Walter lays out the five step playbook that carried the Dutch, then the British, then America to global leadership, and why the same pattern keeps beating centralized continental powers.
The world's great museums are full of art and artifacts that were plundered during an era when plunder was the norm. Now there's a push to return these works to their rightful owners. Sounds simple, right? It's not.
I think the greatest innovation in history isn't vaccines or the iPhone. I think it's the American middle class. And only 40% of men throughout history, I understand, have reproduced and 80% of women.
The economic system that we all inhabit is basically a way of turning energy and ideas into goods and services. And if you think about what's possible when both of those inputs are effectively infinite, I think the world totally changes.
The fraud cycle follows the financial cycle with a lag. And the longer the financial cycle goes on, the more amount of fraud is ultimately uncovered on the down cycle. So, I've already dubbed this the golden age of fraud. And I suspect that when we're on the down part of this cycle, the bodies will float to the surface as they always do.
The most important thing about AI is that it's deflationary for everything except compute and energy. This is very counterintuitive because people assume that a massive new technology wave is going to be inflationary. But AI is fundamentally deflationary for almost everything except the things needed to build and run AI.
I think if I had to pick just one thing, there's sort of an old idea in economics called the resource curse, where countries that have a lot of natural resources — a lot of oil, for example — tend not to develop as fast as countries that have to innovate their way to prosperity. And I believe there's something analogous happening with intelligence. The countries and the people that have the most access to intelligence are going to have to innovate their way to prosperity, and that's going to be the biggest driver of abundance.
You don't have to choose between billionaires and universal healthcare. You can have a society with both. You know, these societies have high tax rates and produce incredible companies that go on to make billions of dollars and trillion dollar market caps and they have billionaires. The two are not mutually exclusive in America.
The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to the economy, and if you have basically unlimited intelligence and energy, you can make almost anything. And we may actually be on track to get there.
The third one was around the destabilization of the middle class of the West. So if you have a rapid sort of outsourcing and a collapse of manufacturing, then the point of view was you're going to have a populist response. And I think we've seen that play out.
To make that vision real, he had to change China's relationship to the world and introduce capitalism to a society steeped in tradition and communist ideals.
Texas isn't exactly Berkeley or Sandled Brooklynites looking to save the whales. It's because the economics of renewables are overtaking the economics or becoming more attractive than the economics of fossil fuels.
Abundance without participation, abundance without inclusion, feels like scarcity. It feels like scarcity. You think you're scaling abundance, but we experience it as you scaling scarcity.
Once a country decides its houses are supposed to make everyone rich, it has to keep prices rising forever, which means restricting supply, blocking development, and quietly pricing out each new generation, which works until it doesn't.
Like tens of millions of people, Stephen Dubner thought he had a penicillin allergy. Like the vast majority, he didn't. This misdiagnosis costs billions of dollars and causes serious health problems, so why hasn't it been fixed?
How do we do away with the the transfer and the cost of transferring money from an anxious, obese, and depressed generation to the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet, and that is baby boomers.
The thing that's going to gut this economy is the fact that we're now spending 40% of our federal budget on programs for seniors, you know, uh Medicare and um and social security and all these basically old people vote and the Dian democracy is working too well and we keep transferring money from young people are more productive to old people who are less productive.
As the Trump administration rolls back environmental regulations, we revisit a 2022 episode that explored the hidden cost of an invisible threat: air pollution.
This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss.
If you do not want everything to be owned by a tiny elite, you have to aggressively tax extremely high levels of wealth. Because otherwise, if you're Jeff Bezos, what is he worth? $300 billion, right? Even if he makes 5% a year, he's making $15 billion a year, right? And it's just going to grow, right? It's going to grow unbelievably quickly.
As manufacturing gets cheaper like the tools that you use, the cars that you drive, the washing machine in your home, uh the tires on your cars, uh all these different things get better, not just cheaper, but actually unlock new capabilities and new things that people people enjoy.
Housing services, which is rent, mortgages, utilities, is like 12% of the economy. Talking about, you can think about that like a $3 trillion a year subscription fee for living.
Just beneath the surface of the global economy, there is a hidden layer of dealmakers for whom war, chaos, and sanctions can be a great business opportunity.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
