Topic
government
- A method for changing systems
What the American Constitution established was not simply a particular system but a process for changing systems, practices, and leaders, together with a method of constraining whoever or whatever was ascendant at any…
- Return to smoke-filled rooms
Jonah Goldberg with one of his classic broadsides against our broken primary system: People hate on “smoke-filled rooms” because they think such venues give the rich and powerful undue influence over the nominating pr…
- Past, Present, and Future
Here's a useful way of thinking about the domains of our three branches of government, from Yuval Levin's American Covenant: It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Congress is expected to frame for the futur…
- How the Constitution Can Bring Us Together
A great interview with AEI's Yuval Levin ahead of the release of his latest book, _American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified our Nation — And Could Again_. Yuval is one of the greatest minds we have working toda…
- The Two Enlightenments
We learn about "The Enlightenment" as a singular entity, a historical age associated with rationality, scientific inquiry, humanism, and liberty. The Enlightenment and scientific revolution were defining moments that…
- Against Centralized Power
From Tom Sowell's masterpiece, A Conflict of Visions: While Hayek regarded some advocates of social justice as cynically aware that they were really engaged in a concentration of power, the greater danger he saw in th…
- Don't Ban TikTok
I'm no fan of TikTok. But I'm with Tyler here that a government-imposed ban is the wrong prescription. Naturally, our government's approach is to attempt to grant the central government more authority to do things ver…
- The Lure of Technocracy
Jason Crawford lays out a theory for why technocracy (the idea that a technical elite can lead a nation to technological progress if given the top-down control of economic and scientific policy) fizzled out around the…
- Weekend Reading: Readwise's Next Chapter, Reviewing Revolt of the Public, and the Helicopter State
📚 The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the "read-later" app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), b…
- Science: The Endless Frontier
Vannevar Bush's seminal report to President Truman, making the case for government support for foundational scientific research (and pushing to create the NSF). Previously: Process Not Products — on Bush's work with t…
- Building a State
Historian Anton Howes on the push/pull dynamics between monarchs and parliaments, and the gradual building of state capacity in 16th century Britain. It’s easy to imagine that governments were always as bureaucratic a…
- Weekend Reading: The Hour of the State, Location AI, and Mapillary Acquired
💬 The Hour of the State or Explosion From Below? Martin Gurri is one of the best minds we have for the current moment. Make sure to subscribe to his essays on the Mercatus Center's "The Bridge." The American people a…
- Police and Road Safety
In the tumult going on the last few weeks about police power, corruption, brutality, and need for reform, this question has been kicking around. Alex Tabarrok has some interesting comments on the likelihood of separat…
- Widespread Looting
Arnold Kling has been a great follow lately. On the Fed's stimulus plan for COVID economic shutdown: I have said all along that the checks being written to households and small businesses were just a fig leaf to cover…
- Weekend Reading: Ancient Text, StarLink, and Chinese Origins
📜 Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy A project from DeepMind designed to fill in missing text from ancient inscriptions: Pythia takes a sequence of damaged text as input, and…
- The Opportunity Project
We've spent the last 6 months or so working with the team at the US Census Bureau on something called The Opportunity Project, a recurring initiative quarterbacked by the Census to bring together creators, government,…
- HQ2: Understanding What Happened
This piece from Barry Ritholtz does a good job breaking down the real background behind the Amazon NYC HQ issues, how they were attracted and why they bailed: The heart of the opposition to Amazon was how much the cit…
- It's Time for a Data Bill of Rights
This is a fascinating idea, arguing that we should shift our thinking about privacy and data away from “ownership.” Since owning / renting data doesn’t afford the privacy and agency control people actually want, the a…
- Progress Report: The Federalist Papers
I’m making my way through The Federalist, which has been on my reading list forever, and for which I had my interest rekindled last year reading Alexander Hamilton. For those that don’t know, it’s a collection of essa…
- Francis Fukuyama on The Origins of Political Order
Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order was one of the most interesting books I've read in the last 5 years. It traces the history of human social hierarchy and government from antiquity to the French Revolu…
- Weekend Reading: CAC, Alexander Hamilton, and Flow
🛒 What is Customer Acquisition Cost? This is a great overview of the importance of CAC in a SaaS business. One of the enjoyable things about SaaS is how much you can modify and optimize what you’re doing by measuring…