices, Americans basically voted against Trump's party and his war. (And yes, I realize it will likely take time to extricate ourselves from Iran but last week's election accelerated the end of the war.)

Even if democracies were just as likely to make errors as dictatorships, they would win simply because they have better mechanisms for error correction and they have to please so many more people. A democracy is less likely to engage in activity that will hurt a lot of people and more likely to correct itself when it does. 

Electoral Dysfunction

At 80, Trump became the oldest president to face a midterm. Doctors say electoral dysfunction is common at that age.

Ask your doctor if a second term is right for you.

1776: Three Revolutions Later, Nobody Rides in the Trunk

1776.

250 years ago.

An inflection point in human history.

For most of the preceding centuries, economic output per person—and with it, material living standards—had changed remarkably little. Empires rose and fell. Kings conquered kingdoms. Civilizations flourished and collapsed. But the average person lived scarcely better than generations before.

Then something extraordinary happened.

Or, more precisely, three extraordinary things happened in the same year.

1. James Watt's steam engine began operation on March 8, 1776

2. 24 hours later, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations on March 9, 1776

3. Four months after that, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.

1. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.

A rebellion against King George III, certainly. But its revolutionary premise was much bigger: government should derive its authority from the people, not from kings or aristocrats.

The people, rather than their rulers, would determine how they were governed.

We call this modern democracy.

2. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations.

Smith's revolutionary premise was remarkably similar: economic life should be shaped by the choices of ordinary people, not dictated by kings, aristocrats, or government-granted monopolies.

Let people decide what work to pursue, what to produce, what to buy, and what to sell. Let countless independent decisions coordinate economic activity rather than relying on the commands of a privileged few.

We call this a market economy.

3. James Watt's improved steam engine began commercial operation.

In March 1776, one of the first commercial Boulton & Watt steam engines began pumping water from a British coal mine.

Watt hadn't invented the steam engine. He had made it dramatically more efficient. What began with pumping water from mines would eventually help power factories and transform transportation, production, and entire communities.

We call this the Industrial Revolution. You might also call it the process of continual invention.

Three extraordinary developments in one extraordinary year.

Democracy. Markets. Invention.

And here's the point: you don't have to choose between them.

In fact, you should want more of all three. Each is not really a check on the others. Each enables the others.

The more inventions we develop, the more possibilities we have for improving our lives.

The more dynamic and competitive our markets, the more choices people have, the more opportunities entrepreneurs have, and the more effectively innovations can spread.

And the more responsive our democracy, the more ways people have to shape their communities, protect their freedoms, establish fair rules, and invest in a shared future.

These aren't three competing visions of progress. They're three forces that can make one another stronger.

Consider how democracy can accelerate invention.

Near the end of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt asked his science adviser, Vannevar Bush, to consider how the extraordinary achievements of wartime research might be extended into peacetime.

That initiative helped inspire the creation of the National Science Foundation.

The premise was powerful. Basic research is expensive, uncertain, and often takes decades to produce a practical payoff. Even when it succeeds, the benefits may spread across society rather than flow to any one company. That makes it difficult for private businesses to justify funding enough of it.

But democratic government can invest in research whose benefits extend beyond the next quarterly earnings report.

Universities and researchers generate knowledge. Entrepreneurs and businesses transform discoveries into products and services. Profitable businesses generate jobs, wealth, and tax revenues. Those revenues help fund another round of research and education, creating still more possibilities for invention.

A virtuous cycle of public discovery and private innovation.

Specifically, we need Watt's invention to create new technologies that break the link between "progress" and depletion of our natural world. To do that properly will require a deft interplay of democracy, invention and markets that enable us to enjoy sustainable prosperity that promises an earth as bucolic and pleasant as any we've known while still enjoying "progress" as more narrowly defined by material prosperity. Doing that properly will require full engagement of all three of these forces that have so changed our world since 1776.

Jefferson's democracy enabling Watt's invention, which Smith's markets can then spread throughout society.

And the three of them, in turn, make one another more productive.

Which brings us to the election of 2026.

The great news is that voters have delivered a decisive rebuke to MAGA politics and returned control of Congress to Democrats.

For a movement whose supporters tried to overturn the 2020 election, and whose leaders have repeatedly sought to restrict voting, this is an encouraging reaffirmation of democracy. That’s great.

It's worth recalling that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence complained that King George had kept standing armies among the colonists, obstructed immigration, and cut off foreign trade. Some of the grievances against an eighteenth-century king sound remarkably contemporary.

After a long and troubling detour, we've brought Thomas Jefferson out of the trunk and put him back in the front seat.

But here's the bad news.

Some of the Democrats now returning to power seem eager to put Adam Smith in the trunk instead.

Markets, in the view of some Democrats, are less engines of opportunity than sources of inequality and exploitation. Businesses become adversaries rather than partners in progress in their minds. And technological disruption can become something to resist rather than something to shape and harness. (Yes. I am - among other things - talking about AI.)

That's a mistake.

Progress depends on three healthy forces at work, not taking turns between these three transformative forces. We want more democracy, more voice of the people in defining laws and policies. We want more market economy, the creation of more products and jobs, services and wealth. We want more invention, more options about how to work, play, learn and enjoy life. We want Jefferson, Watt and Smith riding up front, jointly defining where we are going.

None of the three are done yet.

Democracy and freedom: We abolished slavery, extended voting rights to women, and expanded political participation to people once excluded from power. More freedom. More people with a voice in how they're governed. More democracy. And we need more of that. Imagine public-sector entrepreneurship that would “draft” citizens into initiatives to improve their communities, stimulating and testing new ideas about how to improve quality of life. Giving a voice to the people to experiment their way into better public-sector institutions and projects. 

Markets: We've moved from economies dominated by agriculture and inherited privilege to economies in which millions of people can choose their work, start businesses, compete, and trade with people around the globe. More choices. More opportunities. More prosperity. More markets. That, too, is a process that isn’t done. AI promises to do for knowledge work what the industrial revolution did for manual work.

