How to Really Change the World
I’ve been having a conversation on Substack about social movements and how change actually happens. And I realized that what I’ve been doing instinctively has a solid foundation in…
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Our Future Domain
Small players don’t win by trying to out-scale the giants. That game’s already decided. The advantage, for the 99%, is shifting upstream — earlier in the chain,…
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How We Lost the Nation-State
I’m not sure how far back it goes. Certainly the Vatican was one of the early players in exerting control over rulers of nations. And then came…
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From “Chad” to “Slop”; How Society Has Evolved
Each year, the American Dialect Society chooses one word to represent the Zeitgeist of that year. If you line the words up and look at them, they…
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Real Scarcity is Coming
One aspect of the Western economic system has been the leveraging of manufactured scarcity. Markets have always played at scarcity to drive up demand and price. But…
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Who’s Right About Economics?
Economists tend to fall into two camps, and if you listen to them long enough it begins sounding like a long-running family argument at Thanksgiving. On one…
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The Nation Without a Land
A nation is more than a place on a map. It is a shared story, a common allegiance, a belief in something that binds its people together.…
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Short Essays Collection # 4
Humans Humans have always been shitty. Now we’re just shitty – at scale. What is Left As I continue to work my way through The Good Doctor,…
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Upstream Is Not Charity; When Doing Good Makes Financial Sense
For most of modern nonprofit history, we’ve raised money by telling stories of need. We show the hungry child. The overwhelmed mother. The struggling family. And we…
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Swimming the Mississippi of Life
Sometimes I think living in this world is like floating down the Mississippi River. You didn’t choose the river. You didn’t choose the century. You didn’t choose…