Silicon Valley

It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a remarkable center of technology, but also the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomized by garage start-ups like Apple. Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better.  read more »

The figurative tremblors of the last few weeks have confirmed why we call ourselves Flyover Country. It’s because the major shapers of the American economy keep — well, flying over us as they shake the financial foundations of the entire nation.  read more »

For Americans, California once looked like the future. It was a state defined by risk-taking and utopian dreaming. Yet for most Californians today, the upward mobility so central to the state’s ethos is rapidly disappearing.  read more »

In recent decades, progressive politics has been underwritten by the ascendant economic titans of capital, technology, and communication. Big Tech and financial firms have long financed Democratic causes, led by those such as George Soros and the now-disgraced crypto-master Sam Bankman-Fried, who was released last month on a $250 million bail deal.  read more »

Is charity still charity when it is performed for uncharitable reasons?

Looking beyond the “aw, neat, what a great person” façade of “effective altruism,” (see here, with a grain of salt… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism ) one clearly finds a level of narcissistic cynicism and a will to the permanent power that financial immortality affords that is only matched by the level of the funds being dispersed.  read more »

Harvard’s William Alonso showed that the value of residential land tends to increase from the rural uses on the urban fringe¹ to centers of economic activity, such as central business districts.²  read more »

In the past, ruling classes sought to protect the system that secured their coveted positions. But sometimes, as in the era before the French or Russian Revolutions, some in the ruling circles stopped believing in their religion, their traditions, and their state, only to be exiled, executed, or turned into what the Soviets called “former persons.”  read more »

As in Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex, we are witnessing a generational drama in which inheritors kill their proverbial father to marry their mother, in this case Mother Earth. The psychology behind this pattern is above my pay grade, but many of the richest people on the planet, and their heirs, now seem anxious to disparage the economic system that created their fortunes.  read more »

Free trade and open markets are great ideals. These principles, over the last few centuries, but especially since World War II, have created tremendous wealth, particularly in the developing world. But free markets were made for human society, not the other way around.  read more »

When Google went public in 2004, it epitomised technological and entrepreneurial genius. Two engineers had developed a remarkably powerful, easy-to-use search engine, opening the doors to vast amounts of knowledge.  read more »