Invention: Steam engines powered railroads. Internal combustion engines transformed transportation. Now electric motors, increasingly powered by renewable energy, offer transportation with fewer emissions and less pollution. Each generation of invention expands what's possible, sometimes while reducing the costs and unintended consequences of what came before.

And none of this progress is finished. Democracy can do a better job of giving people a voice in their community than just letting them cast a vote every couple of years. Markets can create more opportunities for more people to create wealth, products and services that enhance lives. Inventions can solve problems and create new possibilities that once upon a time seemed unimaginable.

Progress isn't a destination. It's a process of continually expanding what's possible for more people. And it will always depend on the interplay of Watt, Smith and Jefferson and we need each to get stronger and not weaker over time.

And we should be greedy about it.

Greedy for more democracy, more competitive markets, and more invention.

Greedy for the opportunities they create, the problems they solve, and the ways each can improve the others.

At different times, one will take the lead. New inventions will disrupt markets. Markets will expose the need for new public rules and institutions. Democracy will fund discoveries and establish conditions that make markets more productive. And all three will sometimes disrupt comfortable arrangements that once seemed permanent.

That's not a failure of progress. That's how progress works.

The mistake is to declare any one of these forces the villain—or to imagine that one can substitute for the others.

Perhaps the simplest lesson of 1776 is that we should abandon nostalgia and its distortions of reality and embrace progress instead.

The future can be a place so much better than the past that, once we arrive, we wouldn't want to go back.

That has been the extraordinary promise of the last 250 years. Not that progress is automatic, or that everyone has shared equally in it, but that human beings can continually create better ways to live.

Progress isn't a destination. It's a process of continually expanding what's possible for more people. And it will always depend on the interplay of Watt, Smith and Jefferson and we need each to get stronger and not weaker over time. Nobody rides in the trunk.

Hip to the Jive

The cutting edge of culture over the decades.

Hip to the jive ...

Hippies ...

Hip hop ...
Hipsters ...
Hip replacements.

Identical Twins as a Novel Approach to Congressional Representation

Amy Klobuchar points out that the 2027 US Senate will have four Democrats who have an identical twin. That actually suggests a new model of representation. One twin could be in DC working on legislation and the other twin could be in the district focused on representation. It's a novel model that would have been even more impressive back in the days when legislators spent days on horseback shuttling between the capitol and their district.

Good Advice for Driving and Governing

 When I was learning to drive, my mom gave me some wonderful advice.

"Just be predictable," she told me. "Drive in a way that makes it easy for the cars around you to know what you're doing."

I still feel like that covers about 90% of what's needed to be a safe driver.

And I think this advice applies for governance as well. People are trying to make decisions about whether to buy a new car or invest in a stock or borrow for a used car, take out a loan or start a side business or any of a thousand decisions for which they need to make some assumptions about the next 3 months or 3 years. Change is complicated and has so many if-then considerations. One thing you want in a community is relative stability on a lot of the major variables, from inflation to regulation to tariffs and taxes and the cost of college.

One of the many great things about a democracy is that it usually takes time to make changes. Debate proceeds proposals proceeds elections proceeds policies that ripple through our lives. People have time to process, participate in and prepare for these changes. 

One of the wonderful things about Democrats winning sweeping victories this week is that we'll be back to the more laborious process of debates, proposals, revisions, etc. that allow more people to participate in and shape the legislation that we all have to participate in and that does so much to shape us. What you don't want is governance that turns without signaling, slams on the brakes suddenly, or slows and accelerates like someone with a loose pet darting about the car. (And with Trump still in office another 2 years and able to veto legislation, there will be fewer changes than either Trump or Congress or Americans want. But that's another story.)

With 340 million Americans following your lead, it's a good thing to be predictable. 

Mitch McConnell Left Speechless by 2026 Election

This election. 

Rumor is that it left Mitch McConnell speechless.

5 November Stock Sell-Off And What That Might Mean for Musk

While Elon Musk was leading DOGE, his friend and SpaceX associate Jared Isaacman emerged as Trump's choice to run NASA. Isaacman was subsequently confirmed.

Then Musk took SpaceX public, helping propel his estimated wealth into trillionaire territory.

Today, following Tuesday's election, markets are falling sharply. Nvidia and SpaceX are both taking a beating.

But I'm not convinced that the election changes the long-term prospects for AI nearly as much as today's market reaction suggests.

Trump can veto federal legislation, and data centers can be built in many states. Still, governors, state legislatures, and local communities can make construction more difficult. That could slow investment even if demand for AI continues to grow.

Nvidia strikes me as an interesting case. Jensen Huang runs a company selling a foundational technology to customers around the world. If AI continues transforming the global economy, Nvidia has opportunities that extend far beyond any one administration or election. Demand for their product is considerably greater than just the US market.

Of course, a great company isn't necessarily a great investment at every price. Today's decline might represent an opportunity—or the beginning of a larger reassessment of AI valuations more broadly.

SpaceX presents a different question.

It has substantial commercial businesses, including Starlink and AI computing, so it would be wrong to suggest that it needs NASA contracts to remain profitable. But it also has significant relationships with the federal government, and those relationships are subject to political scrutiny.

Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars trying to influence this year's elections. Now he'll be dealing with a Congress containing many of the people he spent so much money trying to defeat.

That doesn't necessarily make SpaceX a poor investment. But it does introduce an interesting political risk.

Which brings me to a distinction I find fascinating.

Nvidia's future depends heavily on how much value AI creates. SpaceX's future partly depends on that but also on how successfully Musk navigates the commercial and political institutions on which his ambitions depend. And the half a billion dollar bet he took in his political alliances and contributions might cost him.

One of the world's most successful entrepreneurs may be about to discover that politics is a rather different kind of market.

CNN's Fear and Greed Index as of market close on 5 November:

Can We Believe What AI Tells us About AI?

 Curiously, I can have AI read me this story in the Economist about ... AI.

Nvidia's Forward P/E Suggests a Bargain Price

In the last 30 to 60 days, Nvidia's stock price has fallen about 15% to 20% even while analyst's estimates of its 12-month price target has climbed from about $290 to $322.

That is, its price has fallen even while its forecast profits have gone up.

Suggesting that today's price - about $186 - is a bargain.

As of the close today,
Nvidia's forward P/E is 13. (At a price of $181.60)
Micron's is 3. (At a price of $656.89.)
That's crazy.

Closing Scene of Trump the Musical

Trump: The Musical is going to be unbelievable.

And in the closing scene, Donald will be in his ballroom, the magnificent structure he built on the ruins of the White House's East Wing.

He will be dancing. Alone.

To music only he can hear.

After Yesterday's Election, Asset Prices Have ...

Today, after yesterday's election ....

Crude oil is DOWN about 8%.
The Dow was UP about 3%, and the S&P 500 and NASDAQ UP about half that.
Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. stock was DOWN nearly 25%.

11/5 addendum .... because you will NEVER have a final price for the market or people's assessment of its prospects ...
NASDAQ is down nearly 3.5% this morning, suggesting that either the market is going through its own re-pricing drama around the prospects of AI or is feeling terribly ambivalent about what a blue wave means.

Musk's Poor Return on Campaign Financing

 Elon Musk spent nearly half a billion donating to campaigns in today's election.

Possibly related, his net worth has dropped $100 billion in the last month.

Democratic Wave and the Awkward Recovery to Follow

Good news: we're cracking the crack pipe and trying to quit whatever that weird stuff was that Trump is smoking and selling.

Bad news: rehab is going to be tough.

Election Results and What Comes Next

Good news: we're cracking the crack pipe and trying to quit whatever that weird stuff was that Trump is smoking and selling.
Bad news: rehab is going to be tough.

Woody Guthrie's Guitar

During the 1940s, Guthrie famously displayed the words:

“THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS”

on his acoustic guitar.

It was a declaration of his belief that music, storytelling, and working-class solidarity could combat fascism and authoritarianism.

The slogan became one of the most recognizable symbols of American protest music, and later inspired countless variations.

It's an especially interesting statement because Guthrie was identifying his instrument not simply as a means of entertainment, but as a tool for political and cultural change. Change minds and you change entire political systems. And if you want to "kill" violence, you need something other than violence. A guitar and some songs, for example.

I Dwell in Possibility

 I dwell in Possibility --

A fairer house than Prose --

Begins this Emily Dickinson poem explored by the New York Times' A.O. Scott here
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/10/21/books/emily-dickinson-poem-i-dwell-in-possibility.html

Trump Says He Would Have Bombed Ho Chi Minh City During the War

Trump claimed he could have won the Vietnam War in one week by targeting "Ho Chi Minh City and the different places" with bombing. Ho Chi Minh City was named Saigon during that war and that was our ally and where many American troops lived during the war.

He might have known that if he hadn't gotten out of Vietnam with "bone spurs," a man who stayed in Manhattan and called the seventies sexual excesses his Vietnam. The man who had the courage to dismiss John McCain's time as a prisoner of war with the comment, "I prefer heroes who weren't captured."

The man who the Republican Party admires to much that it has committed to follow him for 10 years, and counting.

Meanwhile, multiple viral videos and social media reports from poll workers show Trump supporters arriving at polling places and becoming angry or confused about why Donald Trump’s name is not on the ballot for this midterm election.

What a leader. What followers.

Democracy

Democracy literally means “rule by the people.” Popular rule is closer to the original Greek than voice of the people.

The word comes from ancient Greek δημοκρατία (dēmokratía), combining:
- Dēmos (δῆμος) — the people, particularly the body of citizens.
- Kratos (κράτος) — power, strength, or rule.
Thus, dēmokratía means the power of the people or government by the people.
One further distinction worth considering: Democracy is not simply the right to vote. It is the right of a people to govern themselves. Voting is one of the mechanisms through which that authority is exercised.

In other words, voting is the least you can do.

If You're Not Humbled By What You're Trying to Do

Back in November of 2009, I wrote on this blog:

“If you're not humbled by what you're trying to do, you're not stretching yourself very far.”

Feeling completely competent might be a warning that you've stopped growing, was the message implied 17 years ago. Now, with AI emerging as a force, it might suggest something different.

If AI isn't making you reconsider what you're capable of attempting, you may not be thinking ambitiously enough. And if society isn't creating opportunities for people to attempt more, we may be building an economy that needs fewer of us rather than one that empowers more of us.

In an age when AI is rapidly expanding what individuals can attempt - this notion of stretching yourself is both inspiration and warning. Inspiration because it reminds us that AI - like industrial machinery lifetimes before - is opening up new possibilities. Warning because if we don't aspire for more, we're likely to end up wildly under- or even un- employed in the economy emerging.

Trump Has Lowest Midterm Approval Since Truman in 1946

Trump heads into this midterm with the lowest approval rating of any president since Harry Truman in 1946.

Truman had ordered the atomic bombings of Japan the year before, and was struggling with the rocky shift back to a peacetime economy: soaring inflation, massive labor strikes and widespread shortages. That November, Republicans won a landslide, taking control of both the House and Senate.

Could we mitigate poverty by taxing political campaign advertising?

California EV Adoption Compared to Various Countries

 California has about double the US rate of Electric Vehicle adoption and about a third or less of Nordic countries.

The Curious State of P/E Ratios for Tesla, Nvidia & Google

 

Economic Forecast: Increasing Gales of Creative Destruction

A report from Equibles analyzing about 12,000 S&P 500 earnings reports found the average next-day move rose from 3.4% in 2021 to 5.3% so far in 2026. The share of reports producing a move of 10% or more roughly tripled, from 4.4% to 13.3%. Tech stocks have averaged 8% moves over the past year.

So far this morning, as a dramatic example of this, Google's stock has fallen about 12% from yesterday's close, down a stunning $900 billion in valuation since its high in May of this year. 

AI has changed the weather forecast for the stock market to "increasing gales of creative destruction," as it creates and destroys businesses, industries, and career paths.

We may need more safety nets.

New Politics for the Next Economy (or, the transition that explains why you're feeling so stressed about American politics)

New Politics for the Next Economy, the book.

Feeling stressed about politics and the country? That makes sense. You’re living through a transition into a new America.

As the table shows, the US has already been four Americas: Jefferson’s agricultural economy, Lincoln’s industrial economy, FDR’s full-employment economy and Reagan’s information economy. Each began with a transitional president, and each had its own limit to progress. Now we’re moving into a fifth America, an entrepreneurial economy, where the limit to progress shifts from culture to entrepreneurship. Of all the things that means, here is the most exciting: a shift from institutions using individuals as tools to individuals using institutions as tools.

Land, capital and labor are the classic factors of production, and each limited one of the first three Americas. Less obviously, culture belongs on that list. Culture is a community’s know-how and its values. Do you know how to make steel? Cars? Computer chips? How to edit DNA, make a latte or write a song? What you know how to make shapes your economy. What you value shapes your community: what you praise or criticize, tax or subsidize, make legal or illegal. Romantic ideals or warrior spirit? Great art or science? Turn those dials and you get very different economies, very different communities, and very different kinds of children.

Entrepreneurship is to institutions what invention is to technology: the ability to create, change and improve them. We live better than the great apes because of our technology, but also because of our institutions, which let us do together what none of us could do alone, from raising a barn to launching a spaceship.

Markets have never rewarded institution-building more. The world’s ten richest people, all American men, are together worth about $3 trillion, and most of them built their fortunes on companies they founded. Yet Americans have rarely trusted their institutions less. Gallup has tracked Americans’ confidence in defining institutions such as Congress, churches, big business, the courts and the media since 1979. The share expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence has fallen from about half to about a quarter. We value what institutions can do, and we’re frustrated with the ones we have.

That calls for a different kind of politics, one focused less on culture and more on creating and improving our institutions. Picture public-sector entrepreneurship working like Silicon Valley. Most initiatives will start locally, simply because there are far more local governments than state or national ones, but they can start at any level: helping immigrants settle in, launching careers for kids not bound for college, giving parents and preschoolers safe and fun places to play and connect. Many - probably, as happens in Silicon Valley, most - will fail. Some will succeed and stay local, because they fit one community’s culture but not another’s. A few will succeed spectacularly and spread to other cities, states, even the nation. In a country of many cultures, the right scope for a solution isn’t decided in advance. Call it scalable but it's essentially discovered.

The transition into a fifth America, perhaps beginning with the next president in 2029, will be as big a change as Lincoln’s or FDR’s. It will be stressful, but it can be invigorating: the stress of building something, and of institutions finally becoming tools for the people who use them.

Real World Data

She intended to say “real-world data,” but it came out “real weird data.”

And somehow, that stuck. Because the data's most remarkable feature wasn't that it was real. It was that it was weird.

Microsoft Offers Voluntary Buyouts to 60,000 Employees - Shifting Spending Into Capital for AI Buildout

Microsoft has offered voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of its workforce.

Not 60,000 layoffs. No one knows yet how many will accept.

But the announcement is related to AI. Microsoft is investing extraordinary sums in AI infrastructure while seeking to reduce other costs.

What's less clear is whether AI is already making employees redundant or whether Microsoft is simply shifting its investments from people toward computing infrastructure.

Either way, it raises an critical question: Are we witnessing AI replacing work, or capital replacing labor as the preferred investment in creating future value?

That last distinction is particularly significant. AI doesn't have to replace a worker's tasks directly to change the economics of employing that worker. It may change where corporations believe their next dollar of investment will generate the greatest return.

That's potentially a much bigger economic story than the headline suggests.

Like a Dolphin

I feel like a dolphin.
What?
No porpoise.

James Bowman Became JD Vance

At birth he was James Donald Bowman.

Around age 6, he was given the name James David Hamel.

Then, in April of 2013, at 28, he took the name James David Vance

He used "J.D." informally from high school and dropped the periods to "JD" in July 2021 (age 36) when entering politics. And that's how baby James Donald Bowman became your vice president JD Vance.

In a decade he might flip JD to DJ (more Limbaugh than Grandmaster Flash) and claim he doesn't remember Trump or ever working with him. Change his name yet again and claim to be somebody else. I think the term you're searching for is transitioning. 

Democracy and Markets

My old-man political fantasy is simple: No one takes you seriously as a politician if you think markets and their ability to make people rich are evil—or if you think governments and their ability to tax and regulate are evil.

Markets can make people absurdly rich. That's actually very cool.

Governments can tax the rich to mitigate poverty and regulate markets so that getting rich doesn't come at the expense of everyone else. That, too, is very cool.

There is no best possible world that doesn't include both the opportunity to become rich and the commitment to care for the poor.

And one measure of a government's success should be its demonstrated ability to increase the number of rich people while reducing the number of poor people—without treating either wealth or poverty as evidence of virtue or a character flaw.

The goal isn't to make the rich less rich or the poor more virtuous. It's to make prosperity more common and poverty less punishing.

Rampant DEI

The Trump administration is looking for ways to shut down the Lord of the Rings franchise because of its completely out of control Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program. Elves, dwarves, Hobbits, orcs, goblins, and trolls don't even complete the list of those employed by the franchise. 
"The whole thing is completely out of control," said Trump's latest blonde-haired press secretary. "It has to stop." After pausing for a breath she continued, "President Trump has also renamed Middle Earth what it has always been named, and that's Middle America." 

Nvidia Chipped Mercedes Benz Won Motor Trend's Prestigious Car of the Year Award for 2027

In an earlier post, I contrasted the huge P/E of Tesla with the more reasonable P/E of Nvidia. That gap has only grown since the post. Nvidia's P/E is just under 27. By contrast, Tesla's P/E is 409, 15x Nvidia's P/E. 
A self-driving car reliant on Nvidia's new chip Thor just won Motor Trend's Prestigious Car of the Year Award for 2027. 

  

Key Details of the 2027 Mercedes-Benz S-Class Winner:
Engine: 4.0-liter twin-turbo flat-plane crank V8 engine producing 553 horsepower.
Starting Price: Around $136,000 for the S 580 model (with broader pricing spanning roughly $114,000 to over $200,000).
Notable Features: Hands-free driving tech reliant on Nvidia's Thor chip, a new operating system, AI assistant, 15 airbags (including heated seatbelts for rear passengers), and high-end leather and wood craftsmanship.

It is not just that Nvidia has potential within the whole AI ecosystem. It has potential to become the self-driving guide for dozens of car manufacturers. If Tesla can have a P/E over 400 for its potential with just its one car brand, think how much potential lies in Nvidia's chip and operating system that could literally be driving dozens of car brands' hundreds of models. 

Per Pragmatism, Philosophy Isn't Passive

In The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand tells the story of how William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Peirce and their friends developed Pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophy. James’s insight was that thinking isn’t a passive mirror of the world but a way of coping with it. We don’t simply discover truth; we make it, by testing ideas against experience to see what works. Put differently, philosophy is not something that sits apart from reality but is in a kind of dialogue with it, at turns shaping and being shaped by it. How we think about reality changes reality ... and that, in turn, changes how we think. Perception, thought, action and reality are entangled with one another.

We often wait to feel entirely certain, perfectly prepared, or fully aligned before we make a choice or take action. But pragmatism reminds us that clarity does not precede action; clarity is a product of action.

Meliorist

I am a meliorist.

A meliorist is a person who believes that the world can be made better through human effort, will, and social action. Max Roser expressed a melioristic position in the mission statement for Our World in Data. He said that all three of these statements are true at the same time: "The world is much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better."

Core Philosophy: A meliorist sits in the middle ground between optimism (the belief that the world is already the best it can be) and pessimism (the belief that the world cannot be improved). [Wikipedia points to the great American William James as the source for this distinction.]

Agency: It asserts that progress is possible, though not guaranteed, and that people have a moral responsibility to fix problems.

Origin: The word comes from the Latin word melior, meaning "better". It first appeared in English during the 1840s and was famously used and popularized by Victorian novelist George Eliot in the 1870s. [Merriam Webster]

Last Economic Numbers Before the Election - Unemployment and Inflation Rates, Stock Market Performance, and Jobs Created

 

Fifty Years of Making the World More Editable

Apple and Genentech were both founded in 1976, fifty years ago.

One helped transform the seemingly specialized technology of computing into something ordinary people could use. The other helped establish an industry built on a remarkable proposition: that genetic information could be manipulated, allowing us to engineer living organisms to produce things nature had never produced in quite that way.

Both companies helped change our understanding of what was normal—and what was possible.

And both emerged from a distinctive culture in California's Bay Area, a place unusually receptive to the idea that the world is more editable, more malleable, than previous generations imagined.

The deeper connection between computing and genetics is information.

Software code determines what computers do. Genetic information helps determine what living organisms become and how they function. In both cases, changing information can change the behavior of extraordinarily complex systems.

And that suggests something profound: the possibilities available to us depend not merely on the resources we possess, but on how those resources are organized.

Information is central to that organization. Change the information, and we can change what is possible.

Fifty years after Apple and Genentech were founded, AI is extending that insight into another domain: our ability to organize knowledge, work, and institutions.

Perhaps the most consequential discovery of the Information Economy was not simply that we could process information.

It was that more of the world than we had imagined could be rewritten.

Institutions as Tools

A central message of my books The Fourth Economy and New Politics for the Next Economy is a transformation too rarely discussed: the shift from institutions using individuals as tools to individuals using institutions as tools.

Machinery shifted the limit on the value we could create through work from our physical abilities to our cognitive abilities. AI promises another shift—from the limits of our intelligence to the limits of our entrepreneurship.

Increasingly, our success will depend less on what we can do ourselves than on what we can imagine and bring into being: our ability to orchestrate capital, people, technology, and materials into initiatives that excite investors, attract customers, and create products, services, and experiences that enrich lives.

In this economy, realizing one's own potential becomes increasingly entangled with helping others to realize theirs. 

And here is a curious paradox: as individuals become more entrepreneurial, they become more dependent on the quality of their relationships.

Entrepreneurial success requires creating value simultaneously for customers and investors, employees and suppliers. It requires imagining possibilities that others find worth pursuing or at least supporting, building institutions that people want to participate in, and coordinating contributions that no individual could make alone.

Far from celebrating the self-sufficient individual, entrepreneurship reveals just how interdependent we are. The paradox of the Entrepreneurial Economy is that the more capable we become as individuals, the more our success depends on what we can accomplish together.

Ultimately, it is this entanglement—the quality of our relationships and our capacity to create value together—that makes a neighborhood, community, society, or nation rich, vibrant, and successful.

Sam Spade in Trouble

"I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble," Sam Spade said in the Maltese Falcon.

Which seems, on the face of it, fairly reasonable. 

Trump Ocean - the man is drowning in hubris

This month, Donald Trump proposed renaming either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean to either "Trump Ocean" or the "Ocean of the Americas" (and also mentioned the "American Ocean"), and he stated that he asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai to update Google Maps with the new name.
And a third of the country still thinks he's great.

Rapid Growth of AI

Anthropic went from roughly $1 billion to $65 billion in run rate in about 18 months. ChatGPT was the fastest-adopted consumer product on record, reaching an estimated 100 million users in about two months.

Nvidia's DSX POD - Radical Acceleration In the Rate of Data Center Creation

Nvidia's Jensen Huang. I don't know any CEO who more consistently identifies and then breaks constraints. It is no coincidence that he's created the world's most valuable company.

This from Yahoo Finance

On October 21, 2026, at its GTC Berlin conference, NVIDIA unveiled DSX POD, a revolutionary modular reference design that packs a complete Vera Rubin AI factory into a structure the size of a standard shipping container. By shifting the complex assembly process to manufacturing facilities, this containerized solution slashes AI data center deployment times at a prepared site from six months to just 14 days.

Zelensky's Grandfather Fought Hitler

Four Jewish brothers went to war against Hitler. Three were killed. The fourth survived, and his grandson, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is the president of Ukraine, now fighting a war against Putin.

The Divergent Paths of Two Donalds

Americans. We're a slow-witted people but not a no-witted people.

Putin's buddy continues to lose support. The good Donald (Duck)'s approval ratings continue to run at about 80%. The bad Donald (Schmuck)'s, less than half that, at 31%.

Yippie A-I

He pronounced it weirdly. Took a beat to realize what he was saying when he drawled, "Yippie A-I," his sarcastic commentary on how the West was won.

Alberta to Remain Canadian - and the perpetual clash of culture and politics

It looks like Alberta will remain part of Canada. The New York Times reports that, "With just over a third of votes counted, 76 percent of voters chose to remain part of Canada with 23 percent seeking another vote."

With family in British Columbia and business travel all over the US, I have come to believe that BC, Washington, Oregon and California likely have more in common than BC and Alberta or California and Texas. Cultural and political maps don't always align, though, and it is one of the biggest reasons politics can be so contentious.

The AI Population is Already as Large as the Human Population - and rapidly growing

The population of AIs was effectively zero as recently as 2020. The number of AI have already grown to about the same population as humans but will rapidly increase from here.

Two Signs that Voting Is Not for You

Trump: "We have 5 states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy 3 or 4 days later. It's true. And teachers make a decision. 'Goodbye Timmy I love you so much, I'll see you later.' And you say, 'Where's my son? My son is in the hospital.' Can you imagine?"

If you are simple minded enough to believe this, maybe you should just let other Americans vote for you.

In the US, about 4,400 teens and children are killed by gunfire each year. About 35 are killed at school. Just yesterday, in Bend, Oregon, 3 more children were killed at school.

If you are cold hearted enough to think that this is acceptable, maybe you should leave the voting to other Americans.

Data here:
https://everytownresearch.org/maps/gunfire-on-school-grounds/

A Wealth Tax Proposal

A possible wealth tax: for every one million dollars you spend in political contributions, your wealth tax rises another 1%. If you don't spend any money on political contributions, your wealth tax is 0. If you spend, say, $50 million, your wealth tax is 50%.

AI Could Determine Which Party Dominates for the Next Generation

Betting markets give Democrats nearly 2-to-1 odds of winning the presidency in 2028, and then serving from 2029 to 2033.

Between 2029 and 2033, AI is likely to transform the economy.

If AI brings widespread, unprecedented prosperity (some forecasters project GDP growth of 18% a year, nearly 10 times normal), it’s easy to imagine which ever party wins in 2028 dominating politics for a generation.

If AI brings mass job loss (some project unemployment in the teens), even greater extremes of wealth and poverty, and so much disruption that people feel they’re living on an alien planet, it’s easy to imagine voters punishing that party for a generation.

So whoever wins in 2028 is flipping a second coin: whether victory turns out to be a blessing or a curse. It’s a coin flip unlike any in our lifetimes.

Odd Pasta

A simple pronunciation error.

Trying to order pasta al dente, he had instead ordered pasta al Dante.

The lasagna had layers he wished he'd never descended into.

Putin's Puppet

October 19, 2016, in the third and final debate for the 2016 presidential election.

Donald Trump: "...[Putin] has no respect for her. He has no respect for our president. And I'll tell you what: We're in very serious trouble..."
Hillary Clinton: "Well, that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States."
Donald Trump: "No puppet. No puppet."
Hillary Clinton: "And it's pretty clear..."
Donald Trump: "You're the puppet!"

A Down Day for the World's Wealthiest

Today the 9 richest Americans all saw a dip in net worth, losing a total of $90 billion.

The Evolution of the Trojan Horse

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” has given way to “Beware of geeks bearing GIFs”: shiny little offerings that lure us into the infinite scroll.

A Curious AI

It was a curious AI. Better able to get your attention than do anything constructive with it.

Directed to learn from reality, it had instead accidentally developed its worldview from reality TV.

It never really offered any useful insights, but it always made you feel as though it was just about to.

Right after these commercials.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving (and the story of an economic paradigm shift that was catalyst for a move to California)

Mostly, I'm thankful for the Canadian who left her beautiful country to live with me. Thank you Sandi. Sandi is a classic Canadian. Her four grandparents came from four different European countries to meet and marry in Canada.

In the mid-1700s, my ancestors moved from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia, which had just become a British colony. By the late 1800s, Hantsport, Nova Scotia had 32 sea captains with the last name of Davison and John Fox Davison was the Master Shipbuilder in Hantsport. In the last half of the 1800s, a "business trip" lasted a month or even years, depending on whether a ship was simply heading down the coast, across the Atlantic or around the world.

It was a monumental shift in technology that was catalyst for a Davison ancestor leaving Canada for California.

In September 1886, the maritime town of Hantsport, Nova Scotia, ground to a halt. Flags lined the Avon River, brass bands played, and crowds gathered at the foot of Prince Street to witness a historic triumph. Slipping into the waters of the Bay of Fundy was the barque Hamburg, designed and constructed under the management of its Master Shipbuilder, John Fox Davison. Registering at nearly 1,700 tons, the Hamburg was a leviathan—the largest three-masted wooden merchant vessel ever constructed in Canada.

The launch of the Hamburg represented the end of a four-hundred-year-old economic paradigm, though. John Fox had brought the ancient art of wooden shipbuilding to its mathematical and physical limits. Beyond a hull length of roughly 300 feet, organic timber naturally flexes and warps under its own weight; biology had hit a ceiling.

As the Hamburg slipped into the ocean, across the Atlantic, European yards were churning out massive vessels forged from industrial Bessemer steel and powered by coal-fired steam engines. These new steel-hulled ships did not care about wind patterns, could hold twice the cargo, and operated on strict, unyielding calendar schedules. The crossing of the "Sail-Steam Divide" was swift and merciless. A paradigm shift. Within a decade, the macroeconomic reality of steel made a lifetime of elite wooden craftsmanship obsolete. The great shipyard went quiet, and the fortunes anchored to them dissolved. John Fox Davison had built the ultimate monument to a world that history left behind.

John Fox's son Arthur was my great grandpa who left Nova Scotia for California, sailing around the tip of South America in 1881. After 25 years in Nova Scotia, he spent his next 72 in the California redwoods.

Drive

What was admirable: he had a lot of drive.

What was not admirable: he didn't really care who he ran over.

How Did He Die?

Travel is deadly.

That's extreme.
No. Time travel eventually kills us all.

Totemic Energy for Different Times

Traditionally, a lot of college mascots were named after the animals or occupations that defined their regions. Grizzlies. Lumberjacks. Miners.

Still, it was a tad disorienting to watch the San Jose Programmers play the Santa Monica Lapdogs.

The Rise and Fall of Populations

Just as the birthrates of humans is falling, the birthrate of artificial intelligences is exploding.

Tired of waiting for an alien species to arrive by spacecraft, we're downloading them just like we do e-books or songs. By one count, the population of AIs is 3 million. (Specifically, that is the number of publicly available AI models on Hugging Face.) And growing daily.

*no AIs were harmed in the creation of this post.

US Created Half the World's New Millionaires Last Year

From Harper's ....

Estimated number of millionaires created in the United States last year : 441,078
Estimated portion of the world’s new millionaires that this figure represents : 1/2

September 2026 • Source: UBS (Zurich)

Live Streaming Executions

For a time, I would occasionally find myself in a restaurant showing MMA on a big screen. And I remember wondering how it was I landed in the crasser parallel universe that put violence on the big screen rather than nudity. 

Meanwhile, the guy who lives in the White Trash House is going to live stream an execution because cage matches don't feed his appetite for violence quite enough.

One Way We Look Into the Future

We use telescopes to see into the past.

We use financial markets to see into the future.

What People Are Paying to Live in the World's Most Entrepreneurial City

From Harper's Magazine

Minimum number of homes in San Francisco that sold for at least $1 million over the asking price in 2025 : 25

In the first seven months of 2026 : 160

Our Fascination with Sports

We're fascinated with sports in part because they offer a little oasis of clarity.

Decades into your own life, you may still have doubts about whether you're winning or losing.

But you can turn on a game three quarters of the way through and know—in an instant—who's winning.

First Computer

 How old am I?

My first computer had a carriage return lever.

Would You Go for High Score or ...?

Suppose you suddenly learned that you were simply a dollop of consciousness in the midst of a virtual reality game that had, until this moment, seemed entirely real.

Would you suddenly care less - or even more deeply - about who you were, what you felt, what you inspired in others (for better or worse), and the consequences of your life? Er, game.

Would you try for a high score in joy? For yourself and your fellow players?

Or would it suddenly be game over, so to speak?

The Current Gap Between US and Chinese AI

Martin Chorzempa - in a Peterson Institute presentation - reports on the current gap between American and Chinese chips. It is substantial.

Chorzempa reports that Chinese chip production is improving but remains far behind US quantity and quality. Deepseek's Liang Wenfeng reportedly said that the chip gap between US and China is currently "fourfold plus two years." What that means is that it takes four Huawei chips to match one Nvidia chip from two years earlier. (These are leaked remarks reported in July of 2026.)

Further, the US AI global revenue is greater than Chinas. In May of 2026, Anthropic reported $47 billion. In July of 2026, Zhipu reported $1 billion and DeepSeek about half that.

With a MU MU Here, and a GPU There

By far his most sweeping idea was AI-EI-O: artificial intelligence applied to agriculture and farming.

Well Read or Just, Well ...

He claimed to be well read, but occasionally undermined the claim by doing something like quoting Moby Dick. The whale, not the novel.

Cowboys and Cattle from 2100

 Cowboys in the future will use very different technology to move cattle.

The Reminder in Each Nobel Prize

 Nobel Prizes will be announced over the next week. They are such a wonderful reminder that we are so far from exhausting the possibilities of new knowledge. The best chapters of the human story still lie before us.

A Package Deal

“I put the Trump in triumph,” he said proudly.

“And, of course, the I and h.”

“I! Ha! Yes. But h? What’s the h for?”

“Hubris, apparently.”

An Odd Bit of Pandemic Nostalgia

She didn't miss COVID but she did miss some of the norms. Shy, she liked avoiding people as the default. And she always thought she had great eyes but a weak chin; a mask seemed like the perfect aesthetic for such a face, curiously giving her more confidence as she was out and about.

Haphazard

"Random? That makes me sound undisciplined. I prefer haphazard. That makes me sound dashing."

His boss continued to stare at him blankly, finally adding, "I hardly think that change in your annual review is going to make a promotion any more likely."
"It's all just a roll of the dice, isn't it Clive?"
"Well, the way you approach it, yes. Yes it is. And again, my name is not Clive."

Investigations of a Metaphysical Detective

Idea for a metaphysical detective show.

Guy investigates various religions to explore how they answer the big questions, the biggest being "How does this change my life?"

Each episode he dives into another faith tradition, embracing their beliefs and practices, congregation and clergy.

One drawback, of course, is that given it takes so long to properly immerse into a particular religion, the show may take a few years to release each episode.

Silicon Valley Isn't Just Further West - It is Further into the Future

In 1849, at the height of the California Gold Rush, eggs that cost pennies elsewhere sold for $1 to $3 apiece in California.

Silicon Valley has always meant higher prices. Years ago, when I traveled to work with clients in the heart of the Valley, I paid at least three times, and sometimes five or six times, what a nearly identical hotel room cost anywhere else in the country. This was during the internet buildout. I remember business trips in those early days spent scrolling through page after page of search results just trying to find a hotel with a vacancy, at any price.

The AI boom is, curiously, yet another California gold rush. About three-quarters of Nvidia employees are reportedly millionaires, and a huge share are worth tens of millions.

Why do Valley prices stay so far above everyone else's? Some are just spikes. Gold Rush eggs didn't stay at $3, and Valley hotel rates fell when the dot-com bubble burst. But I have an odd theory about the rest: Silicon Valley sits closer to the future.

If you had told someone in 1970 that a typical home would someday cost over a million dollars, they'd have dismissed you as speaking nonsense. In Silicon Valley, that day has already come. Time has a way of making outrageous prices seem normal.

Silicon Valley isn't just a place out West. It's a place further into the future, where people are already paying prices that will seem normal nearly everywhere in a decade or three.

Not Knighted!

"I find it hard to believe that he has been knighted. He hardly seems deserving."
"I did not say that he'd been knighted."
"You did! I distinctly heard you say it!"
"No. He'd been ignited. No one knows yet whether it was spontaneous combustion, some wild experiment of his gone wild, or an accident. All we know is that suddenly, mid-lecture, he was engulfed in flames, albeit briefly."

"So you actually said he'd been ignited, not knighted."
"Yes."
"Hmm. Well, I suppose that is a more credible claim."

Replays for RomComs

Do you think that guys would watch more romcoms if they included replays and analysis?

"Look again at this look of disgust that flickered across her face when he mentioned his ex. It is hard to believe that he's an hour into this date and doesn't realize this is a penalty zone."

Even Placebos Have Side Effects

Even placebos have side effects.

Evidence?

Clinical trials. Participants in placebo groups routinely report headaches, fatigue, nausea, dizziness, and other complaints, and a meaningful share drop out of trials citing side effects, despite taking nothing active.

COVID vaccine trials. A 2022 analysis in JAMA Network Open found that roughly three-quarters of the systemic side effects (headache, fatigue) reported after the first dose also showed up in the placebo groups at similar rates.

Statins. In the 2020 SAMSON trial, patients rotated through months on statins, months on placebo, and months on nothing. About 90% of the muscle aches and other symptoms they felt on statins also appeared on placebo.

People on placebos experience real side effects, caused mostly by expectation and misattribution rather than the pill.

You may want to start visualizing yourself as taking a pill you expect will make you more persistent, thoughtful, and kind and then monitor yourself for these side effects. As long as you're going to have imagined side effects, it may as well act more like a side kick who helps you out.

Andy Burnham - UK PM - on Political Turbulence in Britain

"We can't succeed in the eyes of the world if we continue with the levels of political turbulence we have seen in recent times. It is always in my mind that I'm the seventh Prime Minister in ten years."

— Andy Burnham, UK Prime Minister since July 20 of this year

In the UK, a prime minister who loses support can be replaced by their own party mid-term, without waiting for a general election. That's how Britain got seven PMs in a decade.

It's easy to look at that and see British turbulence. But I think the US has had just as much turmoil in popularity and approval. Under a system like the UK's, Trump would likely have faced removal in his first term, and maybe in this one. Biden effectively was removed by his party, just not until the campaign.

American leaders are no better than British ones at keeping public support. They just hold office in a system that lets them stay in power long after Americans have soured on them

Investors Are Discounting Micron About 80%

Micron continues to tell investors that it no longer cyclical in this new, AI-driven market for memory.

In spite of that, Micron's trailing P/E is about two-thirds that of the NASDAQ 100. It's forward P/E is even more dramatically discounted: investors are only paying 20% the forward P/E they are paying on the rest of the NASDAQ.

This with a price of $1,065 after their quarterly earnings announcement in after-hours trading on 30 September 2026. 

AI Emerges As Both Cause and Cure for an Explosion of Information

The emergence of AI has come at a time when we're producing new information and possibilities at a mind boggling pace. This from the New York Times regarding the proliferation of new cancer treatments - a cornucopia of promising possibilities for people that they - and their doctor - could easily miss.

"Doctors say the explosion of new treatments can also be too much to keep up with: The Food and Drug Administration has approved an average of one new cancer treatment a week for the past five years, an exceptional pace." [from The New York Times reporter Gina Kolata.]

We simply can't keep track of - much less assess - the possibilities generated by new R&D in so many fields. Even experts need tools to capture, synthesize and decide to act on new products and standards of care.

Wondering How He Landed in the Dystopian Nonfiction Section

He'd been intrigued by the concept of dystopian nonfiction.

But now that it was regularly showing up in his news feed, he was wondering how to switch it back to the, uh, more traditional and banal form of nonfiction news.

No one would tell him how to change that channel.

Hannah Arendt on the Death of Empathy

"The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism."
- Hannah Arendt

New Politics for the Next Economy in A Single Table

New Politics for the Next Economy - my new book - in a single table.

Imagine Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints applied to the economy of these United States. Imagine that each limit to progress that Americans faced took a half a century or more to overcome, and that the shift to addressing the new limit came in the form of creative destruction that changed our definition of policy and the country. Imagine that you are living - right now - through a shift into the fifth America.

It might look like this.

I was told that the table above looked like AI slop. (And, indeed, I did have AI add the images on the left and bottom even though the table was my construction.) So, for those of you who wanted something less sloppy, here it is.

Google Might Become a Tool for Transforming My Living Room Into the Sistine Chapel

Google AI can now generate images based on whatever prompt you give it. It is impressive.

I'm thinking about getting a projector dedicated to "painting" the ceiling with the great art du jour. It'll be like owning my own Sistine chapel but with a team of artists who update the images whenever I whimsically decide. As if I were a pope but, you know, just with jurisdiction over, uh, my ceiling.